Why ChatGPT's Most Cited Pages Don't Rank on Google (And What Does)

The most interesting thing is Google has just made SEO a positioning game again. So if we look at what Lily Rae here said, so she says, Google just put out its first official article on optimizing for AI search, AEO/Geo. The TL;DR, too long, didn't read, is SEO still the foundation for AI search? Wow. Right. That's like, you know, that's kind of a joke a little bit, but create non-commodity people-first content, right? Yeah. Ignore most geo AEO hacks like chunking and LLMs.txt. So the first 2 here, when I say it's a joke, I'm not talking about Lily Ray here. I'm just saying that these things SEOs have known for a very long time, that these SEO and AEO geo, they kind of go hand in hand. And when you're talking about creating non-commodity people-first content, that's ever since the very first day I started learning SEO, it's been like that. And then all these other hacks over here, they don't matter that much. At least that's what Google is saying, right? With these LLMs.txt and chunking. That's the first piece. You have any reactions to this one before I move to the next one?

Yeah, and when Lily Rae's posting this, she's not saying this is how you win in this new AEO or GEO world. She's just summarizing what Google puts out, right? So Google will tell you what they want, their narrative. It doesn't mean that they're going to tell you everything. It also doesn't mean that they're hiding anything either. I do believe SEO is still the foundation. There are some nuances and some differences, but it still is a foundation and you had to create amazing content that people haven't seen before that they want to engage with. And I think if you do that, it'll start doing really well in the LLMs as well. People really struggle with number 2. I don't think too many people have an issue with the fundamentals of SEO because it's been around for a long time, but they do struggle on the content side because content marketing has been around for so long. It's more and more competitive and there's already a lot of information on the web. So you have an issue of regurgitation and people are tired of the same stuff over and over again.

Cool. And so by the way, Tim Soulo shared this and this happened June 2nd. He got a million views on this. So in the last 6 months, Ahrefs, we analyzed over 1 billion data points across 14 studies. And here's what we learned about AI search optimization. Number 1, best X long Uh, sorry, best X blog listicles are the single most prominent content format cited by AI chatbots. They make up 44% of all pages cited by ChatGPT specifically. Number 2, 67% of ChatGPT's top 1,000 citations come from sources marketers can't influence. Number 1 is Wikipedia, 30%. Homepages, 24%. App stores, 6.6%. Only 32% are influenceable content like educational pages, reviews, News and blog posts. I'm going to read one more here and then we can, we can talk about this.

Read them all. Read them all.

Yeah, there's like 10 here. Okay, I'm going to read 3. You can read the rest. 3, 28.3% of ChatGPT's most cited pages have zero Google organic visibility. These pages get cited repeatedly by ChatGPT despite not ranking in Google at all. A completely separate discovery layer. Okay, that's interesting. Number 4, ChatGPT only cites about 50% of the URLs it retrieves. It fetches dozens of pages per query, but uses half as background context without attribution. This means that being retrieved and being cited are very different things. Number 5, before I turn it over to Neil to read the next 5. Number 5, adding schema markup had zero impactful, meaningful impact on AI citations. AI Overviews actually dipped 4.6%, while AI Mode 2.4% and ChatGPT 2.2% showed changes indistinguishable from zero. Okay, let's get to the next.

Number 6, YouTube mentions have the highest correlation, 0.737, with AI-branded visibility out of all the factors we studied, including all the conventional SEO metrics like backlinks, page count, domain rating, et cetera. This held true for both Google-owned and OpenAI products. Number 7, AI overviews reduced clicks to the number 1 result by 58%. That's up from 34.5% just 10 months earlier. This trend is accelerating. Number 8, 99% of AI Overviews appear on informational intent queries. Transactional, navigational, and local searches are almost entirely AI Overview-free. Shopping triggers AI Overviews just 3.2% of the time. Number 9, for a given search query, Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews reach the same conclusions 86% of the time. But cite almost entirely different sources. Only 13.7% citation overlap. Number 10, AI overviews change every 2.15 days on average, with 70% of the content differing between consecutive observations, but semantic similarity stays at 0.95. The words, the sources, the entities constantly shuffle. But the actual meaning barely moves.

By the way, for number 8, it's 99.9%. So basically 100% of AI overviews appear on informational intent queries. I think this is good data, by the way. This is really good. So where do we want to start first? I think this was a surprise to me, number 5, adding schema markup had zero, zero meaningful impact on AI citation. So all the stuff like AEOs, SEOs like to talk about, you know, that was a little surprising to me.

Well, here's clarification here, Eric. He's talking specifically about AI citations. It doesn't— he's not saying it doesn't impact them pulling your content. This is just citing.

So that's why it was surprising me. I didn't read it right.

Right? Okay. Because— but we're all optimizing for citations. We're not optimizing for them pulling from you and not citing you.

