RC Neil

Cowboy coder

[RC Neil @rcneil]

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

That is a HUGE problem.

[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.

[Jamie Marsland - Head of WordPress YouTube ❤️ @pootlepress]

https://t.co/t6CmANsIIO

[RC Neil @rcneil]

@GoDaddy how are you experiencing nationwide issues with AutoSSL issuance and vhost files for the domain and not a single incident report on https://t.co/x0OEdHPixT? I’ve got at least a dozen accounts I have delegate access to that are experiencing this. Nothing?

[RC Neil @rcneil]

@mymusictribe is there any way to take the feet off a Behringer NX amp? I have a 2U rack case and they obstruct it from fitting.

[RC Neil @rcneil]

Anybody using @webflow for content heavy web pages will soon learn why that was such a mistake

[RC Neil @rcneil]

@wp_acf What’s up with the ACF Block being stuck in preview for Patterns bug tho?

[RC Neil @rcneil]

Every song has a part that sounds like collision detection in my minivan

[RC Neil @rcneil]

It’s never been easier to forge or fabricate something thanks to AI. When I’m a senior, I don’t stand a chance.

[RC Neil @rcneil]

@skooookum What’s a shame is that the questions often deemed “too vague” or “not code related” are now the ones that would best make SO relevant again. You need human minds with experience to talk through those things still. I still find myself there everyone once in a while

[trash @trashh_dev]

when you’re 20 “youre absolutely right”, 8 hallucinations and 5 timeouts into your vibe coding session

[RC Neil @rcneil]

@RL_Status @Duckzery I’m on a PS4. Clearing cache attempts (2) were unsuccessful. Thanks.

[RC Neil @rcneil]

@loftwah you just FTP into the server guy

[RC Neil @rcneil]

@TMacPhils If he hates how much you talk can’t imagine what he thinks about Kruk 😂

[RC Neil @rcneil]

@ezsmith397 I will still never forgive the day G Suite with unlimited storage became Workspace with 2GB 🥴

[RC Neil @rcneil]

@matteocollina @platformatic @official_php @nodejs @WordPress do cPanel next

[RC Neil @rcneil]

@icanvardar @laravelphp @MySQL @PostgreSQL @phpstorm @symfony If you work with Wordpress, you better know this like the back of your hand

[RC Neil @rcneil]

@unclebobmartin Old man yells at…. old man yelling at clouds?

[RC Neil @rcneil]

@JeffBlakley2 @junebotprolly Yeah pretty much sums it up. Sad part is most people are fighting about the satellite issues. Nobody ever asks why.

[RC Neil @rcneil]

If your Wordpress dashboard menu is longer than the screen, you’re already fucked.

[RC Neil @rcneil]

@jamonholmgren lemme tell you about my friend jQuery