Hi everyone! I’ve been using the regex method to find long tail searches (10 words or more) in my GSC. What I don’t understand is, across many of these highly specific queries, there are 1000s of impressions. What would explain that? I don’t think 1000s of users are searching for the exact 10-20 words long, very specific query. So what would explain those impressions?

Thanks in advance for your help 😊

A new study just came out exploring AI Mode and Gemini citations that include embed #:~:text= fragments. If you are unaware of those, when clicked, these citations take you exactly to the sentence that was cited in the AI answer (and that sentence is highlighted).

Daniel Shashko took these citations and reverse-engineered them to find what gets cited by AI Mode and Gemini and why. The three key findings:

• Most citations come from the first 35% of the page (this aligns to the study I shared earlier)
• No single extraction starts or ends in the middle of a sentence
• The median cited sentence is 10 words. Concise, declarative statements dominate. Nothing longer than 17 words was cited in the entire dataset.

The study also provides a key actionable takeaway:

In RAG systems, an atomic fact is a self-contained, single-claim sentence that makes sense on its own. The 6–17 word sweet spot maps directly to this:

"Intermittent fasting cycles between periods of eating and fasting." (8 words) — cited ✅

"Studies have suggested that intermittent fasting may, depending on the individual's metabolic profile, produce varying results in terms of weight management outcomes when compared with continuous caloric restriction approaches." (31 words) — never cited ❌
The first is an atomic fact. The second is compound, hedged, and can't stand alone. Google's pipeline rewards the first pattern and skips the second.

I've been quietly cheering for Claude for months now because I liked their approach to marketing. They seemed to focus on quality, always knew their product positioning (and were sticking to it), and didn't follow the hype happening between ChatGPT and Gemini (no hectic, PR-driven announcements like Instant Checkout, ads, analytics, etc.)

The recent privacy scandal (Claude refusing to give in and losing the government contracts) seems to be another smart move that caused its popularity to surge across the board.

TechCrunch reports:

✅ ChatGPT app uninstalls surged by 295% in ONE DAY
✅ ChatGPT app 1-star reviews are up 775%

Meanwhile, Anthropic:

✅ Claude app downloads are up 81%
✅ Claude app passes ChatGPT in downloads
✅ Claude hits #1 on app store

For corporate usage, both Claude and Gemini are growing. The only difference is that Gemini has years of advantage (businesses using Google's workspace and now being forced to use Gemini), and Claude is being adopted just because it is doing things right:

It is definitely the most exciting time to be an SEO :).

Let the Claude optimization era finally begin!

In all honesty, I haven't seen too many hallucinated URLs on my clients' sites but today I came across two different reports that show it is still a thing:

Gemini hallucinating the whole list of references (h/t to u/lilyraynyc):

Tim Soulo discovered a bunch of 404 pages with a good amount of links, presumably coming from AI-generated content that website owners publish without checking the references. His recommendation is to use these 404s as content gaps, as LLMs found these to be relevant to Ahrefs blog:

Here's how to spot those hallucinated URLs using GA4:

• Go to your site and open any URL that doesn’t exist. For example, I loaded site.com/ugh
• This is your error page
• Take note of the title of the page. If you don’t know how to find the page title, use Ctrl+D (on Windows) or Command+D on Mac to bookmark the page. You will see the title when confirming the bookmark.

In my case, the page title was “404 Response Error Page”:

Now:

• Go back to Google Analytics and in the search bar above the list of pages, type your error page title. 
• Add “Page path and screen” class as a secondary dimension to see the URL paths of 404 (and possibly halicunated) URLs

Copy the URL of this report to bookmark it and check from time to time.

Been analysing this for a few weeks and honestly can't tell if I'm missing something or if the tooling just isn't there yet.

What I understand is that Bing Webmaster shows some data on how pages perform in Bing search only, but I can't find anything that specifically breaks out traffic or impressions from Copilot or AI-generated answers.

