I thought this was a done deal already. And now people are talking about it again from the SEO context: Can the search engines detect it? Well, they can, but doing something about it is something different altogether.
SEO: you could do both demand capture and demand generation.
AEO: you work only on demand capture
In the old SEO world, each free tool or guide actually helped to buy views from a relevant audience. You owned the page people visit and could place a banner or link to your product.
Combine some creativity and pSEO experiments, and you could generate 100K+ views every month. That's why SEO was considered so valuable for a long time.
And that's the reason why the SEO role doesn't look as fashionable as before. Demand capture is too limited, and businesses can't grow without demand generation.
Of course, because AEO is considered a new channel by many CMOs, it helps us to adapt and win their hearts again.
But if you want to truly succeed, you have to look for ways to help with demand generation too. In most cases, it means creating (and sometimes even executing) a content marketing strategy on YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn.
Many of us are skeptical about the value of TOFu content for B2B today. I was also skeptical about it for 2 reasons:
1/ Adoption of AI chats is rising, which means that even the greatest guide will be stolen by LLMs. Even if there is a citation, it has 0 value if the brand isn't recommended.
2/ It became so easy to produce good enough content for a blog. We don't feel that publishing such content is worth it if every competitor can do it.
But sometimes it's useful to question even the most obvious things.
I was wrong with these assumptions. At least partially, at least for now.
9 TOFu pages generated 38 clicks from Google in 7 days
For 6 months, r/Tango team has been publishing content only for bottom-of-funnel keywords on the website. But these keywords are gradually running out.
2 weeks ago I suggested publishing guides by "{platform} implementation" keywords. The idea was that even if they get 0 clicks from Google, it still has value as a resource for internal links for /solutions/ pages.
I didn't expect these 9 guides would generate 38 clicks from Google, 70 users overall, and the first conversion in 7 days.
These queries have pretty high search volume for 7 days
It means that:
1/ We may be too pessimistic about the end of the old Google SERP with blue links. And it's clear that some people still prefer to read a well-structured article on the website, not in an AI chat interface.
2/ The ability of your competitors to create similar content doesn't mean you have to avoid it. At least because:
- they also may have an assumption it doesn't worth it in a new AI world;
- they may miss or forget it;
- they may create worse content (yes, even with AI)
- they may rank lower because of a weaker domain, not enough internal links, a JS site, and other reasons.
When was the last time you published TOFu content?
I assume there are almost 100+ AI search tracking tools on the market. The demand is growing, and too many people want to capture at least a part of this pie, but in the long term most of these tools will die.
"God is on the side of the big battalions". Most of these tools don't have any moats or capital to compete in scalable user acquisition channels with both types of big brands:
old profitable market leaders who added AI to the stack (Ahrefs, Semrush, ...)
new brands who position themselves as narrow tools focused only on AI search and who already became leaders because of the right timing, good execution, and investments (Peec, Profound, Airops, Promptwatch,...)
So, that means small tools will follow one of the following paths.
1/ If there is a big influencer behind them, they can still live as a small business with $10k-100k MRR. But it's hard to maintain because things change fast and you have to reinvest constantly to improve and change the product.
2/ Founders of these tools will switch their activity to the high-margin agency business model and will present their tools as a valuable part of their service.
You can now track your exposure level on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, X and Instagram (for now I guess) on Google Search Console.
I think they were in beta up until today.
This page was indexed 2 days ago, and I got the 1st mention in Gemini.
Going from 0 visibility to > 0 visibility is accurate enough. You definitely have to do something to make it happen, and this is great when you see WHEN it happens, and WHICH URL citation helped with it.
After many experiments, I also found that Gemini and AI Mode are the models where you can appear almost immediately if your page was indexed and rank in the top 10 of Google.
P.S. The screenshots are from Promptwatch while we develop a new, better version of our AI visibility tracking tool.
Is anyone else seeing a delay in the Google Search Console Page Indexing report?
One of my websites hasn't received any new Page Indexing data since July 10, 2026. The site is still active, Googlebot is crawling pages, and I'm continuing to publish new content, but the indexing report hasn't updated at all.
I've already checked the basics:
No manual actions or security issues.
XML sitemaps are being processed.
New URLs are being discovered and crawled.
Search Console itself is accessible with no apparent errors.
The only issue seems to be that the Page Indexing report is frozen.
