This is a follow-up to yesterday's announcement that AI Overviews are increasingly showing up for branded (navigational) queries. Here's one example of how that may go wrong.
This has been noticed on LinkedIn, and I did a few searches to verify the observation. No study on this yet, but I am sure it is coming:
Google appears to show AI Overviews in about 90% of cases when you search for a brand name:
This is not exactly great news for companies because they lose control over the narrative even more (those videos listed for sources are not from the official account and may very well include outdated product information, for example). It will also impact click-through to the official sites and will encourage people to click all kinds of links in the AIO (or just change their minds right when reading it or when chatting with the AI Mode, which is incredibly easy, especially on mobile where the conversation moves to the AI Mode very smoothly when you simply expand the AIO):
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7511040160994754560/
“Earning” AI visibility sounds cool, but not actionable... Let’s see how you can do it proactively...
Last week, I shared my takeaways from Man of Many's GEO guide with one of my favorite tips there:
>Track attributes, not just mentions (!!!). What the brand is associated with (price, quality, best-fit buyer) is the part you can turn into content.
Well, Peec.AI does this brilliantly. The "Brand perception" section of my Peec dashboard is quickly becoming the one I use the most. For your tracked brand, you can see:
This #4 analysis is simply gold, and surprisingly accurate (LLMs do have lots of data to make those decisions!).
A couple of weeks ago, I reported what everyone else reported: A drop in Reddit's citations by ChatGPT. At that point, everyone was asking, "If Reddit dropped, what replaced it in citations?"
The answer was "nothing"; ChatGPT just started citing official sites and bigger publications more.
Back then, some studies reported that both Youtube and Wikipedia were also dropping, only no one cared because "Reddit" was in all the headlines.
Well, guess what: recent data from Peec shows what we already knew: Pretty much everything dropped, including (more recently) Youtube, Wikipedia, and Forbes..
Paul Graham shared these stats without linking to the source, but it looks real.
I blame AI Overviews, for the most part.. I am sure that if we look at Google organic traffic, it is going to be much, much worse...
Also curious about that spike in late 2024...
According to David Konitzny, this unfolded pretty quickly:
I hope we will soon be able to track these separately! I imagine the CTR is going to be much higher for these links.
Also, unsurprisingly, this correlates with AI Overviews finally getting publicly monetized with contextual PPC ads. As we suspected, Google needs clicks to monetize!
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7507732652481814529/
GEO/AEO industry report: What do in-house marketers and business owners call "AI visibility optimization," which tactics do they prioritize, and what are they concerned about?
This is my annual survey, which I put together myself (because I thoroughly approach the process) by personally reaching out to in-house marketing teams and business owners.
Methodology: https://www.smarty.marketing/state-of-seo-ai-aeo-geo-industry-in-house-marketing-teams/#Methodology
I don't collect answers publicly because I focus on those two segments. Why?
➡️ I want to hear from SEO and marketing teams that take care of ONE main brand (and have a unified strategy for it). Agencies and freelancers have many clients, and they are all diverse in budgets, terminology, etc.
➡️ I focus on bigger brands and decision-makers when choosing whom to reach out to, to better understand the high-level executives’ points of view.
➡️ In-house teams and business owners are less likely to push some kind of agenda, so they are more likely to share unbiased opinions, which are a reflection of what is happening in our industry.
Dan Petrovic shared a geniusly clear explanation of how LLM visibility works:
A brand with both is more likely to be ranked higher in than a brand that is present in one.
Search presence is easier. Memory presence involves much more than on-site work (lots of PR efforts). It is time to start with both.
Listen, I wish things were THAT easy. For any contradictory matter, go to an AI platform of your choice and it will clear up all your doubts...
ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude do NOT know how they work. If you ask them, "are you biased?" or "does schema help you?", they won't tell you how they work. They will tell you what they "read" about this and what the general (often unverified/incorrect) consensus is.
Instead, try doing some research of your own and find actual studies, experiments, etc. They may not be the source of truth either (and often steer in the direction of the publisher's selling points), but AT LEAST there will be something to discuss there.
