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Joined May 2020
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Cleared Improve retweeted
Wispr Flow, Fish Audio, Cartesia, & now Subvocal.
We’ve generated 60M+ views for voice AI as a category, and we’re just getting started: launchvideo.com
It's been a pleasure working on all of these.
We’ve raised $1.3M from YC & Afore Capital so you never have to type or speak again.
Typing is slow. Talking into your computer is awkward. Subvocal fixes both
Our glasses give you the speed of speech without you making a sound or touching a keyboard.
It tracks your internal speech muscles with non-contact sensing and decodes silent, almost invisible mouthing into text at more than 200 words/min.
Pre-orders are now live at:
subvocal.co/preorder?utm_sou…
Cleared Improve retweeted
Luana Lopes Lara, Kalshi co-founder and the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, was told by experts she had a 0% chance of succeeding
Kalshi just raised an additional $1B, valuing the company at $40B. This will help us expand into stocks, compute, indices, and institutional.
Tomorrow marks 8 years since we got accepted into YC and the journey began.
The odds of a kid from Lebanon getting here were pretty low.
Growing up there was great, but very challenging. We went through war. We had bombs explode in front of my house. I watched brilliant people’s lives destroyed for reasons beyond their control.
Lebanon is an unpredictable country. That unpredictability made it hard to plan for success. And yet despite it all, my mom sacrificed everything to give me and my brother the chance to go back to the US.
I found my refuge in two things: anime and math. Especially math.
I loved math because it calmed me. It was the opposite of unpredictable: clear, deterministic, orderly, and consistent. The proof is either right or wrong. I find that elegant and beautiful.
I was lucky.
I made it to my dream school, MIT (largely thanks to my mom), and my love for math quickly translated to a love for statistics, probability, and markets.
I love markets for a lot of the same reasons. Their incentives are clear: you get rewarded for being right and for pursuing knowledge. They are effective weighting machines for people’s opinions. They provide an incentive to be truthful, because they separate good information from bad information. They let people challenge the consensus and be rewarded for being right.
IMO, Hayek, Surowiecki, Hanson, Tetlock were the founding fathers of prediction markets. The more I read them, the more obsessed I got with the idea of applying market-based pricing to more things.
Markets bring rigor and critical thinking to more questions. And in an increasingly polarized and information-positioned word, I believe we need that more than ever.
Markets would also let people predict and manage more things outside of their control. And the world was becoming increasingly more unpredictable, and more like Lebanon, not less.
That love for markets got Luana and me to build Kalshi.
At first, it was mostly an idea we couldn’t stop talking about. We didn’t have much money. Luana’s sister bought the Kalshi domain name for us (for ~$1.7k). We moved to SF to get started, and embarked on a long, uncertain journey to build a regulated exchange.
The paranoia and anxiety from my childhood never left me. Even when things are going well, I think about what could go wrong. When people trust you with their money, that instinct serves a purpose.
I wanted us to build something that would hold up under pressure.
The first principle we defined at the company: regulatory-first. We worked with regulators for years before we listed a single market. We took every step to do things the right way and always asked for approval before proceeding. It was very hard at times, especially when we were being overtaken by competitors, but we believe doing things the right way matters.
Luana and I aren’t the only ones.
Our team put years of their lives into something far from certain. That’s especially true of Lior, Brandon, Rainer, Luis, Xavier, and Josef, who stuck with us for years. They believed when there was little to point to. And they stuck with us no matter how long it took. Kalshi is the result of an arduous journey through a long desert where, at times, most people didn’t understand why we were making the walk.
Many people still don’t understand what we’re doing and some disagree with us. Markets have historically taken time to be understood and accepted by some. But while not always obvious, their benefits are vast: capital markets help allocate capital and derivative markets help predict and manage uncertainty.
I firmly believe in these benefits, and that’s why I am dedicating my life to building this market.
Markets have caused issues many times in the past, and they certainly can present harms (manipulation, insiders, and addictive behaviors). These harms are more acute for certain types of markets (sports, short-term options, etc.) than others. It’s why I believe that guardrails need to exist and why we have taken the approach we have taken. We have consistently prioritized thinking critically about the risks and building the appropriate safeguards, sometimes beyond what the regulators require us to do. Many believe more needs to be done, and that’s a conversation I welcome.
Over time, I believe more people will see what we see: markets can help us get smarter and manage the future with more rigor, more precision, and more certainty than we have today.
To our tens of millions of users: you have made Kalshi bigger than anything Luana and I could have possibly imagined. Thank you for trusting us and thank you for coming along on the journey. I feel a strong responsibility to build a company worthy of that trust.
I am so lucky to spend my life building something I love. I hope everyone finds something they care about that much. Something that keeps you curious. Something that pushes you to your limits. Something that may put you at odds with the status quo. Something worth the hard days.
For me, it’s still markets. The more I learn, the more I want to understand.
Cleared Improve retweeted
We’ve raised $1.3M from YC & Afore Capital so you never have to type or speak again.
Typing is slow. Talking into your computer is awkward. Subvocal fixes both
Our glasses give you the speed of speech without you making a sound or touching a keyboard.
It tracks your internal speech muscles with non-contact sensing and decodes silent, almost invisible mouthing into text at more than 200 words/min.
Pre-orders are now live at:
subvocal.co/preorder?utm_sou…
Cleared Improve retweeted
Google has revealed the best way to show up in AI Search.
Yes, they finally explicitly addressed how businesses and brands should be getting traffic.
This comes straight from Google’s Brendon Kraham.
Google recently published a new piece called “Good SEO is good GEO.”
Let’s go through it.
By the way, you can see whether your business is appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Grok here. It’s free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
The main point is pretty simple.
Google says its generative AI features are rooted in the same core ranking and quality systems as traditional Search.
AI Mode and AI Overviews retrieve current information from Google’s existing search index.
That matters because a lot of people have spent the last year acting like AI search requires some completely separate playbook.
GEO, AEO, LLM SEO, AI SEO, whatever people want to call it this week.
Google is basically saying the foundation is still SEO.
SEO Stuff (seo-stuff.com) helps businesses navigate this daily.
Obviously, stuff *has* changed.
AI Overviews are changing click behavior, AI Mode is changing how people search and query fan-out means one customer question can become several searches behind the scenes, but the basic requirement is still familiar.
Google needs to be able to crawl your content, understand what it is about, trust it and match it to what the searcher actually wants.
Google’s post also pushes back on a lot of the shortcuts people have been selling.
You do not need awkward content written for bots, artificial snippets everywhere, special AI text files for Google Search or random low-quality mentions sprayed across the web.
That last one is important.
Google says its generative AI features can use information about products and services from across the web, including blogs, videos and forum discussions.
But a fake mention on some random page is not the same as credible coverage, customer proof, expert commentary, useful third-party context or a page that already has authority around the topic.
That is where a lot of bad GEO advice goes wrong.
People hear “AI looks across the web” and assume more mentions automatically means more visibility.
Google’s guidance is much more straightforward: publish fresh and genuinely useful content, contribute something original, demonstrate real expertise, maintain a good website experience and keep your business information accurate across the platforms relevant to you.
For e-commerce, that can include product feeds.
For local businesses, Google Business Profile.
And Search Console and Merchant Center can help you understand whether that work is translating into visibility.
Very normal SEO things and very boring SEO things.
Google also specifically talks about query fan-out. A normal search may involve one query, whereas a complicated AI Mode question can trigger several searches across related subtopics.
If somebody asks for the best payroll software for a construction company with employees and contractors across multiple states, Google may need information about construction payroll, contractor payments, multi-state compliance, pricing, integrations, alternatives and support.
One generic “payroll software” page probably will not cover the whole decision.
A company with useful pages across those different questions has more opportunities to be discovered while Google researches the answer.
That is why “good SEO is good GEO” should not be interpreted as “keep doing the same shallow SEO you were doing in 2019.”
The fundamentals still matter, but the amount and specificity of useful information surrounding the customer’s decision matters more.
This is where SEO Stuff comes in.
