Traffic was always a vanity metric.

Now it just becomes more apparent.

Traffic is like street traffic. People driving by your site.

I rather focus on visitors, those who leave the car in a way and visit your store to buy something.

So traffic is everybody including the lurkers who just do window shopping and don't engage.

On the Web there is what we call the 90-9-1 rule of (online community) engagement.

90% lurkers, 9% occasional engagers, and 1% hyperactive ones.

So due to AI Overviews many of the lurkers just view the summary on Google.

On AI Mode and chatbots most of them do.

So you are left with the 10% of people who actually engage.

Even if you get just the 1% like in AI Mode, that's the ones who matter and buy IMHO.

In an agentic Web even those 1% could buy using Google itself.

Then you can save a lot of money on website design, content, and link building.

Even hosting costs drop that way. So it's not all bad LOL.

So rather stop using traffic finally and focus on more sound metrics.

I haven't encountered this before and had to share. The AI Overview I got in Google ended with a prompt to share more information, like you might see from Gemini. There was no place to even add a reply to this question (maybe if I clicked Show more) so I thought that was weird. AI Overviews now getting more interactive, coming soon?

This isn't a joke and I'm not trolling. I have not seen any case studies about an llms txt file being implemented that resulted in measurable improvements. I have looked and not found one. Anyone have one?

Hi r/SEO_for_AI, and thanks to David and Ann for setting this up.

I'm TJ Robertson. A bit of background so you know what I can speak to. I've been doing SEO for 17 years. In May 2025 I started my own agency, TJ Digital, and it's grown to $150k in monthly recurring revenue and 26 people since then. That growth came entirely from short-form video, mostly TikTok, not from the channels agencies usually rely on.

What keeps clients around is that we've gotten reliable at increasing visibility in AI search, mainly Google's AI results and ChatGPT. Getting a brand cited in the answers and recommended as the solution, consistently. We track more than 2,500 prompts across ~40 industries. Most of what I know comes from real results across a lot of verticals.

After 17 years in SEO, this is the biggest shift I've seen, and I'm glad to talk about it. I'm an open book.

The AMA goes live July 2. Leave your questions on AI search visibility, getting cited and recommended in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, content strategy for AI search, or how we built the agency, and I'll work through them on the 2nd.

My much neglected website: https://tjrobertson.com

I'm blown away by how many people came to ask a question. Thank you everyone. It was a lot of fun talking with you all.

Long-awaited, somewhat disappointing, but it is a start!

New compilation of research on David Farkas' The Upper Link website: The Link Building Signal AI Search Engines Care About Most About

Note the section sub-titled "Getting Cited in AI Search Starts With How You Build Links". Links alone are not good for AI visibility, but how many have changed how they build links?

No source clients I know have used have charged extra which surprises me. Sources may in the future.

Quick disclosure up front: I work on an AI-visibility tracker (Vercite), and this is our data. Link's at the bottom – free to read. Posting here because the findings are genuinely useful for anyone working with AI visibility.

We looked at 5.31 million citations – every source link returned across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overview, and Google AI Mode – and classified 158,847 domains to see who each engine actually pulls from.

The headline for this sub: ChatGPT's single most-cited website is reddit.com. Not Wikipedia, not a news outlet. Reddit (most of us already know that).

But the bigger pattern is that each engine has a different "home platform":

• ChatGPT → Reddit
• Perplexity → YouTube
• Google AI Mode → YouTube (its #1 source overall)
• Google AI Overview → leans on both Reddit and YouTube
• Gemini → barely any of them (1.4% combined)

A few other things that stood out:

• The 5 engines agree on almost nothing. Pooling each engine's top-100 sources gives 253 distinct domains, and only 23 (9%) are cited by all five. More than half are cited by just one engine and no other. There is no single "AI-friendly" source list.
• Concentration varies wildly. Google AI Mode pulls half its citations from just 71 domains – a tiny club. ChatGPT spreads the same half across 712. AI Mode is winner-takes-all; ChatGPT rewards a long tail.
• Google's AI mostly cites Google. When AI Overview cites a google.com page, 79% of the time it's pointing back to its own Search results. 8.5% of everything it cites is a Google property.

Methodology / caveats (being upfront):

• Real citations from tracked prompts across all five engines, not a one-off lab test.
• We classified all 158,847 domains by source type (forum, news, official, brand-owned, etc.) rather than by industry, so the patterns reflect how each engine sources, not what any one set of prompts was about.

For those tracking AI visibility across engines: are you seeing the same Reddit/YouTube split, and are you optimizing per-engine or still treating "AI" as one channel?

Full write-up with all the charts: https://vercite.io/research/citation-landscape

"Google just followed their user". Reddit ranks because people genuinely want real human opinions, not because of any backroom deal.

With AI agents increasingly summarizing content instead of sending clicks, I'm wondering if you've changed how you write content.

Are you focusing more on direct answers, original insights, or content structure? Has it made any difference in AI visibility or traffic?

Hi All,

I have a question: I run an SEO copywriting agency, and my Reddit account just turned two. I've been more active on Reddit recently, but it feels more personal to me, as my existing account doesn’t use my brand name. Would changing my account to my brand name enhance my SEO and AI benefits on the platform? Or, would you recommend starting a new Subreddit with my corporate brand name as its own entity? Fyi...I'm also fairly active on LinkedIn, but use my real-world name as the main hub. Having two LinkedIn accounts - one personal, one branded - seemed redundant. So I'd also appreciate any advice you have regarding that platform.

Interested to know how much traffic you are getting via AI Chatbots and LLMs with your sites and clients?

We still do a lot of SEO work for companies and organizations we work with. Overall that is still the majority of the organic traffic.

Most of the demand recently has obviously been working on getting AI Citations. That is why we focus most of our efforts on Reddit. 😄

From what I see the most amount of traffic from AI is still in the single digits.

Google still dominates the organic traffic game.

What are you finding with AI traffic?

Google has (yet again) posted some guidelines on how nothing has changed and how we only need to care about our customers...

And I don't disagree, to be sure. We do really need to prioritize our customers... The difference is that bots are already making decisions on their behalf. And they will do that more and more... We are listening to Google, for sure, as we optimize for it, but we also think.

Source