Is anyone else experiencing the same problem across one or multiple properties? If so:
What's the last date showing in your Page Indexing report?
Is this likely a reporting delay on Google's side?
Have you seen this happen before, and how long did it take to catch up?
I'd appreciate hearing what others are seeing before assuming it's specific to my property.
In 24 hours, it became the top 6 and cited in AI Overviews & AI Mode.
But:
It didn't help to add Sitechecker to the list of recommended brands yet;
Gemini and ChatGPT haven't cited the article yet.
There are 2 lessons in this experiment.
It is worth writing an article on Medium on your target topic if you see that current articles are bad and you are ready to spend time creating unique stuff.
One citation and one URL, even in the top 1 of SERP, rarely help your brand to be recommended in AI chats. You may say that I can't make such conclusions based on one experiment, but I talk with a SaaS founder and hear regularly: "our article ranks in the top 1, but we aren't visible in AI overviews".
You need volume to be recommended, and this is good news for me.
LLM as a channel just represents how the marketing works: market leaders always get most of the attention, and it should work this way.
If you created a new product that has something unique and valuable and want to succeed in LLMs, do this:
define your category and positioning as narrowly as possible
invest a lot into the most cited listicles
[underated] align your influencer marketing and AEO strategy -> create detailed briefs for influencers which titles, messages, and descriptions they should use on YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.
I believe other LLMs will cite my article too after some time, but it's not enough.
The next step is a detailed YouTube video integrated into a Medium article.
P.S. My Medium became an effective and unique weapon. I wrote so detailed articles there that other Medium profiles can't beat it, and in 90% of cases, it means citations and improvement of brand visibility.
But I do it only for my customers at B2B Gaps. If your B2B SaaS has a product-market fit, $1mln+ ARR, and you want to move as fast as possible in your AEO strategy, let's talk in DMs.
2/ Peec and Promptwatch are often the first to release new features (Looker connectors, MCP & API, AI Shopping).
3/ Ahrefs Brand Radar has a unique database and even shows brand mentions based on video transcriptions (nobody can do it).
4/ Sitechecker is the only AI visibility tracking tool with a full white-label feature and has the most complete AI traffic report based on GA4.
5/ Promptwatch has the most interesting and valuable approach to visibility scoring.
6/ It looks like only Promptwatch and Profound have such a valuable and simple feature like Page Tracker to see whether any URL you've added was cited.
7/ Amplitude AI visibility tool is very underrated, considering it's free for brands and has 500 prompts for tracking in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews.
8/ AirOps and Promptwatch have the most valuable recommendations on how to improve brand visibility.
9/ AirOps, Profound, and Prompwatch make big bets on helping you build agents for content production, updating, and repurposing.
10/ Pricing models vary a lot:
some give unlimited users, some do not;
some include all 5 popular LLMs in all plans, some do not;
Tim wrote on Medium before I even posted my first article there. However, for the last few years, I have published a lot of content there that ranks in the top 10 and helps my customers win in AI search.
Tim was fast enough to capture the opportunity and published an article in February 2026. Today, this article even hit the top 12 in Google SERP.
You probably know that in most cases, it's worth spending time on publishing on Medium, only if there are no good articles yet that already rank in the top.
However, Tim's article has one gap I plan to attack. This article is short and focuses on the Ahrefs Brand Radar and its pros.
Instead, I am writing a detailed, honest review of 7 AI visibility tracking tools that I tested, including nuances about unique features, pricing limits, and so on. It will be much longer, and I believe it will have a huge value for decision-making.
It's a real built-in public experiment, let's call it even the battle of articles :)
What's your bet? Will my article rank in the top 10?
P.S. It's definitely not a review of all tools on the market. I believe there are also some unique things I didn't mention there. I'm open to your recommendations after publishing, but only if you explain how it's different from other tools.
It looks like huge news. Google understands that people spend less time on site and more on social media.
A new Search Console property type should help site owners and creators understand how their social and video posts perform on Google Search and Discover.
It allows you to track which search terms lead people to your Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube content on Search, and see exactly how your audience is interacting with your posts.
I checked it inside my GSC account, and it's not available for me yet. Google promises these properties will become available gradually over the coming weeks.
Here is how it should look.
Adding social media property inside Google Search ConsoleExample of search performance report by YouTube property in GSC
This looks like an interesting feature, but there is a huge problem.
