r/AISearchAnalytics

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?

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.

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