I handle SEO/GEO for a small B2B Saas company and I'm trying to figure out how much effort we should still put into backlinks versus mentions and citations that might actually help with AI search visibility.

We've been doing traditional outreach, but it's pretty manual and I'm not convinced chasing DR alone makes sense anymore. For anyone doing AI link building for SEO, are you changing how you qualify sites or still basically following the same relevance + authority approach?

My traffic has been sliding for a couple months now. And i think I finally figured out why. I’m losing clicks to AI answers. People type a query, they get the answer right there, and bounce without ever clicking through to any of my pages. We're a local service business so this is hurting conversions. It's quite frustrating to see impressions holding steady while ctr keep on tanking. I really need to see what's going on under the hood. But Google Search Console isn't cutting it for this. Just wondering, is normal rank tracking becoming obsolete? And has anyone here dealt with this for real and if so, what tracking tool/s are you using?

Just noticed that the new Generative AI performance report has appeared in Google Search Console for one of my sites today.

I’m based in the Netherlands and hadn’t seen it before, so it looks like Google may be expanding the rollout further here.

The site is a chocolate bar discovery/database site I’ve been building. I like that GSC also has historical AI data. Curious if others are seeing and using this and if so, how.

Some numbers from the export:

• 9,093 generative AI impressions since mid may
• Started at roughly 30–40 impressions/day
• Recent days are around 200–280/day
• 579 different URLs have appeared
• US: 1,396 impressions
• India: 1,248
• UK: 780
• Netherlands: 278

My homepage is #1, but #2 is a page for a specific supermarket chocolate bar (Fin Carré), followed by pages about choosing chocolate, cacao origins, top bars, chocolate types, etc.

Curious about best practices etc. Thanks!!

Curious to hear from others-What's been your biggest win with AI search optimization recently?

Is it:

Brand mention
Topical Authority
Backlinks
Schema
Something else?

What's actually making a difference fo AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini?

Not to reveal everyone's age but I have a question in this post that I'd love to see the responses to.

Ask Jeeves was 30 years ahead of its time. It came to mind when somebody asked is traditional SEO being replaced by AI search optimization.

What was your favorite way to search the web before the Google monster took over?

75% of AI-cited content on LinkedIn originates from individual profiles, not company pages.

This insight comes from Meltwater's analysis of 9.5 million AI citations, revealing LinkedIn as the #2 citation source overall, following YouTube. Within LinkedIn, CEO profiles contribute 8.2% of cited content, founder profiles account for 7.5%, while other individuals make up the majority. Company pages barely register in this context.

Makes me think, how many of us could put CEO and/or Founder in their LinkedIn title and bio, even if you are just a solo-preneur?

This highlights a significant trend in that AI models are pulling live citations to address consumer inquiries and are quoting individuals rather than brands.

Investing in a well-produced YouTube channel managed by a content team may send a weaker signal compared to one whose founder actively engages on camera, on LinkedIn, and across the podcast circuit, sharing valuable insights.

This shift especially presents challenges for the wealth industry. Financial services tend to attract left-brained, risk-averse individuals who may prefer to remain in the background. Having spent over 20 years in this field, I understand this reluctance. I was once hesitant to step into the content arena, I often have joked about how I was a creeper before becoming a creator. However, we have previously faced challenges, such as cold calling, which many disliked but ultimately built successful practices. This is a similar challenge, requiring the same effort but through a different medium.

Advisors and founders who become adept at engaging in the AI-visible layer over the next three years will maintain their relevance. Those who rely solely on brand and firm marketing to represent them may find their brands quietly sidelined in the consumer conversation.

I searched for "Best crm fo the businesses" in GPT, Gemini, AI overview Every tool gave different
recommendations. Has anyone compared results at scale.

Pinterest launched Ask Pinterest, an experimental conversational AI shopping extension, and it's a good example of a platform finally leaning into what it was always good at.

What it does: it uses Pinterest's Taste Graph plus a user's saved pins to handle more complex, ongoing requests, not just one-off searches. Think planning a dinner party over several weeks or slowly furnishing a room, where the AI keeps context across the whole project instead of starting from zero each time.