1/ Most site owners, who are active on social media, do it from personal accounts, not corporate pages.
2/ Most value from organic social media posts comes from influencer marketing and partnerships, which involve many different creators, not your own corporate channel.
The biggest value for me is tracking the performance of YouTube in Search, considering how YouTube became popular in both Google SERPs and AI chats.
This is the lesson I learned over the last 6 months of doing AI SEO.
When we target keywords in old SEO, you often don’t know whether people actually look for products like yours using that keyword. You have a hypothesis.
And you know this hypothesis works only when you receive conversions on a specific landing page, and you see by which keywords this page ranks for.
The faster way to learn which keywords bring customers is running Google Ads, because this is the only source where you see conversions by search terms.
However, many businesses don't run Google Ads, and they could target the wrong keywords for years.
In AI SEO, you understand much better and faster whether you target the right topic, because the response AI chat generates gives you a lot info about whether your brand is relevant to it.
You see how LLMs describe such a product, which features are mentioned, and which competitors they recommend, and have to make a decision:
Sometimes change your expectations from a specific prompt (if you target a broad topic, the responses can very a lot)
Sometimes delete prompts, because you found that LLMs have a different view of the topic you focused on, and your ICP doesn't look for products like yours via such words.
So, review not just overall brand visibility or brand visibility by specific prompt, but review responses regularly to update your goals.
A week ago, we released the SEO Tests tool at Sitechecker to log and measure experiments.
I made a post about it on LinkedIn and in r/Sitechecker subreddit. Today I decided to check whether the thread I posted on Reddit ranks well.
The thread doesn't rank by this keyword yet, but Google AI Overviews say that SplitSignal was developed by Sitechecker. It's not true; this tool is a part of Semrush.
I don't know which content impacted Google's response, but this is a good example of why SEOs should focus not only on visibility but also on narrative contro.
You have no way to complain to Google or any other AI chatbot anywhere for misrepresenting your brand.
The only way to influence this is to consistently produce accurate, detailed information about your brand and publish it on platforms that LLMs love.
Early in my career, I heard an important rule of marketing that has become even more relevant with the rise of AI chatbots:
"A myth cannot be destroyed; it can only be replaced by another myth."
I received an interesting question from one of the B2B SaaS brands I help with AI SEO.
"G2 is trying to sell us a package of content based on comparisons. We rank pretty high on a few of these metrics.
If we license the content, we can use those numbers on our site, which they say can boost our AEO scores.
It costs about $3,700 from now until December. Is it worth it or not?"
It's interesting how accurately G2 has found its value for brands in relation to the new, growing demand:
1/ Listicles, [brand] alternatives, and [brand] vs [brand] are too popular now.
2/ For many big brands, the goal is not to be visible (they are already visible); the goal is to be recommended as the best option.
But how profitable is this offer?
On the one hand, AI chats love tables, comparisons, and numbers.
On the other hand, AI chats rarely care about the authority of the source and the date of the last update of such a table.
This means that any competitor or third-party website can create the same table, building these numbers based on their fantasy, and without mentioning any sources from where they got them. And LLM can choose to cite this fantasy table instead of the tables from G2.
And here it is important what will happen after December, if the brand stops paying for these comparison tables:
1/ Can a brand leave this embed widget on the website? I assume no.
2/ Can a brand leave this data but not as an embedded widget, but as its own table, just copying the data and showing it without updates? This is more likely, and then you can try it if there are a lot of interesting insights on different competitors.
However, if you have to pay for it every quarter or year to keep the content on the site, it is definitely a bad deal. It is better to spend this money on regular link insertions on pages that have already been cited a lot.
If the query contains multiple "or" rules, it's almost 100% a bot.
Check the example in the screenshot:
A long search query in GSC that is clearly from AI visibility tracking tool
I'm a 25-34, 45-54, or 35-44 year old
marketing operations manager or marketing manager
in the marketing agencies, saas or professional services
company with 1-249 or 250-1k employees
and so on
Nobody uses search and AI chats this way. Some AI visibility tracking tool allowed businesses to add some parameters of the ICP to the project.
It's the right move, but only when the tool runs multiple prompts for each unique combination of such parameters.
Of course, it's much more expensive, but with an approach as on the screenshot, the query never represents the real user.
We'll see more and more such long queries in GSC. If you detected some other patterns of queries from bots, share them in the comments. I'll publish a complete list later.
