The Blog
Notes on AEO, GEO, and building for AI search agents.
·4 min readGoogle Just Auto-Migrated Your Search Campaigns to AI Max. Microsoft Made It Opt-In. That Contrast Matters.
Starting September 1, 2026, Google began automatically upgrading Search campaigns using Broad Match or Automatically Created Assets to AI Max. Microsoft rolled out its own AI Max the same month - but kept it optional. Here's what the auto-migration actually changes, and why the two companies chose differently.
·4 min readGoogle's August 2026 Spam Update Made Headlines. AI Mode's Default Expansion Is the Bigger Story.
Google's third confirmed spam update of 2026 knocked 16.71% of top-10 URLs beyond position 100. But a quieter structural shift is happening underneath it: AI Mode now expands by default on more queries, pushing the organic results you're still ranking for further down the page than ever.
·4 min readReddit's ChatGPT Citations Fell 86% in Four Days. Here's the Actual Mechanism.
Reddit's share of ChatGPT Search citations dropped from 3.83% to 0.52% between August 14-17, 2026, per tracking from AI visibility platform Promptwatch. The cause traces to a query fan-out change, not a manual deranking - and it's a sharp illustration of how fragile any single-source citation share really is.
·4 min readA 5.35 Million-Citation Study Just Measured the SEO-to-AI Citation Gap
Kingsworth Research's September 2026 analysis of 5.35 million citations found non-paid, third-party sources drive 94-95% of AI citations, with journalism alone accounting for roughly 27%. Here's what the data actually shows - and where the 'SEO is dead' framing overreaches.
·4 min readThe EU Just Called ChatGPT a Search Engine. That's Not a Technicality.
On August 31, 2026, the European Commission designated ChatGPT a Very Large Online Search Engine under the DSA - the same legal category as Google Search and Bing. Here's what the classification logic means for every AI answer engine, not just OpenAI's.
·3 min read4 Free Tools to Check If Your Site Is Actually Visible to AI
We shipped four free, no-signup tools that each answer a different piece of one question: what does an AI crawler actually receive when it requests your page? No LLM calls, no credit card, no crippled trials.
·4 min readMost AI Crawler Blocks Were Never a Decision
Why robots.txt alone doesn't tell you whether GPTBot or PerplexityBot can read your site - and how to check what your CDN is doing underneath it, for free.
·5 min readWe Built an llms.txt Generator. Here's What It Won't Tell You
A free tool that generates a real llms.txt from your sitemap - plus an honest look at what the file is for, what it isn't, and which AI crawlers actually read it today.
- ·5 min read
What an AI Crawler Actually Sees On Your Page
We built a free tool that shows the raw text GPTBot recovers from your page, side by side with what your browser renders - and the gap is usually bigger than people expect.
·3 min readWhy We Gave Away the Thing We Usually Charge For
The case for a free AI visibility check with no signup wall - and what building it taught us about how many sites are invisible to AI crawlers for one avoidable reason.
·3 min readGetBotRank Now Speaks MCP: Let Your AI Agent Fix What the Audit Finds
A new remote MCP server lets Claude, Lovable MCP, Webflow AI, or any MCP client pull your page-audit issues straight into its own context - and fix them without you copy-pasting a report.
- ·3 min read
Introducing a Free, No-Signup AI Visibility Check
Run a free instant check for the structural issues keeping AI crawlers from reading your site - no account required, full report by email.
- ·4 min read
ChatGPT Now Sells Ads - Which Makes Your Organic AI Visibility More Valuable, Not Less
OpenAI's Sponsored Recommendations hit $100M in annualized revenue within six weeks of launch. Here's why that makes earning an organic citation more important than ever, not less.
·4 min readAdobe Just Validated AI Brand Visibility as a Category - Here's What That Means for You
Adobe's June 2026 launch of Brand Visibility, built on its Semrush acquisition and 289 million AI prompts, confirms that tracking how brands show up in AI answers is now core marketing infrastructure.
- ·5 min read
AI Crawlers Are Already Here: A Practical Guide to robots.txt and llms.txt
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot are crawling your site right now. What actually controls whether they can read it, where llms.txt fits, and where it doesn't.
·4 min readYour AI Referral Traffic Is Hiding in 'Direct' - Here's How to Find It
GA4 quietly undercounts traffic from ChatGPT and Perplexity because so many AI referrals arrive with no referrer at all. What's actually happening, and how to build a channel view you can trust.
- ·4 min read
SEO, AEO, and GEO Aren't Separate Funnels - One Feeds the Other
Why ranking well in classic search is still the foundation AI agents build on, and how to monitor visibility across both before a drop costs you citations.
·3 min readWhat We Learned Auditing 100 Sites for AI Visibility
Patterns from running GetBotRank audits across 100 sites - what predicted citation rate, and what turned out not to matter.
·4 min readGetBotRank vs Peec AI: Which AI Visibility Platform Fits Your Team?
A feature-by-feature comparison of GetBotRank and Peec AI for tracking and improving brand visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI answer engines.
·4 min readGetBotRank vs Profound: Comparing AI Visibility Platforms
How GetBotRank stacks up against Profound on pricing, engine coverage, content tooling, and monitoring for AI answer-engine visibility.
- ·3 min read
You Can't Optimize What You Can't Measure: The GEO Analytics Problem
Traditional analytics don't see AI citations. Here's why that gap exists and how to start closing it.
·3 min readChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini Are the New Homepage
AI answer engines are becoming a primary discovery surface, not a niche one - here's what the traffic shift actually looks like and why it matters now.
- ·3 min read
How to Structure Content So LLMs Actually Cite It
The concrete formatting, structure, and semantic patterns that make a page legible - and citable - to AI answer engines.