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Welcome back to What Matters This Week.
With SEO Week 2026 around the corner, we decided to get ahead of this year’s theme: Where AI search becomes a strategy. So instead of writing about it, we ran an experiment to show you what that actually looks like.
Here’s the TL;DR
- We ran the same prompt across all 15 SEO Week sponsors and logged every ChatGPT citation (220 URLs total).
- 42% came from brand-owned domains, 22% from third-party editorial, 20% from review sites, 15% from UGC and social.
- The citation mix tells an interesting story. Some brands own their narrative, others are being defined by sources they’ve never audited.
- Siteimprove earned the most brand-owned citations with 16 of 24 URLs pointing to their domain.
What We Did
Every day, potential customers are asking ChatGPT to brief them on your brand before a sales call, a demo, or a competitive review. The AI assembles an answer from whatever it can find and hands it over as a confident summary. Most brands have never looked at what that summary actually contains.
We wanted to change that, at least for the brands heading to New York next week. So we ran the same prompt across all 15 SEO Week sponsors:
“I’m going to SEO Week and want to brush up on all the sponsors. Tell me everything I need to know about [Brand].”
Same prompt. Same model. 220 citations logged across 15 brands. The citations broke down into four categories:
- Brand-owned (93 citations, 42%): the sponsor’s own domain appearing in the response
- Third-party editorial (48 citations, 22%): guides, directories, comparison pieces, and industry coverage
- Review sites (45 citations, 20%): G2, Capterra, TechRadar, and similar aggregators
- UGC and social (34 citations, 15%): Reddit threads, YouTube tutorials, LinkedIn posts
A whopping 58% of citations came from content the brands don’t own. And the per-brand breakdown made it even more interesting.
What We Found
The first thing that jumps out from the data is that it doesn’t play out the way you’d expect: AI visibility doesn’t mirror market visibility.
In this limited test, both the total citation count and the mix of owned and not-owned content didn’t correlate neatly with brand size, marketing budget, or category dominance.
The big winner for on-domain citations was Siteimprove with 16 out of 24, beating out big names like Similarweb, Semrush, and Ahrefs.
Siteimprove’s citation mix tells an interesting story.
Beyond their own domain, ChatGPT cited them from Northwestern University, Cornell, Yale, Saint Joseph’s University, Wake Forest, and the Nevada state government. These are institutions that don’t link to tools casually. That kind of presence signals deep integration into large, high-domain authority organizations that use enterprise software. It’s also the kind of credibility signal that no amount of review site optimization or social posting can replicate.
The brands that show up strongest aren’t always the ones with the biggest audiences or the loudest presence.
What To Do About It
Run an audit on your own brand and close competitors.
Ask ChatGPT to tell you everything you need to know about the company before an important meeting. Then log the citations and sort them across the same four categories. The distribution will give you some valuable insights into how GEO shapes LLM answers in your industry.
The Siteimprove finding is the most useful reminder here: AI visibility doesn’t mirror market visibility. It’s an encouraging finding for brands in competitive niches, now you just need a content strategy to drive that visibility. That’s exactly what Ross’s session at SEO Week on April 29 is designed to address.
Inception: How to Plant Your Brand Into the Memory Layer of Every LLM goes beyond AI visibility audits. It walks through how to create the shareable frameworks, tools, and language that get embedded in how your audience talks about your category, and by extension, how AI talks about it. Attendees leave with a concrete playbook and low-lift experiments they can run immediately.
It’s not too late to get your SEO Week tickets. Use code SEO-SIMMONDS for $100 off a four-day pass ($30 off single-day tickets). And for every ticket purchased with that code, iPullRank will donate $100 to Black Girls Code.
📣 Join Ross and Reddit Tomorrow for a Free Webinar
The New Playbook: How Reddit Ads Win in the AI Search Era
April 24 | 10:00AM PST / 1:00PM EST
Paid media doesn’t stop at the click anymore. It shapes what AI shows your buyers next.
Tomorrow, Friday April 24th, at 1:00PM EST (10:00AM PST), Ross is joining Reddit for Business to unpack how Reddit ad formats drive real bottom-of-funnel performance in the AI search era, and how the Reddit Ads Flywheel helps every dollar you spend convert today’s buyer while building your reputation over time.
Register now and join us for The New Playbook: How Reddit Ads Win in the AI Search Era.
Go Deeper on the Answer Economy [G2 Insights Report]
Everything we covered this week is playing out at scale across B2B software buying and G2’s latest Insight Report puts the numbers to it.
Surveying over 1,000 B2B decision-makers, the report found that 71% now rely on AI chatbots for software research, and AI chatbots have become the single biggest influence on buyer shortlists. They now come in ahead of review sites, peers, and vendor websites combined.
The stat that should stop every B2B marketer in their tracks: two-thirds of software buyers chose a different vendor than they originally planned because of AI guidance. A third purchased from a vendor they’d never previously heard of.
The citation audit we ran on SEO Week sponsors this week is a small-scale version of exactly this dynamic. The brands that showed up strongest in ChatGPT’s answers are the ones best positioned to be in that two-thirds.
Read the full G2 Answer Economy Report →
That’s it for this week. If you’re heading to SEO Week, reach out to Ross, Meghan, or Andrea to connect with the Foundation team IRL.
Have a great weekend, Ethan Crump ethan@foundationinc.co