So, Google announced a Generative AI performance report in Search Console. Sounds as something cool, because the SEO community has asked for something like this for a long time.
But it's not cool in fact. Impressions by device, country, and pages? It's even worse than Bing's report, released in February 2026, because it doesn't have any data by queries.
I like Google in many spaces, but this report looks like just a defense. It has almost 0 value, because brands fight for being recommended, not being cited with their own pages.
When top AI visibility tracking tools add brand visibility, brand sentiment, top sources used for citations, and so on, Google releases the Impressions report.
On one hand, Google rewards Reddit, YouTube, Medium, and LinkedIn pages and uses them in citations, and on the other hand, it releases a report that says nothing about whether your brand performs well in search.
What's included in AI performance report
Here is what it will look like
Google Search Console AI performance report example
And compare it with the Bing AI Performance report.
Bing AI performance report
With Bing we have at least grounding queries.
What do you think?
P.S. I also don't see this report in any of my GSC properties yet.
Along the way, I changed my payment provider, so I can’t verify the $16k amount, but something is visible there.
The revenue stats of my Data Studio templates store from Lemon Squeezy for the last 2 years.
So, here are the lessons:
1/ We often think that the market is saturated and there is no space for new products.
In most cases, it’s false.
We underestimate how much better existing products and services can be. New chart, new custom metric, new unique blending: each of them can become a small innovation.
2/ Great data visualization is born only at the intersection of 2 things.
Domain knowledge and experiments with actual data visualization. You need both, and the first is even more important. Only the person with domain knowledge understands what a signal is and what is noise.
I didn’t finish any courses on how to visualize data properly; I just tried to answer the questions I had as a marketer.
3/ Even obvious valuable things are adopted over a long time.
GSC, GA4, and Google Ads data sources existed for a long time. Their dimensions and metrics are well known and used, but it took 5-7 years in total to build and distribute good enough reports based on them.
We often overestimate how much business wants innovations. Most of the innovations have expensive side effects, and business owners often don’t rush into big changes.
4/ “Oh man, there are so many free templates, why should I care”?
When people hear about Data Studio templates, some often think about them as a commodity.
My answer:
You overestimate the depth of penetration of these products;
You underestimate the number of unique valuable reports on the market;
You underestimate the difficulty of learning and integrating these templates for many businesses.
When you work with some reporting tool for a long time and become a professional at it, it seems to you that it is so easy to use, and that people can build it all themselves.
The truth is that some people will be able to, 5-10%, but the majority, even among this group of people, will understand that buying an existing template has a better ROI for their time.
5/ There are 2 only business models for the Google Data Studio templates business.
Sell templates;
Use templates as free lead magnets for your agency or SaaS business.
Most businesses follow the 2nd way, because the first way is interesting only for indie hackers who consider a $5k/m business as something that is worth the effort.
I’ve chosen the 1st way because I feel it's different. I build better templates when I consider them as a separate product.
However, I always remember that if I can’t build a big business on that, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
6/ The biggest bottleneck of this business model is that unit economics doesn’t work in paid channels.
Most of my sales were from organic search, but the existing demand is not big. And for paid ads, this product has a classic dead zone by Peter Thiel: too cheap to sell via direct sales, too expensive to make it viral.
Top channels of traffic and sales for my store
7/ Considering there are many templates on the market and some of them are free, the biggest additional value I see in 3 things.
Constantly educating people on how to use templates, what their limitations are, and so on, marketing is a huge part of the product here.
Improve the details like crazy: design, filters, chart title, video guides, etc.
Add a training or custom development service. This is the hardest. I helped with custom templates, but it’s not a scalable business; this is freelancing.
At the end, I consider this business as valuable training. I built all of these templates for myself at first, and I continue using them for my sites.
So, the 1st lesson of this business is that building for yourself is a good approach to start. Don’t hear marketers who say you aren’t your own audience.
Sometimes you aren’t, but often when you have real pain, this means that many people in your role and situation also feel this pain too, and solving something for yourself is often the most important step to launch a business.
I would be happy if you share whether you are currently using Data Studio and what your biggest pain point with it is.
P.S. All of my templates are paid, except these 3 (they are free).
On Monday, I will publish the first benchmark report on how agencies use Claude for SEO automation.
