Last week, two marketers I really respect asked me if they should invest more in Reddit for AEO. My immediate thought was...to do what? And why?
The next day, I found a well-known landing page platform embedding "Ask AI about us" buttons on their site — pre-loaded with a prompt they wrote themselves, designed to get LLMs to say great things about them.
Seems easy enough…right?
Until you click the Claude button and see Claude flag it as a potential malicious prompt injection.
There's a growing industry telling smart marketers to ignore their instincts. Post on Reddit. Stuff your site with AI prompts. Buy a GEO tool. Track your mentions. The playbook sounds familiar because it's the SEO playbook with a new coat of paint — except AI isn't Google. It doesn't update twice a year and sit still. It's evolving constantly, getting smarter, and it doesn't fall for the same tricks twice.
So I went to the data. We looked at 6,689 brands in our AI Brand Directory and asked a simple question: does doing the "right things" for AI actually mean AI gets you right?
The answer should make you nervous.
THE SIGNAL
404.
Not the error code — the number of brands in our directory that are Loud and Wrong. 75%+ visibility in AI, but less than 30% key facts accuracy. AI talks about them constantly. It gets the facts wrong.
These aren't small brands. These are established companies — AI knows their name, shows up confidently when buyers ask about them, and gets the details wrong.
Boosting visibility for these brands makes the problem worse. You're turning up the volume on a broken speaker.
Quiet and right brands are 4x more likely to get recommended in AI answers (as measured by Brand Authority Index — or BAI)
Let me show you what I mean.
Unbounce — a platform most of you have probably used — sits at 87.5% visibility in AI and 25% key facts accuracy. AI knows Unbounce exists. It just doesn't know what Unbounce actually does or costs right now.
I asked ChatGPT to tell me about Unbounce's pricing. It confidently cited Unbounce's own pricing page and gave me $29/$99/$149/$249 per month across four plans.
Then I went to the actual site. Depending on how you get there, Unbounce has three completely different pricing realities:
Direct, monthly: $29/$99/$149/$249
Direct, yearly toggle (the default view): $19/$64/$96/$161
Via an affiliate link: $23/$79/$119/$199
Same product. Three different prices. ChatGPT picked one and presented it as the truth — while missing two entire plans (Concierge and Agency), all user and traffic limits, and an entire CRM product (Insightly) that Unbounce now offers.
They did the playbook. AI still got it wrong. Because AI can't handle dynamic pricing, affiliate discounts, toggle states, or product expansions. It picks one version of reality and presents it with total confidence. No Reddit strategy fixes that.
THE DATA
Here's why there's no single fix. We looked at 6,689 brands across four AI archetypes and found four completely different realities:
Incumbents (2,602 brands, 39%): 89% average visibility. 99% accurately represented. Their problem isn't being seen — it's staying ahead.
Challengers (3,090 brands, 46%): 74% visibility. 88% accurate. They're climbing, mostly getting it right. The gap is closing but it's real.
Phantoms (691 brands, 10%): 15% visibility. Only 21% accurate. AI barely knows they exist, and when it does, it guesses wrong. These are the only brands that might actually benefit from a visibility-first strategy.
Misread (306 brands, 5%): 48% visibility. 12% accurate. 58% are fundamentally wrong. AI thinks it knows them. It doesn't — and a Reddit strategy makes it actively worse.
Same AI. Same internet. Four completely different problems. A tactic that helps a Phantom will hurt a Misread brand.
There is no one-size-fits-all AEO/GEO playbook.
WHAT TO DO INSTEAD
Before you invest in Reddit, before you buy an AEO tool, before you hire a vendor promising ChatGPT mentions — find out which reality you're in.
Go to the Optimly AI Brand Directory. Find your brand. See your archetype. Are you Loud and Wrong? Quiet and Right? Invisible? Or actually doing fine?
The fix is completely different for each one. And if you're one of the 404 brands where AI is confidently wrong about you, the last thing you need is more visibility.
👉 Look yourself up in Optimly’s AI Brand Directory
ELSEWHERE
A new analysis of 680 million AI citations found that citation volumes for the same brand can vary by 615x between platforms. Only 11% of domains are cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity. The platforms can't even agree on who to recommend — and you think a Reddit strategy is going to work across all of them? (Yahoo Finance / Loganix)
279 brands in our directory scored 4 or 5 on AI readiness and AI still gets them wrong. You can check every box on the AEO checklist and AI can still tell the wrong story about you. The checklist isn't the strategy.
AI-referred traffic converts at 5.1x the rate of Google organic. Which means every wrong fact AI tells about you isn't just a branding problem — it's a revenue problem.
Now, I don't want to be the person yelling "everything is broken." I want to be the person who tells you to trust your gut when something smells like FOMO. If your instinct says "this AEO/GEO tactic smells fishy" — your instinct is probably right.
If AI already has the wrong story about you, more volume just means more people hear the wrong story. Your time is better spent determining out what the right story is — and then figuring out how to teach AI that story.
Until next week! ✌️
—Apurva
ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER
Hi! 👋 My name is Apurva. I’m a brand strategist, data nerd, recovering big-tech marketer, accidental founder, reluctant React debugger, mom of two, and the kind of person who blows past her screen time limits doomscrolling parenting reels while stress-searching LinkedIn for anything that feels human. I started this newsletter because I think marketers are drowning and nobody's talking about it.
You're getting this because we've crossed paths recently — a project, a conversation, a demo, a conference, or you signed up to learn more about Optimly. If this isn't for you, no hard feelings — unsubscribe anytime. But if you're a marketer trying to make sense of AI right now (without going crazy), stick around.