gethoverboard

@glenngabe The OpenClaw effect

Interesting, Project Mariner news -> Google moved some staffers working on Project Mariner, its AI agent that can navigate Chrome and complete tasks on a user's behalf, to higher-priority projects "A Google spokesperson confirmed the changes, but said the computer use capabilities developed under Project Mariner will be incorporated into the company’s agent strategy moving forward. Google has already folded some of these capabilities into other agent products, including the recently launched Gemini Agent, the spokesperson added." "OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent reportedly fell to less than 1 million weekly active users in recent months. Compared to the hundreds of millions of users talking to ChatGPT on a weekly basis, browser agent usage essentially amounts to a rounding error." wired.com/story/google-s…

The easy button is not rewarded by Google.

@harpreetchatha_ Yea, pretty silly. Also, doing AEO or SEO is magnitudes easier when you’re working with big brands. So no, I’m not impressed.

This case study between Profound & Zapier is genuinely mandatory reading if you want to understand the grift behind GEO / AEO. The growth analytics manager at Zapier said that without the AI visibility tool, "they have zero visibility into what LLMs said about them". I wonder if these people use AI themselves? Then "Standing up an AEO program". Profound says that Zapier's AEO program entails "alternative and head-to-head articles". Zapier wanted to own listicles. They have a quote in there which says "they made the decision to double down on AI search as a net-new channel, not a sidecar to SEO". They doubled down via lisicles. I'm gonna leave it at that. Scaling listicles is not an AEO program lol. If VPs, CMOs & marketing leaders are dumb enough to fall for this type of stuff them good luck to those companies. Stay safe out there.

Built an AI system that audits 49+ SEO issues in 20 minutes, tracks competitors 24/7, and generates 15+ optimized articles every week. It replaces $500 manual audits that take 3 days. Recently onboarded 5 new clients most use it to attract more clients and boost visibility. Testing with 3 more companies now. If you want it: Like + Comment “SEO” I’ll DM you the details.

@semrush A jack of all trades is a master of none :) If someone wants to improve visibility in answer engines for example, they’re better off using a tool like gethoverboard.com - which gives specific actions to take to improve brand visibility in AI search

Our new identity reflects how much the Semrush platform has strengthened over the past year. As search expands beyond Google into AI powered answers and chat based discovery, Semrush One brings everything marketers need into one connected workflow. • Unmatched data → The most trusted SEO database with 27.6B+ keywords, now expanded into AI search visibility with 213M+ prompts • Total search coverage → Track and win across both Google and AI search experiences from a single platform. • Future proof performance → Spot growth opportunities early and capture AI search traffic before competitors. • AI powered recommendations → Move faster with intelligent insights across research, optimization and reporting. social.semrush.com/4sgnVw2

@forgebitz @gaganghotra_ The terms people use to search Google are not the same they use on answer engines. A good AI tracking & visibility tool doesn't just show brand visibility but makes specific recommendations that you can use to improve visibility.

@gaganghotra_ please don't tell me you are doing exact matching to track visibility

DataForSEO API is all you need for AI visibility tracking! 1000 prompts at weekly scraping just cost $64 and that gives answers for what's showing up for all those prompts in ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and AI Mode. PS - NOT a sponsored post, sharing it cuz we're using this for our clients and I keep hearing companies spending over $200K yearly on prompts tracking tool license while they can just do same tracking at around $2K yearly cost ONLY!!

Read more here: gethoverboard.com/google-ranking…

SEO is fundamentally important to having good visibility on answer engines. Recently, we analyzed over 100,000 AI prompt responses across five major answer engines: ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Grok. The brands ranking on the first page of Google were significantly more likely to be mentioned by every major LLM platform we analyzed. Anyone that tells you SEO is dead…is oblivious to how LLMs work 😆. That’s not who you should be listening to when it comes to AEO (GEO, AIO, Answer Engine Optimization or whatever you want to call it)

@heygurisingh You should have used it on this post.

Holy shit... someone just open-sourced the cheat code for making AI writing undetectable. It's called stop-slop and it strips every known AI tell from your prose automatically. No rewriting tools. No paraphrasers. No "humanizer" apps. Here's how it works: → A single SKILL.md file you drop into Claude Code, Cursor, or any system prompt → Bans 50+ AI filler phrases your readers are already tired of → Kills structural clichés like dramatic fragmentation and binary contrasts → Forces sentence rhythm variation so your writing doesn't sound robotic → Scores your draft on a 50-point scale across 5 dimensions The wildest part? It's not a tool. It's not a SaaS product. It's a markdown file with rules. That's it. And it works better than any $29/month "humanizer" on the market. One file changes how your AI writes everything. 809 GitHub stars. MIT licensed. 100% Open Source. (Link in the comments)

@hridoyreh How much of your content was AI generated? Scaled content abuse is real and many sites are getting clipped.

Guys, this is really very painful. This is data from one of my websites. When I checked the Search Console 7 days ago, there were still 1,500+ pages indexed. But when I checked today, I saw that many pages were no longer indexed. I don't know why this happened. However, I am investigating...

