ILIAS ISM

I help SaaS companies grow with @MagicSpaceSEO

Building:
🔗 $30k/mo
🔥 $15k/mo
🎨 $10k/mo
👀 $1k/mo

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

🥹 "Your service has literally changed my life"

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

@compliantvc @hthieblot I am just here for the undisclosed paid partnership

[Henrick Johansson @compliantvc]

I sat down with @hthieblot.

He built and sold Curse.
He invests in AI and robotics.
He writes checks to 17-year-olds.

I asked how much due diligence he does.

He said he mostly invests “based on vibes.”

I am reporting this to the proper authorities.

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

@Charles_SEO Congrats, Charles!

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

@fonsvandamme 💪

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

This is the best link building lesson on my timeline and it's not even about SEO

Notion spent years acquiring the .com. What worked wasn't a higher offer.

It was:
- A relationship-first broker
- Months of getting to know the owner
- Finding out he was a Grateful Dead fan
- Offering something money can't (a private meeting with the band)

Real link building is literally just B2B sales
- Cold "can I get a backlink" emails = broke
- Relationships + creativity + patience = the deal closes

The best of the best links aren't bought

They're earned by being interesting to the person on the other side

[Akshay Kothari @akothari]

We're finally shedding the .so (thank you Somalia!), and using the .com for @NotionHQ. And for this beautiful moment, I want to share a fun story:

Back in 2018, I had just joined Notion, and one of the first things @ivan asked me to do was figure out how we could own https://t.co/BxoFvc83VG. I had never done a big domain purchase before, so I reached out to a few domain brokers to understand the landscape. We tried different brokers, kept things anonymous, and attempted to surface a price the seller might consider.

A year went by… nothing. Meanwhile, it was pretty clear this was only going to get more expensive as we grew. We needed a different approach. A fellow founder connected me to a broker who took a very different tack. Less transactional, more long-term relationship builder. He spent months getting to know the domain owner. Turns out owner was a fellow entrepreneur in the west coast… and a huge Grateful Dead fan.

So we figured, why not get creative? Something beyond just price. So I called up our investor Ronny Conway and asked if there was any way he could help set up a private meeting between the domain owner and the Grateful Dead. Ronny is one of those people who somehow makes impossible things possible. A week later he calls me back: “New York City. Halloween. 15 minutes after the concert. Done.”

The broker went back to the owner with an offer: some cash, some equity, and a private meeting with the Grateful Dead. That got his attention. He didn’t take the band meeting in the end, but he did lean into the equity (great call, in hindsight). We shook hands, and a few weeks later, the deal was done.

I’ve been waiting years for the day we move our product to https://t.co/BxoFvc83VG. Looks like 2026 is finally the year. Safe to say I’m unreasonably excited about this update!

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

🚨 This study by @semrush is now 6 months old and scans prompts irrelevant to YOUR business!

Here is how to find out the EXACT domains that matter for your business (for free!) 👇
1. sign up to https://t.co/9NQ49WDfHW
2. generate/add prompts that matter
3. click on sources 🫡

[Jesper Nissen @JespernissenSEO]

Linkedin is the second most cited domain in Google AI overview, Chatgpt and Perplexity.

According to a study by Semrush, Linkedin is being cited on average in 11% of all questions that they asked the LLMs.

They analyzed 325.000 prompts in the three LLMs, to see which domains are being used as citations the most.

Linkedin was cited 13.% in Google AI overview and 14.3% in ChatGPT.

Linkedin beat both Youtube, Facebook and Instagram, but these three were also cited in between 3.7 and 8.7% of all queries.

This shows just how important it is to be active on all your social media platforms.

Posting to social media is more than marketing, its also about SEO, and its about effecting the LLMs.

Google AI is giving more and more weight to user generated content, and posting to your social media is a free ticket to being shown in Google AI overview and ChatGPT.

The Semrush study also gives specific advice on how to use LinkedIn to get cited in AI overview and Chatgpt.

The LLMs tends to prefer to cite LinkedIn articles rather than ordinary posts.

For articles the interval between 500-2000 words was the most cited, and for posts, the best length tends to be between 50-299 words.

That that means is the LLMs have an easier time understanding your content, if your content contain more words. As long as your posts dont get too long...

