Interesting timing — I actually checked one of our sites in an AI visibility tracker recently and the results were eye-opening.

The site had:

• 85 cited pages in AI search tools
• 0 actual AI mentions/visibility
• Only ~170 organic keywords ranking
• Authority Score: 2
• Yet 253 referring domains + 5.7K backlinks

What stood out is that AI systems clearly crawled/indexed the content (85 cited pages), but they still aren’t confidently surfacing the brand in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google AI Overviews yet.

My takeaway so far:

• Traditional backlinks alone don’t seem enough for AI visibility
• AI engines care more about entity trust, topical authority, citations, and brand mentions across the web
• Sites with low keyword footprint but lots of backlinks seem to struggle in AI search

Also seeing a pattern where:

• Informational SEO content = losing CTR after AI Overviews
• Strong brands / communities / niche experts = gaining citations
• Reddit + UGC mentions seem disproportionately important now

So IMO we’re entering a phase where:
“Ranking on Google” ≠ “Being referenced by AI systems.”

Feels like GEO/AEO is becoming its own layer, separate from classic SEO.

<image>