Sam Wehbe

Startup guy. CEO.

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

Start investing in branding and awareness

[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.

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

@fifa_romania New dl CM. 12 play styles

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

@Rickth21 My choice

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

@rxckydusa My choice

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

There is no way that number is real

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

NEW: AI consultant reveals a client accidentally spent $500,000,000.00 in a single month after failing to set employee limits on Claude usage.

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

@fifa_romania Same

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

Not enough is being done to address the dangerous driving by Amazon delivery drivers. Ask almost any small neighborhood about the menace it’s becoming. Kids should be able to play outside safely.

@amazon @amazonca @OttawaPolice

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

The current wave of layoffs feels a lot like the doorman fallacy in real time.

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

👇👇👇

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products.

My Take
The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested.

This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown.

Hedgie🤗

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

New genre of post emerging:

“I’m firing a ton of people and our business has never been better. Here’s why”

Performative white-collar executions

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

Best sales coaching ever!

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

😂😂😂

[Gloriaaa ❤️😍 @ladyhuneybee]

Give this man an interview already definitely following suit 😂😂😂🤌

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

🔥🔥🔥

[Mom @mom_agency_]

Claude's first day at Dunder Mifflin

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

👇

[ℏεsam @Hesamation]

tech industry is optimizing itself to death.

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

@roland_graser Happy to chat about @SignWellApp

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

@rxckydusa He’s amazing

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

💯

[Bearly AI @bearlyai]

The Son of Anton scene will almost certainly be the most referenced Silicon Valley scene in age of AI:

“It’s possible that…the most efficient way to get rid of all the bugs, was to get rid of all the software.”

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

💡💡💡💡

[Brandon Luu, MD @BrandonLuuMD]

Literally just having a delusional golden retriever mindset measurably changes outcomes and physiology.

Sleep badly? Convince yourself you're well rested.
Stressful day? Convince yourself it's fuel.
Failed? Convince yourself it's useful data.

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

@JasonTSco He’s looking great

[Sam Wehbe @swehbe]

@FUTWIZ Couldn’t pass on this guy