Ranking #1 on Google doesn’t mean you show up in AI answers anymore. I’ve run SEO for 15+ years, and the playbook just split underneath all of us. One number from Semrush’s AI Visibility Index 2026 made that clear. Ten domains can account for nearly 40% of AI Mode’s citation weight The report tracked 180M+ AI answers across 9 markets and 4 platforms. I was amazed by how differently each engine picks its sources. From January to July, the top ten sources held 27.9% to 39.2% of citation weight in AI Mode’s US data. For ChatGPT, that same top ten held 14.3% to 15.8%. Same market. Very different concentration. My takeaway: the platform you’re targeting should change how you check your visibility. On AI Mode, citation weight clusters around a small group of domains. So that’s a focused place to start an audit: → Which domains keep showing up in your category → Which specific pages actually get cited → Whether your brand is described accurately when it does On ChatGPT, the sources are spread much wider. That means casting a wider net, not chasing ten domains. Most teams still audit AI visibility the way they audit Google. One list, one approach. The data says that’s a miss. Check the engine before you build the plan. Which domains keep showing up for your brand in AI answers right now? ♻️ Repost to help another marketer get found in AI. See the data: ai-visibility-index.semrush.… Paid partnership with Semrush. P.S. I write about SEO, GEO, and building a B2B portfolio daily.

At its peak, the EcomBalance blog pulled 10,000+ people a month. Rankings strong. Content doing its job. And the leads didn't match. Thousands of people read our stuff and left. Nothing on the page asked them to do anything else. That's when I stopped writing for a month.

Carbon didn't start as a product. It started as a hobby. Nights and weekends. For a video game site. At the start of 2026, my partner Steven got curious. He opened Claude and started building an SEO writing agent. No client. No business plan. Just a founder poking at a new tool. Here's how it went from nothing to a real product in 6 months: Month 1: The hobby project ↳ Steven builds the first agent for his video game site. ↳ Pure experiment. Nobody asked for it. Months 1-3: The stress test ↳ No lead gen. Just traffic. ↳ 750 pages indexed. 2,500 users in a single day. ↳ It grew straight through Google's AI spam updates. Month 3: The test I failed ↳ Steven sent me finished pages. ↳ I'd spent 2 years publicly calling AI content garbage. ↳ I couldn't find the AI tell. Months 3-5: The difficult reader ↳ My job became reading every article and complaining about it. ↳ Hundreds of edits fed back. Our team and clients joined in. ↳ That loop became our 25-check QA process. Month 5: Two brains, two agents ↳ An SEO brain built on 15+ years of TrioSEO knowledge. ↳ A brand brain with each client's real proof and voice. ↳ Carbon researches. Ember writes. Month 6: A working product ↳ Real client pages, live. ↳ Keyword to designed page in 10 to 15 minutes. Here's what I keep thinking about. The tool wasn't the magic. Everyone has access to Claude. The magic was a founder who knew exactly what good looked like. Steven brought the curiosity. I brought the complaints. Ha. Put a founder's judgment next to new technology and things move fast. Six months fast. Today Carbon writes for 40+ businesses. What's the side project you keep almost starting? ♻️ Repost to remind a founder that the hobby might be the business. P.S. Want to see Carbon on your own site? Join the 10 free articles Beta Program. Email [email protected] to apply.

Most AI writing tools stop at the words. Carbon doesn't. It designs the page too. A great article on an ugly page still loses. People skim, bounce, and never see your offer. So we built the design into the system. Here's what every Carbon page ships with: 1. A CTA box at the very top ↳ Some readers are ready to buy right now. ↳ Don't make them scroll 2,000 words to find you. 2. A clear H1, hero image and real byline ↳ One promise. A named author. A fresh date. ↳ Readers trust it. Google checks for it. 3. Bold-label lists ↳ Skimmers get the whole point from the bold words. ↳ Nobody reads every line. Design for that. 4. Comparison tables ↳ Easy to scan for people. ↳ Easy for ChatGPT and AI Overviews to lift and cite. 5. A mid-article opt-in ↳ For the reader who isn't ready to buy yet. ↳ They give you an email instead of leaving. 6. Step-by-step H3s and an FAQ accordion ↳ A clear system keeps people scrolling. ↳ The FAQ handles objections without a wall of text. 7. A product card that matches the article ↳ Not a generic "book a call" bolted on the bottom. ↳ The CTA sells the exact thing the post just taught. Ranking gets you the click. Design decides what happens next. Most SEO content stops at the first part. We care more about the second. What's the one thing on your blog that loses readers? ♻️ Repost if your blog ranks but doesn't convert. P.S. Want to see a Carbon-designed page on your own site? Join the 10 free articles Beta Program. Email [email protected] to apply.

