Mathis | Astral

Most Web3 founders are losing the AI search war and don't even know they're playing it. 800M people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude before Google now. Here's how AI search actually works, and why your project is probably invisible :

@jakezward mostly agree the foundations are SEO and anyone selling llms.txt as a magic bullet is lying. But "expansion" undersells one thing: Google ranks pages, LLMs cite entities. same inputs different unit of optimization. The work overlaps 80% the measurement and targeting don't

What people think AI search is: - llms.txt - Schema - .md pages - AEO hacks - Writing for AI - GEO services What AI search actually is: - SEO - Reviews - Backlinks - Earned media - Owned content - YouTube videos - Brand mentions - Google rankings - Topical authority - Entity consistency - Comparison pages - Community threads - Industry publications - Third-party recommendations AI search needs to be treated as an expansion of SEO, not a completely different channel.

if frontier model access gets priced like this being cited inside the answers matters even more. when fewer people can afford to run the best models themselves, the brands the models already recommend become the default visibility inside the model > access to the model for most businesses

AI subscriptions are dead Claude Fable 5 will only be on the Anthropic subscription until June 22nd. After that, you will need to pay for usage per token This will be the start of a much larger trend Frontier models will no longer be included in subs You’ll pay a fee and it will only get you access to older, much cheaper models If you want access to that dank AI sour diesel, you’re going to need to pay for every token you use. No more subsidies And it make sense. The subsidies were just a Ponzi scheme For those that don’t know, when you pay $200 a month for an AI sub, you get thousands of dollars of tokens These AI companies actively lose tremendous amounts of money because of these subscriptions. GDPs of most countries every year are lost on your $200 Claude Max sub The investor money is running dry. IPOs are coming because of this. And with IPOs need to come profitability The golden age of paying $200 a month and being able to code on 40 Claude Code instances and getting a usage reset every 5 minutes are about to die The party couldn’t continue ever. You can’t just leverage the entire global economy for years and expect nothing to break. Now it’s time to pay up Means a few things: 1. Time to be responsible when it comes to which models you use. You don’t need Fable 5 for GPT 5.5 Xhigh for everything. Build the skill of knowing when to use cheap models 2. Local LLMS/hardware will come even more in demand. I’m currently running GLM on my Mac Studio. It’s great. Is it Fable? No. But it gets the job done for free on simple tasks. Learn about local LLMs 3. This is the beginning of the wealth gap expansion. Those that can afford to spend $10,000 a month on Fable 5 will build incredible products that eat up more and more of the economy. Those that can’t afford Fable 5 will have an insane disadvantage 4. The government will need to step in eventually. There will be too much civil unrest. I hope the answer isn’t free money. That won’t do anything. I hope the answer is education/access to AI resources for ALL. Universal Basic Opportunity 5. You need to seriously reconsider where your money goes every month. If you are complaining about AI prices and in the back of your mind you know your skill set is becoming quickly irrelevant, all while spending money every month on Netflix, Xbox Live, Paramount +, drugs, DoorDash, Uber, and other things that bring nothing positive to your life, you are simply doing it wrong. AI is an investment in yourself. It’s an investment in your relevance to the global economy. You need to make sure you make that investment The pieces on the board are quickly moving around. The rules are changing. The battlefield is shifting. If you’re not strategizing accordingly, you’re cooked.

@theseoguy_ the listicles/reddit/youtube part is the surface. The deeper shift is that google ranks pages LLMs cite entities. Once you internalize that the whole playbook changes you stop optimizing pages and start engineering how the model understands what you are

for awhile I have felt like “GEO” and “AI SEO” are essentially the exact same as a traditional SEO campaign and for the most part it has been but in recent weeks we’ve identified more and more factors that can influence LLMs that wouldn’t get you anywhere with Google listicles, Reddit, YouTube videos, Yelp reviews, comparison tables, and a whole lot more it is very quickly becoming its own discipline we are updating how we do things at my agency almost daily now it’s a ton of fun to be in SEO right now

love this. the natural step after generating the prompts is actually running them across the models and logging which sources get cited that's where the gap analysis lives you see fast that the keyword you rank #1 for on google pulls a completely different set of sources in chatgpt

A little AI search hack I've been using: Take your SEO keyword research & convert keywords into prompts for AI search within Google sheets' AI function using a prompt like this one: =AI("You are converting a terse SEO search keyword into the natural-language query a real person would actually type or speak to an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Gemini, or a voice assistant. Rewrite the keyword as a single conversational question or request that preserves the exact search intent and intent type (informational, commercial, transactional, or local). Phrase it the way someone would genuinely ask out loud in a full sentence — not in keyword shorthand. Keep any brand, product, or location named in the keyword, but do NOT invent specifics, constraints, or details that aren't already implied. Do not answer the query. Return only the rewritten prompt as plain text — no quotation marks, no preamble, no explanation, no trailing punctuation beyond a question mark. Keyword:", A2)

reddit citations are real but they decay if that's your only signal. chatgpt cross checks. a reddit thread pulls weight when it lines up with your site, your docs, your structured data saying the same thing. single source citations get displaced fast. the stack matters more than any one channel

