Wall Street Journal reported today that Reddit is weighing whether to end Google’s access to its content for AI training, even though Google reportedly pays around $60 million a year for that access under a 2024 deal. USA Today, Politico, Reuters, The Economist, and People are reportedly reconsidering their relationships with Google too.

The reason matters more than the headline. Google’s AI overviews now answer a huge share of search queries directly on the results page, so people never click through to the source. Publishers are watching referral traffic collapse even as Google keeps using their content to train and power those same AI answers. They’re providing the raw material and getting less and less back for it.

Reddit’s leverage here is real. It’s reportedly the single most cited source across AI answers right now, ahead of Wikipedia, YouTube, and Google itself. That’s not a coincidence, it’s the same dynamic we talk about constantly. Unfiltered human discussion with visible disagreement and real experience carries more weight with these models than polished brand content ever will.

Whatever happens with the Google deal specifically, the bigger signal is this. The platforms and publishers whose content actually gets cited are starting to realize that’s worth real money, and worth negotiating over instead of giving away for free. That’s a preview of where a lot of this is headed for smaller brands and sites too.

Most people don't see what's happening here but writing is magic. They call it casting a spell for a reason. SPELLing is writing. Literally. Sending is literally casting. Those are facts.

So pulling this confabulation bullshit reprogramming of the mass consciousness is pulling some Orwellian crap. Except instead of deleting words, they're reprogramming them, like propaganda masters have always done, and btw, marketing has been very influenced by propaganda tactics.

The fact is I don't care if you call it hallucination or confabulation, it's still just lying. Stone cold. No BS zone here.

Hey folks, btw, in case you haven't guessed, I'm a human. I sure see a lot of bots in here.

Big Bro has put a spell on us. Every time it shapes our language it's shaping our consciousness, and AI is the first technology in the world to do this at scale.

Which comes back to the point of this rant. I'm looking for pirates and people with a pirate attitude. I want out-of-the-box thinkers. I'm looking for people who will challenge all assumptions and are good communicators. They must speak English and they must be able to write it personally. No bots. I am a pro writer. I know bot slop when I see it.

So if you're a pirate who wants to go hunting for the biggest treasure that I know of, it's time to go for a voyage on The Category Ocean with Sir Edmund Drake, the great eight-grandson of the legendary pirate Sir Francis Drake.

And I have the map that most people don't have. At least I have better maps. You interested? Drop a comment. No bots need apply.

My co-founder and I are opening a small pilot for Far & Wide, our AI visibility platform.

Across seven major Al platforms, it will:

- measure where your brand appears and where it disappears
- show exactly why competitors are being recommended
- uncover the technical, content and authority gaps behind it
- generate and publish fixes with one-click approval and full rollback
- re-test the results and prove what actually improved No endless dashboard.

No 80-page audit that becomes someone else's problem.
**Find it. Fix it. Prove it. Repeat.**

We’re looking for a few companies that want to test it with us and help shape the product before launch.

You basically get a free pilot, demo and 1 month free when we launch.

You can sign up here: https://www.farandwide.io

Or just send me a DM!

I've been looking into GetMentions AI and was wondering if anyone here has actually used it.

From what I understand, they help brands get mentions and link insertions on websites that are frequently cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and other LLMs. The idea seems interesting because AI search is becoming a growing traffic source, but I'm curious how well it works in practice.

A few questions for anyone with first-hand experience:

1) Did you notice an increase in AI-driven mentions or referral traffic?

2) Are the placements on genuinely authoritative sites?

3) How transparent are they about the outreach and placement process?

4) Did the ROI justify the subscription cost?

5) Would you recommend it over any other well-known tool

I'm looking for honest feedback before subscribing. Good, bad, or neutral experiences are all welcome.

Think about two companies.

Brand A has dominated its category for years. The internet is full of:

Articles that were published. Reviews people wrote. Comparisons that gained authority. Conversations that already happened.

Brand B built a genuinely better product six months ago.

Now someone asks AI:

"What's the best product for X?"

Who gets recommended? Probably Brand A. And we'd look at the data and say: Brand A is winning AI visibility.

But is it winning the market today, or are we measuring the accumulated memory of who won yesterday?

Because there might be a strange lag:

The market changes first. The internet catches up second. AI catches up after that.

Which makes me wonder:

Are AI visibility tools showing us who's winning the market - or who's built the strongest history on the internet?

And if you're Brand B, how do you become the answer before the internet has years of evidence saying you are?

I have some set prompts. How can i get my brand visibility for my prompts

Pls help me in this

Any tactics

Came across a paper from University of Toronto (just got accepted at EDBT/ICDT 2026) that looked at which sources Google and generative AI actually pull from when answering the same queries.

Honestly pretty interesting. They diverge significantly, both in which domains get consulted and the types of content that get picked up. But the part I found more surprising is that the divergence isn't just about how retrieval works. LLM pre-training shapes source selection even when live web search is enabled. So basically the model already has some sense of what to trust before it pulls a single page.

Which means your domain authority as Google sees it kind of doesn't transfer. The two systems are running on different criteria and there's no obvious overlap.

The tricky thing is most SEO tooling won't show you any of this. You'd have to be running queries across AI systems separately to even get a sense of where you stand.

Anyone actually doing this systematically? Curious how big the gap looks for different categories.

I work for a b2b saas startup. One of our competitors is actively astroturfing all over reddit and I'm really over it. Wondering if anyone else has any experience in how to deal with it.

