Latest GEO & AEO guides
Practical playbooks to get your brand cited by AI search — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
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What Does a Page AI Cites — But Google Won’t Rank — Look Like? Our Pre-Registered Experiment
Last week we measured how little AI citations overlap with Google rank. This week we profile the gap: 45 domains that AI engines cited but that never appear in Google’s top-10. Here is the full experiment design, pre-registered before we open the data — the exact 62 cited-but-not-ranked instances we’ll code, the feature scheme, and…
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Google Shipped a Search Console for AI Answers — Here’s What It Measures (and What It Still Can’t)
Google’s Generative AI performance report in Search Console went global to all sites on August 31, 2026, alongside a new toggle to block your content from AI features. It’s the first real “AI answer analytics” from a major engine — and it forces us to update a claim we’ve made for months. But it measures…
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AI Is Buying Its Sources. Does a Licensing Deal Decide Who Gets Cited?
In 2026, AI companies are licensing data at scale — Yelp put 330M reviews inside ChatGPT, OpenAI signed ~two dozen publisher deals (News Corp, AP, Axel Springer, FT), and Google is offering UK publishers two-year packages. The hot take: a licensing deal is the new ranking factor. The data says otherwise. A July 2026 study…
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The EU Just Called ChatGPT a Search Engine. Here’s What It Actually Means for GEO
On August 31, 2026, the European Commission designated ChatGPT a Very Large Online Search Engine under the Digital Services Act — the first AI chatbot regulated as a search engine, on the strength of its web-search function. It’s a genuine milestone: a regulator now agrees that AI answers are a search surface. But it is…
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ChatGPT Ads Just Hit a $1B Run Rate — But You Still Can’t Buy a Citation
OpenAI says ChatGPT Ads has reached a $1 billion annualized run rate and is now buyable in 40+ countries. That’s a real structural shift in the biggest AI answer engine — but it doesn’t change the one thing GEO actually chases. OpenAI’s own design keeps ads in a labeled “Sponsored” block below the answer, and…
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Gemini-Powered Siri Is a New AI Answer Surface — With Zero Citation Reporting
Apple’s rebuilt, Gemini-powered Siri ships with iOS 27 this month, and it reads the web to answer questions right inside Spotlight — a brand-new AI answer surface on hundreds of millions of devices. Two things make it different for GEO: Apple hasn’t shipped any measurement surface (no Search Console equivalent, no citation report, no referrer),…
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Verdict: The Rank-to-AI-Citation Decoupling Passed Our Blind Test — 34% Blended Overlap, a 40-Point Engine Spread, and Why “Under 20%” Is a ChatGPT Number, Not a Law
On Tuesday we locked five overlap bands before collecting a single query. This week we ran 8 buyer-intent “best X” searches across Google AI Mode, Perplexity, and ChatGPT and scored the citations blind against Google’s top-10 organic. The verdict: the rank-decoupled thesis passes on both load-bearing criteria — blended overlap 34.4% (ceiling was ≤50%) and…
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Brand Mentions Beat Backlinks for AI Citations — What the 2026 Studies Actually Show
Three large 2026 studies now agree: brand mentions and brand demand — not backlinks — are the strongest correlate of getting cited in AI answers. Ahrefs’ 75,000-brand study puts branded web mentions at r=0.664 versus 0.218 for backlinks; ConvertMate’s 80-million-citation study found branded search volume the single strongest variable. Here’s what the data really says,…
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Google Is Putting Ads Inside AI Answers — What “Highlighted Answers” Mean for GEO
Google’s new Gemini-powered ad formats — Conversational Discovery ads, Highlighted Answers, and AI-powered Shopping ads — are being tested inside AI Mode responses right now, including ads that appear on the AI’s own recommendation list. That’s the exact surface GEO works to earn into. But paid placement and organic citation are two separate systems: buying…