r/GenerativeSEOstrategy

Established brands have years of mentions, reviews, forum discussions, news coverage - all the stuff AI pulls from when building recommendations. Newer brands have almost none of that even if the product is genuinely better.

So, is there actually a compounding disadvantage for newer brands in AI search? Like the longer you've existed the more source material there is and the more likely AI is to surface you?

And if that's true then what's the fastest way for a newer brand to close that gap? Is it just volume of mentions over time or are there specific signals that accelerate it?

Genuinely something I've been thinking about lately and can't find a clean answer to. Would love to hear from people who've actually tested both sides of this.

This is something I’ve been thinking about lately with how AI search and generative answers are evolving.

In traditional SEO, negative press is usually just… bad. It hurts CTR, trust, conversions, all of that.

But with generative AI, I’m starting to wonder if the equation is a bit different. If a brand is being talked about a lot good or bad, does that increase the chances of it getting picked up and mentioned in AI-generated responses?

Like, if there are enough Reddit threads, forum posts, complaints, or debates about a brand, does that actually increase its “visibility footprint” in the data AI pulls from?

And if that’s true, does sentiment even matter as much anymore, or is it just about volume and presence?

something weird happened with a client a few months back and i honestly still think about it.

we were dropping comments in reddit threads where their customers were already hanging out and asking questions. nothing groundbreaking. then one day someone on the team casually typed a category question into ChatGPT and the client's brand casually showed up unprompted. sitting right next to names with marketing budgets that dwarf ours.

so we dug into it and the pattern was kind of hard to ignore, the threads we commented in got indexed, a few were sitting on page one of google, and ChatGPT was apparently pulling from them when it put together its answers.

which got me thinking. is reddit lowkey the most important training ground for AI recommendations right now and most brands are just completely asleep on it? or did we just get lucky and the real drivers are somewhere else?

not trying to push a theory here, genuinely don't know. could be a coincidence. curious what this community has actually seen. has anyone tested this deliberately and measured it? what worked, what didn't, what just raised more questions?

Something interesting is happening that doesn’t get talked about much in SEO or GEO discussions: people aren’t really searching anymore in the traditional sense, they’re just asking for finished answers.

Instead of typing keywords and comparing links, more users are phrasing full intent-based questions into AI tools and expecting a single, usable response. That changes the whole discovery layer underneath content. It’s not just about ranking or even being cited anymore, it’s about whether your explanation is easy enough to be absorbed into a synthesized answer.

Curious if others are seeing this too in analytics or user behavior. Are clicks actually dropping because intent is being satisfied earlier in AI tools, or is it just changing where the first touchpoint happens?

We started adding "according to experts" style phrasing to our articles.

Nothing crazy but we rewrote about 8 articles to sound more quotable and authoritative like phrasing things as definitive statements rather than opinion pieces.

Two months later we're getting cited in Perplexity and ChatGPT for two of those topics where we had zero visibility before.

Anyone else testing stuff like this or is it coincidence?

I’ve been working in digital marketing for about 6 to 7 years now, mostly across content, SEO, and some general marketing work.

Over the last few years I’ve focused more on SEO but I’m starting to feel pretty burnt out with it.

Between constant algorithm changes, client expectations and trying to prove ROI it’s getting harder to stay motivated.

I’m thinking about a career change but not sure where to go from here.

I know there are a lot of transferable skills (writing, analytics, strategy) but I’m struggling to figure out what roles actually make sense outside of digital marketing jobs.

Has anyone here made a similar move? What did you pivot into?

My team and I have tested a bunch of AI search tools during the last few months, we had different clients with different needs and were looking for a tool that adds the most value, affordable and reliable.

Here are our findings and I am not even going to tell you which one we have chosen so you can make up your own mind based purely on the pros and cons.

Important context: we hoped to find a tool that tracks mentions accurately, then we realized that this is impossible. There is no such thing as accurate mention tracking in AI search. LLMs are not deterministic duh

We then changed our criteria and started looking more at robustness, usefulness ability to connect with other apps and ease of use. Mention tracking is good for benchmarking over time and on scale, but not for making decisions based only on what the dashboard shows.

This also means every dashboard will give you different results. Do not be fooled by it and use this data with caution. In general I think the key is to combine a few data sources, really analyze them, and then make a decision based on experience.

1 - Peec AI

We tested it first. Their name was all over and it was kind of an obvious choice. Also what appealed to us was the tracking method. They scrape search data to identify how people search and then use it to test queries.

Peec AI is a solid tool. It is really intuitive and easy to use. Probably one of the easiest to get into.

