In brief
AI search is an expansion of SEO rather than its replacement. Brands still have to do on-page, off-page and technical work, but the priorities change because people now ask long, detailed questions inside chatbots. Liam Dunne and Ben Moore of Discovered Labs argue that visibility depends on relevant content, third-party consensus and a consistent brand message, not on any single citation.
The tension is between what users see and what the model does. Ben describes a multi-step process in which Reddit threads and other sources shape an answer without being cited, and training weights carry brand sentiment. Measuring all this is noisy, so Ben says most of the industry is not doing it rigorously. The guests expect AI agents to move from reading sites to acting on them.
Facts
Stated by the speakers. Each quote matches the transcript, which shows what was said, not that it is true.
Liam Dunne treats AI search as the broad category, with answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) as the same discipline.
“So I would say AI search is like the broad category, um, and then within that you'd have answer engine optimization. Some people say, which is AEO, some people say GEO generative engine optimization.”
0:02:17 · Liam Dunne · AEO terminology · 2026
Discovered Labs is an organic search agency offering end-to-end services covering traditional SEO and AI search.
“it's a organic search agency, um, so we provide end to end services.”
0:02:46 · Liam Dunne · Company
Liam Dunne says organic search still consists of three jobs: on-page content, off-page brand authority and technical accessibility.
“We're doing the same three jobs, that's on page, um, so, you know, looking after your owned website. We're doing off page, which is building brand authority, and we're doing technical”
0:04:16 · Liam Dunne · SEO jobs
Liam Dunne says an AI model now acts as a website visitor that absorbs content and relays it to users, causing lost clicks.
“the LLM is the new website visitor. They're taking that information, they're, they're chewing it up, and they're spitting it back out to the user inside an Lm.”
0:07:11 · Liam Dunne · Zero-click
Ben Moore says traditional search rankings were largely deterministic except when Google ran a core update.
“unless there was a Google core update, essentially like. The rankings were essentially very deterministic.”
0:11:12 · Ben Moore · Traditional SEO
Ben Moore says language model answers have two sources of randomness: floating-point errors in GPU computation and deliberate sampling temperature.
“there's typically two sources of randomness. And the reason I mention this is kind of important. It's like the kernel function, so there's like floating point error in GPUs.”
0:18:08 · Ben Moore · Model randomness
Ben Moore criticizes brands that buy AI-visibility tools such as Profound and track single prompts without bounding measurement uncertainty.
“they buy profound or some other thing and they're like, Here's my prompt, let's go away, go do this and profound.”
0:12:48 · Ben Moore · AI visibility tools
Ben Moore says citation rate, mention rate and share of voice should come with a bounded uncertainty, such as a margin of error of about five percent.
“how do I bound? The you mentioned there citation rate, mention rate, share of voice, how do I bound? The uncertainty on those metrics”
0:12:48 · Ben Moore · Measurement
Ben Moore says a model's retrieval step creates multiple query fan-outs and pulls back a set of initial candidate sources.
“creates a a set of, um, basically query fan outs. Uh, you've probably heard heard the term um, and then pulls back in, um, basically a set of initial candidates.”
0:19:20 · Ben Moore · Query fan-out
Ben Moore says a model may pull in roughly 40 to 60 sources and then run a further analysis pass before answering.
“let's say 40 to 60 sources from various places, it's done this. Um, let's say another set of um analysis on it”
0:19:46 · Ben Moore · Retrieval
Ben Moore says models use a consensus step similar to majority voting to reduce hallucinations.
“Essentially what it's doing there, trying to see, like, well, what is the consensus? So I can basically use like basically majority voting system, so I don't make a mistake or don't have a hallucination.”
0:20:17 · Ben Moore · Consensus check
Ben Moore says Discovered Labs research found ChatGPT's retrieval engine allocated almost a third of its retrieval slots to Reddit.
“it had allocated like an inse, I think, almost a 3rd of its basically retrieval slots for Reddit.”
0:27:32 · Ben Moore · Reddit retrieval
Ben Moore says most retrieved Reddit threads were rejected at citation time but still helped ground the model's answer.
“Most of those were actually rejected at citation time, so they basically are kind of used to ground the model.”
0:28:06 · Ben Moore · Reddit citation
Ben Moore says Discovered Labs found traces of Reddit content in model weights, particularly for ChatGPT and also Gemini.
“there is traces of basically Reddit showing up in the weights, particularly from ChatGpt.”
0:28:31 · Ben Moore · Training data
Ben Moore says that where little information exists, such as pricing in secretive industries, publishing roughly accurate numbers can get cited because models avoid guessing.
“if there's blank space, you could almost publish, you can almost get anything cited.”
0:34:34 · Ben Moore · Content gaps
Ben Moore says Discovered Labs' model rank analysis found Profound had a notably negative sentiment score in the models.
“when we did the model rank analysis, profound has a really negative uh sentiment in the score.”
0:35:19 · Ben Moore · Brand sentiment
Ben Moore says models learn brand associations through co-occurrence of entities in training data via the attention mechanism.
“it's all about co occurrence, right? So there is this attention function, basically, where it's basically going along, looking at all the tokens in a certain space and it's associating you.”
0:36:03 · Ben Moore · Co-occurrence
Liam Dunne says Reddit offers an edge because many B2B companies do not know how to use it well.
“One of the advantages of Reddit is, um, a lot of B2B companies don't really know how to do it well. And so just like because of that, you, you can gain an edge.”
0:40:51 · Liam Dunne · Reddit strategy
Liam Dunne says that if he had to pick one channel for search visibility he would choose YouTube because it is a Google-owned search channel.
“I'd bet on YouTube. It's a it's actually a a native search channel, it's owned by Google. I think it's gonna be around for a while.”
0:41:21 · Liam Dunne · Channel choice
Liam Dunne says Discovered Labs saw no correlation between Reddit upvotes and citations, and the strongest correlation was with the content matching the query.
“we haven't seen that correlate with, um, increased citations. What we have seen highest correlation with is the actual um content itself, right?”
0:44:13 · Liam Dunne · Reddit signals
Liam Dunne says Discovered Labs clients have reported an AI agent booking a demo on their websites.
“we have clients reporting to us that, hey, a d, uh, an agent, an AI agent, booked a demo last week.”
0:48:18 · Liam Dunne · AI agents · 2026
Liam Dunne says some Discovered Labs clients with tens of thousands of weekly conversions get many users through command-line interfaces where agents act for them.
“we have clients that are generating a lot of conversions, you know, tens of thousands of conversions per week. And a lot of their users are coming via a command line interface.”
0:49:17 · Liam Dunne · Agent conversions
Ben Moore says model training cycles have shortened from a new ChatGPT version every nine to twelve months to much more frequent updates.
“the training cycles are actually coming down. So when we 1st started, it was like, cool, we have like a new version of ChatGPT once every like 09:12 months, right?”
0:51:26 · Ben Moore · Training cycles
Ben Moore says AI developers use fingerprinting to avoid training on their own generated text and the resulting model collapse.
“they're trying to avoid training on like, basically model collapse, training on their own systems. And so they're looking at all this content out there.”
0:52:22 · Ben Moore · Model collapse
Ben Moore says OpenAI wanted to offload verification of human-written text to third parties such as Trustpilot, which he says it partners with.
“they wanted to offload, uh, the verification of text to third parties like Trustpilot's a good example, they're in partnership with them.”
0:53:15 · Ben Moore · Content verification