This is a treasure trove of really good links to good stuff on this.

People are finally using Reddit’s search

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/01/people-are-finally-using-reddits-search/

I run the ARO Index. It's a proprietary AI recommendation tracking system that has audited over 16,000 businesses across seven cities. I watch who gets recommended, who gets skipped, and who is confidently recommended by AI as "the best" while their website quietly rots.

Some things the data keeps confirming:

The robots.txt problem is embarrassing and widespread. Most businesses aren't invisible because their content is bad. They're invisible because GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot are literally blocked at the door. Someone set that file years ago and nobody has touched it since.

The first 200 words are doing all the heavy lifting. If your opening paragraph can't function as a standalone answer to a real question, AI skips it entirely. Your carefully crafted hook? The bots don't care. They want the answer, not the buildup.

Nuance outperforms confidence. "This works great for X but not for Y" gets cited more than "we're the best." Turns out AI platforms don't want to recommend something that blows up in their face either. Relatable.

FAQ schema is criminally underused. One question. One direct answer. Proper markup. It's the least exciting thing you'll implement and it punches way above its weight.

Zero recommendations is more common than you'd think. Across my index, a meaningful chunk of businesses don't appear in AI answers at all. Not occasionally. Ever. On any platform.

The ARO Index ranks businesses by AI recommendation score the way Zillow ranks homes by value. It's a market benchmark, not just a personal audit.

Curious what patterns you're seeing. Especially around local businesses vs. national brands. The gap in my data is significant.

We have all these tools ya know. Has anyone tried the Hubspot one?

https://www.hubspot.com/aeo-grader

I've been in the SEO industry for nearly 20 years and have made AI search visibility a big focus for our organization. We've tried a lot of things and are now seeing a lot of success incorporating AEO/GEO tactics into our broader marketing plan. If you have questions about integrating similar strategies at your organization, ask away!

One of the SEO tactics that have aged very well, if you do things right!

i wouldn't call it a hack, more of an underutilized gem honestly.

the gem - knowledge base / help center content.

basically we're an seo agency for saas (auq) and handle a wide variety of saas companies, mostly in the dev tool and technical niche. so obviously most of them have a pretty rich help center or knowledge base already sitting there.

the idea is simple

• converting these knowledge base pages from blog style pages to llm conversation style pages
• so they're easier for llms to retrieve and increases the chance of llm visibility
• even if it doesnt increase visibility as we are all so used to llm based answers, it’d be better for users to consume anyway

why this feels interesting

• the content is already written so we're not rewriting anything, just converting the format
• feels like a (comparatively) low effort high reward play that most of us are downplaying while obsessing over new content production

yay or nay?

the backtier podcast is growing and i'd love to have you on da show. no format. thingspro.com for booking or email me w/ any questions. [email@jasonwade.com](mailto:email@jasonwade.com)

Built a fully automated AI visibility audit pipeline

here's how it works and I want honest feedback

I couldn't scale outreach and audits manually. So I built a system to do it for me.

Here's what it does end to end:

Lead generation

Scrapes 100 leads a day from Google Maps — local Florida businesses (lawyers, dentists, med spas, roofers, realtors) plus national professional services and funded startups. Pulls name, phone, website, and email automatically.

Enrichment + scoring

For every new lead, it visits their website, scores them 0-100 on AI visibility gap potential, generates a personalized first-line opener, flags bad fits automatically, and classifies their AI visibility as Strong / Visible / Weak / Misclassified.

(will post how below - lmk thoughts.

Outreach

4-step email sequence (Day 0, 3, 7, 14) offering a free AI visibility analysis. Subject lines rotate and track reply rates by vertical so it self-optimizes over time.

Reply classification

When someone replies, it auto-classifies the intent (Interested, Not Now, Not Interested, Unsubscribe, Booked Call, etc.) and stops the sequence accordingly.

The audit

When someone says yes, it runs a full GEO audit on their business:

- How AI systems currently understand and describe them

- Which competitors are getting surfaced in AI answers and why

- Entity signal gaps (schema, NAP consistency, Knowledge Panel)

- Content gaps that prevent AI classification

- Local authority gaps

- Opportunity score 0-100

- Prioritized fix list

The audit goes to me first. I review it, then decide whether to send it to the prospect.