Reddit just DESTROYED Google SEO And this graph says it all Reddit now pulls over a billion visits a month from Google Google trusts those threads, and ChatGPT was trained on every one of them So when your brand gets into the right threads, it starts showing up in AI answers about your category There’s no six months of grinding content to get there This is the exact method we used to rank a B2B SaaS #1 in ChatGPT with a 825% traffic growth in 3 months I put the whole system in one guide: - the subreddits that get pulled into AI answers fastest - the exact post format ChatGPT cites - how to get mentioned without it looking like an ad - the 3-step play we run for every client 180M+ people are asking ChatGPT for recommendations right now The early movers are the ones getting named Want the full Reddit playbook? Just follow me + comment "Reddit" and I'll send it over

asked chatgpt "top 5 RWA tokenization platforms 2026" got 5 names. checked rwa.xyz #3 by TVL ($3B) : not in the answer #4 by TVL ($2.5B) : not in the answer #5 by TVL ($2.5B) : not in the answer 3 of the top 5 RWA platforms by capital are invisible to chatgpt RWA founders thinking TVL = visibility are about to learn a hard lesson

@tradeonpear HUGE

Trading alone was never the end state. The future is connected. One account. Every market. Waitlist now open. rewards.pear.trade

the "every AI agent" part is the most underrated line here agents can't hold bank accounts. they can hold wallets. the moment millions of AI agents need to transact autonomously, crypto rails stop being optional, they become the only option that works at machine speed rails first was always the right thesis. agents just made it urgent

I’ll forever be bullish on crypto. I think we overestimated how quickly crypto would become the next major computing paradigm. A lot of people were searching for the next platform shift and assumed it would be crypto, but in many ways that ended up being AI. Over the past decade, ton of capital flowed into crypto, and much of it went toward overbuilding. Instead of focusing on a handful of narrow sectors where crypto had a clear advantage, the industry tried to reinvent everything all at once. What we’re seeing now is a natural pullback and consolidation after that period of excess I don’t think the core thesis is broken by any means. Crypto’s biggest success may not be apps first (even though we have a few), but rails first. As stablecoins, wallets, tokenized stocks and onchain financial infra via neobanks reach every human and eventually every AI agent, crypto becomes the default settlement layer of the internet. Once those rails are everywhere, many of the ideas that arrived too early like DAOs, decentralized marketplaces, machine to machine payments, and the ideas Vitalik wrote about in the early days of Ethereum may finally have the distribution needed to get it off the ground.

solid process. the "optimize what already ranks" principle is gold the interesting part : this exact logic applies to AI search now but there's no GSC for LLMs. you can't filter "position 4-20" in ChatGPT or Perplexity so the striking distance queries exist they're just invisible unless you test for them manually

Want more organic SEO traffic without building a single backlink? Here's the exact process: • Open GSC → Search Results • Filter Position = 4-20 • Sort by Impressions (highest first) • Ignore keywords already in positions 1-3 • Ignore keywords below position 20 • Find pages ranking on page 1-2 with real search volume • Open the page ranking for that query • Add a dedicated section answering the exact query • Include the keyword in a heading (when natural) • Expand topical depth around adjacent questions • Add supporting entities, examples, statistics, and FAQs • Improve internal links pointing to that page • Update title tag if CTR is weak • Add schema where appropriate • Re-submit URL in GSC Why this works: You're not trying to rank for new keywords. You're taking keywords Google already believes you deserve to rank for and giving Google more confidence in them. Moving a keyword from position #8 → #3 is often worth more traffic than publishing 10 new articles. The easiest SEO wins are usually hiding between positions 4 and 20. Its just that most businesses are focused on producing new content instead of optimizing the pages they've already built..

