SEO Strategy Archives SEO Strategy

Aug 15 2025

AI-Powered Search: Adapting Your SEO Strategy via @sejournal, @wburton27

Using outdated and traditional SEO tactics centered around keywords and backlinks is not moving the needle anymore, as Google shifts toward AI-driven answers.

Organic clicks are going down as a result of Google AI Overviews and the rise of zero-click searches, where users get answers directly on Google’s search results page without clicking through to any websites.

SEO is not dead; it just evolved. To succeed in this new era, brands and marketers need to embrace structured, intent-driven content, enhancing trustworthiness, and aligning more closely with brand and user experience strategies.

But, how do you do this? Let’s explore.

Omnichannel Strategy

In today’s search landscape, you need to be everywhere where your audience is, including platforms like Reddit, Quora, TikTok, YouTube, and anywhere else relevant.

If your brand is not present on those discovery channels, you need to get on them as soon as possible.

User behavior has changed, and people are using different search engines and channels to find information, products, reviews, and more.

For example:

Reddit for the opinions of other users who have used a similar product or service.
TikTok and YouTube for tutorials and product reviews.
Instagram for discovery.
Amazon and Pinterest for product reviews and inspiration.

If your marketing strategy focuses only on Google, you’re ignoring a large portion of your target audience who are looking for your content, which is basically invisible to them.

Optimize For AI Overviews

To rank for AIO, brands and marketers must focus on creating high-quality, authoritative content that directly answers user questions, is well-structured, and easy for AI to understand.

Tactic	Overview	Best Practices
Create high-quality conversational content.	Conduct research and see what queries show for AIOs. Create original and unique content that meets user intent and answers users’ questions.	Update and modify existing content for AI Overviews by answering questions, making it conversational, and using quotes, testimonials, and updated headings.
Use plain headings and short paragraphs.	This helps improve content readability for both users and AI.	Use clear headings, concise paragraphs, and natural language to enhance AI understanding.
Mark up content with structured data.	This helps AI and traditional search engines understand your content better.	Use schema markup (e.g., FAQ Page, HowTo, Product).
Let AI bots in.	This will help your content get crawled and cited by AI systems.	Use llm.txt and check your robots.txt file to allow bots like OpenAI’s GPTBot and Google AI. Make sure they are not blocked.
Earn mentions on trustworthy sites.	This will help improve your authority and increase your brand visibility.	Create high-quality content with unique information, contribute guest posts, stay active on social media, appear on podcasts, use internal linking, and implement PR strategies.
Keep content fresh.	AI chatbots love up-to-date information.	Regularly update content with new data, statistics, and unique and valuable information for end-users.
Track brand mentions.	Brands that are mentioned frequently across various platforms (i.e., PR, blogs, social media, news coverage, YouTube forums like Reddit and Quora, and authoritative sites) tend to be mentioned by AI.	Use tools like Google Search Console, Brand24, and Mention.com to monitor online conversations.

Focus On Branded Searches

Branded searches play a vital role in shaping brand perception, driving engagement, and ensuring your brand’s visibility and authority for large language models (LLMs).

LLMs do not work like traditional search engines. They look at user intent, context, and conversational relevance.

To elevate your brand presence:

Your information must be accurate and consistent across all platforms.
Your content should be useful and helpful to your target audience.
It should showcase expertise through thought leadership, offering original, unique, and data-backed insights quoted across authoritative sites and forums.
Your brand needs a strong reputation.

Adapt your approach by tracking brand mentions using tools like Brand24 and Semrush, and analyzing LLM-driven traffic via Google Analytics 4, while also testing brand visibility across different platforms and devices.

Focus On User Intent And Topic Clusters

We have moved from keywords to relevance.

Optimize for entire topics and users’ needs by creating in-depth content that covers all aspects of a subject and anticipates users’ questions.

Use long-tail keywords and natural language to cover users’ intent. Tools like MarketMuse by Siteimprove do a wonderful job at this.

AI-Powered Content Creation And Optimization

Google is not against AI-generated content. Google does not like low-quality AI content.

Before LLMs came on the stage, content creation often involved manual writing and optimization that took a long time to draft a high-quality article focusing on E-E-A-T (or expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness).

Now, you can automate content briefs, generate outlines, create content drafts, edit them, and make them your own. A lot of AI tools and platforms incorporate ChatGPT into their services and add in so-called proprietary algorithms on top of it.

With AI, you can create content at a much faster pace and optimize existing content easier than before, but I don’t recommend it for content creation.

Here’s why.

There is a lot of content out there that repeats and rinses what everyone else does. Your content must be different and educate your audience, convince them that you’re the subject matter expert on a topic, and gain trust and solve their problems.

This kind of content is best written by humans with AI assistance to enhance quality, make it more engaging, and encourage people to share it.

Wrapping Up

SEO is changing fast into a conversational experience powered by AI.

The tactics and strategies that once worked won’t cut it anymore in today’s AI-powered results.

But, this is not the end of SEO. Rather, it’s an SEO evolution as Google continues its mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

To win in this new era, brands and marketers must shift from chasing rankings to building visibility, trust, and relevance across multiple platforms – whether that’s on Google, TikTok, Reddit, or Quora.

It’s also important to deliver content that’s useful and up-to-date, solving users’ problems and helping them during their journey.

AI is here to assist, not replace. AI can handle the heavy lifting, but don’t hand over the steering wheel.

Brands that will thrive have a human touch in providing value, showing expertise, and genuinely connecting with their audience.

