u/nick-profound

Okay, I gotta say I do agree with the majority here that most tools calling themselves GEO platforms right now are just rebranded rank trackers. Buuuuuut, to play devil's advocate, I still don't think that means they all are.

Introducing... my test 😉.

What I do is check whether it shows prompt level visibility and citations or just keyword overlap. If it's the latter, it's SEO with a new name. If it tracks which prompts surface your brand across ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews, logs citation sources and shows share of voice shifts over time then it's worth a second look in my humble opinion.

Does anyone else have a tried and trusted, foolproof test for whether an AI tool is actually legit or legit trash?

TLDR; if a tool isn't giving you prompt level visibility, what are you paying for? You might as well run the manual checks yourself...

Most brands optimizing for ChatGPT Shopping are optimizing for the wrong queries.

The instinct is to make sure your brand name pulls product cards. Nike running shoes. Dell XPS 15. Makes sense on the surface. But we tracked ~2 million prompts through Profound and the data inverts that logic completely.

Open ended prompts like 'best running for flat feet' or 'lightweight business laptops with strong battery life' trigger ChatGPT Shopping at 12.1%.

Brand direct prompts trigger at 3.1%.

Which means the AEO content strategy for ecommerce should be weighted heavily toward unbranded problem framed queries.

Is your AEO content mix actually balanced toward unbranded problem queries or still leaning brand first?

I get why it's hard to know where you stand with AEO . SEO has always had keyword volume and rank tracking working together. You know how much demand exists. It hasn't been the same with AEO, but I think that's changing.

We're now seeing actual prompt volume data from hundreds of millions of real AI conversations. 'ChatGPT visibility' is pulling 762.1k monthly prompts. 'Google AI overview' is at 642.1k. 'AI search optimization' comes in at 367.4k.

You can cross reference that volume against your own visibility to see what's working. High volume prompts where your brand barely shows up? Your content brief is probably a comparison page or a direct answer piece targeting that exact query. If it's a category level prompt you're missing , that's an earned media and third party presence problem not a content problem.

I run this as an automated pipeline in Profound Agents now. The prompts volumes node feeds into Visibility Score data, gaps surface automatically then a prioritized list comes out the other end.

Still noticing a lot of reporting being done from scratch. From what I can gather it's a hangover from when AEO data was limited and everyone was still figuring out what to measure.

But rebuilding the same report every week isn't the best way to skin this cat. It's a waste of time. You also end up looking at slightly different numbers, data ranges, filters and views of the data.

What I recommend is creating dashboards that map directly to the questions your stakeholders ask. For leadership, that might be visibility score, share of voice and top citation sources. For practitioners, maybe it's visibility by topic , platform, region, competitor set etc.

Build the view once, save the filters and make it the source of truth instead of everyone working from their won version of the data.

Are you still building weekly decks or have you moved to a dashboard first reporting cadence?

We A/B tested 381 pages across 6 sites over 3 weeks. Markdown pages saw roughly one extra median bot visit. LLMs have been trained on billions of HTML pages. They're extremely good at parsing it.

That's it. The format you serve them in is probably not the lever you're looking for.

What other AEO "hacks" have you tried that turned out to be a waste of time? Would love if we could start building a list of things people can avoid so we don't all fall into the same trap.

Full study here: https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/markdown-vs-html-ai-search

Based on what we found in our citation drift study, my advice would be to start tracking directional trends over at least 90 days before drawing conclusions.

Don't treat your competitive set as fixed. Build a monitoring system that runs consistently. The advantage goes to whoever can tell the difference between normal volatility and a real shift. You can't do that without continuous data.

More specific advice here: https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/ai-search-volatility 

https://preview.redd.it/8ppdb3h2w68h1.png?width=1116&format=png&auto=webp&s=d4536f8e9332ba2904a1a68ca1462dad005e0847

Two weeks ago I celebrated my first year anniversary at work.

It's been a year of growth for me (personally and professionally). A dream come true really. It's weird to think that when I joined Profound there were about 20 of us and now there's 130 and we just hit a billion dollar valuation.

One year and so much has changed in AEO, so I wanted to do a bit of a roundup of what I've personally learned this year (and I hope some of you will do this same)!

What I've been focused on in the last year:

• Understanding the citation supply chain/ which sources AI trusts in each category and why. 
• Building systems that run automatically instead of doing things manually. I do still believe (now more than ever) that if  you're still doing anything manually in 2026 that's a sign you have room to automate.
• Getting in front of as many marketers as possible - I've taken about 50 demos personally and led them all. Nothing teaches you faster than the questions buyers actually ask.

What I’ve learned:

• Prompt coverage is the metric most teams aren't tracking but should be. Which specific questions are you winning and which are you losing? 
• Off-site authority matters more than owned content. 85% of AI brand mentions come from third party pages. The content you don't control is doing more work than the content you do.
• Measurement is broken and most teams don't know it. UTMs show maybe 3% of AI driven leads. The attribution gap is getting wider.

What I’m focused on going forward: 

• Building the marketing engineer discipline with people who build systems not just campaigns
• Helping brands understand their citation supply chain before they spend a dollar on content
• Zero Click NY next month, getting this conversation into more rooms

Would love to hear from everyone else as well. I think it's helpful to share this with each other as we go!

