Nadia Sorensen
AI search
Covers answer engines: what gets cited, which crawlers actually fetch, and how citation share moves week to week. Reads the crawler documentation so you do not have to, and tests the claims that vendors make about their own data.
13 articles
Bylines here are desk names. Drafting is AI-assisted; every article is edited, fact-checked and approved by a human — see the Editorial Policy.
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Which passages AI answers cite, and which they use unnamed
Bart Magera, writing on the Advanced Web Ranking blog, coded 112 passages from 40 SEO queries. Passages that AI answers linked to were more often dated and named their subject…
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ChatGPT names fewer B2B tech brands per answer
BrightEdge tracked the same set of B2B tech questions in ChatGPT in March and September 2026. The average answer named 5.36 brands in March and 3.87 in September, 27.9% fewer.…
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ChatGPT’s Luna model searches fewer sites, more directly
Seer Interactive ran 346 matched prompts through GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.6 Luna, the model ChatGPT now uses by default. Luna ran almost the same number of searches but aimed most of…
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Most AI Overview citations come from outside the top 10
Conductor matched 167.9 million AI Overview citations against Google’s organic results. A page ranked first was cited about one time in four. More than half of all citations went to…
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Claude’s text watermark and Google rankings: what is known
Anthropic now marks text that Claude writes. Within days, posts on LinkedIn and X said Google would stop ranking such pages. Nothing published by Google or Anthropic supports that claim.
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Silence, not error: what AI does when it does not know your brand
Seer Interactive tracked 1,562 branded prompts for five weeks and reports that the six engines refused to answer 31.2% of the time, while answering wrongly only 2.8%. We checked whether…
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How answer engines cite: the mechanism, the controls, the guesswork
What an answer engine actually does, which crawler token governs what, and which parts of citation nobody outside the vendors can see.
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What the 2026 citation and CTR data actually say about SEO priorities
Organic search is not dying, but the economics of where to invest have shifted in ways that most dashboards will not show you.
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Reddit holds 83.9% of Google’s Discussions and Forums feature
Three domains control most of what shows up in this SERP feature, and backlinks to individual threads have no measurable effect on inclusion.
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When AI citations don’t send traffic: what the 2026 data shows
A trend piece published in July 2026 by Ahrefs’ Louise Linehan draws on Keywords Explorer data and social media discussion to map where AI search measurement is heading. The sharpest…
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What the 2025 Web Almanac says about bot access decisions
Technical hygiene keeps improving on its own: HTTPS is near 91%, title tags near 99%. The interesting numbers are elsewhere. Blocking rates for AI crawlers rose sharply in a single…
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Three GEO claims, tested against evidence
A wave of advice about AI search citation has been circulating, much of it repeated often enough to acquire the social weight of consensus. Some of it has evidence behind…