Don’t forget who you’re really creating content for, which is people.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Collagery/Shutterstock

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Aug 13 2025

Earn 1,000+ Links & Boost Your SEO Visibility [Webinar] via @sejournal, @lorenbaker

Build the Authority You Need for AI-Driven Visibility

Struggling to get backlinks, even when your content is solid?

You’re not alone. With Google’s AI Overviews and generative search dominating the results, traditional link-building tactics just don’t cut it anymore.

It’s time to earn the trust that boosts your brand’s visibility across Google, ChatGPT, and AI search engines.

Join Kevin Rowe, Founder & Head of Digital PR Strategy at PureLinq, on August 27, 2025, for an exclusive webinar. Learn the exact strategies Kevin’s team used to earn 1,000+ links and how you can replicate them without needing a massive budget or PR team.

What You’ll Learn:

How to identify media trends where your expertise is in demand.
The step-by-step process to create studies that can earn links on autopilot.
How to craft a story angle journalists will want to share.

Why This Webinar is Essential:

Earned links and citations are now key to staying visible in AI search results. This session will provide you with a proven, actionable playbook for boosting your SEO visibility and building the authority you need to succeed in this new era.

Register today to get the playbook for link-building success. Can’t attend live? Don’t worry, sign up anyway, and we’ll send you the full recording.

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Aug 7 2025

How To Stay Visible in AI Search [Webinar] via @sejournal, @lorenbaker

AI search is here. Are you ready for the new rules?

The SEO game has changed. Traditional strategies are no longer enough, and some brands are getting lost in the shift to AI-powered search results.

Join Wayne Cichanski on August 20, 2025 for an exclusive webinar sponsored by iQuanti. Learn how to adapt your SEO strategy and site architecture for AI-driven queries and remain competitive in this new search era.

In this session, you’ll discover:

Why user experience, schema, and site architecture are now just as important as keywords
Practical steps to remain visible and competitive in evolving search results
How to position your brand for discovery in AI-driven queries, not just rankings

Why this session is essential:

With generative AI reshaping search results across platforms like Google, Bing, and ChatGPT, it is crucial to rethink how your content is structured and how people interact with your brand in AI search. Do not get left behind. Optimize for AI-driven search now.

Register today for actionable insights and a roadmap to success in the AI search era. If you cannot attend live, do not worry. Sign up anyway and we will send you the full recording.

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Aug 6 2025

The Great Reversal: Why Agencies Are Replacing PPC With Predictable SEO via @sejournal, @mktbrew

This post was sponsored by Market Brew. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

What if your client’s PPC budget could fund long-term organic growth instead?

Why do organic results dominate user clicks, but get sidelined in budget discussions?

Organic Drives 5x More Traffic Than PPC. Can We Prove It?

The Short Answer: Yes!

Over the past decade, digital marketers have witnessed a dramatic shift in how search budgets are allocated.

In the past decade, companies were funding SEO teams alongside PPC teams. However, a shift towards PPC-first has dominated the inbound marketing space.

Where Have SEO Budgets Gone?

Today, more than $150 billion is spent annually on paid search in the United States alone, while only $50 billion is invested in SEO.

That’s a 3-to-1 ratio, even though 90% of search clicks go to organic results, and only 10% to ads.

It’s not because paid search is more effective. Paid search is just easier to measure.

But that’s changing with the return of attribution within predictive SEO.

What Is Attribution?

Attribution in marketing is the process of identifying which touchpoints or channels contributed to a conversion or sale.

It helps us understand the customer journey so we can allocate budget more effectively and optimize campaigns for higher ROI.

As Google’s algorithms evolved, the cause-and-effect between SEO efforts and business outcomes became harder to prove.

Ranking fluctuations seemed random. Timelines stretched.

Clients became impatient.

Trackable Digital Marketing Has Destroyed SEO

With Google Ads, every dollar has a direct, reportable outcome:

Impressions.
Clicks.
Conversions.

SEO, by contrast, has long been:

A black box.

As a result, agencies and the clients that hire them followed the money, even when SEO’s results were higher.

PPC’s Direct Attribution Makes PPC Look More Important, But SEO Still Dominates

Hard facts:

SEO drives 5x more traffic than PPC.
Companies pay 3x more on PPC than SEO.

Image created by MarketBrew, August 2025

You Can Now Trace ROI Back To SEO

As a result, many SEO professionals and agencies want a way back to organic. Now, there is one, and it’s powered by attribution.

Attribution Is the Key to Measurable SEO Performance

Instead of sitting on the edge of the search engine’s black box, guessing what might happen, we can now go inside the SEO black box, to simulate how the algorithms behave, factor by factor, and observe exactly how rankings react to each change.

This is SEO with attribution.

Image created by MarketBrew, August 2025

With this model in place, you are no longer stuck saying “trust us.”

You can say, “Here’s what we changed. Here’s how rankings moved. Here’s the value of that movement.” Whether the change was a new internal link structure or a content improvement, it’s now visible, measurable, and attributable.

For the first time, SEO teams have a way to communicate performance in terms executives understand: cause, effect, and value.

This transparency is changing the way agencies operate. It turns SEO into a predictable system, not a gamble. And it arms client-facing teams with the evidence they need to justify the budget, or win it back.

How Agencies Are Replacing PPC With Measurable Organic SEO

For agencies, attribution opens the door to something much bigger than better reporting; it enables a completely new kind of offering: performance-based SEO.

Traditionally, SEO services have been sold as retainers or hourly engagements. Clients pay for effort, not outcomes. With attribution, agencies can now flip that model and say: You only pay when results happen.