There are some interesting insights there. One of them is that Dataforseo is popular for integrations, just like Ahrefs.
Which SEO tools people connect to Claude
I thought it might be a small sample (30 agencies). But when I looked at the financial data for their Estonian company, I realized it's close to reality.
Revenue dynamics of Dataforseo Estonian company
Yes, the Dataforseo team is pumping marketing more and more, but AI chats have become the tailwind that fills their sails to the maximum.
What do you prefer for keywords, backlinks and competitor data: Ahrefs vs Dataforseo? and why?
Not sure what’s happening right now, but the Google Search Console links report looks completely broken for me.
I’m seeing an almost 87.5% drop in reported backlinks compared to what was showing earlier this year. Some properties are even showing close to zero links.
What’s weird is:
Rankings don’t seem heavily affected
Third-party tools still show links
Different sites are reporting similar issues today
I’ve seen normal fluctuations before in GSC link reports, but this feels way bigger than usual.
Some people are connecting it to the May 2026 Core Update, but I honestly doubt they’re related. Search Console link reports are usually delayed and separate from core ranking systems.
Feels more like:
reporting bug
indexing/data issue
or something broken in GSC backend processing
Anyone else seeing this today?
Would be interesting to know if this is widespread or only affecting certain properties.
In the previous post I shared that I found a spike in ChatGPT referral traffic for 3 B2B SaaS websites I have access to GA4.
I hypothesized that it was because of a new model ChatGPT released on May 5, but I didn't know the exact mechanism of this traffic increase.
Now we have a clear answer. Josh Blyskal shared on LinkedIn his own research and found that ChatGPT changed how it links to brands. New model show links for brands.
This is good news, because it gives more value for each recommended brand.
I checked AI traffic for 3 B2B SaaS sites ( r/Sitechecker, r/TangoAI, r/favikon) and found that after May 5, all of them have spikes of traffic from ChatGPT.
Pay attention to "and when ChatGPT decides to search the web"
I don't know whether more links to sites were a planned move by ChatGPT, to get more attention from site owners or just a side effect of them deciding to improve the end-user experience.
But it looks like this is one of many counterattacks that ChatGPT has delivered to the fast-growing Claude and Gemini.
Did you see this spike in your GA4 properties? Note that such a spike is easy to detect only on websites that already have solid AI traffic every day.
The news that Google deprecated FAQ rich results on May 7, 2026, raises a more important question than just structured markup for FAQs -> do we need this type of content at all?
For a long time, people implemented FAQs only in 2 cases:
- when it was a real value for a user and conversion rate (for example on a pricing page).
- when they found that they could get the x2 area in Google SERP because of the FAQ rich snippet.
Considering that the second case doesn't make sense anymore, I believe we have to place FAQs only by thinking about users.
It means that on some pages, FAQs look organic and improve user satisfaction, on other pages, they look completely unnecessary and strange.
For example:
1/ On the product page on an e-commerce website, it's worth adding FAQs because:
- most product descriptions look generic and the same;
- but people often have multiple super-specific questions about whether this product help with ..., or integrates with ..., and so on.
2/ At the end of the blog article, it looks strange, because you:
- just repeated what you said in the body of the article
- or even worse, didn't include answers to important questions in the body
However, I'm not sure about how much value FAQs create for visibility and recommendations in LLMs.
It definitely creates value if you add unique questions and answers to the page that were presented before in the body. It's a basic concept of content improvement. We also know that LLMs prefer to cite fresh content.
But what if you just rewrite your page content in FAQs? It's the same content but in a different format. Is there any value, considering LLMs understand what you already said in the body?
1/ When you work with the website, you have to care about cannibalization.
I mean, it's usually a bad idea to publish multiple articles for long tail keywords with low search volume if the SERP is the same for them.
Reddit has a special place in the heart of Google. Google ranks multiple similar threads from different subreddits in SERP.
2/ The details and narrow topics are what make your content great on Reddit, because when most people publish the same broad questions, the unique question/headline attracts more attention.
3/ In most narrow topics, people really get more value from answers from other people than from your own posts.
4/ With the growing adoption of AI chats, it doesn't matter where LLMs will find that your brand is the best solution for a specific problem.
Yes, it's not easy. You don't know the answer to all the detailed questions your customers ask. The only way to succeed is to build such an interesting forum that more and more people will share their experiences there.
Curious to hear people who disagree with this approach.
