How to Get Cited by AI: What the Data Actually Shows

by iajyhooda | Aug 24, 2026 | SEO

Search "how to get cited by AI" and you'll find a small industry has sprung up around the answer: agencies selling "GEO audits," tools promising to track your "AI citation share," blog after blog with a numbered list of tactics. Almost none of them show you data. They show you a checklist.

That's a problem, because a real dataset now exists — and it doesn't fully agree with the checklists.

The 8,000-citation study

In August 2026, Search Engine Land published an analysis of 8,000 citations pulled from 57 queries, run repeatedly across four AI engines — ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — using data from the Rankscale.ai platform. It's the closest thing the industry has to a controlled look at what actually gets cited, rather than what marketers assume gets cited.

Three findings stand out for a business owner deciding where to spend time and budget:

• Self-promotion is close to invisible. ChatGPT cited vendor blogs — a company writing about its own product or service — in under 1% of citations. Google's AI Overviews and Perplexity were a little more generous, at around 7%, but even there, brand-written content was a minor player next to independent sources. As the analysis put it plainly: overly salesy content likely won't rank or be cited.
• Third-party authority does the heavy lifting. Wikipedia accounted for roughly 27% of ChatGPT's citations. Reuters showed up in about 6%. Perplexity leaned on expert review sites like NerdWallet and Consumer Reports for close to 9% of its citations. Across all four engines, blogs — mostly independent, third-party blogs, not brand blogs — made up 38–46% of citations.
• Quality beats rank. The study found cases where a lower-ranking page with genuinely authoritative content got cited over a higher-ranking page that was less credible. Position in Google's organic results is a signal these systems weigh, not the only one.

This lines up with separate research from AI-search analytics firm AirOps, which analyzed 21,311 brand mentions across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity and found that 85% of brand mentions in AI search come from third-party pages, not the brand's own website — and for top-of-funnel, awareness-stage queries specifically, mentions were 6.5 times more likely to originate from someone else's content than the brand's own.

Put the two studies together and the pattern is hard to miss: AI engines are, in effect, running their own version of "don't take a company's word for its own excellence." They're looking for someone else vouching for you.

What this means if you're a local or service business

If your business serves customers directly — a clinic, a trades company, a restaurant, a local retailer — there's a second layer worth knowing about, and it just became a lot more concrete.

In July 2026, Yelp confirmed a data-licensing deal with OpenAI, first disclosed in its February 2026 earnings materials. ChatGPT can now surface Yelp content directly in local recommendation answers — star ratings, review snippets, and links back to your Yelp listing — when someone asks it for a plumber, a dentist, or a place to eat. The deal is non-exclusive, meaning the same underlying incentive (your reviews feeding an AI answer) likely extends to other platforms over time.

Moz's research on local reviews and LLMs, published the same week, found that large language models don't just average your star rating — they read the sentiment and specificity inside individual reviews to build a picture of trustworthiness. A detailed four-star review ("the hygienist was gentle and walked me through everything") can carry more weight with these systems than a flat five-star review that just says "Good." Google's own 2025 Maps Trust and Safety report, published in April 2026, disclosed that the company removed 292 million policy-violating reviews and over 13 million fake Business Profiles in a single year — a reminder that manufactured review volume is actively being cleaned out of the exact data AI systems are starting to read from.

For a local business, that reframes "getting cited by AI" as less of an SEO project and more of a reputation-management one: respond to reviews, encourage detailed (not just five-star) feedback, and keep your Google Business Profile and other listings accurate — because that data increasingly feeds the answer, not just the map pin.

What doesn't move the needle

Based on the data above, a few common "GEO" tactics are worth being skeptical of before you pay for them:

• A dedicated "AI citations" or "as seen by AI" page on your site. It's self-published, first-party content — the exact category the 8,000-citation study found AI engines cite least.
• AI-citation "tracking" tools as a starting expense. Knowing your citation count doesn't change it. Budget for earning citations first; measure once you have a baseline worth tracking.
• Generic FAQ-stuffing aimed at AI Overviews. It can help with traditional search snippets, but the data shows engines increasingly reward substantive, quality content over keyword-matched phrasing.
• Buying reviews or review volume. The exact pattern Google's Trust and Safety enforcement is built to catch — and the sentiment analysis in Moz's research means fake reviews often read as fake to the model too.

What actually works, in order of evidence strength

1. Earn coverage on independent, authoritative sites. Digital PR, expert interviews, and inclusion in industry roundups feed the third-party sources AI engines already favor. This is slower and less controllable than writing your own blog post, which is exactly why it carries more weight.
2. Publish something genuinely original. Proprietary data, a real client case study with numbers, an original survey — the kind of content other sites want to reference. Citations from other publishers only happen if you give them something worth citing.
3. Make your site technically legible to machines. Clear headings, logical page structure, and content that directly answers a specific question in plain language, in that order — before worrying about schema markup or an llms.txt file.
4. Treat every review as public data, because it now is. Reply to it, encourage detail, and don't chase volume over authenticity.