Yep. Number 6, YouTube mentions had the highest correlation with AI brand visibility out of all the factors we included. So, I mean, it depends. I mean, you know, with Google-owned products, and it's also true for OpenAI products and I think we revealed this in the last HubSpot that we talked about. I think we like, we pointed out the graph where it's like the top 3 sources are, they're interchangeable, like the rankings shift, but Reddit, YouTube, and Wikipedia. So that makes a lot of sense. What else is interesting to you here?

Well, number 8 is interesting for me because I think it's going to change. So this, Eric and I know, in which AORVs really only appear on informational intent queries. It's the number 1 area where they appear. You don't really see them much on transactional navigation on local searches, which we've seen. But here's the kicker. Tim mentioned shopping triggers AI Overviews just 3.2% of the time. I'm not saying AI Overviews are going to appear more for shopping-related queries. I do believe shopping is going to change because of how Google released their new search features with agents. Eric, if you want to open up a new tab And we can show people on the screen here on what we're talking about.

Which tab? What do you want me to open?

Just a new tab. You know, from the Google I/O Marketing Live in which they talked about the new search tab and shopping features? Did you see that article? And they used the dresses example, find me this dress but in this color, and they uploaded 2 images and then agent just goes out and finds it.

Find me a blue dress for a wedding. You mean like dragging something in?

But it's okay. So, uh, go back really quickly. Okay, so there's a plus button that's being highlighted, right? You saw the Google colors right there. You can actually upload images. So you can upload 2 images. You would upload the first image. Eric's using a blue dress as an example. So you would upload the dress you're looking for, like the style. The second image that you could upload is maybe the color of the fabric. And you can say, find me a dress that looks like this, but in the color red, or you can upload a picture of the specific fabric you want and Google will just go and find it. And you're seeing it right here on the screen. So Eric uploaded an image of a blue dress and it's showing you all the places with a similar style that sell that dress.

Oh, that's pretty cool. You want me to buy you a dress?

I think I'm good on the dress end, but appreciate the offer.

Anyway.

What's cool about this is this is how I think shopping's going to be affected, not necessarily by AI overviews, but the 10 blue links are, and even the shopping category is going to be really affected by people just typing in exactly what they want. Not only can you describe it now in words, you can upload multiple images, not just one. You can say, I like this dress style in this color, but I want it this dress length. So 3 different images. One image with dress length, one image on the color, one image on the style, and it will go scour the web and find you all the ones for sale that might be right for you. And you can even tell it the size you want and the price range, and it'll go figure it all out for you. That's going to change shopping.

It happened very quickly too. So that's awesome. Cool.

A few seconds. It didn't take long at all. It was quick.

Yeah, I think so. By the way, I mean, I just want to call out the fact that this post, Because I think Tim does well on X, but I think this is one of his better ones. When you're super data dense like this and you have a couple of interesting points here, this is very shareable. You got 7,000 bookmarks on it. I just retweeted it myself, a million views on it. I think that's great.

Yes. Quick break.

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And if it sucks, just cancel.

But I don't think you will. Cool. All right, let's move to the next topic here. So, Neil, let's just talk about your— every time you travel or I travel, we should talk about what we're doing. So what are you doing in Jakarta right now? What are the lessons from this week? What are the conversations that are happening right now? Tell us, fill us in.

Sure. So a few things. I left on Sunday. No, Monday. Yeah, I think I left on Monday. Left on Monday from London or LA to London. Landed in London Tuesday night, spoke at South by Southwest Wednesday. Wednesday night I flew from London to Jakarta. I had to go through Dubai, so it was a little bit of a long flight because there's not a flight.

Cool.

But Emirates is nice and it was really cheap, dude. How much do you think my round trip from London going through Dubai to Jakarta first class and going first class from Jakarta to Dubai to Rio was in cost. The Dubai to Rio— Jakarta to Dubai, I think, is around 8 hours. Dubai to Rio is 15. So I got both those legs, Dubai-Rio, uh, I mean, yeah, Jakarta to Rio and London to Jakarta, right? How much?

I'm going to say the way you're saying it right now, because it's Emirates first class as well, or you had pretty good first class, I want to say $7,000.

Close. $8,000.

Yeah, that's a good deal.

I don't— yeah, you're talking about normally a plane ticket that would have been $25,000, $30,000. Exactly.

Yeah. And so that's a good deal.

It's a good deal. And sadly, I think it's because of war and not everyone wants to fly through some of these regions.

Nobody wants to go through Dubai right now. You crazy?

