Our local service site has steady impressions and mostly stable rankings, but CTR on informational queries has dropped quite a bit. I'm starting to think ai answers are taking some of those clicks, but GSC doesn't really tell the full story.

For ai seo, what are you actually measuring beyond rankings and traffic? Ai mentions, citations, share of voice? Curious if anyone has seen ai visibility rise while organic clicks keep falling.

I'm interested to see what others in digital marketing think of this.

Forbes article: How Yelp Became AI’s Ground Truth

Summary

Despite rapid AI adoption, user trust in AI-generated answers remains low, creating a critical need for "ground truth"—verified, reliable data. Unexpectedly, review platform Yelp, once predicted to be disrupted, is now thriving by providing this essential asset. Major AI players like OpenAI are licensing Yelp's extensive, rigorously governed review data and integrating its transactional capabilities. Yelp's two decades of investing in a unique "trust architecture," including strict content moderation and independent review processes, has created an invaluable, hard-to-replicate competitive advantage. This demonstrates that proprietary, credible evidence, built over time, is now the scarce resource determining AI's believability and value.

my thought:

Looks like Yelp is selling it's data to AI and that data might well be influencing generative search results. Considering how I might be able to leverage this to benefit my clients. I don't work with roofers and plumbers and businesses that use the Request a Quote option, but if the reviews and information in Yelp are being used by generative search more, this might impact how I use Yelp and possibly Yelp ads. Thoughts?

It wouldn't let me post the direct link to this article for some reason. I'll try to include it in a response

If a company uses AI for digital marketing tasks, such as analytics, content optimization, and fixing technical issues, to augment its marketing funnel, and its competitors do the same, what happens to competitive edge?

Suppose AI agents analyze two competing websites and identify areas for improvement. Website A scores 4 out of10 and has six areas for improvement, while website B scores 6 out of 10 and has four. Both companies use the same AI tools or plugins, such as Claude-based tools, to plug those gaps. Once issues are addressed, both websites could potentially have a similar level of technical and content optimization.

Now imagine 10 to 12 competitors doing the same thing. All of them are leveraging AI to continuously analyze their websites, identify gaps, and implement recommended optimizations. If they all score 10/10 on SEO and GEO, does anyone really have a competitive advantage and how?

In the case of human agents, people interpret data, identify opportunities, form hypotheses, and make strategic decisions differently.

I keep seeing people build surprisingly good-looking business websites with Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable, etc.

But I’m more curious about what happened *after* launch.

Did you actually get organic traffic or leads? Did Google index it properly? And six months later, is it still easy to maintain?

Would love to hear from people who actually run a business, not just people experimenting with AI builders.

A lot of businesses are still focusing only on traditional SEO: keywords, rankings, backlinks and traffic.

But search behavior is changing.

People are now asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews for recommendations instead of clicking through dozens of search results.

That means businesses need to focus on both:

SEO: Rankings, technical health, content, authority and organic traffic.

AI SEO / GEO: Entity optimization, structured content, topical authority, trusted mentions and making your brand easier for AI systems to understand and recommend.

I’ve been working in SEO for 9+ years, and I’m seeing a clear shift from simply “ranking a website” to building a brand that can be found, understood and recommended across search and AI platforms.

Curious... are you currently tracking your brand’s visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity?

I handle SEO/GEO for a small B2B Saas company and I'm trying to figure out how much effort we should still put into backlinks versus mentions and citations that might actually help with AI search visibility.

We've been doing traditional outreach, but it's pretty manual and I'm not convinced chasing DR alone makes sense anymore. For anyone doing AI link building for SEO, are you changing how you qualify sites or still basically following the same relevance + authority approach?

I'm finding myself and others that are just using chatgpt to find a service I want to use.

Example using ChatGPT

1. Who is the best plumber in my local area?

2. Read the reviews on the top 3 plumbers from google maps and give me a summary and your recommendations.

Yes, this is not that prevalent now... but people will use AI to search for business services more and more.

Will the website matter anymore? Does SEO matter anymore? What becomes of marketing?

Just noticed that the new Generative AI performance report has appeared in Google Search Console for one of my sites today.

I’m based in the Netherlands and hadn’t seen it before, so it looks like Google may be expanding the rollout further here.

The site is a chocolate bar discovery/database site I’ve been building. I like that GSC also has historical AI data. Curious if others are seeing and using this and if so, how.

Some numbers from the export:

• 9,093 generative AI impressions since mid may
• Started at roughly 30–40 impressions/day
• Recent days are around 200–280/day
• 579 different URLs have appeared
• US: 1,396 impressions
• India: 1,248
• UK: 780
• Netherlands: 278

My homepage is #1, but #2 is a page for a specific supermarket chocolate bar (Fin Carré), followed by pages about choosing chocolate, cacao origins, top bars, chocolate types, etc.

Curious about best practices etc. Thanks!!

My traffic has been sliding for a couple months now. And i think I finally figured out why. I’m losing clicks to AI answers. People type a query, they get the answer right there, and bounce without ever clicking through to any of my pages. We're a local service business so this is hurting conversions. It's quite frustrating to see impressions holding steady while ctr keep on tanking. I really need to see what's going on under the hood. But Google Search Console isn't cutting it for this. Just wondering, is normal rank tracking becoming obsolete? And has anyone here dealt with this for real and if so, what tracking tool/s are you using?

So a potential show stopper here to AI visibility if you use Cloudfare. Our robots.txt allowed every AI crawler explicitly, by name but still had crawler issues.

Cloudflare's managed AI-bot setting was returning a 403 at the edge, before anything reached the file. Ran like that for weeks in June. Nothing errored and nothing alerted and there's no gap in analytics to spot it because a crawler that gets turned away doesn't show up as anything at all. It just looks like a quiet month.

The check that caught it: fetch your live robots.txt over the public internet, not the copy in your repo. If the first line is a comment block about conditions of access instead of your own directives, something upstream is rewriting it. Then request a normal page with a crawler user agent from outside your network and confirm you get a 200 and not a challenge.

Worth doing even if you're sure it's fine. I was sure it was fine... but bam!