None of this is a quick fix, and that's worth saying plainly rather than selling around: nobody has found a "hack" for earning third-party trust, because if one existed, AI engines built specifically to detect promotional patterns would learn to discount it — as ChatGPT already appears to be doing with vendor content.

Try this yourself

Before spending on any AI-visibility tool or agency, run this free check: ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overview a question a real customer would ask about your industry — not your brand name, the actual problem you solve. Look at what it cites. If your own site shows up, note where. If it doesn't, note who does — a competitor, a review site, a publication — and ask whether that's a relationship worth building before it's a subscription worth buying.

FAQ

Does submitting my site to an "AI directory" help me get cited?
There's no evidence for this in the available research, and it resembles the low-value directory submissions that stopped moving traditional SEO rankings years ago.

Should I write content specifically "for AI" instead of for readers?
No — the data shows AI engines cite substantive, independently-verifiable content, which is also what serves human readers. Optimizing for one increasingly means optimizing for the other.

Do I need an llms.txt file to get cited?
No. Google has stated it doesn't use llms.txt for this purpose, and none of the citation research above ties citations to its presence.

How long does it take to start showing up in AI answers?
The research doesn't give a fixed timeline, but because most citations trace to third-party coverage and reviews rather than your own new content, expect it to move on the same timescale as earning press coverage or a reputation — months, not weeks.

Is this different for B2B versus local businesses?
Yes. The 8,000-citation study found B2B queries drew more heavily on company blogs and sites (about 17% of citations) than consumer queries, while local and B2C queries leaned on reviews, YouTube, and Wikipedia. The reputation-and-reviews strategy in this article matters more for local businesses; the digital-PR and original-research strategy matters more for B2B.

Takeaway

The data says the same thing twice, from two different research teams: AI engines cite third parties, not your own marketing. If a "get cited by AI" pitch doesn't involve earning coverage somewhere you don't control, it's selling you the 15% that moves the least.

Not sure where your business actually stands with AI search — or traditional search, for that matter? Talk to Digital Roof about an SEO strategy built on evidence, not guesswork. If the honest answer is that your content or site structure needs work before AI citations are even worth chasing, we'll tell you that too.

Why Is My Direct Traffic So High? The AI Search Reason

by iajyhooda | Aug 21, 2026 | SEO

Two things happened in the SEO industry this week that, on their own, look like inside-baseball tool updates. Put together, they explain something a lot of business owners are seeing on their own analytics dashboard right now: "Direct" traffic climbing while "Organic Search" looks flat or shrinking.

If that's your dashboard, the instinct is to assume your SEO has stopped working. Before you act on that, it's worth five minutes to check whether it's actually working better than your reports show.

What "Direct" Traffic Actually Means

Google's own documentation is blunt about this: the Direct channel is what a visit gets labelled when Google Analytics can't identify where it came from. No referrer, no campaign tag, no recognisable source. It's less "this person typed your URL from memory" and more "we genuinely don't know."

That catch-all bucket has always absorbed some noise: bookmarks, links in PDFs, links from apps that strip tracking data. But a new source of noise has become large enough to actually move the number, and it's tied directly to how people are now finding businesses.

For most small and mid-size businesses, nobody is actively watching for this. A monthly report lands, Organic Search is flat or slightly down, Direct is up, and the natural conclusion is that whatever's driving Direct, brand recognition, word of mouth, repeat customers, is doing the heavy lifting instead of search. That conclusion might be right. Increasingly, though, it's wrong in a specific and checkable way.

The New Reason: AI Citation Clicks Are Landing as "Direct"

A nine-month study tracking over 51,000 AI Overview citation events, published this week, found that on average 22.4% of clicks from Google's AI Overviews were misattributed to the Direct channel instead of Organic Search. In the worst month tracked, that figure hit 29.3%.

The mechanism is simple once you see it. When someone clicks a link inside an AI Overview, ChatGPT, or Perplexity answer, the click often arrives at your site without a referrer header, the piece of information a browser normally sends that says "this visitor came from Google" or "this visitor came from Bing." AI interfaces don't consistently pass that along. Google Analytics can't label a visit "AI search" if it has no way of knowing that's what happened, so it defaults to Direct.

This isn't a fringe issue limited to one study. Independent analysis of AI referral traffic more broadly has found a similar pattern: a majority of clicks from AI chat tools arrive with no referrer at all and land in Direct by default, not just occasionally, but as the normal behaviour of how these platforms currently work.

It's Not Just Analytics — "Search Volume" Is Shifting Too

The second development is on the input side, not the output side. Ahrefs is rolling out what it calls "AI-adjusted Volume", a blended estimate that combines traditional Google search volume with modelled demand from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI platforms. No AI provider publishes real prompt data publicly, so this is Ahrefs' best estimate, not a direct measurement, but it's about to become the default. The toggle to see plain, old-fashioned Google search volume disappears from Ahrefs' Brand Radar reports on August 31, 2026.

If your SEO reporting includes keyword volume or demand figures from a tool like this, some of what you're being shown may already be a blended AI estimate rather than a pure Google number, whether or not anyone has mentioned the change.

