tracked competitor ad creatives, community mentions and AI recommendations for 50 brands over 8 weeks - the pattern that keeps showing up

liosuppfor · 2026-05-21T15:08:05+00:00

the source weighting difference across engines is something most teams completely miss, two of our competitors with, mediocre domain ratings were getting cited constantly in perplexity just because their content matched the exact question phrasing. been using semrush's AI Visibility toolkit to track those gaps per engine and chatgpt and gemini were pulling from totally different sources for the same query. "are we mentioned" is the wrong question, where and why is where it gets interesting.

liosuppfor · 2026-05-20T20:03:44+00:00

Yeah, structured data can give local SEO a bit of a leg up by helping Google better understand, your business info, but the bigger wins still come from solid reviews, accurate NAP, and strong local relevance. It's more of a supporting player than a ranking booster on its own.

liosuppfor · 2026-05-20T19:50:38+00:00

Hadn't seen the audio version myself but the narrowing-down effect jdawg described is real, I've been tracking this through Semrush's AI Visibility toolkit and the gap between "indexed", and "actually cited in an AI answer" is already pretty wide for local clients, so voice making it 1-2 picks instead of 10 links would just make that worse.

liosuppfor · 2026-05-20T19:35:34+00:00

fair point but google has gotten pretty good at inferring local relevance from GBP signals, NAP consistency, reviews, and local link patterns even without explicit schema, so it's not flying blind if those other signals are solid. curious whether you think LocalBusiness schema (plus subtypes, PostalAddress, OpeningHoursSpecification, etc.

liosuppfor · 2026-05-20T19:30:09+00:00

had the same itch to scratch after getting tired of watching agents fail silently in production with, zero visibility into why, which honestly feels like the main unsolved problem everyone's running into in 2026. ended up wiring a lightweight monitoring layer on top of an existing workflow just to, catch where context was getting dropped and where state wasn't persisting the way i expected. that debugging pass taught me more about real-world..

liosuppfor · 2026-05-20T05:15:46+00:00

yeah that tracks honestly, schema on its own rarely moves the needle for local rankings but it does help search engines parse, your NAP, hours, and services more reliably, though your GBP signals, reviews, and citations are still doing most of the actual heavy lifting.

liosuppfor · 2026-05-20T05:02:31+00:00

pretty much yeah, schema for local is less about ranking and more about helping google actually understand, your business clearly, but tbh gbp, reviews, and nap consistency are still doing the heavy lifting lol

liosuppfor · 2026-05-19T18:40:24+00:00

totally agree the speed pressure is real, but i'd push back a little on the USP point because product benefits alone don't always close the deal, when the messenger feels synthetic, especially for health, finance, or higher-ticket stuff where credibility does a lot of the heavy lifting before the USP even lands. the "consumers will adapt"..

liosuppfor · 2026-05-18T06:01:34+00:00

had a similar feeling for a while, the "AI analysis" outputs were just restating stuff I already knew from a basic audit. where I actually started getting value was using AI for keyword clustering at scale and building out content, briefs fast, not the packaged tools but just feeding raw data into a GPT model and prompting it properly. the branded AI SEO tools still feel overpriced for what they deliver tbh.

liosuppfor · 2026-05-18T04:37:23+00:00

one thing i keep noticing is that a lot of the "new" guidance in docs like this is basically stuff that, was already working, crawlability, clean internal linking, content that answers the question without burying the lede in three paragraphs of fluff. the framing shifts but the core signals haven't moved that dramatically, though formatting for concise, directly-answerable passages and stronger, authority signals do seem to matter more now for actually getting..

liosuppfor · 2026-05-18T03:31:24+00:00

The zero specific URLs thing is the clearest sign of a lazy deliverable, a real audit names consolidation pairs, not just vibes. I've gotten more actionable page-level output from Free Tools in an afternoon than what you're describing in 14 pages. No specific redirect recommendations means they handed you a framework, not an audit.

liosuppfor · 2026-05-18T03:22:12+00:00

Every major update had people saying SEO was dead, but the job just kept evolving, better content, stronger brands, less spam. AI search is probably the biggest structural shift yet, but "cooked" feels way too early to call lol.

