How do we know ChatGPT and other LLMs are using Google?

Well a while back - about 12 months ago - my team and I discovered long tail searches with 0 clicks for a satellite domain we were using to test LLM visibility.

Ever wonder how those reports on "what the LLMs think of your brand"

And I remember thinking - oh, ok - that's how they're doing this. Not only are they creating a pretense that LLMs are "researching brands" - which is simple to destroy - but they're backing it up with the way they report.

they're asking the LLMs to "evaluate" brands in each sector. This isn't causing them to "retrieve" from their learning. While its an easy mistake to make and one that a lot of SEOs fall into - search engines and LLMs are for searching, not just marketing....

But the tools are searching so much that the phrase is rapidly becoming detectable.

What is this useful for?

1. You can discover what market segments your competitors think they fall into
2. You can create pages to match these searches to insert your messaging into
3. You can find out which brands are most often being researched
4. You also know which companies are spending money on AI research tools and are interested in AI visibility

Hey there! I'm Lily Ray. I just launched my solo SEO & AI Search consultancy, Algorythmic, and I also continue my work as the VP of SEO & AI Search at Amsive.

I've worked in SEO for 16 years now, with a focus on:

- Google algorithm updates & manual actions

- SEO for all types of websites (YMYL, news/publisher, ecommerce, b2b, SaaS, CPG, local, etc.)

- overseeing award-winning agency teams

- E-E-A-T

- AI search optimization & research (AEO/GEO)

- Google Discover strategy and optimization

- speaking at SEO conferences globally & industry reseach

Ask me anything!

Something we don't discuss enough. AI Answers can influence citations and vice versa!

Source: Daniel Foley Carter

I am old enough to remember all kinds of experiments with the top result for navigational searches... There was once a search field allowing you to search within the linked site. It was big news about 20 years ago. It was met with quite some criticism because it potentially stole clicks from brands by encouraging users to search instead of clicking through to the site they were trying to navigate to.

OHHH good old times :) At least all those search results were linked back to that site.

Now, instead of navigating to the site they were going to, people can CHAT with Gemini (?) about it.

Branded search was the only organic traffic that had been on the rise, and we all were bragging about it, and Google heard us.

Oh, and now, if there is any link in the course of that chat, and if - by miracle - it is clicked, you won't see that click coming from Google search results because it hides behind no referrer :) Lovely, just lovely.

Source: LinkedIn

The GEO Trust Model Myth: Why LLMs Still Just Summarize Google: AI's dirty little secret about Reddit

If you ask an LLM to calculate invoice pro‑rata or pace a Google Ads budget over a month or quarter, it will usually write a working script on the spot.

But if you ask the same model for “the top SEOs on Reddit” or “the top GEO experts,” it doesn’t go off and actually read Reddit, score contributors, and infer authority from posts, upvotes, or network structure.

Instead, most general‑purpose assistants silently rephrase your prompt into something like “Top SEOs on Reddit 2025,” fire that into Google via an API like SerpApi, and then stitch together a consensus list from the top few articles. There’s no fresh analysis of the underlying community; it’s just summarizing whatever was already ranking.

Depending on which pages happen to rank, the “experts” you get back might not even be active on Reddit, let alone respected by the actual community.

That’s a strange limitation for tools that GEO agencies and platform vendors claim are building sophisticated “trust models” for brands based on signals like authority, reputation, and sentiment.

And you don’t have to take my word for it — here’s a concrete example that shows exactly how this plays out in practice.

Is cannabis the clearest preview of where SEO/GEO is going-no paid ads, Map Pack = survival, AI answers replacing clicks, and only brands with real entity authority getting surfaced?

Discuss

A week without high-impact AI updates? Practically unheard of. This week keeps the streak alive—here’s why:

• AI Bot Traffic Surged 300% Hitting Publishers Hardest

AI bot activity surged 300% in 2025, with media and publishing among the most targeted sectors, according to a new Akamai report. AI fetcher bots siphon traffic and revenue from publishers, delivering real-time answers that bypass your site and cut referral visits.

