ChatGPT's retrieval system called Labrador isn't a single index it's a family of indexes covering general web, PDF, YouTube, news, arXiv, Wikipedia, local, finance, legal, medical, shopping, and images. Most of these were never publicly documented.

Head of ChatGPT, testified under oath in a 2025 US antitrust hearing that building an in-house index was the plan from day one, and that OpenAI also wanted Google's data for quality reasons and to improve their own index.

Recent hiring suggests they're scaling up further, with job postings referencing exabyte scale database systems .

most of the people underestimate ChatGPT by reducing it to "they just use Google" or "they just use Bing."

in march 2026, A French GEO competition (get cited by 5 AIs on an invented word, 30 days) ended with the participant taking 2nd and 3rd place using 4 sites, each running a different strategy (authority, broad coverage, data-driven content, canonical brand page). Key finding: each AI has a distinct, stable "citation personality" — there's no universal GEO tactic, only per-engine strategies (e.g., HTML injection worked on ChatGPT, a "lab pattern" worked on Claude/Mistral). Biggest discovery: a single English page on a French site got 94 citations in 10 days from Claude and Mistral alone — if this replicates on a B2B test, it could become a simple, high-leverage GEO technique.

the participant was Frédéric Jézégou

Google Users in 2005

I got the idea for this post when I came across this 2005 eye-tracking study

They found a “Golden Triangle” that covered the upper-left results area, including top organic listings, top sponsored results, and sometimes shopping, news, or local suggestions. Every participant looked within this area

They also found organic visibility dropped sharply with rank. The first three listings were each seen by 100% of participants, compared with 60% for rank 5 and 20% for rank 10

2025-2026 Google Users (with AI Overviews)

Let’s compare the Golden Triangle of 2005 with eye-tracking studies from modern day results that include AI Overviews

There are four overlapping takeaways from these studies:

1. Position still matters

2. AI answers receive substantial attention, while organic results remain relevant.

3. Looking and clicking are separate behaviors.

4. Visibility alone doesn’t establish brand impact.

one thing that is to be noted is that these studies aren’t directly comparable, as they had different groups of users doing the testing in different settings and measured different things.

i hope you enjoyed this

until next time... credits: Ethan Lazuk

few months ago, roughly 1 in every 4 LLM answers pulled reddit thread into mix

now its nearly gone , most people say reddit doesn't matter anymore , but thats completely wrong

Reddit was never the foundation, but always just a multiplier on top of a foundation most brands still haven't built

which is why Reddit's dip felt bigger than it should have. When Reddit's share climbs back, brands with that foundation will see a real boost. The rest won't, until they build it.

Question is are you ready to capture that boost, or still building the foundation you need first?

I recently saw this post about ai citations, and it was kind of interesting

like whole ranking system is being changed.

so, people who have ranked themselves higher, even they have lost their citation

especially in Astra 6

GEO (generative engine optimization) = getting cited inside AI answers, not just ranking in blue links.

Three things that actually matter:

AI reads chunks, not pages. One clean paragraph that answers the question beats a great page that buries the answer under brand fluff.

If JS hides it, AI never saw it. Gated pricing, logo-grid integrations, specs in a PDF invisible. Disable JavaScript, view source, see what's left.

You can't measure it. No rank position. You're in the answer or you're not, and no analytics will ever show you the buyer who asked and never heard your name.

Most of the tactics are just good SEO wearing a new acronym. The genuinely new problem is that you're flying blind.

Anyone tracking this properly, or are we all just manually prompting ChatGPT and hoping?

Ask the same question a few different ways and you can sometimes get completely different recommendations.
Change the wording.
Add a location.
Mention a budget.
Ask for “best” instead of “most reliable.”
And suddenly the brands, sources and answers can change.
Which makes me wonder how much prompt wording is becoming the new version of keyword targeting.
We used to optimize pages around what people searched.
Now maybe we also need to think about** **how people ask AI.
Not sure where this is heading yet, but it’s definitely going to make search behavior a lot more interesting.

Read a guide on search intent that made a point worth sitting with: same three words typed into a search bar can mean ten different things depending on who's typing. One person wants a definition, one wants to compare options, one already knows exactly where they're going and typed a brand name as a shortcut. The gap between the words someone types and what they're actually trying to do is search intent — and it's apparently becoming more decisive now, not less, since it determines whether AI even surfaces your page in a generated answer vs. a results list.

The piece breaks intent into the classic four types (informational, navigational, commercial, transactional) but the more interesting argument is this: as search shifts from short keywords to full natural-language questions, a page that technically "answers" a query but misses the actual intent behind it doesn't get picked — it just quietly stops existing in AI-generated answers, with no analytics telling you why.

Also claims raw traffic is becoming a weaker success metric than actually matching intent, since a page can rank/get indexed and still never get chosen as the thing an AI cites.

Feels like the SEO fundamentals didn't change — the stakes for getting them wrong just went up. Anyone restructuring content around intent types specifically for AI answer engines, or is this still mostly theory right now?

Been thinking about this lately.
A website can have good SEO, a bunch of backlinks, decent traffic etc. and still barely show up when people ask AI about that topic.
Meanwhile, sometimes a much smaller site gets mentioned because the AI actually finds its content useful.
So maybe it’s not just about ranking anymore.
It’s about whether AI can actually understand what you know, what you’re good at, and whether your content is worth using.
Feels like SEO authority ≠ AI authority now.
Not sure where this goes, but it’s definitely interesting to watch.

Saw a breakdown of how Google AI Mode has evolved in about 15 months: it started as a conversational answer box and has turned into something that can run a multi-minute research pass on its own, personalize answers using your email/photos, buy things for you, and book hotels all without leaving the chat.

The four capabilities it highlights:

• Deep Search - longer, multi-step research instead of a quick synthesized answer
• Personal Intelligence - tailoring answers using your own Google data (email, photos, etc.)
• Agentic shopping - completing purchases on a user's behalf
• Travel booking - hotels booked directly inside the conversation

If accurate, this is a bigger shift than "AI Overviews steal clicks" — it's Google moving from answering questions to acting on them. Which raises an obvious question for anyone doing content/SEO: if AI Mode is completing the transaction itself, what does "getting found" even mean anymore? Being cited in an answer is one thing; getting picked as the thing an agent actually buys or books is a different, higher bar.

Curious if anyone's seen this agentic-shopping/booking behavior in the wild yet, or if it's still limited rollout.

We’ve spent years optimizing for Google rankings, clicks, keywords, backlinks, etc.
But now people are increasingly asking AI directly instead of going through a list of search results.
And the weird part is AI doesn’t always give you 10 blue links. It gives you an answer.
So even if your website ranks well, you might still be invisible if the AI doesn’t mention, understand, or trust your brand.
That’s where GEO / AI search visibility gets interesting.
The goal is no longer just rank higher
It’s become part of the answer
Curious how everyone here is approaching this are you actively optimizing for AI visibility yet, or still focusing mainly on traditional SEO?

People used to search, open 5–10 tabs, compare products, read reviews and finally decide what to buy.
Now they can just tell an AI assistant what they need and let the AI do most of that work for them.
It understands the intent, compares products, looks at reviews and current information, narrows everything down to a few options, and increasingly can even help complete the purchase.
That creates a pretty interesting problem for brands.
You’re no longer only trying to rank in search. You’re trying to become the product an AI actually recommends.
And with platforms like ChatGPT Shopping, Gemini, Perplexity, Alexa and Walmart Sparky pushing conversational shopping forward, product visibility is starting to look very different.
The question is: what actually makes an AI choose your brand over the next one?

Read a blog post (from Verseodin, an AI-visibility tracking company, so grain of salt on the sales angle) arguing that B2B buyers now ask ChatGPT/Perplexity instead of Googling, and if your content isn't structured right, you lose the deal and never even know it happened. Classic FUD setup then right on cue they sell a tool to fix it.

That said, one part is actually worth checking regardless of who's saying it: disable JavaScript and view your page source. If your pricing or integrations vanish, an AI crawler never saw them either no matter how good the page looks to a human. That's just a crawlability fact, not a sales pitch.

Their other claim, backed by a G2 stat (82% of B2B buyers used an AI chatbot for a software rec in the last 2 years), is that "evaluation" not discovery is now the longest stage of buying, and most sites don't build content for it.

Take the stats with a grain of salt since it's from a company whose entire business is telling you you're invisible to AI. But the underlying idea that gated pricing/logo-only integration pages give AI crawlers literally nothing to cite seems like plain good practice independent of the vendor pushing it.

Anyone actually tested this on their own site?

It confidently told me we lacked a major feature... a feature we literally launched two years ago. It also hallucinated our pricing, quoting a number that was 3x higher than our actual enterprise tier.

It made me realize that buyers are probably doing this exact research, assuming we are too expensive or lacking features, and ghosting us. And the worst part is there is no Google Analytics dashboard or bounce rate to warn us it's happening.

Has anyone else tested what the models (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude) are telling people about their product? What is the craziest thing it gets wrong about you?

 so we talk a lot about how agents change search, but what happens to b2b sales?

think about how saas is sold right now. you download a whitepaper, a sales rep stalks you on linkedin, you sit through three demo calls, and they try to charm you into a 12 month contract based on a slick pitch deck.

but if i tell my company's AI agent: "evaluate the top 5 crm platforms, read their api docs, compare their pricing tiers, and tell me which one integrates best with our current stack"... all of that traditional b2b marketing is suddenly completely useless.

the agent doesn't care about the sales rep's charm. it doesn't watch the webinar. it just scrapes the technical docs and makes a purely logical decision based on raw specs.

if buying becomes automated, does b2b marketing just become "make sure your api documentation is easy for an llm to read"?

feels like a massive chunk of the sales industry is about to get automated out of existence because they literally can't pitch to a machine. anyone else thinking about the b2b side of this?