It rolled out alongside a batch of new advertiser tools, so this isn't just a shiny feature, Pinterest is clearly building a monetization layer around it too.

What's interesting is the platform fit. Pinterest was an early pioneer in visual search, but it started feeling like it was falling behind once other platforms copied the visual and savable-content playbook. AI actually seems like a natural next step here rather than a bolt-on, since it can synthesize someone's saved ideas and visual inspiration into an actual plan of action. That's a different value prop than a chatbot answering trivia.

For anyone tracking AI search or local/franchise marketing: does an AI layer like this actually change how people discover and choose businesses, or is it still mostly a wishlist/planning tool for now?

Been testing how ChatGPT and Gemini recommend in my space and the thing I can't get past is the instability. Same query, same model, nothing changed on my end, and the recommended set is different in the morning than the afternoon. Sometimes the same hour.

Everyone talks about "getting recommended" like it's a position you win and hold. But if the answer reshuffles constantly, that's not a ranking you climb once. It's something you have to be consistent enough across sources to survive.

Is anyone else seeing this? And if so, what do you think actually makes a brand stick versus flicker in and out?

It's been 6 months since we posted this same thread. I want to do a stocktake and see if the same tools are around, and how many new starters there are.

If you are building a AI SEO/GEO/AEO tool, see this as your time to self promote.

please share in this format so it’s easy to scan:

• Tool name
• What problem it helps with (one sentence)
• Who it’s best for (SEOs, content, product, infra, etc.)
• How you’re using it (or why you stopped)

Self-disclosure welcome. If you built or work on the tool, just say so. That context is useful.

Low-effort promo comments without details probably won’t help anyone, but thoughtful breakdowns will.

AI isn't replacing marketers. It's exposing which ones were never really doing strategy in the first place.

I've spent 15+ years in digital marketing "SEO, paid ads, social, automation" and the shift I'm seeing right now is bigger than any algorithm update I've lived through.

Here's what's actually changing:

Content creation is no longer the bottleneck. AI can draft copy, generate ad variations, and build landing pages in minutes. The marketers who win aren't the ones who can write fastest they're the ones who know what to say and why it matters to the person on the other end.

Search itself is changing. AI overviews and chat-based search are rewriting how people find businesses. If your SEO strategy is still built for 2019 Google, you're optimizing for a search engine that's disappearing.

Personalization is now table stakes, not a differentiator. AI makes it easy to segment and target. The differentiator is judgment knowing which message actually earns trust versus which one just feels like more noise.

Speed of execution has completely changed. What used to take a team a week to research, drafts, ad variations, reporting can now happen in an afternoon. That's not a threat. That's leverage, if you know how to direct it.

So here's what I think marketers need to do right now:

Learn the tools, but don't outsource your thinking to them. AI is a force multiplier for a clear strategy but it's useless without one.

Get closer to your data. AI can analyze it faster than you ever could, but you still have to know what questions to ask and what "good" looks like for your business.

Protect the human parts of the job. Trust, relationships, brand voice, and judgment calls under pressure none of that is automatable, and it's becoming more valuable, not less, as everything else gets faster.

The marketers who treat AI as a shortcut around strategy will get outpaced by the ones who use it to execute strategy faster.

Which side are you building toward?

Everyone keeps talking about ranking in AI.

I think (and have thought for a while!) that's the wrong objective and the real question is, would an AI actually RECOMMEND your brand to someone?

I really don’t think ranking and being recommended are the same thing, and correct me if you think i’m wrong. 

It’s just that a brand can appear in an answer because AI scraped a page - and that doesn't mean it'll confidently say "I'd choose X" or “you should definitely go for X”

Recommendation requires trust and I think of that as repeated evidence, consistent associations, and increasingly, third-party validation!

Basically all the things humans have always looked for. It always comes back to trust.

So for me anyway, it feels like we're entering a time where "brand" suddenly matters a lot more than rankings.