If you're tracking Google rankings and nothing else, today's newsletter is the update. The stack I actually use for AI visibility, what to ignore, and what to do the moment a competitor shows up in your spot. Just posted.

New issue is live: The worst feeling in SEO now is seeing a competitor's name where yours should be. 7 tools from free to enterprise, and the exact teardown I run when it happens. Free to read. Link below.

Most people think SEO is just "content". Boy, are they wrong. Here's the 2026 truth... Content is the part you can see. It's maybe 20% of what actually ranks you. The other 80% sits under the waterline. Here's what SEO really is now: 1. Technical Foundation ↳ Google can't rank what it can't crawl. ↳ Indexing, Core Web Vitals, mobile UX. ↳ Site architecture and internal links that point somewhere on purpose. 2. Authority ↳ Who else vouches for you. ↳ Backlinks and digital PR, still. ↳ Plus Reddit threads, reviews and "Best X" lists. Roughly 85% of AI citations come from third-party sites, not yours. 3. AI Search (GEO) ↳ Getting cited, not just ranked. ↳ AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity. ↳ Clear entities, schema, answer-first pages, and coverage of every way people phrase the question. 4. Revenue ↳ The only layer your CFO cares about. ↳ CRO on the pages that rank. ↳ Track leads and revenue per page in GSC and GA4. Not just traffic. Publishing 10 blogs a month fixes none of this. I've watched founders do it for a year and wonder why nothing moved. EcomBalance hit #1 for "ecommerce bookkeeping" because all four layers worked together. Content was the easy part. Which layer is your SEO weakest on? ♻️ Repost if someone on your team still thinks SEO = blogging. P.S. Follow me for more posts like this daily.

Tomorrow's issue in one line: The tool finds the gap. You still have to close it. The full stack, the teardown, and the three numbers that matter more than any visibility score. Tomorrow.

Tomorrow: the 7 tools I use to catch a competitor beating me in ChatGPT, from free to enterprise. Which one to start with, what each is actually for, and the 5-question teardown I run when it happens. Saturday morning.

On-page SEO guide (Loved by Search Engines, AI, and Users) Thanks Ankush Gupta for originally posting this! Most people still think on-page SEO is just about keywords. But in reality, it’s about clarity, structure, and usefulness. Search engines need to understand your page. AI needs to interpret it. Users need to trust it. When all three align, rankings and engagement follow naturally. See the infographic below, where I explain the core parts of on-page SEO step by step. 👇 ♻️ Repost if a founder you know is still "waiting on SEO." P.S. Want to start ranking on AI? 2 months of AI SEO content on the house. Built with our new AI SEO Agent. Keyword to be published in 15 mins. Email me to see if you qualify.

Try this today. Type your 5 most important buyer prompts into ChatGPT, fresh chats. Write down who's named first on each. How many of the 5 named you? How many named a competitor? Post your score below. 0 out of 5 is more common than you'd think.

Which tool are you using to track AI visibility, if any? Semrush, Profound, Ahrefs, Peec, Otterly, something else, or just checking by hand? And what's the one thing it showed you that surprised you? I'm building a list.

