Author: Logan

When ChatGPT tells people where to shop or what to buy, a handful of brands get named again and again. We counted how many of 5.5 million US ChatGPT answers mention each brand. Walmart comes first, named in 95,605 answers, almost twice as many as second-placed Target. Stores take six of the top 10 spots.…

ChatGPT gets its information from four places: Data it was trained on before release Live web searches it runs when it needs current facts Content from publishers OpenAI pays to license Your own context, i.e., your prompt, files, memory, and connected apps Which one it uses depends on your question. Can a website influence it?…

OpenAI has signed content deals with more than 20 publishers since 2023, from the Associated Press to Vogue’s owner, Condé Nast. Each deal works roughly the same way: the publisher licenses its content to OpenAI, and ChatGPT shows summaries of that content with attribution and a link back to the source. That makes these publishers…

How have click-through rates changed since AI Overviews appeared? Which websites does ChatGPT cite most often? How do query fanout, RAG, and other AI search complexities actually work? Research is how you answer these questions, and how you keep up with what’s changing in AI search. These are the 25 people publishing the most original…

“Mentions are the new links” has become one of the most repeated phrases in AI search. But which kind of mention? In our previous research, we analyzed different brand factors alongside AI visibility—including web mentions, anchors, search volume, number of referring domains and so on. This time, we zeroed in on brand mention types. We…

When Clearscope first came out, I became a power user almost immediately. I was writing and optimizing dozens of SEO articles, and it saved me masses of time: type in a keyword, and it pulled the top-ranking pages, worked out the topics they had in common, and showed me how well my draft lined up…

BLUF stands for “bottom line up front”. You put your main point (or conclusion or key finding) in the first sentence, then the detail the reader needs to act on it, then background only if they need it. It comes from the US Army, whose writing regulation tells soldiers to put “the main point at…

Treat citation volatility as normal. It seems to be a built-in trait of AI answers, and it may change significantly with model updates. So, aim to appear more often over time, not to hold every citation without interruption. Because of that, AI citations might not be a great AEO KPI—brand mentions make a better candidate…

We’ve got 5 updates this month, from a brand-new AI Discoverability category in Site Audit to Page types in Site Explorer, and more. Site Audit AI Discoverability issues AI Discoverability is a new issue category in Site Audit. It checks whether AI crawlers like ChatGPT and Claude can reach, read, and cite your pages. If…

Gone are the days of compounding search traffic, ordinal search rankings, forecasting based on predictable click-through and conversion rates. Today, your content pages are grist for the AI mill, their contents scraped from the page, blended together with competing pages, and shown to the user—if you’re lucky—in a context and format controlled entirely by a…