Its a part and parcel of the game, whoever stays on top of it, wins!
Other engines are not affected much, looks like its a contractual thing between Reddit and ChatGPT.
Data Source: Peec AI
Ask 5 AI models "What is \[your brand\] known for?"
If the answers disagree, you don't have a content problem.
You have an entity problem.
AI can't prefer what it can't identify.
Ask 5 AI models "What is [your brand] known for?"
If the answers disagree, you don't have a content problem.
You have an entity problem.
AI can't prefer what it can't identify.
I sell AEO software.
So this is a strange thing to admit:
half of what my own industry is selling right now is going to zero.
Schema tweaks. Citation engineering. Content built to game how models retrieve.
I get why people buy it. It works.
Until everyone does it. Then the edge is gone.
It's the same story SEO lived through from 2005 to 2015. The tricks worked, then they became table stakes, then they became noise.
Here's what I think survives.
Being genuinely useful, in the places AI already trusts.
Real proof you do what you claim, spread across the web where models actually read.
And measurement you can act on, not a dashboard that tells you you have a fever and stops there.
That last one is the whole game.
Watching what AI says about you is worthless if you won't change what it sees.
The AEO that lasts isn't a hack.
It's earning the recommendation, then making it easy for the models to see why.
What's the tactic you think stops working first?
**TL;DR:** Ranking #1 on Google doesn't mean AI bots will cite you. You are likely accidentally blocking AI crawlers, lacking `FAQPage` schema, or burying the answer too deep in marketing fluff. Here is the technical teardown of how to fix your site for AEO (Answer Engine Optimization).
Hey guys,
I have spent the last few months looking at a ton of data on how AI engines actually cite websites. I noticed a pretty crazy pattern.
You can rank #1 on Google, but when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity the exact same question, you completely disappear and some smaller competitor gets recommended instead.
I dug into why this happens. It turns out, it usually has nothing to do with domain authority or backlinks. It basically comes down to just three simple technical gaps on your site that make it hard for the AI to read your content.
Here’s what the winners are doing differently (and how to fix your site):
**1. You are probably blocking the bots (seriously, check this first)**
Back in 2023, a lot of devs and SEO folks blocked all AI crawlers in the `robots.txt` file to save bandwidth or stop scraping. If you are blocking them, they literally can't read your pricing or vs pages. So they just default to citing a random G2 review or Reddit thread.
Just check your `robots.txt` and make sure you are allowing the new crawlers:
`GPTBot`
`PerplexityBot`
`ClaudeBot`
`Google-Extended`
*(Btw, if you unblock Perplexity, we've seen them index and cite pages in like 24 hours).*
**2. Make it easy for them with FAQ schema**
LLMs really don't want to hallucinate. If you just have a giant wall of text on your page, the AI has to try and summarize it, which is risky for the model.
If you use simple JSON-LD `FAQPage` schema, it gives the bot a safe, structured answer to just copy-paste. Figure out what people are actually asking ChatGPT about your tool (like "does \[your brand\] integrate with quickbooks?") and make that exact question the name in your schema, with a direct answer.
**3. The 40-word rule**
Bots don't cite essays, they cite sentences. We noticed that pages getting cited heavily format their text in a very specific way.
Stop using generic H2s like "Features" or "Overview". Make your H2 the actual question the user asks. Then, right below it, write a 40 to 60-word direct answer. Skip the marketing fluff. If a user took a screenshot of that one paragraph, it should completely answer the question. Make it super easy for the bot to just extract that chunk of text.
Has anyone else noticed their normal organic traffic dropping lately?
We built Prefer to automate tracking all these AI citations and prompts, but even if you are just manually asking ChatGPT about your brand every Monday, I highly recommend fixing these 3 things.
Let me know if you have any questions on how these bots are parsing sites, happy to help out in the comments!
Out of curiosity, I have been testing what AI recommends when you ask it for software, the actual answer you get from ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, not Google rankings.
Ran the payments category through all three. Stripe came first everywhere, no surprise.
Turns out AI doesn't know or care who's "big." It recommends whoever shows up in what it reads - docs, Reddit, comparison pages, reviews.
Brand and ad budget don't buy you much here.
Then I spotted Dodopayments, founded 2023, raised $1.1M - showing up as often as Chargebee, Recurly and Maxio. Companies that have raised hundreds of millions, some worth billions. Right next to a startup almost nobody's heard of.
If you are small, that's the opportunity. If you are big, there's probably a name you don't recognise already sitting next to you in the answer your customers see.
Google's top 10 and AI's top 10 are almost entirely different lists.
So the sources we have spent a decade earning rankings on may have little to do with how AI answers for your brand.