u/mjain_entrepreneur

Came across a September 24 study that tested 500 product questions in ChatGPT with web search enabled.

Adding “2026” changed the top product recommendation 65.4% of the time, compared with 54.6% when the exact same question was asked twice.

That made me think about buyer questions like:

“What’s the best CRM for a small business?”

“What’s the best CRM for a small business in 2026?”

For anyone tracking AI visibility, are you testing both versions?

Has anyone tried repeating these in fresh chats and seen a consistent difference in the brands recommended or sources cited? Would be interesting to see whether this holds up in your own category.

I was reading about Google’s /goto redirects and how they affected some tools’ ability to identify the actual page URLs in search results.

Has anyone recently seen keywords disappear or rankings drop sharply in their tracker while GSC clicks to those same pages stayed fairly steady?

I know GSC average position and a tracker’s individual checks measure things differently. I’m interested in sudden discrepancies.

What did you check before deciding the page actually needed work?

We’ve noticed a clear jump in ChatGPT referral traffic at Scalenut since the start of this month.

It caught my attention because Similarweb recently reported that AI referral traffic more than doubled YoY, so this may be part of a broader trend rather than something specific.

For anyone tracking this, have you seen ChatGPT traffic pick up recently too? 

And is the increase coming mostly to blog content, comparison pages, or commercial pages?

I came across an interesting example this week.

One site had around 700 pages cited by AI platforms, but only five actual brand mentions.

That gap stuck with me.

Getting cited obviously means your content is being found and used. But if the brand itself barely appears, how much value are you really getting from those citations?

How important are brand mentions to you when measuring AI visibility?

What matters more to you? Citations or brand mentions? Or do you measure them separately?

I came across an interesting study that tested 480 questions across different industries and query types.

ChatGPT cited sources in only 72 answers. Even more interesting, 69 of those came from just two types of questions: finding providers and asking about cost.

For things like definitions, explainers, trust questions and problem diagnosis, it didn’t cite a source at all in this dataset.

It made me wonder if we spend too much time asking, “How do we get cited?” before asking which prompts are actually likely to trigger citations.

For anyone tracking this, are you seeing certain types of prompts consistently produce more citations than others?

More AI bot visits can look like progress, but it doesn’t show whether your pages were cited, seen by potential customers, or clicked.

It also matters which bot is visiting. OpenAI uses different crawlers for search and potential model training.

I can see the value in checking which bots reach your pages. I’m less convinced that a rising crawl count is enough to call your AI visibility efforts successful.

For anyone tracking this, have more crawler visits lined up with more citations or relevant traffic? What has the data actually helped you change? Would like to know.

Google has made its new AI control available to all websites in Search Console after initially testing it in the UK.

It lets you keep your links and content out of AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative AI features in Discover. Opting out means losing any impressions or traffic from those features, but it will not affect regular Search rankings.

The difficult part is that Google’s AI performance report shows impressions and visible pages, but no clicks or queries.

Has anyone considered using this control? What would make you opt out: low traffic, inaccurate answers, content reuse, or something else?

Google has made its new AI control available to all websites in Search Console after initially testing it in the UK.

It lets you keep your links and content out of AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative AI features in Discover. Opting out means losing any impressions or traffic from those features, but it will not affect regular Search rankings.

The difficult part is that Google’s AI performance report shows impressions and visible pages, but no clicks or queries.

Has anyone considered using this control? What would make you opt out: low traffic, inaccurate answers, content reuse, or something else?

Shopify’s latest Q2 commerce data found that AI-referred sessions grew 197% year over year, while organic search grew 12% from a much larger base.

The traffic quality was also different. AI-referred shoppers who reached product pages converted around 80% better than organic visitors. In research-heavy categories, the conversion rate was roughly twice as high. 

Organic search still delivered far more traffic overall. But Shopify’s data suggests AI may be sending fewer visitors who are further along in their decision-making process.

For those tracking referrals from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Copilot, are you seeing the same pattern?

Is the traffic converting or engaging, or is the volume still too low to influence your strategy?

A recent analysis found that Reddit’s share of ChatGPT Search citations averaged 3.83% from July 18 to August 7.

Between August 14 and 17, it fell to 0.52%, an 86.4% relative decline. The tracker’s latest 7-day figure has risen to 1.5%, suggesting some recovery, but it is still well below the earlier average.

The cause remains unclear, and OpenAI has not confirmed a change.

Still, it raises an interesting question for marketers who have been using Reddit partly to improve AI visibility.

Has this changed how you approach Reddit as a GEO channel? Or was its real value always the customer conversations and insights, with AI citations being an unreliable bonus?

Google rolled out its August 2026 spam update from August 18 to 21. The update applied globally across all languages, although Google did not reveal which specific spam practices it targeted.

Since then, several SEOs and site owners have reported sharp declines in rankings, impressions, and organic traffic. The impact has not been consistent, though. Some sites reported gains, while others saw little change.

I have also noticed slightly lower GSC numbers over the past week, so I’m trying to understand how widespread this is.