I'll be upfront. I came from paid media not SEO.

I get on some level that I don't really have a say in the whole "AEO vs SEO debate". To some of you I never will. That's fine. I'm not sad about it - the distance is what gives me a cleaner perspective on what's really happening here.

My experience in paid was all about the customer journey. I spent time trying to understand what the customer is doing at every stage. Meeting them where they are, that's what drives the different in how you spend and what you build.

At work I try to look at AEO through that lens too. Here's what I see: 90% of the B2B buying journey is complete before a buyer contacts a vendor. 81% already have a preferred vendor in mind before they ever talk to sales.

My opinion?

Is AEO "real"? Is it just a rebrand of SEO? Is AEO the right term?

Who cares!!

At the end of the day the buying journey is changing and AI is intercepting it in a very real way. Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer - they're starting their research in ChatGPT not Google. They can get restaurant recommendations without leaving Perplexity, shortlist software vendors without visiting a single website, form an opinion about your brand before you ever get a chance to tell your own story.

Call "AEO" what you want. Hell, call it Tuesday for all I care. Just make sure you understand that it's not SEO/what's really happening so that you can be part of it.

That's my take.

Okay, sorry folks bit of a longer post but I think it's important and useful!

Around Feb last year, a buddy of mine from work (Josh Blyskal - he's an AI Strategist) did a deep dive on why he think traditional SEO isn't enough in 2025/what the future will look like. I revisited it today to see what he got right. He was on the money about a few things.

For instance, the lack of correlation between Google rank and ChatGPT citations. Josh pointed out that last year for commercial queries like "best men's running shoes" the link between Google rank and ChatGPT citations was -0.98. That holds up. He also point that smaller sites with well structured editorial content outperforming bigger brand names in AI answers. We're still seeing that in our data.

In saying that, that were a few things that shifted faster than either of us imagined. Most notably ofc being Reddit. Citations within ChatGPT went up 800% in 3 months. LinkedIn also jumped from outside the top 20 to the number 1 most cited domain for professional queries.

With that in mind I want to put a few of my own predictions forward for the rest of 2026. This is what I think will matter most:

• Prompt coverage becomes a standard KPI: teams that can't tell you which prompts they're winning and losing will be in the same position as teams that couldn't tell you their keyword rankings in 2015.
• Brand becomes the most important signal in AI search: whether your brand is consistently referenced across the sources AI already trusts will be the most important factor. 
• Off-site credibility over owned content: 85% of AI brand mentions come from third party pages. The content you don't control is doing more work than the content you do.
• Comparison and alternative pages will be the highest ROI content play: if someone asks ChatGPT "best X for Y" and you have no comparative content, it pulls from whoever does. You're handing competitors the narrative.

Interested to hear what everyone else thinks. What's your list of predictions for the rest of the year?

I'll go first. Comparison and alternative pages are indeed the strongest content play... by far. People are right on that. Markdown formatting on the other hand did basically nothing despite what I keep hearing.

What about you? The more specific the better! Let's stay away from the classic "make your content retrievable"...

I work in AI search full time - there's a LOT of changes, all the time. How are you all keeping up?

For me, Josh's approach of asking "what time is it?" has helped, so I thought I'd share it with you guys (he goes into more detail in the Profound University course but this is the TLDR version).

He goes:

• Don’t know where to show up in AI answers yet? It’s set up time. Pick 10-15 prompts your customers would actually ask. Type them into ChatGPT. Log what comes back. That's your starting point.
• Tracking but don't know what's missing? It's analyze time. Look at who's showing up where you aren't.
• Can see the gaps but nothing is shipping? It's generate time. One page. This week.
• It’s working but exhausting? It's engineer time. Make it repeatable.

Does anyone else have a system like this for staying on top of it all?

I've been doing heaps of talks and conferences for work lately. Went to BrightonSEO last week, got Zero Click NY next month. Lots of travel, lots of fun 😉…but also lots of time to think. 

Being in rooms with so many practitioners that know more than I do has made me question where I stand/what my opinion is on AEO/where I see AI visibility going. Specifically I've been contemplating what separates the brands winning in AI search from the ones still waiting to see how it plays out?

I’ve narrowed it down to 3 main contenders based on the conversations I had: 

1. They know their citation supply chain: which specific domains and pages are being cited for their most important prompts and whether their own content is in that mix or whether someone else's pages are carrying them.
2. They track citation share not just visibility: showing up in AI answers and being the actual source powering those answers are two completely different things. The brands winning know the difference.
3. They read sentiment before it becomes a problem: AI engines are being directly asked to evaluate brands. Stale third party content shapes those evaluations whether you like it or not. The winning brands are monitoring what's being said and where it's coming from.

I want to hear everyone else's theories too. What's working for you in 2026? What's not?

Pretty much just the title! I'll start to get the ball rolling.

I wish I'd known how fast you see results. I've published content and seen ChatGPT pick it up and start citing it within 2 days. It changes how you think about publishing content. The feedback loop is tighter which also means you can test and iterate faster than anything I'd done before in search.

What about you?