r/SEO_for_AI

In what is quickly escalating into a war of attrition - with SEOs on the front lines - whats your take?

Quick recap: Google sued SerpApi in December for scraping SERPs at scale, the pipe a lot of AI tools and rank trackers depend on. In July the court tossed the DMCA claim (with leave to amend). Meanwhile, Peec AI published research this month mapping OpenAI's in-house index ("Labrador"), with vertical indexes for news, shopping, PDFs and more, and experiments testing its own index against third-party SERPs.

A lot of LLMs seem to be using Open Crawl - do you think thatis a risk to Google or to LLM search quality?

So Google is trying to wall off its results while OpenAI is building so it doesn't need them.

Hot take: in 2 years "SEO" means optimizing for 3–4 separate indexes with different crawlers and different ranking logic, and most of us are only watching one of them in Search Console.

Questions for the sub:

• Is anyone seeing pages cited in ChatGPT that don't rank on Google at all?
• Are you tracking other bots in your logs yet?
• Which indexes will win out - Open Crawl?
• Do you think moving away from Google = a Quality risk?
• Or is GEO a real discipline or a rebrand to sell new retainers?

Edits

-----

P.S.: happy to share resources if anyone is looking for a deep-dive away from the debate

I’ve been trying to answer a fairly simple question:
Can an AI search system independently discover and use a third-party technical record about a website, without the user mentioning that source?
I ran 20 controlled searches across 7 domains. Each test used a fresh private/logged-out ChatGPT session, and none of the prompts mentioned GoGuides.
Result: GoGuides appeared as a source in 11 of 20 searches.
More interestingly, it wasn’t just citing the URL. In successful tests ChatGPT extracted things like HTTP state, DNS/nameservers, TLS observations, measurement history, content-change counts and SHA-256 provenance fields.
On broader, non-provenance-specific queries, it appeared in 7 of 13 tests.
I kept the failures in the report too. This is a small experiment, not a claim that ChatGPT will always select the source.
Full methodology and results:
https://www.goguides.com/GoGuides_ChatGPT_Source_Discovery_Report_2026-10-03.pdf
Disclosure: I operate GoGuides. I’m posting this because the result is measurable and reproducible. I’d especially like to know whether anyone here can reproduce—or fail to reproduce—the same behavior independently.

I've been rethinking how we report organic visibility in 2026.

Traditionally, it was pretty straightforward:

rankings → impressions → clicks → conversions.

But with AI Overviews and AI Mode, I'm seeing a different pattern. A page can rank well and still contribute to an AI-generated answer without getting the click.

At the same time, a brand can show up in an AI answer or get cited even when its traditional search ranking isn't particularly strong.

So how are people actually handling this in reporting?

Are you tracking traditional rankings alongside AI Overview appearances, AI Mode citations, brand mentions, competitor visibility, and AI referral traffic?

Or is AI visibility still mostly an experimental metric for your clients?

I'd especially like to hear from agencies. What are clients actually asking you to report on in 2026?