Insights

Study: AI Declined to Answer Prompts About Our Brand 31% of the Time (But Got Our Info Mostly Right When It Answered)

Admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:59:59 GMT

TL;DR

We realized AI platforms were relaying an inaccurate narrative about Seer Interactive, so we ran a full analysis to find out what else they were saying — and whether the info was accurate
Of the 6 AI platforms we tracked, they averaged a 95.9% accuracy rating when they answered the prompt
The AI platforms were more likely to decline to answer a prompt (31% on average) than to provide an incorrect answer about Seer (3%)
AI frequently declined to answer prompts about comparisons (80%), but had high accuracy rates for both direct (90%) and indirect (89%) prompts
We share a framework to help brands prioritize inaccuracies in need of fixing, based on how important a claim is, whether it's an easy fix, and if it's objective or subjective

Do You Know What AI Is Saying About Your Brand?

A few months ago, we asked AI models, “what do people say about working with Seer Interactive?” Most mentioned high account manager turnover, which was a surprise to us.

How we built an agentic loop to improve every skill in our company, instantly

Admin — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:48:49 GMT

TL;DR

I reviewed our traffic-decline-analysis skill's and found four real problems: a traffic number from the wrong source, a real drop mislabeled "stable," no way to trace where a number came from, and no long-term trend view
I gave that feedback in a 9-minute recording and an agent picked up my feedback and fixed it the same day, and it shipped to everyone at Seer.
I found another problem the skill was picking which checks to run instead of running all of them, every time
An offhand idea from that same review became a new feature days later. The tool now runs off a simple spreadsheet export instead of needing live client data

Here’s how it all happened…

What Is AI Saying About Your Brand? Develop a Brand Canon and Find Out.

Admin — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:37:16 GMT

TL;DR

Brands are measuring AI visibility without tracking if the perception of their brand is even accurate
We recommend building a brand canon, which tracks facts, differentiators, brand claims, what your brand wants to be known for, and what you don’t
Once you’ve created your canon, you can use it to compare what you want AI to say about your brand versus what it actually says (and fix the output by tracing claims to their source)
Learn how to build your own brand canon, how to measure the accuracy of claims made by AI, and how to prioritize fixing falsehoods and inaccuracies

What Happens if AI Shares Inaccurate Info About Your Brand?

A potential customer asks AI what your company does, and the answer comes back about 70% right (per Seer's analysis of 28,123 responses about our brand across 6 AI models). But nearly 30% of the information is wrong or outdated, or the model declines to answer.

27 GEO RFP questions you should be asking in 2026

Admin — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:37:44 GMT

We looked back at hundreds of sales calls about GEO and looked for the questions people are asking, the pressures they are under, and decided to write up the questions people are asking and the questions they should be asking in an RFP situation.

Like my SEO RFP guide, this guide isn’t limited to those of you looking for an RFP template for your upcoming GEO/AEO project:

Do LLMs Respect robots.txt? Where robots.txt Can and Can't Block AI

Admin — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:49:49 GMT

You’ve probably noindex-ed pages you don’t want showing up in search. It’s a solid practice for product variants or paid destination pages, and it works for Google rankings.

Our Early View of ChatGPT Ads: 5 Initial Observations - Updated July 28, 2026

Admin — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

When we first published this on July 15, we were working from three days of ChatGPT ads data. Revisiting the data this week, our main takeaways haven't changed, but ecosystem is evolving. Share of responses with ads rose significantly, a wider set of brands is now buying them, and early patterns are sharpening.

The updated numbers below now reflect about 2 weeks of data. With that, we advise you treat this as a developing study. It's still early and we are prepared for this to change fast.

OpenAI officially launched the ChatGPT Ads pilot on February 9, 2026, rolling the placements out more widely as of May. While we've been tracking how ads work, tests and usability through our own pilot and other studies, we have not had a view into how often they show up, what types of prompts they’re shown for, and how well they align with those responses that they are served under.

That changed this week when ads started appearing in our AI tracker.

Study: Content Recency's Impact on AI Visibility in 2026

Admin — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:27:35 GMT

Does recency still matter in AI search? How much?

The New Analytics Blind Spot: AI Traffic & AI Agents That Shop Without Visiting Your Site

Admin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This blog was originally published on March 3, 2025 and updated on July 22, 2026.

Is That "Web Visitor" an Agent or a Human?

Back in January 2025, OpenAI’s Operator became the first true "AI agent" to hit the market, available to ChatGPT Pro users. We ran an early experiment to see how it would show up in GA4, and the results were strange enough that we wrote about them in the original version of this blog.

How an intern 10x'ed impressions with 1 AI experiment

Admin — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 22:43:50 GMT

TL;DR: Bryan Gunawan, an intern in Seer's AI Optimization Academy, made 5 targeted changes to an existing Seer blog post and took it from under 100 impressions to a peak of 1,195 in a matter of weeks. The page was also cited in a Google AI Overview.

Why The Best Strategy for Creator Ads Focuses on Testing and Speed

Admin — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:14:10 GMT

TL; DR

Brands investing in creator ads may not be taking the right actions to see their desired results
The industry is focused on helping brands find the right creator, when the real problem is about inconsistent performance
One Seer client saw lower-funnel ROAS vary from 0.69x to 20x and customer acquisition costs spanning $23 to $538
A cost gap will emerge between brands optimizing for creator selection and brands who build a testing framework

Yes, Everyone Is Doing Creator Ads

Almost every paid social team we talk to is putting money into creator ads right now. Most of them will be let down by the results, but not for the reason they might think.

