Josh Blyskal | Profound | I analyzed 40 million search results, here's what I found

Brighton SEO San Diego 2025, September 23-34

Transcript

2. #brightonseo Answer Engine Optimization No Javascript No Javascript No Javascript LLM Crawlability LLM Crawlability LLM Crawlability URL Slugs URL Slugs URL Slugs FAQ Schema FAQ Schema FAQ Schema Intent Analysis Intent Analysis Intent Analysis Semantic Chunking Semantic Chunking Semantic Chunking
3. My name is Josh Blyskal. I lead AI Strategy at Profound. ​ Profound empowers marketers with the data and insights to understand, take action on, and control how they show up in AI Search. #brightonseo
4. We actually analyzed over 250M responses + 3B citations From real frontend monitoring #brightonseo
5. Across 8 answer engines #brightonseo
6. We tested queries with both commercial & informational intents in mind #brightonseo
7. These findings will change the way you think about search #brightonseo
8. We’re seeing massive changes in AEO #brightonseo
9. % of citations reddit chatgpt perplexity google ai overviews Microsoft copilot | | | | | | | | | | | Apr 13 aug 31 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 #brightonseo Reddit has exploded 800%+ as a source of truth for ChatGPT From ~1% to 8% of all citations
10. ChatGPT referrals dropped 52% for answer-forward content Because of GPT-5 #brightonseo | | | | | | | | | | 50000 40000 30000 20000 10000 0 CHATGPT REFERRAL TRAFFIC -52% decrease in July cHATGPT REFERRAL TRAFFIC REDDIT % (14D MA) wikipedia 14d ma % of all citations | | | | | | | | | | 10 8 6 4 2 0 Reddit (14d MA % OF ALL CITATIONS +87% increase | | | | | | | | | | 13 12 11 10 9 8 wikipedia 14d ma % of all citations +62% increase
11. ChatGPT search switched from Bing to SerpApi #brightonseo
12. hot yoga studios with coupons san di URL 1: TITLE META-DESC URL SLUG ChatGPT #brightonseo ChatGPT no longer exclusively relies on the Bing index
13. Experiment: Across 1000 informational and commercial prompts, we asked ChatGPT, Google and Bing the same questions. The best running shoe for marath #brightonseo
14. #brightonseo AUGUST 1st 2025 6 months ago 12% 26% 19% 18% ChatGPT is using a hybrid index
15. ChatGPT results only overlap 19% with the Google SERP Analyzed commercial and informational queries across 1000 SERP analyses of 1000 individual ChatGPT executions 19% ChatGPT Google SERP #brightonseo Profound
16. #brightonseo ChatGPT best hot yoga studio San Diego 2025 San Diego
17. hot yoga studios with coupons san diego URL 1: TITLE META-DESC URL SLUG URL 1 URL 2 URL 3 ChatGPT WebGPT #brightonseo
18. At the same time, we know more about the sources answer engines cite than ever before #brightonseo
19. ChatGPT loves Wikipedia / Reddit #brightonseo en.wikipedia.org 10.36% 37M reddit.com 7.20% 26M techradar.com 1.74% 6.3M tomsguide.com 0.84% 3.0M businessinsider.com 0.73% 2.6M forbes.com 0.62% 2.2M nypost.com 0.57% 2.1M wired.com 0.53% 1.9M investopedia.com 0.53% 1.9M theguardian.com 0.42% 1.5M
20. Perplexity is very Reddit-leaning #brightonseo reddit.com 6.52% 41M youtube.com 2.75% 17M tripadvisor.com 1.34% 8.3M yelp.com 0.84% 5.3M forbes.com 0.58% 3.6M walmart.com 0.58% 3.6M gartner.com 0.56% 3.5M cnet.com 0.51% 3.2M pcmag.com 0.49% 3.0M bestbuy.com 0.47% 3.0M
21. #brightonseo youtube.com 2.66% 15M reddit.com 2.03% 11M quora.com 1.10% 6.5M linkedin.com 0.87% 5.0M gartner.com 0.42% 2.4M forbes.com 0.41% 2.3M nerdwallet.com 0.40% 2.3M businessinsider.com 0.39% 2.2M medium.com 0.38% 2.1M cnet.com 0.36% 2.0M Google AI Overviews is evenly distributed But has a bend towards YouTube
22. #brightonseo google.com 2.25% 4.2M youtube.com 1.32% 2.4M reddit.com 1.15% 2.1M blog.google 0.96% 1.8M linkedin.com 0.92% 1.7M quora.com 0.62% 1.1M amazon.com 0.60% 1.1M indeed.com 0.52% 1.0M tripadvisor.com 0.52% 1.0M nerdwallet.com 0.46 0.8M Google AI Mode is obsessed with citing other Google sources
23. Copilot gravitates towards Forbes and Bing #brightonseo forbes.com 3.67% 12M bing.com 2.08% 6.6M gartner.com 1.56% 4.9M amazon.com 1.11% 3.5M pcmag.com 0.93% 3.0M tomsguide.com 0.76% 2.4M nerdwallet.com 0.71% 2.2M walmart.com 0.61% 1.9M peoplemanagingpeople.com 0.61% 1.9M cybersecuritynews.com 0.60% 1.9M
24. #brightonseo reddit.com 3.50% 88M en.wikipedia.org 1.78% 45M youtube.com 1.63% 41M forbes.com 0.93% 24M techradar.com 0.58% 15M gartner.com 0.53% 13M tripadvisor.com 0.50% 13M nerdwallet.com 0.45% 11M linkedin.com 0.41% 10M tomsguide.com 0.40% 10M These are the world’s most cited domains in AI search Across 3+ billion citations collected over a year (2024-2025)
25. #brightonseo What drives citations?
