There is still no reliable research showing whether generative AI platforms are replacing Google or how many final buying decisions are made through ChatGPT or similar tools.

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ChatGPT is still sending very little traffic, compared to other channels. According to Ahrefs data, traffic from AI platforms accounts for 0.43% of overall website traffic, on average. This number aligns with my own data. The best-performing niche, in my experience, is technology, where AI traffic may reach about 0.7% of the overall traffic.

With such a tiny amount of clicks, a lot of brands are asking the same question: “Should businesses even invest in something that doesn’t seem to yield any measurable results?”

Marie Haynes, a well-known SEO practitioner, published an article claiming that “GEO is a distraction”, which triggered lots of discussions that Barry Schwartz summarized here.

So should business owners prioritize SEO or GEO?

AI Visibility Cannot Be Measured by Clicks

This is a common argument from marketers defending GEO as a valid, separate strategy, and I agree with it.

Traffic is not a valid KPI for something that is not meant to trigger a click. AI Answers are designed to give a satisfactory answer right away, removing the need for a click.

But the problem is, we don’t really have any other reliable means of measuring the success of a GEO strategy. Businesses are currently using a combination of metrics, none of which gives a clear visibility picture:

• AI visibility score assigned by a third-party tool (like Profound or PeecAI). This number heavily relies on the prompts you track and can be easily skewed. If you add prompts that mention your brand/product name or include your narrow expertise, this number will dramatically increase. For example, I am seldom mentioned in an AI response to the “Top SEO experts” prompt, but if I start tracking “Top female SEO experts”, my AI visibility score will be high. We don’t know how real people prompt, so assigning a visibility score to our own synthetic prompts doesn’t give us any definitive answer if we are actually visible. [In my next newsletter, I will share other, more useful and practical metrics and KPIs we can obtain from AI visibility tools, so stay tuned!]

• AI traffic: Comparing a ~30% traffic channel to a 0.4% traffic channel to measure the performance of the latter is not a good idea because the numbers are too low and will inevitably result in a very low amount of sales.

• Branded queries and branded query impressions: The theory is that AI visibility should result in more people searching for your brand name (because many brand names are not linked in AI Answers). This might be true but for smaller businesses, the number of impressions for your branded queries will increase so slightly that it will be hard to even measure. For bigger brands that invest in lots of paid ads, the increase of the branded traffic can often be explained by one of those campaigns, so the correlation with AI visibility is never clear.

Many businesses now integrate “Where did you hear about us” surveys in the on-site buying journeys. This is a great idea but it can be a distraction for site users.

Plus, it will only yield reliable results if a customer makes a purchase right after interacting with an AI platform. If they found out about your brand from ChatGPT and remembered to buy from you the next day, they may fail to tell where they discovered your brand or product. Plus let’s not forget about the primacy effect (when people are presented with a list of options, they are disproportionately more likely to select the first few choices).

So this is also not a perfect measurement solution.

And yet, we know and see LLM platforms grow in popularity and demand. It is not exactly a channel any business can ignore.

With a lack of attribution and reliable measurement options, how can businesses justify their GEO investments?

There’s no perfect answer, but here’s my perspective:

1. SEO should remain the priority

There are two main reasons for that:

• Google is still the only intent-based organic findability channel that can be measured (and that still drives the majority of organic sales). While GEO metrics are still a black box, Google’s numbers are clear and predictable.

• Organic search visibility is the most predictable route to AI visibility. The correlation between top-ranking URLs (in Google) and top-cited URL (by LLMs) is unknown and also very platform-specific. ChatGPT tends to cite bigger publications (many of which happen to be OpenAI partners) and UGC (like Reddit), while Gemini and AI Mode rely on Google’s index. There have been many reports showing ChatGPT-cited URLs do not rank in Google that well. One older study from Ahrefs reported a mere 12% overlap between top-ranking URLs and AI citations. And yet, even if this number is correct, it is higher than any other “GEO tactic” can offer. No other GEO effort yields predictable AI visibility results but SEO. I haven’t seen a single website that would rank well in Google and have 0 visibility in ChatGPT.

Until we have any reliable data proving that AI Visibility actually pays off (and how much), SEO (organic search visibility) should remain the priority also because LLMs search, and they will find your brand if you do good SEO. So SEO is good for both channels.

And yet, I do believe that GEO is not exactly SEO, and there are extra steps to take to be mentioned in AI Answers. These “mostly GEO” tactics include:

• Clean and clear websites that are readable without JavaScript (for SEO, it is essential too, but search engines have become more advanced, and they don’t need as much help crawling and indexing websites as LLM agents do)

• Cross-channel visibility (because LLMs tend to seek more diverse sources when answering prompts. If your brand is visible and findable across several channels where your target audience is, it has a higher chance of being mentioned or cited)

• Cross-channel messaging alignment (LLMs seek consensus when defining your brand, so unclear or outdated copy can result in lower visibility)

• Positive digital footprint: LLMs may not recommend your brand in an AI answer if it has a negative online reputation.

So how to justify these GEO efforts without access to measurable attribution?

2. GEO strategies should always include other channels

Do not invest in a tactic that is only “for GEO”, simply because you won’t be able to measure the effectiveness. Besides, different LLMs tend to disagree on which brands they mention, so there’s no straightforward way to be visible everywhere.

Everything you do for GEO should also result in additional benefits elsewhere (which should be prioritized). For example, if you heard Reddit was beneficial for GEO, don’t invest in Reddit visibility just for the sake of AI visibility. Instead, build Reddit visibility first. This will result in brand awareness and sales directly from Reddit, in the first place. And it will inevitably help GEO, as well.

Or, if you heard that list-type articles (listicles) were good for AI visibility, prioritize your listicle outreach based on the traffic and authority of the website. Being mentioned in a high-traffic listicle will drive direct sales. And it will result in better AI visibility, too.

Prioritizing “real” measurable visibility will give you more data to evaluate the effectiveness of any tactic. And this strategy will also gradually increase your AI mentions and citations.

There have been a few different trends that have made it worse and worse:

• SEO budgets have grown to a level (especially link-building budgets) that only larger businesses could afford

• Smaller websites lost those few clicks they had to AI Overviews

• Consumers are expected to move to ChatGPT or other AI-driven platforms to make final buying decisions, and LLMs are reported to favor big, well-known brands.

As small business organic visibility is getting more and more challenging, many ecommerce owners may doubt the feasibility of starting or maintaining a separate website. Maintaining consistent marketplace visibility may seem the only effective tactic.

Those concerns are valid, but here’s why I believe having a website is still very important (and will remain important in the future), from the SEO perspective.

Cross-channel visibility is definitely more important now than 2-3 years ago, but can or should businesses survive and thrive without an official website?

No!

>>> JOIN US to discuss this topic LIVE on Linkedin or Youtube (free) and bring your questions!

1. Control your branded search better

Lots of customers will search for a business name before buying from it, especially if they saw a product ad on social media or found its products on Amazon or elsewhere.

In most cases, Google will favor an official site for branded search, allowing the business to better control brand-driven SERPs.

Look at the branded AI Overview example here, which prioritizes giving answers from the official website:

[4 out of 13 citations for a navigational query belong to the brand’s official site: 30% control of a branded AI Overview. The more control, the better. In this case, having your own *visible* Youtube channel and subreddit would mean even more control (!)]

Side note: % of the brand sentiment ownership should be one of your business KPIs, going forward.

Customer reviews may be lower on third-party marketplaces or third-party review platforms, like Trustpilot, because the business cannot control customer relationship management there. On their website, businesses can nurture their relationships with customers more effectively, so the top results for the branded search will likely be more favorable.

Branded queries are the highest-intent, bottom-of-the-funnel queries out there. Customers tend to search for brand and product names when they are already ready to buy. Branded search is the most important asset to monitor and manage in any marketing strategy.

Your website allows you to:

• Curate more positive reviews

• Showcase other trust signals and build a positive first impression (family-owned, years in business, hand-picked, etc.)

2. Control the narrative better

When asked about a business, or when considering if a product is worth including in an AI answer, LLMs often consult the official website first.

That’s why having a clear, detailed About page is so important these days: You can become THE source of information about your own business to LLMs.

3. Build long-tail organic visibility

There’s still a huge opportunity for small businesses to build long-tail search visibility, i.e., when searchers are looking for something very specific and/or local. These are low-competition, high-intent queries: Very detailed search queries often mean that searchers know exactly what they need, so they will likely buy if your product matches this intent.

Long-tail queries are not easy to plan for (because third-party tools like Semrush and Ahrefs may not know about them, but you can increase this traffic naturally by:

• Providing more details about each product, especially in the title

• Creating an effective cross-site interlinking strategy

You can also find longer queries your site is currently appearing for in Search Console using its AI assistant.

4. Own your data

Finally, both Search Console and Google Analytics (or any other on-site analytics solution) provide lots of insights into popular products with higher conversions, future low-hanging-fruit opportunities, and seasonal buying trends. You can also attract returning customers through retargeting ads.

There are many other reasons that go beyond purely SEO objectives. Having your own home base for your business, which you actually own, means that you can build other owned assets around it. For example, you can build a newsletter list to build customer loyalty. Or you can invite your customers to your site to create a community and help one another.

If you need an effective SEO and GEO/AEO strategy for your official website, reach out!

Both of these are very likely for many businesses out there.