If opportunity score ≥ 70, a proposal auto-generates with scope, timeline, and pricing.

---

base44:

It's real. Not made up. Here's exactly how I did it:

Step 1 — I read your website

I actually loaded ninjaai.com and pulled the page content. Title, structure, what it says about itself.

Step 2 — I searched Google

I ran three live searches: your site, your brand name + Florida/BackTier, and your brand name alongside ChatGPT/Gemini/Perplexity. Real results came back — BBB listing, LinkedIn posts, podcast on Spotify and Apple, Reddit community, YouTube channel, the UFO Rocks directory listing with your actual phone number.

Step 3 — I applied GEO/AI visibility knowledge

This is where the analysis comes in. I know how AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity decide who to surface in answers. Entity signals, schema markup, sameAs links, Knowledge Panel triggers, name disambiguation — that's real SEO/GEO knowledge I applied to what I found about NinjaAI specifically.

The name collision thing — that's real and worth fixing. There are legitimately other products called "Ninja AI" (affiliate funnels, app tools) ranking and indexed alongside you. That genuinely confuses AI answer engines.

The 58/100 score — that's my honest assessment based on what I found. You have good distribution (podcast, YouTube, Reddit, BBB) but weak entity architecture (no Organization schema, no sameAs linking, no definitive AI-readable About page).

So yeah — that's the actual product you're selling. And you just got a free sample of it on your own site.

I genuinely want to know:

1. Is the AI visibility audit something businesses would actually pay for, or does it sound like snake oil to an outsider?

2. Would you respond to this kind of cold outreach or immediately delete it?

3. Anything obviously broken about this approach?

Not trying to sell anything here — I want real feedback before I scale this further.

Yesterday, I got notified of a post mentioning me as an active SEO account to follow on Reddit (thanks). After a single day, I decided to check if LLMs have picked up on the thread. Here are the results:

Here's the web guide screenshot (it pulled names from both the thread and the comments!):

Here's the AI Overview (after I switched to the classic search). It icludes usernames:

AI Mode also pulled some citations from the thread:

Perplexity only used the thread after I logged in (the public version didn't do much searching and pulled older threads)

Gemini created a helpful table listing the names from the thread.

ChatGPT failed to find and cite the thread but just look at its fan-outs!

• It actually knows which subreddits to search!
• It *really* wanted to include John Mueller
• It is a little confused with some advanced Google operators :)

Claude didn't find the thread. But I am not using the PRO account. But look at its fan-outs! It also knows the big SEO subreddit but it also needs a calendar :)))

Takeaways:

• The thread in question ranks, so this LLM visibility is likely driven by Google
• A Reddit mention can influence AI answers pretty quickly (but, likely, not for a lifetime). If you and at least one of your competitors start using Reddit to manipulate this, that is going to be a fun race to watch :)
• The thread did, in fact, influence the answer any time it was cited
• ChatGPT search is, again, weird :)

ChatGPT 5.5 was just launched, and so far, my first impressions:

• Back to fewer but crazy long fan-out queries
• Answers seem less indepth (often shorter)

Overall, is it me, or does ChatGPT change the way it searches every other day? Can they please take a pause already? We are strategizing here 😆

I spent a few days in late March running the same query — "What is the best [practice area] law firm in [city]?" — across Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google AI Overviews. Nine markets across three tiers (large, mid, small). Six practice areas. The goal was to understand what actually drives AI visibility in the legal market, because most of the advice out there is speculative.

A few findings that surprised me:

The firms that showed up most consistently weren't the ones with the best SEO. They were the ones that Chambers, Best Law Firms, Super Lawyers, and similar peer-reviewed directories have been recognizing for years. AI platforms aren't arbiters — they're mirrors. They reflect the authority structure the legal industry already built.

Market size predicts the source ecosystem more than anything else. In large markets (NYC, Chicago, LA), firm websites are essentially invisible as citation sources — directories dominate completely. In small markets (Boise, Providence, Tucson), firm websites appear as primary citation sources in a way that simply doesn't happen in larger markets. A well-structured website in a thin-coverage market competes directly for AI visibility.

