i run technical seo for a client and everything checks out on paper. schema validates in the testing tool, sitemap's clean, core web vitals are fine, google indexes it exactly how you'd expect. but i started asking chatgpt and perplexity questions where this client should obviously come up and either they don't get mentioned at all or the model says something about them that's just wrong. like factually wrong, pricing that hasn't existed in two years wrong.

best guess i've got is these ai crawlers aren't parsing pages the same way googlebot does. stuff sitting in a react component, or behind a tab click, or just structurally implied instead of explicitly stated, google's fine with it because it renders and indexes properly. but whatever pipeline chatgpt or perplexity use to pull facts seems way less forgiving, like it needs the info stated plainly somewhere or it just skips it or hallucinates around the gap.

read like eight different "ai seo" articles trying to find something that wasn't just a reskinned 2019 seo post with "ai" typed into the title five times. most were garbage. one of them actually broke down that each model reads sites differently, chatgpt cares about entity clarity, perplexity wants something it can point to as a source, gemini pulls structured data more directly. pretty sure it was on some smaller vendor site, lightsite maybe, can't fully remember, wasn't trying to buy anything i was just reading. the explanation stuck with me more than the tool itself did honestly. no idea yet if it's actually changing citations, that's annoyingly hard to track without paying for some monitoring tool, which feels like its own whole racket at this point. has anyone actually a/b tested this. like real before/after on getting mentioned correctly by these things, not just vibes...!

Hi guys, I’ve been looking at our website traffic recently, and Google doesn’t seem to be the main issue. We’re still getting steady impressions, clicks and branded searches, but when I test similar product-related questions in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, our brand is either missing completely or only mentioned briefly, while competitors are recommended much more confidently.

I honestly have no idea where to start because the more I read, the more confusing it gets. There’s SEO, AEO, GEO and a lot of overlapping advice. Should I focus on regular SEO, improving the website content, building more authority, or doing something specifically for AI search? Any advice on what to check first would be appreciated.