Pros:

• very clean UX
• easy to onboard and start getting data quickly
• decent competitor view
• sentiment is there and easy to understand on a high level
• good if what you want is a straightforward visibility dashboard

Cons:

• in our opinion it is mostly a monitoring tool
• you get signals but not much help on what to actually do next
• no real owning of the outcome
• no meaningful traffic / conversion connection
• like with all these tools, the mention data itself should be taken carefully

Bottom line: good clean tool, probably one of the best if you want simple monitoring and do not want something too heavy.

2 - LightSite AI

This one is more holistic and the experience is different, not a dashboard but an agent you can communicate with

This is the only one we tested that actually felt like it is trying to own the outcome and not just show another dashboard.

It combines a few things that we think need to be combined if you actually want to make decisions:

• LLM mention tracking based on a mix of scraping and API style collection
• bot traffic analytics
• Sentiment analysis with NLP
• human visitor analytics from LLMs
• page level analytics
• technical data layer for the website - sort of structured data alyer
• an agent that actually sees the data, analyzes it and helps do something with it - it connects to GSC and Analytics data

This part was the most different. It did not feel like “here is your chart, good luck”. It felt more like “here is what is happening, here is what matters, here is what I can do for you next”.

You can connect more real business data into it, including traffic and search data, and then the system can actually identify opportunities, create content ideas, spot listicles, suggest outreach and in some cases even prepare the outreach.

That is a very different category of product in my opinion.

Pros:

• the most complete / holistic view we saw
• combines technical side and content side
• tracks both bots and humans, which is important
• much closer to actual outcomes and not only visibility
• agentic experience is very strong - it writes good content, find listicle oportunites and creates outreach campaigns and executes them (this was was very cool)
• feels like a system that analyzes your data rather than just storing it in charts
• best fit we saw for people who actually want help making decisions and moving

Cons:

• this is not a lightweight plug and play dashboard
• it requires website integration
• if you do not have a website or someone who can integrate it properly, this is probably not for you
• may be too much for people who only want a simple visibility tracker

Bottom line: if all you want is a dashboard, this is probably overkill. If you want something that actually tries to improve the outcome and something more holistic but without being charged an arm and a leg for

3 - Otterly

Otterly felt a bit more operational than Peec. Not in the sense that it does the work for you, but in the sense that it gives more substance around what might be wrong.

The GEO audit was probably the strongest part for us.

Pros:

• very solid audit
• good coverage across engines
• helpful for identifying technical and content gaps
• pricing felt reasonable for what you get
• setup was fairly easy

Cons:

• the UI is not bad but it feels more fragmented
• a lot of tables and views that are a bit disconnected
• still mostly observational
• no real owning of execution
• no real attribution to visits / pipeline / outcomes
• some things felt stronger in the docs than in the actual product

Bottom line: if your team already knows how to execute and you just want a pretty decent audit plus visibility tracking, this one is worth looking at.

4 - Profound

Profound felt more enterprise to us. More polished in some ways, but also more opinionated and less flexible.

It looked good. It felt premium. But for some of our clients it also felt like a lot of money for something that is still mostly around visibility and reporting.

Pros:

• polished product
• good sentiment analysis
• strong enterprise feel
• better than most at making the product feel serious and mature
• for large brands I can see the appeal

Cons:

• expensive
• less relevant in our opinion for smaller companies or scrappier teams
• not really built for people who want to move fast and do a lot themselves
• some of the more interesting attribution pieces seem more useful for bigger setups
• again, not really owning the outcome

Bottom line: if you are a bigger company and want a more premium enterprise style platform, it makes sense. For a lot of normal companies it felt too expensive for what it actually helps you do.

5 - Scrunch

Scrunch was interesting. Strong coverage, pretty configurable, and it felt like a serious visibility platform.

We liked that it covered a lot and that it gave more flexibility around prompts and setup.

Pros:

• broad platform coverage
• good configurability
• decent UI
• useful if you care a lot about monitoring across many engines and prompts
• more agency friendly than some others

Cons:

• still very much a monitoring first product
• not enough actionable guidance for us
• competitor analysis was fine but did not always explain why somebody else is winning
• you still need your own people and your own workflow to turn the data into action

Bottom line: strong monitoring tool, especially if breadth matters to you. But again, you need to bring your own brain, your own process and your own execution.

My overall take after testing all of this:

I think the market still confuses tracking with truth.

These tools are useful, but mention tracking alone is not enough and in some cases can be misleading if you take it too literally.

The best tools in this category are not the ones with the prettiest charts. They are the ones that either:

1. help you understand what to do next
2. help you actually do it

That is how I would use if I were choosing today.

Tested a bunch of queries related to my space in ChatGPT and Perplexity. Smaller competitors with weaker sites keep getting cited. Mine doesn't come up at all.

Best I can tell it's because they have more Reddit mentions, third-party writeups, and structured content that AI can easily pull from.

Is GEO something you're actively working on or still treating it as a "wait and see"? Genuinely trying to figure out if this needs a dedicated strategy or if good content eventually gets there on its own.

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