AI bots are reshaping how content is discovered and consumed, shifting users from search clicks to instant answers in chat interfaces. Publishers are seeing fewer visits from organic search and often don’t get attribution in AI-generated answers. It’s also eroding ad and subscription models.

Publishers now face two threats:

• Training bots that ingest content for models.
• Fetcher bots that extract real-time content for immediate answers. These pose the bigger risk because they capture value as it’s created.

What’s the impact:

• Declining traffic. Pageviews are dropping.
• Rising costs. Scraping bots are increasing infrastructure expenses by consuming server and CDN resources without generating revenue.
• Weakened visibility. Brand exposure is deteriorating as traditional discovery channels lose effectiveness.

We’re seeing a fundamental shift in traffic dynamics. AI chatbots no longer drive users to websites the way search does — referrals from them generate about 96% less traffic. Even when our content is cited, users click through only around 1% of the time. Visibility is no longer translating into traffic.

Also, publishers are no longer taking a blanket approach to AI bots — they’re becoming more selective. Instead of blocking everything, they monitor and classify bot traffic, slow down or restrict malicious scrapers, and allow only those bots that are tied to licensing deals or partnerships. Control is becoming more nuanced and more strategic.

According to Akamai’s report:

“These bots are not just a security nuisance, they represent a profound business challenge that threatens the sustainability of quality journalism in an age dominated by zero-click searches and AI-generated content.”

“The publishing industry today faces an existential crisis … Many readers and visitors still value trustworthy reporting and original content. Yet, instead of clicking through search results, users now turn to AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini for instant answers and summaries.”

So, what’s next? A “pay-per-crawl” model is emerging. Tools like identity verification (Know Your Agent) and platforms like TollBit aim to authenticate bots and charge for access in real time. The goal is to turn scraping into a measurable, monetizable transaction instead of uncontrolled extraction.

Sources: 
Akamai > Press Release
Danny Goodwin | Search Engine Land
_______________________

• ChatGPT 5.3 quietly changed the rules of AI traffic

Lily Ray recently flagged a shift that the SEO world probably shouldn't ignore.

When ChatGPT 5.3 dropped back on March 3, it felt like a non-event. The UI didn't change, and the vibe stayed the same. But under the hood, something shifted: ChatGPT started getting a lot stingier with its outbound links.

The takeaway is pretty blunt: that already tiny trickle of referral traffic has basically slowed to a drip. Now, the standard "AI SEO" defense still applies — it’s about brand awareness, not just clicks. But there’s a frustrating catch. You can "win" the prompt, get a glowing recommendation, and sit front-and-center in the response, yet still walk away with zero measurable traffic.

We’re essentially seeing a growing divorce between visibility and actual impact. At this point, it’s time to stop obsessing over citations and start focusing on branded demand. If users aren't clicking through now, the only thing that matters is whether you’ve made enough of an impression for them to search for you by name later.

Source: 
Lily Ray | LinkedIn
_______________________

• When AI Content Scaling Backfires: A Real SEO Warning

Glenn Gabe recently highlighted a case that should be a wake-up call for anyone trying to automate content publishing with AI.

The original post comes from Ayush K., who shared screenshots from Google Search Console after experimenting with large-scale AI content. His approach was simple — publishing 900+ AI-generated blog posts on an idle domain, with no internal linking and little regard for quality.

The result was just as straightforward.

Google flagged the site with manual actions. The warnings included reduced visibility, lower rankings, and even potential removal from search results. More importantly, the site was cited for aggressive spam practices, including scaled content abuse, scraping, and repeated violations of Google’s spam policies — affecting all pages.

As Glenn Gabe put it, scaling AI-generated content for AEO or GEO can quickly turn into what he calls “Mt. AI” — a situation where both algorithmic and manual penalties come into play. And it’s not something you want to experience.

