Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 3hThe sites getting hit by Google right now for scaling low quality AI content are actually producing many of the exact same page types and templates that companies scaled with freelance writers before 2023 😅 History repeats itself 152
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 7hSince LLMs construct multiple fan-out queries and use search engines to conduct these searches simultaneously, doesn’t that kind of imply that SEO is actually *more* important than it was before? 🤔 (Better coverage = better visibility) 291
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 8hFor how much Google writes about “inauthentic mentions,” you’d think they’d be better at combating it. I’d say they’re currently doing worse (AIO/AI Mode responses) than the other LLMs on this front; the others have started providing disclaimers about spammy / promotional results. 221
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 28/09/2026I just checked a dozen unrelated terms in Google Trends (US, past 12 months) and every single one showed the same #1 region: Wyoming (The least populated state in the U.S.) Drill down, and it's all coming from Cheyenne - a town of 67K. 270
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 22/09/2026Despite reading AI search and SEO content every day, I rarely read any new finding or discovery that results in actually doing something new or different, strategically. 8170
Reposted by Lily Ray 😏Owain Lloyd-Williams @owainlloydwilliams.com · 16/09/2026A couple of distance shots from Shenzhen SEO conference with fascinating talks from @methode.bsky.social and @lilyray.nyc 051
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 31/08/2026I'm pretty confident these are ChatGPT fan-out queries in Google Search Console. You can use this regex filter to check your own sites: (?i)(site:.*official|official.*site:) 2170
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 26/08/2026As search becomes increasingly cross-channel and multimodal, it's a good idea to consider updating your organic search reporting to include more data than just your own website's organic traffic. 130
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 25/08/2026My amazing @amsive.com teammate Savanna found several examples of PDFs losing clicks and dropping out of the index in GSC. Are others seeing the same? 330
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 25/08/2026Hey @johnmu.com I saw you recently say that there’s nothing special you need to do for AI search, but I have a feeling Zeeshan might disagree with you. Is Google actually planning to do anything about “inauthentic mentions”? I’ve seen some changes but this stuff can still work well. 380
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 25/08/2026ChatGPT is doing fan-out searches using site: … but it doesn’t always get the domain right. And even when it does, a site: search for a brand doesn’t just pull up the root domain. It can pull up all the subdomains too. 😅 150
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 19/08/2026Between ChatGPT heavily using site: searches in fan out queries (which prevents lesser-known domains from being retrieved there), elevating .gov, .org and other “official” sites in fan-outs… (1/2) 241
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 17/08/2026New on my Substack: I spent the past few months watching how ChatGPT's fan-out queries have been evolving and paying close attention to the awesome research being done in our space on this topic. Check out my theories on why they’re changing: open.substack.com/pub/lilyrayn...lilyraynyc.substack.com 2112
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 13/08/2026Seeing dozens of posts stressing about Claude’s new watermarks and potential avenues for circumventing, using Chinese LLMs, etc. …but not a single post about maybe not having Claude do your writing for you 😂 1202
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 11/08/2026Pro-tip: with ChatGPT adding "official" to many more fan-out queries, it's a good time to consider whether adding "Official" makes sense to things like official brand homepage <title> tags (e.g. "Official Site"). 🧵 171
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 11/08/2026What if I told you that - not only did this Jan 20 casualty not recover at all - but the AI company working with this site has since published a case study about the great success of this campaign 🤣 3110
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 11/08/2026The power of LinkedIn likes / comments on high-engagement accounts is kinda wild. Glad it boosted your post Gastón! 180
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 07/08/2026I just had 4 people leave nearly identical comments on my LinkedIn post, all within a few minutes of one another So now the AI spam is all coming from the same source, or something?? 😩😩😩 070
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 06/08/2026My favorite part of posting online is the AI-generated comments validating all of my opinions. 3111
Reposted by Lily Ray 😏Barry Schwartz @rustybrick.com · 03/08/2026Bing Webmaster Tools to add query and page filtering to performance reports www.seroundtable.com/bing-webmast... via @kmadhavan.bsky.social and @lilyray.nyc #bingwebmastertools #bing #microsoft 021
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 03/08/2026If I actually made a list of the best SEO / AI search experts, it would look totally different than pretty much every other list out there. Most of the world’s best people are rarely on those lists. 2100
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 31/07/2026Fun fact: client redirected a URL over 2 weeks ago and ChatGPT is still citing the old URL path 👀 The URL was updated in search results within 24 hours btw 190
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 29/07/2026“We ingested 20M URLs, trained a proprietary embedding model, ran 47 regressions, controlled for 300+ variables, and applied a novel entropy-weighted citation index to determine what the top LLM-recommended brands have in common. The answer is… wait for it… 150
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 28/07/2026My feed is half people talking about tracking more prompts & all the right prompts and half people saying prompt tracking is fundamentally useless 5110
