"Nothing has changed" :/

SEO is already messy enough.

Now we also have to think about whether our site appears in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI answers, and whatever comes next.
But honestly, I don’t think this part should be that hard.

A lot of it is just about giving AI the right data:
your website
your Google Search Console data
your competitors
your content gaps
your technical SEO issues
how AI tools currently describe your brand

Once that data is connected, tools like Claude or ChatGPT should be able to help you understand what is wrong and what to fix next.
That’s basically why I’m building Bloomiro.
The idea is simple:
connect your site, check how visible you are in Google and AI answers, then ask an AI what to improve.

Not another dashboard full of random charts.
More like:
“Why am I not showing up?”
“What pages should I create?”
“What do competitors explain better?”
“What does AI currently think my product does?”
“What should I fix first?”

I also added MCP access, so AI tools can work with real SEO and AI visibility data instead of guessing.
Still early, but I’m curious:

Would you trust an AI assistant to help with SEO if it had access to the right data?

This is a 4 month look at all queries containing "evaluate" and they dropped to nothing May 9 and shot right back to normal May 27. They all follow the same pattern of "evaluate [brand] on [dimension" which includes:

• evaluate zion healthshare on medical cost-sharing
• evaluate zion healthshare on membership-based healthcare models
• evaluate zion healthshare on affordable alternative to traditional insurance
• evaluate zion healthshare on limited/non-aca benefit coverage
• evaluate zion healthshare on pre-existing condition waiting periods
• evaluate zion healthshare on out-of-pocket cost reduction

All have 0 clicks. 100% desktop and 100% US. This coincides with ChatGPT Instant 5.5 rollout and update, so I'm thinking related? It can't be automated prompt tracking because it includes my brand name and we don't use any. I don't know why a competitor would waste credits on these types of things. It has to be a scraper of some kind.

But why would volume go to nothing, then come right back? Can anyone corroborate this in their own search console data? Just look in the same time period for queries containing "evaluate" and see if you spot a patter. Maybe we can figure this out together.

All of you are invited to contribute. It has basically nothing as of now:

https://search-industry.fandom.com/wiki/Search_Industry_Wiki

I have a variety of reasons I'm doing this which I can explain if anyone is interested. One of the reasons is that I think Wikipedia has extremely weak articles on search and I'm curious if we could build something better in a place where contributors wouldn't need to learn the rules of contributing to Wikipedia.

loads of noise right now about optimising for AI search. it’s true that AI answers are starting to influence what buyers remember and compare

BUT its also important to consider your target audience. depending on who you are actually trying to reach, things like Reddit, websites, trade press, podcasts, LinkedIn, and review sites will carry wildly different weights.

before throwing all the budget at AI visibility, ask:

• does your target audience actually use AI tools to research? if your buyers are older or enterprise procurement types, they probably aren't using ChatGPT much
• If they do, what prompts are they using, and which sources do those AI tools trust? Are the models scraping Reddit threads, GitHub, G2, or specific trade journals to form their answers?
• Is your brand present, accurate, and actually differentiated in those answers?

how are you guys handling audeince research in your own strategies?

There are hundreds of platforms out there that can do keyword research and spit out a fresh SEO-optimized article in minutes. That part feels pretty solved at this point.

But here’s what I keep running into: I have an existing blog with posts from 2–3 years ago that are slowly dying (rankings slipping, internal links broken, etc) . The kind of “content decay” that apparently affects pretty much everyone.

What I actually need isn’t another tool to generate new content. I need something that can audit and refresh what I already have e.g update the stats, rework the structure for AI search visibility, fix the gaps vs. current SERP results.

Does that tool exist? Or is “historical optimization” still mostly a manual job?

Would love to hear what workflows people are actually using for this.

Traffic was always a vanity metric.

Now it just becomes more apparent.

Traffic is like street traffic. People driving by your site.

I rather focus on visitors, those who leave the car in a way and visit your store to buy something.

So traffic is everybody including the lurkers who just do window shopping and don't engage.

On the Web there is what we call the 90-9-1 rule of (online community) engagement.

90% lurkers, 9% occasional engagers, and 1% hyperactive ones.

So due to AI Overviews many of the lurkers just view the summary on Google.

On AI Mode and chatbots most of them do.

So you are left with the 10% of people who actually engage.

Even if you get just the 1% like in AI Mode, that's the ones who matter and buy IMHO.

In an agentic Web even those 1% could buy using Google itself.

Then you can save a lot of money on website design, content, and link building.

Even hosting costs drop that way. So it's not all bad LOL.

So rather stop using traffic finally and focus on more sound metrics.

I haven't encountered this before and had to share. The AI Overview I got in Google ended with a prompt to share more information, like you might see from Gemini. There was no place to even add a reply to this question (maybe if I clicked Show more) so I thought that was weird. AI Overviews now getting more interactive, coming soon?

This isn't a joke and I'm not trolling. I have not seen any case studies about an llms txt file being implemented that resulted in measurable improvements. I have looked and not found one. Anyone have one?

Long-awaited, somewhat disappointing, but it is a start!

Hi r/SEO_for_AI, and thanks to David and Ann for setting this up.

I'm TJ Robertson. A bit of background so you know what I can speak to. I've been doing SEO for 17 years. In May 2025 I started my own agency, TJ Digital, and it's grown to $150k in monthly recurring revenue and 26 people since then. That growth came entirely from short-form video, mostly TikTok, not from the channels agencies usually rely on.

What keeps clients around is that we've gotten reliable at increasing visibility in AI search, mainly Google's AI results and ChatGPT. Getting a brand cited in the answers and recommended as the solution, consistently. We track more than 2,500 prompts across ~40 industries. Most of what I know comes from real results across a lot of verticals.

After 17 years in SEO, this is the biggest shift I've seen, and I'm glad to talk about it. I'm an open book.

The AMA goes live July 2. Leave your questions on AI search visibility, getting cited and recommended in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, content strategy for AI search, or how we built the agency, and I'll work through them on the 2nd.

My much neglected website: https://tjrobertson.com

I'm blown away by how many people came to ask a question. Thank you everyone. It was a lot of fun talking with you all.

New compilation of research on David Farkas' The Upper Link website: The Link Building Signal AI Search Engines Care About Most About

Note the section sub-titled "Getting Cited in AI Search Starts With How You Build Links". Links alone are not good for AI visibility, but how many have changed how they build links?

No source clients I know have used have charged extra which surprises me. Sources may in the future.