Blog
What we measured, including the experiments that failed and the numbers we do not trust yet.
Measurement
Check the denominator before you trust an AI metric
Our own sentiment flip rate came out 12.7% on the first pass and 37.7% on the second. Same answers, same classifier. The difference was which rows were allowed to count.
by John Lee
AI Search
We removed sentiment from our dashboard. Here is the data.
Ask an AI engine the same question twice: whether it names a brand flips 11.8% of the time. Whether the mention reads positive flips 37.7%. And negative was assigned 0 times in 1,075 answers.
by John Lee
GEO
Brand mentions beat backlinks for AI visibility (75k-brand study)
Ahrefs correlated 75,000 brands against Google AI Overview appearances: branded web mentions 0.664, backlinks 0.218. Their study, not ours — and three caveats.
by John Lee
AI Visibility
8 AI Visibility Tools Compared (2026): Features and Prices
Eight AI visibility tools compared on engines, cadence, prompts and price — using only what their own pages publish. 18 of 32 feature cells are blank.
by John Lee
AI Search
Why your brand isn't in AI Overviews — check your Google rank
Across 12 queries with a Google AI Overview, one brand was cited 6/6 times when it ranked on Google and 0/6 when it did not. How to find your failing stage.
by John Lee
AI Search
Does ChatGPT Know My Brand? A Fake Name Scored 90.5%
Guides tell you to ask ChatGPT whether your brand is real. We measured it: an invented company scored 90.5%, a shipping product 7.1%. Use this audit instead.
by John Lee
AI Search
Long-Tail Prompts vs Head Terms in AI Search (2026 Data)
Only 31% of prompts trigger a search. When one does, query fan-out rewrites it into short machine queries — those, not your sentence, are what pages match against.
by John Lee
AI Search
How to track your brand in AI answers (step by step)
The six steps, and what they produced on one brand: 336 stored answers, 50.0% overall — and 0.0% on the unbranded questions a stranger would actually ask.
by John Lee
AI Search
How Often to Update Content for AI Search (2026 Answer)
Two datasets agree that about a quarter of AI-cited pages have not been updated in a year. Nothing published supports a monthly timer. Here is a defensible cadence.
by John Lee
AI Search
Does YouTube help you get cited in AI search? (2026 data)
Google's answer surfaces cite YouTube heavily — 26.6% of citations in our set — while ChatGPT cited video 0%. Whether publishing video helps is unmeasured.
by John Lee