From ChatGPT’s selectivity to the weight of external citations, OtterlyAI’s data reveals a GEO fragmented across different platforms and increasingly tied to concrete business results
Hello and welcome back to SEO Confidential! 🎙️
Today we’re publishing an interview we’ve been waiting for a while, because this episode’s guest is one of the most serious and hands-on researchers working on GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AI Search at an international level.
We’re talking about Rick Tousseyn, GEO/SEO Content Strategist & Researcher at OtterlyAI, where he spends his days doing what few of us do: real experiments, on real websites, to understand how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews decide who gets cited and who gets ignored.
No abstract theories or guesswork. You start from the data, run tests, observe the results and try to understand what is really happening inside AI-powered answer engines.
It’s the same method we use with our GEO Observatory: observing AI directly in the field to turn a phenomenon that is still hard to interpret into something that can be measured and analyzed.
Rick is also the co-founder of MarchiteQ, an agency that helps B2B and SaaS companies find their way in this new world of GEO, advertising and automation.
And here’s a heads-up: what we discussed overturns quite a few certainties. You’ll discover why a website can disappear from Google and still keep being cited by Copilot, why ChatGPT sometimes “sees” your content but chooses to ignore it, and what Rick believes is the only metric that truly matters when we talk about ROI.
If you work in search marketing or run an online business, this is one of those interviews to read very carefully. Let’s dive in!
Does your website have little content? AI can cite it anyway (as long as your brand is mentioned online, even without links)
OtterlyAI’s experiment shows that the same AI content can be removed by Google, rewarded by Bing and cited massively by Copilot. What does this difference tell us about how we should do SEO today? Does it still make sense to talk about a single GEO strategy, or would the ideal be to optimize separately for each platform?
There is no one-size-fits-all GEO strategy. Every industry is fundamentally different from the others and carries a different weight. From our data we’ve observed that traffic coming from Claude is far more likely to turn into commercial leads. This may be because Claude’s audience is made up mostly of marketing professionals (not casual AI users) who know much better what they want.
From our “Claude Citation” study we also know that Claude behaves completely differently from other AI-powered search engines. For example, it doesn’t rely on social media sources at all. In short, it’s always better to adapt your strategy to your target audience.
The finding that struck me most is that a website can disappear from Google and keep earning citations on AI platforms. Does this mean that today authority on Google and authority for AI systems are two different things?
That’s correct. From this study, however, we saw that the platform that keeps citing the website is Microsoft Copilot, even after Google removed the site from its results. To be honest, that trade-off isn’t worth it, unless being cited by Copilot is genuinely important to you.
ChatGPT visited your websites thousands of times, while OAI-SearchBot came by just 80 times and ChatGPT never cited them. What does this data tell us about the relationship between crawling, indexing and citations? And above all: what signals do you think ChatGPT uses to decide whether a source truly deserves to be cited?
ChatGPT does indeed seem to “see” and consider the content, but deliberately chooses not to use it. So it’s quite selective. In that sense, it’s a positive signal: low-quality AI-produced content shouldn’t be rewarded.
There’s a lot of talk about visibility on ChatGPT, Claude and the other AI engines. But how much is being visible there really worth, in business terms? Do we already have enough evidence to say that AI Search brings in customers, or are we giving too much weight to metrics that are still hard to tie to revenue?
The starting point is self-reported attribution, declared directly by users. Contact forms should always include a question like: “How did you hear about us?”. It’s the only way to know for sure whether and how much these leads actually contribute to the company’s revenue.
To get cited by AI today, what works better: an article, a YouTube video, or do you need both? And what determines which source the different platforms choose?
Both, but in many industries written content is now saturated. Video therefore represents a huge opportunity. If you don’t have a team capable of creating videos, you can rely on influencers to talk about your brand.
Which GEO techniques are proving, data in hand, to actually increase citations on ChatGPT, Gemini and the other AI engines? And which ones are often recommended but still lack solid evidence behind them?
Here you’ll find the complete list of everything our team has tested so far in AI-powered search, with notes on what works and what doesn’t. Take a look!
Some SEO experts were used to working mainly on-site and very little off-site. In GEO, how much weight does what is said about the brand on external websites, forums, media and other sources carry instead?
In this experiment we show that even a website with little or no content beyond the homepage and service pages can still be mentioned by AI-powered search. It’s enough for the brand to be cited often enough by external websites, even without links. It’s a very different mechanism from what worked in traditional SEO.
So far we’ve mostly measured how often a brand appears in AI answers. But how can we tell whether ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity are building a positive or negative perception of that brand? And above all, what can a company do to change the way AIs talk about it?
Check what the AI really knows about your brand. Ask it brand-related questions: problems, alternatives, frustrations, fears, concerns, goals, myths, interests and possible misconceptions.
If a page stays first on Google but loses clicks because of AI Overviews, how can we tell whether it’s really gaining or losing visibility? What is the most reliable metric to watch?
The only truly reliable indicator is the number of qualified leads that generate concrete sales opportunities. Everything else risks being a mere vanity metric.
It may sound controversial, but I believe that even search rankings, when not directly tied to ROI, can end up being a metric that’s more useful for self-gratification than for measuring the real value of the work done. You have to measure what really matters.
Regardless of traditional search rankings, being visible in Google’s AI Overviews should always be a priority. In my view, video is the only format that can genuinely guarantee a click: videos tend to appear more often in AI overviews and, when done well, push the user to click to learn more. Text content, on the other hand, can deliver the answer directly, leaving no concrete reason to visit the website.
Between AI Search, video content and qualified leads: GEO must be results-driven
And that’s all for today!
What can I say, this chat with Rick left us with plenty of food for thought.
Rick sees it the way I do: there is no longer ONE strategy that works for everyone, but a different puzzle for each platform. Google, Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude… each has its own logic, its own criteria, its own audience.
Another point that got me thinking: qualified leads as the only true metric of success. How many times do we chase rankings and citations without asking ourselves whether any of it actually translates into revenue?
And that’s not all: if it’s true that text risks “just answering” without generating clicks, maybe it really is time to invest more in video content, even for those who have only worked with writing so far.
In short, plenty to chew on, and I recommend re-reading the interview at your own pace, because there are passages that deserve a second read.
The good news is that here at SEO Confidential we’re not stopping: next week we’ll be back with a new episode and a new expert ready to tell us about another piece of this world we call, for short, AI Search.
See you next Monday as always, don’t miss it!