AI visibility is defined by three layers:

• Brand’s visibility and clarity: Do LLMs “know” about the brand?

• SEO: Is it findable when LLMs are searching for answers?

• Sentiment: Does your brand survive the “reputation” searches LLMs run before creating the shortlist?

Today we are talking about layer #3.

>>>> JOIN US to discuss this topic LIVE on Linkedin or Youtube (and bring your questions!).

Also, make sure to watch Edward Sturm and me discuss online reputation and AI Overviews.

Imagine investing in brand visibility and SEO for years and never making it into an AI answer because LLMs couldn’t define your digital footprint as trustworthy.

Online reputation is no longer about “making a good impression” when consumers are searching for your brand name. Online reputation defines your visibility.

ORM before AI vs. NOW

I’ve been presenting on branded searches and taking control of your branded SERPs for decades. One of my older slides illustrates the point quite well: More channels -> More control over the top ten results for your branded queries.

It is no longer THAT easy.

When AI “knows” all your brand’s digital footprint, hiding anything about your brand past page 1 for branded queries is not enough.

AI summarising your whole digital footprint in 5-6 paragraphs creates a new challenge for businesses: How do we make sure it’s up to date, accurate, and not all negative?

AI Overviews for Branded Searches: Your Wake-Up Call

Google started showing ~90% more AI Overviews for navigational queries in early October. This is not essentially new (ChatGPT has been doing this behind the scenes since day 1). But this is definitely any business’s final reminder: Your ORM strategy should be about making sure those AI summaries of your business’s digital footprint are not scaring your customers away:

But the problem is bigger than that. AI answers are highly trusted (we saw a good example of that just last week). If product research used to take days and weeks of searching for all the options, comparing pricing, and finally narrowing your list down to a few most suitable options, LLMs do all of that within a minute, and if your digital footprint is negative, your brand won’t make it to the final list and won’t even be considered further down the buying journey.

That’s why we often see branded fan-outs anytime we ask ChatGPT for product recommendations: It checks reviews and reputation of each product or brand before including it in the answer. These are fan-outs for the “Best headphones for running” prompt. See how it researches each product to consider recommending it.

Would your brand or product searches convince ChatGPT to include you in the list of recommended options?

How do I fix my LLM reputation: Consistent, Long-Term Effort

I repeat: Consistent and long-term…

I know, executives don’t like to hear “consistent and long-term,” but that’s the only way to shift the semantic consensus.

It all starts with an LLM consensus audit:

• What’s your current brand sentiment, and where is it coming from?

• What outdated information comes up in search and AI answers?

• Which brand attributes is your brand associated with (and which of those are wrong or outdated)

You can create the audit using tools like Peec AI (the screenshot is below) or by creating an autonomous workflow using Claude Code.

Here’s brand perception analysis done by Peec, for example. There’s a list of current “objections” (i.e., which attributes are associated with your brand that can prevent you from making the shortlist) and which citations are associated with each one.

You can create something similar using Claude or other LLM tools.

Then, you focus on creating long-term presence where it matters:

• Instead of trying to influence Reddit or Youtube sentiment by commenting on other threads/videos, create a strong branded subreddit or Youtube channel that helps you lead the conversation

• Instead of trying to sponsor your way into one or two high-intent listicles, develop long-lasting relationships with the editorial teams of publications that make the most influence. This will help your brand to be mentioned there on a consistent basis (which creates an LLM consensus)

• Instead of trying to hide negative reviews, create an effective workflow to curate positive reviews everywhere it matters.

• In addition to building links, focus on building authority by regularly publishing high-quality and (more importantly) unique research studies, tests, etc.

More importantly, make sure your whole company is involved. You need strong, clear, and consistent messaging on all channels (customer support, sales, paid media, on-site content, PR, etc.)

Shortcuts don’t build strong LLM consensus; smart strategic approaches do.

If you need help getting started, LLM reputation has been my specialty. Reach out!

There are lots of tools claiming their AI-generated content is “undetectable” and “high-quality”.

Google’s saying, “We don’t care how your content was produced as long as it’s useful,” has been perceived as “Go ahead, and generate your content with AI”.

But is it really the case? All signs point to the opposite.

>>>> JOIN us to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions!

Long-term SEOs had already known this cycle: SEO agencies that like profit margins will rush to AI-generate content for their clients → AI-generated content will dominate the web → Google will act. And this is what is already happening as we speak.

So far, everyone who cared to listen and watch has seen lots of signs that Google is actively penalizing AI-generated content:

• There are lots of case studies showing websites generating content using AI are being penalized by Google’s Spam Update every year. @Lily Ray has lots of great examples in her newsletter.

• There’s a brand new patent on AI content “AI slop” detection.

• Google has just updated its official documentation mentioning that any AI-generated OR AI-assisted content should be labeled as such.

All of this was done right before Google’s Spam update, which was longer than any other Spam update so far. I’ve been in SEO long enough to know all of this points to one thing: Google is starting a war against low-effort AI-generated content, and the key here is “low-effort.”

And I said this before: If something is too easy to do, it is neither valuable nor is going to result in long-term growth.

Because everything valuable comes with hard work, and it is not about engineering a sophisticated prompt to generate content. This is a popular argument by those in favor of AI-generated content (and currently in denial that it won’t work).

You may think you outsmarted Google and came up with a genius prompt on how to generate your article, but in the end you are publishing recycled low-effort content, and Google doesn’t like rewarding low-effort.

Content effort and SEO

Content effort is not at all a new concept in SEO.

“Effort” is mentioned 120 times in the official guidelines used by human raters who evaluate Google’s search results. Here’s how content “effort” is explained there:

Effort: Consider the extent to which a human being actively worked to create satisfying content.

Here’s an example of an article that the quality raters’ guidelines encourage to classify as the lowest-effort:

While the content itself is relevant, it simply repurposes other people’s content without providing any sources, adding any expert opinions, or otherwise showing any effort in creating it.

This is a classic AI-generated article that many website owners publish on their websites.

And it is the lowest-rated page, according to Google’s guidelines.

@Cyrus Shepard, who used to work as Google’s quality rater, shares that a lot of attention was paid to content effort during training, and it was always easy to tell low-effort content from high-quality content. He shares some examples:

At this point, content effort is also part of Google's official guidelines. Read it twice if that helps:

Effort: The extent to which human work went into creating the content or the systems powering it. For example, writing original analysis, translating a poem manually, or building a custom interactive map for a game represents high effort. Conversely, automatically generating pages from feeds or using generative AI to produce large amounts of text without manual oversight or curation represents little to no effort. Attribution or giving credit to other sources doesn’t replace the need for original effort.

Note: I already shared a similar concept of “non-commodity” content earlier. To me, the distinction is as follows:

• “non-commodity” content = your authority-building / data-driven digital PR asset that helps you become the source (surveys, proprietary data, whitepapers). No business can produce too many of these a year.

• “content with effort” = your overall editorial strategy for ALL the content that exists on your site (how-tos, reviews, product comparisons, etc.)

Repeat after me:

When it comes down to AI-generated content, it doesn’t matter if it can be detected as AI. It doesn’t even matter if it is actually useful.

• Effort is NOT the number of words

• Effort is NOT depth of content (AI can do research well)

• Effort is NOT the amount of time you were refining your prompt to generate “high-quality content in your voice”

• Effort is how much time YOU (or your team) dedicated to the piece to make it truly original (this is key!) because the web is already oversaturated with repurposed content.

What really matters is: WHY would Google or LLMs surface it? Is there anything new YOU added that is worth being found? How is it better than a ton of similar content on that topic???

Content “effort” as part of the algorithm

@Shaun Anderson found contentEffort attribute in the Google algorithm leak back in 2025. We don’t know if it is a direct ranking signal or how much it can impact a website’s visibility, but the fact that it exists in the algorithm is very telling.

The attribute is believed to power the Helpful Content updates and was later refined enough to become part of the core algorithm updates.

So ignoring (or faking) the content effort concept may decrease your visibility algorithmically.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of (even big) brands switching to AI-generated content production, and low-effort is pretty obvious there.

Reach out for a free review or consultation if you are worried about your content strategy or online visibility.

So far, we haven’t even agreed on a name for it (although, it looks like we are going to stick with AEO and/or GEO).

But first a couple of cool announcements:

• JOIN us to discuss this topic LIVE on Linkedin or Youtube (and bring your questions!)

• Ask your questions in this week’s AMA (and join our sub!). This week the host is Pedro Dias, former part of Google’s Search Quality team (!), SEO advisor for eBay, and now Head of SEO at geoSurge. What a host! Ask him ANYTHING!

We have seen multiple “new” and “newish” AEO/GEO tactics floating around, from article to article, from “playbook” to “playbook”, from study to study, and if you haven’t been too deep into the topic, you are likely to be losing your mind.

There’s very little effort in putting all of that together, giving brands some way to understand what it is they should be doing to be visible in AI answers. The closest to a solid AEO/GEO guide is Man of Many’s guide to GEO which includes well-researched, clutter-free highlights of the most trustworthy advice and research on the topic of building AI visibility.

I have shared my highlights from the study here, but I highly recommend reading it in its entirety.

And yet, I’d like to expand on one of the most useful chapters of the guide: The five layers of search:

While I fully agree with the concept here, the guide isn’t answering the most important question for the most important layers here:

How do you EARN the third-party authority and, consequently, AI recommendations?

