Guides
How to write content AI platforms actually cite
A page can rank first and never get named in the AI answer. What actually earns the citation, from our own data, the most-cited pages, and the one controlled study.
8 min read
Read articleAI visibility, explained
Research, guides, and product updates on how AI engines decide which brands to cite.
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ResearchChatGPT no longer reads your page before recommending you
ChatGPT used our pages in 9 of 10 answers and fetched one page, once. Cloudflare data shows its page fetches down 70% from the June peak.
Ali Khallad6 min read
ResearchFake AI crawlers are scanning for Claude and OpenAI API keys
We checked every visit that arrived with an AI crawler name against the address lists OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and Perplexity publish. More than a third were not who they said.
ResearchHow many checks before an AI visibility score means anything?
Of the combinations where a brand appeared at least once, 80.4% were inconsistent. On those, a single check agrees with the majority verdict only 72.2% of the time.
ResearchChatGPT citations dropped Reddit. Perplexity and Gemini didn’t.
We ran a controlled before-and-after on our own tracked set, same brands and same questions in both windows. ChatGPT’s Reddit citations collapsed. Perplexity and Gemini did not follow.
AnalysisAI Overview tracking is in Search Console now. Here’s what it can’t tell you
Google Search Console now reports impressions inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. It gives you no clicks and no queries, and on our own tracked set 16.4 percent of AI mentions arrived with no link for it to count.
ResearchWhat replaced Reddit in ChatGPT’s answers
Reddit fell from 34.4 percent of ChatGPT answers to 3.2 percent in a single week in August 2026. Government and regulatory sources more than tripled to fill the space, and everything else shrank.
ResearchI told eight AI assistants not to read a page. Three read it anyway.
I blocked one page in robots.txt and asked eight AI assistants to read it. Three said no, three read it anyway, and two never showed up. The split is not what I expected.
ResearchSame question, different sources: how much AI citations change between checks
Ask an AI the same buyer question repeatedly and the cited sources shift. We measured how much they change between checks, and it turns on the engine and the question.
GuidesHow to run a GEO audit that shows where competitors beat you
A step-by-step GEO audit: build a buyer-question prompt set, run it across five assistants, score coverage per engine, and find where competitors win.
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Product updates
View all- Product updateCheck Your AI Visibility for Free and Share the ResultSee whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini mention your brand on a starter set of buying questions, then share a card with the result.
- Product updateSee the YouTube Channels and Reddit Communities AI CitesIdentify the creators and communities behind your AI citations, review cited Reddit threads, and watch selected communities for new conversations.
- Product updateAdd More Prompts and AI Platforms to Your PlanPrompt packs expand your tracked questions. Claude, Grok and DeepSeek add coverage on more assistants, without changing your paid plan.
- Product updateThe AI Search Index: What AI Assistants Cite, Updated DailyExplore daily citation trends and changes in AI sourcing through SurfacedBy’s public benchmark. No account needed.
- Product updateA Free WordPress Plugin for AI Crawlers and ReferralsSee which AI bots request your pages and which assistants send visitors, directly in WordPress. The plugin works locally without a SurfacedBy account.
