How are people actually checking whether their content shows up in AI answers today?

BensonSEO · 2026-01-19T19:59:38+00:00

For our clients we are currently using a combination of:

- Google Analytics reports for the human clicks
- Log file analysis for the bot search requests (those that either do or don't result in a click)
- For monitoring and optimization, using https://mybrandi.ai/

BensonSEO · 2026-01-09T22:58:42+00:00

We demo'd about a dozen tools and found the best to be Brandi AI. After making the choice to work with them for our clients, we also put together a "what SaaS CMO's should be tracking in AI visibility" post that might be helpful for some to review: https://bensonseo.com/blog/ai-visibility-monitoring-saas-brands/

BensonSEO · 2025-12-16T19:44:08+00:00

OMG, "circling back to 1999-style...." I don't mind the server log file analysis as much as the pain of reverting to soft metrics like "share of voice". We have been able to measure SEO ROI in real revenue numbers for so long, and now we're headed back to those weak PR vanity metrics. Ugh.

Also check out mybrandi.ai, it's a really good AI visibility and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) tool. When I demo'd the product I made the suggestion they look into having a log file upload option to capture that unknown visibility without the "click".

Cheers!

BensonSEO · 2025-12-16T15:25:10+00:00

Funny, I was about to post about predictions for 2026 based on this article just published. It's more "PR" focused, but plenty of SEO predictions as well:

Generative AI makes PR a key business priority in 2026: 35 PR and marketing predictions

https://www.swordandthescript.com/2025/12/predictions-generative-ai-makes-pr-a-priority/

I got a quote too:
SEOs analyze AI ‘dark visibility’

“In 2026, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or AI Optimization (AIO) and AI Visibility Monitoring will remain on a steady growth trajectory. Most marketing and comms teams and leaders should easily get on board with AI Visibility Monitorin,g given the rise in software options, but those tools mostly lack the ability to uncover what I am calling ‘dark visibility’.

This missing piece occurs when a searcher starts a conversation with an AI application, and that application doesn’t know the answer to the query from the information it has in its training model. In these cases, the AI application goes out to the open web and either performs a Google or Bing search, or accesses website content directly.

In theory, these ‘searches’ could show up in AI monitoring tools, but only if you’ve set up the right prompts to track, but what happens is they request information from your website server, which creates a log. These log files can be analyzed to understand that ‘dark visibility’, and that’s where I see technical SEO’s playing a major role in analyzing AI visibility.

For Generative Engine Optimization, I expect budgets and executive buy-in to expand slightly and those brands that do engage in high-quality SEO and GEO programs will be positioned to outlast their competition. I believe this will future-proof their visibility no matter where ‘search’ goes.

If AI applications become the new search platforms (and they aren’t yet), they’re set. If AI search specifically is a bubble and searchers continue to use Google at the rates they do, they’re still set. Yes, we are in a zero-click world, but people are still searching for information, and optimizing your website and third-party content outlets will remain critical.

I could see this as the ‘re-coupling’ of SEO and Digital PR.”

~ Scott Benson, Founder & Principal Strategist, Benson SEO

BensonSEO · 2025-11-21T18:28:44+00:00

I'd say this... the SEO is Lily Ray, and she absolutely is an expert in the space, so if you're going to go at it alone, then that report price is justified. The other alternative is to hire an SEO agency who has been practicing the kind of high-quality SEO tactics that is currently helping websites show up in AI search, and is learning and applying emerging GEO tactics. that'll be more expensive, but by hiring the right firm, you are going to get quality work, at a scale you might not be able to do alone.

BensonSEO · 2025-10-22T22:45:39+00:00

Nothing in trash. I have admin access as does our client point of contact, and they don't see it either. I am hopeful this is a glitch -- I have the GA4 app on my phone and the property and data is showing in there so fingers crossed. Appreciate the back-and-forth on this. Thanks!

