Author: Rick Tousseyn
Global SEO/GEO strategist, speaker and trainer with +10 years experience. Specialty in content strategy for ambitious B2B, SaaS, Tech and AI brands.
AI Search Studies
UK and US AI Search Cite the Same Web
About 30.7% UK AI Search citations go to UK sites, against 76.0% in Germany and 76.1% in France, on the same 16 industries, according to the OtterlyAI AI Search Index, a study of 4.25 million citations across four markets (US, UK, Germany and France) on 7 AI Search Engines. A UK site can take three […]
Read More
AI Search Studies
AI Search in France Prefers .com Websites
Only 49.4% of French AI Search citations point to an address that declares itself French: a .fr, .be or .ch domain, or a global domain carrying /fr/ in its URL. In Germany the same measure reads 64.9%. That is from the OtterlyAI AI Search Index, a study of 16 industries and more than 3.77 million […]
Read More
AI Search Studies
AI Search in Germany Plays by Different Rules. Here Is the Data.
64.9% of German AI Search citations point to a domain that carries a local region or language signal: a .de, .at or .ch address, or a global domain on a German URL such as .com/de-de/. That is from the OtterlyAI German AI Search Index, a study of 16 industries and more than 3.95 million citations […]
Read More
GEO Experiments
Reddit GEO in 2026: What Gets You Banned, What Still Works, and What ChatGPT Changed
Reddit removed all 4 subreddit communities we built for our 60-day GEO engagement experiment. The reason given was a breach of Rule 2 of Reddit’s Content Policy. Every post, every comment thread, every ranking URL and every AI citation that pointed at them went with the communities. We are publishing this because the GEO experiment […]
Read More
AI Search Experiences
The September Update: The Month AI Search Stopped Agreeing About Social
LinkedIn ended September cited 39% more often across AI Search than at the start of the month Reddit rose 9%. Facebook rose 16%. That is the first sustained climb social platforms have had since the 8 August ChatGPT change, and on Perplexity and Google AI Mode it is steep enough to see without a trend […]
Read More
GEO Experiments
Are SEO Glossary Pages Still Worth Building in a Zero Click World?
Zero-click search is the pattern where an AI Search engine answers the question on the results page itself, giving no incentive to visit the sourced website. In the first four months of 2026, 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click. It lands hardest on informational, top-of-funnel content, because a definition is exactly what an […]
Read More
AI Search Studies
The AI Search Index: What ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google Actually Cite in 17 Industries
Half of everything AI Search cites is a page a company wrote about itself. Journalism is one citation in six. And the split between them swings by a factor of seven depending on which industry you are in, which means the GEO advice most teams are following is written for an average sector that does […]
Read More
AI Search Experiences
We Sliced Daily LiveStreams Into 610 Videos. AI Citations Grew 3.4x
Every trading day, onvista broadcasts a live market show. Together with Birthe Stuijts at onvista, we spent 107 days testing what happens to AI Search visibility when you stop treating that broadcast as one asset and start treating it as raw material. The pipeline was simple. Cut the day’s live show into short single-stock videos, […]
Read More
AI Search Experiences
How a New Zealand Agency Launched Their AI Search Service? What IF Web’s GEO Playbook Explained
Ask a marketing manager whether AI search matters and almost all of them will say yes. Ask what they should actually do about it and the answers get thin fast. That gap is where What IF Web built a service. Isaac Farrow is co-founder of What IF Web, a creative studio in Christchurch, New Zealand. […]
Read More
Case Studies
How SORN.AI Turns Existing SEO Into AI Search Citations
SORN.AI is an AI SEO agency running content, technical SEO, link building and GEO across SaaS, e-commerce, cybersecurity, hospitality and legal. Their client PagePilot.ai builds AI-powered Shopify landing and product pages, and it arrived with solid rankings, a real content library and almost none of it surfacing in AI answers. Three months later pagepilot.ai was […]
Read More
AI Search Experiences
News Publishers With OpenAI Deals Get +48% More AI Citations on ChatGPT
View the interactive version of this study here Since 2023, AI companies have signed 91 confirmed content licensing deals with news publishers, and the money involved is real: one deal alone is reported at up to 50 million US dollars per year. For brands and PR teams, that raises a practical question: if you pitch […]
