GEO? AEO? LLMO? What's With All This AI Stuff? - Patrick Stox Ahrefs Evolve 2025

Transcript

1. GEO? AEO? LLMO? What's with all this AI SEO stuff?
2. Product Advisor & Technical SEO @ Ahrefs Who Is Patrick Stox? Ahrefs SEO book Ahrefs blog Lead Author: SEO Chapter of the Web Almanac 2021 Technical Review Editor of the Art of SEO 4th edition Writing Founded a Technical SEO slack group /r/TechSEO moderator on Reddit Organize Tech SEO Connect & Triangle SEO Meetup Defined the role of SEO for the US Department of Labor Community
3. What Are We Calling It?
5. 1.65% yandex 4.08% bing 90.4% Google 0.75% baidu 0.87% duckduckgo 1.46% yahoo! Search Engine Market Share Search Engine Market Share Worldwide - September 2025
6. 4.05% microsoft copilot 10.82% perplexity 81.13% chatgpt 0.19% deepseek 0.99% claude 2.82% google gemini AI Assistant Market Share AI Chatbot Market Share Worldwide - September 2025
7. ChatGPT Microsoft Copilot Google Gemini Perplexity Claude A Grok Deepseek Komo Brave Leo AI Fantasy Google AI Overviews ChatGPT Google Gemini Perplexity Other assistants Reality AI Assistant Market Share Reality
9. AI Traffic is growing Percentage (%) Based on a study of ~82K sites. Source: Ahrefs Web Analytics. AI traffic has grown ~9.7x over the last year
10. Based on a study of ~82K sites. Source: Ahrefs Web Analytics. ai chatbot traffic distribution Based on a study of ~82K sites. Source: Ahrefs Web Analytics. percentage of web traffic by ai platform over time It’s Mostly ChatGPT
12. Google Sends Far More Traffic source https://chatgpt-vs-google.com/
13. And it’s still your best marketing channel - Ryan Law
14. AI Search Is Still Search
15. The Great Decoupling
16. The Great Decoupling: ~800k Sites For ~800K Google search console properties. average total impressions and average total clicks
17. It’s The AI Overviews
18. AIOs Are On ~19% of queries
19. 1,000,000 SERPs analyzed. ai overview and featured snippet SERP presence ai overview snippet Goodbye Featured Snippets
20. 0 Forecasted CTR (March 2025) Change Analysis of 300,000 keywords Actual CTR (March 2025) 0.020 0.040 0.060 impact of aios on position #1 ctr 0.040 -0.014 (-34.5%) 0.026 AI Overviews reduce clicks by 34.5%
21. My estimate for the new normal:

 Clicks will be 25% of what they are. AI Mode Will Be Worse…
22. Still better than impressions, but that will be a more common metric now. SEOs Are Still Going To Report On Clicks
23. Revenue Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) Conversions Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Even Better To Report On
24. 62.4% Overall 63.7% Search 67.8% AI Average bounce rate 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% Based on a study of ~82K sites. Source: Ahrefs Web Analytics. average bounce rate 4 AI 5.2% Search 5.5 Overall Average bounce rate 6 4 2 0 Based on a study of ~82K sites. Source: Ahrefs Web Analytics. average # of pages visited AI Search Traffic May Not Be Better Quality
25. 2.27 AI 2.79 Search 2.99 Overall Average pages per session duration 3 2 1 0 Based on a study of ~82K sites. Source: Ahrefs Web Analytics. average pages per session duration 78 Overall 78 Search 86 AI Average time on site (s) 100 75 50 25 0 Based on a study of ~82K sites. Source: Ahrefs Web Analytics. average time on site AI Search Traffic May Not Be Better Quality
26. That’s a 23x higher coverversion rate than traditional organic search. For Ahrefs: 0.5% of Visitors Drove 12.1% of Signups
27. Desktop 34.1% Smartphone 0.62% Tablet 0.08% Phablet Count 65.08% 2M 1.5M 1M 0.5M 0 ai traffic by device type (2025 june) Smartphone 20.9% Desktop 2.2% Tablet 0.2% Phablet Count 76.5% 350M 300M 250M 200M 200M 150M 100M 50M 0 organic traffic by device type (2025 june) AI Search Isn’t Mobile First
28. -50 -40 -30 -10 0 10 20 30 AI Assistant traffic (%) - Organic Search traffic (%) Product page Homepage Informational Hallucinated Training Blog homepage Data study Product roundup Statistics Template Pricing Documentation Programatic Free tool Traffic performance difference by page type: AI Assistants vs Organic Search
29. ChatGPT Microsoft Copilot Google Gemini Perplexity Claude A Grok Deepseek Komo Brave Leo AI Google AI Overviews ChatGPT Google Gemini Perplexity Other assistants internat ional vs non-internat ional visi tors organic search internat ional vs non-internat ional visi tors ai assistants International Pages Perform Poorly
30. International corpus is smaller. English is more likely to be cited But you won’t be cited at all without translated content Original data gets mentioned International Pages
31. Google AI Overviews ChatGPT Perplexity
32. mentions vs impressions for google ai overviews (june2025) mentions vs potential reach for chatgpt (june2025) AI Assistants Have Different Biases
33. 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 Spearman correlation Branded web mentions 0.664 Branded anchors 0.527 Branded search volume 0.392 DR 0.326 Number of ref. domains 0.295 Branded traffic 0.274 Number of backlinks 0.218 Ad traffic 0.216 Ad cost 0.215 URL raitng 0.18 Number of site pages 0.17 fa c to r s t h at c o r r e l at e w i t h b r a n d a p p e a r a n c e i n a i o v e r v i e w s Brands Win in AIOs
34. 1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0 Perplexity ChatGPT Google AI overviews Spearman, p branded web mentions vs ai visibility correlations Not so much others
35. The cat is sleeping The cat is sleeping on The cat is sleeping on the bed how llms predict the next word
36. Training Data Retrieved Pages (RAG Models) Temperature (eg 0.8) Probabilities = Randomness
37. Topic Coverage
38. Chunking = Topical Content
39. Personalization
41. But They’re Augmented By Search That Does
42. Training Data Tempe Retrieved Pages (RAG Models) rature (eg 0.8) Partial? Probabilities = Randomness
43. Just don’t. 

