The research behind Selka
Before building anything, we studied how AI search works, took 20 AEO tools apart and mapped the whole market. 1,000+ research notes, every claim sourced.
394
notes on tools and companies
Pricing, features, reviews and claims vs reality, tool by tool.
222
notes on markets
AI search, SEO, prompt volume, the AEO tool market and more.
102
notes on problems and patterns
What breaks, what repeats, and what the data actually says.
77
source records
Every claim keeps its source, date and caveats.
What we found. Each one sourced.
The facts every part of Selka is built on. Checked October 19, 2026. Quote them freely, with a link back.
#1
Only 12% of the pages ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot cite rank in Google's top 10 for the same question.
Ahrefs compared 15,000 long-tail prompts with Google results. Perplexity was the exception, with about 1 in 3 citations from the top 10. Ranking first is no longer a promise of being cited.
Source: Ahrefs, Aug 2025#2
The share of Google AI Overview citations taken from the top 10 fell from 76% to 38%.
Ahrefs measured 76% in July 2025 and 37.9% in March 2026, on 4M URLs. Part of the drop is real (Gemini 3 and more query fan-out), part is better measurement. Either way, the top 10 matters less than it did.
Source: Ahrefs, Mar 2026#3
The same AI prompt gives the same list of brands less than 1 time in 100.
SparkToro and Gumshoe ran 12 prompts nearly 3,000 times across ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI. Brands that showed up often stayed fairly stable, but their order rarely did. One check tells you almost nothing.
Source: SparkToro and Gumshoe, via Search Engine Land#4
No AI company publishes prompt data, so every “prompt volume” number is an estimate.
The panels behind these numbers see far less than 1% of ChatGPT's roughly 2.5 billion daily prompts, then scale up. Conductor, NP Digital and even some vendors call the result directional at best.
Source: Conductor, July 2026#5
About 2% of ChatGPT messages are about buying products.
OpenAI's own study of about 1.1 million conversations found most use is guidance, information and writing. A big volume number says little about buyers. Intent matters more than size.
Source: OpenAI and NBER, How People Use ChatGPT, Sept 2025#6
ChatGPT reads Reddit far more often than it cites it.
In Ahrefs' analysis of 1.4 million ChatGPT prompts, Reddit pages were cited only about 1.9% of the times they were retrieved. Reddit shapes answers even when it isn't linked. Perplexity and Google AI Overviews cite it far more.
Source: Search Engine Journal on Ahrefs data#7
Brand mentions across the web track AI visibility more closely than backlinks.
Across 75,000 brands, web mentions correlated 0.664 with Google AI Overview visibility, against 0.218 for backlinks. Correlation, not proof, but it's why Selka measures who mentions you off-site.
Source: Ahrefs, May 2025#8
AI assistants lean toward fresher pages than Google does.
Across 17 million cited URLs, pages cited by AI assistants were on average 1,064 days old, against 1,432 days for Google's organic results. Keeping key pages up to date is worth it.
Source: Ahrefs, July 2025#9
Most small businesses want to show up in search, but over half don't invest in SEO at all.
In a May 2026 survey of 365 small businesses, 55.6% said they don't invest in SEO, while 63.6% said appearing in search results is very important or critical. Meanwhile, 94% of enterprises plan to increase AI search investment in 2026.
Source: Small Business Expo, May 2026#10
We mapped about 75 AEO companies in 11 types. The small-business end is almost all cheap trackers.
Enterprise platforms, mid-market platforms, budget trackers, SEO suites with AI add-ons, content autopilots and more. Tools that tell a small business what to build, in order, were close to empty.
Source: Selka research, Oct 2026#11
Keyword clustering lives in SEO tools. Almost no AI tracker does it.
Founders who want both today stack two subscriptions: a clustering tool for SEO and a tracker for AI. Selka's research joins them, from keyword data to topic clusters to the prompts behind them.
Source: Selka research, Oct 2026#12
Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations fell by more than 85% in a few days in August 2026.
Promptwatch tracked Reddit falling from about 3.8% of ChatGPT Search citations to about 0.5% around August 14, 2026. Brandlight measured an 89% drop the same week. The cause isn't confirmed, and Perplexity and Google AI Overviews still lean on Reddit heavily.
Source: Promptwatch and Brandlight data, Aug 2026
1,128 notes, 2,720 links. One connected picture.
Notes link to the notes they build on: a study to the finding, the finding to the product decision. The most-linked notes, in blue, are the ideas Selka is built around.
We studied the market before building into it.
Each tool got its own teardown: features, pricing, who it's for, what reviewers and Reddit say, and where its claims don't match reality.
- Profound
- Peec AI
- Promptwatch
- Otterly
- HubSpot AEO
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- Surfer
- AthenaHQ
- Siftly
- Gauge
- Omnia
- AI Peekaboo
- Sight AI
- Wildcard
- Bear AI
- Leapd
- QueryDive
- LeadsRover
- RedditGrow
Plus a map of about 75 AEO companies in 11 types. See how Selka compares.
Four rules for every note.
01
Sources first
Real pages and studies, not summaries of summaries. Every number keeps its source and date.
02
Claims vs reality
A company's site is a claim until reviews, Reddit or data back it up. We record the gap.
03
Contradictions kept
When studies disagree, we write both down and say so. No cherry-picking the convenient one.
04
Numbers with context
A percentage means nothing without the sample, the engine and the date. We keep all three.
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