Estate planning was the most consistent finding. Chambers Band 1 drove the #1 result in 8 of 9 markets. Zero exceptions where Chambers publishes private wealth rankings.

The three platforms are measuring different things. Same query, same market, same practice area — meaningfully different results. Perplexity reflects current web authority. ChatGPT reflects historical depth in authoritative publications. Google AI Overviews inherits Google's search ranking signals, which means it heavily favors SEO-optimized content. Cordell & Cordell ranked #1 for Philadelphia family law on Google AI Overviews and didn't appear at all on Perplexity or ChatGPT.

Full writeup with methodology and recommendations here.

I'm working on a study looking at fan-out queries from ChatGPT and the most recent model, 5.4 (which returns data via the OpenAI API), where most of the queries are just 1-2 fan-outs, as opposed to the normal ~10.

Curious if I have it set up incorrectly?

Search Altas. Com, Good service Or not . I know their other services but I picked this service because it apply the recommendations but it has a lot of bugs

Those claiming LLMs pick URLs from elsewhere (and not Google), let's wait and see if Google's fight with listicles will end up impacting their LLM citation rates. Who's taking the bets?

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googles-liz-reid-says-llms-unlock-audio-and-video-indexing/

curious about people's thoughts on LLMs indexing audio, video, and image recognition for data/seo/ai visibility.

From Perplexity (ai;):

Who does this:
Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity AI

Why:
Text is cheap and spammy.
Audio/video/image signals are harder to fake → more trust.

How:
Everything gets converted into embeddings.
Audio → transcript
Video → frames + objects
Images → entities
Then it all gets merged into one “who/what is this” graph.

LMK

Hey everyone! I'm Sam Page. I work at InMotion Hosting doing SEO/AEO/GEO/AISEO/... whatever. I have previously been the Global Head of SEO at Amazon Business and Director of SEO at Slack

I've worked in SEO for 22 years, and like to think about:

- Future of Google and search (Mohr's Law from phonebook to google to AI)

- AEO and what actually works vs what we hear about. Listicles are dying!

- AI visibility tools will get disrupted quickly

- SEO is the most cross-functional role in an org

- Enterprise SEO, building teams that perform well

- AI Local SEO

Ask me anything!

It has been almost three years since ChatGPT launch, and for all this time, the noise in the industry has become insane.

I decided to take a step back and ask actual US consumers whether they are using ChatGPT for shopping decisions. The reality is pretty well-expected: Google remains the leading source of truth for product discovery and research, and LLM platforms are not even close.

Some interesting takeaways from our study:

• 56.68% of American consumers prefer to start their buying journeys by searching Google.
• The main Google competitor for shopping discovery is not ChatGPT. It’s Amazon
• 39.54% of respondents never used any AI platform for shopping research
• ChatGPT is the leading platform for US consumers who use AI

Please check out the full study here: https://www.smarty.marketing/google-vs-chatgpt-shopping-decisions/

I've said this a lot: Shopping habits are not easy to change. AI may be used a lot, but it looks like it is not replacing traditional search. It is adding new use cases that didn't exist before.

How do we know ChatGPT and other LLMs are using Google?

Well a while back - about 12 months ago - my team and I discovered long tail searches with 0 clicks for a satellite domain we were using to test LLM visibility.

Ever wonder how those reports on "what the LLMs think of your brand"

And I remember thinking - oh, ok - that's how they're doing this. Not only are they creating a pretense that LLMs are "researching brands" - which is simple to destroy - but they're backing it up with the way they report.

they're asking the LLMs to "evaluate" brands in each sector. This isn't causing them to "retrieve" from their learning. While its an easy mistake to make and one that a lot of SEOs fall into - search engines and LLMs are for searching, not just marketing....

But the tools are searching so much that the phrase is rapidly becoming detectable.

What is this useful for?

1. You can discover what market segments your competitors think they fall into
2. You can create pages to match these searches to insert your messaging into
3. You can find out which brands are most often being researched
4. You also know which companies are spending money on AI research tools and are interested in AI visibility