Leaving us there with the “earning” part is not fair. This reminds me of Google telling us for years, “Oh, just create useful content and you will rank”. (We all know it has always been much more than “Build it and they will come” concept behind organic search visibility).

So how do you earn your way to the top two tiers?

Luckily, there are proactive steps you can take here. Let me give you just a few ideas…

Note (and I will repeat myself a few more times below because you cannot just say this enough): NONE of the steps below should be done for “GEO”/”AEO” only, otherwise they all fail miserably.

Cross-channel visibility: Be visible where your customers make those buying decisions

This is by far the most effective, most overlooked strategy to “earn” online visibility everywhere, be it traditional search or AI answers.

What you need to know is where your audience is, and be there. Tools like Sparktoro can be used to figure your specific influential platforms. Brand monitoring, competitor research and tracking will give lots of insights into where you are already being discussed… Just knowing your niche and audience usually helps.

It could be Reddit, Youtube, niche or local groups, or Pinterest (this one is going extremely strong in some niches!), Instagram, etc. etc. Pick the channels where your current and future customers go every day for shopping decisions and recommendations.

Repeat after me: Visibility drives visibility.

Once you are visible on those channels, your customers will bring that visibility elsewhere, and LLMs will quickly pick it up.

And that is how you build that “earned coverage footprint”, as editors and authors start seeing you mentioned everywhere and have no choice but include you in roundups, comparisons and lists.

And it is not just “set up your accounts and broadcast” kind of visibility. That’s growing a channel for it to have a dedicated community around it of real people willing to read your updates and engage.

Just don’t choose channels because of AI. Choose channels because of your customers (AI is following them, not vice versa).

Stop listening to AI studies on “most cited domains” to identify channels where you need to be. Today they cite Reddit, tomorrow they cite Wikipedia. A cross-channel strategy isn’t supposed to align with those whims. Plus, those citation rates are different from niche to niche.

I’ve had Reddit marketing leads knocking my door asking for Reddit services, and when asked “Why did you decide to invest in Reddit”, the confident answer was, “Because it is cited by LLMs”.

Listen, AI visibility is a highly ephemeral concept

We don’t know how to reliably measure it and attribute it to KPIs. For the most AI-visible brands, AI contributes to measurable 0.1-0.2% of revenue at this point (the rest is theory).

To quote Rand on my Linkedin post sharing this stats:

Invest in visibility for your customers, and all other bots will follow them. It is never the other way around.

Reputation and customer relationship building strategy

With building brand visibility, there’s always an inevitable problem most businesses don’t expect, for some reason. Online reputation gets out of control, as more and more people start discussing your name online.

Having an active community (see above) is extremely helpful because your happy customers will also be heard and seen.

But it also takes a careful reputation and relationship building strategy to take your own brand’s digital footprint under control. Essential things your business should be doing:

• Listen to your customers and adjust your on-site and social media content to address their pain points (this means including your customer support and sales teams into the process, brand monitoring, etc.).

• Fix as many of those issues you identify (no-brainer, right? Well most brands are trying to find other ways to fix their reputation)

• Establish strong presence where your brand is being discussed (again, see above) to have enough authority to confidently and publicly reply to negative reviews and comments

The goal is that most of the brand-driven user generated content flows into your own channels and all the customers’ concerns are addressed on your site.

This is the kind of a reputation strategy that will help your AI visibility because that is how you build a well-balanced, trustworthy and convincing customer review footprint.

Creative / data-driven digital PR (original research, guides, reports)

Data-driven digital PR has been brought up in the guide a few times as the most effective content strategy:

• Specific evidence wins. Original data, citable facts and first-party information beat generic content, nearly unanimously.

• What makes you worth citing? Original data nobody else has

• What correlates with results is depth, editing and original research

• Original data earns roughly 3.3 times more AI citations and improves the odds of a strong business result by 50%, and fewer people are doing it every year.

What the guide fails to emphasize is that original data or original reporting is exactly what earns you layer #4: Third-party authority.

Unless you create (and market!) something truly great on a regular basis, no one will know about you, including LLMs.

I do like the concept of *earning*, to be fair

…because it discourages businesses from taking useless shortcuts when they are “building” visibility. And none of the steps above is easy or quick.

And again, none of them should be done for “GEO” sake because they all bring about more, quicker, and more measurable benefits than AI visibility (additional revenue channels, happier (and hence more returning) customers, even higher organic rankings and more brand visibility.

And they will, by all means, earn your brand to layer 5, i.e. AI recommendations.

If you need help building your AEO/GEO strategy, reach out!

Check out the full report: The State of SEO + AI (AEO/GEO) Industry: What Do In-House Marketing Teams Prioritize and Fear?

Many of the SEOs and marketers also chose to add their own insights and recommendations, so in this episode I am sharing what actual in-house SEO practitioners are implementing AI visibility strategies, what they are struggling with and what they recommend moving forward:

>>> JOIN us to discuss this report live and bring your questions!

AEO / GEO experts most in-house teams are following:

• Lily Ray

• Ann Smarty *

• Michael King

• Aleyda Solís

• Kevin Indig

• Dan Petrovic

• Metehan Yeşilyurt

• Suganthan Mohanadasan

• Mark Williams-Cook

• Wil Reynolds

• Profound Team cc Josh Blyskal

• Carrie Rose

• Nick LeRoy

• Chris Long

• Britney Muller

• Rand Fishkin

• Glenn Gabe

• Barry Schwartz

• Krishna Madhavan

Most people I reached out to were already in my network, so many of them knew and followed me, so these results are skewed. But I am still including myself, because… ummm ego…

Also, if you like my content, please follow me on Google to see more of me in Discover and AI Answers!

GEO or AEO: We don’t have a clear winner yet

This was the biggest surprise after my first survey last year: Companies are now referring to AI visibility as AEO (39%) or GEO (37%). Last year one clear winner was “SEO for AI”.

This is bad news to long-time SEO experts who (rightfully) look at AI visibility optimization as an evolving SEO strategy and see no need in more acronyms.

I don’t disagree with that but I also think this is a lost cause at this point. For the time being, I am using both acronyms but choose to distinguish between the two in a meaningful way (in my opinion): GEO -> SEO - AEO.

Whether you insist on using the SEO acronym for everything, there’s no denying the fact that it is not just search anymore. Roberto Grasiano, Head of Organic Growth @Lottie, put it very well:

SEO is becoming broader than ever. It cannot rely purely on search engines; branded profiles across the web, user interaction, and mentions will have a bigger impact than before and help LLMs understand which brands are relevant to user prompts. So embedding organic social (TikTok, X, Reddit, YouTube, Shorts, etc.) will be part of the organic remit. I also believe SEOs should rebrand as Organic Growth, since it covers all of the above.

SEO isn’t dying, it’s graduating

Credit: Dianna Kersey

Tactics will evolve, but most of them are the ones we have always had:

• Meet real user interest with content worth reading

• Earn links from external sources, and now add mentions and messaging to that list.

That last part has always been PR work, and Avi Buchbinder thinks link building and PR are finally merging. Linus Logren, an SEO Lead at Kjell & Company, also believes that the fundamentals haven’t changed: We still focus on good content, spreading the word, and being accessible.

SEO will evolve and remain foundational to AI visibility, because AI search systems rely on discovering and retrieving useful, reliable web content. From what I understand prioritizing technical accessibility, original expertise and data, accurate information, and credible third-party coverage are critical success factors.

Alex Yardley, CEO of Laters.com, believes that SEO will evolve and remain foundational to AI visibility, because AI search systems rely on discovering and retrieving useful, reliable web content. Prioritizing technical accessibility, original expertise and data, accurate information, and credible third-party coverage are critical success factors.

Dan Deceuster reminds us about the biggest change so far: We are optimizing for AI Agents visiting our websites and reporting back to real people. It is a completely new audience we are dealing with:

Good SEO is part of being found, it’s just that we’re trying to be found by bots now, not people. People are finding you through the AI now, whether that’s an AI Overview or an LLM. If you want people to find you, then you want those AIs to find you, and being found by them means doing SEO.

Mary Albright thinks (and I agree) that SEO has always been changing, so it is not exactly new (abeit faster than ever):

Its all just going to evolve, there will be a period of spammers and grifters and then things will shift towards the middle as they always do.

David Karalis, SEO at T-Mobile, believes that SEO is just evolving but it takes a lot monitoring and analyzing to adjust:

I think AI just changes the broader search experience, not remove old paths entirely. Marketers should be testing and watching what downstream impacts come from changes in AI visibility, how actual referral traffic from citations behaves vs other channels, etc. For example, if we make our brand present in a conversation about a service/topic we weren’t previously in, but brand sites aren’t cited, how do we know the impact? Did brand search demand increase, did direct traffic increase, do we see increased in conversion further down the line? Nothing is dead, it’s just all evolving.

Cedric Harris emphasizes the importance of fundamentals but recognizes that there’s an added layer to also prioritize:

The fundamentals still matter: the technical SEO, authoritative content and strong user experience. However, marketers now need to optimize for how AI/answer engines interpret, summarize and recommend answers from brands and which brands it should come from.

So what should we be doing?

There are new tactics that companies started prioritizing because of AI, but the fundamentals remain crucial.

