SE Ranking

Everybody’s been worried about LLMs stealing clicks, but it looks like Google may be the biggest competitor — just not in the way people expected 🤔 Google is keeping users inside its own loop, sending them from one search page to another when they enter AI Mode. We saw this in 17% of all cases we analyzed, and in 19 out of 20 niches, Google was the top source. How will this affect clicks? Let’s discuss.

Health is probably the last place where AI should get a free pass for being "mostly right." So when we saw that Google’s AI was citing YouTube 2–3x more often than trusted medical sites, it hit a nerve. And the deeper we looked, the more interesting it got 🤔 youtube.com/watch?v=LhWCjD…

What actually makes an agency profitable in 2026? Together with @PlanableApp, we analyzed data from 186 agencies and found a few patterns worth paying attention to: ✅ Client count matters a lot. More than half of agencies with just one client are losing money. Among agencies with 20+ clients, only 6.5% are. ✅ "AI-first" is not the same as operational AI use. Lower-profit agencies are more likely to use the label. Higher-profit agencies are more likely to use AI in daily workflows. ✅ Low-profit agencies rely on price increases much more often. They use price hikes as their main lever about twice as often as high-profit agencies. There are more insights like this in the full report, including patterns around client count, team size, and zero-loss setups. ⚡ Check the full Agency Profitability Report at the link: planable.io/blog/agency-pr…

@SharbelFS That’s interesting. Are you also going to support it with SEO? Or is this experiment mostly about steady content publishing on a new domain?

@SERanking Actually I started a week ago, still improving layout and rules. and it's a new domain, it will take a while for google to start work on that. my idea is to publish just a few every single day and see what happens.

Could AI-generated content rank? Yes. And it may last about three months. We built 20 new domains and published 2,000 articles with no human input. In 36 days: - 71% got indexed - 8 sites ranked for 1,000+ keywords - 122K impressions 3 months in: completely gone. Was AI content the problem? Not exactly. The problem was publishing AI content with no strategy and no SEO behind it. These were new sites with no backlinks, no authority. Once Google picked up on that, the rankings dropped. And we’ve also seen the opposite: when AI-generated content is reviewed by a human and published on a strong domain, it can keep ranking and drive clicks. 📌 Read the full experiment: seranking.com/blog/ai-conten… We’re running new experiments now, and we’ll be sharing the results along the way. If you want us to test your theories too, drop them in the comments 👇

@SharbelFS We published 100 articles per site within the same period on November 5–6, so basically all at once. Would love to hear how your experiment is performing so far!

@SERanking this got me curious because I'm trying kind of the same experiment. How frequent were the posts or did you just created everything at once?

If you use AI-generated content on your website and are seeing great results, share them in the comments

@loganix Could be, for sure. There are probably several factors influencing this, so we see it as one of a few possible explanations.

@SERanking could also be: >google crawled and indexed the pages >tested them on the SERPs >engagement metrics were crap 'cause "no human input" >demoted them down the SERPs or... the talk of an unofficial update in feb was true. a bunch of sites got hit for publishing AI content at scale

@jakezward From what we see, there’s a lot more overlap than people think. AEO is mostly SEO plus brand presence, and ChatGPT still appears to rely on many of the same signals as traditional search. seranking.com/blog/how-to-op…

Is AEO even a thing? Or is it just SEO? Here's how LLMs actually work: An LLM is not a search engine. It's a next-token predictor. It guesses the statistically likely next word based on patterns baked in during training. During that training, it processed billions of web pages. But it didn't log URLs. Didn't store sources. Didn't remember where anything came from. What's left is a frozen statistical snapshot. Not an index or database. So where does real-time retrieval come from? The search engine layer bolted on top via RAG. That's the actual information retrieval part. Because the “base” LLM can't do it alone. Which means there are only two things you can actually influence: 1. Rank in search so retrieval-based AI can cite you. Traditional, boring SEO. 2. Earn third-party coverage so the model already knows you before the prompt is typed. And that's pretty much the whole game. So stop optimising for some vague idea of 'AI.' Optimise for search engines with owned content and build brand authority for earned mentions. Are you actually doing AEO? Or just SEO?

