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The SEOs Diners Club

Founder of Stradiji, SEO & GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) specialist Mert Erkal breaks down what's really moving in AI Search, GEO, and SEO — every week, backed by real tests and data.

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Latest Issues

ChatGPT

Sep 7, 2026

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8 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #237 - ChatGPT Built Its Own Search Index. And Not Just One, Twelve.

"ChatGPT uses Google or Bing" got corrected this week, and then argued with. The Peec AI team documented ChatGPT's own family of indexes: web, PDF, YouTube, news, Wikipedia, local, finance, legal, medical, shopping and more. The evidence runs from sworn court testimony to job postings, from live A/B tests to a billion-page crawl experiment. But the objections underneath the post are serious too, and almost nobody read them. I read both.

Mert Erkal

loop engineering

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #236 - But Claude Doesn't Say That." Stop Asking Chat Windows for SEO Decisions.

Aug 31, 2026

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10 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #236 - But Claude Doesn't Say That." Stop Asking Chat Windows for SEO Decisions.

A client challenged my recommendation with a screenshot this month. The screenshot was confident, well written, and produced by a session that had never seen the site. Will Scott's piece in Search Engine Land this week shows the mechanism underneath: give an AI execution authority and it produces what looks finished, not what is correct. The fix isn't a better model, it's a loop around it. Memory, tool access, meeting transcripts, a verification checklist and a learning mechanism. Plus ten SEO MCP servers I verified myself this week, and the WebMCP support OpenAI just shipped.Part of a series: GEO Roadmap > Working Discipline with AI. For the last few weeks we covered what the model says about you on the outside. This week we move to the other side of the table: how are we running that model in our own work?

Mert Erkal

non-commodity content

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #235 - Google Doesn't Penalize AI Content. It Penalizes Commodity. Scale Decides Which One You Made.

Aug 24, 2026

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10 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #235 - Google Doesn't Penalize AI Content. It Penalizes Commodity. Scale Decides Which One You Made.

The panic that started with Claude's text watermark turned into "write with AI and you're finished." Google's own documentation says the opposite in its very first sentence: generative AI is useful for researching a topic and for adding structure to original content. What gets penalized isn't the tool, it's producing many pages without adding value. A viewer on my YouTube channel asked a sharper question than the industry has been asking, so this week I answer it on two axes: do you have original data, and at what scale are you publishing it? Lily Ray's 220-site study shows what scale does. Then I add my own: an AI engine wrote out its own reasoning for shortlisting us, and it never once asked who wrote the content.Part of a series: GEO Roadmap > Content Quality and Citability. Over the last few weeks we covered how the model decides who to recommend. This week we go back to the start of the chain: how should we produce that content, and where is the line?

Mert Erkal

The Full Archive — 230+ Weekly Issues

ChatGPT

Sep 7, 2026

•

8 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #237 - ChatGPT Built Its Own Search Index. And Not Just One, Twelve.

Mert Erkal

loop engineering

Aug 31, 2026

•

10 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #236 - But Claude Doesn't Say That." Stop Asking Chat Windows for SEO Decisions.

Mert Erkal

non-commodity content

Aug 24, 2026

•

10 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #235 - Google Doesn't Penalize AI Content. It Penalizes Commodity. Scale Decides Which One You Made.

Mert Erkal

ChatGPT

Aug 17, 2026

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9 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #234 - ChatGPT Decides Who It'll Recommend Before It Searches. "Known" Beats "Findable."

In short: three names this week (Suganthan Mohanadasan's research, Rand Fishkin's video, Dixon Jones's commentary) all pointed at the same thing and corrected the most expensive misunderstanding in GEO. Suganthan read the network traffic across 60 conversations: ChatGPT writes brand names into its own first search query before it fetches a single page. Those names come from the model's memory, not the web. A brand that ChatGPT names in its own query gets mentioned in the answer 68.9% of the time; a brand that's only fetched but never named, 2.1%. About 33 times the difference. So the fan-out isn't a search for candidates, it's the model walking down a list it already had. Here's what that means, plus the one test to run this week.