Credit: Chee Lo

-> Great content is still key:

AI answers have to pull from somewhere, and that’s still the open web. The brands that show up in ChatGPT or Google’s AI results are the ones putting out strong, useful content and making it easy for machines to read. So SEO isn’t going away. It’s becoming the input to AI search (Eric Kovalkoski)

-> Outbound strategies go beyon backlinks

(Although, backlinks are very important too!)

Building a brand that gets talked about and recommended just became a lot more important. (Krinal Mehta, Director of SEO @ Bluehost)

Digital PR and reverse engineering query-fan outs will be crucial to LLM visibility moving forward (Alex D’Amato)

-> Effective GEO/AEO strategy requires cross-team collaboration:

AI SEO needs involvement from brand teams, especially PR and communication and social media teams. (Maham Azam, SEO Manager at Paddle)

-> Review management and hence customer relationship building are crucial (especially for ecommerce and SaaS):

Reviews are incredibly impactful for AI visibility but often overlooked. Generating genuine reviews on your website should be a higher priority, especially for ecommerce businesses. However a lot of review platforms are invisible to LLMs. This requires a technical fix to ensure reviews are being utilised to their full extent. Make sure you’re generating reviews AND that they are visible to LLMs (Destiny Flaherty ).

Here are new tactics that companies introduced *just* because of AI visibility concern:

• Optimizing new content for AI (FAQs, takeaways, etc.)

• Reddit marketing

• Refreshing existing content to optimize it for AI

• Digital PR for linkbuilding and brand mentions* (Note: AI-driven digital PR strategy is different from the traditional PR)

• Schema

• Content chunking

• Content partnerships / affiliate relationships with top-cited sites

• Wikipedia monitoring and inclusion strategy

• Creating non-commodity content

• General authority and brand building

• Refreshing content to make it more valuable and useful

• Youtube marketing

Overall:

Keep doing seo best practice on top of getting owned channels machine-ready plus understanding which earned sources to target to help build brand trust. (Melt du Plooy)

Long-term visibility vs quick gains

I’ve talked about shortcuts a lot here, and how they may cost your business long-term visibility, and Jack Thornburg, Digital Growth @ HelloFresh, has a very balanced perspective on this topic:

It feels like a lot of SEO / AI SEO decisions being made today are somewhat dependent on how far into the future a business can afford to look. If a business is small and needs quick wins, being aggressive on Reddit may actually make sense. It may make sense to build listicle content at scale to win citations in AI.

But for larger, more established businesses with more downside to those kinds of tactics, I think the smarter approach is to bake AI SEO / GEO into what is, quite simply, a sound SEO strategy. Create genuinely useful content, build authority around the topics that matter to your business, and make sure you’re showing up across the 3rd-party sources that AI platforms are actually using.

However, for any type of business, it is important to prioritize proven strategies. Don’t fall for yet another shiny tactic and a fancy term! Most experienced SEOs learned that lesson long time ago, so did Taryn Siwale, Interim Digital & SEO Manager at Aviva Insurance Ireland:

Having been around the block, I’ve found that testing strategies specifically for your own industry, website, and target audience provides infinitely more insight than blindly following SEO tactics found online. That’s not to say you shouldn’t listen to best practices, where possible run a controlled test phase before full-scale implementation.

I recall when Google doubled the length of meta descriptions; everyone scrambled to rewrite their tags to boost CTR, only for Google to revert the change a few months later. Similarly, community-driven tactics like leveraging Reddit for SERP and AI visibility have likely peaked and begun to plateau as algorithms mature. SEO is inherently a long-term commitment. While both traditional search and AI are evolving at an accelerating rate, remember: slow is the turtle that beats the jack rabbit to the finish line.

The huge issue with data and reporting

Lack of reporting, first-hand data, clear attribution and reliable KPIs are the biggest concerns behind AI-driven journeys.

We have to rely on third-party data that is often skewed and doesn’t tell us the full story (e.g. how AI visibility scores translate in the actual revenue).

There are different data sources and metrics companies are trying to embrace.

Avi Buchbinder explains the problem very well:

The bigger trouble I see coming for SEOs is the erosion of the click based attribution model. In a way we are back to the days before the internet, when you didn’t really know where a conversion came from. And honestly we never truly knew what convinced someone to convert, only what correlated with it. Now even the correlation gets fuzzy.

Julian Redlich has some interesting thoughts about the clickstream data rising in popularity since it can tell us what a user did before purchasing a service or product. There’s something between ChatAI and the purchase (e.g. watchign a video, Googling, reading a listicle) that we will focus more on.

Therefore, Rand Fishkin’s “Building on rented land” will become more popular since click stream data will make it more measurable.

There are new and emerging metrics we are still trying to figure out. For example, Dana Tan, Head of SEO/GEO Aritzia, is looking for ways to measure Machine Validated Trust, a concept we didn’t have to deal with before.

Understanding your target user is becoming even more important, as Michael Hayes states:

Having deep empathy for the user and their query path is critical, as it may no longer present in classic keyword research data.

It is getting harder and harder for small businesses

This is the most unfortunate trend because small businesses are the most vulnerable (and the most honorable) of all businesses.

Abby Gleason encourages businesses to find product market fit and lean into their differentiators to show up when prospects search for solutions to specific needs. But building a brand around that is absolutely essential right now.

Kirill Kniazev, Marketing Director at ToolBeltData, also believes there is still good opportunities for small and new businesses to build visibility:

Our brand is still relatively early in the SEO game, but I am still seeing reasonably good SEO results in spite of a lack of AI awareness of our brand. So, good content still works, and building an AI strategy through credibility takes time.

Fundamentals remain, everything else is changing…

I think we’re moving away from the concept of search altogether. Users are no longer “searching”; they’re “asking.” A seemingly small distinction, with big ramifications. To make an imperfect analogy, I see it as the difference between browsing your public library for a book on home repairs, or simply asking your librarian to recommend one and get it for you. The library no doubt has many books on home repair, and the librarians have curated them before you got there, but you would still need to spend time searching and discerning them from one another.

On the other hand, the librarian has expertise in picking quality books and knowing where they’re located, so you cut down on search time. In today’s world, AI acts as a super-intelligent librarian with access to seemingly all of human knowledge. If you’re a business owner or professional, your job today is to become one of the books the librarian would recommend, instead of just one of the books the librarian curates.

Traditional SEO is still relevant because the strategies and tactics we used to get curated still apply to getting recommended (quality, authority, trust, brand, etc.). But, our AI librarian can’t recommend every business, so we need to differentiate ourselves. With traditional search, businesses had direct control of the top of their funnels. Now, AI is the top of every funnel, and our new job is to navigate that shift and ensure our business is visible, properly represented, and users continue moving down funnel.

Because of this, traditional marketing and brand-building will be more important than ever in the new SEO/AI world. I think, in a way, we are going back to old-school marketing, with SEO shifting from a massive acquisition channel to a strategy we use to gain AI visibility, regain some control of the top of our funnel, and differentiate ourselves enough to be recommended. (Miljo Dragutinovic, Head of Growth at Termly)

The SEO industry is overwhelming and noisy these days. But it looks like internal teams are figuring GEO/AEO out.

If you need help with your AI visibility optimization strategy, reach out!

• GEO (generative engine optimization): Training data tracking, analysis, and optimization strategy

• SEO (search engine optimization): Making sure LLMs find our pages when searching

• AEO (answer engine optimization): Optimizing for retrieval. If our page is found (see step #2) and picked, this strategy ensures LLMs will find the answers it was seeking for

Thoughts?

If you have questions, feel free to reach out!

I blame clickbaity headlines that dominate our industry. They contribute to the unbearable noise.

We need to get better than this.

Reports: ChatGPT stopped citing user-generated sites in its new edition. Meanwhile, the headlines: “ChatGPT dropped Reddit from its citations!!!”

Look, before we get any further, let’s have a quick look at ChatGPT visibility (traffic) for the past few months…

>>> JOIN US to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions/feedback to be featured!

For the fun of it, let’s take a look at how ChatGPT “SEO” has been doing so far

Looking at ChatGPT referral traffic data is as much fun as being an SEO strategist these days.

You can see how different models immediately change the traffic patterns without businesses necessarily doing anything to impact that.

Talk about GEO playbooks 🤌

Those ups and downs you see in the graph are - guess what - ChatGPT launching new models that generate answers differently.

How are you supposed to strategize around these whims?

Now back to Reddit: If you are doing anything *just* for GEO, you are wasting your money

It also means that you were doing it painfully wrong and were doomed to fail.

That, by the way, applies to overall SEO too, not just to GEO. (Next time, I am going to talk about Google’s concept of “content and effort”, which most agencies chose to ignore)

I cannot imagine a long-term marketing strategy that follows visibility whims like that.

If you are committed to building *REAL* Reddit presence that will drive brand visibility, trust, conversions, etc., THEN go for it. Because if you do it right, you will not only build an additional conversion and visibility channel, but it will BY ALL MEANS improve your AI visibility.

I’ve rejected ALL the leads that were looking for quick mentions in Reddit comments or seeded threads, because I never believed in that tactic. What’s the point in faking it if it will stop working tomorrow?

Instead, for our clients, we build brand-owned channels that are strong enough to:

• Host expert AMAs (which reengage past leads and get new ones from the Reddit community)

• Build brand trust, authority, and loyalty

• Announce exclusive Reddit deals (which convert like crazy!)

