Why Is My Brand Invisible on Google but Cited on Claude?

I was researching sauna manufacturers in BC. (I’m on that bandwagon). I ran the same query across Google, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini to compare outputs.

I got four different answers.

Not minor variations, I got entirely different sets of “top” companies. Different brands, different narratives, different winners.

The company I ended up going with — a small, well-run manufacturer with a genuinely strong product — barely showed up on Google. Claude surfaced them immediately, with clear reasoning: materials, craftsmanship, and build quality. My criteria definitely influenced the results — I explicitly wanted something that was designed and built in the Pacific Northwest, using BC western red cedar, and is local-ish. Claude also remembered previous searches, so that was a factor… but more on all this below.

I’ve been doing marketing audits and digital strategy long enough to know how SEO works. Or worked. But I couldn’t explain, cleanly, why the company that earned my trust through Claude was effectively invisible in traditional search.

That gap is what pushed AI visibility from “interesting” to “important” for me. It comes up in every marketing audit now. And yet most of my clients have no idea how they show up in AI responses — or whether they do at all.

I’ve followed Rand Fishkin for years (big Moz fan here) and, more recently, Kevin Indig. Between their work and everything else I could get my hands on, I understand this a bit more. This post is a synthesis of what I’ve found useful — aimed at marketers and operators trying to decide what to do next.

What Are We Actually Talking About?

The terminology is messy. GEO, AEO, LLMO, GSO, pick your acronym. It’s the usual soup of terms designed to sound smart.

Here’s how I’m thinking about it:

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) — Making your content citable by AI systems. You want to be referenced, recommended, or included when someone asks a relevant question in Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) — A subset of that: structuring content so it can be pulled directly into answers. Think “featured snippets,” but for AI synthesis.

SEO — Still critical. Still foundational. Also insufficient on its own.

The mistake right now is treating these as either identical or completely separate. They’re neither. There’s overlap, but the outputs are different enough that you need to be deliberate.

Why You’re Getting Different Answers Everywhere

You run the same query across platforms and get different answers. The instinct (mine anyway) is to assume one is “right.” They’re not converging because they’re not optimizing for the same signals.

From the best data available — largely from Kevin Indig’s research, which involves analyzing hundreds of thousands of real ChatGPT conversations rather than theorizing — traditional SEO metrics like domain authority, backlinks, and page speed have a weak correlation with AI citations. Each system (if you believe the research) is weighing different things:

•       Perplexity leans toward depth and completeness. Dense, comprehensive content wins.

•       Google AI Overviews favour breadth of factual coverage. More specific facts, more inclusion.

•       ChatGPT correlates strongly with brand prominence and readability. Clear language matters. So does your overall brand footprint across the web.

•       Claude and Gemini tend to reward structured, well-reasoned, “sourceable” content.

The sauna company I bought from had a detailed FAQ, plain-language product descriptions, clear comparisons, and little marketing fluff. Nothing about it was “optimized” in the traditional sense. But it was easy to parse, specific, and credible. Claude could use it. Google largely ignored it.

Big gap there.

AI Sends Me No Traffic, and My Analytics Look “Fine” – Who Cares?

Your brand can be absent from AI answers and still look “fine” in your analytics. AI platforms send almost no traffic. Recent SparkToro/Datos clickstream data puts AI referral traffic at around 1% of all website visits, with ChatGPT accounting for nearly 90% of that already-tiny share.

It seems decisions are being made upstream. By the time someone Googles your brand name, the shortlist is already formed. AI is acting earlier in the funnel: as a filter, not a channel.

At the same time, search impressions are up, click-through rates are down, and more queries are being answered without a click. You’re being seen more and visited less.

Traditional analytics won’t show this. I ran this on a few sites recently and the gap between their Google performance and their AI presence was surprising. One client ranked well for competitive terms but barely registered a mention across ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity on the exact questions their customers were asking. They had no idea, and neither did I.

You need to start thinking in terms of citation frequency, share of mention, accuracy of how your brand is described, and whether that’s improving or eroding over time. Different model, different metrics.

Rand Fishkin Knows What’s Up

Fishkin’s data is worth taking seriously because it’s grounded in actual clickstream behaviour, not surveys or posts like this.

A few things worth noting:

•       Google isn’t dying. Per Fishkin’s analysis, search volume grew 22% in 2024 — roughly a trillion net new queries, more growth than the previous seven years combined.

•       AI platform usage is growing faster — but not sending traffic out. The platforms are designed to answer, not refer.

