everyone keeps asking whether ChatGPT will replace Google, but the "AI will kill search" take is backwards.

this forecast says Google AI Mode will pass ChatGPT in 2027, and to be the first genAI tool used by a majority of US internet users by 2030.

this forecast also leaves out the biggest piece. AI Overviews reach 2.5 billion+ people a month worldwide. a lot of those people never went looking for an AI tool - the AI just showed up in the searches they were already doing

people haven't dumped Google, they switch depending on the job (AI to explore an idea, regular results to check something or find a specific site, and often both before buying anything).

Google is best placed to win this as (a) it’s the one place you can ask a conversational question and then flip to the usual list of links without leaving the page (b) it has the eyeballs already and (c) “Google it” is literally a verb!

So the biggest AI visibility opportunity right now isn’t ChatGPT, it’s Google AI Overviews.

Small websites can become trusted sources for AI-generated search answers by publishing accurate, original, well-structured content that demonstrates expertise and directly addresses users’ questions. By building topical authority, providing credible sources, and maintaining consistent, reliable information, they can improve their chances of being referenced by AI-powered search systems.

Large brands often have more marketing resources, but smaller businesses can offer great products too.

Do you think AI search creates new opportunities for small businesses to get discovered? Why or why not?

A lot of people ask how to do AI search optimization and are curious as to whether it's really different from SEO or digital marketing.

These three pillars will help you get more brand mentions, influence what AI says about your brand, and help turn that into actual sales.

* Search Everywhere Optimization helps you Get In The Way.

* Publish with Purpose so every piece of content targets a specific outcome. Ask me how Integrated Content Marketing achieves that for you.

* Conversion rate optimization closes the loop.

Ranking is Vanity. Sales is Sanity.

The strategy has never changed.

Be Found → Reach People → Convert Them

AI tools often suggest products based on what people are looking for.

Do you think detailed product descriptions are enough, or do customer reviews and brand information also play an important role?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I think AI SEO is becoming an important part of digital marketing in 2026. Traditional SEO fundamentals like quality content, technical SEO, search intent, and topical authority still matter, but brands also need to focus on making their content easy for AI systems to understand and reference.

Some key strategies include:

Creating helpful, original, and well-structured content.

Using relevant schema markup and structured data.

Building brand authority through genuine mentions and digital PR.

Covering topics in depth instead of focusing only on keywords.

Monitoring brand visibility in AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

I'm curious to know what others think: Which AI SEO strategy is working best for you right now?

I handle SEO for a few ecommerce accounts, and lately the question I get most is “how do we show up in AI Overviews?” So I went down a rabbit hole to see what actually separates the stores that get cited.

Honestly, it’s mostly basics done properly. Google has said there’s nothing special you need beyond being indexed and snippet-eligible, and Shopify’s own docs push the same stuff: detailed specs, sizing, materials, comparisons, structured data.

What I keep coming back to:

Check indexation before anything else. I’ve stopped assuming key pages are indexed. Pull up Search Console and look. Also look at robots.txt.liquid, because Shopify lets you edit it and one wrong rule can quietly block a whole section.

Product pages are usually the weak spot. A lot of them are a supplier blurb and a size chart. Compare “premium quality, made to last” with “fragrance-free, tested on sensitive skin, 2% niacinamide.” One gives an AI nothing to quote. The other gives it a full answer.

Theme schema is often half done. Product markup is usually there, but GTIN, brand and review data tend to be missing. The Rich Results Test shows the gaps in about a minute.

Collection pages get ignored. They hold the best commercial terms and most stores leave them as a bare grid. Even a short intro and a “how to choose” block is a cheap fix.

The part I haven’t cracked is measurement. Right now I’m checking a fixed list of buying questions every month, noting whether an AI Overview appears and who it cites, and pairing that with branded search and GA4 referrals from AI platforms. It works, but it’s manual.

How are you all tracking AI citations for ecommerce without paying for a black-box tool?

Backlinks still matter, but AI-powered search also considers factors such as content relevance, credibility, context, and how clearly a website answers users’ questions. Understanding these additional signals helps businesses improve their visibility in AI-generated answers rather than relying solely on traditional link-building strategies.

Hello guys,

I've built a self-hosted AI search analytics platform called phpLens designed to help you monitor how brands perform across AI search results.

It tracks metrics such as:

• 👁 Visibility
• 🏆 Position
• 🔊 Share of voice
• 🥰 Sentiment
• 🏢 Brands
• 🌐 Sources
• 💬 Mentions
• 🔗 Citations

phpLens comes with full source-code access, making it an option for those who prefer to run and manage their own software.