Read More
AI Search Experiences
Video vs. Blog: We Published the Same Story in Both Formats. Here’s What AI Search Cited
Every interview we publish at OtterlyAI ships in two formats: a video on YouTube and a written article generated from its transcript. That gave us something rare in GEO: a clean way to test how AI Search treats the same story in two formats. We tracked two prompts per story across seven AI Search platforms […]
Read More
News
Press Release
OtterlyAI backs The Ocean Cleanup: Making a splash for cleaner seas and a safer place for otters around the world
Today OtterlyAI, the AI Search Optimization Platform, announced it has become an official supplier of The Ocean Cleanup, the nonprofit environmental engineering organization working to rid the world’s oceans and rivers of plastic. As part of the collaboration, OtterlyAI is providing The Ocean Cleanup with complimentary access to its AI Search visibility platform, helping the […]
Read More
AI Search Studies
GEO Experiments
ChatGPT Ads Study: 76.4% of Commercial Answers Carry an Ad, and the Leaders Buy None
Paid ads now sit inside ChatGPT’s commercial answers, and the paid layer does not look the same in any two categories. OtterlyAI measured OpenAI’s paid Ads and product Shopping Card appearances across different industries in the United States, then mapped who is buying the slots, how often, and where the advertised brands diverge from the […]
Read More
GEO Experiments
Dead AI Citations: Why Deleting a Page Doesn’t Remove It From AI Search
Here is a question most brands never test: when you delete a page, does it truly disappear from AI Search? We ran the experiment. One brand deliberately removed 15 comparison pages on known dates, and we tracked their citations across seven AI Search Engines every day, before and after each takedown. The pages kept getting […]
Read More
AI Search Studies
GEO Experiments
Claude Citation Study Reveals What Actually Gets Cited
Claude has become one of the most widely used AI assistants for research, comparison, and decision-making queries, and like every AI Search engine it answers by pulling from, and citing, sources across the open web. For brands, that raises a practical question: when Claude composes an answer, which kinds of sources does it actually reach […]
Read More
News
Press Release
PRESS RELEASE: OtterlyAI Doubles Down on the US, Becomes Headline Sponsor of BrightonSEO San Diego 2026
We’re going big in the US. OtterlyAI is the headline sponsor of BrightonSEO San Diego 2026, and we want to see you there. Key highlights Why San Diego, and why now North America already makes up 47% of OtterlyAI’s customer base. As US brands race to stay visible inside AI answers, OtterlyAI is meeting them […]
Read More
GEO Experiments
Human vs AI: Has AI gotten good enough to predict our taste? We had to know.
People have taste. We argue about it, defend it, and change our minds about it. The question for this experiment was simple: do AI Search Platforms have taste too, and does it look anything like ours? To find out, we ran a controlled aesthetic test. We built five pairs of abstract images, each isolating one […]
Read More
AI Search Studies
GEO Experiments
1 in 8 Social Media AI Citations Point to LinkedIn: AI Search Study by OtterlyAI
LinkedIn surpassed 1.3 billion registered members in January 2026, with roughly 310 million monthly active users. It is also one of the most cited social sources in AI Search. That makes LinkedIn more than a professional network. It is a working part of AI Search Optimization. OtterlyAI analyzed 1,310,455 LinkedIn AI citations to understand what […]
Read More
AI Search Studies
GEO Experiments
OtterlyAI’s Research Methodology: How We Design Correct Experiments
Setting a golden standard to run GEO experiments for the marketing community. This document explains how. A Note on How We Write About Research Disclaimer: OtterlyAI follows the structured research methodology of Kohavi et al, which is described in this document. However, our primary audience is marketing professionals, not statisticians. Our published experiment articles are written […]
Read More
Press Release
Press Release: OtterlyAI Launches a Public API, a Claude Skill, and a Marketplace of 101+ Marketing Workflows for AI Search
Brand visibility data now runs wherever marketing teams work, including Claude, n8n, and other tools, with a community marketplace where users can submit their own agent workflows Vienna, Austria – June 1, 2026— Today OtterlyAI, the AI Search Optimization Platform, released three product updates that move brand visibility data out of the dashboard and into the […]
Read More
GEO Experiments
Does Winning An Industry Awards Increase Your AI Visibility?