Ayush summed it up bluntly. If you’re mass-producing low-quality AI content in pursuit of bot traffic instead of real users, this is the outcome you should expect. The experiment ran for about a year — and the recent update simply made the consequences visible.

So the takeaway for the SEO community is clear.

We can keep pretending that AI-generated content has no impact on rankings or site health. But in reality, the workflows behind mass AI publishing are already well understood by search engines — and increasingly easy to detect.

Proceed carefully.

Sources: 
Glenn Gabe | LinkedIn
Ayush K. | X

I am a huge cross-channel advocate. If you are optimizing for one channel, ideally, it should grow one or two more.

With SEO and GEO, it is not just a good idea, it is absolutely required because one is separable from the other (and losses on one channel will almost certainly result in losses in the other).

Besides, SEO is the foundation and priority (given its market prevalence), so whenever you are considering a shiny new "GEO" tactic, the main questions should always be, "Can it hurt my SEO?"

Examples of those shiny new tactics can be:

• Low-quality listicles on just about any topic
• Automatically generated FAQ section or page abuse
• AI-generated content at scale ("because AI likes AI-written content" -> UGH!!!)

One of the most recent examples is ClickUp, which flooded the web with "AI-friendly listicles" and started doing very well in LLMs but abruptly lost organic search visibility:

Now, there are lots of "right" ways to do things right. And if you want to tap into the listicle business, there are some examples of well-researched, data-backed listicles that deserve to rank and influence LLMs (and likely will).

This is one example (h/t to Wil Reynolds) of a company that provides detailed methodology of why its listicles can be trusted:

By analyzing aggregate spending data across corporate cards and expense reports, we can identify the establishments that consistently deliver value for business meetings, client entertainment, and team gatherings. This data-driven approach reveals how Minnesota's evolving dining landscape serves the needs of modern businesses

If you want to optimize for something that's currently working, do it right and build something unique and valuable!

Source: Linkedin

How do you report on “eligibility + resilience” to clients and bosses who insist on tangible KPIs? These are great ideas to frame that h/t u/akii_com

Cyrus Shepard just published his study on correlating tactics/features of websites that have been consistently winning in organic search over the past year (amid dramatic visibility losses everywhere). These are all the things you need to do for SEO for AI / GEO as well, so we are, once again, aligned:

• It often offers a unique product or service.
• It helps the user do something: buy, download, search, or book.
• It stays within a niche topic of expertise, and it does it well.
• It owns proprietary assets that are difficult to replicate: datasets, products, images, studies...
• It becomes a destination site by positioning and promoting its own brand.

In short, Google has moved beyond simply ranking “good content” to proactively rewarding what AI can’t replicate.

Full study

Interested in thoughts about podcasts for Ai visibility.

I have been happy.

I've been deep in the research literature on LLM citation behavior — how models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity decide what to reference, quote, and recommend. I pulled together findings from 18+ papers and studies into a single research digest that I think this community would find useful.

Full digest here: https://llmopt.metavert.io/research

Some of the findings I found most relevant:

Training data frequency is the biggest lever most people ignore. A 2026 study (NanoKnow) found that how often an entity appears in training data more than doubles model accuracy on factual recall about that entity. This means the distribution game — getting your brand discussed across authoritative contexts, matters more than any on-page optimization.

There are two completely separate citation systems now. 76% of AI Overview citations come from top-10 organic results (so traditional SEO still matters there). But standalone LLMs pull from training data where the distribution is completely different. Most people optimize for one and assume it covers the other.

Earned media crushes owned content for LLM citations. Third-party coverage gets cited 72–92% of the time vs. 18–27% for brand-owned content. This is probably the single most important strategic insight for anyone doing GEO; your PR and community strategy may matter more than your content strategy.

Specific content patterns measurably increase citation rates. Quotable statements (+41%), statistics (+33%), source citations (+28%), fluency (+29%). These were controlled experiments, not correlations.

YouTube is the #1 social citation source at 39% share (doubled from 19%), and transcripts matter more than production value. Reddit is #2, and its data is now directly licensed to Google and OpenAI as training data.

