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Tuesday. Hope the week is being kind so far.
Everyone selling generative engine optimization has the same slide. Your customers ask ChatGPT now, the click is dying, sign before your competitors do.
Here is the number that slide never carries. Rightmove pulls around 200 million visits a month, about 85% of them direct, and traffic from LLMs currently accounts for less than half a percent.
That is Matt Bushby, the company's CMO, in a Creative Salon feature that is the best reported thing I have read on this all month. Less than half a percent, from the CMO of a site whose own name is the biggest search term in UK property.
He is preparing anyway, and what he describes is not a retainer. "The big thing we're focused on is having the right data and the right understanding of what's going on. So even though it is unpredictable, we can see what's happening," he says.
Instrumentation first. That is somebody who has lived through a platform shift.
The agency side is louder, and not wrong. Mirza Germovic of Edelman: "If a brand isn't showing up in the answer itself, it's effectively invisible for a growing share of searches. This isn't a future problem."
DEPT's Daniel Moreno points at Harvard research done with OpenAI finding roughly 48% of AI searches are queries the model had never seen before. Half the demand is not in any keyword tool because nobody has typed it.
Then Becky Jenkins at TMW names the risk none of the pitches will: "The industry fell into the 'volume over quality' trap before, and teams have put years of work into fixing that. Falling into it again risks taking a very costly step in the wrong direction."
Underneath sits the trade nobody has solved. Letting the crawlers in earns citations and makes it easier for the model to answer instead of sending anyone. Ollie Betts at WPP Media notes the New York Times blocks many GEO partners for that reason.
So you are asked to pay to be quoted inside a product that may eventually stop forwarding the visit, on under half a percent of traffic.
I would do what Bushby is doing. Measure first, buy second, keep the receipts. What does your version of "we can see what's happening" cost, and how much of it do you already own and never look at?
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TALK ON THE MARKET
Verena Gründel, director of brand and communications at DMEXCO, in a Digiday piece sponsored by DMEXCO:
The earned-paid gap shows that marketers cannot simply buy their way into AI visibility
Sponsored, from the person who runs the conference, so discount it. It survives the discount.
Nearly every pitch in your inbox is a way to buy into an answer, and what moves the answer is whether credible third parties keep mentioning you. That is a PR budget wearing a martech badge.
Want to see case studies of AI-powered campaigns?
Try our sister newsletter:
NUMBERS MATTER
$29 to $699 a month. The public price range for AI visibility tooling, from Otterly.AI's entry tier to Ahrefs' full AI Visibility Index, with Semrush and Profound starting at $99, per Cybernews' buyer's guide.
That guide earns affiliate commission on what it ranks, so take the prices and ignore the order.
The shape is the useful part. A hundred-dollar-a-month category with a seven-hundred-dollar ceiling is something you can run for a quarter without building a business case.
DAILY PROMPT
Our Google AI Overview Optimization Strategy, pointed at one page rather than your whole site:
Optimize a content asset for visibility in Google AI Overviews (AIO) and other AI-generated search surfaces. Research the live search results yourself, read any files I attach, and work through the analysis end to end before reporting back.
## Current Situation
Analyze this content piece for AI Overview optimization:
**Content Title:** [YOUR_CONTENT_TITLE]
**Target Keyword:** [PRIMARY_KEYWORD]
**Current Search Volume:** [MONTHLY_SEARCHES]
**Content Type:** [BLOG_POST/GUIDE/CASE_STUDY/PRODUCT_PAGE]
**Current Word Count:** [WORD_COUNT]
**Target Audience:** [AUDIENCE_DESCRIPTION]
**Attached Files:** [URL_OR_FILES: live page, draft doc, Search Console export, rank tracking export]
**Brand Constraints:** [BRAND_VOICE_AND_CLAIMS_RULES]
## Analysis Framework
### 1. AI Overview Eligibility Assessment
- Search the keyword and confirm whether it currently triggers an AI Overview
- Identify the type of AI Overview (definition, comparison, list, process, etc.)
- Analyze what content is currently cited in the overview and quote the cited passages
- Rate the competitive difficulty for AI Overview inclusion (1-10)
### 2. Content Structure Optimization
Review the attached content and recommend:
- Optimal heading hierarchy for AI extraction (H1, H2, H3 patterns)
- Ideal paragraph length for snippet inclusion (40-60 words per section)
- Strategic placement of key claims and data points
- Table or list formats that retrieval systems parse cleanly
- Recommended content length for this query type
### 3. Citation Authority Enhancement
Provide specific recommendations for:
- How to position original research or data for citation
- Formatting techniques that increase attribution likelihood
- Strategic use of statistics, studies, and named expert quotes
- Schema markup implementation (FAQPage, HowTo, etc.), with ready JSON-LD
- Internal linking strategy to support AI Overview visibility
### 4. Competitive Analysis
Identify:
- Top 3 sources currently cited in the AI Overview
- Content gaps or unsupported claims in those sources
- Unique angles or data our content can provide
- Specific claims or statistics that would differentiate our content
### 5. Actionable Optimization Roadmap
Provide a prioritized list of 5-7 specific changes:
- Rewrite recommendations (specific sections and why)
- Content additions needed for AI Overview inclusion
- Technical SEO requirements (schema, formatting)
- Timeline estimate for implementation
- Expected impact on visibility and traffic, with your confidence level
## Output Requirements
Provide your analysis in this structure:
1. AI Overview Eligibility Score (1-10) with reasoning
2. Current AI Overview Landscape (what is being shown now, with source links and retrieval date)
3. Top 3 Optimization Priorities (with specific implementation steps)
4. Revised Content Outline (showing structural changes)
5. Implementation Checklist (ready-to-execute tasks)
Every recommendation must state the exact change to make. Flag anything you could not verify in live search rather than estimating it.Use it on the page that earns the most revenue, not the blog. The output worth reading is the citation audit: who is quoted in the overview today, and the passage that got them there. That list is your competitive set now, and half the time it is not the competitor you budget against.
CMO CORNER
Work expands to fit your anxiety. Design shrinks it.
AI search is the most anxious subject in marketing right now, and the anxiety is producing work. An audit, a dashboard, a new agency, a Friday deck nobody opens.
Pick the one measurement you would defend to the board, instrument it, let the rest wait a quarter.
We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.
TOOL UPGRADE
Three ways to find out whether you are in the answer, at three budgets:
Frase — best for teams who know their keywords and want briefs built from what is ranking now, from $99 a month. Try Frase here →
RankPrompt — best for testing prompts against the surfaces themselves, free at five keywords a month. Try RankPrompt here →
Scalenut — best for volume teams wanting research, brief and draft in one place, if you accept that the drafts need editing. Try Scalenut here →
→ We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.
LEARN THIS
If you are about to ask for an AI visibility budget: Finding ROI in AI Workflows. It walks the 3A framework, audit, analyze, act, over workflows you already run.
Do that before you add a line item, because the answer you give about the last one decides this one.
→ We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more on AI marketing for free. Browse our learning resources for free.