First Published: 13 June, 2025
I couldn’t help myself. My first test of AI mode in the wild had to be around who are the best SEO agencies in New Zealand.
Having done this test with mixed results through all the different Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Chat GPT, Perplexity and Claude o ver the past few months I was pleased to see that Pure SEO was top and that all (bar one) of the choices it gave were actually in New Zealand!
Unfortunately, like all the other tests I did, there were strangely at least one result of an agency that was neither in New Zealand and also (on the surface) appeared to be a bit suspect in respect of their online presence.
If you attended the Brainy Breakfast’s I spoke at in Auckland and Wellington, you will know that I think we are in a ‘wild west’ period where results will be changing all the time and often spam proliferates.
One thing I immediately noticed was that one or two of the sources used was the website Clutch.co. I noticed this because when I did this test with the other LLMs Clutch was a repeated source for them.
I decided to dig further. What was it about clutch that was so appealing as a source to multiple LLMs, as from a user perspective the results were awful:
All the top options were not New Zealand based (although they state they serve New Zealand). When I did get to genuine NZ based companies, I noticed one of them that had closed many years ago – I know because we acquired their customers and some of their staff members!
I decided to start my investigation by asking AI Mode why it selected Clutch!
Like with my investigations into the other LLM providers I looked for the sources of the source and where AI Mode sourced the answer to my question from.
The results didn’t surprise me and started to show a pattern that correlated with my findings from my research into the other LLMs:
Reddit featured widely in the sources of the answer to the second question and to the sources of the sources to the first question!
Interestingly it seems Clutch and similar websites started losing their organic rankings on Google around the time of the helpful content update, yet now they are being heavily used as sources in the world of LLMs!
Again, this corresponds to research we have been undertaking internally on the changes in search and the way results are being influenced by consumer conversation and behaviour. We have been saying for a while that citations are the new backlinks and currently, I stand by that.
It seems that Reddit is getting a disproportionate weighting in this currently (with the majority of LLMs), my personal view however is that over time this will change and more authoritative websites will win out in the end.
That being said, many businesses should be monitoring and engaging with their communities on Reddit. Whilst the benefit may be short / medium term. If done in the correct manner there is very little downside and the potential for long term value in respect of an organic citation profile.
Still intrigued by Clutch.co’s ubiquitous appearance in the LLM results for this and similar queries. I decided to dig a little deeper. Using AHRefs I looked at some of the data around Clutch to see how authoritative it is, especially considering its drop in rankings.
The results were astounding. Clutch has 6.2m backlinks and a domain ranking of 90 out of 100. To put that into perspective. That is a higher domain ranking than The Beehive and Trademe whilst only being slightly lower than the NY Times.
AI Mode was launched in the US on May 20th 2025 and will likely be rolled out to the rest of the world in the coming months, it is an experimental chatbot powered by a custom Gemini 2.5 and gives us a view about how search and AI is evolving. At Pure SEO’s research lab we have been playing and testing it (using a VPN) almost every day and analysing the data and trends (far too much info to share here!)
AI Mode has other more advanced features in the pipeline, which are available in Google Labs, such as Deep Search, shopping features and complex analysis.
Whilst the industry changes and our understanding evolves, we will continue to share some of the insights that we have gleaned. Many professionals are now using the term GEO, which stands for Generative Engine Optimisation rather than SEO. My team have put together a free guide highlighting the key differences between SEO and GEO for anyone interested in a more detailed summary. I will be talking more about this at the upcoming Digital Day Out (July 15th at the Cordis Hotel) and love chatting about this stuff in general, feel free to reach out for a coffee / chat (richard@pureseo.com) although I do get extremely busy!
On the positive, at least every LLM correctly presented Pure SEO as either the top or second option when searching for the best SEO agencies in New Zealand. Sometimes we are the only one actually based here!
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