Yeah. And I think that's why it was so cheap for a first-class ticket. Um, so why am I doing all this traveling? London was South by Southwest. We tend to do it because more branding for our European agencies. Indonesia, we have an APAC division, but we don't do tons of business in Indonesia. The GDP per capita isn't too high. I'm not trying to talk trash, I'm just telling you the real reality. So we just don't see companies spending as much in marketing. And I haven't actually flown to Indonesia before, but my team's talked about buying an agency in Indonesia multiple times because they're like, oh, it's going to be the next big region. in APAC, and agencies have been saying that for a long time. And I was like, you know what? I have the opportunity to go. Let me just go. There's going to be 5,000 people at this conference, so I'll end up seeing what they're doing, seeing some of the companies. I'll meet a lot of the sponsors. I'll get to know the lay of the land. And then from there, I'll head to Reel for Web Summit. Reel for Web Summit is one of our better events of the year that we tend to speak at. Because when you look at most Web Summit events, they bring in massive crowds and they come from all parts of the world. The Portugal one's really good. The Canada one, it used to be called Collision. They changed it to Web Summit Vancouver. I used to prefer Collision Toronto. It was still owned by them. It was bigger than Web Summit Vancouver, although they're probably working on building it up.

Why aren't you going to Cannes?

Cannes is more creative. We do creative stuff like we did stuff with Formula 1, WNBA, Trojan Condoms recently. The list goes on and on on the creative campaigns that we do, but just being very transparent in the agency world for anyone who has an agency or is looking to hire one, there's not much money to be made on creative. It's not because of AI either. Even after AI, you know, and before AI, there still wasn't a lot of money to be made on creative. And the reason I say that is creative is in the eye of the beholder. So if Eric hires NP Digital to do his creative, I can say we created something amazing. Eric has his own taste. He could say he dislikes it or likes it and wants another version or tweaks or whatever it may be. And because of that, because it's in the eye of the beholder, and when you work with large organizations that have tons of people who are meddling and getting involved in the creatives, The margins just suck. And it's not just us. Most creative agencies don't have great margins, but you have to offer creative solutions to get the rest of the contract, which is why we acquired a creative agency years ago. But the reason we're not at Cannes is it's a low margin, you know, side of the business for us. And most of the people who are at Cannes are going there to party and have fun. So you tend not to pick up a ton of business from what we've seen.

Exactly. So I was at an event last week and then a couple of entrepreneurs asked, oh, you can, makes a lot of sense. I'm like, no, no, it doesn't. I'm like, I'm not there. Like more power to you if you want to party. I'm just not there to party. Like if I'm going to travel, I want to either it's for vacation. I mean, there to like, you know, have good food or I'm there to do business and then meet with some people and then get out of there, which is what Neil does 99% of the time. So.

Yeah. The flight attendants or yeah, flight attendants, think I'm crazy because a lot of times, A, I think I fly more than most flight attendants. I'm pretty sure on that, the amount of hours that I clock. And B, I see a lot of the flight attendants like multiple times. Like even on my trip to Jakarta from London, flight attendants said goodbye and I was like, oh, I'll probably see you tomorrow. And they're like, you're leaving tomorrow? I was like, yeah. Same with when I was in Hong Kong the other day. I left on a Monday afternoon. I think it was a United flight, like around 10, 11 AM. Got there Tuesday sometime their time. Wednesday I spoke, did my meetings, and I flew right back and I was home Wednesday night because of the time change. And the flight attendant's like, you're on our flight again? But that's normal. And then I was home for a few days and then I was off on the road again.

I'm surprised you don't get sick more because this stuff really screws with your immune system.

Dude, you want to know the secret? It's changed everything in my immune system. Vitamin D drops. I'm not trying to give health advice to anyone, but, uh, Jacob, you know Jacob who has the—

Yeah, yeah, I talked, I talked to him earlier this week. Uh, I'm getting some hookups on peptides. Shout out to Jacob and Abud. Abud just did the Andrew Huberman podcast, and I'm getting some, some peptides. Yeah.

So Jacob ran some tests on me. Uh, we've been paying him for many, many years, and he's just like, dude, you get sick a lot. And I was like, Are you asking me a question? He's like, no, you get sick a lot. And I'm like, how'd you know? He's like, the vitamin, I think D level was really low in me. And he's just like, that's the number one reason we know if people get sick a lot, especially when they're traveling. He's like, you need these vitamin D drops. He doesn't sell them. He's like, just go on Amazon and buy them. Here's some few brands that you can pick from. I bought one and I've been using it for years and I take a lot of the drops, maybe more than I need to. Again, not medical advice here, and that stopped me from getting sick, I would probably say 9 out of 10 times.

You got to be careful because I did the same. Like, my vitamin D was really low, but you can also go too high on it too because you got to do your blood draws. But I will say, to your point, Neil, I was low on vitamin D maybe 3, 4 years ago. I haven't really been sick for 3, 4 years. So, you know, there's a trend there. Not health advice, guys, but Um, it's just what worked for us. Anyway, thank you all for listening. Um, hope you enjoyed it. Uh, please don't forget to rate, view, and subscribe, and we will see you tomorrow. Bye.