David Konitzny shared some cool insights into how ChatGPT "ranks" Youtube videos:
Views:
pop_views>1,000 → 0.00798 (1.10% / 10.51%)
pop_views>10,000 → 0.00322 (0.45% / 4.25%)
pop_views>100,000 → 0.00413 (0.57% / 5.43%)
pop_views>1,000,000 → 0.00662 (0.92% / 8.72%)
pop_views>10,000,000 → 0.01283 (1.78% / 16.90%)
pop_views>100,000,000 → 0.00820 (1.14% / 10.80%)
Follower:
pop_follow>1,000 → 0.01228 (1.70% / 16.18%)
pop_follow>10,000 → 0.00492 (0.68% / 6.48%)
pop_follow>100,000 → 0.00137 (0.19% / 1.81%)
pop_follow>1,000,000 → 0.00206 (0.29% / 2.71%)
pop_follow>10,000,000 → 0.00160 (0.22% / 2.11%)
pop_follow>100,000,000 → 0.00062 (0.09% / 0.81%)
Verification:
channel_verified → 0.00534 (0.74% / 7.04%)
channel_verified_artist → 0.00474 (0.66% / 6.24%)
-> 1,000 followers and 10 million views have the single biggest impact of all 14 buckets, together worth almost a third of the entire popularity budget.
I've been seeing a few unfortunate trends as our community grows. I know other subs enjoy metrics like repetitive questions, with comments stating the same thing over and over again because these (albeit empty) metrics tell Reddit to send more users to those empty discussions.
From the very start, I wanted this place to be different. I wanted it to be actually useful, and I don't care about metrics. Thank you, u/onreact, for helping me on this journey.
So here's the list of our rules, with updates in bold.
Don't ask the same question if it has already been answered. Don't ask generic questions that have been discussed to death.
We like to support other tools, creators, etc. Just be honest when sharing what you have and clearly explain why it is useful. If you are sharing your tool, explain what it does and what it does differently from the sea of other similar tools! Details, screenshots, use cases will be appreciated! A generic announcement will be deleted!
Let's limit these discussions to SEO for AI (GEO/AEO) only as we are trying to make this place laser focused.
If you post something and people start commenting, be there to join the discussion. We will be deleting threads where OPs never show up to participate!
If you are making a statement (e.g., "I just found out that 80% of people switched to ChatGPT from Google") or something bold like this, give us your sources. If you are citing your own observations, give us your screenshots.
I run various high-intent queries regularly just to watch the possible buying journeys driven by ChatGPT (this is by far the most consumer-driven LLM at this point)
And yeah, it changes all the time...
Comparing iPhone 16 vs iPhone 17
If I do that manually (which I did btw a few months ago):
Using ChatGPT 5.6 Sol:
No real unbiased customer reviews and experiences; only one official site and one publication.
Not sure I'd be making my decisions based on that but I imagine lots of people would.
For my SEO crew: This is like the 50th time ChatGPT has changed the way it searches, and definitely it will change 500 times in the future. Just breathe and optimize for real visibility, not for how things currently are..
Businesses focus so much on citations that they forget about actual visibility.
If you are cited but not mentioned, I'd look at two things here:
I'd look into both... because the goal should be to BE THE ANSWER, and not just cited as the source of it.
ChatGPT seems to be very serious about shopping results (are they getting ready to serve commercial intent propmts better?)
Tomek Rudzki identified at least 20 A/B experiments on shopping ChatGPT ran on shopping
Here's what they're testing:
More details are here
If backlinks drive relevant visibility in trustworthy publications, they matter, regardless of your goal: whether it is SEO, GEO, or wherever your goal is.
You instantly lose all AI visibility in Google (appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode), and lose some traffic too. It's also almost instant.
Source: Cyrus Shepard / Linkedin
I'll update here when Cyrus reports with click loss numbers!
Peec came out with a great article on how ChatGPT is building its own index (if we use the term "index" very loosely here) and likely beta-testing it with external searches (like Google or Bing).
Meet: Labrador, and it's not one index but a family of vertical ones: web, PDF, YouTube, news, Arxiv, Wikipedia, local, finance, legal, medical, shopping, and images. Note: We've talked about this before.
ChatGPT appears to cache everything it finds. This is not exactly new because we saw signs of that months ago (and a few months ago again). What's new is that ChatGPT is likely no longer THAT reliant on Google.
And there's more:
>Line up every provider that's shown up in this investigation, and a clear pattern appears. ChatGPT is stitching together at least eight other providers:
The job of an organic optimizer has expanded. However you call it, SEO - GEO - AEO - or anything else, here's what the process should involve.
What would you add?
Source: Linkedin
When writing your About page, keep in mind that now AI agents may come to read it and report back to their human users