What One Award Win Did to Our Brand Visibility Across 32 AI Search Prompts Industry awards are a fixture of B2B and agency marketing. Teams spend time and budget entering them, and a win earns a badge in the website footer and a line in the next update. The question we wanted to answer is […]
Read More
News
OtterlyAI Wins Best AI Search Software Solution at the European Search Awards 2026
We are still letting this one sink in. This week in Porto, OtterlyAI was named the winner of the Best AI Search Analytics Software Solution category at the European Search Awards 2026. In a field of eleven finalists, including some seriously strong competition, the judges chose OtterlyAI as the standout platform for AI Search monitoring […]
Read More
AI Search Studies
GEO Experiments
Are Analyst Relations Sites Important for AI Visibility? How Gartner Dominates 81.7% of Citations While Blocking 5 Major AI Crawlers
10 Analyst Firms, 1M+ URLs: One Firm Owns the Citations, and It Is Not the Research You Think Gartner. Forrester. IDC. The big three names in industry analyst research influence trillions in annual enterprise IT spending decisions. For four decades, their Magic Quadrants, Waves, and MarketScapes have shaped how enterprise buyers pick vendors. So when […]
Read More
AI Search Studies
GEO Experiments
The URL AI Citation Study 2026
1 Million URLs Studied: Which URL Structures Gets You Cited The Most on AI Search URLs are the first signal AI Search engines see, before any content loads. Shorter URLs are “better.” Descriptive slugs “help.” Clean canonical structure “signals authority.” These conventions carry over from traditional SEO, where URL attributes have measurable influence on rankings. […]
Read More
GEO Experiments
GEO Experiment: Your Image Alt Text is Built for SEO. AI Search Reads Right Past It
If you add a fact to an image filename, alt text, or caption, but don’t mention it anywhere in the visible body text, can AI search engines pick it up? We tested it across five AI search platforms using six page variations, and the answer was clear: image metadata alone is not enough. This experiment […]
Read More
Black Hat GEO
GEO Experiments
We Hid Text on a Webpage to Trick AI Search – Here’s What 7 AI Platforms Actually Did
Hidden text, white text on a white background, is one of the oldest tricks in SEO. Google penalized it over a decade ago. But AI Search Engines are a different system with different retrieval pipelines. So we tested it: can you hide text on a page and have AI search platforms read it? And what […]
Read More
GEO Experiments
GEO Experiment: Markdown vs. HTML, Which Format Do AI Crawlers Prefer?
A recurring suggestion in GEO circles is that brands should publish Markdown (.md) versions of their web pages alongside standard HTML. The reasoning sounds plausible: LLMs process plain text more efficiently than HTML, so giving them a clean Markdown file should make your content easier to consume, and therefore more likely to be cited. To […]
Read More
GEO Experiments
GEO Experiment: Does Schema Markup Really Impact AI Search?