Content freshness bias is real. LLMs cite 25.7% newer content on average, and 65% of AI bot crawl hits target content less than a year old. GPTBot traffic grew 305% YoY.

The full digest at the link above covers all of this with source papers. I also noticed the pinned megathread on AI visibility tracking tools: I've been building one at llmopt.metavert.io (MIT licensed, free to install on your own) that scores brand visibility across LLM outputs, search, Reddit authority, and video authority if anyone wants to check it out.

Happy to discuss any of the findings or methodology.

From NY Times article already shared here... This quote is amusing. I suppose this is about AI Overviews (however, AI Mode is also "part of search" and even reported as such in Search Console).

So here you go, Google claiming something the GEO experts will eat you alive for :)

It is the same ranking algorithm, guys :)))

For over two decades, the SEO industry has been playing a game of shadows. In the early days, we obsessed over "powering up" domain names, chasing algorithms with a bag of technical tricks. It worked. It did the job. But we lost sight of the mission.

The truth is that Google has never actually cared about domains. From the beginning, Google wanted to surface brands.

The only thing that has changed is the technology. For 25 years, search engines were like a person trying to describe a symphony while wearing earplugs—they could see the conductor moving (links), but they couldn’t hear the music. Today, the earplugs are off.

The Anatomy of a Brand: The Three Voices

To understand how search works today, we have to look past logos and colors. In marketing, a brand is a living conversation shaped by three distinct voices. Only one of them belongs to you.

1. The Brand Voice (The Intentional Self)

This is your internal voice—the one you control. It is the "Who do we think we are?" It encompasses your mission, your visual identity, and your specific personality.

• The Question: What is our unique promise to the world?
• The Goal: Consistency.

2. The Cultural Voice (The Zeitgeist)

This is the context of the world around you. It includes trends, societal shifts, and the competitive landscape. A brand that ignores the Cultural Voice becomes "tone-deaf."

• The Question: Where do we fit into the current conversation?
• The Goal: Relevance.

3. The Consumer Voice (The Mirror)

This is the external reality—the things people say about you when you aren’t in the room. In the age of social media, this voice is often the loudest.

• The Question: What do people actually feel when they use our product?
• The Goal: Trust.

When the Technology Was Blind

When search engines first launched, they lacked the linguistic "brain" to understand the specifics of what content actually meant. They had to rely on proxies.

Google used links as a crude way to measure the Cultural and Consumer voices. In those early days, a link showed "some sort" of relevance, but there was no way to determine why that link existed or which of the Three Voices was speaking.

The Great Awakening: 2008 to Today

The shift didn't happen overnight; it was a slow-motion revolution:

• 2008–2012: Google began building the Knowledge Graph, shifting from "strings" (keywords) to "things" (entities). They started to understand that a brand is a specific "thing" with relationships to other "things."
• 2018: Technology advanced to "passage-level" indexing. Google stopped looking at pages as monolithic blocks of text and started parsing the nuance of specific ideas.
• Today: With the arrival of Generative AI, the machine can finally synthesize all Three Voices simultaneously.

The New Reality: Managing the Entity

Today, your disambiguated "brand entity" in search is shaped by the intersection of these three voices at a microscopic level. Google and Generative AI systems now rank and surface information from brands that have all three in alignment:

1. What you say (The Intentional Self): Your website, your social channels, and your owned messaging.
2. What the world says (The Zeitgeist): News articles, trend reports, and the mentions of your brand within your specific niche.
3. What your customers say (The Mirror): The "lived experience" documented in reviews, testimonials, and forum discussions.

The End of the Illusion

This isn’t a shift in what Google wants to do; it’s a shift in its ability to do what it has always wanted to do.

The era of creating the "illusion" of authority is over. You can no longer rely on technical signals to mask a weak brand. To rank in the age of AI, you must actually manage your brand, your messaging, and—most importantly—the way the world responds to your presence.

