Ray: LLM Visibility affected by SEO

Key Takeaways:

• Ray analyzed websites (US) that were hit by an unconfirmed Google Update in January and found: Dropping in Google SEO also negatively impacted their LLM Visibility

  • The data shows a broad decline in both SEO traffic & AI search citations: every subfolder in the study (11 of 11) experienced a drop in both Google organic traffic and total AI search citations, with a significant average citation decline of -22.5%.

  • Google’s AI Mode (-23.8%) and ChatGPT (-27.8%) showed the most severe declines, closely mirroring the -26.7% average drop in organic traffic.

  • While Gemini also saw broad declines (10 of 11 sites), Perplexity proved to be the most resilient, with only 4 of the 11 sites seeing a drop and a much milder average change of -2.9%.

    • This data supports the theory that Perplexity is primarily using non-Google search surfaces to generate its responses.

• Methodology: Ahref estimated traffic before and after compared to LLM visibility scores from Ahrefs Brand Radar (number of citations over time)

Sources:

• https://lilyraynyc.substack.com/p/are-citations-in-ai-search-affected