Simon Vreeman

👨‍💻 Growth and Technical Marketing Human being.
🛠 Into: #Analytics, #CRO, & #SEO.

[Simon Vreeman @vreeman]

Ten Data-Backed Truths Of User Experience ROI — Smashing Magazine https://t.co/dgsjL1Cqmu

[Simon Vreeman @vreeman]

@MartijnSch jup.

[Simon Vreeman @vreeman]

@MartijnSch Let’s be honest we just had too many wines and tequila.

[Martijn Scheijbeler @MartijnSch]

4 weeks ago, I shared that I was in building mode.

I'm building a platform for outdoor travel. Starting with stays: campgrounds, RV parks, cabins, and more. @OutReserve is out of stealth.

Outdoor travel should be easy to discover, compare, and book 🏕️

https://t.co/WxkuSlYJM2

[Simon Vreeman @vreeman]

Bret Taylor of Sierra on AI agents, outcome-based pricing, and the OpenAI board https://t.co/S2kfgsa28o

[Simon Vreeman @vreeman]

Europe's dependence on US companies in tech and finance is in no small part its own fault after overregulation left European businesses too weak to compete https://t.co/0TLoC2ymk7

[Simon Vreeman @vreeman]

@friedberg Dutch journalist Dirk de Bekker did great research (book and podcast) on the effects of pesticides on our health (e.g., Parkinson's) and on the food supply system.

[Martijn Scheijbeler @MartijnSch]

My consciousness about my espresso game ☕️ has tripled since watching @MaxLevchin on Sourcery: https://t.co/q3iMGn8x1o

[Simon Vreeman @vreeman]

@Quintin24 wel lekker om eens 2+ uur naar Friedberg te luisteren ipv kort science corner

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Smooth

[Simon Vreeman @vreeman]

Demis Hassabis: Why AGI is Bigger than the Industrial Revolution & Where Are The Bottlenecks in AI https://t.co/hTHG6BjakV

[Simon Vreeman @vreeman]

The history and future of AI at Google, with Sundar Pichai https://t.co/6AgNGBEdQe

[Simon Vreeman @vreeman]

Cleo Abram interviews Demis Hassabis https://t.co/kOhAJTZmLE

[Simon Vreeman @vreeman]

@brodieseo congrats on the launch!

[Google Search Central @googlesearchc]

Today we released the March 2026 core update. We'll update our ranking release history page when the rollout is complete: https://t.co/tBENzbTqB2

[Simon Vreeman @vreeman]

@jdevalk tof!

[Simon Vreeman @vreeman]

The 49MB Web Page https://t.co/G4I08oA6xb

[Simon Vreeman @vreeman]

Palantir CEO on Iran, AI Weapons and America's Advantage | a16z American Dynamism Summit https://t.co/VJkOL2GWyQ

[Jan-Willem Bobbink @jbobbink]

94% of AI citations come from non-paid sources. Gartner is telling CMOs to double their PR budgets by 2027.

Gartner just published their 2026 comms predictions. The headline: PR and earned media budgets will double by 2027 as LLMs replace traditional search. They're telling CMOs to reallocate spending from paid channels toward PR and earned media because that's what AI answer engines actually cite.

Data backs this up. Muck Rack analyzed over a 1M links cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Around 94% of those citations come from non-paid sources. Earned media alone accounts for 82%. Journalism makes up 20 to 30% of all AI citations depending on the time period. Paid placements and advertising barely register.

Semrush found that visitors arriving from AI search convert at 4.4 times the rate of traditional organic search visitors. That number comes from analysis of 500+ topics in digital marketing and SEO verticals specifically, so the exact multiplier will vary by industry. The direction is clear.

There is a recency factor too. Muck Rack's February 2026 update found that more than half of all AI citations come from content published in the last 12 months. The highest citation rate occurs within seven days of publication. Press release citations alone grew 5x between July and December 2025. AI systems are actively prioritizing fresh content over older material.

That recency signal matters for SEOs. This is not a one-time optimization play. It requires ongoing editorial presence.

When CMOs start doubling their earned media budgets, that money has to come from somewhere. Gartner explicitly says to reallocate from paid. But in their 2025 CMO Spend Survey, paid media was already at 30.6% of total marketing spend. If earned media doubles, the budget pressure will hit every digital channel. Including SEO.

We have spent two decades building an industry around optimizing for Google's algorithm. Now the discovery layer is fragmenting across a dozen AI systems that each weigh signals differently. And the signal they all seem to agree on is third-party editorial validation. Not backlinks. Not technical SEO. Editorial trust.

Across analytics data from hundreds of properties, the pattern is consistent. Sites gaining visibility in AI-driven discovery are the ones with genuine brand authority and regular editorial coverage. Not the ones with the cleanest technical audits.

Technical SEO is not dead. But it is no longer enough on its own. If your entire strategy is optimizing for crawlers and you are ignoring how AI systems evaluate brand trust, you are building on a foundation that is shifting.

The PR industry just got handed the playbook that used to be ours. The smartest SEOs will learn from it.

Sources:
- Gartner, Top Predictions to Inform 2026 Comms Strategies (Feb 2026)
- Muck Rack, What Is AI Reading? report (Feb 2026)
- Gartner, 2025 CMO Spend Survey (May 2025)
- Semrush, We Studied the Impact of AI Search on SEO Traffic (Jul 2025)

[Aaron Haynes @myeyesshine_]

These guys from NYU and UV tested 35 LLMs and found something that matters for AI visibility.

When similar content competes in a retrieval context, the model’s ability to pick the right source declines log-linearly toward zero. Not toward ‘good enough.’ Toward zero.

The bottleneck isn’t context window length - they held input length constant, same result. It’s interference. More similar pages in the grounding pipeline = worse selection accuracy for all of them.

What predicts resistance? Model size. Context window? No significant effect.
They tried telling models to ‘ignore earlier info’ and ‘focus on recent updates.’ Barely moved the needle. CoT didn’t help either.

For AI visibility this means: being structurally distinct from competing content matters more than being marginally better. Read that again.

If your page looks like the other 8 in the grounding context, you’re adding to the interference problem, not solving it.
Density beats length. Distinctiveness beats comprehensiveness. And flooding a category with similar placements may actually hurt citation rates, not help.

Paper: https://t.co/hU5V6JNbqD. Thank you @arxiv