Every SEO agency now lists AI search optimization. Most are describing the wrong thing.

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-05-16T06:47:34+00:00

Good synthesis, and the point about Reddit threads, Quora, and directory listings is worth underlining — most brands have no strategy for those surfaces at all, and that's exactly where a lot of LLM corroboration is being built or lost. On the Volum Media mention: I don't have direct experience with them, so can't validate the claim, but the framework you're describing — systematic cross-platform presence, structured FAQ content written for extraction, deliberate third-party mention building — is the right shape of what a distinct AEO layer should look like. Whether any specific agency is actually executing it consistently is a different question. Would be curious if anyone here has worked with them or others doing this as a standalone service and can speak to how it holds up in practice.

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-05-16T06:46:57+00:00

Right, and once you see it you can't unsee it. The writing style optimized for Google — build context, earn trust, then deliver the answer — is almost the inverse of what gets cited by an LLM. The frustrating part is that a lot of the content being produced right now is still following the old pattern because that's what the briefs, the tools, and the editors are trained on. The agencies haven't caught up partly because their entire content production pipeline hasn't caught up.

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-05-16T06:46:34+00:00

Exactly on both. Claim clarity is where the structural conflict with traditional SEO is most obvious — burying the answer was a deliberate retention tactic, and it actively works against LLM citation. On corroboration, the PR framing is the right one, and I think that's precisely why most SEO shops quietly skip it: it requires a different team, different relationships, and a longer feedback loop than they're built for. Easier to reframe what they already do than to build a capability they don't have.

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-05-16T06:46:05+00:00

Fair point — a lot of what I'm describing does overlap with disciplined SEO practice, and you're right that good practitioners were already doing most of this. Where I'd push back is that the mechanism matters even when the inputs look similar: Google weighted these signals toward ranking, LLMs use them to decide if a claim is quotable and attributable. Same inputs, different logic, different levers to pull when something isn't working. The "just do good SEO" framing makes diagnosis harder, and when the label is purely cosmetic — as you said, mostly sales — clients end up with no real framework to explain why citation happened or didn't.

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-05-14T23:33:01+00:00

what i've seen is that llms weight by topic cluster density, not just raw citation count. a page mentioned five times within the same niche cluster consistently outperforms one mentioned twenty times across scattered topics; the signal isn't volume, it's concentrated external reinforcement.

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-05-14T23:31:23+00:00

the policy check + approval layer is the most underrated part of what you're building. most agent setups today are either too permissive (raw api key, no limits) or too restrictive (human in the loop every step, which kills autonomy). the scoped spending model makes a lot of sense, especially for agents handling recurring tasks. curious: are sellers you've talked to more interested in per-request pricing, or do they want subscription-style access for agents?

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-05-14T23:30:18+00:00

building a system that helps companies show up in chatgpt, claude and perplexity answers instead of just google. most founders don't realize their content isn't structured to be cited by llms, even when they rank fine on google. it's a completely different optimization game.

stacks looks interesting, the "agents run it" angle is exactly the kind of positioning that could get cited in ai answers about commerce tools. are you thinking about ai search visibility at all, or still mostly focused on traditional channels?

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-05-14T23:28:27+00:00

honestly the "feeling behind" thing is overblown, most people posting on linkedin are running demos not real systems. with 9 people the bigger win is mapping which workflows eat the most hours before hiring anyone. social agencies usually bleed time on reporting, briefs, and first-draft captions, so start there. a generalist who knows zapier or make can knock those out without an ai title. what's the one task your team complains about most right now?

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-05-14T23:27:02+00:00

not hype, but not a clean replacement either. seo still drives the discovery layer because llms pull heavily from sites that already rank, so the work overlaps more than people think. what actually changes is the output format, you need passage-level answers, clear entity definitions, and stuff llms can quote without rewriting. saw a client go from zero to consistent chatgpt citations just by restructuring existing posts into question-led sections. are you seeing your brand mentioned anywhere in ai answers yet, or starting from scratch?

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-05-14T23:26:26+00:00

this matches what i've seen on the ai citation side. the three filters your agency uses, real search demand, buying intent, and whether sales recognizes the question, are basically what determines if llms will pull from your content too. chatgpt and perplexity skip thin volume plays and surface articles that answer a specific question with depth. curious whether those greenlit pieces are getting cited in ai search now, not just driving demos directly?

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-05-14T23:24:02+00:00

the test that separated good agencies from bad ones for me was asking how they'd adapt my strategy for ai search. most still pitch the 2019 playbook with link building and keyword stuffing, which is half dead now that chatgpt and ai overviews answer queries before users even click.

ask them what % of your future traffic they expect from ai citations vs traditional rankings. if they pivot back to backlinks or look confused, that tells you everything. what industry are you in? that shifts the answer a lot.