 Isn’t used, probably won’t be. llms.txt
44. Doesn’t go into the training data.

 May be used for features in AI Search. Schema
45. AI Assistants Are In Their Black Hat Era
46. Parasites Hacked Sites Expired Domains Reddit/Quora spam Spam
47. Legal liability. Data Poisoning: False Info
48. They’ll get better at combating spam. Data Cleaning
49. SEOs Got Lucky, Google Forgave Us
50. AI Assistants May Hold A Grudge
51. Multiple articles Buy or setup other sites Influencer marketing Leverage affiliates Paid outreach or content Content syndication Digital PR Better, But Still May Be Abused
52. Multiple articles = Content Buy or setup other sites = M&A Influencer marketing = Influencer Leverage affiliates = Affiliate Paid outreach or content = Influencer Content syndication = Paid Digital PR = PR How They Map
53. More Than SEO
54. Brand Product - fix things Social Media - what are people saying Product Marketing - BOFU / Comparison content Marketing Customer Service More Teams
55. Be a better business Build a better product/service Address customer issues Top AI Search Tactics
56. SEO: Optimize Your Site. Now: Optimize How The Internet Talks About You.
57. Blogs Presentations Social Media Video Podcasts etc Content: Repurpose Content - Repeat Your Messaging
58. Social Media YouTube - 2nd largest search engine Communities - be active Diversify Your Traffic
59. Brand Radar: See How You’re Mentioned
60. Check Competitor Gaps
61. Keep it simple and pay attention to specific parts of the text.
62. Cover A Topic Well
63. AIOs result in 34.5% less clicks AI search traffic converts 23x higher than organic search traffic for Ahrefs etc. Citable Content - Statistics
64. Redirect Hallucinated URLs
65. source http://metehan.ai/blog/citemet-ai-share-buttons-growth-hack-for-llms/ Creative - Ask AI To Remember
66. 100% 75% 50% 25% 0% No 12.63% Yes 87.37% do you use ai to create or help with creating content? Survey: 87% use AI to help create content
67. 20 15 10 5 0 AI 17 No AI 12 median monthly publishing frequency Survey: companies publish 42% more content with AI
68. Survey: 97% edit & review AI content 0% 10% 50% 20% 60% 30% 70% 40% 80% 90% 100% I check it myself manually I have an editor I ask AI to do it for me I don’t check quality I work with subjects matter experts 80.4%
 618 resp. 34.7%
 267 resp. 30.4%
 234 resp. 14.2%
 109 resp. 2.9%
 22 resp. 80% of respondents manually review AI content for accuracy
69. Human + AI 71.7% Pure AI [100%] 2.5% Pure Human [0%] 25.8% Substantial AI use [11-70%] 46.36% Dominant AI use [71-99%] 15.51% Minimal AI use [1-10%] 9.87% Human + AI 81.9% Pure AI [100%] 4.6% Dominant AI 7.8% Minimal AI 13.8% Moderate AI 40.00% Substantial AI 20.3% Pure Human 13.5% how many pages in the top 20 serps are created/assisted with ai Based on Ahrefs study of 900K web pages, published in APril 2025 (one per domain). how many pages are created/ assisted with ai
71. thank you