2.3M+ pages That’s how many pages we analyzed to understand what influences citations in AI Mode and ChatGPT. We compared both, and it turns out they reward different things. ⚡️ seranking.com/blog/how-to-op…

@foley_seo And to prove your point, our latest research shows that Google isn’t just "borrowing" content for AI answers — it’s also sending people back to more Google pages instead of actual websites. In fact, Google is the most cited source in AI Mode. seranking.com/blog/google-li…

AI Overviews don’t create clicks they kill them. According to data from Ahrefs and Amsive Ahrefs (300,000 keywords): -34.5% drop in CTR for position 1 when AI Overviews are present Focused on informational intent keywords (99.2% overlap with AI Overviews) Amsive (700,000 keywords): -15.49% average CTR drop across all keywords - 37.04% CTR drop when AI Overviews + featured snippets appear together -19.98% CTR decline on non-branded keywords -27.04% CTR drop for keywords ranking outside the Top 3 Only 4.79% of branded keywords trigger AI Overviews, but those that do saw a +18.68% CTR boost AI Overviews are disproportionately harming non-branded, informational queries, while branded queries see less disruption (and in rare cases, a CTR boost). So based on that, Let’s cut the nonsense AIOs are built on scraping and rehashing other people’s work. It’s content theft at scale because you are using SOMEONES work to provide an answer without returning the click. Whilst technically it's NOT scraping, it borders a VERY grey area (because they do provide a link to the source) The very thing Google told webmasters not to do for decades, they’re now doing themselves Google’s stance for publishers: Google’s spam and helpful content policies stress that websites must create original, valuable, experience-driven content, not thin summaries or regurgitations. They explicitly discourage content that is “stitched together” or “rephrased” without adding real insight. What AI Overviews do: AIOs pull content from multiple sources, repackage that information, and serve it back to the user as a “new” answer. While citations may be shown, the visible content itself is essentially a Google generated digest, not the original publisher’s work. So this is clearly contradictory. And don’t kid yourself that “it’s just informational clicks” Those clicks used to build brand awareness, shape perception, and spark consideration before purchase. That’s where businesses lost visibility and revenue Google search console does NOT report AIO data even though it SHOULD be shown as a search appearance item. Whilst this COULD change in the future along with AI mode data right now, AIO data is unavailable, all we see are site owners/SEOs sharing crocodile graphs Every audit tells the same story AIOs do not send more clicks COMPENSATION STRATEGY? You need MORE high quality content that's of sheer value to the end user (not just text, but video, tools etc) to offset the lost clicks - if you are a publisher obviously this is going to be challenging So as SEOs we should switch to compensatory strategies where we maximise high quality content generation but also ensure we cull off anything dead, we use our new content and get it out over social media, create videos to go with post content and get them onto Youtube, Vimeo, Insta Shorts, TikTok Whilst the SEO industry HAS been impacted by AIOs, we should merely adapt our strategies accordingly

Hey y'all @SERanking agency growth day is live! Tune in! seranking.com/webinars/digit…

Google is stealing your clicks Last year, Google was already citing itself in almost half of AI Overview answers in the US. Now, in AI Mode, Google.com makes up 17% of all citations. So when AI answers someone’s question, there’s a real chance that click never reaches your website. Instead, it goes right back to Google. 📌 Read the full study here: seranking.com/blog/google-li…

Most agency conversations about profitability start with pricing. But the data suggests that’s not the place to look. When we analyzed 186 SEO & Social agencies with @SERanking, one pattern stood out: agency configuration drives profit. Read the report: planable.io/blog/agency-pr…

It’s happening today, and there’s still time to sign up for free. Join live or watch the recordings later 😎 Here’s what you’ll learn at Digital Agency Growth Day: → smarter approaches to KPIs and dashboards → practical AI and automation use cases → how to maintain healthy agency margins in 2026 → how to align SEO and PR with buyer behavior → a scalable content refresh system built around information gain ⚡️ Speakers: @MordyOberstein, @AriNahmani, @BrockbankJames, @Zooglymedia, Mike Korenugin, and Miruna Dragomir ⚡️ Book your spot: seranking.com/webinars/digit…

☝ Not every prompt deserves to be tracked We asked teams that have been doing this for a while how they decide what actually makes the cut. Here’s the checklist we ended up with:

If you’re vibe coding, tell us how it’s been working for you

A lot of websites still see robots.txt as just a box to tick. But in 2026, it can shape much more than people expect, including #AI crawler access. So let’s finally answer all your questions about robots.txt 🔥 seranking.com/blog/guide-rob…