Enter Market Brew’s AdShifted feature to model this value and success as shown here:

: Screenshot from a video by MarketBrew, August 2025

The AdShift tool starts by entering a keyword to discover up to 4* competitive URLs for the Keyword’s Top Clustered Similarities. (*including your own website plus 4 top-ranking competitors)

: Screenshot of PPC vs. MarketBrew comparison dashboard by Marketbrew, August 2025

AdShift averages CPC and search volume across all keywords and URLs, giving you a reliable market-wide estimate and details for your brand towards a monthly PPC investment to rank #1.

: Screenshot of a dashboard by Marketbrew, August 2025

AdShift then calculates YOUR percentage of replacement for PPC to fund SEO.

This allows you to model your own Performance Plan with variable discounts available to the Market Brew license fees with an always less than 50% of PPC Fee for clicks replaced by new SEO traffic.

: Screenshot of a dashboard by Marketbrew, August 2025

AdShift simulates a PPC replacement plan option selected based on its keywords footprint to instantly see savings from the associated Performance Plans.

That’s the heart of the PPC replacement plan: a strategy you can use to gradually shift a clients’ paid search budgets into measurable performance-based SEO.

What Is A PPC Replacement Plan? Trackable SEO.

A PPC replacement plan is a strategy in which agencies gradually shift their clients’ paid search budgets into organic investments, with measurable outcomes and shared performance incentives.

Here’s how it works:

Benchmark Paid Spend: Identify the current Google Ads budget, i.e., $10,000 per month or $120,000 per year.
Forecast Organic Value: Use search engine modeling to predict the lift in organic traffic from specific SEO tasks.
Execute & Attribute: Complete tasks and monitor real-time changes in rankings and traffic.
Charge on Impact: Instead of billing for time, bill for results, often at a fraction of the client’s former ad spend.

This is not about replacing all paid spend.

Branded queries and some high-value targets may remain in PPC. But for the large, expensive middle of the keyword funnel, agencies can now offer a smarter path: predictable, attributable organic results, at a lower cost-per-click, with better margins.

And most importantly, instead of lining Google’s pockets with PPC revenue, your investments begin to fuel both organic and LLM searches!

Real-World Proof That SEO Attribution Works

Agencies exploring this new attribution-powered model aren’t just intrigued … they’re energized. For many, it’s the first time in years that SEO feels like a strategic growth engine, not just a checklist of deliverables.

“We’ve pitched performance SEO to three clients this month alone,” said one digital strategy lead. “The ability to tie ranking improvements to specific tasks changed the entire conversation.”

– Sean Myers, CEO, ThreeTech

Another partner shared,

“Instead of walking into meetings looking to justify an SEO retainer, we enter with a blueprint representing a SEO/GEO/AEO Search Engine’s ‘digital twin’ with the AI-driven tasks that show exactly what needs to be changed and the rankings it produces. Clients don’t question the value … they ask what’s next.”

– Stephen Heitz, Chief Innovation Officer, LAVIDGE

Several agencies report that new business wins are increasing simply because they offer something different. While competitors stick to vague SEO promises or expensive PPC management, partners leveraging attribution offer clarity, accountability, and control.

And when the client sees that they’re paying less and getting more, it’s not a hard sell, it’s a long-term relationship.

A Smarter, More Profitable Model for Agencies and SEOs

The traditional agency model in search has become a maze of expectations.

Managing paid search may deliver short-term wins, but it comes to a bidding war with only those with the biggest budgets winning. SEO, meanwhile, has often felt like a thankless task … necessary but underappreciated, valuable but difficult to prove.

Attribution changes that.

For agencies, this is a path back to profitability and positioning. With attribution, you’re not just selling effort … you’re selling outcomes. And because the work is modeled and measured in advance, you can confidently offer performance plans that are both client-friendly and agency-profitable.

For SEOs, this is about getting the credit they deserve. Attribution allows practitioners to demonstrate their impact in concrete terms. Rankings don’t just move, … they move because of you. Traffic increases aren’t vague, … they’re connected to your specific strategies.

Now, you can show this.

Most importantly, this approach rebuilds trust.

Clients no longer have to guess what’s working. They see it. In dashboards, in forecasts, in side-by-side comparisons of where they were and where they are now. It restores SEO to a place of clarity and control where value is obvious, and investment is earned.

The industry has been waiting for this. And now, it’s here.

From PPC Dependence to Organic Dominance — Now Backed by Data

Search budgets have long been upside down, pouring billions into paid clicks that capture a mere fraction of user attention, while underfunding the organic channel that delivers lasting value.

Why? Because SEO lacked attribution.

That’s no longer the case.

Today, agencies and SEO professionals have the tools to prove what works, forecast what’s next, and get paid for the real value they deliver. It’s a shift that empowers agencies to move beyond bidding-war PPC management and into a lower cost & higher ROAS, performance-based SEO.

This isn’t just a new service mode it’s a rebalancing of power in search.

Organic is back. It’s measurable. It’s profitable. And it’s ready to take center stage again.

The only question is: will you be the agency or brand that leads the shift or watch as others do it first?

Citations

Get Your Predictable SEO Plan

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Market Brew. Used with permission.

In-Post Image: Images by Market Brew. Used with permission.

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Aug 4 2025

How AI Search Should Be Shaping Your CEO’s & CMO’s Strategy [Webinar] via @sejournal, @theshelleywalsh

AI is rapidly changing the rules of SEO. From generative ranking to vector search, the new rules are not only technical but also reshaping how business leaders make decisions.

Join Dan Taylor on August 14, 2025, for an exclusive SEJ Webinar tailored for C-suite executives and senior leaders. In this session, you’ll gain essential insights to understand and communicate SEO performance in the age of AI.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

AI Search Is Impacting Everything. Are You Ready?

