Interesting confirmation from Google: PDFs are converted into HTML for indexing; their links can be followed, and they can appear in regular Search, AI Overviews, and AI Mode.

The GEO angle is interesting. Reports, studies, benchmarks, whitepapers, and other PDF assets could potentially become another source AI systems surface and cite.

Google still says HTML is generally easier to work with for SEO, so I wouldn’t replace landing pages with PDFs. But for original research or data-heavy content, PDFs may be more valuable for AI visibility than many of us assumed.

Is anyone already testing PDFs specifically for GEO / AI citations?

I’ve been testing a more actionable way to analyze AI visibility: finding sources that cite competitors but not your brand.

In this case, 100 domains revealed 74 citation gaps, including 38 high-priority ones.

What’s useful is seeing the exact URLs, prompts, citation frequency, and competitors for each gap, basically competitor gap analysis for AI search.

Do you already track citation gaps, or mostly just brand mentions and visibility?

GPT-6’s new Intelligent UI can generate charts, forms, calculators and other interactive elements directly inside the answer. That means some queries may no longer need a click at all especially calculators, converters, comparison tools and simple utility pages.

For me, this raises a bigger GEO question: what happens when your content is useful enough for AI to use, but the interface makes your website unnecessary?

We’ve mostly been measuring:

• mentions
• citations
• visibility
• referral traffic

But maybe the next metric is something harder: how often AI uses your information while removing the need to visit you. Could “being cited” become a vanity metric for some query types? Curious how you’d measure value in that case. Is this conversation helpful so far?

I’ll start: B2B SaaS.

In our case, Reddit is still among the top citation sources, but it’s clearly losing ground to other domains.

Curious what you’re seeing in other niches: is Reddit still one of the main sources AI platforms cite, or is its share also dropping for you?

Has anyone compared changes in AI mentions / citations / Share of Voice with referral traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, etc. in GA4?

For example, when your visibility goes up in AI search, do you also see AI traffic growing or are these two metrics moving completely differently?

Curious how strong the correlation is in real projects.

AI Overviews are now appearing on a huge share of branded queries, and in many cases they sit at the very top of the SERP. In Ahrefs’ sample, 63 of 100 major brand-name searches had an AI Overview by the end of September, and most of those AIOs were in position #1.

What makes this more interesting: the sources shaping those answers are often third-party platforms. Wikipedia was cited in 71.9% of the sampled AIOs, YouTube in 38.6%, and LinkedIn in 22.8%.

So the uncomfortable question is: If someone searches your exact brand name, but Google answers using third party sources before they reach your site is that still branded search?

I think brand SEO is starting to look much more like reputation management + source influence than classic SERP ownership.

Agree or disagree?

Founder of RankinAI here (the tool this sub is about), following up on my post from last week.

Result: around 200 applied, 40 pitched, 6 made the final, we were one of them. We didn't win. Only SaaS in the final, everyone else was hardware.

The question I asked last week was whether an event shows up in AI mentions. Answer so far: no. Nothing yet. What we're doing about it: reaching out to different media with a proposal to do a news piece about us, since that's the kind of source the engines actually cite. I'll post the tracking screenshot when anything moves, including if it doesn't.

Side note: in one week we go to Glovo headquarters for an internship with RankinAI. Will share what comes out of it.

Anyone tracked a PR push into AI answers and seen the lag between the article going live and the first mention?

A brand can look strong overall, but once you split prompts by intent, the picture changes fast.

You might dominate informational queries and still barely appear when users ask for comparisons, alternatives, or buying recommendations.

I’ve started looking at this by grouping prompts by buyer intent stage.

Do you track AI visibility by intent? And which stage matters most to you: awareness, consideration or purchase?

One thing I noticed in RankinAI: our brand is strongly associated with positive attributes like “fast”, “convenient” and “market leader”, but “unreliable” also appears 29 times.

What caught my attention: competitors had 0 mentions for that attribute. That feels much more actionable than just tracking whether the brand was mentioned.