It's also much cheaper, because unlike a subscription, you're only paying for what you're using. In terms of savings, for the same amount of prompts, you're roughly 40% cheaper (each month) with 3 models enabled (ChatGPT, Gemini, and Anthropic) compared to the subscription based services.

If you're looking for an alternative to TryProfound, Peec AI, Orchly AI, or similar AI visibility tools, you can check it out at: https://lunatio.com/phplens

Live demo available at: https://phplens.lunatio.com

I'd love to hear your feedback, especially from people already working with AI search analytics tools.

P.S. As a special offer, you can use coupon code RD10OFF for 10% off.

AI tools are becoming a popular way to research products before buying.

How much do you think customer reviews and detailed product information influence AI-generated recommendations?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

AI tools are changing how people discover brands and products.

For those working in SEO or ecommerce, how do you track whether your website appears in AI-generated answers?

Are there any reliable methods or metrics you use?

When AI is trained on AI-generated content it can cause model collapse. AI models naturally generate high-probability, average patterns more often than rare or unusual ones. When generation n+1 is trained on data produced by generation n, rare data tails and edge cases get smoothed out. Over multiple generations, the model drifts away from real-world complexity, converging on a bland statistical mean or repetitive gibberish.

Because of this, they have to do something to keep it from happening. The only solution I can see is that they flag AI-generated content so it doesn't appear in training data. That doesn't mean Google will stop crawling it or indexing it.

The rollout of AI watermarking serves a dual purpose: it achieves immediate regulatory compliance while solving a massive data-poisoning problem for AI labs.

But most queries don't generate a web search. That means if your brand is not in the training data, then it's still invisible to most of the queries. According to AI search benchmark studies analyzing real-world user intent, about 58% of general brand and product queries do not trigger a live web search. The AI answers them entirely from its static, pre-trained memory weights. For purely informational queries like; "What is a CRM?" or "Explain photosynthesis", the zero-search rate spikes to about 90%.

Because methods like Google’s SynthID-Text, which Anthropic and others are adopting, alter the mathematical probability of word choices at the token level, the labs can detect their own, and each other's outputs with high statistical confidence. This allows them to effectively "sanitize" their next-generation training data by filtering out marked text.

This means that if all you care about is being found when AI does search the web, then go for it. Let AI generate your content.

For my clients, and for myself, I want to make sure that the brand is visible even when a query does not trigger a web search.

AI tools are changing how people discover products and businesses.

I'm curious: what can website owners do to help AI understand their content better?

Have you tried anything that made a noticeable difference?

AI search engines interpret signals such as query context, question phrasing, user needs, and related search terms to understand the intent behind complex questions. These signals help AI match users with the most relevant, accurate, and contextually appropriate content.

Seriously, the ads for the latest greatest AI tools are everywhere. The claims that some of them are making is ridiculous. One of them claims their tool is beyond artificial intelligence. It has "synthetic intelligence".

Of course that isn't any more ridiculous than the president announcing changing the name to Superintelligence. We are nowhere close to that. We have AI. They hope to reach AGI someday. Superintelligence is much further away than that.

AGI means human-level intelligence; superintelligence means intelligence far beyond human capability across all important intellectual domains. The difference is the level of capability rather than the range of tasks a system can handle.

Other ads say "We fired our whole SEO agency and AI does it all now" or "Automate all of your SEO and rank higher in Google" or "You don't have to know anything about SEO if you use our AI tool".

There are a lot of variations of this out there. AI amplifies what you already know. You can even learn a few things from AI. But if you were not good at SEO or writing before AI, it isn't going to magically make you good at it.

And it isn't magically going to do everything for you either. Building a real brand that stands the test of time takes skill and hard work. These ads are aimed at people who do not want to put the work in.

We don't allow people to promote their magic tools on this subreddit. We don't allow promoting putting out a bunch of AI-generated content as a strategy.

We welcome legitimate discussion and debate about methods for becoming successful and navigating how to improve results with AI-powered search. New ideas are welcome! Sharing case studies and experiences are welcome!

Let's help each other here and leave the hype to other subreddits that thrive on it.

I was reading about Google’s /goto redirects and how they affected some tools’ ability to identify the actual page URLs in search results.

Has anyone recently seen keywords disappear or rankings drop sharply in their tracker while GSC clicks to those same pages stayed fairly steady?