AI search is already here, and it’s impacting everything from SEO KPIs to customer journeys. This webinar will give you the tools to lead your teams through the shift with confidence and precision.

Register now for a business-first perspective on AI search innovation. If you can’t attend live, don’t worry. Sign up anyway, and we’ll send you the full recording.

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Jul 30 2025

How To Win In Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) via @sejournal, @maltelandwehr

This post was sponsored by Peec.ai. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

The first step of any good GEO campaign is creating something that LLM-driven answer machines actually want to link out to or reference.

GEO Strategy Components

Think of experiences you wouldn’t reasonably expect to find directly in ChatGPT or similar systems:

Engaging content like a 3D tour of the Louvre or a virtual reality concert.
Live data like prices, flight delays, available hotel rooms, etc. While LLMs can integrate this data via APIs, I see the opportunity to capture some of this traffic for the time being.
Topics that require EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness).

LLMs cannot have first-hand experience. But users want it. LLMs are incentivized to reference sources that provide first-hand experience. That’s just one of the things to keep in mind, but what else?

We need to differentiate between two approaches: influencing foundational models versus influencing LLM answers through grounding. The first is largely out of reach for most creators, while the second offers real opportunities.

Influencing Foundational Models

Foundational models are trained on fixed datasets and can’t learn new information after training. For current models like GPT-4, it is too late – they’ve already been trained.

But this matters for the future: imagine a smart fridge stuck with o4-mini from 2025 that might – hypothetically – favor Coke over Pepsi. That bias could influence purchasing decisions for years!

Optimizing For RAG/Grounding

When LLMs can’t answer from their training data alone, they use retrieval augmented generation (RAG) – pulling in current information to help generate answers. AI Overviews and ChatGPT’s web search work this way.

As SEO professionals, we want three things:

Our content gets selected as a source.
Our content gets quoted most within those sources.
Other selected sources support our desired outcome.

Concrete Steps To Succeed With GEO

Don’t worry, it doesn’t take rocket science to optimize your content and brand mentions for LLMs. Actually, plenty of traditional SEO methods still apply, with a few new SEO tactics you can incorporate into your workflow.

Step 1: Be Crawlable

Sounds simple but it is actually an important first step. If you aim for maximum visibility in LLMs, you need to allow them to crawl your website. There are many different LLM crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic & Co.

Some of them behave so badly that they can trigger scraping and DDoS preventions. If you are automatically blocking aggressive bots, check in with your IT team and find a way to not block LLMs you care about.

If you use a CDN, like Fastly or Cloudflare, make sure LLM crawlers are not blocked by default settings.

Step 2: Continue Gaining Traditional Rankings

The most important GEO tactic is as simple as it sounds. Do traditional SEO. Rank well in Google (for Gemini and AI Overviews), Bing (for ChatGPT and Copilot), Brave (for Claude), and Baidu (for DeepSeek).

Step 3: Target the Query Fanout

The current generation of LLMs actually does a little more than simple RAG. They generate multiple queries. This is called query fanout.

For example, when I recently asked ChatGPT “What is the latest Google patent discussed by SEOs?”, it performed two web searches for “latest Google patent discussed by SEOs patent 2025 SEO forum” and “latest Google patent SEOs 2025 discussed”.

Advice: Check the typical query fanouts for your prompts and try to rank for those keywords as well.

Typical fanout-patterns I see in ChatGPT are appending the term “forums” when I ask what people are discussing and appending “interview” when I ask questions related to a person. The current year (2025) is often added as well.

Beware: fanout patterns differ between LLMs and can change over time. Patterns we see today may not be relevant anymore in 12 months.

Step 4: Keep Consistency Across Your Brand Mentions

This is something simple everyone should do – both as a person and an enterprise. Make sure you are consistently described online. On X, LinkedIn, your own website, Crunchbase, Github – always describe yourself the same way.

If your X and LinkedIn profiles say you are a “GEO consultant for small businesses”, don’t change it to “AIO expert” on Github and “LLMO Freelancer” in your press releases.

I have seen people achieve positive results within a few days on ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews by simply having a consistent self description across the web. This also applies to PR coverage – the more and better coverage you can obtain for your brand, the more likely LLMs are to parrot it back to users.

Step 5: Avoid JavaScript

As an SEO, I always ask for as little JavaScript usage as possible. As a GEO, I demand it!

Most LLM crawlers cannot render JavaScript. If your main content is hidden behind JavaScript, you are out.

Step 6: Embrace Social Media & UGC

Unsurprisingly, LLMs seem to rely on reddit and Wikipedia a lot. Both platforms offer user-generated-content on virtually every topic. And thanks to multiple layers of community-driven moderation, a lot of junk and spam is already filtered out.

While both can be gamed, the average reliability of their content is still far better than on the internet as a whole. Both are also regularly updated.

reddit also provides LLM labs with data into how people discuss topics online, what language they use to describe different concepts, and knowledge on obscure niche topics.

We can reasonably assume that moderated UGC found on platforms like reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, and Stackoverflow will stay relevant for LLMs.

I do not advocate spamming these platforms. However, if you can influence how you and competitors show up there, you might want to do so.

Step 7: Create For Machine-Readability & Quotability

Write content that LLMs understand and want to cite. No one has figured this one out perfectly yet, but here’s what seems to work:

Use declarative and factual language. Instead of writing “We are kinda sure this shoe is good for our customers”, write “96% of buyers have self-reported to be happy with this shoe.”
Add schema. It has been debated many times. Recently, Fabrice Canel (Principal Product Manager at Bing) confirmed that schema markup helps LLMs to understand your content.
If you want to be quoted in an already existing AI Overview, have content with similar length to what is already there. While you should not just copy the current AI Overview, having high cosine similarly helps. And for the nerds: yes, given normalization, you can of course use the dot product instead of cosine similarity.
If you use technical terms in your content, explain them. Ideally in a simple sentence.
Add summaries of long text paragraphs, lists of reviews, tables, videos, and other types of difficult-to-cite content formats.