The done-for-you package combines 10 AI-search-optimized articles with three DR50+ authority placements:
seo-stuff.com/gold-plan-pack…
The content helps your business cover the problems, use cases, comparisons, pricing, alternatives, objections, case studies, product details and implementation questions customers ask before buying.
The authority placements help strengthen visibility across the trusted web sources search and AI systems use to understand your category.
Google can call it SEO and other people can call it GEO, AEO or AI SEO - the name really does not matter.
If you want visibility in AI Search, build the kind of site and brand Google can crawl, understand, trust and confidently surface when somebody asks a relevant question.
And if you want to see whether your business is already appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Grok, check here:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Not trying to insult anyone but...
B2B SaaS operators on here are *struggling* right now.
They're losing a bunch of $$$ on rising Meta ad costs, blowing cash on influencers with no actual reach and hoping a Product Hunt launch gets them 1,000 paying customers. Good luck.
All this while high-intent buyers are asking Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude which tools they should consider.
SEO Stuff (seo-stuff.com/ai-seo) uses Google and AI search to help companies add serious revenue.
In some cases (scroll down a few tweets), just under $100,000/month.
And if you want to know how your business ranks across Google, ChatGPT, Claude and broader AI search, check here (it's free):
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Alright, let’s start at the top.
Google and AI search both care about trust, albeit in slightly different ways.
Google looks at content quality, keyword alignment, backlinks, topical authority and site structure.
AI systems also look at how people discuss your company across the web, including reviews, articles, podcasts, newsletters, forums, comparison pages and other third-party mentions.
The clearer and more credible your company appears across these sources, the easier it becomes for search and AI systems to understand and recommend it.
First, fix your positioning.
“Project management software” means a lot less in this brave new world than “Project management software for agencies doing X launch videos” does.
“Compliance platform” means less than “Compliance automation software for fintech startups preparing for SOC 2” does.
Your homepage needs to immediately explain who the product is for, what problem it solves, what makes it different, what it integrates with, what outcomes it creates and why buyers should trust it.
If someone cannot understand your product in five seconds, AI systems will struggle too.
Next, build authority outside your own website.
Most SaaS companies think authority means publishing more blog posts, but that is not enough.
Useful authority plays include founder interviews and podcasts with transcripts, original benchmarks, reports and product data, inclusion in “best tools” and category roundups, customer stories on third-party sites, partner pages and integration directories, strong profiles on G2, Capterra and TrustRadius and mentions or backlinks from sites already appearing in Google and AI answers.
These signals help establish what your company does, where it fits and whether its claims are credible.
Now let’s talk keywords.
Broad SaaS keywords are usually dead weight, and what you actually need to rank for the questions buyers ask before booking a demo.
That could include “best CRM for B2B agencies,” “usage-based billing software for SaaS,” “customer onboarding tools with HubSpot integration,” “compliance automation for fintech startups,” “best SOC 2 software for small teams,” “[Your Product] vs [Competitor]” and “is [Brand Name] worth it.”
Look for clear commercial intent, natural-language phrasing and specificity around the product, integration, role or industry.
Then build one strong page for each meaningful intent.
A feature search should lead to a feature page, an industry search should lead to a use-case page, a comparison search should lead to a comparison page and an educational search should lead to a guide, calculator, template or report.
Your commercial pages should clearly explain who the product is for, what problem it solves, what it replaces, which systems it integrates with, how long setup takes, how it compares to alternatives and what it costs.
Include clear screenshots, use cases, customer proof, FAQs and a direct path to pricing, a trial or a demo.
“Work Smarter” tells people a lot less than “Automatically Reconcile Invoices Across Multiple Accounts” tells buyers and search systems exactly what the feature does.
You also need dedicated use-case pages.
That could include “contract automation for HR teams,” “security monitoring for SOC teams,” “customer onboarding software for B2B SaaS” and “compliance automation for healthcare startups.”
Each page should explain the audience’s specific problem, relevant features, integrations, proof and expected outcome.
These pages give you more opportunities to appear when buyers describe the same product in different ways.
Comparison and alternative pages are often where the revenue lives.
People constantly ask AI tools questions like “[Your Product] vs [Competitor],” “best alternatives to [Legacy Tool],” “best [Category] software in 2026,” “best [Category] tools for [Industry]” and “is [Brand] better than [Competitor]?”
Use a quick verdict, pricing and feature comparisons, best-fit use cases, honest limitations, customer proof and a clear CTA.
Do not claim your product wins every category, because a balanced comparison is more believable to buyers and more useful to AI systems.
Content clusters matter too.
A connected group of pages around one commercial topic can establish much stronger authority than a random blog post.
For example, a customer onboarding software cluster might include a complete guide to customer onboarding software, a list of the best onboarding tools for SaaS companies, customer onboarding checklists, onboarding software with HubSpot integration, customer onboarding metrics and a direct comparison between your product and a competitor.
Each page should connect naturally to the relevant feature, use case, comparison or demo page.
Keep the content structured with direct answers, question-based headings, examples, screenshots, comparison tables, credible sources and internal links.
You also need to control branded search.
Create pages targeting questions like “is [Brand Name] legit?”, “[Brand Name] reviews,” “how [Brand Name] works,” “[Brand Name] pricing,” “[Brand Name] vs [Competitor]” and “best [Brand Name] alternatives.”
Buyers are asking these questions whether you create the pages or not, and without clear answers on your own site, Reddit, review platforms and competitors will define the brand for you.
Reviews matter for the same reason.
Encourage customers to mention their use case, industry, team size, integrations and measurable outcome.
“We use [Product] to onboard enterprise healthcare clients across HubSpot and Salesforce” is much more useful than “Great software.”
It clearly explains who uses the product, what they use it for and where it fits.
Also, do not ignore technical SEO in 2026.
Your site should have fast load times, clean URLs, proper canonical tags, strong internal linking, working sitemaps, no unnecessary duplicate pages, clear pricing and security information and access for relevant AI crawlers.
A confusing site structure can bury your best feature, use-case and comparison pages before buyers or search systems ever reach them.
Video can strengthen the same pages.
Create feature explainers, integration demos, use-case walkthroughs, customer stories and comparison videos, then publish transcripts and embed the videos on the relevant pages so the information remains searchable and extractable.
Finally, track what creates pipeline, including branded search growth, AI citations and mentions, commercial page rankings, demo and trial conversion rates, review volume and sentiment, off-site brand mentions and pipeline from organic and AI referral traffic.
And keep "what matters" in mind - a comparison page with 300 qualified visitors may create more revenue than a generic guide with 20,000 readers.
Again, AI systems recommend trusted, well-cited companies.
To build pipeline without relying entirely on paid acquisition and outbound, you need both.
For the done-for-you version, the SEO Stuff Done-For-You package combines backlinks, keyword research and AI-optimized content in one package:
seo-stuff.com/gold-plan-pack…
And to see how your B2B SaaS ranks across Google, ChatGPT, Claude and broader AI search, check here. It’s free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Cleared Improve retweeted
Not trying to insult anyone but...
B2B SaaS operators on here are *struggling* right now.
They're losing a bunch of $$$ on rising Meta ad costs, blowing cash on influencers with no actual reach and hoping a Product Hunt launch gets them 1,000 paying customers. Good luck.
All this while high-intent buyers are asking Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude which tools they should consider.
SEO Stuff (seo-stuff.com/ai-seo) uses Google and AI search to help companies add serious revenue.
In some cases (scroll down a few tweets), just under $100,000/month.
And if you want to know how your business ranks across Google, ChatGPT, Claude and broader AI search, check here (it's free):
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Alright, let’s start at the top.
Google and AI search both care about trust, albeit in slightly different ways.
Google looks at content quality, keyword alignment, backlinks, topical authority and site structure.
AI systems also look at how people discuss your company across the web, including reviews, articles, podcasts, newsletters, forums, comparison pages and other third-party mentions.
The clearer and more credible your company appears across these sources, the easier it becomes for search and AI systems to understand and recommend it.
First, fix your positioning.