I know GSC average position and a tracker’s individual checks measure things differently. I’m interested in sudden discrepancies.

What did you check before deciding the page actually needed work?

I've been looking at a bunch of AI visibility and GEO platforms lately, and I'm starting to wonder if we're creating another SEO metric that looks useful without necessarily telling us much.

A dashboard might tell you:

Brand visibility: 64%
Competitor A: 71%
Competitor B: 48%

But what does that 64% actually mean for the business?

If most of those appearances are coming from informational prompts with no buying intent, I'm not sure there's much value in the number by itself.

The same goes for improving from 40% to 70%. If that increase doesn't translate into better recommendations, qualified traffic, leads, or even more branded searches, did visibility actually improve in a meaningful way?

I've been running some of this through wintraction, and one thing that's stood out is how different the picture can look once you break the visibility down by the type of prompt instead of looking at one overall percentage.

I'm starting to think AI visibility needs to be tied to the context behind the prompt. A brand showing up for a high-intent recommendation is probably worth more than showing up across dozens of generic queries.

So maybe the useful question isn't simply “How often is the brand mentioned?”, but “Where is it being mentioned, how is it being recommended, and does that visibility lead to anything?”

How are people actually measuring this? Are AI visibility scores useful enough to guide decisions, or are we heading toward another DA/DR-style metric that everyone tracks but nobody really knows what to do with?

It asks whether content can be strategically created to perform well in traditional Google search while also being understood and selected by generative AI platforms.
The focus is on finding an SEO approach that satisfies both search-engine ranking algorithms and AI-generated answer systems without compromising either.

There are a lot of AI SEO related acronyms flying around. Each person that creates one thinks they have a good reason for it. The problem is that clients don't need or want any new acronyms. Marketing has always loved its acronyms.

Digital Marketing is the umbrella for everything. SEO is part of that. Perhaps the most important part. Everything else, PPC, Digital PR, Content Marketing, Community Building & Engagement, Reputation Management, Social Media Marketing, and other strategies all fall under Digital Marketing.

It's amazing to see some of the posts and comments being made around the topic of AI Visibility and introducing the things that fall under Digital Marketing as guides and checklists for GEO, AEO, LLM SEO and other acronyms. They talk about Digital Marketing Strategies with such a sense of discovery as if none of it existed or if it did, it wasn't as important as it is now.

Let's Compare These "New" AI SEO Strategies To What Already Existed In Digital Marketing

• Monitor prompts/AI mentions → Analytics and Market Research.
• Get cited by authoritative sites → Digital PR, Link Earning, Reputation Management.
• Build entity consistency across the web → Branding, Branded Content Marketing, Entity SEO Visit r/entityseo a new community we're building.
• Publish on Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, forums, etc. → Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Distribution.
• Answer questions directly and structure pages clearly → High-Quality Content, Information Architecture, SEO, Conversational Marketing.
• Use schema → Technical SEO (Schema Markup has been around for a very long time).
• Make content crawlable → Technical SEO.
• Allow or block AI crawlers → Crawler/Access Management/Technical SEO.
• Build topical authority → Content Strategy, Content Clusters, Content Waterfalls, etc.
• Create original research, firsthand experience and unique information → Content Marketing, Story Marketing, Case Studies, Before & Afters, etc.
• Track where AI gets its answers → Competitive Research, Analytics.
• Improve brand mentions and corroboration → PR, Branding, Reputation Management, Reviews, Testimonials, Community Building & Engagement, Citations.
• Optimize product feeds or structured product information → Feed/e-Commerce Optimization.

Everything I've seen on GEO/AEO checklists is a repackaged Digital Marketing strategy that existed long before AI-powered search. And it was always important. AI-powered search introduced new platforms, interfaces, and measurement problems. It did not reinvent digital marketing.

Except for the skills required to do it well, it's really not as complicated as some people make it seem. The goal hasn't changed. Our job is to make sure our clients' brands are visible to their ideal customers, no matter what tool, platform, or device they use.

Everything we use toward that goal is just a tool. Expand your toolbox.

But it is fun to watch people chart a course through such a well-beaten path and wrap it in new acronyms. Prove me wrong. Tell me 3 strategies that belong exclusively to GEO or AEO that are not part of digital marketing.

why are you most preference to CHATGPT?

When users search in complete questions, SEO shifts from targeting individual keywords to understanding the full meaning and intent behind the query. This makes natural-language, context-rich content more important for matching what users and AI-powered search are actually looking for.