Step 8: Optimize your Content

Start of the paper GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (arXiv:2311.09735)

The original GEO paper

If we look at GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (arXiv:2311.09735) , What Evidence Do Language Models Find Convincing? (arXiv:2402.11782v1), and similar scientific studies, the answer is clear. It depends!

To be cited for some topics in some LLMs, it helps to:

Add unique words.
Have pro/cons.
Gather user reviews.
Quote experts.
Include quantitative data and name your sources.
Use easy to understand language.
Write with positive sentiment.
Add product text with low perplexity (predictable and well-structured).
Include more lists (like this one!).

However, for other combinations of topics and LLMs, these measures can be counterproductive.

Until broadly accepted best practices evolve, the only advice I can give is do what is good for users and run experiments.

Step 9: Stick to the Facts

For over a decade, algorithms have extracted knowledge from text as triples like (Subject, Predicate, Object) — e.g., (Lady Liberty, Location, New York). A text that contradicts known facts may seem untrustworthy. A text that aligns with consensus but adds unique facts is ideal for LLMs and knowledge graphs.

So stick to the established facts. And add unique information.

Step 10: Invest in Digital PR

Everything discussed here is not just true for your own website. It is also true for content on other websites. The best way to influence it? Digital PR!

The more and better coverage you can obtain for your brand, the more likely LLMs are to parrot it back to users.

I have even seen cases where advertorials were used as sources!

Concrete GEO Workflows To Try

Before I joined Peec AI, I was a customer. Here is how I used the tool – and how I advise our customers to use it.

Learn Who Your Competitors Are

Just like with traditional SEO, using a good GEO tool will often reveal unexpected competitors. Regularly look at a list of automatically identified competitors. For those who surprise you, check in which prompts they are mentioned. Then check the sources that led to their inclusion. Are you represented properly in these sources? If not, act!

Is a competitor referenced because of their PeerSpot profile but you have zero reviews there? Ask customers for a review.

Was your competitor’s CEO interviewed by a Youtuber? Try to get on that show as well. Or publish your own videos targeting similar keywords.

Is your competitor regularly featured on top 10 lists where you never make it to the top 5? Offer the publisher who created the list an affiliate deal they cannot decline. With the next content update, you’re almost guaranteed to be the new number one.

Understand the Sources

When performing search grounding, LLMs rely on sources.

Look at the top sources for a large set of relevant prompts. Ignore your own website and your competitors for a second. You might find some of these:

A community like Reddit or X. Become part of the community and join the discussion. X is your best bet to influence results on Grok.
An influencer-driven website like YouTube or TikTok. Hire influencers to create videos. Make sure to instruct them to target the right keywords.
An affiliate publisher. Buy your way to the top with higher commissions.
A news and media publisher. Buy an advertorial and/or target them with your PR efforts. In certain cases, you might want to contact their commercial content department.

You can also check out this in-depth guide on how to deal with different kinds of source domains.

Target Query Fanout

Once you have observed which searches are triggered by query fanout for your most relevant prompts, create content to target them.

On your own website. With posts on Medium and LinkedIn. With press releases. Or simply by paying for article placements. If it ranks well in search engines, it has a chance to be cited by LLM-based answer engines.

Position Yourself for AI-Discoverability

Generative Engine Optimization is no longer optional – it’s the new frontline of organic growth. At Peec AI, we’re building the tools to track, influence, and win in this new ecosystem.

Generative Engine Optimization is no longer optional – it’s the new frontline of organic growth. We currently see clients growing their LLM traffic by 100% every 2 to 3 months. Sometimes with up to 20x the conversation rate of typical SEO traffic!

Whether you’re shaping AI answers, monitoring brand mentions, or pushing for source visibility, now is the time to act. The LLMs consumers will trust tomorrow are being trained today.

Try Peec AI

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Peec.ai Used with permission.

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Jul 23 2025

AI Search is Here: Make Sure Your Brand Stands Out In The New Era Of SEO [Webinar] via @sejournal, @lorenbaker

Wish you could control what AI says about your brand?

You’re not alone.

As generative search becomes the default for tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, fewer people are clicking through to traditional search results. If your content isn’t part of their training data or grounding sources, it’s effectively invisible.

And that means one thing: you’re no longer just optimizing for humans or search engines. You’re optimizing for machines that summarize the internet.

Introducing Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

In this tactical webinar, we’ll break down what it takes to get your brand cited, linked, and quoted in AI-generated content, intentionally.

You’ll discover:

How to show up in AI search results.
Ways to increase your AIO (AI Overview) brand presence.
Proven SEO & GEO workflows you can copy today.

Learn How To Influence LLMs

This isn’t theory. We’ll walk through the specific strategies SEOs and marketers are using right now to shape what language models say, and don’t say, about their brands.

Expect insights on:

How foundational training data is gathered (and how you might influence it).
The role of search and retrieval-based answers (RAG) in real-time LLM responses.
What makes content “quotable” to machines, and what gets ignored.

Stay Visible As AI Search Becomes The Default

AI search isn’t coming. It’s here. And it’s rewriting how visibility works.

In this session, you’ll learn:

Why traditional SEO tactics still matter (especially for citation).
How query fanout and grounding shape which documents LLMs pull from.
Which formats and language structures improve your chances of being cited.

This is for SEOs, content strategists, and marketing leads who want to stay relevant as AI redefines the playing field.