“Project management software” means a lot less in this brave new world than “Project management software for agencies doing X launch videos” does.
“Compliance platform” means less than “Compliance automation software for fintech startups preparing for SOC 2” does.
Your homepage needs to immediately explain who the product is for, what problem it solves, what makes it different, what it integrates with, what outcomes it creates and why buyers should trust it.
If someone cannot understand your product in five seconds, AI systems will struggle too.
Next, build authority outside your own website.
Most SaaS companies think authority means publishing more blog posts, but that is not enough.
Useful authority plays include founder interviews and podcasts with transcripts, original benchmarks, reports and product data, inclusion in “best tools” and category roundups, customer stories on third-party sites, partner pages and integration directories, strong profiles on G2, Capterra and TrustRadius and mentions or backlinks from sites already appearing in Google and AI answers.
These signals help establish what your company does, where it fits and whether its claims are credible.
Now let’s talk keywords.
Broad SaaS keywords are usually dead weight, and what you actually need to rank for the questions buyers ask before booking a demo.
That could include “best CRM for B2B agencies,” “usage-based billing software for SaaS,” “customer onboarding tools with HubSpot integration,” “compliance automation for fintech startups,” “best SOC 2 software for small teams,” “[Your Product] vs [Competitor]” and “is [Brand Name] worth it.”
Look for clear commercial intent, natural-language phrasing and specificity around the product, integration, role or industry.
Then build one strong page for each meaningful intent.
A feature search should lead to a feature page, an industry search should lead to a use-case page, a comparison search should lead to a comparison page and an educational search should lead to a guide, calculator, template or report.
Your commercial pages should clearly explain who the product is for, what problem it solves, what it replaces, which systems it integrates with, how long setup takes, how it compares to alternatives and what it costs.
Include clear screenshots, use cases, customer proof, FAQs and a direct path to pricing, a trial or a demo.
“Work Smarter” tells people a lot less than “Automatically Reconcile Invoices Across Multiple Accounts” tells buyers and search systems exactly what the feature does.
You also need dedicated use-case pages.
That could include “contract automation for HR teams,” “security monitoring for SOC teams,” “customer onboarding software for B2B SaaS” and “compliance automation for healthcare startups.”
Each page should explain the audience’s specific problem, relevant features, integrations, proof and expected outcome.
These pages give you more opportunities to appear when buyers describe the same product in different ways.
Comparison and alternative pages are often where the revenue lives.
People constantly ask AI tools questions like “[Your Product] vs [Competitor],” “best alternatives to [Legacy Tool],” “best [Category] software in 2026,” “best [Category] tools for [Industry]” and “is [Brand] better than [Competitor]?”
Use a quick verdict, pricing and feature comparisons, best-fit use cases, honest limitations, customer proof and a clear CTA.
Do not claim your product wins every category, because a balanced comparison is more believable to buyers and more useful to AI systems.
Content clusters matter too.
A connected group of pages around one commercial topic can establish much stronger authority than a random blog post.
For example, a customer onboarding software cluster might include a complete guide to customer onboarding software, a list of the best onboarding tools for SaaS companies, customer onboarding checklists, onboarding software with HubSpot integration, customer onboarding metrics and a direct comparison between your product and a competitor.
Each page should connect naturally to the relevant feature, use case, comparison or demo page.
Keep the content structured with direct answers, question-based headings, examples, screenshots, comparison tables, credible sources and internal links.
You also need to control branded search.
Create pages targeting questions like “is [Brand Name] legit?”, “[Brand Name] reviews,” “how [Brand Name] works,” “[Brand Name] pricing,” “[Brand Name] vs [Competitor]” and “best [Brand Name] alternatives.”
Buyers are asking these questions whether you create the pages or not, and without clear answers on your own site, Reddit, review platforms and competitors will define the brand for you.
Reviews matter for the same reason.
Encourage customers to mention their use case, industry, team size, integrations and measurable outcome.
“We use [Product] to onboard enterprise healthcare clients across HubSpot and Salesforce” is much more useful than “Great software.”
It clearly explains who uses the product, what they use it for and where it fits.
Also, do not ignore technical SEO in 2026.
Your site should have fast load times, clean URLs, proper canonical tags, strong internal linking, working sitemaps, no unnecessary duplicate pages, clear pricing and security information and access for relevant AI crawlers.
A confusing site structure can bury your best feature, use-case and comparison pages before buyers or search systems ever reach them.
Video can strengthen the same pages.
Create feature explainers, integration demos, use-case walkthroughs, customer stories and comparison videos, then publish transcripts and embed the videos on the relevant pages so the information remains searchable and extractable.
Finally, track what creates pipeline, including branded search growth, AI citations and mentions, commercial page rankings, demo and trial conversion rates, review volume and sentiment, off-site brand mentions and pipeline from organic and AI referral traffic.
And keep "what matters" in mind - a comparison page with 300 qualified visitors may create more revenue than a generic guide with 20,000 readers.
Again, AI systems recommend trusted, well-cited companies.
To build pipeline without relying entirely on paid acquisition and outbound, you need both.
For the done-for-you version, the SEO Stuff Done-For-You package combines backlinks, keyword research and AI-optimized content in one package:
seo-stuff.com/gold-plan-pack…
And to see how your B2B SaaS ranks across Google, ChatGPT, Claude and broader AI search, check here. It’s free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Google accidentally revealed how its AI search systems choose which sites to recommend and send traffic to.
Now that none of it is much of a secret anymore, let’s talk about it.
With the new Google Search rolling out as we speak, it has never been more important to understand how to maximize value from this marketing channel.
If you want to see where your site stands across Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and broader AI search, you can do so for free here:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Let’s start from the beginning.
Metehan Yesilyurt, who previously went viral for his analysis of Perplexity’s ranking factors, recently broke down Google AI ranking factors in a fascinating blog post.
A lot of what he found also lines up with what SEO Stuff (seo-stuff.com/ai-seo) has been doing all year to get customers more traffic and sales.
Specifically with the done-for-you package:
seo-stuff.com/gold-plan-pack…
Basically, Google sells much of the underlying retrieval infrastructure through Google Cloud Discovery Engine, also called Vertex AI Search.
By analyzing what Discovery Engine exposes, Yesilyurt was able to show how Google’s AI retrieval and ranking stack works.
The seven major signals he identified were Base Ranking, Gecko embedding similarity, Jetstream cross-attention relevance, BM25 keyword matching, predicted click-through rate, freshness and Boost/Bury rules.
In simpler terms, Google is combining traditional ranking signals with semantic similarity, deeper contextual relevance, keyword matching, engagement predictions, recency and manual business logic.
Discovery Engine exposes a maximum chunk size of 500 tokens, roughly 375 words, while ancestor headings can travel with each chunk and tables, images and page layouts can all be parsed with Gemini-enhanced understanding.
That means important ideas need to make sense inside relatively small, clearly labeled sections.
If your content is one massive wall of text, Google has a much harder job extracting the exact information it needs.
This is also why I keep talking about question-based headings, direct answers, clear comparisons and structured pages.
Additionally, Discovery Engine shows Google processing structured data using separate Searchable, Indexable and Retrievable settings.
Those can affect whether information can be found, used for filtering or ordering and surfaced by the model. Mind you, they are independent.
So a field can potentially influence retrieval or ranking without necessarily being displayed in exactly the same way.
That gives us a pretty significant clue about why structured data continues to matter as Google becomes more AI-driven.
Discovery Engine also reveals a four-stage pipeline: Prepare, Retrieve, Signal and Serve.
Google first interprets the query, handles things like synonyms and intent, then retrieves and chunks relevant content, applies ranking signals and finally uses Gemini to generate the response with grounding and safety rules.
Traditional Search, AI Overviews and AI Mode can be thought of as different configurations built on much of the same underlying retrieval infrastructure.
So what does all of this mean for businesses?
You need to optimize for several layers at once.
Your content needs strong semantic alignment so Google clearly understands what the page is about, enough contextual detail to handle nuanced searches such as comparisons and “best for” queries, and clean chunk-level structure so useful answers can be extracted without digging through hundreds of words of filler.