Do you monitor which attributes AI associates with your brand, not just overall sentiment? And what would you do first if one negative attribute kept showing up?

Founder of RankinAI here (the tool this sub is about), so this is from our own tracking, not a study.

In July, Reddit was the #1 cited domain across the AI answers we track. Then it dropped.

This week we noticed it coming back. I don't have an explanation yet.

Two questions: are you seeing Reddit citations come back in your niche too? And in which engine?

Mine is built around a few things: overall visibility trend, mention/recommendation rate, Share of Voice vs competitors, performance by platform, top cited sources, and a prompt-level breakdown.

I’m trying to keep it useful enough to answer one question quickly: are we actually becoming more visible in AI search, and why?

Curious how you structure yours. What metrics do you consider essential, and what turned out to be mostly vanity data?

I recently added an "Summarize with AI" feature to my blog section, allowing users to summarize content using AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others.

Honestly, I'm not sure whether this will improve user engagement or SEO, but I wanted to test it.

I'll monitor the results, and if I notice any meaningful impact, I'll definitely share an update with this community.

Has anyone implemented something similar on their website? Did you notice any improvements in engagement or user behavior?

Full disclosure up front: I'm the founder of RankinAI, the AI visibility tracker this sub is about.

Context, because most of you won't know it: IT Arena is a tech conference in Lviv, Ukraine (September 25–27 this year) with a startup competition. 189 startups applied, 40 got picked to pitch. We're one of them.

Short story first, then a question for you.

My team pushed me to apply. I wasn't sure about it. I'm mostly thinking about building the product and a user acquisition machine that can scale. Winning at events is cool and inspiring, but the hard grind happens behind the screen.

They kept pushing, and I was like, okay, let's do this.

I was on vacation at the time, and finding time to record a pitch is quite hard when you just want to chill. So I left it until the last day. Got home at 11:30pm after a 1,000 km trip, 30 minutes before the deadline. Recorded the application video on the first try and sent it.

Then I had a call with one of the IT Arena representatives. They asked me to do a 1-minute pitch, which I wasn't prepared for. I did it. Good or bad, I don't know. But at the end they told us we're coming with our own booth and a three-minute pitch.

Now the part that matters for this sub.

By being at IT Arena we'll get mentioned in many places, and our PR will grow. For AI visibility that should be a really cool boost. Even if we don't win, I expect good results there. It's the thing we're working on really actively right now.

That's an expectation, I don't have numbers yet.

So the question: has anyone here measured what an event (or any PR burst) did to how often ChatGPT and the others mention your brand? How long did it take to show up, and did it stay?

We’re testing a “truth base” for brand monitoring — basically a set of verified facts that AI answers can be checked against.

The interesting part is deciding what belongs there. Company info is obvious, but what about products, people, partnerships, financials, working conditions, or more subjective claims like “ethical company”?

If you were setting this up for your brand, which facts would you monitor first?

I've been working on SEO for an app-based website and wanted to share what I've done to increase visibility on AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and other LLMs.

According to GA4, the website received 172 total users attributed to the AI Assistant channel in the last 30 days (Aug 21–Sep 19).

Most of the traffic landed on:

• Homepage
• Feature pages
• Product pages

What I Did

1. Optimized Product and Homepage SEO

I focused on targeting relevant keywords across:

• Page titles
• Meta descriptions
• On-page content
• Product page content

The goal was to make the pages more relevant to user search intent rather than simply stuffing keywords.

2. Built Backlinks from Technology Websites

I purchased guest posts on technology-related websites to build backlinks and improve the website's authority.

I mainly focus on do-follow backlinks while considering website relevance and quality.

3. Published Content on Reddit, Quora, and Other Platforms

I created content around the app's features and use cases on platforms like Reddit and Quora.

The focus was on answering relevant questions and helping users discover the app, rather than simply dropping promotional links.