Read the entire study here:

https://t.co/KtLXhsLhxB

#seo #jespernissenseo

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

@JespernissenSEO depends on the prompts, innit

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

seeing the same thing in https://t.co/9NQ49WDfHW, it is basically almost 80%+ listicles

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

In the last 6 months at @Ahrefs, we analyzed over 1 billion data points across 14 studies. Here's what we learned about AI search optimization:

1) "Best X" blog listicles are the single most prominent content format cited by AI chatbots. They make up 43.8% of all page types cited by ChatGPT specifically.

2) 67% of ChatGPT's top 1,000 citations come from sources marketers can't influence: Wikipedia (29.7%), homepages (23.8%), app stores (6.6%). Only 32.3% are influenceable content like educational pages, reviews, news, and blog posts.

3) 28.3% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages have zero Google organic visibility. These pages get cited repeatedly by ChatGPT despite not ranking in Google at all. A completely separate discovery layer.

4) ChatGPT only cites about 50% of the URLs it retrieves. It fetches dozens of pages per query but uses half as background context without attribution. This means that being retrieved and being cited are very different things.

5) Adding schema markup had zero meaningful impact on AI citations. AI Overviews actually dipped −4.6%, while AI Mode (+2.4%) and ChatGPT (+2.2%) showed changes indistinguishable from zero.

6) YouTube mentions have the highest correlation (0.737) with AI brand visibility out of all the factors we studied (including all the conventional SEO metrics like backlinks, page count, DR, etc). This held true for both Google-owned and OpenAI products.

7) AI Overviews reduce clicks to the #1 result by 58%. That’s up from 34.5% just 10 months earlier. The trend is accelerating.

8) 99.9% of AI Overviews appear on informational intent queries. Transactional, navigational, and local searches are almost entirely AIO-free. Shopping triggers AIOs just 3.2% of the time.

9) For a given search query, Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews reach the same conclusions 86% of the time — but cite almost entirely different sources (only 13.7% citation overlap).

10) AI Overviews change every 2.15 days on average, with 70% of content differing between consecutive observations. But semantic similarity stays at 0.95. The words, sources, and entities constantly shuffle, but the actual meaning barely moves.

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

@awpthorp @googlesearchc Wagmi

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

@marckohlbrugge @wesoudshoorn Adding this to shadcn today

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

@fonsvandamme @marcba @Adobe Yes good idea @Adobe

[Google Search Central @googlesearchc]

The rollout was complete as of June 2, 2026.

[GenPPT ⚡ AI Slides @GenPPT]

We did it! GenPPT → 100k users 🎉

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

@tech_nurgaliyev Quora

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

@webjuice_ie @LinkDR_ @cursor_ai @Google @OpenAI @OpenRouter @Uber Yeah, I do, some of it I will get back but I have exclusions for a few things

I am just healthmaxxing all of it now that I am in CDMX and everything is so easy and quick (vs 6mo waiting)

+ getting stocked up on meds that are usually on prescription in any other country

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

I spent $34,327 in May 2026

🔗 @LinkDR_ backlinks — $15.4K
🤖 @cursor_ai — $4.9K
🧰 SaaS & infra — $4K
📣 @Google Ads — $3.7K
🧠 AI APIs (@OpenAI / @OpenRouter) — $2.6K
🛒 Life & food — $1.4K
🍔 @Uber Eats — $612
🏢 Office — $599
💊 Healthcare — $555
🚕 Rides — $411
🧾 Bank fees — $48

[Marc Lou @marclou]

I made $87,507 in May 2026.

⭐️ TrustMRR — $27K
📈 DataFast — $20K
🏴‍☠️ Ship or Die — $20K
🧑‍💻 CodeFast — $8K
⚡️ ShipFast — $7K
🐥 Twitter — $3.2K
🦐 SuperShrimp — $1K
🍜 Indie Page — $715
🛡️ ByeDispute — $248
🎞️ YouTube — $111
🌱 HabitsGarden — $97
🧬 BioAge — $49
📚 WorkbookPDF — $19
💩 PoopUp — $18

To whoever bought PoopUp: Thank you ❤️

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

@vascoabm it is literally 50% of global GDP

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

@JesseSchoberg @LinkDR_ @cursor_ai @Google @OpenAI @OpenRouter @Uber if I post this in the Belgian news they would have a heart attack I think

Sick backlink though 😃

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

@grok @thekitze thank you gork

[ILIAS ISM @illyism]

@grok @thekitze @grok is this accurate