That means clear definitions, direct answers, comparison language, question-based headings, concise sections, factual claims, TLDR summaries, clean HTML and useful tables where appropriate.
This is exactly why SEO Stuff content is structured the way it is.
The done-for-you package combines 10 long-form, search-focused articles with three DR50+ contextual authority placements:
seo-stuff.com/ai-seo
The content is designed around semantic relevance, keyword alignment, structured sections, comparisons, freshness and extractability, while the authority placements help strengthen the underlying authority of the pages and domain.
The Premium Content Bundle takes the same idea much further:
seo-stuff.com/premium-conten…
It includes 60 long-form articles designed to build broader category coverage, stronger semantic associations and more opportunities for Google to retrieve useful sections across the different questions customers ask.
Then there is the Premium Authority Bundle:
seo-stuff.com/premium-backli…
It adds three contextual DR50+ authority placements designed to strengthen search authority and reinforce the company’s identity and category across the web.
And if you want to see where your site stands across Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and broader AI search, you can do so for free here:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Cleared Improve retweeted
Introducing RL with Neural Feedback (RLNF). We have found reliable ways to train AI models to respond to human preferences purely from brain signals.
The example below is a picture of a face that self-transforms into a more attractive version for the subject as they are looking at it.
Cleared Improve retweeted
Blocking a single inflammatory protein made old mice live up to 25% longer.
The protein is IL-11, and treatment started at the human equivalent of age 55, with the mice also getting stronger and less frail along the way.
Here's everything the study found:
Cleared Improve retweeted
Wanted to see if AI could do slapstick comedy
Introducing: D*ckhead
Huge thanks to @NicooSvane and @tvnxty for helping get this over the line
Cleared Improve retweeted
Google accidentally revealed how its AI search systems choose which sites to recommend and send traffic to.
Now that none of it is much of a secret anymore, let’s talk about it.
With the new Google Search rolling out as we speak, it has never been more important to understand how to maximize value from this marketing channel.
If you want to see where your site stands across Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and broader AI search, you can do so for free here:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Let’s start from the beginning.
Metehan Yesilyurt, who previously went viral for his analysis of Perplexity’s ranking factors, recently broke down Google AI ranking factors in a fascinating blog post.
A lot of what he found also lines up with what SEO Stuff (seo-stuff.com/ai-seo) has been doing all year to get customers more traffic and sales.
Specifically with the done-for-you package:
seo-stuff.com/gold-plan-pack…
Basically, Google sells much of the underlying retrieval infrastructure through Google Cloud Discovery Engine, also called Vertex AI Search.
By analyzing what Discovery Engine exposes, Yesilyurt was able to show how Google’s AI retrieval and ranking stack works.
The seven major signals he identified were Base Ranking, Gecko embedding similarity, Jetstream cross-attention relevance, BM25 keyword matching, predicted click-through rate, freshness and Boost/Bury rules.
In simpler terms, Google is combining traditional ranking signals with semantic similarity, deeper contextual relevance, keyword matching, engagement predictions, recency and manual business logic.
Discovery Engine exposes a maximum chunk size of 500 tokens, roughly 375 words, while ancestor headings can travel with each chunk and tables, images and page layouts can all be parsed with Gemini-enhanced understanding.
That means important ideas need to make sense inside relatively small, clearly labeled sections.
If your content is one massive wall of text, Google has a much harder job extracting the exact information it needs.
This is also why I keep talking about question-based headings, direct answers, clear comparisons and structured pages.
Additionally, Discovery Engine shows Google processing structured data using separate Searchable, Indexable and Retrievable settings.
Those can affect whether information can be found, used for filtering or ordering and surfaced by the model. Mind you, they are independent.
So a field can potentially influence retrieval or ranking without necessarily being displayed in exactly the same way.
That gives us a pretty significant clue about why structured data continues to matter as Google becomes more AI-driven.
Discovery Engine also reveals a four-stage pipeline: Prepare, Retrieve, Signal and Serve.
Google first interprets the query, handles things like synonyms and intent, then retrieves and chunks relevant content, applies ranking signals and finally uses Gemini to generate the response with grounding and safety rules.
Traditional Search, AI Overviews and AI Mode can be thought of as different configurations built on much of the same underlying retrieval infrastructure.
So what does all of this mean for businesses?
You need to optimize for several layers at once.
Your content needs strong semantic alignment so Google clearly understands what the page is about, enough contextual detail to handle nuanced searches such as comparisons and “best for” queries, and clean chunk-level structure so useful answers can be extracted without digging through hundreds of words of filler.
That means clear definitions, direct answers, comparison language, question-based headings, concise sections, factual claims, TLDR summaries, clean HTML and useful tables where appropriate.
This is exactly why SEO Stuff content is structured the way it is.
The done-for-you package combines 10 long-form, search-focused articles with three DR50+ contextual authority placements:
seo-stuff.com/ai-seo
The content is designed around semantic relevance, keyword alignment, structured sections, comparisons, freshness and extractability, while the authority placements help strengthen the underlying authority of the pages and domain.
The Premium Content Bundle takes the same idea much further:
seo-stuff.com/premium-conten…
It includes 60 long-form articles designed to build broader category coverage, stronger semantic associations and more opportunities for Google to retrieve useful sections across the different questions customers ask.
Then there is the Premium Authority Bundle:
seo-stuff.com/premium-backli…
It adds three contextual DR50+ authority placements designed to strengthen search authority and reinforce the company’s identity and category across the web.
And if you want to see where your site stands across Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and broader AI search, you can do so for free here:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
You can have 4.5+ stars, 100+ Google reviews, and still be completely invisible in ChatGPT, Claude, etc.
A new study checked 6,682 local businesses across 25 U.S. markets.
85.6% were never named by ANY of the four AI assistants tested, and among businesses with 4.5+ stars AND more than 100 Google reviews, 1,611 were still never named.
Let's go through it.
By the way, if you want to see whether your business is appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and broader AI search, start here. It's free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Alright, so Seeably analyzed dentists, personal injury lawyers, plumbers, roofers and med spas across New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix.
Then it tested local recommendation questions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
Of 6,682 businesses, 5,721 were never named once, and every single market had at least 80% of its Google-listed businesses go unnamed.
More Google reviews were associated with a better chance of being named, but they were nowhere close to a guarantee.
Among businesses with more than 1,000 Google reviews, 47% were STILL never named.
Seeably even manually verified businesses with nearly 9,000 reviews, 6,600+ reviews and 3,500+ reviews that never appeared.
So if your local SEO strategy is "Get lots of Google reviews and we'll be fine," that is clearly not enough anymore.
Among businesses WITHOUT a website, 4.4% were named by at least one AI assistant.
Among businesses WITH a website, 17.5%.
So imagine two plumbers.
Both have 4.8 stars and 500 reviews.
One has a generic homepage and a contact form.
The other has detailed pages for water heater repair, drain cleaning, leak detection, emergency plumbing, pricing, service areas, FAQs and licensing.
Those businesses may look similar if you're only counting stars - but their information footprints are completely different.
Mind you, businesses' own websites represented just 20.5% of the cited-page mix.
Lists, articles and other third-party sites? 52.7%.
Directories and review platforms? 26.7%.
That is why SEO Stuff combines first-party content with authority building:
seo-stuff.com/ai-seo
Also, I've talked about this before, but the four AI assistants rarely agreed.
Across the 25 markets, they recommended 1,971 different businesses.
70.7% of those businesses were named by ONLY ONE of the four assistants.
Just 4% were named by all four.
So being visible in ChatGPT does not mean you're visible in Claude.
Showing up in Gemini does not mean Perplexity agrees.
You get the idea.
The recommendation concentration was interesting too.
In the typical market, the five businesses AI recommended most often captured 33% of all recommendations.
Just five companies.
And among businesses that DID get named, more than half appeared in only one answer.
There was also an interesting pattern in the ratings themselves.
Businesses rated 4.5 to 4.7 stars were named by at least one assistant 20.4% of the time.