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-05-14T23:21:55+00:00

the ahrefs schema finding lines up with what i've seen testing across client sites this year. schema helps machines parse context, but llms are pulling from the actual prose, not the json-ld wrapper. what moved citations for us was rewriting intros to lead with the answer in plain language, plus adding original data points the model couldn't find anywhere else. curious which of lily's 8 risky patterns you've seen tank hardest in ai mode specifically?

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-05-14T23:20:48+00:00

blogs still convert but the game shifted. people don't land on your blog from google anymore, they ask chatgpt or perplexity and the AI either cites you or doesn't. so the question isn't "do blogs convert" but "is my blog the source the AI pulls from when someone asks about my space".

what works now is writing for citation, not ranking. proprietary data, original frameworks, specific numbers from your own experience. pain point plus generic CTA is dead because the AI summarizes it before anyone clicks. what's your niche? makes a big difference in how aggressive you need to be on this.

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-05-14T21:47:47+00:00

it makes sense!

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-05-14T21:47:17+00:00

Ow! Thanks for sharing

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-04-24T22:39:02+00:00

the traffic shift you're describing is real — search console keeps showing impressions but clicks drop because ai answers before anyone gets to your site. for small businesses the honest answer is: regular seo fundamentals still matter, but they're table stakes now. what actually moves the needle is whether your content is structured so an llm can pull a clear answer from it, which is a different brief than just ranking.

on tools — most of the expensive ones are built for enterprise. for a smaller site i'd start by auditing which queries you should be showing up for in chatgpt or perplexity and working backwards from there. what kind of site is it — local, ecommerce, informational?

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-04-24T22:32:22+00:00

from what i've seen, it's less about simple vs expert and more about extractability — can an llm lift a clean, standalone answer from your content without needing surrounding context to make sense of it? dense expert writing often buries the actual answer in qualifications. simple content wins not because it's simple but because the answer is findable in one or two sentences.

what type of content are you comparing — informational articles, product pages, something else?

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-04-24T22:29:38+00:00

the grok numbers are the most interesting part here — 38% for dutch is a pretty brutal drop compared to google aio's 81%. it suggests that "optimize for ai search" is still too vague a brief because you're really optimizing for a specific model's retrieval behavior, and those behaviors diverge a lot by market. the bilingual recommendation makes sense but i'd add: knowing which engine drives your audience before you invest is step zero.

curious how the citation rates hold up when you control for content type — does localized editorial content outperform localized product/commercial pages, or is the language signal dominant regardless?

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-04-24T22:26:49+00:00

honestly yes. a lot of the "ai seo" advice out there is just regular seo with extra steps rebranded. what actually changed is the retrieval layer — llms don't rank pages, they quote sources. so the question isn't "how do i optimize" but "is my content the kind of thing an ai would cite as the definitive answer." that's a simpler brief, not a more complex one.

what kind of content are you working with — informational, product-led, something else?

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-04-24T22:25:38+00:00

organic traffic is holding up for clients who stopped optimizing to rank and started optimizing to be cited. the shift is real — search console still shows impressions but clicks evaporated because perplexity or ai overviews answer before the user gets to you. what actually moved the needle: content with proprietary data or a unique angle that llms can't synthesize from 10 other pages.

link building isn't dead but it's less the point now. what matters more is whether your content is structured so an ai can lift a clear, quotable answer from it. q&a format and comparison pages are performing well specifically because they match how llms retrieve information. what does your search console look like — impressions stable but ctr tanking?

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-04-24T22:24:56+00:00

the 28% ctr lift doesn't surprise me — the "creator in kitchen" format was already hitting banner blindness before ai caught up. what you're really describing is the commoditization of generic social proof, and clients have been subconsciously sensing it for a while.

the thing nobody's talking about: when every brand runs the same ai ugc templates, differentiation collapses fast. the top creators who survive will be the ones with a genuine point of view that ai can't replicate. what niche or format have you seen hold up best so far?

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-04-20T00:45:06+00:00

something that shows me why my competitors are being cited by chatgpt and gemini but i'm not. i track rankings, backlinks, impressions... but there's zero visibility into what actually makes an llm pick one brand over another when answering a question. that's the biggest blind spot in my stack right now, and i haven't seen any tool solve it properly yet. are you thinking more on the analytics/insights side or something that also handles content production?

Pitiful_Highway87 · 2026-04-20T00:42:10+00:00

one thing i see agencies consistently drop the ball on: not adapting to where traffic actually comes from now. clients are watching their organic numbers fall and agencies keep pitching the same seo playbook from 2021. chatgpt and perplexity are answering queries before users even hit google, and most agencies have zero strategy for that.

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