@lilyraynyc Really good post Lily. Posted on the same topic recently (but yours is much more in depth 😆) gethoverboard.com/is-your-answer…

One of the worst things you can do for AI search visibility? Destroying your SEO performance with shiny new AI search tactics that are ultimately dangerous for SEO - and by extension - AI search. In my latest Substack article, I wrote about the fundamental connection between SEO and GEO/AEO, along with some of the risky tactics I've seen sites employing, plus the early signs that these approaches are dangerous for SEO (and therefore AI search as well). lilyraynyc.substack.com/p/your-geo-str…

Experiment bears repeating on older trusted domains. Many possible reasons why, but new domains have no trust built up with Google yet, so are much more likely to see AI generated pages tank.

Truth. It also makes it easier for people that have no real understanding of SEO to "sound" like they know what they are talking about when selling their services. Tons of new SEO/AEO/GEO agencies right now who have not done "the reps" but think that they can get all the answers from LLMs. In the end, people will get burned by hiring those who will just be using the same generic tactics that AI is recommending to everyone else. 100% agree. It's those with years of experience...not just "doing" SEO...but actually doing it successfully (especially in super competitive niches).

Unpopular opinion: AI does make SEO easier. It makes scaling tactics trivially simple. What it can’t do is tell you which tactics are worth scaling. That’s still strategy. That’s still the hard part. That’s still where years of reps actually matter.

@seosmarty Thanks Ann!

@gethoverboard Shared your study in my subreddit! reddit.com/r/SEO_for_AI/c…

Checking our clients' digital PR campaigns we did 6+ months ago, I am seeing them become the top cited sources for LLMs, even for pretty huge sites. There's, of course, a lot into that (apart from the fact that LLMs do love citing stats): ✅ Solid organic findability (direct correlation with citability. PR projects that didn't end up ranking well in Google are not cited that well) ✅ Strategic (and ethical) seeding on Reddit I've seen many studies that LLMs seem to "trust" sources that regularly publish authority-driving content (original research, whitepapers, etc). Whether it is because they are like people (original research makes people believe a site is kind of a big deal) or because of all other signals (mainly, organic search visibility), but it surely works! Bottom line: If you want to get cited by LLMs, invest in original research in your niche!

@naval Big software, yes. But AI actually opens the door for smaller, more verticalized software.

Software was eaten by AI.

@kalashvasaniya And you think profile links move the needle 😆

i found something crazy just add your website link to blogger dot com and it gives you a free dofollow link

Really good post here. Very true, all the people posting about tactics based on their "research" apparently don't understand (or just ignore) correlation/causation. Every single piece of "research" I've seen pretty much ignore all the variables that are likely to be more important factors. Strip those out and "prompt analysis" is basically just a list of traits that high-authority sites happen to have. As anyone who has put time into understanding LLMs knows, these are not deterministic retrieval systems but I have to wonder if the people making the claims even realize that. The agencies selling GEO hacks are essentially promising they can influence a dice roll by changing the color of the dice. I say all this despite being a SAAS that is a visibility and answer engine optimization platform for agencies.

"This GEO tactic gets you cited in LLMs!" "Interesting. How do you know that...?" "My research bro. I analyzed 10,000 prompts bro. All of the brands cited in ChatGPT have pages with expert quotes, statistics, inline citations, structured formatting, and topical depth…" "Ok…sure, but did the page get cited because it had those features? Or did it have those features because it was already high-authority content that performs well everywhere...and AI search just picked it up too?" Nobody peddling GEO fairy dust wants to answer this question. Right now, a huge chunk of GEO research is treating correlation like causation. Like these content traits are brand new levers you can pull to "get cited in AI search." Do X, get cited. Simple. Except: if everyone can just add charts and tables to a post and get cited, how does AI determine YOUR brand gets mentioned in a short output of 5 solutions in a space where thousands exist? It can't just be "do X tactics." That math doesn't work. What actually separates the brands getting cited? The same thing that's always separated them: real authority. Google's own "How Search Works" documentation states openly that links are a core signal for content quality. AI is very similar. HubSpot found that 92% of AI mentions come not from your own content, but third party sites mentioning you. So when someone says AI engines cite content with quotes, data, and good structure, they're simply observing a trait of authoritative content in general, not a "do x and get Y" causation factor. And even if these content tweaks do influence AI citation likelihood, SparkToro's recent research found there's less than a 1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT or Google AI will give the same list of brand recommendations in any two responses...even on the identical prompt run 100 times. The lists are different. The order is different. The number of results is different. Nearly every response is unique...so the agencies selling revolutionary GEO hacks are building on two broken assumptions: that these tactics directly cause citations (unproven), and that the outputs are consistent enough for those tactics to track reliably (they're not). AI search is real. It matters. Heck, we generate tons of leads from it. But the brands winning there are the same ones that have been winning everywhere... because they built actual authority over years, not because they added a data table to a blog post last Tuesday. Our own AI visibility increased the most by doing one thing: acquiring mentions + links on publications talking about our niche: being in more places that AI pulls from, increasing the likelihood AI mentions our brand.

The funny thing about people publicly boasting about their explosive SEO campaigns is that bringing viral attention to them is the single best and fastest way to get caught, including potentially having multiple accounts in your GSC all penalized at the same time. But alas, you would also have to be an experienced SEO to know that part.

@fin465 @ProductHunt @origamichat Launch

We built Claude Code for Lead Generation… We hit #1 on @ProductHunt & took @origamichat from slow growth to 2x MRR every week since I wrote up the exact guide we used to hit #1 and get thousands of users to sign up in a day. Complete blueprint to #1. I’ll dm it to you Just comment “Launch” RT so other founders get the blueprint