26. Experiment: Across 5 key industries and 50,000+ prompts, we measured how SEO signals correlate with AI citations #brightonseo
27. Traffic ≠ AI Citations 95% of AI citation behavior cannot be explained by traffic AI Citations Traffic (Visitors) Low traffic High citation High traffic Low citation Zero traffic 900+ citations r2 = 0.05 #brightonseo
28. Backlinks ≠ AI Citations 97.2% of AI citations cannot be explained by backlinks
 Sites with fewer backlinks often receive significantly more AI citations r2 = 0.038 #brightonseo
29. #brightonseo Generative intent is 37% of all prompts ‘No intent’ accounts for 12.1% of prompts Transactional 0.6% Commercial 14.5% Navigational 32.2% Informational 52.7% Traditional Search* No Intent 12.1% NEW Generative 37.5% NEW Navigational 2.1% Transactional 6.1% Commercial 9.5% Informational 32.7% AI Search Existing Intent New Intent
30. Typical SEO strategies don’t apply But make no mistake, AI Search is controllable #brightonseo
31. Technical optimization is key, but it looks a little different #brightonseo
32. AI crawlers still don’t interact with Javascript 9:41 #brightonseo
33. Semantic URLs get 11.4% more citations We analyzed the URLs for 50,000 top-cited pages and compared them to the URLs for 50,000 bottom-cited pages Natural-language slugs of 4-7 words were far more common among highly cited pages #brightonseo
34. goodonyou.eco/a8d7f-ethical-92j3k-brands ecothes.com/blog/72hf3-sus-bra earthday.org/kit-92hd2-shop-clo-3jf8/ goodonyou.eco/most-ethical-and-sustainable-clothing-brands ecothes.com/blog/sustainable-brands earthday.org/toolkit-how-to-shop-for-your-clothes/ #brightonseo URLs market the page to the AI Answer Engines go to the open internet and want to find the content that they are most confident will solve the specific query When ChatGPT compares URLs, it selects the one it’s most confident contains the answer
35. content=" " The best business credit cards include Ink Business Unlimited, Venture X Business and U.S. Bank Business Triple Cash Rewards, among other options. Spoil your content in your meta-description #brightonseo
36. Semantic Chunks #brightonseo Title: Content: Title: Content: Title: Content: "Average Rent in San Francisco, CA (Q1 2025)" "Studio (0) $2,297 · 1 Bedroom $2,904 · 2 Bedroom $4,175" "Average Rent in San Francisco – Zumper" "As of July 2025, median rent is $3,461... decreased 1% last month" "Is San Francisco Affordable? (2025)" "Median rent in San Francisco is $3,019. Studio $2,177; One Bedroom $3,150” “Average rent prices in San Francisco”
37. Positions 5-10 on Google are viable for AI citations #brightonseo 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Google Position #1-10: Human Clicks vs. ChatGPT Citations CTR/Citation rate (%) Human CTR ChatGPT Citations Google SERP Position
38. Answer Engines have a recency bias #brightonseo
39. #brightonseo ChatGPT best hot yoga studio San Diego 2025 San Diego
40. Content is king #brightonseo
41. AI Search is lazy #brightonseo
42. Listicles and comparative content dominate in AI citations (Across 2.6B citations) #brightonseo Profound Comparative/Listicle 666,086,560 25.37 Comparative/Listicle 666,086,560 25.37 Comparative/Listicle 666,086,560 25.37 Comparative/Listicle 666,086,560 25.37 Comparative/Listicle 666,086,560 25.37
43. best men's running shoe? Thinking... #brightonseo
44. #brightonseo
45. Answer Engines pick up and cite content on the scale of days #brightonseo
46. AI search is (generally) in love with UGC #brightonseo 17.4% ChatGPT 15.8% Perplexity 12.3% Google AI Overviews 4.6% Microsoft Copilot % UGC by Platform
47. I think these cloud GPU providers are probably the best bets for your startup: RunPod.io - Affordable, scalable, and flexible GPU cloud with serverless, dedicated, and community-run instances for Al/ML Paperspace - User-friendly platform, good for development and research CoreWeave - High-performance cloud GPUs with enterprise-grade reliability Vast Al - Decentralized GPU marketplace for deep learning and HPC FluidStack - Low-cost cloud GPUs leveraging underutilized hardware, optimized for training and compute-heavy tasks Social Media and UGC work situationally #brightonseo