Why This Webinar Is A Must-Attend

Whether you’re refining your search strategy or trying to future-proof your brand visibility, this session offers high-ROI insights you can apply immediately.

✅ Actionable examples

✅ Real-world GEO workflows

✅ Early looks at emerging standards like MCP, A2A, and llms.txt

📍 Designed for experienced marketers ready to lead change.

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Jul 17 2025

Your Reviews Are Ranking You (Or Not): How to Stay Visible in Google’s AI Era

This post was sponsored by GatherUp. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

If your business has a great local, word-of-mouth reputation but very few online reviews, does it even exist?

That’s the existential riddle facing local businesses and agencies in 2025.

With Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs) now reshaping the search experience, visibility isn’t just about being “the best.”

It’s about being part of the summary.

And reviews? They’re no longer just trust signals. They’re ranking signals.

This article breaks down what’s changing, what’s working, and how agencies can keep their clients visible across both traditional local search and Google’s evolving AI layer.

Reviews Are Now A Gateway To Search Inclusion

Reviews have long been seen as conversion tools, helping users decide between businesses they’ve already discovered. But that role is evolving.

In the era of Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs), reviews are increasingly acting as discovery signals, helping determine which businesses get included in the first place.

GatherUp’s 2024 Online Reputation Benchmark Report shows that businesses with consistent, multi-channel review strategies, especially those generating both first- and third-party reviews, saw stronger reputation signals across volume, recency, and engagement. These are the exact kinds of signals that Google’s systems now appear to prioritize in AI-generated results.

That observation is reinforced by recent industry research and leaked Google documentation, which suggest that review characteristics like click-throughs, content depth, and freshness contribute to both local pack visibility and AIO inclusion.

In other words, the businesses getting summarized at the top of the SERP aren’t just highly rated. They’re actively reviewed, broadly cited, and seen as credible across sources Google trusts.

Recency Is A Signal. “Relevance” Is Google’s Shortcut.

More than two-thirds of consumers say they prioritize recent reviews when evaluating a business. But Google doesn’t necessarily show them first.

Instead, Google’s “Most Relevant” filter may prioritize older reviews that match query terms, even if they no longer reflect the current customer experience.

That’s why it’s critical for businesses to maintain steady review velocity. A flood of reviews in January followed by silence for six months won’t cut it. The AI layer, and the human reader, needs signals that say “this business is active and trustworthy right now.”

For agencies, this presents an opportunity to shift client mindset from static review goals to ongoing review strategies.

Star Ratings Still Matter, But Mostly As A Decision Shortcut

During our recent webinar with Search Engine Journal, we explored how consumers are using star ratings to disqualify options, not differentiate them.

Research shows:

73% of consumers won’t consider businesses with fewer than 4 stars
But 69% are still open to doing business with brands that fall short of a perfect 5.0, so long as the reviews are recent and authentic

In other words, people are looking for a “safe” choice, not a flawless one.

A few solid 4-star reviews with real detail from the past week often carry more weight than a dozen perfect ratings from 2021.

Agencies should help clients understand this nuance, especially those who are hesitant to request reviews out of fear of imperfection.

First-Party & Third-Party Reviews: Both Are Necessary

AI Overviews aggregate information from across the web, including structured data from your own website and unstructured commentary from others.

First-party reviews: These are collected and hosted directly on the business’s website. They can be marked up with schema, giving Google structured, machine-readable content to use in summaries and answer boxes.
Third-party reviews: These appear on platforms like Google, Yelp, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and Reddit. They’re often seen as more objective and are more frequently cited in AI Overviews.

Businesses that show up consistently across both types are more likely to be included in AIOs, and appear trustworthy to users.

GatherUp supports multi-source review generation, schema markup for first-party feedback, and rotating requests across platforms. This makes it easier for agencies to build a review presence that supports both local SEO and AIO visibility.

AIOs Pull From More Than Just Google Reviews

According to recent data from Whitespark, over 60% of citations in AI Overviews come from non-Google sources. This includes platforms like:

Reddit.
TripAdvisor.
Yelp.
Local blogs and industry-specific directories.

If your client’s reviews live only on Google, they risk being overlooked entirely.

Google’s AI is scanning for what it deems “experience-based” content, unfiltered, authentic commentary from real people. And it prefers to cross-reference multiple sources to confirm credibility.

Agencies should encourage clients to broaden their review footprint and seek mentions in trusted third-party spaces. Dynamic review flows, QR codes, and conditional links can help diversify requests without overburdening the customer.

Responses Influence Visibility & Build Trust

Review responses are no longer just a nice gesture. They’re part of the algorithmic picture.

GatherUp’s benchmark research shows:

92% of consumers say responding to reviews is now part of basic customer service.
73% will give a business a second chance if their complaint receives a thoughtful reply.

But there’s also a technical upside. When reviews are clicked, read, and expanded, they generate engagement signals that may impact local rankings. And if a business’s reply includes resolution details or helpful context, it increases the content depth of that listing.

For agencies juggling multiple clients, automation helps. GatherUp offers AI-powered suggested responses that retain brand tone and ensure timely replies, without sounding robotic.

How Agencies Can Make AIO Part Of Their Core Strategy

Google’s AI systems are designed to answer user questions directly, often without requiring a click. That means review content is increasingly shaping brand narratives within the SERP.

To adapt, agencies should align client visibility efforts across both search formats:

For Local Pack Optimization

Keep Google Business Profile listings fully updated (photos, categories, Q&A).
Build and maintain steady review velocity using email, SMS, and in-person requests.
Respond to reviews regularly, especially nuanced or negative ones.

