r/AI_SearchOptimization

Came across a massive study published on Search Engine Land by Fractl that analyzes 1,010,848 high-volume keywords (representing 35.4B monthly searches) to see if Gartner's prediction of a 25% search volume drop by 2026 is actually happening.

The drop is real (29% decline on tracked keywords), but search demand is redistributing rather than disappearing.

Why? While traditional search volume has dropped by 29%, overall demand is not disappearing but rather shifting to new types of keywords.

Ai search is changing how people discover websites, and I'm trying to understand what actually workw.

Have you made any changes to your content or seo strategy that improved your visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini or other Ai assistant?

What's been your biggest success - or biggest mistake?

Half of American shoppers first ask AI what to buy — then head to Reddit to check reviews. Reddit surveyed 20,000 Americans and Brits and published the results. Here are the key findings:

⌨️ 50% of shoppers first ask ChatGPT or another AI what to buy, then go to Reddit to verify the quality of the product or service

🗣️ Every fifth shopper adds the word "reddit" to their search to find real reviews instead of branded content

🥇 Reddit ranked #1 among all social platforms for its impact on speeding up purchase decisions — both in the US and in the UK

🛒 The new pattern: AI gives the recommendation → Reddit verifies it → the person buys

For brands, this means one thing: being present on Reddit is no longer optional. It's a social platform you need to be on just as much as LinkedIn, X, or Instagram.

for the people using AI visibility/GEO tools today
which one are u using? and if u could change one thing about it, what would it be?

feels like every tool has visibility scores and prompt tracking now, so i’m curious what’s still missing

Is anyone here actually selling GEO as a service?
I’m considering it, but I can’t figure out how you’d report ROI to clients when AI responses aren’t deterministic.What do clients even expect to see every month?

I’m thinking about starting one, but I’m curious how clients actually perceive it.

Are businesses specifically asking for “AI visibility/GEO,” or are they still thinking in terms of SEO and content marketing?

It feels like there’s a lot of buzz, but I’m trying to understand if people are actually paying for this as a standalone service or if it’s mostly being bundled with SEO.

Would love to hear from anyone who’s sold it.

Most SEO work is still built around ranking. Get to page one, get the traffic.

But research shows only 17% of sources cited in Google AI Overviews simultaneously rank in the organic top 10 for the same query. Five out of six AI citations come from pages ranking 2 through 10.

The AI retrieval system is evaluating different signals than PageRank. It prioritizes topical comprehensiveness, structured formatting, and entity confidence over domain authority and backlinks.

What actually moves AI citation rates:

FAQ schema and direct answer blocks. Content structured to answer the question in the first 60 words of each section. Tables and extractable lists. llms.txt present and AI crawlers not blocked in robots.txt.

I’ve been auditing sites across these signals and the gap between traditional SEO scores and AI visibility scores is significant. Sites with strong organic rankings often score poorly on AEO and GEO. Sites outside the top 10 sometimes score better for AI citation because their content is better structured.

Pages that do get cited inside AI Overviews receive 120% more clicks than uncited competitors sitting directly beneath the module.

Worth auditing for both layers separately at this point.

• Chat GPT
• Claude
• Gemini
• Perplexity
• Other (comment below)

I keep seeing some version of this question. Should I use FAQ schema? Should I change my H1? Should I put my package name on the page more often? Should I get more reviews? After a lot of testing, I think we're asking the wrong question. We're still thinking like Google. We assume there's one thing we can optimize that will make AI say what we want. I don't think it works that way. What I keep seeing is AI building confidence from lots of signals that all tell the same story. Your page content, your service descriptions, your glossary, your FAQs, your structured data, your reviews, your internal links, and the places other websites mention you all help AI understand who you are and what you actually do. One signal by itself doesn't seem very convincing. Fifty signals pointing in the same direction are a different story. That's why I've stopped chasing individual tactics. I'm much more interested in making a business easier for AI to recognize, understand, and name when it's actually relevant to the question being asked. Nobody outside the AI companies knows every signal being used. Anyone who says they do is selling certainty they can't prove. All we can really do is test, compare results, and keep looking for patterns that hold up over time. Has anyone found a change that consistently increased the chances of their business being named in AI generated answers?