@morganlinton the design taste prediction is the interesting part code correctness was always the easy metric. taste (knowing what good actually looks like) is the hard one. if 5.6 cracks that in Codex it's a bigger unlock than raw capability gains

For 99% of us, GPT 5.6 is going to be what we use, not Mythos. And it won’t be because Mythos isn’t awesome - it definitely is. It’s that it will be the most expensive frontier model on the planet. Needs to be used with incredible precision, by companies with monster budgets. And common, let’s be honest, Codex with GPT 5.5 is so damn good, 5.6 is going to be so much fun. My prediction is that GPT 5.6 will be the tipping point where Codex suddenly gets the design taste we always wish it had 🤌

true but here's the trap : brands chase a Wikipedia page thinking it's the GEO silver bullet it's not. a thin Wikipedia entry with no citations behind it does almost nothing. LLMs weight the sources Wikipedia itself cites not just the page existing presence isn't the signal. the citation graph underneath is

Being included in Wikipedia means different things to different platforms. Look at how Google views Wikipedia versus how ChatGPT does. Based on data from Brightedge, Google looks at Wikipedia as more of a social site. And ChatGPT sees it more as a resource site.

running Astral from a 31st floor bangkok flat month 5. building slow. building right 50+ audits delivered. 20+ founder calls no vc. no plan b this is the part most founders skip in their story. I'm not skipping it

@sanjaybuilds_ learned this the hard way taking on clients i shouldn't have early on settling for the wrong fit costs more than waiting for the right one

Some things in life you cannot "settle less" for When you accept something less, universe will give you just that - LESS Always ask the universe for the most and for the best, believe that you deserve it, the best or nothing and the universe shall provide Ones who know, know

@yo_itsmatt agreed on the activity edge. Wonder how discovery plays out though when agents pick which protocols to route through, that decision layer becomes everything whoever the agents default to wins the wave

Solana is going to dominate onchain AI The next wave of agents will extend what users do online everyday And no chain gives users more useful things to do than Solana It really is that simple

@Bhavani_00007 distribution. AI writing the code means everyone ships the same product faster the moat is whether anyone can find you and increasingly that means whether ai recommends you when buyers ask

AI can write the code now. So what's the real skill left for founders in 2026?

@Codie_Sanchez mostly true but there's a flip side : some people buy the car to become the person who can afford it. Identity pulls behavior sometimes not always insecurity

Hard truth: The real reason 99% of people buy an expensive car is so strangers at stoplights think they’re successful. No one who’s already wealthy needs a car to show it.

@atmoio the bubble popping and the tech mattering aren't mutually exclusive. Dotcom popped and still rewired commerce. the question isn't if it's overvalued now, it's what survives the contraction and becomes default infrastructure

Once the bubble pops, Anthropic and OpenAI will become the Coinbase and Block of the AI world. Mundane companies that ship narrative wrappers on mundane bytes. That the bubble will pop isn’t some apocalyptic doomsday prophecy. It’s not that complicated: AI is freakishly expensive to serve. If the returns on the other end are not justified, the bubble pops. And thus begins the decades long buildout to actually economically justifiable AI. It’s amusing how resistant reality is to our fictions and fantasies. In the peak of the crypto bubble we thought reality was going to be transformed into financial liberty and democratization for all, and network states and decentralized reserve currencies. Coinbase stood to be a multi-trillion dollar company and is now just a mundane tech startup. Today we spin similar narratives about the intellectual upheaval of AI, about the new democratization of intelligence and how everything will soon begin to orbit this new technology. At the end, Anthropic and OpenAI will be mundane IT providers with an insanely grim research outlook to make AI economically sensible and useful, no different from Google’s position in trying to make quantum commercially viable. Reality is, fortunately, pretty hardened against our delusions.

@satofishi nah the ones paying attention won't miss it. They'll have built during it. Defi summer made careers for the people who showed up early

One day, people will miss the AI boom the same way we today miss the DeFi summer.

@GadzhiIman the part nobody talks about : those 16 hour days don't feel like sacrifice when you're building something you'd do for free anyway building my agency rn and the grind genuinely is the fun part

I started at 14 with a laptop in my bedroom. It took 4 years of 16 hour days before I built my first real business. 12 years later: - I have a C-suite who all started as entry-level hires - Team went from 9 to 50 - Business has grown YoY for 8 straight years - My main focus now is thinking 1-2 years ahead and making the calls only I can make The early years buy the leverage and then the leverage buys the life.

this is the part that matters : google naming "GEO" and "AEO" in official docs is the category crossing from hype to acknowledged discipline doesn't mean every agency emailing you is legit (their warning is fair) but "is this even real" stops being a valid objection the day google documents it

Heads-up, two new updates from Google in their docs. First, Google just updated it's "Do you need an SEO" page in the documentation with mentions of "Optimizing for generative AI". It now contains guidance advising site owners to check if advice on optimizing for AEO/GEO aligns with its new guidelines. The page also says to make sure any tools you use are aligned with Google's guidance. "If they have advice on optimizing for AI experiences (also known as "AEO" "GEO" services), is their advice aligned with Google Search's official guidance on optimizing for generative AI features?" developers.google.com/search/docs/fu…