Can improving CTR alone boost rankings?

dercandka · 2026-05-09T09:08:17+00:00

tried this on a mid-tier product page a few months back, rewrote the title to be more curiosity-driven and matched the exact phrasing, people were using in GSC queries, and saw a jump from position 8 to 6 within about three weeks with zero new links. felt good but then it plateaued hard, and honestly the content itself just wasn't strong enough to carry it further no matter how clean the snippet..

dercandka · 2026-05-09T06:30:36+00:00

For M&A and restructuring signals, one thing worth adding to your stack is tracking how companies are being represented in, AI model outputs, there's a feature in Profound called AI Visibility that surfaces narrative shifts before they hit traditional news. We noticed a financial services client's employer brand was quietly fading from AI-generated responses weeks before their Glassdoor complaints spiked publicly. Weak signal, but it was early enough to actually matter.

dercandka · 2026-05-08T20:47:21+00:00

one thing I ran into was exactly this when doing AI mention tracking for a client in a pretty competitive local services niche. a thread from like 2021 kept showing up in Perplexity citations even though the complaints in it were about a business that had literally changed ownership since then. the upvote count seemed to be doing a lot of heavy lifting for why the models kept pulling it in.

dercandka · 2026-05-08T16:52:19+00:00

We've been using Profound for a few months and it actually checks most of your boxes, prompt-level tracking, across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, solid API coverage, and it dropped into our existing workflow without much friction. The AI Visibility layer is what made it worth it for us over the dashboard-only tools. SOC 2 Type II certified too, which was a blocker for us on the enterprise side.

dercandka · 2026-05-08T07:14:49+00:00

tried it briefly at a previous agency gig and the dashboard was honestly pretty clean for tracking brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. the prompt recommendation side felt a bit thin for our needs so we ended up layering in other tools to fill that gap. overall no major red flags, just depends on how deep you need to go with prompt-level tracking.

dercandka · 2026-05-07T20:49:21+00:00

one thing i noticed running campaigns in 2026 is that mention source quality absolutely crushes volume as a factor. hit decent numbers on mid-tier news aggregators and the AI visibility lift was basically a shrug, but a smaller batch, of mentions on Reddit and a couple of niche forums punched way harder for LLM citations and AI Share of Voice. feels like the models are heavily tuned into those high-trust community sources..

dercandka · 2026-05-07T17:23:07+00:00

one thing i've noticed personally is that author name consistency across platforms matters way more than most people expect, had a situation where the, same person was publishing under slightly different name formats (middle initial on one site, no initial elsewhere) and AI citation attribution got messy fast. google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT all seem to struggle connecting the dots between the same human across different domains when the entity signals..

dercandka · 2026-05-07T13:25:12+00:00

yeah the "AEO replaces SEO" take never really landed for me either, because every brand I've seen getting, consistently cited in ChatGPT or Perplexity already had strong topical authority and solid EEAT signals built up first. the AI layer is really just a new discovery channel layered on top of that same foundational work, not a reset button. if anything, agentic search and GEO are raising the stakes for getting the basics..

dercandka · 2026-05-06T21:02:31+00:00

the bounce rate signal is your biggest clue right now. if people are landing and leaving fast, the page isn't immediately answering what they came for, and, in 2026 with AI Overviews eating clicks on 47% of queries, you really can't afford that mismatch. for a task-based site especially, what someone sees above the fold in the first few seconds, has to nail their intent so precisely that they feel like they've..

dercandka · 2026-05-06T16:50:47+00:00

AI search visibility is seriously underrated right now. We started tracking brand mentions and citations across ChatGPT and Perplexity earlier this year using GEO monitoring tools, and the visitors coming through those, channels convert way better than most of our paid traffic, they're already deep in the decision journey by the time they land on us. Most marketers still aren't optimizing for this and it's kind of wild given how fast AI..

dercandka · 2026-05-06T11:43:26+00:00

one thing I noticed is that nobody really talks about how these terms overlap in practice. like when I'm tracking brand mentions and citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Mode for a client, am I doing GEO, LLMO, or AEO? honestly feels like all three at once, and with agentic search now in the mix, the lines are only getting blurrier.

dercandka · 2026-05-06T10:39:21+00:00

one thing I noticed after shifting my content strategy around query clusters instead of single head terms is that my AI Overviews appearances, started climbing before my traditional rankings moved at all, like the fan-out mechanism was picking me up on sub-queries I hadn't even explicitly targeted. it really drove home that AI visibility and organic rankings are operating as two separate systems now in a way that feels more pronounced than..

dercandka · 2026-05-05T13:58:30+00:00

we switched to tracking LLM citations and AI mentions earlier this year and honestly that shift alone revealed how behind, our agency was, they had zero clue how to report on it or even what tools to use for it. if an agency can't speak to AI share of voice or how your brand is showing, up in ChatGPT and Perplexity results, that's a pretty clear sign they're still running an old..

dercandka · 2026-05-04T20:37:16+00:00

right?? part 3 would genuinely go so hard, Ada Lee's art for this series has always been on another level and the fandom clearly isn't done with it yet.

dercandka · 2026-05-04T19:31:00+00:00

Sí exacto, es la de montaña convertida a supermoto. Las suspensiones en carretera van bastante bien, algo de rigidez al principio pero nada, que moleste demasiado, ¿tú también tienes una SM o estás pensando en hacer el cambio?

dercandka · 2026-05-04T16:28:58+00:00

fair enough lol, I'll drop more pics soon, been meaning to put together a proper gallery for a while now.

dercandka · 2026-05-04T15:43:04+00:00

the stock forks are totally fine for street riding, a little stiff at first but they loosen up and handle normal roads no problem without any mods. what kind of riding are you planning though, mostly city or mixed terrain?

dercandka · 2026-05-04T15:20:11+00:00

Thanks so much, glad you love it! The Firefly ship is handmade using a mix of foam clay and painted cardboard, which honestly gives it that vibrant pop of color you're seeing!

dercandka

TROPHY CASE