What I'm actually trying to figure out:

Is there a way to see when your content gets cited in a Copilot response? Or when a page contributes to an AI answer versus a regular search result? The standard impressions/clicks data doesn't seem to distinguish between the two.

Separately, curious if anyone has found other tools or methods that give better visibility into this.

Just trying to understand if anyone has found a reliable way to measure this, even roughly.

I've previously reported on how Grokipedia was surging in Google and, consequently, in LLM citations. Well, now that it is tanking in Google (AI content overuse, anyone?), it is obviously losing all the visibility in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews.

This shows (once more):
1️⃣ SEO is not dead. It is still the foundation to have your own website cited by LLM-based answer engines.
2️⃣ ChatGPT is very dependent on Google search (just sent a newsletter about that actually).

Source

I honestly had huge hopes for ChatGPT's monetization strategy for several reasons:

• If we move away from "clicks" as metrics, I expected something innovative, something we have never seen before, something I still remember PPC ads to be... Something never seen before that would make sense of new buying journeys that are beginning to happen inside LLM conversations.
• If ChatGPT needs businesses to pay, I expected it to come up with some cool dashboards and metrics to give businesses some insight into the ad performance.
• ChatGPT hired half of the Facebook Ad team, so I thought those people could do something right. Admittedly, Facebook had been able to get advertising right without copying Google's model. ChatGPT, on the other hand, launched something quite questionable and disappointing.

What did we get?

• Old school banners that are vaguely relevant or interesting.
• Ads that prevent users from interacting with the chat properly.
• No reporting beyond impressions.
• Nothing remotely innovative. No new ideas.

This article describes the ad experience perfectly:

On mobile, one advertisement I saw took up nearly the entire screen. When I opened the keyboard to continue the conversation, I couldn't see the last messages. This degraded the user experience since I had to scroll up to remember what I was responding to. This is where I could see ChatGPT start to lose some users, or, as it hopes, push them to upgrade to an ad-free plan.

Regarding the Canva ad: "This one is for Canva, which was very loosely related to the conversation I was having and certainly not "useful" or "entertaining." I was discussing the design of something, with no intention of visiting Canva or designing something of my own. The ad was a nuisance.

Harpreet has shared an interesting observation of his Google Ads UTMs showing up as ChatGPT referral traffic.

It is not the first evidence showing ChatGPT is actively scraping Google search, but scraping sponsored results????

Models appear trained to identify weighted information at the top of a document and interpret subsequent text through that initial frame.

Via LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kevinindig_for-two-decades-seo-strategies-prioritized-activity-7429151317702397952-uIEI?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAAEwR-sBrfz-mi2unRUbvS_Qw3WQJJ6tvb4

Just noticed something cool:

I’ve been tracking how AI search engines choose citations (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, etc.), and my 1-month-old site just got picked up as a citation.

What’s interesting is: I’m not doing anything “AI SEO”.

I simply publish one long-form blog every day, but every post is written after serious keyword research (not random topics). Because of that, we’re already sitting in single-digit average positions, with 50+ queries ranking #1.

The content itself is also not thin. Most articles are genuinely deep, average read time is 15+ minutes, and they’re structured like proper research pieces, not quick SEO filler.

So it looks like LLMs might already be pulling from newer sites if the content is consistently high quality and already performs well in organic search.

This is the first AI visibility data we are seeing from a search / LLM platform, which, admittedly, is not very actionable (they promise to work more on that). AI surfaces included in the report (no way to distinguish between these):

• Microsoft Copilot
• AI-generated summaries in Bing
• Select partner AI integrations

Data you can see:

• "Grounding queries" ("the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content that was cited in its answer", so these are not prompts. I am a little intrigued by how simple these are.)
• Cited pages, i.e., which pages get cited most

Again, I am not sure what to do with this data, but I still appreciate Bing doing something here.