• Manage relationships and turn angry, unhappy customers into happy ones (who are even ready to go and spread a good word and/or delete older angry threads)

• Foster word-of-mouth marketing outside of your subreddit

This takes time, but having an organic channel like this is priceless.

One of our client’s less-than-a-year-old subreddit drove $80,000 from just one official thread announcing a Reddit exclusive deal:

In all honesty, this doesn’t have to be necessarily Reddit. You can, for example, do the same on YouTube, or another channel. Reddit just happens to be more visible outside of the platform itself…

Let’s talk about Reddit’s visibility and influence on other channels

Smarty.Marketing team has been doing Reddit marketing since about 2013 (give or take), LONG before it became known as a weird shortcut to GEO. In those years, whether Reddit ranked or not, it continued to be the most powerful visibility channel, if you had the brains to do that right.

Reddit has been influencing the bottom of the funnel for most businesses for YEARS (people searching “product name reddit”): These queries have been dominating branded search since at least 2018, which is when I spoke on that at conferences).

Consumers are actively searching for Reddit. It’s not like it ranks because Google decided so. Google followed the consumer demand!

THAT IS WHY Reddit is all over AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, etc. etc. (and likely it’s STILL part of the constantly updated training data for ChatGPT and all others)

It is because people need it; this is not artificial visibility.

So if your customers are asking Reddit opinions about your product, chances are your audience is there, and the only way to reach them is to be on Reddit, creating your own community for them.

If you are there to throw a few (or many) promotional and/or fake comments about yourself, you won’t achieve any, especially long-term, positive results. (You’ll likely ruin your trust and reputation instead).

And if you are visible on Reddit, you will be visible in LLMs. Because visibility drives visibility.

Repeat after me: Any tactic is only worth investing in ONLY if it builds up several channels, never just one…

The point is: If you were only looking at Reddit JUST for SEO or GEO, your strategy was already doomed and a waste of budgets… It is for everyone’s good that you are now changing your mind.

If you want to be on Reddit because your target customers are there, and you need to turn that channel into a long-term visibility hub and your Reddit community home, THEN reach out!

Some of the common questions that I see every day:

• Do backlinks still help for organic search rankings?

• Do backlinks increase your LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, AI Mode, etc.) visibility?

• What to do if I am penalized for spammy link building tactics?

The short answers are:

Do backlinks still help for organic search rankings?

YES!

Do backlinks increase your LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, AI Mode, etc.) visibility?

YES!

What to do if I think I was penalized for spammy link building tactics?

If you are not sure, you likely were not… But you may need to improve your link building strategy…

But let’s try to figure this all out in more detail and add some context…

>>>> JOIN us to discuss this LIVE and bring your questions!

Do backlinks still matter?

This question has been floating around for years now, but those who do actual SEO work and track visibility have always known the answer: Yes. Because we see this in practice.

But there’s a very recent confirmation that got a lot of attention.

Someone asked on Reddit if incorrect disavowing links can cause a sitewise penalty… And in the midst of everyone in the thread hating on the Disavow tool* and saying it is outdated, Google’s John Mueller joined in to say that the Disavow tool is still useful.

* Note: The Disavow tool allows website owners to instruct Google to ignore listed backlinks pointing to their websites.

If we try to cut through all the noise that this statement caused, here are some important takeaways:

• This means backlinks matter a lot (otherwise, why would the Disavow tool still exist?)

• This also means that the backlinks don’t just “matter”; they are still important AND often complicated enough for Google not to be able to figure them out algorithmically: there is still a tool that allows website owners to point Google to backlinks they don’t want to count for rankings.

So the answer is a confident yes here.

Will backlinks matter in the future?

Yes, but let’s talk more about this, as most marketing teams and business owners don’t like this answer.

A few decades of SEO spoiled us: We were trained to look at backlinks in terms of numbers: PR (and then DR or DA), as well as how many we got.

These days, it is about true visibility.

If backlinks drive relevant visibility in trustworthy publications, they matter, regardless of your goal: whether it is SEO, GEO, or wherever your goal is.

The thing is, Google, as well as any LLM out there (like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude), is looking for trust signals, and the best trust signals out there are:

• Citability signals (such as backlinks from trusted publications or relevant brand mentions)

• Organic search visibility (which is driven by the above).

For decades, humanity hasn’t come up with better trust signals than citability and mentions.

The thing is, if you are not mentioned anywhere outside of your own website, your business may not be trusted. The more you get cited and mentioned, the more you are trusted, and hence the higher your visibility in both organic search and AI answers.

It is that simple. I am not sure why this causes so much confusion or debate.

What if I Think My Website Lost Rankings Over Spammy Backlinks?

Let’s talk about penalties now because there’s still a lot of confusion here.

This confusion came from old link-related updates, called Penguin. Those were a series of officially announced updates when Google penalized websites algorithmically if a spammy link-building pattern was identified.

In 2016, Google announced that the Penguin update became part of the core algorithm. An important part of that announcement:

Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.

This means that:

• Spammy links will not impact your whole site. Low-quality link building tactics can still impact certain pages, but the filters no longer act as penalties. Poor-quality links may be devalued, so your page may be losing rankings because a previously effective link no longer sends any authority signals. (This, unless you got a manual link-related penalty.)

• There may be no updates associated with a change in rankings. These changes may happen at any time, with no warning.

Instead of Thinking “Recovery”, Think “How to Do Things Right Going Forward?”

In other words, unless you got a manual penalty claiming your links are spammy, there’s nothing to recover from. If you are losing ranking, it may be just because you were wasting your money on questionable link-building tactics, and those backlinks just lost their link equity. And it is likely a sign to start investing in something real and long-term instead.

So the recovery route is not about fixing what you may have done in the past. It is about changing your current SEO and link-building tactics to provide higher quality.

If you need help diagnosing your traffic loss, creating a GEO-/SEO-friendly link-building strategy, or improving your visibility, reach out!

With AI platforms, the problem has become worse because AI agents will often search Google to find answers for their users.

The first step in solving this issue was Google canceling support for the num=100 parameter, which caused some analytics and reporting problems in the SEO industry.

Now, Google has introduced a new update trying to combat bot traffic: It hid the destination URLs from search results.

Google has been testing replacing direct URLs in search results with google.com/goto? redirects for a few weeks.

It is now officially confirmed that Google has rolled this update out within a month for most users.

You can only see the redirects when logged out of Google:

>>> JOIN US to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions!

As this change is gradually going live for everyone, here’s what you will likely be seeing:

Your daily rank tracker may be showing weird results

It is a hard switch for rank-tracking platforms because the ranking URLs cannot be retrieved without clicking the links.

It may take some time for your ranking reports to start reflecting your actual rankings. Both Moz and Ahrefs are claiming to have solved the problem because they saw it coming (from earlier tests Google was noticed to do) and were able to adjust.

Semrush seems to be adjusting pretty well too. At the beginning of August, Semrush started reporting /goto links as ranking URLs but the numbers have declined recently. Presumably, this is a sign that Semrush has found a way to retrieve the actual URLs:

There are also free browser-based solutions already that fix redirects to point to direct URLs, so it is definitely doable at this point (but Google will persist, for sure).

If your rank tracker fails to adjust, you may notice your rankings disappear which may not actually be the case.

Your Search Console “Performance” section will likely be impacted

It is unclear how Search Console data may be affected yet. Even if all major rank trackers promptly figure out reporting, the data may still be skewed if AI agents change their searching behavior. Here are two possible trends we may start seeing:

• Fewer impressions without clicks being impacted (from AI agents giving up on using Google because the URLs are harder to retrieve)

• More clicks (Instead of giving up on searching Google - which is not easy to do because Google does provide the highest-quality results and is used by most people - AI agents may be compelled to click more URLs instead of just citing them without reading).

In either case, if you notice your numbers start changing, don’t panic just yet.

So far it looks like many AI platforms are still searching Google and just citing the /goto URL (which I expect to change soon). So you may also start noticing your citation numbers going down as well.

What’s the future of SEO data?

This is one question that bothers everyone now. After Google lost the DMCA case to a well-known search scraper, SerpAPI (which is also used by ChatGPT to access Google’s search results), Google seems to be even more serious about blocking its results to bots. This will likely cause ongoing issues for SEO analysis and reporting.

Since then, “About” pages have become one of the most common checks in SEO audits.

Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini often check official About pages to verify whether a brand is worth recommending. In my GEO audits, I always see a business “About” page as one of the most cited pages for target prompts.

» JOIN us to discuss this topic live and bring your questions!

So when creating your About page, keep the SEO and GEO/AEO aspects of it in mind:

A clear value proposition statement

Start the page explaining what you do, in a very clear, non-promotional way.

This statement should be consistent with what you say about your business everywhere else (in your business social media profile bios, directory listings, etc.)

LLMs may ignore bold, marketing statements (“We are the best in XX”) but will likely pick up on factual, number-based messages (e.g., “trusted by XXX consumers for since XXXX”).

Credibility signals

When landing on your About page, both people and AI agents are likely to be already aware of your brand, so they are looking for verification, rather than business details. In other words, you need to prove that your business is trusted.

Any verifiable claims should be prioritized here:

• Years in business

• Partnerships with known entities/brand

• Certifications

• Security verifications

• Notable clients

• Recognitions from known organizations

• Industry awards

• Mentions in authoritative publications (names and links, not just logos)

• Testimonials from verifiable people

Be as factual and specific as possible: Add links to known entities, years your business was awarded, link to customer profiles on social media, etc.