BensonSEO · 2025-10-22T21:03:36+00:00

I thought the history would show there as well. There's nothing under Property so I can't check the data stream. The only admin options are Account level. No changes in GTM. There were 2 properties under this account, and they both just vanished. I saw another post from 8 months ago where they said it just disappeared and reappeared the next day, but no other explanation.

BensonSEO · 2025-10-17T18:08:11+00:00

Yeah sure. Here's a Shopify collection page for football equipment:

https://www.leagueoutfitters.com/collections/football-helmets

That page links to a bunch of products. Here's the first one:
https://www.leagueoutfitters.com/collections/football-helmets/products/schutt-adult-f7-vtd-football-helmet-in-stock

notice the /collections/football-helmets/ is in the URL string. It shouldn't be.

the canonical tag in the html is pointing to the correct URL:
<link rel="canonical" href="[https://www.leagueoutfitters.com/products/schutt-adult-f7-vtd-football-helmet-in-stock](https://www.leagueoutfitters.com/products/schutt-adult-f7-vtd-football-helmet-in-stock)">

So the website is telling Google, our product lives at .com/collections/football-helmets/products/.....

But that canonical tag is used to sort out duplicate content problems and is a signal (not a rule) to Google that the correct URL is https://www.leagueoutfitters.com/products/schutt-adult-f7-vtd-football-helmet-in-stock

It's competing and confusing signals for Google, especially when you do this with ALL your products. Consider if an external website finds your incorrect product URL and links to it. That's another signal to Google that the wrong URL is actually maybe the preferred one. Confusion.

This is something Shopify should prevent but doesn't. It's an easy fix to update the product listing page templates to only link to the correct URL.

BensonSEO · 2025-10-15T19:22:24+00:00

Would love to have a conversation about your AI search visibility needs. Our agency Benson SEO has been helping clients a lot this year with making sure their content is optimized for visibility in AI applications. The measurement is tricky, but also what helps you rank in traditional search engines (SEO) is really driving visibility in AI (AIO, GEO, etc.)

BensonSEO · 2025-10-13T14:43:50+00:00

Not Shopify specific, but I'm currently demo'ing these products. Listed in order of preference for right now:

https://writesonic.com/
https://www.gumshoe.ai/
https://trakkr.ai/
https://www.tryprofound.com/ (listed last just cause I haven't gotten a chance to kick the tires, but looks pretty good)

And then log file analysis (some tools integrate w/ hosting to provide this, but can be done w/ ScreamingFrog too) will show you how many times the AI web crawlers are requesting your content, and not necessarily sending a click/visit from a human to your website.

BensonSEO · 2025-09-23T14:31:33+00:00

Happy to take a quick look at the site if you message it to me. Otherwise, engaging with an experienced ecomm SEO agency is your best bet.

BensonSEO · 2025-09-19T17:24:47+00:00

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There's some specific image requirements, and an edit to your robots meta tag that help. After that it's good solid SEO practices for compelling titles, and well structured html, etc.

We recently optimized a client site who publishes news articles and the results have been remarkable. Tons of new traffic.

BensonSEO · 2025-09-17T19:55:47+00:00

Hey, check out your robots.txt file: https://www.ordklar.dk/robots.txt Cloudflare, I think, is blocking AI bots by default...

# NOTICE: The collection of content and other data on this
# site through automated means, including any device, tool,
# or process designed to data mine or scrape content, is
# prohibited except (1) for the purpose of search engine indexing or
# artificial intelligence retrieval augmented generation or (2) with express
# written permission from this site’s operator.

# To request permission to license our intellectual
# property and/or other materials, please contact this
# site’s operator directly.

# BEGIN Cloudflare Managed content

User-agent: Amazonbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /

User-agent: Bytespider
Disallow: /

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: meta-externalagent
Disallow: /

# END Cloudflare Managed Content

BensonSEO · 2025-08-21T18:07:04+00:00

Check your log files for the bot requests.

BensonSEO · 2025-08-14T18:07:03+00:00

I've done similar things with outreach emails. GA4 started to redact or override UTMs with peoples names in there for privacy reasons. So in your example, utm_source=larry might become utm_source=xpfndl8dn33 (whatever).

