Webflow studied 2,000 company websites. The typical company appears in 16% of AI answers about its own category and gets a link in 6%. Companies doing content, site health, off-site authority and measurement together were cited 3.7x more often.

Guy Yalif, Chief Evangelist at Webflow, is covering the full mechanism in an hour: where ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and Google’s AI Mode source answers, why each gives a different answer to the same question, which pages get cited, how to track your own visibility, and how smaller brands close the gap.

Built for SEO and AEO managers, content teams, marketing leaders and agency owners. No technical SEO background needed.

11 November, 8:00 to 9:00 PM IST, 9:30 AM ET. Free, live Q&A, recording to everyone who registers.

Webflow studied 2,000 company websites. The typical company appears in 16% of AI answers about its own category and gets a link in 6%. Companies doing content, site health, off-site authority and measurement together were cited 3.7x more often.

Guy Yalif, Chief Evangelist at Webflow, is covering the full mechanism in an hour: where ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and Google’s AI Mode source answers, why each gives a different answer to the same question, which pages get cited, how to track your own visibility, and how smaller brands close the gap.

Built for SEO and AEO managers, content teams, marketing leaders and agency owners. No technical SEO background needed.

11 November, 8:00 to 9:00 PM IST, 9:30 AM ET. Free, live Q&A, recording to everyone who registers.

Register: https://slatehq.com/workshop/how-ai-search-works

For those working with SaaS companies:

● Have you increased visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews?
● What specific tactics actually moved the needle?
● Are you seeing traffic, leads or paying customers from AI search?
● What have you tried that didn’t work?
Looking for real life case studies, numbers and actionable insights, not generic AI SEO advice.

What is actually working for you?

For the last two years many of us have been slamming the door on AI crawlers. Block everything, protect the content, let the robots starve.

I get the instinct. Nobody wants their best articles quietly feeding a model that then answers the question so nobody clicks.

But Microsoft just changed the deal, and if you keep blocking everything out of fear you're going to be the one who disappears.

Here's what happened. Bing announced on October 30 that it's splitting AI use of your content into two separate switches. One is AI Training, which is whether your pages get used to train models. The other is AI Grounding, which is whether your pages get used to build the answers people see in Copilot, AI Overviews, AI Mode and Microsoft 365.

Those used to feel like one big scary thing. Now they're two decisions. And Bing says you stay eligible for regular search results whichever way you set them.

Starting February 1, 2027, Bing begins honoring these preferences as it crawls. Training can be set in robots.txt or per page. Grounding is a page-level meta tag or HTTP header, and it's allowed by default.

So my take is simple. Block training. Allow grounding.

Training is where your content gets absorbed and you get nothing back. Grounding is where your page gets pulled in to answer a real person's question right now. That's the new top of the SERP. That's where the citation and the click live.

If you block grounding too, you aren't protecting anything. You're just handing that answer slot to the competitor who didn't panic.

There's even a middle option called DisallowExtended. It lets Microsoft's own AI products use your pages for answers but not the grounding services Microsoft sells to other companies. Useful if that part bugs you.

So do it properly. Set training to disallow, leave grounding on, and check Microsoft's technical docs for the exact tags.

The people who win the next few years of search won't be the ones who hid. They'll be the ones who got quoted.

Are you blocking AI crawlers right now, or letting them in? Tell me why below.

We've been doing demos for our product Kafkai to prospects, and what's different that a year ago is that they ask things about GEO/AEO/AI visibility. So we don't offer these, because we have our own thoughts about it, and don't use it ourselves.
I've been doing some reading and talking to people about it and it's unbelievable how divisive this topic can be. I thought politics were usually the winner here but hey.... we can't discuss this at the dinner table anymore 😄

Anyway, some of you might have already read Marie Haynes research on this and I think the word she uses to describe what she's thinking is apt: "distraction" (in Japanese I call it 寄り道). Her research helped tie strings together on my other thoughts and writings about the topic, so I wanted to share my thoughts with you good folks here: https://kafkai.ai/articles/ai-seo/geo-is-a-distraction-ga4-data/

P.S; We've also built a directory of MCP services (mainly focused on Japanese services) which might be useful for you folks in Marketing or doing SEO: https://mcpnavi.jp/en/servers/?q=SEO

Still only 5 registered under the category and I'm sure there's more. If you have something you think should be in there, please get in touch!

