In partnership with
Rex Gelb spent a decade building HubSpot's paid engine. Now he's showing founders exactly how to do it.
On April 27th, get the framework to structure, launch, and scale paid media that drives pipeline, not just traffic. 20 minutes. Live Q&A. Free.
Visible But Blind
Your brand is already in the AI conversation. The question is whether it's saying the right things.
Here's what the data is telling us this week, and what it means for your business.
A new study dropped this week with a stat that stopped me cold: 89% of brands now appear in AI powered search results. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, your company is almost certainly being cited somewhere.
Here's the problem: only 14% of marketers are tracking it.
That means the vast majority of businesses are showing up in the channel their buyers increasingly use for decisions, and have zero idea what's being said. Wrong pricing. Outdated positioning. A competitor framed as the better option. All of it, playing out in AI answers, completely unmonitored.
This isn't a traffic problem. It's a brand reputation problem happening in a channel most teams aren't even watching yet. I know this first hand having many Monic and Monica names in the AI space!!
What to do: Start by simply asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI search a few questions your ideal customer would ask. See if you appear. See what's said. That's your baseline.
Rankings ≠ Citations (And the Gap Is Widening Fast)
Here's something that should fundamentally change how you think about SEO in 2026: the overlap between what ranks #1 on Google and what gets cited in AI answers has collapsed from 70% to under 20%.
That means the content Google rewards and the content AI engines recommend are now almost entirely different sets of sources.
AI Overviews now appear on nearly 48% of all Google searches, up 58% year over year. But only 1% of users click on the sources cited. The click is largely gone. What remains is the recommendation itself.
The brands that are cited, though? They're seeing 35% more organic clicks than competitors who aren't. Being the source AI trusts has become its own distinct advantage, one that doesn't show up in your rankings dashboard.
What to do: Stop optimizing exclusively for rank. Start asking: Is my content the kind of thing an AI would cite as an authoritative answer? That's a different question, and it requires a different strategy.
Stop Chasing AI Traffic. Start Chasing AI Mentions.
Everyone in the marketing world is obsessed with AI referral traffic right now. Here's the counterintuitive truth: that traffic is actually shrinking. New data shows LLM referral traffic dropped 42.6% since last July. AI models are including fewer links per answer than they did just months ago.
And yet AI usage keeps growing. More people are asking more questions and getting more answers, they're just not clicking through.
This is actually the point. When someone asks ChatGPT 'What's the best tool for X?' and your brand is the answer, that recommendation lands whether or not they click. The trust transfer happens in the answer itself. That's a new kind of brand equity, one that doesn't show up in Google Analytics.
The brands winning in AI search aren't winning because of traffic. They're winning because they're recommended or even selected. That's the metric that matters now.
What to do: Shift your success metric from AI referral visits to AI mention frequency. Are you appearing in the answers? In what context? That's your new share of voice.
Your Website Is the Least Important Part of Your AI Visibility Strategy
This one surprises almost every client I talk to. Research from AirOps found that 85% of brand mentions in LLM responses come from third party pages, not your owned website.
Review sites. Industry publications. Reddit threads. Comparison pages. Podcast transcripts. Those are the sources AI engines trust most.
It makes sense when you think about it: AI systems are trained to synthesize what the broader world says about you, not just what you say about yourself. Your homepage is marketing. A Capterra review or a Forbes mention is signal.
This means GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) isn't just about polishing your own content. It's about earning the right coverage, in the right places, so that when AI summarizes your category, your brand is part of the answer.
What to do: Audit where your brand appears off your own site. Trade publications, review platforms, communities your buyers trust. That's where your AI visibility is actually being built.
🎙️ Want to Actually Track This Stuff?
Everything I covered today, knowing where your brand appears in AI answers, what it says, how often, is exactly what Say Hi AI Podcast is built for.
The Say Hi AI podcast is launching soon, and the waitlist is open now. Early subscribers get first access, including tools to track your own AI mentions when we go live.
Final Sign Off
That's all for this week. If any of these sparked a question about your own brand's AI visibility, hit reply, I read every one.
Stay visible and keep building your authority.
Monic AI Systems helps businesses get discovered and recommended by platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Search. From Generative Engine Optimization to multi platform content systems and AI automation, we help you win in the age of AI search.
- Monica