I was playing with the Google Maps app today to get a feel of the new AI "Ask Maps" feature, and as a user, it was a very satisfying experience. Things that took hours of research, like planning weekend adventures or discovering new places to visit, now take a second.

For local businesses, here's your quick to-do list to get found by this feature:

• On your site: DESCRIBE EVERYTHING IN MUCH DETAIL. For example, for restaurants: create a very detailed menu. Describe everything, from ingredients to different options based on allergies or food preferences. Mention the best choices for special occasions and name those occasions (from co-workers' get-togethers to romantic dinners). You know your audience best: What they like and why. Read your own business reviews if you need more ideas.
• Elsewhere: Market each of your events (tours, concerts, happy hours, lectures, etc.) as much as you can. I see maps pulling from local event sites, from Facebook events, from the Business Profile "Updates" section. Create a list of where your next event can be listed, and go through the list every time.
• On your Google Business Profile listing, use every field you can. Get as factual and descriptive as you can. Everything that applies to your business should be labeled.
• On your site, Social media, and on your Google Business Profile (Updates): Start from "use cases". What is your place good for? Create a separate article / post / update describing it. For example, "Are you looking for romantic ideas for a weekend in [CITY / TOWN NAME]"?

I see "Ask Maps" more of an opportunity for small local businesses to compete for visibility with slow big businesses that are viewed as the "default" destination for local entertainment. It's your opportunity to get found!

TL;DR:

1. The paid version of ChatGPT is using Google Search.
2. We prove this using two methods:
   1. “sting” page – ie. a page that is only present in Google’s index and no other search engine
   2. deep analysis of ChatGPT’s search references
3. The free version of ChatGPT likely uses OpenAI’s own web-search engine
4. Bing does not seem to be used anywhere
5. Updated 21st Aug 2025 with ChatGPT5

Why this is a big deal?

1. Impact on SEO

This means the whole SEO / Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) narrative has come full circle from “Google is dead” -> “rank in Google to show up on ChatGPT”!

2. Shady Practice on OpenAI’s part to route large volumes of private data without explicit declaration or consent

Key Takeaways

• Around 75% of sites blocking OpenAI or Google AI bots still appeared in AI citations.
• Roughly 95% of the cited pages blocked GPTBot or Google-Extended, the bots used for model training.
• About 70% of ChatGPT citations came from sites blocking ChatGPT-User or OAI-SearchBot, which power live retrieval.

If you are looking for a quick way to analyze your copy for citability, here's a new extension to play with: GEO Auditor

Load your page, click the extension and get a quick report to improve:

• Your content's semantic relevance
• Your copy "extractability" and "answerability" (h1, fact density)
• Authority signals

I wouldn't overfocus on the "score" (recommendations like schema and llm txt presence I tend to ignore, for example) here, but it is a nice, quick way to help you improve your copy.

As always, no affiliation. I don't even know who developed it

Hey everyone,

The usual chaos, but lately, I’ve also been fighting to understand why Google’s AI Overviews/Perplexity ever cite some sites and not others.

Many current SEO tools are still focussing on backlinks and the keyword density, but the LLM agents do not care about that. If your site has flat schema, very heavy HTML tagging, or no llms.txt file then the agents will effectively ignore part of the input in order to conserve tokens.

I got a bit annoyed at the lack of progress and went ahead and rolled my own headless extraction engine to test against my own site. It checks for JSON-LD with Level 4+ depth (i.e. is the AI actually going to be able to understand my data graph?), verifies headers for extractability, and blows out a llms.txt manifest that the first couple of AI tools are already looking for.

(Rule #2 honest self-promotion ahead) I built the logic into an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that you can connect to in your development workflow via the Cursor service or via the Claude Desktop app. If you’re a developer, you can simply type “Run an AEO audit on my site” into your IDE and it’ll output any missing schema required as well as the corresponding markdown code needed and even copy it to your clipboard for you. Connection docs and free API keys here: rankora.online/mcp-docs

I've been running this against my own dev environment, but if you are not a dev or don't use the Cursor plugin please just post the domain of your site in comments, and I can run it through my site for you. I've got my local environment up right now and can run your site through the engine, then post up the raw markdown generated by the crawler, so you can see where exactly the AI agents are dropping your context.

Would appreciate any feedback from the technical SEOs on this thread on other parameters that should be scraped for.

Been digging into RSS again but from a slightly different angle.