Ahrefs' own reasoning for the change is worth understanding, not just the deadline. No AI platform, not ChatGPT, not Perplexity, not Gemini, publishes real prompt data the way search engines have historically shared search volume data with tool vendors. So the new figure is modelled: it takes a prompt's closest matching Google keyword, looks up that keyword's known search volume, then applies a platform-specific ratio built from Ahrefs' own traffic data to estimate how often something similar gets asked inside AI tools. It's a reasonable estimate, but it is an estimate, built on a proxy, not a direct count. Worth knowing which one you're looking at before you make a decision based on it.

Why This Actually Matters for Your Business

There are two ways to get this wrong, in opposite directions.

The first is concluding your SEO has stopped working because "Organic Search" looks flat while "Direct" climbs, and cutting the budget for a channel that's actually performing, just being counted in the wrong column. If a chunk of your real organic and AI-search performance is quietly landing in Direct, your reports are underselling what's working.

The second is the opposite mistake: treating a rising Direct number as proof of growing brand strength, "people know us well enough to type our name straight into the address bar", when a meaningful share of it is just AI referral leakage. Neither read is safe without actually checking.

This is also a budget conversation, not just a curiosity. Marketing spend gets allocated based on which channels appear to perform. If a content or SEO investment is quietly earning AI citations that show up as Direct instead of Organic, the reporting can make that spend look weaker than it is, right at the point someone is deciding whether to renew it.

A Check You Can Run Yourself

This takes about five minutes in Google Analytics 4 and needs no extra tools. Go to Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition, and filter the table down to the Direct channel. Then add or switch to the Landing page dimension.

Look at what's actually showing up. A homepage getting Direct traffic is normal, people do type in short, memorable URLs. A deep blog post, a comparison page, or an FAQ page with a long, specific URL getting a steady stream of "Direct" visits is a different story. Almost nobody memorises or types a URL like that from scratch. That pattern is a strong sign you're looking at AI-citation clicks landing in the wrong bucket, not genuine direct visits.

Cross-check those same pages against Search Console, if they're also picking up impressions for informational, question-style queries, that reinforces the read: people are finding this content through search and AI answers, then arriving with the trail erased.

What to Ask Your SEO or Agency

• Ask whether your reporting separates likely AI-citation traffic from genuine direct visits, at the landing-page level, not just the channel total.
• Ask whether the keyword or demand figures in your reports are classic Google search volume, an AI-adjusted blend, or unlabelled either way.
• Ask for a technically clean website and analytics setup as a baseline. Custom channel groupings and landing-page pattern checks only work if the tracking underneath them is sound.
• If your SEO reporting still only shows channel-level totals with no landing-page detail, that's worth raising, not because the agency is doing something wrong, but because the standard GA4 setup genuinely can't tell this story on its own.

None of this changes what actually earns the click in the first place: content clear and specific enough that an AI system chooses to cite it, and a search engine chooses to rank it. That's still the same job as before, it's the measurement of the result that's gotten harder. If your content is thin or vague, no amount of attribution cleanup will fix the underlying problem.

FAQ

Why is my Direct traffic suddenly so high?

It could be genuine, but a documented and growing cause is AI search. When someone clicks a link from an AI Overview, ChatGPT, or Perplexity answer, the click often arrives without a referrer header, so Google Analytics can't identify the true source and defaults to Direct.

How much AI traffic actually gets miscounted as Direct?

A nine-month study tracking over 51,000 AI Overview citation events found an average misattribution rate of 22.4%, peaking at 29.3% in one month. Broader analysis of AI chat referral traffic beyond just AI Overviews has found even higher shares landing in Direct.

How do I check if my Direct traffic is really AI search?

In GA4, filter Traffic acquisition to the Direct channel and switch to the Landing page dimension. Deep, specific pages, blog posts, comparisons, FAQs, getting steady Direct visits is a strong sign of AI-citation leakage rather than genuine typed-URL traffic.

What is "AI-adjusted Volume" and why does it matter?

It's a new metric from Ahrefs that blends traditional Google search volume with modelled AI-platform demand, since no AI provider shares real prompt data publicly. It's becoming the default in Ahrefs' reporting from August 31, 2026, so keyword and demand figures you're shown may already include this blend.

Should I stop trusting my Organic Search numbers?

No, but treat them as a floor, not the full picture. Your real organic and AI-search performance is likely at least as good as your reports show, and possibly better, since some of it is currently being counted as Direct instead.

The Takeaway

If your Direct traffic has been creeping up while Organic Search looks stagnant, that's not automatically a verdict on your SEO. It might be AI search working exactly as intended, just landing in the wrong column of your report. A five-minute landing-page check in GA4 will tell you which story is true for your business. If you'd rather have someone else run that check and explain what it means for your numbers, get in touch and we'll walk through it with you.

Does Link Building Still Work? A 2026 Reality Check

by iajyhooda | Aug 17, 2026 | SEO

Google's own search advocate has said the company needs "very few links" to rank a page. This week, a fresh study of 35,000 real ChatGPT citations found that Reddit and Wikipedia together outrank every news publisher on earth as a source AI search trusts. So why are small businesses still being sold "50 backlinks a month" packages like it's 2015?

