Lily Ray 😏

@lilyray.nyc

SEO by day, DJ by night

If 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.

Fun 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

“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…

My feed is half people talking about tracking more prompts & all the right prompts and half people saying prompt tracking is fundamentally useless

Building 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.

Interesting: 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

So 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.

This 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.

Just 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.

Ooo 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!

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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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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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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Pro 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.

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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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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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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I’m confused by this notion of GEO working faster than SEO. The GEO worked quickly because the language model found the article in a search engine. So technically the SEO preceded GEO. What am I missing?