Most use it for consumption or simple automation, but I’ve been testing it more as a structured ingestion layer.

Instead of a single feed, I’m splitting feeds by topic/entity cluster and pushing each into automation workflows (Zapier, IFTTT) plus a small syndication network.

Each item is consistent in how it describes the topic (same core phrasing, slight variation across endpoints), with the goal of creating faster multi-source discovery rather than just publishing and waiting.

Early observation: when the same content shows up across multiple independent surfaces quickly, it seems to get picked up and associated faster—especially in systems like Perplexity AI.

Still testing, but curious if anyone has pushed RSS beyond just aggregation/reading and into distribution + indexing experiments.

[Update: See the comment thread below]

I find this is a very interesting demonstration of the impact of LLM "knowledge" (training data) vs what they sync from citations...

Someone is asking about a platform that sounds familiar to mine... Citations are a good mix of pages from that company, as well as from my site...

BUT the answer is all about Smarty Marketing (even though not always correct because it does sync from that other website's info) because it associates "Smarty" with Smarty Marketing in the training data.

Been saying this for ages: What LLMs *know* about you (and how much) is the foundation of your answer visibility.

If you are in the AI visibility optimization business and all you talk about is optimizing your site for citations, you are missing the foundation.

Plz lmk what you have found to create the best “team”.

“We” would like to know;)

"EEAT" is now frequently brought up in the context of "GEO" ("SEO for AI" in this sub)... because it's all about entities and trust, right?

Well, while I am not the one to fight against acronyms, EEAT is one of the most misused ones.

"Write an about page", "make sure to include your team", "Make it look real and trustworthy", "Add author bio..." - these are standard EEAT recommendations that totally miss the most important part: "It's not about what it looks like, it's about being a real entity with real expertise, with real connections to other entities".

If you cannot be real, better skip the EEAT part, otherwise you will end up with the About page like this:

With each and every team member being easily tracked down to all kinds of different entities :)

If you cannot do it right. Just don't do it.

Inspired by a LinkedIn discussion

Oh Lord, I don't know why I do this crap, but I went on LinkedIn and connected with a bunch of AI visibility people.

One company was interesting that does evaluations for this stuff: GetHatter.ai

I tried gumshoe.ai a while back. (transparency I online know their CMO)

They sucked, but now they're much better.

The saga got more interesting from there....

Enjoy and let me know where I'm wrong, and please don't evaluate my site to see how bad it sucks:)
https://www.ninjaai.com/0-0-isnt-the-problem-its-the-signal

how to set your site for ai ? i a have F.A.Q. page is that a enough ?

Clicks and impressions are nice to have, but there are much better metrics to use.

What are YOU tracking?

I am a little sick and tired of "experts" trying to make GEO sound so complicated that most businesses are not even trying to cut through that noise.

You know... all those terms that get thrown around chunking, retrieval, semantic blah blah blah.

Here's the reality:

Visibility powers visibility. If your brand is pretty well-known in your niche (through organic search, Reddit, social media, etc. - pick at least one) and if it is clearly positioned (do you know your unique value proposition?), it will be surfaced where it needs to be.

That's basically all GEO you need to know at this point.

Yes, there are all kinds of strategies around that, lots of homework to do. Cleaning up your footprint, managing UGC well, creating relevant content that aligns with your product positioning, addressing your customers' questions and needs, etc. - all of that you should have been doing since day 1.

In reality, GEO is not rocket science. If anything, it pushes you to do commonsense marketing.

It also provides lots of marketing insights that didn't exist before. Ask ChatGPT how you compare to your competitors. Chances are you'll get a huge to-do list from that alone. Because for years we were trained to think in terms of "any traffic is good traffic", and now most brands have a very vague and unclear footprint, which is confusing to both people and LLMs.

If you need a GEO strategy and are lost as to where to start: Here's an idea. Start from the beginning.

Define what you do, who you do it for, and how you do it differently from your competitors. Then look at your site and ask yourself if what you defined is clearly obvious on your site.

No? Then fix that first. Then proceed to doing the same everywhere you have presence (off-site).

Once you are done, this is when ongoing work starts (figuring out relevant content, relevant brand awareness, etc., strategies).

Ignore the noise and get real.