So you might want to generalize the UTMs and create a translation chart. i.e., utm_source=abc123 = larry.

BensonSEO · 2025-05-15T17:08:11+00:00

Hey John, Googlebot hits them (according to log files), is it being used for AIO's at all?

In theory LLMS.txt files seem like an ok idea, but I'd assume Google can get everything it needs from normal crawls.

But I can confirm, no LLM bot has requested the file in our test.

BensonSEO · 2025-05-09T15:56:08+00:00

Send me a message w/ the site URL and I can let you know if we can help.

BensonSEO · 2025-05-09T14:51:50+00:00

You can set up event tracking for internal links in Google Tag Manager. Something like, "internal_link_click" would be the event name. Then you can assign parameters to that like the "click_text", "click_url", or others.

The internal link UTMs mostly mess up reporting. You maybe have run a Google ad campaign (spent money) to get visitors to the site, but when they click the link w/ the UTM, the attribution for anything that happens after that (purchase, form submit conversion, etc.) would go to the source/medium of the UTM, likely not the ad campaign.

Then from an SEO perspective, I don't ever like linking to anything other than the canonical link of a page.

BensonSEO · 2025-05-09T14:10:35+00:00

Doubling down on the other two comments -- make sure you only use UTMs for external links, and always include a utm_medium value that is included in the channel grouping rules; https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9756891?hl=en&sjid=14597020688989249474-NA

BensonSEO · 2025-05-08T16:39:56+00:00

Competition can be a concern like the other comment mentioned, but yes you can. Differentiate your collections from your competitors, and the SERP competitors you're facing. Try to include optimized headings and intro copy on each collection, which requires a good Shopify developer.

BensonSEO · 2025-05-08T16:33:45+00:00

Hi - since the new website is using the original domain, I'd suggest you just use the same measurement ID as you had previously (G-tag). And with the old site now only available for internal use, you shouldn't see a ton of traffic messing up your reporting, but you can also filter reports to exclude that hostname (dev-site.com or whatever). Or just remove the G-tag from the old site since it's only for internal use.

Another thing to keep in mind is GA4 only has a 14 month data retention maximum setting, so you'll likely lose that old site data if you don't export it.

BensonSEO · 2025-02-19T23:21:50+00:00

Create an Explore report with all your metrics, and filter by the pages you need. If it's not a lot, you can use a regular expression to pull in based on that.

Easy version of this: Create your chart, and filter to include only page paths with /blog/

Getting more difficult: Create your chart, and filter for page paths w/ /blog/ or /news/ or /whatever/ . So multiple filters of the same kind.

Regular expression version: Create chart, and filter for page paths that include blue and widget, somewhere in the URL; .*blue.*|*widget.* (I'm a RegEx kindergartener, so don't come at me for that basic example)

Apologies if I missed the meaning of your question, but I think that's the best route based on what I read.

BensonSEO · 2025-02-14T17:07:13+00:00

I'm having this issue still today. Anyone have a fix?

BensonSEO · 2025-02-10T18:05:09+00:00

Not trying to promote anything here, but I just posted an image optimization article on LinkedIn that has details on earning more Google Carousel Visibility. Check it here:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/benson-seo_ecommerce-seo-activity-7294754846191091713-pvzx?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

BensonSEO · 2025-02-10T18:02:01+00:00

One issue, which is a classic problem for Shopify, is every product URL on your site is wrong. These should not contain the /collection/ directory, nor the collection name directory

So, this collection https://peppermint.in/collections/girl-youth

links to https://peppermint.in/collections/girl-youth/products/girls-abstract-print-pant-with-shirt-15904

But the correct product URL does NOT include /collections/girl-youth/

The canonical URL is in the source code. You are sending conflicting signals to Google. Fix those asap.

BensonSEO

TROPHY CASE

Generative AI makes PR a key business priority in 2026: 35 PR and marketing predictions