48. Because Reddit is the most cited source in AI search REDDIT’S RANK AI ANSWER ENGINE 1st 1st 1st Overall (Aggregated) 1st 1st 1st Perplexity 2nd 2nd 2nd ChatGPT 2nd 2nd 2nd Google AI Overviews 3rd 3rd 3rd Google AI Mode 1st 1st 1st 1st Overall (Aggregated) #brightonseo
49. What does all of this mean for you? #brightonseo
50. AI search is going to even more diverge Index Shifts Semantic Chunking AI search predictions #brightonseo
51. Brand Customer #brightonseo
52. Track queries Create AI conducive content Monitor and mimic citations Optimize your site Build your muscle now #brightonseo
53. Track your AI Visibility Profound arms marketers globally to understand and control what AI says about their brand We run millions of searches on Answer Engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews to build a picture of how AI responds to questions about brands, products, and industries Brand visibility Percentage of AI answers about Accounting Software that mention FreshBooks Jan 29 Feb 04 Feb 03 Feb 02 Jan 31 0 25% 50% 75% 100% 45% vs last week Visibility score 89.8% #brightonseo
54. Find out which pages matter most Track which of your pages command authority in AI Search responses and understand exactly how your content - and your competitors' - shape the narrative across channels Earned 30,445 (95.1%) Operated 518 (1.6%) Owned 1,056 (3.3%) Domain Number of mentions 1 forbes.com 1885 2 builtin.com 1276 3 rho.co Owned 1086 4 fitsmallbusiness.com 1056 5 fintechlabs.com 750 6 Bill 72.3% Citation Domain Count Percentage of open-ended AI answers #brightonseo
55. Explore prompt and topic volume Find which models surface your brand and understand how many people are searching for any topic in AI Search Platform Count Last indexed Change Pages OpenAI 18 minutes ago 243 33 875 Google 12 5 days ago 7 26 Microsoft 297 1 hour ago 24 23 Perplexity 98 2 hours ago 20 20 Apple 875 18 minutes ago 1 9 Bytedance 875 18 minutes ago 1 7 Amazon 875 18 minutes ago 24 23 Meta 875 18 minutes ago 2 2 DeepSeek 875 18 minutes ago 1 23 Region Track as topic Real Estate Volume Estimates Total volume Estimated total prompts using this keyword 2.7m Frequency This keyword ranks in the top 28% by usage frequency Frequent Platform Volume Estimates 2.7m SearchGPT 2.1m Perplexity 90k Copilot 60k Other 480k Global Volume US 201.0k IN 110.0k UK 60.5k CA 27.1k AU 27.1k Rest 148.6k Keywords variations Real estate market 9 Real property 4 Real estate business 8 Real estate investment 16 Keywords variations real estate agency real estate business real estate sales real estate broker real estate company real estate agent real estate agent real estate industry #brightonseo
56. Content that is architected to be cited Profound analyzes citations, conducts deep research, and builds AI-ready content All in real time Platform Count Last indexed Change Pages OpenAI 18 minutes ago 243 33 875 Google 12 5 days ago 7 26 Microsoft 297 1 hour ago 24 23 Perplexity 98 2 hours ago 20 20 Apple 875 18 minutes ago 1 9 Bytedance 875 18 minutes ago 1 7 Amazon 875 18 minutes ago 24 23 Meta 875 18 minutes ago 2 2 DeepSeek 875 18 minutes ago 1 23 Prompt LLM gpt-5 Chat AI Prompt LLM Generate Image Knowledge Base Retrieval Transcribe Audio Logic If & Else Iteration Loop Human Review Code Run Code Call API Run SQL Query Variable Aggregator Web Research Google Search Blocks Prompt LLM Add description... Settings Last Run Error Handling None Add Message Write your prompt here or enter ‘/’ to insert a variable… User Prompt Write your prompt here or enter ‘/’ to insert a variable… System Prompt Context Start / sys.user_id String AI Model gpt-5 Chat Generate Image Generate Image Generate Image #brightonseo
57. #brightonseo Profound #brightonseo As a former SEO, we’re the black sheep of marketing AI Search is becoming the sexiest area of digital marketing... and everyone in this room has a prime opportunity