Mert Erkal

geo score card

Aug 10, 2026

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7 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #233 - I Ran Hundreds of Sites Through One GEO Scorecard. Most Have Slammed at Least One of AI's Three Doors: Reach, Recognize, Believe.

Through our GEO Score Card program I have reviewed hundreds of local and international sites. Across the ones I audited in depth, the pattern is clear and strikingly shared. Showing up in AI takes three doors: the engine must reach you, recognize you as an entity, and believe what it says about you. Three quarters of the sites I audited give AI bots no explicit access (some block them entirely), roughly 87% have no Wikidata entry, and half have no independent reputation signal. The problem is not content quality; it is that at least one of these three doors is shut. And this is not a Turkey problem; US, German and Estonian sites show the same holes. Here is the shared gap list and the door to open this week.

Mert Erkal

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #232 - Off-Page GEO. Backlinks Aren't Dead, But the Game Changed: The Goal Is No Longer the Link, It's the Citation.

Aug 3, 2026

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9 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #232 - Off-Page GEO. Backlinks Aren't Dead, But the Game Changed: The Goal Is No Longer the Link, It's the Citation.

In SEO, off-page work chased the backlink. In GEO, off-page work chases the citation. This week I put Peec AI's off-page playbook, Waikay and Dixon Jones's "what AI knows about you" approach, and fresh Similarweb data side by side. They all point to the same place. Per reported analyses, a brand's own website is only 5-10% of the sources AI leans on when it builds an answer. The rest is off-page: Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, industry portals, earned media. And no, this doesn't mean backlinks or domain authority are dead. The data says both still work, just not as the goal anymore. Plus the one move to make this week.

Mert Erkal

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #231 In Turkey, the Service for Getting Seen by AI Doesn't Even Have a Name Yet. And the Demand Isn't Gone. It's Still Being Searched as "SEO."

Jul 27, 2026

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9 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #231 In Turkey, the Service for Getting Seen by AI Doesn't Even Have a Name Yet. And the Demand Isn't Gone. It's Still Being Searched as "SEO."

This week I put Semrush, our own Google Search Console data, Google Trends, and YouTube side by side. Turkish users have already adopted AI tools: "chatgpt" gets 1,000,000 searches a month. But almost nobody searches for the service of getting seen inside those tools. "seo hizmeti" (SEO service) gets 1,600 searches while "geo hizmeti" (GEO service) sits below the measurement threshold. The service doesn't even have a settled name. Yet the demand didn't evaporate. It's still hiding inside the word "SEO." So this season's job isn't to capture demand, it's to make hidden demand visible.

Mert Erkal

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #230 :In English, G2 Tells AI the "Best" Tool. In Turkish, That Seat Is Empty, and Ads Fill It.

Jul 20, 2026

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4 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #230 :In English, G2 Tells AI the "Best" Tool. In Turkish, That Seat Is Empty, and Ads Fill It.

This week I ran a live test across 10 sectors, on two engines (ChatGPT and Perplexity), both logged out. One question: when AI answers "what is the best X," who actually feeds the answer? You already know the English-language answer: G2, Capterra, PCMag. So I ran it in Turkish, a market with no independent-review layer, to see what AI leans on when that layer simply doesn't exist. Across 20 searches, the number of independent, neutral local review institutions was zero. The gap gets filled by vendor listicles, commission-driven comparison sites, and, I am not kidding, a recipe site. It is a gap. It is also a wide-open opportunity.

Mert Erkal

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #229 :How GEO Actually Works. A Short Guide, and the 6 Myths the Industry Still Believes.

Jul 13, 2026

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10 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #229 :How GEO Actually Works. A Short Guide, and the 6 Myths the Industry Still Believes.

This week I'm not reporting news, I'm writing a guide. A language model decides what to say about your brand based on only two things: training data and grounding. Almost every myth in our industry comes from missing that distinction. I take the six biggest ones apart. At the center sits the llms.txt saga, and its real lesson has nothing to do with the file: don't take Google's word for it, and don't take your favourite expert's word for it either. I apply the same discipline to Google's new OKF standard. Then one live observation: I asked Google's AI which credit card is best. It named seven banks by product. Not one of the sources it cited was a bank.

Mert Erkal

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