u/Ready-Tourist-3476

A few months ago someone at work asked if our company was actually showing up in ChatGPT answers.

I realized I had no clue.

So I did what most curious people do I went down the rabbit hole.

Over the next few months I tried pretty much every AI visibility/GEO tool I could find. Between subscriptions and trials, I spent around $2,400.

Here’s what actually stood out.

The biggest surprise?

Most of these tools are really good at telling you there’s a problem, but not what you’re supposed to do about it.

You get dashboards, percentages, charts… but very little guidance. I kept thinking, “Okay… now what?”
My quick take on the ones I used:

Otterly.ai — Cheap and easy to start with. Tracks ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity well enough. Mostly monitoring though.

Profound — Lots of data and clearly built for bigger companies. It felt more like a reporting tool than something that helped me improve visibility.

Peec AI — Simple and reasonably priced. Nothing fancy, but it does the basics.

Scrunch AI — Probably the one I liked most because it actually pointed me toward things I could improve instead of just showing numbers.

AthenaHQ — If you’re running a Shopify store, this one made the most sense since it connects visibility back to revenue.

After trying all of them, I realized the tools weren’t really my biggest problem.

The real issues were things like AI crawlers getting blocked, missing structured data, and pages that weren’t rendering properly.

None of the software fixed that.

Looking back, I’d probably spend a day checking the technical basics before paying for any platform.
Once you’ve done that, a cheaper monitoring tool is probably enough unless you’re managing a large brand with a dedicated team.

Just sharing this because I wish someone had told me before I started paying for every shiny new tool I came across.

Happy to answer questions if anyone else is looking into this. It took me way more weekends than I’d like to admit.

So this isn’t a “here’s my framework” post. I genuinely don’t have one yet. Just need to vent and compare notes with people who get it.

I run SEO for a small agency, mostly local service businesses plus a couple of SaaS clients.

Last week one of my SaaS clients called me panicking because their signups were down about 30% over the last two months. Traffic in GSC looked… fine? Not great, but definitely not a cliff.

So I’m poking around, and on a whim I ask ChatGPT the exact question their landing page is built around.

It just… answers it.

Fully.

Mentions two competitors by name. Doesn’t mention my client once.

I tried another 15 or so queries.

Same story over and over.

We rank #3–5 on Google for most of these. Doesn’t seem to matter. The AI has already picked its favorites, and it’s not us.

Nobody prepared me for this.

Every SEO newsletter I read in 2023–2024 was still 90% “here’s how to get featured snippets,” like that was the finish line.

Meanwhile, the finish line moved to a different building.

Anyway, I don’t have a clean answer, but here are a few things I’ve noticed that seem to correlate with brands getting cited by AI:

They get talked about organically on Reddit and forums, not just on their own site.

Their content answers the question in the first couple of sentences instead of spending 400 words on an “in today’s fast-paced digital landscape…” intro.

They show up in comparison-style content (“best X for Y”) written by other people, not just themselves.
Older, more established sites seem to have a weird trust advantage, even when their content honestly isn’t better.

None of this is scientific. I’m just a guy staring at query logs at 11 p.m.

Is anyone else seeing this, or is it just my clients’ niche getting unlucky?

After a year of testing, I realized AEO isn’t a new SEO hack.

AI doesn’t rely on one search. It gathers information from blogs, Reddit, reviews, docs, videos, and comparison sites before answering.

The question I ask now isn’t “Will this rank?”
It’s “Will AI find enough trusted signals to mention my brand?”

That’s what separates content that ranks from content that gets recommended.

I keep seeing people talking about AEO/GEO everywhere lately, but I’m trying to figure out if this is something worth seriously investing in or just another marketing trend.

For context: I run a midsize equipment rental website with a team of around 15 people.

Historically, we’ve mostly focused on traditional SEO creating content, improving rankings, building authority, etc. That’s what we understand.