Use cases

Your “About” page should clearly list which problems it is solving and for who. This will make it clear to LLMs which prompts your business is a good candidate for listing.

One of the best ways to create this problem-solving content in a meaningful way is to list summaries of your business use cases that would list a persona and a problem they were trying to solve (and how your product helped).

You can link to more details of each use case, but it is beneficial to list the key details on the About page.

Consistent terminology

One of the biggest AI optimization mistakes out there is inconsistent, and often vague messaging.

Update your About page and all your public business listings with specific, clear, and consistent messaging.

Schema

There’s no confident proof or confirmation on whether AI agents pay any attention to website schema usage. Yet, “Organization” schema is officially recommended by Google, so it remains a consistent SEO recommendation.

How detailed the schema should be is also a matter of a lot of debate. I recommend playing it on the side of clarity rather than too much detail. Note:

• Your business name (as noted in the official documentation)

• Your alternative business name (based on how searchers may refer to your business when searching)

• Your address and contact details

• Your logo

• Your foundation date

• Your founder’s name (here you can embed the Person schema for more details)

• Your sameAs properties (links to official social media profiles)

Overall, when working on your business About page, prioritize clarity, factual details, and establishing connections with trusted known entities.

Get in touch if you need help with optimizing your About page!

This question has been one of the biggest ones in the SEO industry for a few years now, because we are taught to live in the “keyword-based” world.

The answer came from Google, albeit an unofficial one.

A few days ago, John Mueller confirmed that Search Console recorded AI Mode prompts as queries.

So now we have an official confirmation that some of Search Console’s Performance section could give us a glimpse into real people’s prompting.

>>>>> Please join us to discuss this topic and bring your questions!

So let me share how to pull that prompt data from Google and how to use it (I’d welcome some more ideas here):

How to find real prompts in Google’s Search Console

1. Search Console query filters

Prompts are likely to be longer, so you can easily find those by using a regex:

([^” “]*\s){10,}?

There’s another regex shared by Jean-Christophe Chouinard on Linkedin that filters likely “follow-up” queries, like “yes”, “please”, etc..

Note: For high-traffic properties, you will only be able to see queries that send at least some clicks. Since AI Mode might be sending none, you will miss those unless you access the SC data through the API.

Which brings us to a free API-based solution:

2. A Google Spreadsheet extension

I’ve been using this Google Spreadsheet extension for many years, and it turns out to be useful for this task as well. All you need:

• Install and authenticate it

• Choose the website you want to run the report

• Group by query and use the regex above

From there, you can pull 25,000 queries that use the built-in Gemini capabilities to analyze and group the data:

3. A free tool

This may be a vibe-coded tool, but it is a very useful one! It is free; it pulls data from your Search Console (so it does need access to your account), but it does some useful things:

• Pull likely queries that are AI Mode prompts

• It categorizes prompts by topics and intent

• It shows impressions for each prompt

• It blocks “likely bot” prompts

You can export everything into a spreadsheet for further analysis:

Use it on your own discretion as it does access your SC data through its API.

Prompt impressions: How to find *real, human* prompts

The major question I had: “Why do some of these prompts have such insane impression numbers? How many types can the same prompts be logically used by different people?”

Well, these are likely to be prompt tracking software running these prompts in the AI Mode. So these may not be actual human prompts. Instead, these are what marketers *think* the prompts may be. This is still a good insight into what your possible competitors are focusing on.

If you really want to know what people type as a prompt to an LLM, keep an eye on 1- or 0-impression queries.

Bing’s AI query report vs Google’s query report

Another popular confusion: Bing AI section already reports on AI prompts.

No, it does not.

Bing Webmaster Tools gives you the grounding query report, i.e., what its LLM (Copilot) searches when a human being asks a question. There’s no report on what people are actually prompting.

While this is still quite a useful report, it gives no insight into real human interactions with an AI platform.

What to do with the prompt data

The answer to this question is going to keep evolving because this is the new data we are dealing with.

From my personal perspective, so far:

• Use AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) to categorize and understand the prompt trends

• Better optimize the ranking URLs to address those questions

• Refine your prompt tracking strategy (chances are, you have some essential prompts missing), but don’t try to track each and every one of those prompts.

If you need help with brainstorming and analysis, let me know!

»» JOIN ME to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions!

There’s no single, well-defined playbook as to which steps they should take to get surfaced by LLMs. Instead, there’s an incredible amount of noise in the industry as agencies are trying to sell single tactics that are proclaimed to be efficient: Reddit, Listicles, organic rankings… Each of these is often advertised as your best way to get into AI answers.

While all those tactics are helpful (when done right), individually, none of them will drive long-term visibility across a wide variety of prompts and all LLM platforms.

LLM visibility cannot be quikcly/easily built or scaled, and that might be your strongest competitive advantage by the way. In the world where everyone is trying to fake it, there’s a clear benefit of building something real.

There’s no one single tactic to elevate your brand’s presence in AI answers because there are two important components working here (driving one another):

• Your brand needs to be “known” by LLMs in a clear way (what you do and how you are different from direct competitors)

• Your brand needs to be consistently present across several URLs AI agents find and use to create an answer when searching.

This notion of a business clearly positioned around the web is referred to as “LLM consensus”, and there’s no one tactic to achieve it.

Ensure consistent messaging about your business everywhere

The first step to LLM visibility is ensuring that all the pages that rank for your brand name or variations consistently and clearly describe your business and its value proposition in the same way, to avoid confusion. This “LLM consensus audit” should be as extensive as possible, because AI agents search further than top 10 ranking URLs:

• Your website: On-site “About” pages are usually very outdated and weak

• Official profiles across social media platforms

• Your local reviews (Trustpilot, BBB, Google Maps, Yelp, Tripadvisor, etc.)

• Niche directory listings

• Any other pages mentioning your business

The essential details that should remain consistent from URL to URL include:

• Date and year when the business was founded

• Current address

• Consistent description of the business and the key identifying factors (that make your business different from direct competitors).

• Partnerships, collaborations, sponsorships (with other brands/entities)

• Awards, achievements, and milestones

Some examples of business details that can make your business stand out (and get surfaced more often):

• Manufactured in [America]

• Family-owned

• Locally farmed

• XX+ years in business

• Awarded in [year] as “XX”, etc.

If you keep repeating these unique identifying factors across the web consistently, they will ultimately become part of the LLM training data and help your business get included in more relevant answers.

Identify “gaps” in visibility

The next step is identifying the most influential domains and URLs where your business lacks visibility (and where your competitors are included). For bigger businesses that try to be visible across a wide variety of prompts, tools like Peec.AI and Amadora.AI can be useful. For smaller businesses that care about 3-10 prompts, manual prompting and analysis are also doable.

For your target prompts, take notes for:

• Most cited domains (in many cases, those could be Reddit, YouTube, etc.) and create a long-term visibility strategy around those.

• Most cited URLs. Those are likely to be listicles on well-established domains. If several of your competitors are listed but your business consistently fails to be included in those, create a plan on how yours can be included as well. Usually, this involves a well-crafted outreach or a relationship-building strategy with journalists/bloggers and editors of the publication.

Each of these steps can take many months. But there’s no easier plan to get consistently surfaced in AI answers. It is neither easy nor fast.

So stay away from marketing agencies that advertise easy and quick solutions because those usually involve short-term visibility or manipulations that can cost your business long-term visibility.

Don’t forget to monitor AI visibility progress using some measurable KPIs and clear metrics.

And feel free to have a quick free chat if you need help!

And there are many reasons for that:

• Data-driven studies were also found to drive consistent search visibility if you plan them with SEO in mind.

• High-quality assets attract backlinks and brand mentions consistently, when done right. Both are important for search and LMM visibility.

• They build trust and get cited a lot.

• They drive relevance factors and brand positioning inside LLM training data.

>>>> JOIN us to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions!

And yet, most of these campaigns fail miserably. In fact, there are so very few examples of businesses doing them right that we don’t even do competitive research for inspiration anymore.

Most of what we see is too mediocre for us to use as a sample of work done well.

Here’s why most businesses fail to make their digital PR strategy work:

1. Too much focus on scaling

Our industry has always been guilty of trying to scale everything to a point when it becomes easy to sell.

As I said before, if it is easy, it is not going to work because everyone can do “easy”.

Scaled PR campaigns fail to capture the attention of truly good publications. Now that many more businesses attempt to do those studies, it is becoming harder to stand out.

Most agencies want to sell more. But it is not about the volume. It is about creating something great each time to attract real signals.

At Smarty.Marketing we spend at least a month brainstorming, researching, and creating assets that have the biggest potential to do well.

2. Not enough time and effort to brainstorm truly great ideas

Brainstorming is the hardest and the most important part of the process. And yet most marketers neglect it. From what I’ve seen, most people simply use ChatGPT to generate idea lists.

I’ve said this before and I’ll die on this hill: ChatGPT cannot come up with something truly unique. It can give you some directions but a good idea needs much more work.

When brainstorming digital PR campaign ideas, we take time to:

• Read relevant subreddits to see which topics trigger active discussions

• Research available data and come up with angles that were never done before

• Look at relevant search queries and questions (We want those studies to be found organically long after it is published)

• Read stories that were done before by solid publications

3. Over-focusing on the wrong KPIs

Businesses tend to over-focus on old metrics. For digital PR, these are usually backlinks.