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 27/07/2026I took the latest @similarwebinsights.bsky.social LLM data (desktop web visits to LLM platforms) and used Claude to visualize the trendlines over time. 🧵 351
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 22/07/2026This is really useful research. I think that ChatGPT’s new search behavior in query fan-outs shows how they are making changes to retrieve higher quality information. www.linkedin.com/pulse/unders... (1/2)linkedin.comUnderstanding site operator usage in ChatGPT 5.6 Fan-outsIn one of my previous analyses, I highlighted that the site operator appears significantly more frequently in ChatGPT 5.6 query fan-outs than in previous versions. 110
Reposted by Lily Ray 😏Page 2 Podcast | SEO Podcast @page2pod.com · 21/07/2026A team-building take for AI search: don't hire AEO/GEO "experts" with no SEO foundation. Everyone on the SEO team already does AEO work - you evolve their skills. The real shift is closer work with social and more in-house digital PR. How is your team adapting? Full episode with @lilyray.nyc 143
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 21/07/2026Building a spammy site that gets indexed in search and picked up/cited by a language model - before later dropping out of the search results and not being cited for anything relevant in AI search a couple weeks later - is not a strategy. 090
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 17/07/2026Interesting: I’m working on a site that blocks OpenAI’s crawlers, but ChatGPT still frequently does site: searches for the “official” content from that site, and includes its URLs in citations even though it can’t see the page content. 1/2 250
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 16/07/2026So am I correct in understanding that *none* of the existing SEO rank tracking tools have any type of organic visibility / traffic index for Bing? After 16 years in SEO, I officially really need this 🤣 PS if your company has one of these, please lmk. 140
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 11/07/2026This may be a hot take but being able to show something ranked at the top Google quickly isn’t really a huge flex… the real question is whether it consistently stays there. Lots of things rank really well for a short period because they are new. 160
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 09/07/2026Just my two cents… SEOs and AI search folks attending conferences and meetups this year need to read the fine print about which talks / panelists / speakers are SPONSORED. This will explain a lot about the recommendations stemming from those talks. 2230
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 09/07/2026Ooo I just LOVE when the major GEO vendors pitch me paid links / mentions in my articles. Makes my job much easier when hunting for screenshots 😂 Thanks guys! 0100
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 08/07/2026This is cool to see: this is a site I did a recovery audit for earlier this year; they were hit by the December 2025 Spam Update The recovery finally started a few weeks ago; check out the impact on AI Overview citations and brand mentions 👀 050
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 08/07/2026Another cool aspect of social data (X in this case) in GSC: you can see which of your social posts got impressions/clicks from Google Discover (or lack thereof, lol) 160
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 08/07/2026Pretty cool, got my X data in GSC... you can see how certain high-volume search queries generate tons of impressions when Google shows tweets in "What People are Saying" and other SERP features highlighting social posts (Example in 2nd screenshot) 020
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 07/07/2026Pro tip: just because your brand is being recommended as #1 on your personal, logged-in ChatGPT account certainly does not mean others are seeing the same results. 0145
Reposted by Lily Ray 😏Sitebulb @sitebulb.com · 03/07/2026Why Calling Yourself the Best Could Be Helping Your Competitors Win in AI Search - via @lilyray.nyc #seolilyraynyc.substack.comWhy Calling Yourself the 'Best' Could Be Helping Your Competitors Win in AI SearchGoogle appears to have decoupled what it cites from who it recommends. For many brands, ranking yourself #1 could be a vote for your rivals. 055
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 01/07/2026When you've officially reached "FAFO" mode. I was wondering for over a year when this one would finally happen. I'll be very curious to see what that drop looks like in a few weeks/months... 010
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 30/06/2026Yellowpages.com, arguably the predecessor to Google, surged with the recent core update to their highest visibility ever! Playing the long game? 😂 360
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 29/06/2026Does losing organic traffic after scaling AI-assisted content affect the performance of pages *outside* of the folder containing the AI content? I just looked at an example of a major brand that lost a ton of traffic since the Jan 20 update... 130
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 29/06/2026Hey @johnmu.com - noticing that a lot of AI Overview citations show these markdown tables in the snippet… as an SEO, is there something we should be reading into when we see these? 😂 250
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 29/06/2026Just finished speaking around Europe about “how to do GEO without destroying your SEO” and the tactics people are using to game AI search while inadvertently hurting their organic performance: Check out my slides here: www.slideshare.net/slideshow/ho... 0151
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 27/06/2026If you’re interested in learning a bit about my SEO history and approach, I was honored to be part of the 20 for 20 Search Engine Land 20-year celebration video series. youtu.be/gRfP9sM_ZfA?...youtu.be20 for 20: Lily Ray on navigating AI search, overviews, and moreYouTube video by Search Engine Land 161
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 27/06/2026Love a spontaneous SEO meetup in London! Thanks for organizing @aleyda.bsky.social 1150
Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 24/06/2026Excited to see this site that was hit by the December 2025 Spam Update is starting to recover... Interesting that the recovery happened just outside of a core update. It took about 5 months after beginning to make fixes to finally see the impact (as expected!) 190