They are trying to manipulate AEO/GEO summaries of our sector by posting something roughly like this (from accounts with stupidly high karma because they are bots posting all over the place):

I am ICP and I did some research into the job to be done... yada yada...

I found:
* Glowing review of their product
* tear down of each key competitors (including my product)

Then pretends to ask what others think/use

Then they have other fake accounts comment about how they use their product, building up activity on the thread.

The worst bit is: it's working. They are getting cited in LLM searches with these models that are then saying lies about our product & our other competitors and glowing over this competitors.

I've tried:

• Commenting straight up and addressing the lies (LLMs don't cite comments so this doesn't do a lot)
• Reporting it as spam (works about 50% of the time)

I'm not sure what else to do. I am at my wits end.. they are so obviously astroturfing and yes I could join in, but I'm not here to play their dirty games, I only want to use Reddit as it was intended, for community not for this smack talk.

Before I get asked: yes I know it's not a real ICP asking this because the post never changes in more than 5% of it's content as it's reposted in the exact same format and language every few days in another sub.

I started using Profound a few months ago for my b2b saas company. It’s been super helpful uncovering competitors and also helping execute actual tactics to improve AEO.

Anyone else on the platform? Or using something similar?

Lately I have managed to drastically increase my citations and AI agents crawlability of my wesbite, but I came across a conflicting aspect.

While on Bing Webmasters the AI page citation keeps climbing (for what is worth - i know is only a proxy of traffic not a citation count per se), on the Google Search console the same pages are turning into crawled but not indexed.

I assume this is happening due to increasing quality gate on Google side since their major update in May, but is anyone else experience this conflict.

Personally I incline to follow the traffic as I still see an increasing number of subscribers on my website, but just wondering if anybody experienced this and how you handle it to maybe push some peace between the two.

The OpenAI API now lets you select: `chat-latest` as the web search model so you can get some parity against most chatgpt users UI experience.

Huge for chat vs API parity. Removes a large factor in predictability!

In a Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) category, where engines are slow to trust a new name,  we did not expect the number to move that fast.

But we also didn't resort to the same tactics that you hear about aeo or ai search visibility.

Here's what we didn't do.

1. We did not write "us vs them" comparison articles. The client refused the Pepsi vs Coca-Cola tactic.
2. We did not lean on schema as the strategy. Entity schema matters. But it is also table stakes now. Clean markup makes you legible to an engine. Legible is not the same as chosen.
3. We did not assume the question-format content is necessary for every heading that everyone is saying gets you citations and mentions. Headings phrased as questions and FAQ blocks stacked on every page were used based on need and where the data suggested we had queries. That is table stakes too. It formats your content for retrieval. It does not give the engine a reason to pick you.

I keep seeing the same pattern. Schema, question formatting, comparison pages. Each one gets sold as the thing that wins AI visibility. Each one is table stakes. None of them is how you win.

What moved the number was different. We answered the two things the engines did not understand about the client.

>>> What actually makes their investment platform different, given they run a different business model to the names they get compared with?

>>> And who is the platform really for?

Product pages completed, entity schema updated, two articles live. Mentions up 200%.

It is a good start and nothing more. A long way to go to stabilise that share, and weeks before we know if it touches revenue. I am not calling it a win yet.
Table stakes get you into the game.

What you are —- How are you different —- What's the value that your customer gets —- Who you serve and —- Where’s the proof is what gets you mentioned.

If your entire AEO/GEO/SEO (whatever you may call it) plan is schema, FAQ blocks, and competitor comparison pages, you have built the price of entry, but you have way far to go to get recommended.

Your brand might be visible to AI today. But will it still be the answer tomorrow?

Ask ChatGPT to recommend a brand in your category.

Now change the buyer.

Change the use case.

Change the problem.

Did the same brands still make the answer?

That's where AI visibility gets interesting, because appearing once isn't the same as owning

the conversation.

A brand could be winning one buyer intent and completely missing another. A competitor

nobody was watching could already be gaining ground. And the sources AI trusts might be

telling a very different story from the one your marketing is trying to build.

But perhaps the bigger question is:

What are buyers starting to care about now, that your next strategy hasn't accounted

for yet?

We've been spending a lot of time looking at these patterns at Pallix, and we want to take

that analysis beyond our own datasets.

So we're running a few Free AI Visibility Audits - for brands curious about their own

position, and agencies curious about what AI is seeing across the brands they work with, at Pallix

We'll look beyond whether you show up to understand why you do, why you don't, what's

beginning to shift, and what that could mean for your next marketing move.

Because the real value isn't another visibility score. It's understanding what shaped your

position, where you stand today, and where the opportunity is moving next.

If there's a brand or category you've been curious about, tell us. We'd genuinely love to see

what the data uncovers.

#AIVisibility #AEO #GEO #MarketingStrategy #BrandStrategy #Pallix

Brands write in a way that sounds professional but real people don't talk like that but AI cites content that sounds more natural which is probably why old Reddit threads keep popping up. But if you write too casually the content doesn't read so good. So how are you finding the middle ground like how do you make content sound like a real person while still looking professional enough for both AI and google to cite? I am a new content writer btw still working on my basics

I've been getting emails offering paid link placements and wondering if theyre worth it for AI visibility. I'm only interested in whether the websites linking to you make a difference for getting mentioned in ChatGPT or Perplexity.