If you're a business owner paying for SEO, or being pitched on it, this is worth five minutes of your time. It's not a technical question. It's a budget question: where should your money actually go in 2026?

What Google Actually Said About Links

Backlinks have been central to SEO since Google's founding. PageRank, the original algorithm, was built almost entirely on the idea that a link from one page to another was a vote of trust. For two decades, "get more links" was close to the entire industry's advice.

That's been changing for longer than most business owners realise. In April 2024, Google's Gary Illyes, a longtime member of Google's Search Relations team, told a room of SEOs at SERP Conf in Bulgaria: "We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years, we've made links less important." The remark travelled fast enough through the industry that Illyes later half-joked on X that he "shouldn't have said that."

Read that carefully, because the nuance matters. Illyes didn't say Google ignores links. He said Google needs fewer of them, and weighs each one less than it used to. For a business owner, the practical translation is this: quantity-based link building, the kind sold in bulk monthly packages, has been losing value since at least 2024. That's a Google story, not an AI story. AI search has simply made the gap impossible to keep ignoring.

What's Actually Earning Visibility Now

Search Engine Land published an analysis on August 13, 2026 of 35,000 real ChatGPT citations across industries. The finding: user-generated content platforms, mainly Reddit, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn, account for 17.1% of all cited domains. That's more than four times the share held by news publishers, which came in at 4.0%. Wikipedia, Reddit, and LinkedIn alone make up 99% of those UGC citations.

Why does a Reddit thread outweigh a press mention in an AI model's eyes? Large language models are trained heavily on forum and community text, and they tend to treat it as a proxy for authentic, unpaid opinion, the opposite of a press release or a sponsored post. A mention of your business in a niche forum or an industry community can carry real weight with an AI answer engine, even with no link attached at all.

That's not a reason to abandon publisher coverage or PR entirely. It's a reason to stop assuming publisher backlinks are the only thing that counts, when the data says they're currently the smaller share of what AI models actually cite.

This matters more for small and mid-size businesses than it does for national brands. A large brand already has a press archive and a Wikipedia page working in its favour. A local plumber, a regional accounting firm, or a niche ecommerce store rarely does, but that same business often already has something more valuable sitting unused: real customers talking about it in Facebook groups, local subreddits, and review threads. That's the raw material AI models are reading. Most businesses just haven't thought to treat it as an SEO asset.

The "Ghost Citation" Problem

Before you redirect your entire budget toward Reddit threads, one more data point matters. Semrush's research on what it calls "ghost citations" found that 62% of AI citations don't actually produce a visible brand mention in the answer a user reads. In other words: an AI tool can pull facts from your website or a page describing your business, and never once say your business's name to the person asking the question.

This cuts both ways for a business owner. It means citations alone aren't the finish line, being named matters as much as being sourced. And it means any "AI visibility" report that counts citations without checking whether your brand name actually appears in the answer is overstating how visible you really are. If a tool or an agency shows you a citation count and nothing else, ask to see the actual answers.

So Should You Stop Paying for Backlinks?

No, but you should stop paying for the wrong kind, and this is the part most agencies won't tell you, because it's their product.

If your current spend is a fixed number of links per month from anonymous "guest post" networks, private blog networks, or link farms, that's exactly the product Google has been devaluing since 2024. It's also not the kind of mention that shows up in the AI citation studies above. You're paying twice for something that's worth less than it used to be in either system.

What still earns its budget is narrower: a handful of genuinely relevant links from real publications, earned through digital PR or expert commentary rather than bought in bulk, sitting on top of a technically solid website that's actually worth linking to in the first place. If your site itself is the weak link, that's a website development problem before it's a link-building one.

There's also a trust cost to the old playbook that rarely makes it into the sales pitch. Google has spent years penalising sites caught in obvious link schemes, and the same low-quality networks that no longer move rankings much can still trigger a manual action if Google decides they cross the line. That's a real, if less common, downside risk attached to a tactic that's already delivering less upside than it used to. Weigh that against the near-zero downside of building a genuine review and community presence, and the budget decision gets easier.

A Check You Can Run Yourself

This takes five minutes and costs nothing. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google's AI mode and ask the question your customers would actually ask, something like "best [your service] in [your city]" or "who does [what you do] well." See if your business is named. Then, separately, search "[your business name] reddit" and "[your business name] reviews" in a normal search engine. If neither returns anything meaningful, no amount of paid backlinks is going to fix what's actually missing: a genuine footprint in the places AI models are reading from.

The pattern holds up across the client sites we work on: businesses with an active review profile and some real community presence tend to get named in AI answers even when their backlink count is modest. Businesses with a large but generic link profile and no community footprint often don't, however many links point at their homepage.

What to Do With Your SEO Budget Instead

• Keep a small, high-relevance link-building effort aimed at real publications and partners, not volume vendors selling links by the dozen.
• Put real budget into content worth citing on its own merits: original data, direct answers to the questions your customers actually ask, pages that don't need a backlink to be useful.
• Claim and actively manage your presence on the review sites and forums relevant to your industry. This is where AI models are increasingly pulling from, with or without your permission.
• Get a specialist's read on your current link spend rather than guessing. A proper SEO review will show whether your current spend matches what's actually moving the needle for your business today.