Culture: What things we got rid of, changed, kept and why!

Admin — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:21:02 GMT

The Case of the Missing Click: What Zero-Click Search Actually Means for Paid Strategy

Admin — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:24:27 GMT

Who doesn’t love a good mystery? I've been thinking about the conundrum that is zero-click search a lot lately, partly because of Rand Fishkin's recent study showing that less than one-third of Google searches still send a click. But it’s also on my mind because of what I keep hearing from marketing teams across the industry.

How to Use AI to Enhance Client Relationships (Without Losing Your Competitive Edge)

Admin — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This blog was originally published on December 4, 2023 and was updated on July 10, 2026.

Is Your Brand Considering a Reddit Strategy for AI Visibility? Here’s What to Do.

Admin — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:11:36 GMT

Brands have heard that Reddit matters for AI visibility. Many of them are adopting the mindset of “we need to be on Reddit” without thinking the strategy through.

New to Working With a Marketing Agency in the Age of AI? Here's What to Expect.

Admin — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This blog was originally published on February 24, 2023 and was updated on July 7, 2026.

So, You Decided to Hire a Marketing Agency

Maybe it’s your first time, or it’s been a while.

My GEO Strategy & Consulting Tool is open sourced

Admin — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:55:52 GMT

This GEO consulting tool is built for strategists who struggle, like me, to articulate what tactics we have to deploy in GEO against what expectations should be about impact and speed of impact as our clients ask, what should I do to show up more in AI.

It is completely open sourced, so make it your own if you want, the idea is for Seer to try to help us all command these tough conversations better.

The hardest part about consulting around generative engine optimization these days is that there are like 100 different tactics to improve AI visibility, social, listicles, citation correction, editing footers, building text only pages, llms.txt, schema. Each carrying it's own, ability to implement vs the speed of impact vs the risk - and differing opinions from all of us.

And we're all disagreeing about what tactics are "right" but I wanted to build something that let us all communicate better about the tradeoffs not that said this thing is right or wrong according to me.

This is an early prototype, I feel like I am missing a LOT of tactics, fork this and help me make it better for all of us or just give me feedback.

I have taken 30 GEO tactics and put them on an X & Y axis based on Speed vs Risk and another one for Risk vs Impact. Then we kick out sample KPIs to track to show impact. I've been beating the drum on GEO KPI's vs SEO KPI's for a while.

This tool is built to help you have a strategic conversation about GEO and the tradeoffs and opportunities.

How I see this being used for me, it is an alignment tool. I'm sick of flipping through slides + relying on the most recent research, and trying to update those slides - It's a way of talking real time with a manager, boss, CEO, client, about what can you honestly do and not do to optimize your AI visibility and impact, Then based on what you have left that I can do, how likely is it to work and how risky is it.

You give me a VP of search without a strong relationship with the brand or product team, certain tactics go off the table, but a VP of search who also controls aspects of social, certain tactics become very doable.

This tool helps SEOs and GEOs alike to have tougher conversations in real time, with well meaning execs and leaders to help level up the conversations strategically about GEO.

Can a prompt undo years brand building? Our AI interview tests say yes

Admin — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:11:04 GMT

TL;DR: We interviewed 28 people across almost 100 tasks, having them use AI to solve a product selection problem, and we ask them what brands people intend to buy, before using AI, then we check what brand they considered after.

One AI research session cut GE's purchase consideration in half while lesser known brands like Rheem surged.

The questions we wanted to answer:

When someone has a task, what brands do they think would solve their problem before they search or use AI?

The Proof: ChatGPT 5.5's fanout patterns reveal the importance of brand

Admin — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:04:44 GMT

If you've been looking at the whole "do I have to do listicles" thing and throwing up in your mouth a little, this post is for you.

Your AI Traffic Is Hiding: A Practical Guide to Tracking ChatGPT, Claude, and More

Admin — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This blog was originally published on December 2, 2024 and was updated on June 22, 2026.

⚠️ AI Tracking Is A Moving Target

The AI tracking landscape evolves rapidly. Since our original publication, Google launched its native AI Assistant channel (May 2025), ChatGPT shifted from 'citations' to 'sources,' Claude added embedded links capabilities, and ChatGPT introduced advertising. Methods described in this blog represent current best practices as of the last update date, but we encourage you to validate these approaches yourself as platform behaviors continue to change.

Are you trying to better understand how searchers are using ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI platforms to find your websites? We sure are!

How to Set SEO Goals & Objectives in the Age of AI Search

Admin — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This blog was originally published on May 18, 2023 and updated on June 19, 2026.

Setting SEO goals has always required balancing ambition with realism. But in 2026, it requires something else too: a clearer picture of what "working" actually looks like when the search landscape is changing faster than most measurement frameworks can keep up.

AI Overviews, zero-click searches, and AI-native platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini have fundamentally shifted how people find and engage with content. A brand can be cited in an AI-generated response, influence a purchase decision, and generate real business impact — with none of those actions showing up in session data.

Meanwhile, KPIs like traffic numbers that once served as a reliable proxy for SEO performance are becoming harder to interpret. Traffic can drop even when organic is working, and it can hold steady even when you're losing ground.

In this article, we'll walk through how to set SEO goals that reflect the current reality: ones that tie to business outcomes, account for the limits of traditional metrics, and give you a framework for measuring success even as the landscape keeps evolving.