So, a couple of weeks back, a client of ours showed up in an AI answer, and the source it cited was a Reddit thread, not their site. Posted about it at the time and figured it might just be a fluke, so I actually went and checked properly, ran a pile of "best X in Y" queries through ChatGPT and perplexity.

And yeah, perplexity straight up lists "reddit community discussions" as one of its main sources. It even tied specific business recommendations to individual Reddit users (like "recommended by a Reddit user for competitive pricing"). So it's not a one-off, it's a documented part of how the thing works. chatgpt leaned more on directories and roundup blogs fwiw, but perplexity clearly weights reddit.

Which leads me to the part. If the AI is pulling recommendations from Reddit threads, then a brand getting mentioned naturally in the right subreddits is kind of an SEO asset now? not in the old backlink sense. More like the model treats Reddit as proof because it's real people talking instead of polished marketing copy.

And that feels both obvious and slightly cursed lol. Because the second marketers fully clock this, they're gonna start astroturfing subs to get clients mentioned, and then the whole reason the AI trusts Reddit (actual humans) quietly breaks. We'll have ruined another good thing.

I honestly don't know where I land on it. Part of me thinks the only real move is to just be genuinely useful in the communities your customers actually hang out in and let mentions happen on their own. The other part of me thinks that doesn't scale, and the spam wave is coming no matter what.

Hey Founders, first time posting to reddit. So I'm gonna say Hi to everyone :)

*(Disclosure up front: I work in this space, posting purely because I think it's underrated, not selling anything.)*

I've been going down a rabbit hole on something most people aren't paying attention to yet: not ranking on Google, but getting *cited inside AI answers* (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews).

More people are asking AI "who's a good X for Y?" instead of scrolling search results. If your business never shows up in that answer, you're invisible to a growing chunk of buyers — and it doesn't show in your analytics, so most people don't realize it's happening.

I ran \~20 small-business sites through a few AI tools to see how often they got pulled in as a source. Most scored basically 0% not because the content was bad, but because it wasn't structured the way AI extracts and quotes info.

A few things that actually matter:

1. AI loves clean, answerable blocks. A clear question → a tight, self-contained answer gets quoted way more than long meandering paragraphs.
2. Entity authority is real. Pages with a named author + consistent identity get trusted more than anonymous "our team" copy.
3. Most tools just show a score but don't fix anything. The score is the easy part; the work is rewriting the pages.

Curious if others here have noticed their site showing up (or not) in AI answers and how you're thinking about it.

I need some honest input from people who actually run stores, because I'm starting to wonder if I've been chasing a problem that isn't real.

I've spent a lot of time building something that measures how visible a store is when people ask ChatGPT or Gemini things like "where do I buy X" or "best store for Y." My assumption was that more people start their shopping journey inside these tools instead of on Google.

The part that actually nags at me: the stores that keep showing up aren't always the biggest ones. It seems to come down more to what's written about them on third-party sites than to their own SEO. I can't fully explain the pattern, which is half of why I'm posting. I feel the tool gives a lot of information about what sources AI actually grounds its answers on, which for ChatGPT is an ridiculous amount of Reddit.

But every time I bring it up with people in the industry, I get a polite nod and not much else. So I'll ask it straight: do you actually care about this at all, or is it still just Google and Meta that matter when you plan? I can't tell if I'm too early or simply wrong that this matters. Tell me how it is.

So, SEO people, AI visibility is this something you use time on? Is it some thing you measure, if so how?

I feel LinkedIn has most AI content out there, there is no restriction or machanism to mark it down. There are a lot of seo gurus who publish AI content for the sake of engagement and other side people has made it another instagram shit with irrelevant videos and personally created or altered clickbait whatsapp messages, Honestly enough is enough