Hi everyone, this is Neo.

Independent site owners have been on edge lately. Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) and all kinds of AI search engines (ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, you name it) are rapidly eating into the SEO traffic that used to be ours.

Everyone’s asking the same question: in the AI era, how do I get my products to rank at the top?

Back in the day, reverse-engineering Google’s algorithm was already “dark magic.” Now we’re staring at giant “black box” LLMs (large language models), and it feels even more hopeless.

But then a hard-hitting study codenamed CORE burst onto the scene, prying that black box open just enough to let the light in. The researchers found that we can not only guess what AI likes — we can actually “manipulate” rankings using specific tactics, with a success rate of over 80%!

Today, Neo is walking you through this paper in depth, to see if we can dig out some gold we can actually put to work on our independent sites.