For AIO Inclusion

Collect first-party reviews and mark them up with schema.
Rotate requests to third-party platforms based on vertical relevance.
Capture reviews with photo uploads and detailed descriptions.
Build unstructured citations through community involvement, media mentions, and event participation.

Download Our Complete Proactive Reputation Management Playbook for Digital Agencies for templates and workflows to operationalize this as a branded, revenue-generating service.

Reputation Is No Longer Separate From Rankings

AI Overviews now appear in nearly two-thirds of local business search queries. That means your clients’ next customers may form an impression—or make a decision—before ever clicking through to a website or map pack listing.

Visibility is no longer guaranteed. It’s earned through content, coverage, and credibility.

And reviews sit at the center of all three.

For agencies, this is a moment of opportunity. You already have the tools to guide clients through the shift. You know how to structure content, build citations, and amplify voices that resonate with customers.

Reputation management isn’t optional anymore. It’s infrastructure.

About GatherUp

GatherUp is the only proactive reputation management platform purpose-built for digital agencies. We help you build, manage, and defend your clients’ online reputations.

GatherUp supports:

First- and third-party review generation across multiple platforms,
Schema-marked up feedback collection for AIO relevance,
Intelligent, AI-assisted response workflows,
Seamless white-labeling for full agency control,
Scalable review operations tools that can help you manage 10 or 10,000 locations and clients.

Agencies who use GatherUp don’t just react to algorithm changes. They shape client visibility, and defend it.

To learn more, watch the full webinar for actionable strategies, data-backed insights, and examples of AIO-influenced local search in the wild.

Watch the full webinar

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by GatherUp. Used with permission.

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Jun 18 2025

AIO Hurting Traffic? How To Identify True Loss With GA4, GSC & Rank Tracking [Webinar] via @sejournal, @lorenbaker

Wondering if AI Overviews (AIOs) are stealing your clicks?

Are these AI answer engines eating into our traffic, or just changing the shape of it?

Google’s AI Overviews now appear on up to 40% of search queries, but what impact are they really having?

Stop Guessing. How To Measure AIO’s Real Impact

Get the on-demand webinar, where we explore the three main tools that can help you:

In this tactical on-demand session, Tom Capper, Sr. Search Scientist at STAT, will walk you through a practical framework for assessing AIO impact using three tools you already rely on.

You’ll learn to pinpoint if, where, and how AIOs affect your traffic so that you can respond with clarity, not guesswork.

Start Measuring the Real Impact of AIOs on SERPs Today

Don’t rely on assumptions.

Grab this free on-demand webinar now to accompany the slides below; uncover if AIOs are actually hurting your traffic, and what to do about it.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

Lead Local SEO: How To AI-Proof Your Rankings With Reviews

Join Mél Attia, Sr. Marketing Manager at GatherUp, as she shows how consumer trust and AI updates are reshaping Local SEO, and how agencies can lead the way.

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Jun 17 2025

See What AI Sees: AI Mode Killed the Old SEO Playbook — Here’s the New One via @sejournal, @mktbrew

This post was sponsored by MarketBrew. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

Is Google using AI to censor thousands of independent websites?

Wondering why your traffic has suddenly dropped, even though you’re doing SEO properly?

Between letters to the FTC describing a systematic dismantling of the open web by Google to SEO professionals who may be unaware that their strategies no longer make an impact, these changes represent a definite re-architecting of the web’s entire incentive structure.

It’s time to adapt.

While some were warning about AI passage retrieval and vector scoring, the industry largely stuck to legacy thinking. SEOs continued to focus on E-E-A-T, backlinks, and content refresh cycles, assuming that if they simply improved quality, recovery would come.

But the rules had changed.

Google’s Silent Pivot: From Keywords to Embedding Vectors

In late 2023 and early 2024, Google began rolling out what it now refers to as AI Mode.

What Is Google’s AI Mode?

AI Mode breaks content into passages, embeds those passages into a multi-dimensional vector space, and compares them directly to queries using cosine similarity.

In this new model, relevance is determined geometrically rather than lexically. Instead of ranking entire pages, Google evaluates individual passages. The most relevant passages are then surfaced in a ChatGPT-like interface, often without any need for users to click through to the source.

Beneath this visible change is a deeper shift: content scoring has become embedding-first.

What Are Embedding Vectors?

Embedding vectors are mathematical representations of meaning. When Google processes a passage of content, it converts that passage into a vector, a list of numbers that captures the semantic context of the text. These vectors exist in a multi-dimensional space where the distance between vectors reflects how similar the meanings are.

Instead of relying on exact keywords or matching phrases, Google compares the embedding vector of a search query to the embedding vectors of individual passages. This allows it to identify relevance based on deeper context, implied meaning, and overall intent.

Traditional SEO practices like keyword targeting and topical coverage do not carry the same weight in this system. A passage does not need to use specific words to be considered relevant. What matters is whether its vector lands close to the query vector in this semantic space.

How Are Embedding Vectors Different From Keywords?

Keywords focus on exact matches. Embedding vectors focus on meaning.

Traditional SEO relied on placing target terms throughout a page. But Google’s AI Mode now compares the semantic meaning of a query and a passage using embedding vectors. A passage can rank well even if it doesn’t use the same words, as long as its meaning aligns closely with the query.

This shift has made many SEO strategies outdated. Pages may be well-written and keyword-rich, yet still underperform if their embedded meaning doesn’t match search intent.

What SEO Got Wrong & What Comes Next

The story isn’t just about Google changing the game, it’s also about how the SEO industry failed to notice the rules had already shifted.