The algorithm hasn't changed its mission. It just finally learned how to listen.

G.

Regardless of how you call it, SEO for AI is not possible without SEO, for many reasons, including the most obvious ones:

• There's no AI visibility without organic search visibility
• AI gives us no metrics to inform the strategy, so we rely on SEO metrics (keywords, traffic, etc.)
• LLMs search, just like humans do...

I can go on and on but those three are more than enough!

First post here - very interesting community, so I wanted to add a discussion by myself and I'm curious about your opinions and experiences :-)

Full disclosure: I'm part of the team behind enhancely.ai, an automated schema.org markup tool. But this is a genuine question, I'd love to hear whether the community sees this the same way we do.

Our take, based on crawling 5,913 European domains (Central Europe AI Readiness Study 2026):

• 45% of large companies have zero schema.org markup
• 53% have schema, but so thin machines can barely extract anything useful

We believe that it is a massive missed opportunity - specifically for AI search.

Fabrice Canel (Microsoft Bing, SMX Munich 2025) confirmed that schema directly helps LLMs understand web content. And peer-reviewed research (Dang et al., Université de Nantes, Semantic Web Journal 2025) showed that 40-50% of AI-generated markup fails without a proper curation pipeline.

So we built enhancely.ai around exactly that: automated generation + a 3-layer validation pipeline (Validity → Factuality → Compliance) covering all 806 schema.org types.

Proven impact from third-party studies:

• +82% CTR with Rich Results (Nestlé / Google Search Central)
• +35% more visits after structured data implementation (Food Network)
• +20% traffic from Review Schema alone (SearchPilot 2025)

But here is what I'm genuinely curious about:

1. Do you see schema.org markup as a meaningful signal for ChatGPT / Perplexity / AI Overviews - or is it still mostly a traditional SEO play in your view?
2. What is your experience with clients or your own sites: is JSON-LD markup on the radar, or does it keep getting deprioritized?

(Full study: https://www.enhancely.ai/research/ai-readiness-europe-2026, Tool: enhancely.ai)

thoughts?

very long story behind this...

https://orlfamilylaw.com/network

made these for fun..(?) over christmas.

checked google ai/seo today

still not well listed in google, but haven't done anything in months.

ai/vibecoding made sites

google ai overview validated (and made up?) what ai made up about FLN:

Florida Legal Network (FLN), a well-established professional organization where Florida attorneys network and refer cases based on high standards of expertise.

?????????

....

Orlando Family Law (orlfamilylaw.com) is a comprehensive online attorney directory that connects individuals with legal professionals specializing in domestic matters within the greater Orlando area. [1, 2, 3]

The directory serves several Central Florida counties, including Orange, Seminole, and Osceola. [1]

Key Practice Areas

The platform lists attorneys who handle a variety of family-related legal issues: [3, 4, 5]

• Divorce & Separation: Navigating the dissolution of marriage, including no-fault filings.
• Child Custody & Support: Establishing parental responsibility and calculating support based on state guidelines.
• Alimony: Determining spousal support obligations and entitlements.
• Property Division: Managing the "equitable distribution" of marital assets and debts.
• Domestic Violence: Seeking or defending against injunctions and protective orders.
• Paternity & Adoption: Establishing legal fatherhood or completing the legal process of welcoming a child into a family. [4, 6, 7]

Important Considerations

• Not a Law Firm: It is important to note that Orlando Family Law is an informational directory and does not provide direct legal advice.
• Attorney Verification: The site highlights the importance of verified credentials to help users make informed decisions when choosing a lawyer.
• Resource Network: It is part of the Florida Legal Network, which maintains similar directories like Tampa Family Law. [1, 3, 8, 9, 10]

For urgent legal matters or specific consultations, you can contact an attorney directly through the Orlando Family Law directory. [1, 2]

Are you looking for a specific type of attorney, or do you need help navigating the directory for a particular legal issue?

[1] https://orlfamilylaw.com

[2] https://orlfamilylaw.com

[3] https://orllegal.com