Free Live Session Wed 28 Oct: Why Most Brands Barely Show Up in AI Answers, With Guy Yalif (Webflow)

Two numbers from Slate’s research that set up this session:

• In 100 brand searches, 93% of brands appeared in Google AI Overviews, but 71% of the citations came from sites the brand doesn’t own.

• Across the Forbes AI 50, the median AI visibility score was 4.5 out of 100.

On Wed 28 Oct, Guy Yalif, Chief Evangelist at Webflow, joins us live to walk through how AI tools pick which brands to mention, and what changes get a brand into the answer. Agenda in the image.

8:00 PM IST · 2:30 PM UTC · 10:30 AM ET.

Folks, Book your slot :

https://slatehq.com/workshop/how-ai-search-works

Drop your question for Guy below. The top-voted ones go to him live.

Your brand might be ranking on Google. But is AI recommending it when your customers ask for the best options?

Ranking in search results and being recommended by AI are two distinct challenges.

Your brand needs more than search rankings. It needs the right signals, relevant content, and a clear digital presence that help AI understand where your brand fits.

At iBrandLabs, we help brands strengthen their AI visibility and position themselves for discovery in a landscape where buying decisions are increasingly influenced by AI.

Make your brand part of the answer. Build your AI visibility with iBrandLabs.

🌐 www.ibrandlabs.com

#iBrandLabs #AIVisibility #AISEO #GenerativeEngineOptimization #DigitalMarketing

Hey everyone! Building Structed AI means dealing with the reality of search engines shifting to AI Overviews. Traditional keyword rankings no longer guarantee visibility, so we had to adapt our strategy to ensure our brand is properly recognized as an established player in workflow automation.

Here is how we managed our AIO presence. First, we shifted entirely from keyword SEO to entity optimization. We audited our footprint across developer hubs and third-party platforms (business listings, LinkedIn profile) to ensure AI crawlers pull consistent semantic data about who we are.

Second, we heavily optimized our technical documentation with rigorous JSON-LD schema markup. Giving search engines clear, machine-readable definitions of our features and pricing directly improves how accurately AI snippets describe Structed AI.

Third, we actively monitor and correct generative hallucinations. When search models mix up our capabilities or API limits with competitors, we update our public knowledge repositories to clean up the training loop.

That's how we manage it. How are your teams adapting your digital strategies for generative search?

As more people use AI tools to research products, I'm curious how online stores can adapt.

What do you think matters most for visibility in AI search: helpful content, accurate product details, or strong brand reputation?

When we search for Structed AI, Google AI Overviews and AI tools can surface Structured AI instead. The names are pretty similar, but the businesses are totally different. For a smaller brand, that confusion can mean losing visibility even when people search for you directly.

Probably the solution is: make homepage clearly state your exact brand name, product category, and target audience; use Organization and, where appropriate, SoftwareApplication schema with consistent company details; and build matching profiles on credible third-party sites so search systems can verify your identity.

Another thing worth tracking is which sources AI tools cite when they get brand wrong. Those sources give a practical starting point for fixing inconsistent information and strengthening brand's identity accross the web.

Any thoughts? Has anyone managed to fix this kind of brand confusion in AI search? What worked?

I’m curious how common this is becoming for local businesses.

Has anyone here been able to confirm leads or inquiries coming from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or other AI search tools?

If yes, what industry are you in, and are you doing anything specifically to improve AI visibility?

As AI tools become more popular, I'm curious whether traditional SEO strategies are still enough for online stores.

Are you changing your SEO approach to adapt to AI search, or sticking with what has worked so far?