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🔥 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

AI Mode

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #228 :We Measured What Google's AI Overviews Did to Search in Türkiye. Then We Built a Public, Monthly Dashboard.

Jul 6, 2026

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8 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #228 :We Measured What Google's AI Overviews Did to Search in Türkiye. Then We Built a Public, Monthly Dashboard.

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode went live in Türkiye on 18 February 2026. Four and a half months in, we stopped guessing and measured. Rankings held. Clicks on informational queries lost a third. We put it all in a live, bilingual, monthly-updated dashboard.

Mert Erkal

AI Visibility

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #227 :Blocking AI Agents Is Becoming the New SEO Mistake. John Mueller Says Locking the Door While Gemini Browses the Web on Your Behalf Has a Cost

Jun 29, 2026

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10 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #227 :Blocking AI Agents Is Becoming the New SEO Mistake. John Mueller Says Locking the Door While Gemini Browses the Web on Your Behalf Has a Cost

This week we dig into John Mueller's critical comment on agentic browsers. AI agents like Gemini can now browse the web and complete tasks on a user's behalf. Mueller says most quality principles stay the same, but a new basic is coming: don't blindly block agentic browsers. So "a site useful for humans is useful for agents too," but if you won't let the agent through the door, you make yourself invisible. This points the same way as last week's Amazon agent ads and Google's entity patent. Plus Google's June 2026 spam update (AI manipulation now in scope), the LLM patent that says "teach AI who you are," SimilarWeb's research on how a ChatGPT recommendation drives branded search, and how AI website builders like Manus are automating SEO.

Mert Erkal

AI Visibility

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #226 :Calling Yourself "the Best" Is Handing the Win to Your Competitors in AI Search. Lily Ray's Study Shows Being Cited and Being Recommended Aren't the Same Thing

Jun 22, 2026

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11 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #226 :Calling Yourself "the Best" Is Handing the Win to Your Competitors in AI Search. Lily Ray's Study Shows Being Cited and Being Recommended Aren't the Same Thing

This week we dig into Lily Ray's study across 100 B2B queries: a listicle ranking your own brand as the best gets cited as a source in the AI answer, but doesn't get your brand recommended. Worse, 69% of the time the competitors you named in your own listicle get recommended in your place. So your own content becomes a vote for your rivals. Plus Google's new research on detecting AI "slop," OpenAI bringing improved health responses to free ChatGPT, Bing Webmaster Tools' new AI reporting panel, Peec AI's "intent vs. keywords" study across 37,804 AI responses, and the merging of paid and organic visibility under AI.

Mert Erkal

AI Visibility

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #225 :Being Visible in AI Isn't Enough Anymore — You Have to Be Believed. Burson's "Credibility Paradox" Study

Jun 15, 2026

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11 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #225 :Being Visible in AI Isn't Enough Anymore — You Have to Be Believed. Burson's "Credibility Paradox" Study

This week we dig into Burson and Profound's "Credibility Paradox" study, built on 85 companies and 55,000 believability forecasts: showing up in AI answers doesn't mean the answer is believed. Plus the YouTube video I shot with Claude Fable 5 and the US government shutting the model down, Google officially adding "optimizing for generative AI" to its SEO docs, Google's myth-busting list calling llms.txt and chunking "unnecessary," the traffic jump from ChatGPT's branded-link update, and citation-buying now counting as spam.

Mert Erkal

AI Visibility

Jun 8, 2026

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15 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #224 :Automate Your AI Visibility Audit — Build a Weekly Scheduled Task in Claude Cowork

This week I build, step by step, a Claude Cowork scheduled task that audits your brand visibility every week across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews. Plus: Google's authority claim over third-party SEO tools/AEO/GEO, the May 2026 Core Update's intent-and-market-fit analysis, the GA4 + Google Business Profile connection, Cloudflare's "bots are now 57% of traffic" data, Search profiles in Discover, and Manus' Shopify integration.

Mert Erkal

agentic engine optimization

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #223 : Become a Preferred Source in Google AI Answers — 345K Brands Already Added

Jun 1, 2026

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10 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #223 : Become a Preferred Source in Google AI Answers — 345K Brands Already Added

Google's Preferred Sources hit 345,000 sources and landed inside AI Overviews and AI Mode responses. This week I'll walk you through how to add the widget to your site in 30 minutes, a practical 6-step action list, and the strategy checks behind it. Plus: the May 2026 Core Update's final week, Peec.ai's 500K-prompt AI Overviews study, Gianluca Fiorelli's spam-in-AI-search map, Marie Haynes' Lighthouse "agent-readiness" report, OpenAI's conversion-focused ChatGPT ads, and Sundar Pichai saying "search, agents and tools will become one product."

Mert Erkal

Google I/O 2026

May 25, 2026

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11 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #222 : Google I/O 2026 — The Search Box Was Reborn After 25 Years, and SEO's New Name Is "Selectability"

Last week I touched briefly on Google I/O 2026 and Google Marketing Live 2026, and said the in-depth coverage would come this week. Here it is. The most fundamental redesign of the search box in 25 years, Gemini 3.5 Flash, information agents, Generative UI; the mechanics of "selectability" through a GEO lens, Stradiji's field observations from GeoGenie, expert opinions, and the post-I/O developments (May 2026 Core Update, Marketing Live, WordPress 7.0, Screaming Frog 24).

Mert Erkal

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🔥 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.

🔥 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.

🔥 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."

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

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

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #228 :We Measured What Google's AI Overviews Did to Search in Türkiye. Then We Built a Public, Monthly Dashboard.

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #227 :Blocking AI Agents Is Becoming the New SEO Mistake. John Mueller Says Locking the Door While Gemini Browses the Web on Your Behalf Has a Cost

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #226 :Calling Yourself "the Best" Is Handing the Win to Your Competitors in AI Search. Lily Ray's Study Shows Being Cited and Being Recommended Aren't the Same Thing

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #225 :Being Visible in AI Isn't Enough Anymore — You Have to Be Believed. Burson's "Credibility Paradox" Study

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #224 :Automate Your AI Visibility Audit — Build a Weekly Scheduled Task in Claude Cowork

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #223 : Become a Preferred Source in Google AI Answers — 345K Brands Already Added

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #222 : Google I/O 2026 — The Search Box Was Reborn After 25 Years, and SEO's New Name Is "Selectability"

The SEOs Diners Club

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