Top 20 Digital Marketers to Follow in 2026: Most marketers follow 200 people and learn from none. The fix is a shorter list of people who actually publish. I've been doing SEO and marketing for 15+ years. The people I learn from have one thing in common. They show up every week, with real work attached. Here are 20 worth following in 2026: 1. @neilpatel ↳ SEO data, tested and published constantly. 2. @aleyda ↳ Technical SEO and AI search, no theory. 3. @lilyraynyc ↳ Google updates, explained while they're happening. 4. @randfish ↳ Audience research and zero-click reality. 5. @amandanat ↳ Content strategy that works without rankings. 6. @MarketingProfs ↳ Writing that people actually read. 7. @TheCoolestCool ↳ Distribution. Create once, promote forever. 8. @searchbrat ↳ How AI is changing marketing teams. 9. @garyvee ↳ Volume and attention, posted daily for years. 10. @aprildunford ↳ Positioning for B2B products. 11. @davegergardt ↳ B2B marketing without the corporate filter. 12. @cmwalker ↳ Demand gen and pipeline, with the numbers. 13. @RichardvdBlom ↳ LinkedIn algorithm research, updated yearly. 14. Jasmin Alić ↳ LinkedIn copywriting, line by line. 15. @laraacostar ↳ Personal branding that converts to clients. 16. @thejustinwelsh ↳ One-person business systems. 17. @AlexHormozi ↳ Offers and growth, on LinkedIn and IG. 18. Sophie Miller (Pretty Little Marketer) ↳ Instagram carousels on social trends. 19. Ashwinn Krishnaswamy ↳ Brand and marketing breakdowns on IG. 20. Eugene Healy ↳ Brand strategy, short and clear on IG. None of them got here with a viral post. They picked a lane and published for years. Consistency is the strategy. Everything else is tactics. Pick 5 from this list. Not 20. Then study how they repeat themselves. Who did I miss? ♻️ Repost if a marketer on your team needs this. P.S. I have a new secret anti-slop AI SEO Agent that's helping 35+ businesses rank faster on AI and Google. I'm looking for agencies and SaaS owners who want 2 months of AI SEO content in exchange for a case study. Email me if interested.

Ignore any single "AI visibility score" with no breakdown. 41 to 43 tells you nothing and costs you a meeting. Three things worth watching: are we named, on which prompts, and is the traffic converting. Everything else is decoration.

The most useful moments in my week are the ones that annoy me. I'm researching for a client, I type the buyer's prompt into ChatGPT, and a competitor is named before us. Every time, it opens a can of worms. Why them? What does their page have? Who's mentioning them? I've learned to love the can of worms. It's the start of a to-do list.

One AI platform can carry most of your brand's visibility. Cleveland Clinic pulls 86% of its AI mentions from a single source. Most teams treat AI search as one channel. @semrush 's 2026 data says it's four. And brands show up wildly differently on each. From Semrush's 2026 AI Visibility Index (126M prompts, 4 platforms): → Cleveland Clinic leans hard on one platform ↳ 86% of its AI mentions come from Google AI Overviews → Yelp puts nearly half its mentions on Google AI Mode → Home Depot spreads evenly across all four ↳ The most balanced brand in the study → Only 36 of 1,200+ brands showed up on all four, every month If one platform carries your visibility, one update can erase it. A balanced presence is much harder to knock over. 45% of marketing leaders can't even measure this yet. That gap is the opening. Treat each AI as its own channel. Know which one you lean on most. Then earn ground on the other three. Boring work, but it protects you. Do you know which AI carries your brand? ♻️ Repost if your team tracks only one. See the data: ai-visibility-index.semrush.… Paid partnership with Semrush. P.S. I write about SEO, GEO, and building a B2B portfolio daily.

Content gap or authority gap? If our page is better and they still win, it's authority. Go get the mentions. If their page is clearly better, it's content. Go fix the page. The fix is different. Guessing wrong wastes a quarter.

Competitor showing up in your spot in ChatGPT? Ask 5 questions: 1. What does their page have that ours doesn't? 2. Which sources mention them and not us? 3. Is it a content gap or an authority gap? 4. What's the smallest change that could flip it? 5. When do we check back? Same teardown I've run for 15 years. Different place to look.

Own a few websites? Collaborator wants to hand you an iPhone. They just launched a giveaway for publishers, and the prizes are real. Add your sites to @collaboratorpro — PR Distribution Marketplace. Pass moderation. Earn entries. The prizes: → 1st: a brand-new iPhone Duo → 2nd: iPhone 18 Pro → 3rd: Collaborator New Year gift box and merch How to get in: → Log in or create a publisher account → Add your websites and pass moderation → Each approved site is 1 entry ↳ Connect Google Analytics for +1 ↳ Connect Search Console for +2 ↳ One site with both = 4 entries → Join the Collaborator Slack community (required to win) A few things worth knowing: → Sites must be added and approved between Oct 14 and Dec 20 → Submit early so moderation has time to clear you → Winners are drawn at random on Dec 23 If you already own sites, this is close to free upside. More approved sites, more entries, better odds. The Slack community is the part I'd actually stick around for. That's where publishers and buyers connect once the giveaway ends. How many sites could you get approved before December 20? ♻️ Repost to put an iPhone in another publisher's hands. Check out the full giveaway details here: collaborator.pro/blog/collab… P.S. I write about SEO, GEO, and building a B2B portfolio daily. #CollaboratorPartner