Schema markup is one of the most consistently recommended tactics in technical SEO, and for good reason. It has a 10+ year track record of helping Google surface rich results, trigger featured snippets, and improve SERP feature eligibility, benefits that remain fully intact today. As AI Search platforms have grown in prominence, a natural question […]
Read More
AI Search Experiences
How Top Brands Are Winning on AI Search? Industry Experts Share Tips for 2026
The rules of discoverability have changed. AI Search engines no longer return a list of links, they return a single answer. We interviewed 33 practitioners to find out who is winning, how, and what that means for everyone else. For the past two decades, “winning search” meant ranking on page one. Build the right content, […]
Read More
AI Search Studies
GEO Experiments
We’re Running Live GEO Experiments And You Can Follow Along
Explore All GEO Experiments & AI Search Case Studies You can download the latest version of the experiment sheet below. It gets updated every week with new experiments as we test them, so bookmark this page or check back regularly to follow our progress. 👉 View GEO Experiment/Studies (Google Sheets) Weekly GEO Experiments: What We’re […]
Read More
GEO Experiments
New Brand, Zero Authority: How We Got AI Search Mentions in 14 Days
The central debate in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) right now is deceptively simple: does AI Search care more about who you are on your own site, or who talks about you across the web? OtterlyAI designed a controlled, real-world experiment to find out. We built a brand from scratch, zero domain authority, seven pages, and […]
Read More
AI Search Studies
The YouTube Citation Study 2026
OtterlyAI’s YouTube GEO Study: What Actually Gets Your Videos Cited by AI Search YouTube has over 2.7 billion monthly active users and consistently ranks among the top 10 most cited domains in AI-generated search responses. That makes it more than a social media channel. It’s become an essential part of AI Search Optimization. OtterlyAI analyzed […]
Read More
GEO Toolstack
Tools & Workflow to Automate Media Outreach for GEO
AI Search Engines are changing how brands appear online. AI Platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity often synthesize answers from multiple sources instead of pointing users to a single webpage. Many of those sources are editorial articles. Comparison pages, listicles, and industry roundups summarize products and services in structured formats that generative systems can easily […]
Read MoreTeam
Meet the OtterlyAI Team (6)
Who We Are OtterlyAI is an AI Search Monitoring and Optimization platform that helps brands track and improve their visibility across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. The company was founded in 2024 by Thomas Peham (CEO), Josef Trauner (CPO), and Klaus-M. Schremser (CRO). All three are experienced marketing […]
Read More
Team
Meet the OtterlyAI Team (5)
Who We Are OtterlyAI is an AI Search Monitoring and Optimization platform that helps brands track and improve their visibility across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. The company was founded in 2024 by Thomas Peham (CEO), Josef Trauner (CPO), and Klaus-M. Schremser (CRO). All three are experienced marketing […]
Read MoreTeam
Meet the OtterlyAI Team (4)
Who We Are OtterlyAI is an AI Search Monitoring and Optimization platform that helps brands track and improve their visibility across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. The company was founded in 2024 by Thomas Peham (CEO), Josef Trauner (CPO), and Klaus-M. Schremser (CRO). All three are experienced marketing […]
Read More
Team
Meet the OtterlyAI Team (3)
Who We Are OtterlyAI is an AI Search Monitoring and Optimization platform that helps brands track and improve their visibility across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. The company was founded in 2024 by Thomas Peham (CEO), Josef Trauner (CPO), and Klaus-M. Schremser (CRO). All three are experienced marketing […]
Read More
Team
Meet the OtterlyAI Team (2)
Who We Are OtterlyAI is an AI Search Monitoring and Optimization platform that helps brands track and improve their visibility across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. The company was founded in 2024 by Thomas Peham (CEO), Josef Trauner (CPO), and Klaus-M. Schremser (CRO). All three are experienced marketing […]
Read More
Team
Meet the OtterlyAI Team (1)
Who We Are OtterlyAI is an AI Search Monitoring and Optimization platform that helps brands track and improve their visibility across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. The company was founded in 2024 by Thomas Peham (CEO), Josef Trauner (CPO), and Klaus-M. Schremser (CRO). All three are experienced marketing […]
Read More