Will Scott
@willscott
Husband, father, marketer, Ironman, locomotive consultant.
AI search visibility is no longer just a website problem. Google's platform properties connect social and video reporting with search performance. This Visibility Report covers platform properties, AI opt-out trade-offs, AI ads, product feeds, and AI citations. https://thevisibilityreport.com
ChatGPT ads now have conversion bidding, geo exclusions, and bulk controls. The paid side of AI search is starting to look like performance marketing. This week's Visibility Report covers ads, citations, crawler access, entity consistency, and reviews. https://thevisibilityreport.com
Google says AI search sends billions of clicks each week. Publishers still cannot verify the number or isolate the traffic. This week's Visibility Report covers AI clicks, AI Overviews, share of voice, tool notes, and Duane Forrester's GEO tools survey. https://thevisibilityreport.com
AI search makes the old higher ed marketing boxes less useful. SEO, content, reputation, and enrollment visibility have to work together. https://edtechconnect.castos.com/episodes/paula-french-from-clicks-to-conversions-a-practical-playbook-for-ai-search
Google Search Console now reports social and video content performance. That matters for AI visibility because the cited surface is bigger than your website. New Visibility Report: off-site visibility, AI-shaped B2B shortlists, RAG, AI shopping, and entity clarity. https://thevisibilityreport.com
AI visibility is getting more technical. This week's Visibility Report covers Safari MCP for AI debugging, markdown pages for AI bots, what agents skip, and Lighthouse checks for llms.txt. If agents cannot parse the page, they may not cite it. https://thevisibilityreport.com
Your page can rank on Google and get skipped by AI Mode. Here's why: Google says it breaks a question into "a multitude" of sub-queries (outside analyses put it around 8-12), searches each one. Learn more: https://www.searchinfluence.com/blog/what-is-query-fan-out-in-ai-search/
Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Freedom from want. Freedom from fear. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Four Freedoms Address, 1941
“Ubiquity equals probability” has been a useful shorthand. If AI tools are going to understand who you are and what you know, one perfect page is not enough. Repeated, attributable signals matter: site, profiles, video, social, examples, quotes, mentions.
AI citations may shape what people search next. Similarweb tied AI brand mentions to later direct visits and branded search. New Visibility Report: Similarweb, schema for AI search, citation decay, Google's spam update, and Reddit as source material. https://thevisibilityreport.com
A login is not onboarding. It is account provisioning. The useful AI work starts when a team chooses one real workflow, gives the model context, sets boundaries, and builds a review loop. The tool is not the hard part anymore.
AI visibility is an off-site evidence problem too. Reddit belongs in GEO, AI citation tracking, sentiment analysis, and modern off-page SEO because buyers are already doing the talking there. https://www.searchinfluence.com/blog/reddit-ai-search-strategy-ai-citations/
AI visibility data is more useful when it leaves the dashboard. This week: MCP connectors, Slack workflows, prompt discovery, agent-ready websites, and Google/Microsoft backing agent discovery standards. https://thevisibilityreport.com
Google’s AI Mode report: keywords became task briefs. Top terms include Find, Identify, Explain, Summarize. Optimize for the job, not just the phrase. Windsock, not GPS. SMX class: https://searchengineland.com/smx/master-classes/topics/claude-code-for-seo
ChatGPT gets the conversation. Google has the habit. If most users meet AI inside the search results they already use, AI Overviews needs its own measurement plan. New Visibility Report: Peec AI's 500K-prompt study, MCP data stacks, and agent discovery. https://thevisibilityreport.com
My SMX Master Class is Thursday: Claude Code for SEO. If you read the SEL piece on Claude Code as an SEO command center, this is the deeper live class. June 25 + on-demand. Friend15 = 15% off. https://events.searchengineland.com/smx-master-classes-june-2026/register?ref=will
Search is moving from rankings to answers to actions. My Search Influence colleague Cory Agular explains MCP SEO, a visibility layer for the AI assistant era. SEO: where do we rank? GEO: are we mentioned? MCP SEO: are we the source? https://www.searchinfluence.com/blog/what-is-mcp-seo/
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." Buckminster Fuller
ICYMI: the durable AI SEO asset is not the model. It is the learning system: sources, prompts, rubrics, structured facts, human review notes, and citation tracking. Visibility #21: https://thevisibilityreport.com
Ranking #1 is useful. It is not a guarantee that AI systems will cite you. AI search pulls from a messier source layer than most dashboards show. I pulled the SMX Advanced data into a short carousel here: https://willscott.me/2026/06/04/smx-advanced-2026-less-busywork-more-geo/
I don’t think AI means everyone becomes a manager. A lot of the work is still work: checking, editing, improving, and deciding whether the output is worth using. That’s less management and more QA.
Google's AI reporting and the UK-forced opt-out path belong side by side. If publishers can choose whether to appear in AI answers, they need data. If Google wants participation, it needs to show value. This week's Visibility Report: https://thevisibilityreport.com
"Information is the resolution of uncertainty." -- Claude Shannon Good AI search content does exactly that: answers clearly, removes ambiguity, and makes the next step obvious.
This is what I'm presenting at #SMX today: Less busywork, more GEO. AI visibility is not just rankings. It is entity clarity, source readiness, task workflows, human review, ubiquity, and measurement. Slides + summary: https://willscott.me/2026/06/04/smx-advanced-2026-less-busywork-more-geo/
Google's new Search Console reports are a real AI search milestone. They start showing when pages appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover's generative AI features. Still early. Still partial. But visibility is moving from anecdote to reporting.
I’m glad to report barnacleseo.com is officially out of the doghouse. Anybody want to throw me a link with exact match anchor? j/k. No really.
"Once a new technology rolls over you, if you are not part of the steamroller, you are part of the road." -- Stewart Brand AI search adoption is not slowing down. Optional is a position too.
Three practical AI moves for sales and marketing: 1. Map the funnel. 2. Improve top-of-funnel creative rotation. 3. Compare paid and organic data to find coverage gaps. Tool second. Funnel first.