While we still like and report on backlinks, focusing on the link building aspect of digital PR means you oversee other metrics which are just as important.

For our campaigns, we look at:

• Brand mentions (linked and unlinked)

• Backlinks

• Organic visibility of each campaign

• LLM citations of each campaign

• Overall traffic and sources

• Reddit visibility and activity (how actively each campaign is discussed on Reddit)

This combination of different metrics gives a lot of data for a balanced success evaluation. A campaign may bring just a few good backlinks right away but then it will start driving many more through good organic visibility. This is as good (or even better) than a campaign that went viral (and then died out over time).

If you need help brainstorming, let me know! Data-driven PR is what we have been doing for more than 16 years!

Check out what Ann Smarty’s digital PR agency do to build links.

How to regain search and AI visibility?

Here is what you need to start doing:

>>>> Join us LIVE to discuss this topic and bring your questions!

1. Truly Unique Content (Based on Your Experience) That Requires a Click

Most content strategies are not keeping up with current buying journeys. Generic “how to” or “what is” content is easily summarized in an AI answer and seldom needs a click for further reading. This traffic has been lost forever.

While I still encourage businesses to publish it if it is useful, truly unique (non-commodity) content is needed to generate traffic and visibility.

What could those be?

• Unique proprietary research studies (based on your own data or original surveys)

• Unique studies based on public data, exploring trends, patterns, etc.

• Videos (especially interviews on current trends, unique commentary, actionable walk-through and how-tos)

• Case studies and product testing

All of these are not as easy to summarize in a quick answer, so they will require a clear, visible reference.

They are also great at generating links and awareness:

• Research studies become top lead magnets for just about any brand we create them for (even huge and well-linked ones)

• Videos are highly shareable social media content assets (because you can cross-share them through multiple channels)

• Unique product tests and comparisons rank for branded queries and get linked by journalists naturally.

2. Cross-Channel Distribution

I’ve always been an advocate of meaningful content repackaging in order to reach a wider audience. I think I’ve been talking about that since at least 2005! This interview I was able to find is from 2015 but there were many more.

With LLMs consuming content spontaneously from everywhere, content repackaging for cross-channel distribution makes even more sense.

While the main article should live on your site, you also can:

• Visualize your unique research study and post it on Instagram, Pinterest, etc.

• Use takeaways from your video (interview) and post them on Twitter, Linkedin and elsewhere

• Use visual quotes from the video and post them on Instagram

• Turn your video into a podcast and distribute it through podcast streaming platforms

• Take individual graphs from your study and tweet them using one important point that makes people talk

• Discuss your visual study in your own subreddit and other subreddits (r/DataIsBeautiful, etc.)

• Break your video into reels and shorts for different content types (Instagram, TikTok, etc.)

One unique, non-commodity content asset can have lots of lives and last for months if you bring up a new message every time. And it all reminds LLMs that you exist and makes them remember your brand better. If they have consistent context around your brand, they will keep surfacing you, and citing you.

If you need help creating this strategy, reach out!

Here’s how SEO shortcuts work: You exploit a known tactic; you gain traffic for 3-6 months; you either sell or just set up a new site to do the same.

>>> JOIN US to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions!

This build-and-flip model has been here for ages. And it is not rocket science if you are willing to lose everything before you start a new site.

Unfortunately, these so-called success stories have been loud enough for brands to start trying things like these. And this is nothing new. Let’s go back in time to list some of the most notable brands that lost 90% of their visibility and had to fire 90% of their teams because they were willing to try shortcuts:

• Panda Updates (2011): This is when businesses thought it was a good idea to create a semi-auto-generated page for every variation of a search query. Unfortunately, those low-quality pages dragged high-quality pages down to the bottom as well. This was a sitewide automated penalizing update. Lucky for them, there was a solid recovery route there. You just had to nuke 90% of your site and slowly build your visibility up.

• Penguin Updates (2021-2016). These have been part of Google’s core algorithm (updates) ever since. These updates have been hitting lots of websites trying to take advantage of quick link-building shortcuts (PBNs, bulk guest posts, paid links, etc.). Those were devastating for lots of well-known brands, but yet again, Google gave them some recovery routes (like Disavows).

As you can see, back then, there were well-defined recovery steps. Ever since Core Updates started, there have been none. You actually need to fix everything in hopes of recovery, and the stakes are much higher.

Ever since AI content generation has become a thing, we all saw where it was going

All those smart tools using ChatGPT content and generating “AI-undetectable” content. It didn’t last long. Quite predictably.

It has always been the main rule: “If something is easy to do, it won’t last”

Google cracked down on easy links, easy content, easy anything else before.

It was quite logical that AI-generated content would not last.

It is obvious that self-serving listicles won’t last.

We already have lots of well-documented cases when pretty big brands are losing visibility because they tried both or either of those shortcuts.

is reporting on those cases, and so is :

It was equally obvious that Reddit would crack down on AI-generated content and automated spam.

I actually think that Reddit is well equipped to do that, since most of it is manually moderated.

And it is quite logical: If something is easily scaled, why won’t everyone do it? How would you stand out?

Shortcuts are not effective in the long run because they are not competitive.

If everyone can do it easily, who is rewarded with visibility?

To be visible, you need to stand out:

• Create something original, like proprietary studies, tools, reports, etc.

• Build a real Reddit presence, which takes time and creativity, hence most of your competitors will fail.

• Invest in tactics that help everywhere, from organic search to LLMs, for long-term organic visibility.

Stop looking for silver bullets and invest in something real and long-term!

And feel free to connect if you need help brainstorming!

The problem is, this is the bottom-of-the-funnel searches, meaning that people searching for [brand name reviews] already know the business. They are interested enough to research you. You have already spent money on them getting to know you (ads, SEO, etc.)

>>> JOIN US to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions!

These search results are leaking your warmest leads. It can be devastating for a business’s well-being.

So the most common question is, “How do we get rid of this thread?”

Well, you are likely looking at this the wrong way.

We have a client with mixed reviews on Reddit (which is natural), but there was one thread that included “HORRIBLE” in the title, which was ranking everywhere, for just about any branded query, even the main one, and consequently showed up in most branded prompts as well.

When that client came to us, they asked for a Reddit thread removal service. I immediately told them that we don’t recommend Reddit thread removal as the main strategy. We don’t chase negative threads to remove them (this can backfire big time as mods get very angry about removal requests).

Reddit thread removal can never be your main focus

Reddit cannot be taken by storm because it can backfire!

Our specialty is to build the brand’s presence to a point where:

• Old negative threads are not as visible.

• There’s a noticeable decline in negativity on Reddit because the brand sentiment has shifted

The client agreed.

So here is what we did:

• We set up an official Reddit account and built up its Karma, focusing on relevant authority-driven content

• We set up the official subreddit, focusing on addressing and explaining common pain points, and posting interesting and engaging content

• We set up a workflow for their customers to share real, detailed reviews, product pictures, etc.

After more than 6 months of work, we saw great results: more positive threads from the branded subreddit started showing up for a variety of branded queries.

And yet, that “horrible” thread persisted in visibility.

The thing is, those “horrible” and “scam” threads are hard to compete with because of their huge clickability. Google knows people will choose to click them.

So we assessed the situation:

• The thread was very old and outdated

• The discussed pain points were long addressed and fixed

Instead of bothering the mods, we reached out to the user and asked if they wanted to try the product again and see if they would change their opinion. At that point, we had already built a solid official brand Reddit account that was trustworthy enough for the customer to be impressed to see it in their DMs.

So the customer was open to it, got the free product, loved it, and removed their old thread.

The rankings took another week or so to shuffle, and the branded search immediately became much better balanced (and fresher).

The key takeaways:

👉 On Reddit, don’t attack the problem right away. You need time to build trust before you can get proactive with your old & outdated footprint

👉 It is hard work, and it takes time, but it fixes your problem forever

If you need help fixing your Reddit reputation, reach out!

• Bing Webmaster Tools show what Bing’s LLMs (Copilot) are searching for and whether your URL was cited to be seen. It is not about search (for all we know, LLMs may not be even searching Bing). These are LLMs searching, not people.

• Google’s Search Console reports whether your URL was ever cited inside search features (AI Mode and AI Overviews). In other words, it is a search visibility report (not Google’s LLM visibility report). We really don’t know who is searching here (for AI Overviews, it’s people. For AI Mode, it’s likely Google’s AI agents. Since there is no way to filter between the two, there’s no way to know.) But we know, it’s Google-only visibility.

It is a little funny how we are given so little insight into all the above, but it is important to know.

Now, let’s see if this data can be made useful:

>>>> JOIN us to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions!

Bing’s “AI Visibility” section

The report consists of two sections: “Grounding Queries” and “Pages:”

• “Grounding Queries,” which are “the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content that was cited in its answer.” In other words, the queries are the “fan-out” terms that Bing’s AI agents use to search for and find answers, though we don’t know which search engines or platforms they access.

• “Pages”, i.e., the URLs included in the AI answers.

For every Grounding Query, Webmaster Tools now reports on:

• Query Intent (Navigational, Informational, “Learn and Solve”, Commercial, Conversational, Comparison). I found those latter two (Conversational and Comparison) quite useful.

• Query Category (I wasn’t a fan here but no complaints). Both intent and topic labels are AI-generated, according to Bing.

