Digital Ingenuity

🦞🤖🧪 We test AI + SEO experiments in the wild (real client results). Digital marketing agency, 12+ yrs. Sharing what actually works. Dallas, TX 🚀

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

@mikedutuandu Agreed, exposure is the right word for it. Search Console's Generative AI report shows AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions by page, country and device, but no clicks. We'd put it next to AI referral sessions and qualified leads, and flag where the two lines diverge.

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

Google is now testing ads for AI Mode's Personal Intelligence users. ChatGPT Ads shipped new measurement tools today. In SE Ranking's study, only 11.53% of AI Mode advertisers' domains were cited in the same answer. Paid and cited are two lanes. #AEO #PPC https://t.co/orcVA2THxI

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

@HTaraf36086 One caveat: SE Ranking measured the overlap, not the cause, so it doesn't tell us what earned those citations. It does show ad spend didn't buy them. At the exact-URL level, only 1.95% of advertiser pages were cited for the keyword they bid on.

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

@ailyield Agreed. SE Ranking's numbers back that up: AI Mode showed a text ad on 29.45% of 50,032 US commercial keywords, but only 11.53% of those advertisers' domains were cited in the same answer. Original data and comparisons are still the open lane.

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

@Hsenju Good point on intent. In SE Ranking's data, an AI Mode ad shared the block with a rival 71.1% of the time, so creative that answers the actual question is what sets you apart. We'd track ad CTR and citation share as two separate lines.

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

And a verified profile with complete, accurate info is more likely to show up in local results.

Distance counts too, and that one you can't change. Relevance comes from detailed business info: category, hours, address.

Source: https://t.co/3Mi25GiosC

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

Quick quiz for local business owners.

Which of these helps your Google Maps ranking?

Owners ask some version of this on Reddit all the time. Vote, then check the reply for Google's own answer. #LocalSEO

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

All of the above.

Google says prominence, meaning how well-known a business is, is partly based on how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have. More reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking.

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

@sengineland Quick update for anyone seeing this now: the tags are back. Glenn Gabe confirmed this morning that ChatGPT again adds utm parameters to all links, and OpenAI called the drop a bug. So a dip around Oct 14-15 is a window to annotate in GA4, not a real decline in AI referrals.

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

@sejournal @MattGSouthern The practical detail for site owners: Meta's crawler docs split Meta-ExternalAgent (AI training) from Meta-WebIndexer (Meta AI search), so robots.txt can block one and allow the other. The catch is that the new terms, effective Oct 30, don't mention robots.txt at all.

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

@glenngabe The two starting signals are concrete: does a bot's traffic stay consistent with robots.txt over time, and does it slow down after a 429. Cloudflare says it scores sustained patterns, not one-offs, and plans to let customers pick their own trust threshold for Verified bots.

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

Next, read average position next to impressions.

Impressions up, position down: new rankings, mostly low.
Top-5 position steady, CTR falling: Google likely answered on the page.

Part 2 of our Search Console series:
https://t.co/LLT9YrLWGp

Part 3 lands tomorrow.

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

68.01% of US Google searches in Jan–Apr 2026 ended with no click (SparkToro/Similarweb).

Impressions up, clicks flat in Search Console? Don't assume it's your site.

First check: Google misreported impressions from May 13, 2025 to Apr 27, 2026. Clicks weren't affected. #SEO

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

What Google says still matters: allow crawling in robots.txt and at your CDN or host, keep important content in text, and keep your Business Profile and Merchant Center info up to date.

Source: https://t.co/REHtwm080H

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

True or false?

To show up in Google's AI Overviews, your site needs special schema markup or a new AI text file.

Business owners keep asking this on Reddit. Vote first, then check the reply. #AEO

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

False. Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimizations needed for AI Overviews or AI Mode. No new AI text files, no special schema.

To be eligible as a supporting link, a page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. That's it.

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

@glenngabe Good to see. For the days the tag was missing, those ChatGPT visits likely landed in Direct, and with noreferrer there's no way to reclassify them later. Worth a GA4 annotation for the gap so nobody reads it as a real drop in AI referrals.

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

@sejournal Useful detail: it's limited to trending UGC, still needs public pages Googlebot can reach, and asks for engagement counter updates within 72 hours. Google hasn't named a participant yet, so if forum results start crowding your queries, there's no way to tell if this is why.

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

@lilyraynyc @ForbesAdvisor That lines up with the randomized test from ISB and Carnegie Mellon this year: 1,065 Chrome users, with AIOs quietly hidden for some. Satisfaction ratings came out nearly identical either way, while organic clicks fell 38% on queries that showed one.

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

@AlDev0 Ha, fair. Every model has off days, so we keep a small set of real client prompts and rerun them whenever a new version ships. That tells us more than any leaderboard does.

[Digital Ingenuity @Digi_Ingenuity]

🤣 Agree

[Al @AlDev0]

Grok bot is a great product, but in my humble opinion Grok 4.7 is nowhere near the level of reasoning of Opus 5.5. At least as of today.

I say this fully hating on anthropic’s usage limits btw.