u/annseosmarty

The news is all over my feed these days: Reddit is cited much less in ChatGPT, and not just Reddit... (according to Peec.AI)

1. Reddit - 88% fewer citations
2. arXiv - 84% fewer citations
3. YouTube - 78% fewer citations

First of all, counting citations has never been enough ("impacting an answer but not cited" has been what's been happening with Reddit URLs for months now)

Secondly, ChatGPT has been changing its searching and citing behaviours every other month now. Sometimes it just cites less of everyone, sometimes it prefers official sites, sometimes it just stops searching as much or starts using very weird fan-outs.

Lastly (and I am saying this even though I am providing Reddit marketing services, so I am supposed to be here to defend Reddit's well-being), Reddit deserves this.

What are your thoughts?

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

Go ahead and play with it! Love it so far!

Malte Landwehr from Peec.AI is tracking llms.txt files citations and he now reports that those doubled in ChatGPT (putting llms.txt citations to a 0.0001% of citations for ChatGPT).

I wouldn't share this report because the overall impact is so minimal. But I was willing to share my opinion on this increase (because there's so much confusion on this topic).

So... Where is this increase coming from, in my opinion:

• LLMs will seek info however they can. If your llms.txt file gives an answer (and they cannot find it elsewhere, they will cite it). Businesses including llms.txt files may care about optimizing it for good, clear answers rather than/instead of including them anywhere else on the site.
• More sites add llms.txt files now than a month or two ago, hence the overall increase in citations.

Still not a magic bullet. It is still smarter to optimize your website than to add the file and call it a day...

Source: Linkedin

I've had that argument a million times already, and I get it: We are willing to measure what we can see. But there are so many missing pieces here that many choose to ignore, but let me try:

• Citations rely on how LLMs (like ChatGPT) search, and LLMs search for what they already know (so training data is fundamental); see the screenshot for the prompt, "Best apps to track your health and fitness," for example. ChatGPT specifically lists apps it already knows!
• Citations don't guarantee brand visibility (a brand's URL can get cited but never mentioned in the answer)
• A URL can impact an answer and help your brand inclusion but never make it to citations (so it will be invisible for you)..

Overall, over-focusing on citations is misleading and mostly useless unless you zoom out to see a bigger picture.

Mobile Text Alerts is tracking the performance of text messages that include "now, hurry, urgent, today, last chance, expires, expiring, limited, act now, don't miss, don't miss, ends, ending, final, only, asap, immediately, deadline", commonly expressing urgency.

Urgency-implying SMS marketing campaigns have higher click-through rates (22% CTR for messages expressing urgency vs 15.4% CTR for messages that don't imply any urgency).

While urgency-expressing wording is commonly used by businesses in order to trigger quick actions, brands should be mindful of using it because it can also result in higher opt-out rates.

• About a third of SMS marketing campaigns include some kind of urgency
• Urgency wording doesn't translate into a higher reply rate
• Urgency wording has a higher opt-out rate than non-urgent

So overall:

• Don't overuse urgency words in your campaigns in order not to lose subscribers.
• Time the urgency campaigns better and more meaningfully (for special occasions, like birthdays, weather alerts, or other essential alerts, upcoming holidays, etc.).

To sum up what I say in the video:

• GEO is about being present in the training data, as well as proper positioning there
• SEO is about being findable in traditional search (Google, Bing, Brave Search)
• AEO is about easy and clear answer extractability (on-site)

I know it is a controversial topic, so before you jump in here with something like "we don't need more acronyms", let me make a few notes:

• It is not my call... Leads and clients ask me that question for a reason. Just saying "oh, it is all SEO" won't do it...
• There are definitely parts of it that were not part of traditional SEO, e.g., training data monitoring, product positioning, AI agent tracking, etc. So new acronyms do make sense, if you take a moment to think about it.

Also, this is a very short, simplified version of the AI answer generation process. It was made short on purpose: People need to understand it. No fancy terms here. Some essential steps are skipped. For the full discussion, watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xklnwT3YfKE

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

For 3 years now, we haven't had a way to get any first-hand/official insight into how our average target customer may be prompting AI platforms, like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.