Businesses rated 4.8 to 5.0? 18.4%.
All of which is to say...
Local businesses increasingly need BOTH traditional local SEO and AI Search visibility.
Build the website, reviews and authority.
Then track whether those systems are recommending you.
Because being one of the best-reviewed businesses in your city matters a lot less if the customer's AI assistant never tells them you exist.
And if you want to see whether your business is already appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and broader AI search, start here.
It's free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Cleared Improve retweeted
You can have 4.5+ stars, 100+ Google reviews, and still be completely invisible in ChatGPT, Claude, etc.
A new study checked 6,682 local businesses across 25 U.S. markets.
85.6% were never named by ANY of the four AI assistants tested, and among businesses with 4.5+ stars AND more than 100 Google reviews, 1,611 were still never named.
Let's go through it.
By the way, if you want to see whether your business is appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and broader AI search, start here. It's free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Alright, so Seeably analyzed dentists, personal injury lawyers, plumbers, roofers and med spas across New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix.
Then it tested local recommendation questions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
Of 6,682 businesses, 5,721 were never named once, and every single market had at least 80% of its Google-listed businesses go unnamed.
More Google reviews were associated with a better chance of being named, but they were nowhere close to a guarantee.
Among businesses with more than 1,000 Google reviews, 47% were STILL never named.
Seeably even manually verified businesses with nearly 9,000 reviews, 6,600+ reviews and 3,500+ reviews that never appeared.
So if your local SEO strategy is "Get lots of Google reviews and we'll be fine," that is clearly not enough anymore.
Among businesses WITHOUT a website, 4.4% were named by at least one AI assistant.
Among businesses WITH a website, 17.5%.
So imagine two plumbers.
Both have 4.8 stars and 500 reviews.
One has a generic homepage and a contact form.
The other has detailed pages for water heater repair, drain cleaning, leak detection, emergency plumbing, pricing, service areas, FAQs and licensing.
Those businesses may look similar if you're only counting stars - but their information footprints are completely different.
Mind you, businesses' own websites represented just 20.5% of the cited-page mix.
Lists, articles and other third-party sites? 52.7%.
Directories and review platforms? 26.7%.
That is why SEO Stuff combines first-party content with authority building:
seo-stuff.com/ai-seo
Also, I've talked about this before, but the four AI assistants rarely agreed.
Across the 25 markets, they recommended 1,971 different businesses.
70.7% of those businesses were named by ONLY ONE of the four assistants.
Just 4% were named by all four.
So being visible in ChatGPT does not mean you're visible in Claude.
Showing up in Gemini does not mean Perplexity agrees.
You get the idea.
The recommendation concentration was interesting too.
In the typical market, the five businesses AI recommended most often captured 33% of all recommendations.
Just five companies.
And among businesses that DID get named, more than half appeared in only one answer.
There was also an interesting pattern in the ratings themselves.
Businesses rated 4.5 to 4.7 stars were named by at least one assistant 20.4% of the time.
Businesses rated 4.8 to 5.0? 18.4%.
All of which is to say...
Local businesses increasingly need BOTH traditional local SEO and AI Search visibility.
Build the website, reviews and authority.
Then track whether those systems are recommending you.
Because being one of the best-reviewed businesses in your city matters a lot less if the customer's AI assistant never tells them you exist.
And if you want to see whether your business is already appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and broader AI search, start here.
It's free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Your business can publish:
"The 10 Best [Your Category] Tools"
Put YOUR OWN PRODUCT at #1...
And AI systems may actually use that article as a source when recommending tools.
But only if you do it right.
(Which most brands do not.)
A new study analyzed 18,084 software questions across Google, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
For "alternatives to X" questions, between 34% and 47% of the listicles cited were published by software companies that included their OWN product.
Let's go through it.
By the way, if you want to see whether your business is appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and broader AI search, start here. It's free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Alright, so Minuttia and Convex Works analyzed 18,084 software questions, 5,983 software brands and 196 categories.
The questions included alternatives, X vs Y and best-tools searches.
Across the study, they collected 686,749 citations from more than 311,000 pages.
Then they classified the pages AI systems were using.
A page counted as "self-promotional" when a software company published a listicle or comparison in a category where it sells AND included its own product.
So imagine a CRM company publishing:
"10 Best CRM Platforms" and including itself.
Among those self-promotional listicles 93% highlighted the company's own product and 87% placed its own product FIRST.
Only 16% clearly disclosed that the company itself wrote the list.
...and AI systems were still citing these pages.
This is something SEO Stuff (seo-stuff.com) helps businesses with daily.
For "alternatives to X" questions, the share of listicle citations coming from self-promotional pages was:
Google Search: 47%.
Gemini: 47%.
Perplexity: 43%.
Google AI Overviews: 43%.
Claude: 36%.
ChatGPT: 34%.
Across software categories overall, Minuttia says 43% of the listicles cited by AI platforms were self-promotional.
So what is the key to doing this successfully?
There were a few common themes:
1. Be transparent.
2. Make the page genuinely useful.
3. Include competitors.
4. Explain where each option fits.
5. Explain where YOUR product fits.
6. Explain who should choose you.
7. And where somebody else may be the better fit.
8. Publish real pricing where possible.
9. Discuss strengths and limitations.
10. Show your methodology.
So you don't need to hide the commercial interest - just make the page useful despite it.
AI systems are willing to cite vendor-written listicles when those pages help answer the buyer's question.
All that being said, third-party coverage still matters enormously.
For "alternatives to X" questions, between 53% and 66% of cited listicles were still NOT self-promotional.
For "alternatives to X" questions, 42% of ChatGPT's citations went to software companies' own websites.
And Minuttia analyzed 52,293 ChatGPT web searches from those questions.
71% named exactly ONE product while another 26% named two or more.
ChatGPT appeared to start broad, identify candidates, investigate the products individually and then move from there.
What does that mean for brands? It means first you need to get into the shortlist, then you need to make sure your website actually holds up when the AI investigates you.
Minuttia also found that when ChatGPT used a site: search, 92% of those searches targeted a software vendor's own website.
So first-party information clearly mattered in this dataset.
That is exactly where the SEO Stuff Premium Content Bundle fits:
seo-stuff.com/premium-conten…
Build the information buyers and AI systems need: best-of content, alternatives, comparisons, pricing, etc.
There is also an interesting authority lesson here.
Median domain rank in the study was -
Self-promotional listicles: 49.
Independent listicles: 63.
Review sites: 72.
So vendor-written listicles often came from weaker domains than the independent lists and review platforms.
That is why SEO Stuff's done-for-you package combines AI-search-focused content with contextual DR50+ authority placements:
seo-stuff.com/ai-seo
And if you want to see whether your business is already appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and broader AI search, start here.
It's free:
rightcited.com/
Cleared Improve retweeted
Your business can publish:
"The 10 Best [Your Category] Tools"
Put YOUR OWN PRODUCT at #1...
And AI systems may actually use that article as a source when recommending tools.
But only if you do it right.
(Which most brands do not.)
A new study analyzed 18,084 software questions across Google, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
For "alternatives to X" questions, between 34% and 47% of the listicles cited were published by software companies that included their OWN product.
Let's go through it.
By the way, if you want to see whether your business is appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and broader AI search, start here. It's free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Alright, so Minuttia and Convex Works analyzed 18,084 software questions, 5,983 software brands and 196 categories.
The questions included alternatives, X vs Y and best-tools searches.
Across the study, they collected 686,749 citations from more than 311,000 pages.
Then they classified the pages AI systems were using.
A page counted as "self-promotional" when a software company published a listicle or comparison in a category where it sells AND included its own product.
So imagine a CRM company publishing:
"10 Best CRM Platforms" and including itself.
Among those self-promotional listicles 93% highlighted the company's own product and 87% placed its own product FIRST.
Only 16% clearly disclosed that the company itself wrote the list.
...and AI systems were still citing these pages.
This is something SEO Stuff (seo-stuff.com) helps businesses with daily.