•       SparkToro can now show you which AI platforms your target audience uses and what prompts they’re using — which is genuinely useful for prioritizing where to focus.

Go where your audience pays attention. That is your new job.

For a growing number of categories — especially B2B and considered purchases like, say, a sauna — that now includes AI systems. The job hasn’t changed. The surfaces have.

What Works?

You don’t need to rebuild your strategy from scratch. But you do need to adjust how you execute it. I’m still working through what this looks like in practice. I’m not sure anyone has a complete playbook yet, but here’s what the “evidence” consistently points toward.

1. Make your content extractable.

Answer the question at the top. Use clear headings and FAQ sections. Write in plain English. Go deep on topics that matter. If an AI can’t confidently pull an answer from your page, you won’t show up. This sounds basic because it is — the difference is that it used to be optional.

2. Build entity-level authority.

AI doesn’t just read your site. It builds a picture of your brand across the web: LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, reviews on G2 or similar platforms, directory listings, and — more than most teams are comfortable with — Reddit. Indig’s data shows that a 10% increase in G2 reviews correlates with a 2% increase in AI citations, and that Reddit accounts for nearly half of all Perplexity citations. Consistency across those surfaces matters more than polish on any single one.

3. Invest in earned media.

AI models are trained on, and continue to ingest, earned media. Coverage in credible publications builds trust signals faster than almost anything else you can do. Expect PR to matter more, not less, as this matures.

4. Get the technical basics right.

Clean HTML, schema markup where relevant, logical site structure, descriptive URLs. None of this is new. You just can’t skip it.

5. Publish original material.

If you give AI something unique — real data, original analysis, a case study with specific numbers — you give it a reason to cite you instead of a dozen interchangeable alternatives.

Tools

This space is moving fast. A few categories are emerging:

Monitoring

•       Otterly AI — good, affordable entry point

•       Profound — enterprise-grade, most data, most expensive

•       AthenaHQ — strong on citation probability; free audit to start

•       Goodie AI — broadest platform coverage

Research

•       SparkToro — audience intelligence, now shows AI platform usage and prompts

•       Kevin Indig’s Growth Memo (Substack) — best primary research in the field

•       Manual querying — still the most instructive thing you can do

That last one is important. If you’re not regularly prompting AI systems the way your customers would, you’re flying blind. I do it every week now, and I keep finding things I didn’t expect.

No one has this fully figured out.

This “discipline” barely existed a year ago. The tooling is early. Best practices are still forming. I’m not entirely sure how to price GEO work in an audit yet, and the few times I’ve tried to forecast how long it takes to move the needle, I’ve been wrong in both directions.

What is clear is the behavioural shift. More people are using AI to shape decisions before they ever visit a website. That’s not theoretical. It’s happening in B2B research, in considered purchases, in category discovery. It happened to me when buying a sauna.

What This Means for Your Strategy

The sauna company that got my money didn’t “do GEO.” They answered questions clearly. They wrote like humans. They described their product honestly. They showed up consistently across the web.

In a traditional SEO model, they’d struggle. In an AI-mediated environment, they were the obvious answer.

You don’t need a separate “GEO strategy.” You need to evolve how you execute your existing one, which connects to the broader question of where AI integration delivers returns and where it doesn’t.

Start here: ask how your brand shows up in AI responses. Do it yourself, manually, today. Identify gaps in clarity, structure, and coverage. Fix what’s already on your site before creating net new content.

Most companies haven’t done even that.

This is the work I now build into every marketing audit — mapping where a brand actually surfaces across AI platforms, where it doesn’t, and what’s recoverable. If you want to know where you stand, a scoping call is the fastest way to find out.

→ Book a free marketing assessment call

Resources Worth Your Time

•       Rand Fishkin / SparkToro — sparktoro.com/blog

•       Kevin Indig / Growth Memo — growth-memo.com (start with ‘State of AI Search Optimization 2026’)

•       EMARKETER FAQ on GEO/AEO — emarketer.com (April 2026, balanced overview)

•       Conductor 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks — conductor.com/academy/aeo-geo-benchmarks-report

Related reading from sequenceDM:

•       AI Marketing Integration: What Separates Results from Hype

•       AI Agents in Marketing: What They Are, What They Can Do, and Why Your B2B Team Needs a Plan

Gregory De Rocher is the founder of sequenceDM, a Vancouver-based B2B marketing consultancy. He founded sequenceDM a decade ago, following 17 years at Fidelity Investments Canada in Director-level marketing roles.