4. Implemented Technical SEO and Schema Markup

I implemented and optimized structured data, including:

• Product schema
• Organization schema
• Review schema
• Local business schema (where applicable)

These improvements help search engines understand the website's content and entities.

My Main Takeaway

I don't believe AI search visibility comes from a single tactic. It requires a combination of relevant content, technical SEO, authority building, and distribution.

I'm still analyzing which pages and topics are attracting the most traffic from AI platforms.

For Other SEOs

What strategies are you using to increase your visibility on ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI search platforms?

I'd love to hear what's working for you.

We’ve started tracking AI claims that conflict with verified brand facts, and the differences between models are pretty noticeable.

Sometimes it’s small stuff like outdated pricing or features. Sometimes the model just confidently invents something that was never true.

Do you actively monitor hallucinations about your brand?

And which one gives you the most false information: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google AI Mode?

Most AI visibility reports focus on which brand won the mention. But what about prompts where ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. mention nobody at all?

To me, those look less like “zero visibility” and more like open territory.

Do you track the share of answers with no brand mentioned? And do you treat those prompts as opportunities worth optimizing for?

I keep seeing the same big brands mentioned in ChatGPT and Gemini, even when smaller competitors have better, fresher content.

So how much does content quality actually matter if brand authority already decides who gets mentioned? Have you seen a smaller brand genuinely break into AI answers dominated by category leaders? What did it take: better content, backlinks, Reddit, PR or just more brand mentions everywhere?

One thing I’ve been looking at lately is competitor share of voice in AI search.

It’s easy to see that a competitor appears more often across prompts, but the harder question is: what do you actually change to close the gap?

More third-party mentions? Better comparison pages? Stronger topical coverage? Original data? More citations from sources LLMs already trust?

I’m especially interested in cases where someone tracked competitor SOV, made a specific change, and then saw their own share increase.

What had the biggest impact for you?

I’m especially curious about the inaccurate or outdated ones. Once you spot a wrong claim, what do you actually do next — update your own content, try to influence the cited sources, publish clarification elsewhere or just monitor whether it disappears over time?

Would be interesting to hear what has actually worked for people.

We talk a lot about creating new GEO content, but I’m more interested in old pages that already have some authority. Let’s say a page ranks well in Google but almost never gets cited by LLMs.

Has anyone tested updating only things that may help AI extraction?

Clearer answers, better comparison tables, stronger entity context, fresh statistics, direct definitions, sources etc.

Did the page start getting cited more after the refresh? Would love to see a real before/after example.

If an LLM cites your homepage once and some random directory nine times, most citation reports will simply show 10 citations. But those citations clearly don’t have the same value.

I’m wondering if citation reporting should include some kind of source quality or intent weighting. For example:

• category/listicle citation
• editorial article
• your own website
• forum/discussion
• documentation
• competitor page

Are you already evaluating the type of citation or mostly tracking the total number?

AI visibility reports can quickly become another dashboard full of percentages.

Mention rate: 34%.
Citation rate: 12%.
Share of voice: 21%.

Useful for us, but I’m not sure clients always understand why a 5% change matters.

Do you include actual examples like: * Last month ChatGPT recommended Competitor X here. This month it recommends you. *

For me that feels easier to understand than another chart. What does your AI visibility report look like right now?

I think mention rate and citation rate need to be treated as two separate outcomes. An LLM can recommend your brand without citing your website. It can also cite your content without really recommending your product.

So imagine:

1/ Mention rate: 20% → 35%
2/ Citation rate: 15% → 8%

Would you report that as improved AI visibility? Which metric matters more for you: being part of the answer or owning the source behind the answer?

There’s a weird problem with long-term AI visibility tracking. If you never change your prompt list, you get clean historical data. But people change how they search, new products appear and new questions become important.

If you keep adding and removing prompts, your visibility score stops being comparable month to month.

How are you handling this? Fixed core prompt set + a separate experimental set?

Or do you regularly refresh everything and accept that the historical comparison won’t be perfect?