Don’t: Misread the Signals

As rankings dropped, many teams assumed they’d been hit by a quality update or core algorithm tweak. They doubled down on familiar tactics: improving E-E-A-T signals, updating titles, and refreshing content. They pruned thin pages, boosted internal links, and ran audits.

But these efforts were based on outdated models. They treated the symptom, visibility loss, not the cause: semantic drift.

Semantic drift happens when your content’s vector no longer aligns with the evolving vector of search intent. It’s invisible to traditional SEO tools because it occurs in latent space, not your HTML.

No amount of backlinks or content tweaks can fix that.

This wasn’t just platform abuse. It was also a strategic oversight.

SEO teams:

Many believed that doing what Google said, improving helpfulness, pruning content, and writing for humans, would be enough.

That promise collapsed under AI scrutiny.

But we’re not powerless.

Don’t: Fall Into The Trap of Compliance

Google told the industry to “focus on helpful content,” and SEOs listened, through a lexical lens. They optimized for tone, readability, and FAQs.

But “helpfulness” was being determined mathematically by whether your vectors aligned with the AI’s interpretation of the query.

Thousands of reworked sites still dropped in visibility. Why? Because while polishing copy, they never asked: Does this content geometrically align with search intent?

Do: Optimize For Data, Not Keywords

The new SEO playbook begins with a simple truth: you are optimizing for math, not words.

The New SEO Playbook: How To Optimize For AI-Powered SERPs

Here’s what we now know:

AI Mode is real and measurable.
✅You can calculate embedding similarity.
✅You can test passages against queries.
✅You can visualize how Google ranks.
Content must align semantically, not just topically.
✅Two pages about “best hiking trails” may be lexically similar, but if one focuses on family hikes and the other on extreme terrain, their vectors diverge.
Authority still matters, but only after similarity.
✅The AI Mode fan-out selects relevant passages first. Authority reranking comes later.
✅If you don’t pass the similarity threshold, your authority won’t matter.
Passage-level optimization is the new frontier.
✅Optimizing entire pages isn’t enough. Each chunk of content must pull semantic weight.

How Do I Track Google AI Mode Data To Improve SERP Visibility?

It depends on your goals; for success in SERPs, you need to focus on tools that not only show you visibility data, but also how to get there.

Profound was one of the first tools to measure whether content appeared inside large language models, essentially offering a visibility check for LLM inclusion. It gave SEOs early signals that AI systems were beginning to treat search results differently, sometimes surfacing pages that never ranked traditionally. Profound made it clear: LLMs were not relying on the same scoring systems that SEOs had spent decades trying to influence.

But Profound stopped short of offering explanations. It told you if your content was chosen, but not why. It didn’t simulate the algorithmic behavior of AI Mode or reveal what changes would lead to better inclusion.

That’s where simulation-based platforms came in.

Market Brew approached the challenge differently. Instead of auditing what was visible inside an AI system, they reconstructed the inner logic of those systems, building search engine models that mirrored Google’s evolution toward embeddings and vector-based scoring. These platforms didn’t just observe the effects of AI Mode, they recreated its mechanisms.

As early as 2023, Market Brew had already implemented:

Passage segmentation that divides page content into consistent ~700-character blocks.
Embedding generation using Sentence-BERT to capture the semantic fingerprint of each passage.
Cosine similarity calculations to simulate how queries match specific blocks of content, not just the page as a whole.
Thematic clustering algorithms, like Top Cluster Similarity, to determine which groupings of passages best aligned with a search intent.

🔍 Market Brew Tutorial: Mastering the Top Cluster Similarity Ranking Factor | First Principles SEO

This meant users could test a set of prompts against their content and watch the algorithm think, block by block, similarity score by score.

Where Profound offered visibility, Market Brew offered agency.

Instead of asking “Did I show up in an AI overview?”, simulation tools helped SEOs ask, “Why didn’t I?” and more importantly, “What can I change to improve my chances?”

By visualizing AI Mode behavior before Google ever acknowledged it publicly, these platforms gave early adopters a critical edge. The SEOs using them didn’t wait for traffic to drop before acting, they were already optimizing for vector alignment and semantic coverage long before most of the industry knew it mattered.

And in an era where rankings hinge on how well your embeddings match a user’s intent, that head start has made all the difference.

Visualize AI Mode Coverage. For Free.

SEO didn’t die. It transformed, from art into applied geometry.

AI Mode Visualizer Tutorial

To help SEOs adapt to this AI-driven landscape, Market Brew has just announced the AI Mode Visualizer, a free tool that simulates how Google’s AI Overviews evaluate your content:

Enter a page URL.
Input up to 10 search prompts or generate them automatically from a single master query using LLM-style prompt expansion.
See a cosine similarity matrix showing how each content chunk (700 characters) for your page aligns with each intent.
Click any score to view exactly which passage matched, and why.

🔗 Try the AI Mode Visualizer

This is the only tool that lets you watch AI Mode think.

Two Truths, One Future

Nate Hake is right: Google restructured the game. The data reflects an industry still catching up to the new playbook.

Because two things can be true:

Google may be clearing space for its own services, ad products, and AI monopolies.
And many SEOs are still chasing ghosts in a world governed by geometry.

It’s time to move beyond guesses.

If AI Mode is the new architecture of search, we need tools that expose how it works, not just theories about what changed.

We were bringing you this story back in early 2024, before AI Overviews had a name, explaining how embeddings and vector scoring would reshape SEO.

Tools like the AI Mode Visualizer offer a rare chance to see behind the curtain.

Use it. Test your assumptions. Map the space between your content and modern relevance.

Search didn’t end.

But the way forward demands new eyes.

Book Your AI Mode Strategy Session

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Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by MarketBrew. Used with permission.

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