FAQ

Is link building dead in 2026?

No. Google's own team has said links matter less than they used to, not that they don't matter at all. What's changed is that link volume from low-quality sources carries little to no benefit, while a smaller number of relevant, earned links still helps.

Do unlinked brand mentions help SEO?

They help AI visibility more directly than they help traditional SEO. Large language models are trained on raw text, not just hyperlinks, so a mention of your brand in a forum thread or review, even without a link, can influence whether an AI tool names or cites you.

How many backlinks does a small business actually need?

There's no fixed number to chase. Google's Gary Illyes has said the company needs "very few links" to rank a page well, so the goal should be relevance and quality over raw quantity.

What is a "ghost citation" in AI search?

It's when an AI tool pulls information from your site as a source but never actually names your brand in the answer the user sees. Semrush's research found this happens in 62% of AI citations, meaning being a source and being visible to the customer are two different things.

Should I fire my link-building agency?

Only if they can't tell you where your links are actually coming from. If the answer is a fixed monthly quota from unnamed sites, that spend is better redirected toward digital PR, reviews, and genuine community presence.

The Takeaway

Links aren't dead. The link-building industry's old pitch, more links, delivered monthly, from wherever, is. Google has been saying so since 2024, and AI search has just made the gap impossible to ignore. If you're not sure whether your current SEO spend matches where visibility is actually coming from now, get in touch and we'll show you exactly what's working and what isn't.

AI Visibility: What to Track Before You Pay for a Tool

by iajyhooda | Aug 12, 2026 | SEO

Over the past year, a new category of software showed up in every marketing tool roundup: the "AI visibility tracker." It promises to tell you whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews mention your business when someone asks a relevant question. Prices for these tools typically run $200 to $500 a month, and vendors are moving fast — Semrush, Ahrefs, HubSpot, and a wave of newer startups like Profound and Scrunch have all launched competing products in the last twelve months.

If you own a business and someone — an agency, a consultant, a tool's own marketing page — has told you that you need to start tracking your "AI visibility" right now, it's worth pausing before you buy anything. The data on how AI search actually works, published by the same companies selling these tools, tells a more complicated story than the sales pitch does.

What "AI visibility" actually means

"AI visibility" is shorthand for how often, and how accurately, your business shows up when someone asks an AI assistant a question related to what you do. That could mean ChatGPT recommending you by name, Perplexity citing your website as a source, or Google's AI Overviews summarizing your services alongside competitors.

It's tempting to treat this like a new version of search rankings — track your "position," report on it monthly, optimize toward a number. That comparison breaks down quickly. There's no fixed results page. The same question can get a different answer twice in a row. And a business can be recommended by an AI system without its website ever being cited or clicked.

Tom Capper, a search consultant who does regular AMAs on Moz's blog, put it this way in a recent one: “AI search doesn't send traffic the same way traditional search did… A recommendation can still be a win even when your site isn't the one cited.” If someone asks an AI assistant for a plumber recommendation and it names your business while citing a local directory instead of your homepage, that's still visibility — even though nothing in your analytics will show it.

The data behind the sales pitch

Before spending money on a tracking tool, it's worth understanding what the industry's own research says about how AI mentions actually get distributed. Two recent studies are useful here, and both come from companies that sell AI visibility tools — which makes the caution in their own findings notable.

Semrush, working with SEO analyst Kevin Indig, tracked 1,094 US product and service categories in ChatGPT from January through June 2026. The finding: only 15.2% of categories had a clear brand "owner" — meaning one company that reliably appeared across the majority of related questions. For a business to count as a category owner, it had to appear in at least four of five related prompts with a real lead over whoever came second. The other 85% of categories showed no consistent winner. The study also found that only 21% of the most-cited websites in a category belonged to the most-mentioned brand — being mentioned by name and being the source an AI cites are frequently two different companies entirely.

Moz ran a separate experiment, generating 50,000 AI "fan-out" prompts (the follow-up questions an AI system generates behind the scenes to answer a broader query) across 1,000 subtopics. Researcher Dr. Pete Meyers found that even when a brand and its competitors were deliberately fed into the prompt-generation process as hints, only 12.8% of the resulting prompts ended up mentioning any brand at all. Most of the "conversation" an AI system has with itself while researching an answer never touches brand names — it's about the topic, not the company.

Put together, these numbers suggest that for the large majority of categories and queries, there's no stable "ranking" to track yet, and a fair amount of what a $300/month tool would report back to you is noise from month to month rather than a signal you can act on.

What Google Search Console will (and won't) tell you for free

You don't need a third-party subscription to see some of this. In June 2026, Google added generative AI performance reporting directly to Search Console, at no cost, for sites in the rollout. It's worth knowing exactly what it does and doesn't cover before you assume it replaces a paid tool — or before you assume you need a paid tool to get this data at all.