Has your organic traffic or visibility changed since August 18? If it declined, are you seeing the loss across the site or only within certain pages and queries?

Google rolled out its August 2026 spam update from August 18 to 21. The update applied globally across all languages, although Google did not reveal which specific spam practices it targeted. 

Since then, several SEOs and site owners have reported sharp declines in rankings, impressions, and organic traffic. The impact has not been consistent, though. Some sites reported gains, while others saw little change.

I have also noticed slightly lower GSC numbers over the past week, so I’m trying to understand how widespread this is.

Has your organic traffic or visibility changed since August 18? If it declined, are you seeing the loss across the site or only within certain pages and queries?

A recent study looked at what people did after using AI assistants for news.

Only 1.1% of the publisher visits that followed showed AI as the referral source. Around 75% came through direct traffic, while another 9% came through traditional search.

The study does not prove that AI caused those visits. But it shows the problem with tracking them.

When someone discovers your brand in an AI answer, and then search for it on Google or visits your website directly, analytics will record the visit as organic or direct, with no connection to the earlier AI interaction.

So, AI referral traffic may look low even when AI mentions, branded searches, and direct visits are increasing.

For anyone reporting AI or GEO performance to clients or leadership, how are you explaining this gap without making assumptions? What signals are you showing alongside AI referral traffic?

A recent report found a publisher placing sponsored FAQ-style messages in the AI-readable version of its pages, even though human visitors could not see them.

Perplexity blocked the content from influencing its search index and warned that similar practices could affect a publisher’s trust score.

That is an extreme example, but it points to a broader content challenge.

Content now has to be easy for AI systems to understand without becoming mechanical or difficult for people to read.

For those creating content now, what does your actual workflow look like for making the same piece easy for AI systems to understand while keeping it useful and natural for human readers?

What practices have genuinely helped you balance both?

Google’s new Generative AI Performance report finally gives us a separate view of visibility across AI Overviews and AI Mode.

For properties that have access, you can see AI impressions, which pages are appearing, how visibility changes over time, and break it down by country or device.

What’s harder to tell is what those impressions actually mean for performance, since the report doesn’t connect them to specific queries or clicks.

If a page suddenly goes from 2,000 to 10,000 AI impressions, that looks positive. But without the queries or separate click data, how much does that actually change what you do with the page?

For anyone who has access to the new report already, have you started using it in your SEO or GEO workflow?

How useful are you finding the AI impression data so far? Is it actually influencing what you optimize, or are you mostly treating it as another visibility signal for now?

I’ve been trying to work out what a genuinely useful LLM visibility audit looks like beyond testing a few prompts and saving screenshots.

Testing buyer-intent prompts across platforms sounds simple. But results can shift by model, location, search mode, and run.

So how are you auditing this in practice? Do you repeat prompts, weight high-intent queries, or separate genuine visibility gaps from normal volatility?

Which signals have actually proved useful for you over time?

This is becoming a much more interesting SEO problem to me.

I found a recent study that shows how only 37.9% of cited URLs appeared in the first 10 SERP blocks for the exact query. Around 31% were beyond the top 100. 

Say your page ranks #3 for a query that triggers an AI Overview, but Google cites three competitors and leaves you out.

What do you check first?

Is it whether the cited pages are covering related fan-out queries better or  whether they have stronger supporting content or off-site mentions?

Do you usually find there’s a clear reason a ranking page isn’t being cited, or is AI Overview citation volatility still too high to confidently attribute changes?

Would love to hear the actual workflow you use to investigate the gap.

Google keeps saying there are no special optimizations required for AI Overviews. The same SEO fundamentals still apply.

llms.txt, extra schema, aggressive content chunking, pages for every fan-out query, rewriting everything into answer blocks, etc.

I’m more interested in what didn’t work. Has anyone tested one of these tactics, tracked citations before and after, and eventually decided it wasn’t worth doing?

And on the flip side, was there something that actually improved AI overview citations for you?

Would be useful to hear actual before/after observations rather than another list of GEO best practices.

I’ve been looking at referral traffic from Reddit and trying to understand what actually makes it grow.

Even when a brand is active in relevant communities and contributes helpful comments, the traffic can remain low or fluctuate significantly from one month to another.

For those who have worked on Reddit as an organic marketing channel:

What usually causes Reddit referral traffic to increase or decline?

Is most of the traffic driven by a few successful posts, direct links, older Reddit threads appearing in Google, or the size of the subreddit?

How do you encourage more website visits without making your contributions feel promotional?

Would love to hear practical examples of what worked, what didn’t, and what you would avoid.

I’ve been reviewing referral traffic from ChatGPT and noticed that it has declined over the last couple of months, despite no major website or content changes.

I’m curious whether others have seen a similar pattern or whether this is more likely to be specific to certain websites, industries, or topics.

For those actively tracking ChatGPT traffic:

What usually causes referral traffic to rise or fall?

Has anything genuinely helped you increase traffic from ChatGPT, rather than just improve brand mentions or citation counts?

Would love to hear practical experiences, including what worked, what didn’t, and how long it took before you noticed a meaningful change.