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Digest #66 ā Subscribeā 7 minute readā New research exposes how AI search actually works. 60% of searches now end without a click. YouTube gets cited 200x more than any other video platform. Discovery queries make up 31% of all searches and AI skips your brand site entirely for those. If you're not on YouTube and review platforms, you're invisible to 800 million weekly ChatGPT users making buying decisions. Your SEO strategy is worthless for AI search. Let's get in to it. Amazon Owes You Money Most sellers leave thousands on the table every year. Lost inventory. Damaged units. Fee errors. Overcharges. Amazon doesn't tell you about it. They just keep your money. āCarbon6's Seller Investigators finds it. Gets it back. You pay nothing unless they recover cash. Average seller gets back $4,200 in the first audit. Takes 5 minutes to connect your account. They handle everything else.
Your Brand Is Invisible to AI Search New research from Anthony Lee just exposed how AI search engines actually decide what to recommend. For months, everyone pushed llms.txt files. Put this special file on your website to help AI understand your content. Anthony tracked server traffic for 24 hours across multiple sites. Zero AI platforms checked for llms.txt files. Not ChatGPT. Not Claude. Not Perplexity. Everyone installed a doorbell while AI climbed through the window. Anthony asked Perplexity about a product called Slack Brain. Perplexity said it didn't exist. The website was live. Perplexity never checked the server. This "real-time answer engine" was running from cached data. ChatGPT was the only platform that visited sites. But it was fetching URLs from Bing's index so outdated that 11 out of 12 pages had been deleted. The citation patterns are brutal. Reddit appeared first in Google results 138 times across 120 queries. AI platforms cited Reddit zero times. YouTube dominated. Perplexity cited YouTube 70 times. ChatGPT cited it 43 times. YouTube accounts for 29.5% of all citations in Google AI Overviews. That's the #1 domain overall. YouTube has a 200x citation advantage over its nearest video competitor. The New York Times, Amazon, and Home Depot got exactly zero ChatGPT citations despite dominating Google rankings. SEO dominance translated to nothing in AI visibility. Here's the part that should terrify Amazon sellers. Anthony classified nearly 20,000 search queries. 31.2% are "discovery queries." People exploring options without specific brands. "Best protein powder for weight loss." "Top PPC tools for Amazon." For these crucial queries, AI platforms skip brand websites entirely. They go straight to G2, Capterra, TechRadar, Consumer Reports, YouTube reviews. Your optimized product pages? AI ignores them for third-party review sites. The brutal math: Only 3.2% of queries are validation queries where your website is the preferred source. For everything else, AI prefers third-party content. Here's the measurement nightmare. When ChatGPT mentions your brand, there's often no referral traffic. No click to track. No conversion to attribute. Your brand could influence thousands of purchases while your analytics shows nothing. Bain & Company reports that 60% of searches now end without a click. Gartner predicts traditional search volume will drop 25% by 2026 due to AI chatbots. This changes faster than crypto markets. Reddit was essential six months ago. Now it gets ignored. YouTube wasn't in most SEO strategies a year ago. Now it's mandatory. When ChatGPT rolled out GPT-5, premium brands like Chanel and Burberry that dominated in GPT-4 dropped out entirely. These aren't edge cases. They're the new normal. What actually matters now: Review platforms are non-negotiable. G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, Amazon reviews are essential infrastructure. No substantial review volume means you're invisible to discovery queries. YouTube is mandatory. Regular how-to videos, product demos, comparison content. AI values YouTube transcripts for step-by-step instructions. Traditional SEO is a parallel game. Google rankings and AI citations operate independently. Ranking #1 on Google while invisible to ChatGPT is increasingly common. Attribution requires new thinking. Track brand mentions in AI summaries. Monitor which platforms cite you. Measure branded search volume increases. Flexibility beats strategy. With platforms changing citation preferences quarterly, rigid plans are worthless. Build capabilities for rapid adaptation. The only sustainable approach: diversify presence across platforms, monitor obsessively, pivot fast. Voice commerce is expected to hit $80 billion by 2026. AI drove $262 billion in sales last holiday season. Brands optimizing for answer engines now are capturing 3.4x more visibility than late adopters. Companies that show up in AI answers will define their categories. The ones that don't will wonder where their visibility went. CortexIQ Update: Upload Once, It Follows ForeverCortexIQ's memory function just changed the game for brands with established processes. Drop in your PPC optimization SOP. Your bid adjustment rules. Your pause criteria. Your entire playbook you spent years building. Upload it once. CortexIQ follows it forever. When it analyzes an account, it's not just remembering ACOS targets. It follows your complete playbook. Specific thresholds, bid adjustment rules, pause criteria. Word for word. Memory isn't for storing preferences. It's for programming your entire operation into the AI that's already connected to all your brands. Next phase coming: CortexIQ doesn't just tell you what to do. It does it. We're building out the automation layer now. Bid management, keyword optimization, budget adjustments. Set your thresholds once and CortexIQ handles the rest. Uses your rules. Your ACOS targets. Your SOPs. Just executes automatically instead of making you do it manually every week. āLearn more and Lock in your spotā š ļø ResourcesTools by SellerSynapse:
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