That's a real limitation. You'll know your pages showed up somewhere in Google's AI features, but not what was asked, what was said about you, or whether a competitor was mentioned instead. Google has also confirmed the rollout is still limited to a subset of sites, starting in the UK, so not every Search Console account has access yet.

A DIY check you can run this week

Before paying for a dedicated platform, there's a manual version of the same exercise that costs nothing but half an hour:

1. Write down the 5–10 questions a real customer would type into ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode when they're close to hiring someone in your category — not generic industry questions, but the actual buying-decision ones ("best [service] in [your industry] for [specific need]").
2. Ask each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode, in a fresh/incognito session so past history doesn't skew the answer.
3. Record three things for each answer: were you mentioned, were you cited as a source, and was the description of your business accurate.
4. Repeat monthly. Consistency matters more than volume — the Semrush data above shows that a single appearance means very little; a business only "owns" a topic once it shows up reliably across related questions.

This won't give you impression counts or trend charts, but it answers the question that actually matters for a small or mid-sized business: not "what's my score," but "if a customer asked, would I show up, and would the answer be right."

When a paid tool is actually worth it

None of this means AI visibility tools are a bad purchase for everyone. They start to earn their cost once a few things are true for your business:

• You compete in a category with real commercial stakes per lead (legal, healthcare, financial services, high-ticket home services) where losing a recommendation to a competitor is expensive.
• You operate across enough locations, product lines, or service categories that manually checking prompts monthly isn't realistic.
• You already have a working SEO and content program in place, and AI visibility tracking would be additive intelligence — not a replacement for the fundamentals.

If none of those apply yet, the DIY check above, combined with Search Console's free reporting, covers most of what a small business actually needs to know for now.

What actually moves the needle

Both studies point to the same underlying lever: AI systems build their answers from sources they consider trustworthy on a given topic, and a citation on a well-regarded third-party site does more for visibility than anything you can change on your own homepage alone. That's a case for two things that predate the "AI visibility" trend by years: getting accurate, consistent coverage from other reputable sites in your industry (what's traditionally called digital PR or earned media), and making sure your own site's content clearly and accurately describes what you do, so that when an AI system — or a person — does land on it, the description holds up.

Our SEO services work is built around exactly this: earning the kind of third-party visibility that both AI systems and traditional search reward, rather than chasing a vanity metric that resets every month. If your own site's content is thin or outdated, that's also worth fixing first — our content creation work focuses on making sure what's on your pages actually describes your business accurately, which matters whether the reader is a person or a language model. None of that helps if AI crawlers can't reach or parse your site in the first place, so it's also worth confirming the technical basics are solid — our website development work covers exactly that groundwork.

Takeaway

The AI visibility tool market grew fast, but the research these same companies have published shows the underlying signal is still noisy: most categories don't have a stable "winner," most AI-generated questions never mention a brand, and even Google's own free reporting only shows impressions, not the full picture. For most small and mid-sized businesses, a monthly manual check plus free Search Console data will tell you what you need to know for now. If you want help figuring out whether your business is showing up accurately — in AI answers or regular search — get in touch and we'll walk through it with you.

FAQ

Do I need to buy an AI visibility tool right now?

Not necessarily. Unless you're in a high-stakes category with real per-lead value, or managing visibility across many locations or product lines, a monthly manual check across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode plus free Search Console data covers most of what a small business needs.

What does Google Search Console's new AI report actually show?

Impressions, which pages appeared, country, and device — for sites in Google's limited June 2026 rollout. It does not show click-through rate, the specific questions asked, or which AI-generated answer your page appeared in.

Can my business be recommended by AI without my website being cited?

Yes. AI systems can name your business while citing a different source, like a directory or review site, for the underlying information. That's still a form of visibility, even though it won't show up in your website analytics.

How often should I check my AI visibility manually?

Monthly, using the same set of buying-decision questions each time. A single appearance in an AI answer means very little on its own — research from Semrush found that reliable, repeated appearance across related questions is what separates a real "topic owner" from a one-off mention.

Does having good SEO automatically improve AI visibility?

It helps, but it's not the same thing. AI systems weigh third-party coverage and how consistently other trusted sites describe your business, alongside your own site's content. A strong SEO and digital PR foundation supports AI visibility, but ranking well in traditional search doesn't guarantee an AI system will recommend you by name.

Does Your Website Need an llms.txt File? Google Says No

by iajyhooda | Aug 7, 2026 | SEO

Over the past few months, llms.txt has become one of those things that shows up in every SEO newsletter, every LinkedIn post, and eventually in a message from a client asking why their site doesn't have one.

The pitch is appealing. Add a single Markdown file to your root directory, and AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google's AI Overviews will understand your site better and cite you more often. It sounds like robots.txt for the AI era.

There's now enough evidence to answer the question properly. The short version: for the vast majority of businesses, llms.txt is not worth your time. Google has said so directly, and the crawl data backs it up.

What llms.txt Was Supposed to Do

The llms.txt specification proposes a Markdown file at your domain root — yoursite.com/llms.txt — containing a curated summary of your site with links to your most important pages.