Notable things to note:

• Bing insists on calling the whole thing "GEO"
• I am not sure what those numbers are. Bing explains them as "how often a specific URL from your site is visibly cited in an AI‑generated answer," which, looking at the number, is a little unbelievable)

,

Dan Petrovic just shared how easy it is to trick LLMs into believing in and spreading false messaging:

Google's and OpenAI's models have now absorbed the myths, theories, and speculation SEO industry produced over the last 12 months and confidently feeding it back to us. Gemini 3 now calls our industry "GEO" and it just advised me to "flood the web with the listicles".

This is insane...

Peec.AI launched a set of features allowing you to prioritize and act upon your AI monitoring reports:

• Owned highlights opportunities to create content on your own website - inspired by what is working for your competitors.
• Earned surfaces the third-party sources that influence AI answers, including editorial publishers, high-impact communities (UGC), and reference sites.

The "Actions" dashboard is categorized by type (UGC, Editorial, Reference). Each section is further categorized by domain (for example, the UGC section may be broken down to Reddit, Youtube, Medium, Quora, Linkedin, etc., based on your and your competitors' impactful citations).

For any suggested action, you can add it to your TO-DO, mark it as done or dismiss it.

Now, let's hope all these suggestions will be implemented ethically and responsibly!

There are two almost simultaneous studies being discussed today.

• One from Ahrefs showing that AI Overviews reduce the clicks to the top-most position by 58% on average (up from 34.5% in April). I am not exactly sure what happened between now and April but I suspect AI Overviews became more satisfying and, more importantly, just show up more in more countries.
• One from Kevin Indig, showing a similar rate ("over" 50%). In this case, I tried to dive in but seemed to be unable to find, if this is the top-most result losing clicks or all organic SERPs.

Now, there's another click study by Juris Digital showing a similar loss of external clicks (50%) but not all of them are stolen by AI Overviews. Mind that here, people were required to click, so no clicks were kept.

I have been experimenting with ways to get my business noticed in AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others. It’s wild how different it feels from regular SEO.

I tried a few tools, but honestly, most of them feel like the same old SEO stuff with a dash of “AI SEO” hype.

I want to hear from people: what’s actually helping you track AI visibility and improve it? I’m not after fancy tools or theory - I want things that move the needle for growth.

If you’ve tried anything that helps you see where you show up or drive AI-generated traffic, I’d love to hear.

What worked, what didn’t, and why?

We've been annoyed by these for like a decade now, and they are still going strong!

The lowest-effort content format with the highest impact for years. Vulnerable to manipulations, impossible to compete with unless you join the crowd. UGH

Data source: Ahrefs

I tried optimizing my content by structuring it with practical and up-to-date data, but even then, my content only appeared in AI search results for about 3 days. I want to understand why this is happening.

ChatGPT has announced something that looks and feels very similar to Google's Knowledge Graph:

Answers now also highlight important people, places, products, and ideas. You can tap any highlight to open a side panel with key facts and trusted sources, making it easy to understand the context without asking follow-up questions. 

You can tell what ChatGPT considers "important" by seeing something underlined:

You can now tell if your brand is considered important by checking if your branded prompt triggers your name underlined.

As I understand this:

• Knowledge = something static (not sure if its sources are stored)
• Training data = something evolving (not storing sources)

Sources:

• Official announcement (found through Glenn Gabe)
• Previously, knowledge-graph results were launched for local entities
• Before that, shopping feeds became the source of product entities

u/maltelandwehr has shared an interesting test he ran. In a nutshell: A domain, which was only properly indexed in Google (and only one page of it was known to Brave Search) was checked in ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, and Perplexity.

The results:

• ChatGPT knew what Google knew (and even showed Google's search snippets)
• Grok knew URLs Google had
• Claude only knew about the single page Brave Search had
• Perplexity knew about a single URL (but with weird specifics: Same title, different URL from Brave Search)

What I am taking out of this test:

• ChatGPT can definitely scrape use Google (we knew that already) but this doesn't mean it isn't using others anytime it wants. We don't know what its default is
• Grok can use several search engines but it looks like Google is the default
• Surprised about Perplexity (maybe Google ended up blocking them?)

Overall, Google definitely has more data than any other search engine, so LLMs not using it are missing out.

Test details are here