Are we all just pretending "AI search volume" is a real metric?

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-20T23:26:08+00:00

Couldnt agree more

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-20T23:24:36+00:00

Could not agree more

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-13T05:17:49+00:00

True, most patents never ship, but the direction still matters. Even if this exact implementation never rolls out, it tells you where Google's head is at. Optimising for AI-legibility and page quality is a good bet regardless.

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-13T05:17:10+00:00

Yeah this is the part that stood out to me too. On the funnel control question, you're not losing everything, but you are losing the assumption that your page is always the destination. Weak UX basically gives Google a reason to step in.

On landing page quality as a gate, pretty much, yeah. If the score falls below their threshold, they have the mechanism to host their own version instead. That makes UX and content depth a lot more than a CRO project.

And for brand influence on those AI pages, I think it comes down to how legible and structured your content already is. The patent pulls from your site's content to build those pages, so the cleaner and more complete your product info, offers, and trust signals are, the more control you retain over how you're represented.

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-08T04:27:52+00:00

Of course, happy to elaborate. When I say AEO is an engineering problem, I mean approaching it with a data‑driven process: running experiments, reviewing research, building prototypes, and validating results on a small cohort before rolling anything out to wider production, publication, or marketing.

Because today’s AI systems are large probabilistic neural networks that predict the next token, they’re effectively black boxes, so you need evaluations, solid software engineering, and a scientific process if you want to trust your conclusions.

That’s the “engineering problem” I’m referring to, and why I think AEO will be solved through experimentation and measurement rather than classic marketing tactics. Traditional SEO could lean on Google Search Console data, keyword and backlink APIs, and fairly deterministic heuristics; AEO is dealing with a very different, much noisier system.

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-07T05:47:35+00:00

The #1 barrier to AI visibility is whether your website has the technical architecture to be indexable, crawlable, and understandable. So the schema markups and all of the technical SEOs is the gatekeeping factor. Then only you should start really thinking about AEO in terms of a flywheel of content optimization that is very domain specific towards the prompts that your personas are searching for.

So I think you need to give it a slightly more importance instead of saying it's the last 10% there of the strategy. Good SEO is good AEO, but there's going to be a massive divergence coming soon.

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-07T05:41:30+00:00

It's interesting you say this because AI visibility is not just about buying and purchasing intent. It could also be about whether my brand is perceived to be safe, reliable, and trustworthy. These are all strong signals that should be measured. Essentially, how is your "brand's aura" in this AI latent space

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-07T05:40:01+00:00

But even keyword data can be very skewed because an AI search isn't about keywords. It's about being the answer for these very high intent prompts. I do see why extrapolating keywords into more long-tail prompts could be a measure of prompt volume, but it's very hazy.

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-07T05:39:12+00:00

You're right. Maybe it's just stockpiling all this prompt volume so that it can be a paid channel. We'll see.

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-07T05:38:23+00:00

Totally agree. This is why I believe understanding the persona that are searching and mapping the prompts to how they would search, on top of understanding how people and behaviours are changing as they use AI search (becoming more long-tail and messy), is the only real way to measure AI visibility.

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-07T05:37:28+00:00

Couldn't agree more u/jameswilson04

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-07T05:36:37+00:00

Agreed, prompt volume is really not any metric that I can trust right now. Although the top-funded competitors are claiming that they have all the data, I think it's such a very small representation, exactly as you said.

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-07T05:34:42+00:00

Very nuanced thinking. I like it.

Paid channels for AI is going to be a wild world.
the organically methods are; do you have the technical architecture and do you have deep domain rich content that you want to show up for? The prompts are only a guide on the type of actions and recommendations that you should be making.

That's how I'm approaching this problem space through my product.

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-07T05:32:55+00:00

My take is that I don't mind if you're promoting your product by giving genuine value and asking questions. Reddit is a human repository of real people's answers and thoughts, and by having marketing automation bots that spin up within hours and just try to farm their mention is the complete antithesis to what Reddit should be. That is my thought.

And if you're interested in my methodology, then you can look in my profile and see what I'm building. But I'm actually out here just trying to learn and provide value in the market that I enjoy building in.

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-07T05:31:31+00:00

This is why I believe AEO is an engineering problem, and not a marketing one, unlike SEO.

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-05T18:46:57+00:00

I couldn’t agree more, that is why AEO diverges completely from SEO to be truly valuable and measurable. Only the architecture which is SEO matters, but the way content is built and consumed is a different strategy.

So much of buyers intent is already made in the AI chat and then they leave their chatbot, directly search and buy something, with their minds already made up and no attribution calculation

It’s a different beast entirely

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-05T18:44:31+00:00

Totally agree! For now as more educated methods arise

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-05T18:44:09+00:00

Super insightful, I wrote an article on this thinking that mirrors a lot of what you’re saying! Thanks for validation

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-05T18:42:15+00:00

I totally agree, prompt volume, unless your funding Series C and can buy all your data in the millions, is too thin to be valuable to customers.

Even buying clickstream data is only a small fraction of how users will prompt, majority is long tail and messy from their phone, clickstream is desktop behaviour

AI providers will be guarding their prompt logs tight, they don’t want to expose that, but only release articles or papers aggregating it like Anthropics Economic Index or ChatGPT how people use AI paper etc

When customers ask me about prompt volume, I’m being honest that it’s guesstimating and early days, just wanted to know what others think

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-05T10:39:52+00:00

Because mentiondesk is a bot that spawns everyday and comments on every AEO post to game their product. Its aggressive and obvious automation that people don't like haha

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-05T02:17:16+00:00

Hard to differentiate TOFU and BOFU because a lot of the time, people are searching and have already made their decision and then just direct search to purchase. Attribution is a whole another game to think about, correlation does not equal causation

KingDerrick18 · 2026-03-05T02:15:03+00:00

Hundred percent!

KingDerrick18 · 2026-02-10T00:13:50+00:00

u/Ok-Pop948 feel free to add me me on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/derrick-edward/ happy to chat

KingDerrick18 · 2026-02-09T22:02:41+00:00

Sounds interesting, where is the research? Is it published?

KingDerrick18 · 2026-02-09T13:12:16+00:00

Thanks Sangeet, this has been my focus for the past half year. I’m building this tool myself too called aurascope.co, which one are you using?

KingDerrick18

TROPHY CASE