A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

I have been on the fence for the better part of 2 years now - do I need to start buying into the whole AEO/GEO hype machine. Until now, the answer has been HELL NO, as I've been saying SEO is dead for almost 20 years. Yes, despite building my early career on SEM/SEO - I have no love for the work. It tends to be tactical and sometimes spammy and doesn't leave much room for creative thinking. If you read the usual suspects, you'll see LOTS of tactics to improve AI visibility for your brand that are just old, stale SEO tactics wrapped in shiny, new GEO clothing. In fact, there's an entire ecosystem of tools, experts, influencers, and the like who are all selling the same SEO shtick. I'm sure you've seen it and perhaps you have also been trying to avoid it.

Well, while I'm NOT buying into the whole on-domain GEO/AEO BS - I AM very interested in advising my clients on how they can become a trusted source for our AI answer engines. The tide has turned and AI has now become the first stop for discovery. I have spent the last several weeks vetting dozens of AI visibility tools, building my own visibility audit workflows, and ultimately crafting meaningful and actionable strategic recommendations on how my clients can become citation-worthy (sharing what I have learned here). This week Google just added an important piece to the AI visibility puzzle with their new generative AI visibility reports. You can bet this is just the first step of Google OWNING AI's version of search. While the report doesn't currently offer up click data or how many users actually click over to your website from the AI answer engine - my bet is that will arrive soon.

And while we're on the subject of trust - Google has offered up additional tools to allow users to choose their own preferred and trusted sources to AI's output along with a 'Highly Cited' badge for sources that have influential coverage of specific topics. Stay tuned for tactical posts that propose spammy solutions for getting a coveted 'Highly Cited' badge - it feels like backlink hell all over again. Content marketers and communications pros - Don't be fooled by these short-term tactics. Getting cited is all about EARNING trust and there's no shortcut for that, just the long game.

🎯 The Big Story

Google finally gives Search Console its own generative AI visibility reports (PPC Land)

On June 3, Google launched dedicated Search Generative AI performance reports inside Search Console. For the first time, site owners get a standalone view of how often their URLs appear inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the generative AI features in Discover, with breakdowns by page, country, device, and date down to hourly granularity. The rollout starts with a subset of websites, with broader availability promised but not scheduled.

Here's why this matters. Since AI Overviews launched in 2024, you've had no way to know whether your content was being cited in AI answers. Your impressions and clicks moved, and you guessed at the rest. This report changes that. It's a direct readout of what Google trusts enough to surface, which makes it the best barometer we've had for the citation-worthiness of your branded content. You're no longer optimizing in the dark. You can see whether the trust you're building is actually showing up where discovery now happens.

What to do about it: go check Search Console for the new view, but don't panic if it's not there. This is a phased rollout, and there's no click data yet, so when you do get access, treat it as a citation barometer rather than a traffic metric. Note which pages Google surfaces in AI features and start asking why those pages earned the spot.

📌 Also Worth Knowing

Agentic AI is changing how brands show up, but marketers can't lose focus on what happens next (Marketing Week) — Once every brand figures out how to show up in AI answers, showing up stops being the advantage, and the real contest becomes what you do after you're surfaced.

New ways to find your favorite sources and original content in AI Search (Google) — Google's own announcement of Preferred Sources in AI Overviews and AI Mode plus the new 'Highly Cited' badge, straight from the source, so you can read exactly what the trust signals are before the tactics crowd starts spinning them.

Google Just Changed SEO Forever — And Most People Don't Know It Yet (Gaurav Sharma, LinkedIn) — A practitioner's playbook for the new report, with four moves to make the day you get access: find your AI-impression winners, find the gaps, track country performance, and baseline everything now.

📊 The Number That Made Me Spill My Green Tea

120%

Being cited in the AIO (AI overview) delivers +120% more organic clicks per impression versus when you are not cited according to Seer Interactive's newest study covering 5.47 million queries and 2.43 billion impressions. The clicks aren't coming back to the old blue links, but they haven't vanished either. They're consolidating around the sources AI answers trust. That's a prize you earn, not a trick you pull.

🏆 My Take: What This Means for Your Marketing

AI visibility finally has a scoreboard. Between Google's new reports, user-curated trust signals, and third-party trackers, you can now measure whether you're cited, and that means the era of handwaving about AEO is over. The shortcut sellers will multiply, but the only durable play is publishing original work worth citing.

This week's one move: Run a 10-prompt visibility audit. Write ten questions your buyers would actually ask an AI engine, run them through ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode, and log every time your brand appears or doesn't. That's your baseline, and it costs you nothing but an hour.

✍️ From Me This Week

Opus 4.8 is Smart but It Still Takes a Village I ran my newsletter prompt through four Claude models, including the brand-new Opus 4.8, to find out whether the smartest model is also the best writer. Spoiler: each one won a different job. Read it here

AI Visibility: Make Your Content Citation-Worthy My upcoming free lesson on how to get into AI answers the hard way - by earning trust. Register here

Before You Go

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That's a wrap on this week's AI marketing alchemy. Keep experimenting, keep transforming, and remember: true magic happens when we blend AI efficiency with human creativity.

Crafted with passion and a dash of AI alchemy by Lisa Peyton AI Practitioner, Professor, and Pioneer

Let's connect: https://linktr.ee/lisapeyton

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