For "alternatives to X" questions, the share of listicle citations coming from self-promotional pages was:
Google Search: 47%.
Gemini: 47%.
Perplexity: 43%.
Google AI Overviews: 43%.
Claude: 36%.
ChatGPT: 34%.
Across software categories overall, Minuttia says 43% of the listicles cited by AI platforms were self-promotional.
So what is the key to doing this successfully?
There were a few common themes:
1. Be transparent.
2. Make the page genuinely useful.
3. Include competitors.
4. Explain where each option fits.
5. Explain where YOUR product fits.
6. Explain who should choose you.
7. And where somebody else may be the better fit.
8. Publish real pricing where possible.
9. Discuss strengths and limitations.
10. Show your methodology.
So you don't need to hide the commercial interest - just make the page useful despite it.
AI systems are willing to cite vendor-written listicles when those pages help answer the buyer's question.
All that being said, third-party coverage still matters enormously.
For "alternatives to X" questions, between 53% and 66% of cited listicles were still NOT self-promotional.
For "alternatives to X" questions, 42% of ChatGPT's citations went to software companies' own websites.
And Minuttia analyzed 52,293 ChatGPT web searches from those questions.
71% named exactly ONE product while another 26% named two or more.
ChatGPT appeared to start broad, identify candidates, investigate the products individually and then move from there.
What does that mean for brands? It means first you need to get into the shortlist, then you need to make sure your website actually holds up when the AI investigates you.
Minuttia also found that when ChatGPT used a site: search, 92% of those searches targeted a software vendor's own website.
So first-party information clearly mattered in this dataset.
That is exactly where the SEO Stuff Premium Content Bundle fits:
seo-stuff.com/premium-conten…
Build the information buyers and AI systems need: best-of content, alternatives, comparisons, pricing, etc.
There is also an interesting authority lesson here.
Median domain rank in the study was -
Self-promotional listicles: 49.
Independent listicles: 63.
Review sites: 72.
So vendor-written listicles often came from weaker domains than the independent lists and review platforms.
That is why SEO Stuff's done-for-you package combines AI-search-focused content with contextual DR50+ authority placements:
seo-stuff.com/ai-seo
And if you want to see whether your business is already appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and broader AI search, start here.
It's free:
rightcited.com/
There is a huge opportunity for businesses competing on buyer-intent searches right now.
Specifically because Google AI Overviews are showing up directly on the searches people make when they are deciding what to BUY.
A new study produced some fun AI Overviews numbers. They are now appearing on 96% of "best X for Y" searches and about 90% of review searches.
Also, they're showing up for more than 86% of brand-vs-brand searches and more than 82% of alternatives searches.
Alright, let's go through it.
By the way, if you want to see whether your business is appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and broader AI search, start here. It's free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
So, Semrush tracked a fixed panel of 400 commercial keywords every month from September 2025 through August 2026.
The keywords covered banking, software and ecommerce across five commercial modifiers: alternatives, brand vs brand, best X for Y, pricing and cost, and reviews.
In September 2025, AI Overviews appeared on 45.75% of those keywords.
By August 2026? 88%.
Nearly double.
And then when Semrush weighted those same keywords by estimated search volume, AI Overviews covered 97.08% of the commercial search demand represented by the dataset.
What kind of searches are we talking about here? Think:
"Best CRM for a real estate company"
"HubSpot vs Salesforce"
"HubSpot alternatives"
"HubSpot pricing"
"HubSpot review"
The customer is comparing, checking price, evaluating options and deciding who makes the shortlist - and Google increasingly puts an AI-generated answer in front of them on exactly those kinds of searches.
That is why SEO and AI Search Optimization increasingly need to happen together, and why SEO Stuff (seo-stuff.com) works with businesses daily on checking all the necessary boxes.
Businesses NEED TO pay attention to the information Google can find around the brand.
Your website, comparison pages, review sites, editorial coverage, YouTube, communities, 3rd party websites and competitor content - it all matters.
Semrush showed a good example with "Mailchimp vs Klaviyo" where Google's AI Overview cited Klaviyo's own comparison guide when explaining when somebody should choose Klaviyo.
For the Mailchimp side, it used a third-party source.
That is a pretty good illustration of what commercial AI Search can look like.
Your own website can help shape the answer but then your website is not the only voice Google can use.
So if customers compare your company with competitors, have useful comparison content.
If people search for alternatives, explain where your product fits.
If pricing matters, make pricing clear.
That is exactly what the SEO Stuff Premium Content Bundle is designed to build:
seo-stuff.com/premium-conten…
Mind you, not just top-of-funnel articles, but content around comparisons, alternatives, pricing, reviews, use cases, industries, objections and buying decisions.
Then there is the authority side.
AI Overviews can synthesize information from multiple sources.
So you do not want the only information about your company to come from your own website.
That is why the SEO Stuff done-for-you package combines content with contextual DR50+ authority placements:
seo-stuff.com/gold-plan-pack…
And if you want to see whether your business is appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and broader AI search, start here.
It's free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Cleared Improve retweeted
Cold calling isn’t dead. And that’s why today, we’re launching Unify Dialer.
Sellers have already placed 112K+ calls with it.
→ Prospect, sequence, and dial in one place.
→ Move faster through your call list with Power Dialer, with the research done before you dial.
→ Reach more buyers with 34% more reachable numbers than Apollo and 66% more than ZoomInfo in our benchmark.
60% of reps book a meeting within their first hour of dialing on Unify.
Who better to pick up the phone than the wolf of insurance himself, Juliano Massarelli? 👇🏻
Try it here:
unifygtm.com/dialer?utm_sour…
Cleared Improve retweeted
There is a huge opportunity for businesses competing on buyer-intent searches right now.
Specifically because Google AI Overviews are showing up directly on the searches people make when they are deciding what to BUY.
A new study produced some fun AI Overviews numbers. They are now appearing on 96% of "best X for Y" searches and about 90% of review searches.
Also, they're showing up for more than 86% of brand-vs-brand searches and more than 82% of alternatives searches.
Alright, let's go through it.
By the way, if you want to see whether your business is appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and broader AI search, start here. It's free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
So, Semrush tracked a fixed panel of 400 commercial keywords every month from September 2025 through August 2026.
The keywords covered banking, software and ecommerce across five commercial modifiers: alternatives, brand vs brand, best X for Y, pricing and cost, and reviews.
In September 2025, AI Overviews appeared on 45.75% of those keywords.
By August 2026? 88%.
Nearly double.
And then when Semrush weighted those same keywords by estimated search volume, AI Overviews covered 97.08% of the commercial search demand represented by the dataset.
What kind of searches are we talking about here? Think:
"Best CRM for a real estate company"
"HubSpot vs Salesforce"
"HubSpot alternatives"
"HubSpot pricing"
"HubSpot review"
The customer is comparing, checking price, evaluating options and deciding who makes the shortlist - and Google increasingly puts an AI-generated answer in front of them on exactly those kinds of searches.
That is why SEO and AI Search Optimization increasingly need to happen together, and why SEO Stuff (seo-stuff.com) works with businesses daily on checking all the necessary boxes.
Businesses NEED TO pay attention to the information Google can find around the brand.
Your website, comparison pages, review sites, editorial coverage, YouTube, communities, 3rd party websites and competitor content - it all matters.
Semrush showed a good example with "Mailchimp vs Klaviyo" where Google's AI Overview cited Klaviyo's own comparison guide when explaining when somebody should choose Klaviyo.
For the Mailchimp side, it used a third-party source.
That is a pretty good illustration of what commercial AI Search can look like.
Your own website can help shape the answer but then your website is not the only voice Google can use.
So if customers compare your company with competitors, have useful comparison content.
If people search for alternatives, explain where your product fits.
If pricing matters, make pricing clear.
That is exactly what the SEO Stuff Premium Content Bundle is designed to build:
seo-stuff.com/premium-conten…
Mind you, not just top-of-funnel articles, but content around comparisons, alternatives, pricing, reviews, use cases, industries, objections and buying decisions.
Then there is the authority side.
