Darly Selby

I keep digging into what actually gets a product mentioned in ChatGPT or Perplexity answers, and the data keeps pointing somewhere that makes me question the whole "GEO/AEO" hype.

Ahrefs looked at 75k brands and found branded mentions correlated with AI visibility way more than backlinks 0.664 vs 0.218. It's correlation, not causation, so take it with salt. But the gap is big enough that I can't ignore it.

Which makes me wonder if we're overcomplicating this. Maybe AI visibility isn't a new discipline at all. Maybe it's just the old thing: be genuinely talked about in the right specific places.

We went with credits because it's the only model that survives routing across a dozen models with different per-token costs. Seats don't work when one user's afternoon costs more than another user's month.

What broke wasn't the price, it was that people wouldn't press the button. If you can't tell whether a run costs 1 credit or 40, not running it is the safe move, and a tool nobody runs churns quietly. The fix was putting the cost of that specific action next to the button, before it happens, not on a pricing page.

The starting line

New domain, launched in January. No indexed pages, no referring domains, no keyword rankings, nothing for search engines or AI systems to recognize the brand as. This is the hardest starting position there is: no existing trust to borrow from, everything has to be earned from scratch, on both fronts at once.

Where it stood six months later

We track this with three sources running in parallel (Search Console, SEMrush, and our own analytics), so these numbers are measured, not estimated: