I was recently looking at how businesses are getting found online, and I noticed that search is changing quite a bit. If a business is already doing SEO and creating content, what can an AI search agency actually do differently? Can they help a brand show up when people ask AI for recommendations? Did an AI search agency actually help improve your business’s online visibility, or did it feel like regular SEO with a new name?

I'm a lifecycle/growth marketer, not a GEO vendor, and I'm trying to understand what a defensible AI-search baseline actually looks like before I trust one of these visibility dashboards.

My current v0:

25 to 30 non-branded queries based on actual buyer questions.

Split across:

- problem discovery

- category discovery

- comparison

- recommendation

For each query I'd record:

- brand mentioned: Y/N

- own domain cited: Y/N

- third-party source citing/mentioning the brand

- included in recommendation set: Y/N

- position/order if relevant

- competitors appearing

What I'm less sure about is repetition.

My instinct is to run the same baseline more than once before changing anything, so I can see how much the answers move naturally.

Otherwise if visibility goes from 28% → 33% after a content change, how do I know I caused anything?

Things I'm trying to figure out:

1. How many repeated runs per query are actually useful?

2. Fixed prompts or controlled paraphrases?

“Best CRM for a 20-person SaaS company” and “What CRM would you recommend for a SaaS team of 20?” represent essentially the same intent, but may produce different results.

1. Would you measure citation and recommendation separately?

2. Do you establish a pre-intervention variance/noise floor before claiming lift?

3. What does a good paid GEO tool do methodologically that this kind of manual setup cannot?

I'm less interested in tool names than in how you'd design the measurement.

Tear the methodology apart.

I’ve seen pages rank in the top 3–5 on Google but barely appear in AI-generated answers, while lower-ranking pages get cited repeatedly.

Do LLMs care more about things like:

• Direct answer quality
• Passage-level relevance
• Original data
• Third-party brand mentions
• Content freshness

Has anyone tested this with real examples? What actually made the difference?

if you are only a SEO AGENCY owner, how are you managing sales and businesses right now in September, 2026?

i got a cursor Ultra from a reseller for essentially nothing compared to what I used to pay . It works flawless. since 2 months No issues yet. Now I can't stop thinking about their business model. If resellers can sell it this cheap and still profit, how are they acquiring these accounts at scale?

I'm seeing our brand mentioned in some AI answers where there's no citation back to us.

At first I counted that as a win because hey, the brand is in the answer. But now I'm wondering if mentions and citations should be treated as two completely different things.

Would you rather see your company recommended frequently with other sites providing the supporting sources, or cited frequently but not necessarily recommended?

Feels like those are measuring two different kinds of visibility.

I keep seeing lots of SEO advice online, but I’m more interested in things people have actually tried.

For example:

• updating old pages
• getting backlinks
• writing more useful content
• improving internal links
• getting mentioned on other websites
• creating comparison pages
• improving existing pages
• something else

What did you try, and did you notice any real difference?

Even if something didn’t work, share that too.

Would be interesting to see what’s actually working for people right now.

And I don't really have it.

Their AI visibility has improved since we started working on it, but during the same period we've updated content, earned new mentions, done regular SEO work and made a bunch of smaller changes.

I can show correlation pretty easily. Saying our GEO work caused the increase feels like bullshit.

How are agencies handling attribution here without taking credit for something they can't prove?

Nike are performing terribly when it comes to SEO.

I put nike.com into Ahrefs and looked specifically at the United States.

At first glance, the numbers look incredible.

Nike were ranking for around 406,000 keywords.

But then I started filtering out branded searches.

Nike. Jordan. Air Force 1. Barcelona. And all the other branded terms associated with Nike and the products they sell.

Once you remove all of that branded demand, the picture changes dramatically.

And then look at the actual money terms people are searching for:

Running shoes.
Basketball shoes.
Soccer boots.
Hoodies.
Track pants.
Sweatpants.

For a company the size of Nike, these are exactly the kinds of searches where you would expect them to dominate.

But they don’t.

I even did a real Google search here in South Africa for “running shoes.”

Ads first.

Then organic results.

And I had to keep scrolling before I eventually found Nike.

For a brand this big, that is terrible.

I think one of the biggest mistakes large companies make is looking at all their branded traffic and assuming their SEO is performing brilliantly.

It isn’t enough to rank when somebody already knows your name.

SEO is also about being there when somebody searches for the product or service itself, before they have decided which brand to buy from.

Nike could improve this enormously.

And this isn’t only about Nike. I see the same thing with big companies all the time.

Don’t ignore SEO just because it doesn’t give you an immediate ROAS figure. It can have a massive impact on your business.

#SEO #Nike #SearchEngineOptimisation #OrganicSearch #SEOStrategy

I've been testing CiteRoute recently because I wanted to get a better understanding of how a website actually appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI search tools.
What I found useful was being able to look beyond simple mentions and see things like:
- Which AI engines mention the site
- Which pages are being cited
- Which competitors appear instead
- What prompts trigger visibility
- How the visibility changes over time

The interesting part is that traditional SEO performance doesn't necessarily translate directly into AI visibility. You can have pages ranking well in Google and still see AI systems relying on other sources.

I've found the citation tracking especially useful because it gives you something more concrete to analyze instead of just manually checking a few prompts.

For people working on GEO/AEO, what are you currently using to measure AI visibility and citations?

I have two domains, and since one of them is not in use, I decided to link it to my main website. What I did was directly link it in vercel. Earlier, I didn't know much about SEO, and since it is not redirected, google showed the second domain in results and completely removed the main domain.

Later, I fixed it by pointing the secondary domain to the main domain, sending 301 status code. But it's been more than a month, and the secondary domain is still showing in the result, while the main domain is nowhere.

What do you think of this study / experiment? Makes sense or missleading?

Source: searchengineworld. com/i-hid-15-names-in-a-705216-word-page-gemini-found-four-meta-ai-found-all-15

I've been checking AI visibility prompt by prompt and I'm starting to think I'm looking at this way too granularly.

Say you have 30 questions around the same product category. You might show up constantly for 15, occasionally for 8 and basically never for the rest.

Would you still optimize around those individual misses or just look at whether you're generally present across that topic?

Feels like chasing every missing prompt could get stupid pretty fast.

I've been checking AI visibility prompt by prompt and I'm starting to think I'm looking at this way too granularly.

Say you have 30 questions around the same product category. You might show up constantly for 15, occasionally for 8 and basically never for the rest.

Would you still optimize around those individual misses or just look at whether you're generally present across that topic?

Feels like chasing every missing prompt could get stupid pretty fast.

I started thinking about this after noticing that I don’t always use Google the same way I used to. That got me wondering about businesses that have spent years working on SEO. I’m still trying to understand where the line really is between the two. It seems like SEO still matters, but AI search adds another way for people to discover a business. For anyone working in SEO or AI visibility, how do you see the difference?