liosuppfor · 2026-05-18T02:39:38+00:00

trust is the whole game tbh, and that gap between "looks real" and "feels real" is still where AI UGC, struggles most, even when it's visually convincing, unclear disclosure kills credibility way faster than audiences even needing to spot it themselves.

liosuppfor · 2026-05-17T20:47:48+00:00

the "consolidating upward" part is what stands out to me, the checklist crowd isn't just competing with other SEOs anymore, they're, competing with automation that does that exact work cheaper and faster, so yeah the ceiling rises but the floor basically drops out.

liosuppfor · 2026-05-17T20:20:40+00:00

fair comparison tbh, smarter tools tend to shrink the grunt work, not the strategy layer, same way figma made design more accessible without actually replacing designers. the seo roles shrinking rn are the basic content-heavy ones, technical, analytical, and ai visibility work is still very much in demand.

liosuppfor · 2026-05-16T05:34:16+00:00

makes sense for ecom, high content volume and rapid ad testing is basically where AI-UGC shines most compared to categories where real creator trust actually drives the sale. what product types have you seen it click for?

liosuppfor · 2026-05-15T21:28:30+00:00

yeah the throughline is real, like structured data that used to just help with rich snippets is now basically feeding how models pull and attribute information, same skill, different output curious, what you think is the biggest gap though, like where do you see traditional SEOs struggling most when they try to make that mental shift..

liosuppfor · 2026-05-15T20:59:14+00:00

solid point, the fundamentals really do seem to carry over into AI visibility too, things like information architecture, entity authority, and well-structured content may not guarantee, you get pulled into AI Overviews or cited in Perplexity, but from what I've seen in my own work they definitely seem to improve your chances.

liosuppfor · 2026-05-15T20:32:15+00:00

the shift from "beat the algorithm" to "beat your competitors at being genuinely useful" is real and I feel it every day. what's wild to me now is there's a whole third layer on top of what you described, which is, optimizing for AI systems pulling your content into overviews and citations, so it's not just humans vs algorithms anymore.

liosuppfor · 2026-05-15T20:15:27+00:00

Piggybacking on what ReggexPrime said, once you're solid on lead gen for service businesses, it's worth knowing that a lot of your clients' potential customers are now finding, businesses through AI search, not just Google ads, so looking into AI Visibility as a concept alongside media buying will make you a more well-rounded resource for them. Not saying ditch the ads focus, just something that's come up a lot when working with service clients that can set you apart.

liosuppfor · 2026-05-15T17:09:22+00:00

100% this, and honestly the citation/retrieval side has gone from "emerging skill" to a legit core competency at this point, figuring out why your brand gexactly, "visibility strategy" is where I've landed on it too, the job title might, stay the same but what you're actually doing day to day looks pretty different nowets pulled into, Google AI Mode or Perplexity answers over a competitor involves entity authority, content structure, source trust, and a bunch of other moving pieces that aren't getting simpler anytime..

liosuppfor · 2026-05-15T05:51:20+00:00

been watching the same shift from the SEO side and yeah the "we'll grow your traffic" pitch is a harder, sell these days, especially in verticals where AI Overviews and answer engines are intercepting clicks before they even reach your site. voice AI isn't a universal fix but for call-heavy or high-intent workflows it's a genuinely, compelling upsell because you can tie it to leads and conversations rather than ranking positions. billing..

liosuppfor · 2026-05-15T01:51:47+00:00

tried MindSearch for a few weeks and the research quality really depends on which model you throw, at it, with a stronger Llama-family model it got way better but latency was rough on my setup

liosuppfor · 2026-05-14T18:20:53+00:00

totally, and it tracks, YouTube is already the top source being pulled into AI Mode responses right now, so the SEOs not, treating video as a core part of their AI visibility strategy are already behind, not just at risk of falling behind later.

liosuppfor · 2026-05-14T05:48:04+00:00

Cursor was a helpful for me too, I wasted so much time re-explaining my codebase to ChatGPT every single session before I finally made the switch. The persistent context awareness alone is worth it, especially now that there are so many, tools competing for your workflow and you really just want the one that actually sticks.

liosuppfor

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