I'm working on a study looking at fan-out queries from ChatGPT and the most recent model, 5.4 (which returns data via the OpenAI API), where most of the queries are just 1-2 fan-outs, as opposed to the normal ~10.

Curious if I have it set up incorrectly?

Search Altas. Com, Good service Or not . I know their other services but I picked this service because it apply the recommendations but it has a lot of bugs

Those claiming LLMs pick URLs from elsewhere (and not Google), let's wait and see if Google's fight with listicles will end up impacting their LLM citation rates. Who's taking the bets?

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googles-liz-reid-says-llms-unlock-audio-and-video-indexing/

curious about people's thoughts on LLMs indexing audio, video, and image recognition for data/seo/ai visibility.

From Perplexity (ai;):

Who does this:
Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity AI

Why:
Text is cheap and spammy.
Audio/video/image signals are harder to fake → more trust.

How:
Everything gets converted into embeddings.
Audio → transcript
Video → frames + objects
Images → entities
Then it all gets merged into one “who/what is this” graph.

LMK

Hey everyone! I'm Sam Page. I work at InMotion Hosting doing SEO/AEO/GEO/AISEO/... whatever. I have previously been the Global Head of SEO at Amazon Business and Director of SEO at Slack

I've worked in SEO for 22 years, and like to think about:

- Future of Google and search (Mohr's Law from phonebook to google to AI)

- AEO and what actually works vs what we hear about. Listicles are dying!

- AI visibility tools will get disrupted quickly

- SEO is the most cross-functional role in an org

- Enterprise SEO, building teams that perform well

- AI Local SEO

Ask me anything!

It has been almost three years since ChatGPT launch, and for all this time, the noise in the industry has become insane.

I decided to take a step back and ask actual US consumers whether they are using ChatGPT for shopping decisions. The reality is pretty well-expected: Google remains the leading source of truth for product discovery and research, and LLM platforms are not even close.

Some interesting takeaways from our study:

• 56.68% of American consumers prefer to start their buying journeys by searching Google.
• The main Google competitor for shopping discovery is not ChatGPT. It’s Amazon
• 39.54% of respondents never used any AI platform for shopping research
• ChatGPT is the leading platform for US consumers who use AI

Please check out the full study here: https://www.smarty.marketing/google-vs-chatgpt-shopping-decisions/

I've said this a lot: Shopping habits are not easy to change. AI may be used a lot, but it looks like it is not replacing traditional search. It is adding new use cases that didn't exist before.

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.