THE FIRST O · RESEARCH

We study how discovery is changing.

Google. AI search. LLMs. The systems that decide what gets found, cited and recommended.

WHAT WE STUDY

Questions worth answering.

AI discovery

How brands and information surface in generative search.

Search behaviour

How the way people find, evaluate and choose is changing.

Visibility & citations

What makes sources discoverable, trusted and cited.

Organic growth

What actually moves performance across search ecosystems.

FROM THE LAB

Brand mentions predict AI visibility twice as well as traditional ranking factors.

Mentions correlate 0.664 with whether a brand shows up in AI generated results. Being talked about turns out to matter more than being optimised for, which is not how SEO has worked for twenty years.

“Which signals are worth paying attention to? Which tactics can you actually put into practice right now? And which ones are probably better to ignore until we know more?”

“That is what we wanted to cover in this white paper: separating what has enough evidence and is worth implementing today from what still sits in the ‘let us test it and see’ bucket.”

Jasveer Matharu
0.664correlation between brand mentions and AI visibilityLong, 2025
90mAmericans expected to use AI first search by 2027Pure SEO, 2025
50%+of Google searches already end without a clickSparkToro & Datos, 2024

Understanding Generative Engine Optimisation, our GEO white paper, edition 2, June 2026.

Everything we publish shapes what we build.

The research feeds the tools, and the tools feed the client work.

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