Geode

I've been working on Invocly, a text-to-speech SaaS that turns PDF, DOCX, and TXT documents into audio.

Like many indie developers, I reached the point where I knew I needed to invest more in SEO.

The problem?

I didn't want my workflow to be:

I keep seeing the same pattern in product launches: "Now with AI!" slapped on everything like a magic label.

But here's what I've noticed from watching dozens of AI-powered products succeed and fail:

Ahrefs just dropped a study that changes how we think about SEO. They analyzed 863,000 keywords and 4 million AI Overview URLs. The findings are clear: the old playbook is broken.

In July 2025, 76% of URLs cited in AI Overviews also ranked in Google's top 10 for the same query. Today, that number has collapsed to 38%. The drop is real. The overlap has been cut in half in less than a year.

Where are the citations coming from now? The remaining citations are split almost evenly: 31.2% come from positions 11 100, and 31.0% come from outside the top 100 entirely. A huge chunk of AI citations are coming from pages you wouldn t even see on page one.

Why is this happening? Query fan out. When a user searches, Google splits the query into multiple related sub-queries and pulls sources from all of them. The pages that appear most often across those sub-queries get cited in the AI Overview, even if they don t rank for the original keyword. The AI answer is not a summary of the SERP below it.