The reasoning behind it is sound. Large language models work within a limited context window. HTML pages are full of navigation, scripts, cookie banners, and markup that waste that budget. A clean Markdown summary would, in theory, let an AI system grasp your site efficiently.

It's a genuinely reasonable idea. The problem is that nobody with a major AI crawler agreed to read it.

What Google Actually Said

This is where the case falls apart. Google's AI optimisation guidance, updated in June 2026, states it plainly:

You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn't use them.

That's not ambiguous. Google's own AI-features documentation lists llms.txt among tactics you do not need for AI Overviews or AI Mode.

Gary Illyes said at Search Central Live in July 2025 that Google does not support llms.txt and has no plans to. When John Mueller was asked whether Google publishing its own llms.txt file counted as an endorsement, his answer was about as direct as Google gets: "I'm tempted to say something snarky since this has come up so often, but to be direct, no."

Mueller also drew a comparison worth sitting with — he likened llms.txt to the old keywords meta tag: a file where a site declares what it's about, when the search engine would rather just read the site and decide for itself.

Anyone who was doing SEO in 2009 knows how that story ended. Self-reported relevance signals get ignored, because they're trivially gamed.

The Crawl Data Is Worse Than the Statements

Official positions are one thing. Actual bot behaviour is another, and it's more damning. An analysis of 137,000 websites found:

Read that second row again. Nearly every llms.txt file that exists has never been fetched — not by Google, not by OpenAI, not by Anthropic, not by Perplexity.

These aren't files that got crawled and ignored. They were never opened at all. A quarter of the web built a door that nobody has knocked on.

If you want to check this on your own site, don't take anyone's word for it. Open your raw server access logs and search for requests to /llms.txt. On the sites we've looked at, the count is almost always zero. That's a five-minute check, and it's more persuasive than any blog post — including this one.

So Why Does Everyone Keep Talking About It?

Three reasons, and none of them are "it works."

It's easy to sell. "Add this file" is a concrete, cheap deliverable. It looks like progress on an invoice. Real AI visibility work — earning citations, building genuine subject authority, getting mentioned on sites that models actually train on and retrieve from — is slow and much harder to package.

Tools shipped support for it. Yoast added an llms.txt feature. Various generators appeared. Once tooling exists, adoption follows, and adoption gets mistaken for effectiveness. The file being easy to create says nothing about whether it's read.

Correlation gets misread as causation. Sites that publish llms.txt tend to be run by teams who follow SEO closely and do a lot of other things well. When those sites show up in AI answers, the file gets the credit that belongs to the underlying content quality and authority.

What Actually Influences AI Visibility

The uncomfortable answer is that it looks a lot like good SEO — which is roughly what Google has been saying all along.

Ahrefs recently studied 331,000 pages and reached a conclusion worth repeating: Google doesn't punish AI content, it punishes bad content. The same principle applies here. There's no file that substitutes for being genuinely worth citing.

What does move the needle:

1. Content that answers a question completely and can be quoted. AI systems extract passages. Clear, self-contained, factually accurate sections get pulled; rambling ones don't.
2. Being mentioned elsewhere. Models retrieve from and are trained on the wider web. Getting cited on sites that already have authority matters far more than anything in your root directory. This is digital PR and content strategy work, not a technical checkbox.
3. A site that renders fast and clean. If your key content only appears after heavy JavaScript execution, retrieval systems may never see it. This is ordinary technical site quality, and it was already worth fixing.
4. Structured data. Unlike llms.txt, Schema.org markup is documented, actively consumed, and used by Google. If you want a machine-readable file that genuinely gets read, this is the one.
5. Clear, consistent entity information. Who you are, what you do, and where — stated the same way across your site and off it.

None of that is new. That's rather the point. The teams doing well in AI search are largely the teams that were already doing the fundamentals properly.

The Honest Recommendation

Skip it — for now.

If you have a spare ten minutes and a developer already in the codebase, adding an llms.txt file is harmless. It won't hurt your rankings. Google has said it's "fine," which is a long way from saying it's useful.

But if creating and maintaining one would take real hours, displace other work, or appear as a line item on an agency invoice — that's a bad trade. You'd be maintaining a second copy of your site structure that must be kept in sync, in exchange for no demonstrated benefit.

The exception: if you run developer-facing documentation, there's a real case. Tools like Cursor and Claude Code can be pointed at documentation directly, and some documentation platforms have adopted the format meaningfully. If your users are developers who will actively feed your docs to an AI coding assistant, llms.txt may earn its keep. That's a genuine use case — it's just not the one being marketed to most businesses.

Revisit if this changes: if OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google announce official support, the maths changes overnight. It's worth watching. It's not worth pre-emptively building for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Google use llms.txt?

No. Google's AI-features documentation, updated June 2026, states that Google Search does not use machine-readable AI text files, and Gary Illyes confirmed there are no plans to support it. Google publishes its own llms.txt file, but John Mueller has explicitly said this is not an endorsement.

Will adding an llms.txt file hurt my SEO?

No. It's a static file that search engines ignore. There's no ranking penalty. The cost is the time spent creating and maintaining it, not any risk to your rankings.