Recently one of our interns suggested that we should start optimizing for AI search and try to get visibility in tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc.

I understand the basic idea behind AEO (answer-focused content, FAQs, structured information, making content easier for AI systems to understand), but GEO is still a bit unclear to me.

My questions:

• Are businesses actually seeing leads/revenue from AEO/GEO yet?
• Is getting mentioned by AI platforms something you can realistically optimize for?
• What things are actually working right now?
• Should a company like ours invest in this now, or just keep improving SEO?

I’m not looking for a “AI will replace Google tomorrow” type answer.

Would love to hear from people who have actually tested this on real websites.

What worked? What was a waste of time?

Most people build a random list of prompts, plug them into a tracker, and start watching dashboards.

But… where did those prompts come from?

If they’re not based on real user behavior, you’re basically measuring visibility for questions nobody is asking.

The part everyone skips is validating the prompt list first.

I started building prompts from pages that already rank, then mapping them by search intent before tracking anything.

It’s a simple step, but it completely changes how useful the data is.

Anyone else feel like the industry skipped straight to tracking without asking if the prompts are even worth tracking?

Been thinking about this a lot lately.

Everyone’s talking about AEO and optimizing for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, etc., but I’m struggling to figure out how much of it is actually “new” versus just good SEO with a different label.

My take so far:

SEO still seems to be where the majority of traffic and conversions come from.

But AEO feels more like making sure your brand/content becomes the source AI tools trust and pull from when answering questions.

The problem is there’s only so much time and budget to go around.

If you’re working on a site right now, are you:

Still mostly focused on traditional SEO?

Actively building an AEO strategy?

Or just rolling AEO into your existing SEO efforts?

Would love to hear what people are seeing in the real world, not just what the SEO influencers are saying.

Are you tracking AI visibility yet? Seeing actual results? Or is it still too early to justify making it a major priority?

I’ve spent the last few months testing AI search pretty obsessively.

One thing keeps bothering me.

Everyone is tracking whether their brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, etc.
Visibility.
Mentions.
Citations.

Share of voice.

But when I repeatedly test the same queries, I keep seeing something strange:

The answers aren’t stable.

Sometimes a brand appears.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes the citations change completely.

Sometimes the answer itself changes.

Yet people are building dashboards that make it look like these results are fixed and predictable.

It reminds me of early SEO when everyone obsessed over rankings, except this feels even messier because the underlying systems are probabilistic.

The thing that’s becoming more interesting to me isn’t:
“Did my brand appear?”

It’s:
“Why did the model trust one source over another in that specific answer?”

Because those are very different questions.
A citation is an outcome.

Trust is the mechanism.
And I feel like most of the industry is measuring outcomes while barely understanding the mechanism.

Maybe I’m wrong.

But if I were starting from scratch today, I’d spend less time tracking mentions and more time studying:

Which sources get cited repeatedly

Which language patterns keep showing up

Why some pages survive across answer variations while others disappear

Curious if anyone else testing AI search heavily has noticed the same thing.

Are you seeing stable results, or is everyone pretending these systems are more predictable than they really are?

I analyzed the last 20 inbound leads that contacted me.

Here’s where they came from:
Google Search: 6
Referrals: 5
LinkedIn: 4
ChatGPT / AI tools: 3
X (Twitter): 1
Direct traffic: 1

The interesting part wasn’t the numbers.

It was the behavior.

The people coming from AI tools already trusted the recommendation.

They weren’t comparing 20 different providers.

They had a shortlist before they even reached out.

That made me realize something:

We’ve spent years optimizing for search engines.

Now we need to think about optimizing for answer engines.

If AI tools become the first stop for discovery, being recommended may become more important than being ranked.

Curious:
Has anyone else started seeing leads mention ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or other AI tools as the way they found you?

A few years ago, if you wanted to influence buying decisions, you’d write blog posts, build backlinks, and rank on Google.

Now when I look at AI answers, a lot of the sources aren’t company websites at all.