• The average number of unique pages cited per day in AI answers.

• “Citation share,” which is “the percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations shown for a specific grounding query.” This is an interesting metric to look at.

Clicking any grounded query in the report will take you to all your site’s pages that were found and cited for that query. This is pretty awesome.

What can you do with this data?

You can:

• Identify all branded queries (those with “Navigational Intent”) and optimize the corresponding pages to better answer brand-driven questions

• See all grounded queries any URL had any visibility for, identify queries with fewer citation frequency and update your page to better respond to a problem behind those queries

• Identify pages with higher citation share and reverse-engineer why they might be performing so well for the corresponding grounded queries

• Group grounded queries by topic to identify related URLs (for internal linking purposes)

• Identify URLs that show up for the same queries and find if there’s a potential duplicate intent or a duplicate content issue to fix there

• Optimize content for under-performing grounded queries, etc.

• Track visibility trends after your optimization efforts to identify more effective tactics.

Google’s “Generative AI Features”

This report shows:

• Which URLs get impressions in Google’s AI answers

• How many impressions each URL got within a set period of time

• Which countries and devices each URL was viewed from

So what is an impression?

Most of the URLs are hidden behind the “Show more” button in AI answers, so we are not sure if the URLs were actually seen…

The “Show more” opens the full answer:

According to Google’s John Mueller, an impression will only be recorded if the URL is in the visible part of the screen. So URLs that are not immediately visible will not record an impression unless someone clicks “Show more”:

As of now, the report is not too actionable as there is no click-through data or feature-specific filters.

To make it more useful, you need to do some digging.

• Download the top-traffic URLs from the “Search results” sections

• Download the top viewed URLs from the “Generative AI Features” section

• Use Excel to combine the two

Now you can see:

• URLs that perform well in search but may not be included in AI features (so you can optimize them better for AI answers with a better structure, clearer answers, etc.)

• URLs that are featured in gen AI answers but not as well-performing in organic search.

There can be different reasons why there’s some disconnect between the two, to be sure. For example, some queries just don’t trigger AI features (so they won’t be included in the AI feature report).

Also, LLMs seem to reference the branded sections more. For example, this AI report includes methodology, the about page, and specific About pages about employees, etc.:

It is still useful to know and research which queries/prompts these brand-driven pages are coming up.

If you need help using the AI visibility reports, you can schedule a quick free call!

😱 Reddit ranks for about 2 MILLION queries containing “reviews” (These are reviews businesses have NO CONTROL OVER)

😱 About 500K of Reddit’s ranking URLs and titles contain “SCAM” (Searchers seeing these in search may make a buying decision right away without clicking to verify)

😱 About 500K of Reddit’s ranking URLs and titles contain “legit” (When your potential customer is questioning if your business is legit, would other Redditors be able to confirm that it is?)

Join us to discuss this LIVE, and bring your questions!

Is Reddit Here to Stay?

Businesses are not happy. I am often asked if I think this is long-term visibility or if they can hope Reddit will finally decline in visibility for their most important queries.

Well, Google didn’t start ranking Google just because they wanted to :)

GOOGLE just FOLLOWED THEIR USER.

According to Semrush (again, this is not ALL Google’s data),

✅ The word “reddit” is added to at least 9 MILLION queries Semrush knows about.

✅ This is over 100 MILLION searches a month. People want to know what Redditors think on that many topics.

Reddit is Google’s users’ DESTINATION. That’s why Reddit is so visible in search, and consequently in LLMs (AI wants to give people what people need!)

I cannot predict the future, but don’t assume Reddit’s visibility is because of high-level agreements with Google and OpenAI. The latter two just give users what they apparently need!

Can Reddit Be Manipulated?

Any platform can be manipulated. It all comes down to how much you value your brand and how ready you are to risk its existence.

The recent article from 404 Media exposes some vulnerabilities that still work.

Reddit’s visibility is also its major challenge. Will it be able to cope?

So far, it looks like it will.

Reddit understands its power in delivering real insights from real users. If AI slop prevails, it will not exist.

So just a few days ago, Reddit delivered a quiet “Reddit update”, and that’s what we saw:

• Major subreddits were suspended for a lack of moderation

• Lots of posts and accounts are banned without even a chance for a moderator to see them.

Reddit automation and manipulation are becoming impossible as we speak, because Reddit knows it is the matter of its existence.

So What Should Business Do?

Generally, building an engaged community on Reddit will help your brand’s sentiment for just about any situation:

• Explain pain points

• Talk to your customers, like you are a real human being

• Showcase customer stories without being promotional

Overall, make yourself heard as an authentic, legit business entity.

It takes time, but it is also long-term. Once you set up your business as a trustworthy brand entity, it is not easy to lose.

Here are some resources that can help to create a strategy:

• Reddit OWNS the Bottom of the Sales Funnel (And Businesses Fail to Do Anything about That)

• So, How Do You Fix Your Reddit Reputation? (For SEO & AI Visibility)

• The Dangers of Reddit: If You Cannot Beat it, Lead it

• How to Use Reddit for Marketing THE RIGHT WAY

• How to Manage Your Brand’s Reputation on Reddit

• How to Do Reddit Marketing without Making Enemies

And start working on your Reddit strategy now (actually, you should have started a few years ago!)

Don’t forget that these guidelines are about Google search AI-powered features (AI Mode and AI Overviews). It is not clear if these guidelines apply to Google’s standalone generative AI platform (Gemini). And these definitely don’t refer to other LLM platforms (like ChatGPT or Claude).

—->>> JOIN us to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions we will answer in real time

Also, we are hosting another AI visibility AMA, this time on Digital PR. Ask your questions!

SEO is as relevant as ever

The guidelines confirm that SEO is still very relevant because:

• AI answers rely on search results to give more accurate and up-to-date results

• “Fan-out” queries are search queries that Google uses to search before giving an answer.

Google doesn’t call “optimizing for generative AI answers” anything other than “SEO”.

From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.

Best SEO practices still apply to AI answer optimization

Google recommends prioritizing effective SEO strategies over “AEO/GEO hacks”. The guidelines list the same practices that Google recommends for traditional SEO, mainly:

• Create “people-first” content (in these guidelines, it is referred to as “non-commodity”) with a unique/truly original point of view

• Structure your web pages to make them easy to read and use for people (no additional effort to optimize content for agents is required)

• Use high-quality and helpful videos and images. Overall, focus on what your site users would enjoy.

• From the technical standpoint, make sure your page is crawlable by (and is not blocked for) Google’s bots (Search Console is very helpful for verifying that)

• Semantic HTML structure should be created for people (and screen readers). No special optimization for AI agents is required.

• If you have JavaScript, make sure your content is visible with it disabled (Search Console is all you need for that too)

• Make sure your site provides a good user experience when accessed from various devices

• For ecommerce businesses, also ensure your product feeds are submitted in the Merchant Center.

What about the myth-busting?

Google’s guidelines are busting the most common myths in “GEO”:

• LLMs.txt file is not needed (which is not that clear btw)

• Markdown pages are not needed (it was later discovered these actual guidelines existed in markdown :))

• “Chunking” content (i.e., breaking it into short paragraphs for AI retrieval) is not required, unless it is for people ;)

• “Seeking inauthentic” links/mentions may flag your site as spam (just in the traditional SEO). AI systems do evaluate brand and product mentions across the web, but, just like Google, they can tell real mentions from fake ones. No wonder, as this is about Google’s LLMs

• No “special” structured data (schema) is required. For general SEO, it is not a bad idea to use the recommended schema types, as it helps generate rich snippets. This remains questionable as other Google guidelines recommend schema for clarity, not just rich snippets ;)

Overall, the guidelines emphasize two core ideas:

• Google’s AI answers directly rely on organic search

• For Google’s AI answer optimization, no “additional” tactics are required or recommended

BUT AGAIN, This is ONLY About The Search Features

Google talking about search features and saying it is still SEO has two quite contradicting messages, in my opinion:

• It is about search, of course, it is SEO

• Saying nothing has changed is very convenient, since they give us 0 insight into the click-through while everyone is losing clicks over those search features.

Here’s what changing (and problems I have with those guidelines):

• Clicks are going down

• There are no 100 reliable metrics to measure 0-click visibility

• Attribution is weird (as smart brands switch to cross-channel instead of relying on Google, and many of those channels are 0-click too!)

• Many of those myth-busted elements may be useful for other purposes outside of SEO (e.g., LLMs.txt file seems to be adopted quite well by API developers), so the messaging is terribly confusing.

• There seems to be no alignment inside Google (nothing new but still alarming)

• Google is pushing AI features (and an AI-powered search box) without clear guidelines on how businesses should adapt (instead, they just claim nothing is changing)

To be fair, even in the SEO guidelines, Google notes that in the future, AI agents will not only search but also perform various actions on human users’ behalf, like making a purchase or booking a hotel. So it is recommended to get prepared for that future and become familiar with the emerging protocols, like Universal Commerce Protocol. There are also separate recommendations for creating AI-agent-friendly websites, which website owners can start implementing.

This is a mere mention, but it should already be a wake-up call for everyone.

To sum up:

• Everything is changing

• Just SEO best practices are not enough (not that they were actually enough before)

• There’s another level of AI Visibility before LLMs, searching. More on this here. So it is not quite “just SEO”.

If you need help figuring this all out, I am always open to chatting!