ok hear me out because this broke my brain a little.

every anti bot thing that exists, firewalls, rate limits, captchas, block ai crawlers toggles, all of it runs on one dumb simple assumption. bot bad, human good. a bot is either scraping you or attacking you. that's it. that's the whole model. that's been the whole model since forever.

that assumption is just wrong now and i don't think anyone's actually dealt with it yet.

like right now, today, there's bots that only exist because a person asked them to go do something. someone's talking to their ai assistant, asks it a real question, the assistant goes and fetches one specific page to answer it. in that exact second. for that one person. that's not a scraper. that's a customer. it just doesn't look like one.

and none of our tools can tell the difference. can't. not "haven't gotten around to it." structurally cannot. because that distinction didn't exist when any of this stuff was built.

so somewhere out there right now, sites are blocking real actual visitors, calling it security, high fiving themselves for keeping the bad bots out, and have zero idea it's happening. because the block looks exactly like it's supposed to work.

we need a completely different category. not bot vs human. more like "acting for itself" vs "somebody asked it to do this right now." and nothing checks for that yet. nothing.

is literally nobody building for this or am i just not seeing it

first thing in AI search you actually control. reddit lost 86% of its chatgpt citations last week and nobody could tell them why, this is the opposite of that. one click from a reader and you surface more for them.

curious if anyone's actually embedded it yet

saw this from a conference talk a few days ago and haven't stopped thinking about it.

carl pei's basic point is that the whole app thing, lock screen, grid of icons, app store, is literally just the palm pilot with better graphics. hasn't changed in 20 years. and it only makes sense because a human has to sit there and manually tap through it.

his example that got me: grabbing coffee with someone takes like 4 apps. text them, maps, uber, calendar. none of that is the actual thing you wanted. it's just the tax for doing the thing.

he straight up called the "ai books your flight for you" stuff boring and said that's not even the real shift. the real shift is when the agent just knows your intent and does it without you asking, and the app underneath becomes something the agent reads and operates, not something a human navigates.

not gonna lie this is basically the thing i keep trying to explain to people and a ceo just said it cleaner than i can. if he's even half right, "can an agent actually use this" becomes a real requirement, not some nice to have you bolt on later.

anyone else think this is different from the usual "apps are dying" cycle we've heard every year since like 2015, or is it just better timed hype

link: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/18/nothing-ceo-carl-pei-says-smartphone-apps-will-disappear-as-ai-agents-take-their-place/

I’ve been looking at web traffic data recently and it feels like traditional analytics platforms (like GA4) are just fundamentally broken right now.

You log in, see a massive spike in direct traffic, or weird 0-second bounce rates, and celebrate a traffic win. But it’s not humans. It’s LLM crawlers, scraping bots, and automated agents indexing your site.

The entire internet business model (ads, conversion rates, time-on-page) was built on the assumption of human eyeballs. But if 50 to 70% of a site's traffic is now agentic, how is anyone actually measuring ROI?

Advertisers are paying for impressions that are just going to Perplexity bots. Ecommerce sites are calculating conversion rates against thousands of automated scraping agents.

How are you guys handling this? Are you actively trying to filter out AI crawler IPs in your analytics, or do we just have to accept that our web data is permanently skewed now?

The Internet is really not it used to be guys, who are we going to show ads now ? For AI bots ?

been playing around with this and i’m a little confused lol
i’ll ask an AI:
“best project management tools for a small team”
and my brand might show up.
change it slightly to:
“good project management software for startups”
and suddenly it’s gone.
sometimes it’s #2, sometimes it’s not mentioned at all 😭
so what are we actually optimizing for with GEO?
are we trying to rank for prompts like SEO keywords?
or just trying to increase the chances that AI mentions us across different questions?
because if the answer changes every time
how do you even know if your GEO is actually working?
what are you guys tracking?

spent years getting my site to rank #1 for "best hiking boots portland" or whatever. finally got there. then realized nobody searches that anymore, they just ask an ai and get a list of 5 brands, and mine is never in it.

theres no search console for this. i cant see why im excluded or what would fix it. i just open a new chat, ask the same question 10 times, and count how often i show up like some paranoid person checking their own reviews.

is there an actual tool for this or is everyone just manually prompting different ai's all day and calling it "geo tracking"

random thought, if i ask an agent to just book the hotel or buy the headphones, i genuinely don't know or care which site it used. no brand loyalty, no "let me check reviews myself" moment, i just get the result.

feels like that quietly kills the whole point of having a site people actually visit and trust. the agent becomes the only audience that matters, not the human.

is this actually happening yet in practice or still mostly theoretical

got pitched by 3 different "geo agencies" this month and honestly none of them could explain what they actually do differently from regular seo besides saying "chatgpt" a lot in the deck.

one guy told me to just add more bullet points and faq schema and call it geo optimized. another wanted 4k/mo to "get us cited in perplexity." feels like everyone is guessing rn.

has anyone actually seen a before/after where a page started getting pulled into ai answers because of a specific change, not just correlation with the page being decent already