AI Overviews can synthesize information from multiple sources.
So you do not want the only information about your company to come from your own website.
That is why the SEO Stuff done-for-you package combines content with contextual DR50+ authority placements:
seo-stuff.com/gold-plan-pack…
And if you want to see whether your business is appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and broader AI search, start here.
It's free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
There is a big opportunity for businesses right now.
A new dataset focused on 1.5 million AI search-engaged sessions, 175 websites, 70 brands and 20 industries exposed something interesting.
AI Search traffic grew 392% year over year. Transactions attributed to that traffic?
Up nearly 600%.
Revenue growth? Up more than 300%.
Let's go through it.
By the way, if you want to see whether your business is appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and broader AI search, start here. It's free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Alright, so IDHL analyzed 13 months of AI-search referral data across 1.5 million AI-search-engaged sessions, 175 websites, 70 brands and 20 industries.
Businesses in the U.S. and UK were included, and six major AI platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, etc.
So this wasn't one SaaS company or one ecommerce store seeing a random spike.
The headline numbers were pretty remarkable.
AI-search sessions: +392%.
Transactions: +553%.
Revenue: +312%.
There has been a lot of chatter in recent months about how much smaller, in terms of raw numbers, AI search is compared to Google search.
That is totally true.
That said, a marketing channel does not need to become your biggest source of traffic before it becomes worth optimizing.
If traffic is growing nearly 5x year over year and transactions are growing even faster, you probably want to understand why.
That is something SEO Stuff (seo-stuff.com) helps businesses with on a daily basis.
The especially interesting part is that transaction growth outpaced traffic growth, which shows that the commercial activity associated with AI Search grew even faster than the traffic itself.
And that lines up with a pattern we keep seeing.
People increasingly use AI to research products, compare vendors, check pricing, find alternatives, evaluate businesses narrow down options and *then* click once they already have a much clearer idea of what they want.
Think about the difference between:
"CRM software"
and:
"What's the best CRM for a 20-person real estate company that needs automated follow-up, integrates with Gmail and costs under $500 per month?"
The second customer has already told the AI their industry, company size, required features, integration, budget and intent.
The AI can do a lot of the research before deciding which companies to surface.
If your company appears in that answer, you may be entering the journey much closer to the decision.
And it is why AI Search Optimization needs to move beyond:
"Did ChatGPT cite my blog?"
The better questions are:
Does ChatGPT recommend my company for commercial searches?
Does Gemini?
Does Claude?
Does Perplexity?
Which buyer questions cause us to appear?
Which questions cause competitors to appear instead?
And what happens after somebody visits the website? Traffic, leads, transactions, revenue - these are the metrics businesses actually care about.
There was another interesting finding.
ChatGPT accounted for roughly 91% of the AI-search traffic IDHL measured.
So in this dataset, ChatGPT remains the dominant referral source by a huge margin, but the broader ecosystem is growing too.
That is another reason not to build an entire AI Search strategy around one platform.
You may get most of your referral traffic from ChatGPT today, but that does not mean your customers aren't researching you elsewhere, and it does not mean the distribution will look the same 12 months from now.
The job is increasingly to make your company easy for all of these systems to discover, understand, compare and recommend.
That starts with your own website.
It should clearly explain what you do, who you help, what you sell, how much it costs, which problems you solve, which industries you serve, how you compare, which use cases you fit and what evidence supports your claims.
A homepage and five generic service pages probably are not enough if customers are asking dozens of different questions before making a decision.
That is exactly what the SEO Stuff Premium Content Bundle is built around:
seo-stuff.com/premium-conten…
Build deeper coverage across comparisons, alternatives, pricing, use cases, industries, problems, objections and buying decisions.
Every useful question you answer creates another potential entry point into the research process.
Then there is authority.
Your website tells AI systems what YOU say about the company and then the broader web gives them additional evidence.
Editorial publications.
That is why the SEO Stuff done-for-you package combines both sides:
seo-stuff.com/ai-seo
AI-search-optimized content.
Plus contextual DR50+ authority placements.
IDHL also found something else interesting - AI Search is starting to show recognizable seasonality.
Travel engagement rose around major planning periods.
Retail and property also showed seasonal movement.
That matters because it suggests people are increasingly using AI around real-world demand cycles.
So if your busiest season is approaching, do not wait until demand peaks to start thinking about AI visibility.
Make sure the content exists, the important pages are current, the product/service info is accurate, etc.
And if you want to see whether your business is already appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and broader AI search, start here.
It's free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Cleared Improve retweeted
Ben Horowitz on why AI won’t repeat the dot-com crash, and why tiny billion-dollar teams might not stay tiny:
Horowitz was at Netscape during the first internet boom. He explains why that boom collapsed before it rebuilt:
“Every investor was like, ‘Oh, this is the biggest thing ever. I’m going to put all my money into it.’ But the truth was... at Netscape in 1996 we had 90% browser share and we had 55 million users. And so the whole internet wasn’t that big, and then half of those people [were] on dial-up.”
Building an internet app was expensive (“you had to use Sun Microsystems servers and EMC storage and all this”), and the ceiling was low:
“You could get to like 30 million people or something. So, good luck with that. That’s not really a business. And so the whole thing kind of collapsed before it rebuilt, but eventually it was going to get there.”
AI is different because the distribution problem is already solved:
“With AI, when it works, almost instantly you can get to a giant number of users. We’ve seen companies grow faster than any companies we’ve ever seen because you don’t need more people on the network... The internet’s already here. Everybody’s on it, and all you have to do is put your thing up and they can get to it.”
Andrew Chen then raises the obvious next question. LLMs have turned out to be shockingly good at writing code. Does that mean billion-dollar companies built by tiny teams, or even solopreneurs?
Horowitz agrees, up to a point:
“I think you can get to a giant audience and a ton of money with a very few number of people. Like, I think that that’s for sure true.”
His example:
“Instagram was 13 people and sold for a billion dollars, but Meta’s got a ridiculous number of employees. Would Instagram have just been that many employees if they hadn’t got bought by Meta? Probably.”
So reaching scale isn’t the hard part anymore. The real question, in his words:
“Can you sustain it, or will you get taken out by somebody who’s kind of doing more things?”
His answer comes from history. He points to a paper by John Maynard Keynes arguing that once people’s basic needs were met, “once they had shelter, food, and clothes, people would start to work maybe no more than 15 hours a week.”
“That turned out to be spectacularly wrong, because of course then all of a sudden everybody needed a car, and then everybody needed a car for everybody in the family, and everybody needed a television. Then everybody needed a television in every room in the house, and now everybody needs a smartphone and everybody needs air conditioning... and none of that stuff even [existed] when he wrote that.”
His conclusion:
“What people need does tend to expand almost infinitely. So to fulfill that need, sometimes you have to build a bigger company. But we’ll see.”
Cleared Improve retweeted
Marc Andreessen on how businesses are born in Silicon Valley:
To understand how companies get started in the Valley, Marc Andreessen says you first have to understand what the Valley is.
"It's a company town, by which I mean it's all about tech."
But unlike a traditional company town, which is usually built around one employer ("In the old days you would go to Rochester, New York and it was all Kodak"), the Valley works differently:
"The company is the Valley, and then the individual corporations form, and some of them become very big and important."
In other words, individual businesses form inside a larger system. Based on what Andreessen describes, that process looks like this.
Step 1: The builders arrive.
Most of the people starting and staffing these companies aren't locals.
"Very few people you'll meet in the Valley working in tech actually grew up here."
Andreessen is one of them. He grew up in the rural Midwest and came out after college. The Valley also filters for commitment: "People who love tech love it here, and people who don't love tech don't stay here that long."
Step 2: They believe they can build it.
Andreessen says the Valley runs on a mentality that he connects to something Steve Jobs said:
"Basically everything around you, every tech product that you have ever used, has been created by people who are no smarter than you."
That belief lowers the barrier to starting:
"If you put your mind to it, and if you get the skills required to create these products, you can create products that are just as good as the ones that everybody already knows and loves. And the whole Valley kind of has that mentality. It's possible to build new things, new products and new companies."
