Codeless

AI visibility tools “measure” fantasy, not reality. They are measuring something that doesn't exist in the way they claim. In this article we’ll show you the findings of our hands-on, head-to-head AI visibility tool test. We ran the same prompts across multiple platforms. We manually verified the results. We analyzed the recommendations. This included a standardized set of prompts across each tool in multiple runs, looking at internal consistency, comparability across platforms, and results of manual queries in Google AI Mode, Google AI Overview, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Each prompt represented a different stage of the funnel: - “Best accounting software for small business” for TOFU. - “QuickBooks alternatives” for MOFU. - “FreshBooks pricing” for BOFU. Our analysis largely focused on results for FreshBooks, but we also gathered data for competitor brands, like QuickBooks, Zoho Books, Wave, and Kashoo. The results confirmed our hypothesis: the data provided by these tools is inconsistent, often inaccurate, and a poor reflection of real-world LLM behavior. - Key finding 1. High variance across results for the same brands and prompts - Key finding 2: Discrepancies with manual verification And my favorite? - Key finding 3: Generic, unactionable, contradictory recommendations

Most “data driven” marketers make the same content reporting mistakes… ❌ An obsession with each end of the funnel’s spectrum, focusing exclusively on eyeballs or last-touch. ❌ Relying on backward-looking outputs, like traffic or leads, that don’t tell you anything about your current day-to-day decision making. ❌ High-level, aggregate monthly or annual trends that only provide surface-level visibility without any answer to “why” those graphs are going up or down. ❌ And worse, arbitrarily comparing yourself to competitor data points that are completely irrelevant. Here’s how you can fix it: Step #1. Estimate potential ROI with “time to results” before starting Step #2. Create month-over-month reporting that links leading indicators with lagging ones Step #3. Segment cohort-based data by monthly publication date Step #4. Further segment publication cohorts by content types and topics Step #5. Analyze these cohorts with quarter-over-quarter comparisons to glean actionable insight Get examples for each of these in this week’s newsletter.

I don’t know Databox or Peter Caputa personally. I think we swapped emails years ago when Peter was still at HubSpot. He’s always come across as a nice, smart, genuine, transparent person. So I’ve followed him on LinkedIn ever since. Over the past year, I’ve seen various posts from Peter about their SEO + content performance issues. Then, a few weeks ago, I saw yet-another message about how “business blogging is dead.” So I wanted to dig deeper. From my view, this is an emotional reaction to a difficult problem that requires sober analysis other than “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” And I’ll go to lengths here to show why, highlighting my belief that the biggest problem sabotaging their performance is strategy, not tactics. A few caveats: - This is meant for information & education purposes. These problems are depressingly-common. - I am not attempting to throw shade at all. I’m trying to help (even if some aspects are triggering). - I want to highlight the systematic and process-driven issues vs. the person or brand or product or writer or anything else. - I do not have any sort of inside info whatsoever, so I’m probably neglecting or am naive about key info that I shouldn’t be. AND, they’re also doing a lot of stuff really well overall. So again: no shade whatsoever. Hopefully it’s received in that vein. Or maybe I'll get lucky and Peter won’t see this? Anyway, here goes.

Stop bringing a knife to a nuke fight 🔪💣 You want Big Brand ROI, but are you willing (or able) to build a Big Brand Site? The biggest competitive moat restricting your ROI is the Growth Gap. The "gap" is a difference in inputs - or the things that drive the outputs you want (ranking positions, traffic, leads, and revenue). The good news is that there's a simple 5-step process to analyze what's holding you back: Step 1. Identify your “Growth Gap,” or the distance from market leaders you need to close ASAP Step 2. Run a competitive analysis to pinpoint obvious product & ICP gaps that need prioritizing Step 3. Analyze existing coverage or saturation of these topics to find the gaps Step 4. Play offense: Assess existing topical authority to predict net-new content "time to results" Step 5. Play defense: Update and expand existing, underperforming content to prevent content decay Click to read the full breakdown of how to prioritize your content offensive and start building long-term market dominance.

What's your biggest underperforming content? Find out now.

How do you close competitor gaps? Find out now.