They’re Reddit threads.

Random forum discussions.

People sharing real experiences.

Sometimes a 2-year-old comment from a user seems to have more influence than a polished article a company spent weeks creating.

Not saying SEO is dead.

But I do think we’re moving into a world where being part of the conversation matters more than publishing another “ultimate guide.”

Curious if anyone else is noticing this.

I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion around getting brands mentioned in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.

But after testing a bunch of companies, I noticed something more interesting:

The AI isn’t always right.

I’ve seen outdated pricing, old feature lists, incorrect comparisons, and sometimes descriptions that don’t match the product at all.

Which made me wonder:

Why are we so focused on whether AI mentions us, but not whether AI understands us?

For most businesses it’s annoying.

For industries like healthcare, finance, or legal, it could become a real problem.

Maybe the bigger question isn’t:

“How often am I mentioned?”

Maybe it’s:

“What exactly is AI saying about me?”

Curious if anyone has caught an AI getting their company, product, or industry completely wrong.

After a year of testing, AEO feels a lot less complicated than people make it seem.

AI doesn’t just search the exact query. It runs multiple related searches, looks for clear answers, trusted mentions, and strong brands.

So far, it seems like:

Good SEO + quality content + strong brand mentions = most of AEO.

Is anyone seeing something different in their own testing?

Maybe unpopular opinion, but I don’t think AEO is killing SEO.

I think it’s exposing a problem SEO has had for years.

A lot of SEO wasn’t really about creating the best answer. It was about creating the page most likely to rank. Those aren’t always the same thing.

For years, if you could figure out what Google wanted, you could win. Backlinks, keyword optimization, content clusters, whatever the tactic was at the time.

Now AI search seems to care a lot more about whether your content directly answers the question.

And honestly, I’m seeing an interesting split.

The companies with genuinely useful, clear content seem to be adapting pretty well. Some are actually getting visibility in AI search despite never dominating Google.

The companies that spent years optimizing for rankings first and users second seem way more worried.

Maybe AEO isn’t killing SEO.

Maybe it’s just making “SEO for the sake of SEO” less valuable.

Curious if anyone else is seeing this with their clients or sites.

The more I test ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, the less I think traditional SEO metrics explain what's happening.

A few things I've noticed:

• Pages that directly answer a question often get mentioned more than long-form content.

• Comparison content seems to show up surprisingly often in AI recommendations.

• The language people actually use matters more than marketing jargon.

• Some brands get recommended constantly despite having weaker SEO metrics than competitors.

The strangest part?

The results aren't always consistent.

I've asked the same query multiple times over a few weeks and gotten different recommendations, even when nothing obvious changed.

That makes measuring AI visibility much harder than measuring rankings.

I'm curious what others are seeing.

If you've managed to increase AI recommendations, what had the biggest impact?

And has anyone figured out a reliable way to connect AI visibility to actual revenue?

When I want to learn about a product now, I often do one of three things:

• Search Reddit
• Ask ChatGPT
• Ask Perplexity

Google is usually my fourth step.

What’s interesting is that ChatGPT and Perplexity often reference Reddit discussions anyway.

It feels like we’re moving from:

“Find the company’s website”
to
“Find what real people are saying.”

Curious if others are seeing the same shift.

When researching software, products, or services, what’s your first stop today?

For years the advice was:

“Create more content.”

Now it feels like AI cares more about:

• Reviews
• Discussions
• Recommendations
• Mentions

Less about who published the most blog posts.

Are we entering the reputation era of search?

One thing I’ve noticed while testing ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity:

When AI recommends software, it rarely gives 20 options.

Usually it gives 3-5.

That means being ranked #8 isn’t the problem anymore.

The problem is not being mentioned at all.

In traditional SEO, position #8 still gets some clicks.

In AI search, position #8 often doesn’t exist.

Curious if others are seeing the same thing.

Are AI assistants making markets more concentrated around a handful of brands?