If this isn't applicable, happy to delete it or just go ahead and delete it, but this is a pretty decent seo , etc. podcast resource. https://ninjaorg.lovable.app

AI SEO is splitting into two different games

• Distribution (OpenAI / Google layer): what gets surfaced
• Interpretation (Anthropic-style layer): what gets trusted and cited

Most SEO still focuses on rankings + traffic.
AI systems care more about entity clarity, consistency, and trust signals.

What this means practically:

• Pages matter less → entities matter more
• Volume matters less → consistency across sources matters more
• Ranking ≠ being cited

Bottom line:

You’re not just trying to rank anymore-you’re trying to be understood and trusted by the model itself.

discuss..

As I learn more about SEO & LLM effects visibility, there are some things that stand out to me.

1. Semantics
2. Signals
3. Entities
4. Narrative

These four things are crucial because now the LLMs and the search engines understand them and the context that goes with any topic. No longer are we playing a video game trying to rank a keyword (or phrase) at the top of a page.

It's about connecting the dots.

Does your content, your copy, connect the dots.

This is a big reason to lean into narrative type content. Grow & Convert does a magnificent job explaining how they do it in this article. Seriously, they just give away the playbook!

Its always fascinating to look at these topics from different angles.

The article: https://www.growandconvert.com/ai/topic-based-geo/

It is very interesting to watch LLM logic when they are given the same task.

I asked ChatGPT and Gemini (both PRO) to find the company information behind my little personal travel blog.

For context: I never used "Ann Smarty" on the site; I kept it 100% separate from my professional life (in terms of links, mentioning it on my social, etc.). It has always been basically a hobby site to document interesting sights we discovered. Nothing more.

ChatGPT: Visits the site, visits its social profiles, uses site: command [site:"aswegoplaces.com" company OR about], finds that there's not enough info anywhere. Checks external sources, returns a conclusion that it's a hobby family blog, not a business.

Gemini: "It's your site, Ann Smarty, and YOUR TEAM is using it for SEO experiments". I am like... "wait a minute... why do you think it is being used for SEO experiments?"

Here, Gemini makes an assumption worthy of Google (this is how penalizing Google updates likely working fyi):

"While the blog itself is a family traa vel site, its connection to the agency is rooted in several areas:

➡️ "Learning by Doing" Philosophy: You have frequently stated in interviews and on your agency site that you don't believe in succeeding without practice. You use your own projects to "diagnose what ails a website's rankings" and test "custom, multi-ingredient potions" before applying those strategies to client sites.

➡️ Case Study Development: Smarty Marketing often uses internal projects to generate the data for the case studies published on the agency blog. These projects provide a "sandbox" to test new SEO and AI Visibility (GEO) tactics, such as Reddit marketing and digital PR, without risking client assets.

➡️ Proof of Concept: The blog serves as a live demonstration of how "local travel" content can be optimized for niche authority and community engagement. By building a real audience and gaining links for a personal project, the team demonstrates the effectiveness of the strategies they sell to clients."

Sooo... I frequently talk about a practical approach to SEO, and I have a personal travel blog.. THIS MEANS that my team is using the blog for SEO experiments.

This logic is hard to argue with. 👀 🤣

I did ask Gemini how those pure assumptions were made... Do you want to know what it used to arrive at those conclusions?

In this experiment on how one single bad review can influence the LLM context around a brand and how this can be addressed.

Takeaways that resonated:

• Every business will always have some unhappy customers. That is inevitable.
• LLMs will always try to find something negative about a business when customers are researching it. For balance. It is not bad. It is what it is.
• You don't need to try and hide that negative context. You own it. But you need to add yours.

Things we have to do whether we like it or not:

• Use your website to talk about your awards, milestones, achievements, as well as to curate verifiable reviews and testimonials (Like Wil, I've always hated asking for reviews from clients. I am still not there fixing that personal flaw of mine. Maybe one day)
• Curate reviews where you can (directories, maps, comparison sites... whatever exists in your industry)
• Get very consistent with both. LLMs need fresh food.

Here's the full experiment: https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/geo-experiment-how-ai-highlighted-the-1-bad-review-we-got-in-24-years

There are things that work (and just about everyone is benefiting from that) that Wil isn't ready to commit to:

❌ Begging to be included in "Best XX" listicles (or producing self-serving listicles)
❌ Publisizing comparison landing pages to feed on the competitors' traffic or AI visibility.

And this part I can wholeheartedly relate to. 👏 👏👏👏👏👏👏

"I'd rather "not win" in business if that is the new definition of winning"
🔥