It was recently noticed and confirmed that AI Mode records those prompts as queries in the "Performance" section of the Search Console.

This was noticed by "yes" queries, which were confirmed to be follow-up questions in AI Mode. I see those as well...

Looking at the clients' reports, this idea already looks useful, as I can click to the "Pages" tab for each of those queries to see which assets LLMs are pulling from the client's website. Lots of additional opportunities there (update, optimize, create similar ones, etc.)

Another idea is to pull longer, conversational queries using the following regex:

([^” “]*\s){10,}?

This can reveal some cool AI Mode prompts as well.

Note: This must be common knowledge, but since I was confused about that as well, here's your reminder... For high-traffic properties, you will only be able to see queries that send at least some clicks, only. Since AI Mode might be sending none, you will miss those unless you access the SC data through the API.

Source: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-ai-mode-queries-41821.html

SerpApi, famously used by ChatGPT as one of the grounding data, is officially proven to have the right to scrape Google. If it is on the open web, a machine is allowed to read it.

And it is not just about SerpApi or even scraping. It gives many more answers:

>“On what terms is an automated visitor allowed onto public web content?” is the founding question of the agentic web, not some niche scraping spat, and it does not end with SerpApi. A scraper reselling results, an answer engine reading your pages to cite you, a shopping agent turning up to buy on someone’s behalf, an assistant pulling your specs to compare you against a competitor. In the eyes of the law, those are one thing: an automated visitor on public content. SerpApi is the ugly early test case.

Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-lost-its-scraping-case-now-you-have-to-pick-a-side-on-the-open-web/583066/

Since July 6, ChatGPT seems to have started favoring publications over business websites:

• Major brands and corporate websites are losing citation share after July 6.
• Meanwhile, some media websites and review/comparison sites are gaining citation share

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/thomaspeham_why-is-no-one-talking-about-this-july-6-share-7487755320803536897-lhVL/

Nice update from Peec AI: ChatGPT ads tracking!

Now you can see:

• Who is advertising in each answer, and across all your prompts overall
• Which of your topics and prompts attract the most competitor ad activity
• What copy competitors are running, and where they're linking out to
• Which brands are running ads on your branded prompts
• How often a given prompt shows an ad at all

Pretty cool!

Reported here: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ai-search-billions-clicks-41709.html

Google's Gemini AI chatbot blocks popular sci-fi novels. Other AI search tools don't censor them.

My long time online friend Wayne Barker shared an unbelievable video of Google Gemini getting hiccups each time he asks it for 1984 quotes:
https://lnkd.in/dh9kfcDe

So I wondered:

> Is this a bug or feature?

> Does the US maybe ban some books?

> Does Gemini block other similar books?

Thus I politely asked Gemini about George Orwell quotes from the 1984 novel and got the same result (including the hiccup when the answer disappeared).

To find out whether it's just this one author and book I asked for similar utopian/dystopian classics.

Half of them got censored. Gemini even used different wording to explain the blocks.

> It says "George Orwell Quotes Unavailable" as the saved chat title.

> Yet when I searched for Fahrenheit 451 quotes the saved chat got automatically called "Fahrenheit 451 Content Access Denied".

Two other similar books by Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Dispossessed" were available though.

See the screenshots below.

All other LLM chatbots I tested (Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Ecosia and Mojeek) were able to provide quotes from 1984.

Isn't it ironic that books dealing with a totalitarian reality of censorship get censored themselves?

Fahrenheit 451 specifically deals with the burning of books!

Are your favorite books also banned on Gemini?

IMHO this is something worth noting.

P.S.: At least they know my whereabouts in Berlin so they can send a missile to that la curiosidad stronghold LOL.

A good reminder here: Prompt selection is by far the most important step in AI visibility tracking:

>AEO teams need to treat prompt selection with the same seriousness that search teams treat keyword research, gotta remember that the prompt portfolio decides what “visibility” actually means

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joshua-blyskal_is-running-the-same-ai-prompt-once-a-day-share-7480696854683279361-kyuv/