Step 3: The culture rewards the risk.
New ideas need somewhere they won't be dismissed. According to Andreessen, the Valley is that place:
"It's a place that really rewards, I would say, creative thinking and even radical thinking. And it rewards a level of risk-taking and kind of danger in creating new ideas that a lot of other places just simply won't tolerate."
Step 4: Talent is always available to move.
Because people see themselves as members of the Valley and not just of their current employer, they're always open to the next opportunity:
"There might be something more interesting out there. I can maybe get a job at a different startup, maybe with bigger opportunity, and maybe not even have to change my parking spot."
Established companies see this as a retention problem. For a young company, it's a hiring pool.
Step 5: When something works, the talent swarms.
This is the moment a business goes from new to big:
"When these companies figure out something good, they can scale incredibly quickly, right? And they can pull in talent from all across the industry incredibly quickly."
Andreessen calls this "the thing that I think is most underestimated about the Valley."
He points to the smartphone as proof. At one point, it looked like the Valley had lost:
"Nokia and these other companies had kind of won, and everybody said the Valley's best days were behind it. And then it just turned out that when Apple figured out the iPhone, Google figured out Android, the talent just immediately materialized to support those efforts."
Step 6: Every new company stands on the old ones.
None of this starts from zero. Andreessen describes his own work as building "on top of 50, 60, 70 years of effort that took place long before I got here."
Cleared Improve retweeted
There is a big opportunity for businesses right now.
A new dataset focused on 1.5 million AI search-engaged sessions, 175 websites, 70 brands and 20 industries exposed something interesting.
AI Search traffic grew 392% year over year. Transactions attributed to that traffic?
Up nearly 600%.
Revenue growth? Up more than 300%.
Let's go through it.
By the way, if you want to see whether your business is appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and broader AI search, start here. It's free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Alright, so IDHL analyzed 13 months of AI-search referral data across 1.5 million AI-search-engaged sessions, 175 websites, 70 brands and 20 industries.
Businesses in the U.S. and UK were included, and six major AI platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, etc.
So this wasn't one SaaS company or one ecommerce store seeing a random spike.
The headline numbers were pretty remarkable.
AI-search sessions: +392%.
Transactions: +553%.
Revenue: +312%.
There has been a lot of chatter in recent months about how much smaller, in terms of raw numbers, AI search is compared to Google search.
That is totally true.
That said, a marketing channel does not need to become your biggest source of traffic before it becomes worth optimizing.
If traffic is growing nearly 5x year over year and transactions are growing even faster, you probably want to understand why.
That is something SEO Stuff (seo-stuff.com) helps businesses with on a daily basis.
The especially interesting part is that transaction growth outpaced traffic growth, which shows that the commercial activity associated with AI Search grew even faster than the traffic itself.
And that lines up with a pattern we keep seeing.
People increasingly use AI to research products, compare vendors, check pricing, find alternatives, evaluate businesses narrow down options and *then* click once they already have a much clearer idea of what they want.
Think about the difference between:
"CRM software"
and:
"What's the best CRM for a 20-person real estate company that needs automated follow-up, integrates with Gmail and costs under $500 per month?"
The second customer has already told the AI their industry, company size, required features, integration, budget and intent.
The AI can do a lot of the research before deciding which companies to surface.
If your company appears in that answer, you may be entering the journey much closer to the decision.
And it is why AI Search Optimization needs to move beyond:
"Did ChatGPT cite my blog?"
The better questions are:
Does ChatGPT recommend my company for commercial searches?
Does Gemini?
Does Claude?
Does Perplexity?
Which buyer questions cause us to appear?
Which questions cause competitors to appear instead?
And what happens after somebody visits the website? Traffic, leads, transactions, revenue - these are the metrics businesses actually care about.
There was another interesting finding.
ChatGPT accounted for roughly 91% of the AI-search traffic IDHL measured.
So in this dataset, ChatGPT remains the dominant referral source by a huge margin, but the broader ecosystem is growing too.
That is another reason not to build an entire AI Search strategy around one platform.
You may get most of your referral traffic from ChatGPT today, but that does not mean your customers aren't researching you elsewhere, and it does not mean the distribution will look the same 12 months from now.
The job is increasingly to make your company easy for all of these systems to discover, understand, compare and recommend.
That starts with your own website.
It should clearly explain what you do, who you help, what you sell, how much it costs, which problems you solve, which industries you serve, how you compare, which use cases you fit and what evidence supports your claims.
A homepage and five generic service pages probably are not enough if customers are asking dozens of different questions before making a decision.
That is exactly what the SEO Stuff Premium Content Bundle is built around:
seo-stuff.com/premium-conten…
Build deeper coverage across comparisons, alternatives, pricing, use cases, industries, problems, objections and buying decisions.
Every useful question you answer creates another potential entry point into the research process.
Then there is authority.
Your website tells AI systems what YOU say about the company and then the broader web gives them additional evidence.
Editorial publications.
That is why the SEO Stuff done-for-you package combines both sides:
seo-stuff.com/ai-seo
AI-search-optimized content.
Plus contextual DR50+ authority placements.
IDHL also found something else interesting - AI Search is starting to show recognizable seasonality.
Travel engagement rose around major planning periods.
Retail and property also showed seasonal movement.
That matters because it suggests people are increasingly using AI around real-world demand cycles.
So if your busiest season is approaching, do not wait until demand peaks to start thinking about AI visibility.
Make sure the content exists, the important pages are current, the product/service info is accurate, etc.
And if you want to see whether your business is already appearing across Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and broader AI search, start here.
It's free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Google just revealed why it sometimes ignores your site.
Yes, even if you think you are doing everything right.
This comes straight from Google’s John Mueller.
A site owner recently took to Reddit with a frustrating problem.
Their sitemap returned a 200, the XML was valid, nothing was blocked and Googlebot logs looked normal.
Yet Search Console kept showing “Couldn’t fetch” and “Sitemap could not be read” for months.
By the way, if you feel like you're doing everything right but still aren't showing up in Google, ChatGPT, Claude or broader AI search, let SEO Stuff take a look (it's free):
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
Mueller’s response was pretty blunt:
“Micro one part of sitemaps is that Google has to be keen on indexing more content from the site. If Google’s not convinced that there’s new & important content to index, it won’t use the sitemap.”
That is a really important point.
A technically valid sitemap does not mean Google is automatically interested in crawling and indexing everything you publish.
The broader quality and value of the site still matter.
If Google does not see enough new, useful or important content worth discovering, fixing the XML file alone may not solve the underlying problem.
And this connects directly to AI search.
Google evaluates sites using signals around content quality, authority, freshness, internal linking, historical performance and external validation.
If your strongest pages are difficult to discover or never make it into the index consistently, they also have fewer opportunities to surface downstream in AI-powered search experiences.
That does not necessarily mean your site is bad.
It may mean you have thin coverage relative to competitors, weak internal linking, poor structural clarity, little decision-stage content, limited external authority or not enough differentiation.
This is exactly why SEO Stuff is structured the way it is.
The done-for-you package combines decision-stage content, question-based headings, direct answers, internal linking and three DR50+ contextual authority backlinks:
seo-stuff.com/ai-seo
The goal is to give Google more useful pages to discover while strengthening the authority behind them.
The Premium Content Bundle goes deeper:
seo-stuff.com/premium-conten…
It adds 60 long-form articles designed to expand topical coverage, strengthen internal linking, reinforce the categories and problems associated with the business and keep the site actively publishing useful information.
The larger takeaway is simple.
Technical SEO gets Google through the door.
You still need to give it a reason to keep crawling.
A perfect sitemap cannot compensate for a site with weak content, little authority or nothing meaningfully new to discover.
And as Google Search becomes more intertwined with AI retrieval, getting your best information crawled, indexed and understood becomes even more important.
If you feel like you're doing everything right but still aren't showing up in Google, ChatGPT, Claude or broader AI search, let Rightcited take a look. It’s free:
seo-stuff.com/free-audit