Do ChatGPT or Claude read llms.txt?

There's no confirmed automatic support from any major AI provider. The crawl data is the clearest signal here — in a study of 137,000 sites, 97% of published llms.txt files were never requested by any bot at all.

What should I do instead to show up in AI answers?

Focus on content that's genuinely quotable and complete, earning mentions on authoritative third-party sites, fast clean rendering, and Schema.org structured data. These are documented, actively consumed signals — unlike llms.txt.

Is llms.txt the same as robots.txt?

No. robots.txt is a long-established standard that crawlers genuinely obey and that controls access. llms.txt is a proposed format that suggests content, and major AI crawlers have not adopted it.

The Takeaway

llms.txt is a sensible idea that hasn't been adopted by the systems it was designed for. Google has said it doesn't use it. The crawl logs show almost nobody else does either.

Being cited by AI systems comes from the same place it always has: being genuinely useful, clearly structured, and referenced by other people. There's no file you can upload that shortcuts that.

If you're unsure where your site actually stands in AI search — as opposed to where a checklist says it should — get in touch. We'll look at your real server logs and tell you honestly what's worth fixing.

How Much Do SEO Services Cost?

by iajyhooda | Feb 1, 2024 | SEO

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, where online visibility can make or break a business, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has emerged as a critical tool for success. It's the secret sauce that ensures your website not only exists but thrives amidst the vast expanse of the internet. Yet, as businesses navigate this digital frontier, one question consistently looms large: "How much do SEO services cost?"

Understanding SEO Services

What is SEO?

• Start by defining SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as the practice of optimizing your website and online content to improve its visibility in search engine results.
• Explain that the primary goal of SEO is to increase organic (non-paid) traffic to your website.

The Role of SEO in Online Visibility

• Emphasize the importance of SEO in today's digital age, where the majority of online experiences begin with a search engine query.
• Discuss how SEO helps businesses and websites rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), leading to increased exposure and potential customer engagement.

Aspects of SEO

On-Page SEO

• Define on-page SEO as the practice of optimizing individual web pages to improve their search engine ranking.
• Mention key elements of on-page SEO, such as keyword optimization, meta tags, and content quality.

Off-Page SEO

• Explain off-page SEO as the efforts made outside your website to improve its visibility and authority.
• Discuss backlinks (external links pointing to your site), social media, and online reputation management as key components of off-page SEO.

Technical SEO

• Introduce technical SEO as the optimization of your website's technical elements to improve its search engine performance.
• Mention technical aspects like website speed, mobile-friendliness, site architecture, and XML sitemaps.

Factors Influencing SEO Costs

Competition Level

The SEO Arena

• Describe the competitive landscape within the digital realm, where businesses vie for top positions in search results.
• Explain how the level of competition in your industry or niche can significantly affect the cost of SEO services.
• Use examples or statistics to illustrate the varying degrees of competition across industries.

Geographic Location

Location Matters

• Discuss how the geographic location of your business and target audience plays a pivotal role in SEO pricing.
• Explain that businesses in highly competitive or densely populated areas may face higher SEO costs.
• Highlight the importance of local SEO for businesses targeting a specific geographical area.

Business Goals

Tailoring SEO to Objectives

• Explore how the specific goals and objectives of a business can influence the SEO strategy and, consequently, pricing.
• Discuss common objectives like increasing website traffic, generating leads, or boosting e-commerce sales.
• Mention that different goals may require varying levels of SEO effort and investment.

Current Website Condition

The State of Your Digital Home

• Describe how the existing condition of a website is a critical factor in determining SEO costs.
• Discuss factors like site structure, content quality, and technical issues that can impact SEO.
• Explain that websites in need of extensive optimization may require more time and resources, affecting pricing.

Types of SEO Pricing Models

Monthly Retainer

Consistent SEO Support

• Define the concept of a monthly retainer in the context of SEO services.
• Explain that a monthly retainer involves an ongoing partnership with an SEO agency or consultant.
• Describe how clients pay a predetermined monthly fee for continuous SEO support.

Project-Based

SEO Projects and Specific Tasks

• Discuss the project-based pricing model for SEO, which is suitable for one-time projects or specific tasks.
• Explain that project-based pricing involves a fixed fee for a defined scope of work.
• Give examples of SEO projects, such as website audits, keyword research, or content optimization, that can be priced using this model.

Hourly Rates

Paying by the Hour

• Describe how some SEO consultants or agencies charge clients based on hourly rates.
• Explain that hourly rates are typically applied to tasks or consultations that don't fit neatly into a retainer or project-based structure.
• Highlight that hourly rates can vary based on the experience and expertise of the SEO professionals.

As you contemplate your SEO journey, remember that there's no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of SEO costs. Your unique needs and budget should be the guiding factors in your decision-making process.

Should you have further questions or require assistance in navigating the SEO landscape, don't hesitate to reach out to us. We're here to help you achieve your online goals and ensure that your business thrives in the ever-evolving digital realm. Your success is our mission, and we look forward to being your trusted partner in this exciting journey.