TROOLSocial

12/12/2025

GEO Platform Shutdown Sparks Industry Debate Over AI Search

Benjamin Houy shut down Lorelight, a generative engine optimization (GEO) platform designed to track brand visibility in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, after concluding most brands don’t need a specialized tool for AI search visibility.
Houy writes that, after reviewing hundreds of AI answers, the brands mentioned most often share familiar traits: quality content, mentions in authoritative publications, strong reputation, and genuine expertise.

Benjamin Houy shuts down Lorelight, arguing AI search doesn’t need stand-alone GEO tools. The decision sparks debate over measuring assistant visibility.

05/12/2025

Your Brand Is Being Cited By AI. Here’s How To Measure It

Search has never stood still. Every few years, a new layer gets added to how people find and evaluate information. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Copilot Search, and Perplexity haven’t replaced Google or Bing. They’ve added a new surface where discovery happens earlier, and where your visibility may never show up in analytics.

Measuring brand visibility in the answer layer above search.

28/11/2025

Google Explains Expired Domains And Ranking Issues

Google’s John Mueller answered a question about an expired domain that was unable to rank for relevant search queries, including its own brand name. The answer sheds light on how expired domains are handled by Google after they are re-registered.

Google's John Mueller answers a question about a website built with an expired domain that's having ranking issues.

27/11/2025

Wishing all of our American friends and followers a safe and Happy Thanksgiving !

21/11/2025

Pew: Most Americans Want AI Labels, Few Trust Detection

A new Pew Research Center survey reveals a gap between people’s desire to know when AI is used in content and their confidence in being able to identify it.
Seventy-six percent say it’s extremely or very important to know whether pictures, videos, or text were made by AI or by people. Only 12% feel confident they could tell the difference themselves.
This confidence gap reflects a rising unease with AI.
Half of Americans believe that the increased presence of AI in daily life raises more concerns than excitement, while just 10% are more excited than worried.

Pew’s survey of 5,000 U.S. adults finds 76% want AI content labeled, but only 12% feel confident spotting it.

14/11/2025

ChatGPT Study: 1 In 4 Conversations Now Seek Information

New research from OpenAI and Harvard finds that “Seeking Information” messages now account for 24% of ChatGPT conversations, up from 14% a year earlier.
This is an NBER working paper (not peer-reviewed), based on consumer ChatGPT plans only, and the study used privacy-preserving methods where no human read user messages.
The working paper analyzes a representative sample of about 1.1 million conversations from May 2024 through June 2025.
By July, ChatGPT reached more than 700 million weekly active users, sending roughly 2.5 billion messages per day, or about 18 billion per week.

An OpenAI and Harvard study finds that 24% of ChatGPT use is information-seeking, with non-work usage now exceeding 70%.

11/11/2025

Lest we forget

07/11/2025

3 Different Ways To Do Bulk Updates On WordPress ( via Rhys Wynne )

A step-by-step guide to bulk updating WordPress posts, plugins, and products — safely, quickly, and without breaking your site.
One of the strengths of WordPress is its extensibility. You can run everything from e-shops and booking systems to massive WordPress multisites from one instance of WordPress.
In this post, I’m going to present three different ways to bulk update WordPress.

Bulk updating certain elements within WordPress can save you time and money. This post discusses some of the most common.

31/10/2025

Happy Halloween !

31/10/2025

LinkedIn Study: Professionals Trust Their Networks Over AI & Search

LinkedIn reports that professionals are more likely to seek workplace advice from people they know than from AI tools or search engines.
A new LinkedIn study finds that 43% turn to their networks first, with nearly two-thirds saying colleagues help them decide faster and with more confidence.

LinkedIn reports that professionals trust their networks more than AI or search engines for work advice, with spending shifting to creators and community content.

27/10/2025

Ask An SEO: Why Is Google Not Indexing My Pages? ( via Adam Riemer )

This week’s Ask An SEO question comes from Harjeet:
“Hi! I have a website that provides information of warehouses all over United states. The problem is that only eight to nine pages are indexed by Google. But it has many dynamic pages.
For example, if you do a search for any location on homepage search bar, it will open the location page with the listings.
But Google is not indexing the location pages and warehouse listings as well. Can you help me solve this issue?”

Learn how to address crawling issues and create stand-alone pages to improve your chances of location pages getting indexed by Google.

24/10/2025

What To Do When the Click Disappears: Surviving SEO In The AI-Driven SERP

You may have noticed your organic traffic looking different lately. Rankings fluctuate wildly, your content appears in AI summaries one week and vanishes the next, and users are increasingly getting their answers without ever visiting your website.
When 58.5% of searches end without a click, that carefully optimized content you spent weeks perfecting might be feeding AI answers instead of driving traffic to your site.
We’re witnessing the biggest shift in search since Google’s early days. Traditional SEO tactics aren’t enough anymore.
You need a strategy that works when AI systems become the middleman between your content and your audience.

When the majority of searches end without clicks and AI systems are rewriting SEO rules, success now means being cited, not just ranked highly.