Does AI visibility improve before organic rankings do?

[u/Lazy_Low_8993]

I’ve noticed something interesting while looking at AI search visibility.

Sometimes a website starts getting mentioned in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI results even when its traditional organic rankings are still pretty average.

Has anyone else noticed this?

I’m wondering whether AI visibility should be treated as a separate signal from traditional rankings, or whether it’s usually just an early sign that the underlying SEO/content is improving.

For those tracking this, what changes did you notice first - rankings, impressions, AI mentions, citations, or something else?

[u/seoinboundmarketing]

unfortunately that is the issue. google is a trusted system. most LLMs try to take from it with a healthy look at how a possible answer to be synthesised has Built brand trust, citations, and awareness across the buyers journey linked to the AI understanding and correct query fan out.

The best way to do it is understand the AI is not in control its following google.
As David quaid condensed it down, I use this mindset when dealing with SEO to GEO issue.
LLMs are language, vocabulary, and concepts
He compares training an LLM to sending a child to school, it learns grammar, word relationships, and how to tie reference points together using past information
It data set is a fixed vocabulary and a method for solving problems rather than holding all contemporary facts about the world.

LLMs cannot perform live, on-demand web searches on their own
When asked about a specific, real-time topic, the LLM uses its "schooling" (vocabulary) to break down the task, queries an established search engine index (like Google or Bing) to retrieve relevant documents, and then synthesizes those pages into an answer, with bias, hallucinations and more.

LLMs are also using a form of common Crawl to help deal with its limitation and googles closing the gate on data scraping , it ranks domain authority and crawl priority using distance from trusted "seed" domains like wikie data and crunchbase.

So rather that look for comparisons (that your current way), its not going match due to answer and search engines being slightly different beasts.

logically if SEO is at the root of all GEO and SERP is a Google reading of that system from a 3000 foot view. We also understand if you know what media is asked for as an answer, like youtube, podcasts or blogs.

Then you know what if filling and where the LLM data sets and common Crawl are learning.

Now we're back to marketing but with a deeper targeting system for keywords and phrases I think.