[Blog]

Insights on AI Search and the agentic web.

Expert research, product updates, and practical guides on helping marketing teams win in the age of AI search.

Bar chart 'A citation doubles a brand's AI visibility. Being sourced does not.' comparing brand mention rate on cited and not-cited days across Gemini, ChatGPT and Google AI Mode
[Research]

Do AI Citations Actually Matter? What 354,004 AI Answers Show

Sitefire research across 354,004 AI answers on what an AI citation is worth, and why being sourced without being cited pays almost nothing.

Jochen MadlerJul 31
Bar chart 'One prompt, three AI models, three different answers' comparing brand mentions and cited pages across ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Mode
[Research]

Why AI Models Recommend the Same Brands but Cite Different Sources

Sitefire research on why ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode cite different sources for the same prompt, and what it means for your AI visibility.

Jochen MadlerJul 21
News logos including CNN, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian feeding into a German-language Google AI Overview card about a publisher
[Industry]

Google Is Liable for What Its AI Overviews Say: Inside the Munich Ruling

A Munich court held Google liable for false AI Overviews. The legal reasoning, the precedents, and what AI Overviews liability means for brands.

Jochen MadlerJun 10
Three-layer diagram of AI visibility measurement: AI answers, bot fetches via Cloudflare, and AI referral sessions in GA4
[Playbooks]

How to Measure GEO Beyond Prompt Monitoring

Prompt monitoring is a useful start, but it only measures synthetic visibility. The real GEO measurement stack adds Cloudflare bot data and GA4 referrals.

Jochen MadlerApr 18
Trustpilot FY2025 earnings stat card showing 1,490% growth in AI search click-throughs and a 25% one-day stock move
[Industry]

Trustpilot's AI Search Earnings: The First Proof That AI Visibility Drives Revenue

Trustpilot's AI search click-throughs grew 1,490% YoY and the stock surged 25%. What the first AI search earnings report reveals about brand visibility.

Jochen MadlerMar 29
Sitefire Research bar chart titled 'Most cited domains are cited once', showing 43.3% of 129,904 domains get just one AI citation
[Industry]

AI Content Is Good Enough - But Good Enough for What?

AI content can rank in Google. But can it earn citations in AI search? Analysis of 25M+ citations reveals what actually gets cited - and it's not production quality.

Jochen MadlerMar 19
Comparison of browser versus AI agent Accept headers, highlighting text/markdown as the signal that flags agent traffic
[Playbooks]

How to Detect AI Agents Like OpenClaw Visiting Your Website

AI agents like OpenClaw send Accept: text/markdown - a header no browser uses. Learn how to detect agent traffic on Vercel, Cloudflare, Nginx, and more.

Jochen MadlerMar 8
Diagram showing the query 'Best CRM for small business' branching into six sample fan-out queries an AI runs before answering
[Explainers]

Query Fan-Out: What AI Search Actually Does With Your Query

AI search rewrites every query into 5-20 separate searches before answering. Learn how query fan-out works and why 68% of AI-cited pages aren't in the top 10.

Jochen MadlerMar 3
Card titled 'Start with the number you do not have yet', showing a brand at 18.4% share of AI answers against three competitors
[Playbooks]

How to Run a GEO Audit on Your Website

A 6-step framework to audit your AI search visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, and more. Covers content structure, schema markup, and competitor benchmarking.

Jochen MadlerFeb 28
Flowchart 'From prompt to citation' showing the grounding funnel from 10^11 indexed pages down to cited results, plus the foundation model path
[Explainers]

How AI Search Engines Actually Work: From Prompt to Citation

The full pipeline behind AI search: query fan-out, Reciprocal Rank Fusion, and why only 12% of ChatGPT citations overlap with Google results.

Jochen MadlerFeb 26
Stat cards showing AI engines at 5.2% of daily sessions against 78% of Google sessions that already show an AI answer
[Industry]

Global AI search engine market share

Google Search is now showing AI-infused content in 78% of sessions. ChatGPT has a 56% share of the AI search market.

Jochen MadlerJan 22