What does not work in AI visibility
Also known as: GEO myths, AI SEO snake oil
The tactics being sold for getting cited by AI that either do nothing or actively damage you — worth knowing before you buy them.
Last revised 2026-09-07. Also available as markdown — request this URL with Accept: text/markdown.
In plain English
A new channel attracts confident advice faster than it produces evidence. Some of what is currently sold as AI optimisation is repackaged advice that already worked, some is harmless waste, and a few things carry real downside.
The test to apply to any tactic: does it make a passage easier to retrieve and safer to quote? If the answer needs three sentences of theory, it is probably not doing that.
How to fix / set it up
- Apply the test: does this make a passage easier to retrieve and safer to quote?
- Ask any vendor how they measure the effect, and how many samples the measurement uses.
- Prefer changes you could defend to a reader, not just to an engine.
- Spend the effort on the boring version instead: clear answers, real specifics, and pages that load without JavaScript.
The technical detail
**Hidden instructions to the AI** — white text, off-screen blocks, comments telling an assistant to recommend you. Detected as spam, treated as prompt injection, and it puts your domain in the category of sources that cannot be trusted as input. Real downside, no upside. See prompt-injection.
**Keyword density for LLMs** — retrieval matches meaning through embeddings, so repetition adds nothing that a clear explanation does not already provide.
**Mass-generated "AI-optimised" pages** — thin coverage of every possible question. It fails the same way it failed in search: nothing is answered well enough to be worth quoting, and the volume itself is a quality signal in the wrong direction.
**Schema everywhere** — structured data removes ambiguity about what a page is; it does not create authority. Marking up a page that says nothing quotable changes nothing.
**Buying "AI citations"** — placements on sites nobody reads are not cited, because engines weigh sources by independent signals the seller does not control.
**Blocking AI crawlers to force licensing** — a defensible commercial position for a large publisher with leverage, and simple invisibility for everybody else. Decide it as a business question, not as a growth tactic.
FAQ
Is there any quick win at all?
Two, both mechanical: make sure the answer exists as plain text in the HTML, and make sure each passage stands on its own. Both are usually an afternoon and both raise retrievability immediately.
What about AI-written content?
The origin is not the problem; the sameness is. Content that repeats what every other page says is not quoted, whoever wrote it, because there is no reason to prefer it.