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Lily Ray 😏

@lilyray.nyc
4K followers 213 following 2.2K posts

SEO by day, DJ by night

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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 30/09/2026
Pulling some updated numbers on the performance of self-promoting listicles in AI Overviews (~100 queries): In September (compared to June), Google's AI Overviews cite 38% fewer self-promotional 'best of' listicles, and they leave out the brands behind them 83% of the time, up from 69% in June.
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 30/09/2026
This is interesting to see - a few sites hit hard by Google's updates 3 years ago (including the HCU!) are starting to gain back visibility in recent weeks & months. Yellow one is a former client from 2024-2025 👀
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 28/09/2026
I 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.
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 14/09/2026
Hello from Hong Kong
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 31/08/2026
I'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:)
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 26/08/2026
As 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.
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 25/08/2026
My 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?
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 25/08/2026
Hey @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.
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 22/08/2026
The comments when I post literally anything about AI search
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 11/08/2026
What 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 🤣
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 07/08/2026
I 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?? 😩😩😩
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 27/07/2026
I took the latest @similarwebinsights.bsky.social LLM data (desktop web visits to LLM platforms) and used Claude to visualize the trendlines over time. 🧵
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 08/07/2026
This 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 👀
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 08/07/2026
Another 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)
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 08/07/2026
Pretty 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)
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 01/07/2026
When 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...
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 30/06/2026
Yellowpages.com, arguably the predecessor to Google, surged with the recent core update to their highest visibility ever! Playing the long game? 😂
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 29/06/2026
Does 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...
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 29/06/2026
Hey @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? 😂
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 29/06/2026
Just 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...
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 27/06/2026
Love a spontaneous SEO meetup in London! Thanks for organizing @aleyda.bsky.social
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 24/06/2026
YouTube is flying off the chart now
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 24/06/2026
Excited 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!)
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 18/06/2026
Good morning Campixx Berlin! Excited to kick off another keynote with you all today!
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 16/06/2026
Sneak peek of the new Substack article I am working on: Imagine being cited this many times in the AI Overview answer (Oasis LMS in this case)... but having your brand excluded from the recommendation? 1/2
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 16/06/2026
This one is an interesting case study: When you get a manual action on Google, what's the impact on GEO? This site's blog received a manual action on May 17 - check out the citations on AI Overviews and ChatGPT around the same time: (Same site @glenngabe.bsky.social shared last week)
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 13/06/2026
Enjoying another lovely trip to Croatia! 🥰🌊 Bravo to Croatia SEO Summit, the conference was fantastic (especially the afterparty! 🎧😉)
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 09/06/2026
A little AI search hack I've been using: Take your SEO keyword research & convert keywords into prompts for AI search within Google sheets' AI function using a prompt like this one:
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 09/06/2026
In today’s edition of “not my title, our agency’s pre-acquisition name from 5+ years ago, and I also never said that” #aislop
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 08/06/2026
Think Google is leaning on Reddit more heavily in AI Overviews for "best" keywords The chart below is Reddit citations in AI Overviews via @ahrefs Brand Radar filtered for prompts containing "Best"
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 08/06/2026
lol just saw this in AI Overviews “Rather than self-proclaimed gurus” 👀👀👀👀 Google is tweaking things for sure
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 08/06/2026
These are 3 well-known brands that are also listed as case studies of AI content scaling tools They scaled a lot of page templates that can manipulate AI answers, like excessive "best X" content, self-promotional listicles, scaled comparison/alternative pages, etc. 🧵🧵🧵
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 05/06/2026
About 70% of this website's visibility comes from its "articles" site section. That section appears to have been aggressively demoted on Jan 20, when a bunch of sites were hit for excessive AI-generated/low quality content (1/2)
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 03/06/2026
Looks like the US Chamber of Commerce website (commerce.gov) just dropped out of Google's search results entirely 🤯 This site houses a lot of important content, like the official page listing all U.S. federal holidays It appears the site returns a 403 to Googlebot
Us chamber of commerce site deindexed from Google Us chamber of commerce site deindexed from Google Us chamber of commerce site deindexed from Google Us chamber of commerce site deindexed from Google
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 02/06/2026
This is the SEO traffic, ChatGPT mentions & ChatGPT brand mentions for an SEO agency that pitched our agency "reciprocal brand mentions" on a listicle in December 2025 Maybe Google is already identifying "inauthentic mentions" after all 👀
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 02/06/2026
Not sure I've seen Google put "why we like it" and "key perks" in these AIOs before Also notice how Ramp's self-promoting listicle is cited but Ramp is not recommended in the response (Its listed competitors Mercury & Bluevine are recommended though)
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 26/05/2026
Anyone else seeing a lot of wonky HTML formatting in AI Overview sources?
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 26/05/2026
One of the casualties of the Jan 20 unconfirmed algorithm update Google launched that hit a bunch of sites with spammy AI content This one is the subfolder of a major brand everyone has heard of & where the site was using AI to scale content -800K in monthly organic traffic YOY
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 24/05/2026
I finally found the secrets in Ancient Greece 😂
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 23/05/2026
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 23/05/2026
Athens SEO was a blast!
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 23/05/2026
Outside of technical SEO, would I be doing this strategy if search engines didn’t exist? Great question to ask with your SEO approach @markwilliamscook.com @athenseo.bsky.social
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 23/05/2026
Mark @markwilliamscook.com created a fake standard called cats.txt and now LLMs are crawling it, it’s being indexed, and ChatGPT even says it works for ranking in search and LLMs 😂😂👏🏽👏🏽
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 22/05/2026
Markdown files double the size of your website and create needless duplication We can instead use content-type: text/markdown but the default is still HTML. This reduces having a duplicate URL Have one url per piece of content. @seo.guru
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 18/05/2026
Funny - I made this article as a joke last year to influence AI answers. AI Overviews had previously indicated that the article was satire, but now it seems AIO & AI Mode take it seriously 🫡 Love that it’s “widely recognized” despite being from just 1 article. @jono.id
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 17/05/2026
In today’s edition of “that’s not my tittle and I never said that”
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 15/05/2026
Google just put out its first official article on optimizing for AI search (AEO/GEO)! TL;DR: ⭐️ SEO is still the foundation for AI search. ⭐️ Create non-commodity, "people-first" content. ⭐️ Ignore most "GEO/AEO hacks like chunking and llms.txt. developers.google.com/search/docs/...
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 12/05/2026
I believe Google recently changed how it answers some "best" queries in AI Overviews. Previously, using a listicle that ranked your own company as #1 was often sufficient to get recommended in the answer. 🧵
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 11/05/2026
This is another graph of one of the public case studies on an AEO tool's website. You can't make this stuff up
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Lily Ray 😏 @lilyray.nyc · 11/05/2026
This is a cool one to watch: this site had a ton of low-quality programmatic content that it cleaned up late last year, and it's seeing the benefits now, ~8 months later
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