“What’s closing is the cheap part,” Shane Tepper told me. “The stretch where you can win position with work instead of budget.”
Tepper is co-founder of Resonate Labs, and I’d asked him a pointed question. Everyone in SEO talks about a closing window on earned AI visibility, but the surface area of AI search keeps expanding. More queries get answered by ChatGPT and Perplexity every month. More of those answers now carry clickable citations. So, what exactly is supposed to be closing?
His answer sent me back to a field I know firsthand, one that has nothing to do with chatbots and everything to do with what happens when a wide-open channel starts getting fenced off.
I was president of SEO-PR from 2003 to 2025, part of our early reputation was built on a tactic the industry called press release SEO, or “SEO PR,” and it worked because distributing an optimized release through a wire service stacked three separate payoffs at once: a direct ranking boost from keyword-rich anchor text pointing back to a client’s site, referral traffic from the link itself, and the indirect benefit when a journalist read the release and wrote an original story that linked back organically.
Then, on July 30, 2013, Google fenced off the first one. It updated its Link Schemes guidelines and explicitly classified optimized anchor text in press releases distributed on other sites as an unnatural link, the same category as paid advertising, on the reasoning that a company pays a wire service for that distribution rather than earning it editorially. Every client relying on that anchor text for direct SEO lift lost it overnight. What didn’t disappear was the referral traffic the distribution still generated, or the indirect benefit when a reporter picked up the story and linked to it on their own initiative. SEO-PR kept winning awards for years afterward, for clients including Rutgers University, because the agency adapted to what Google had actually fenced off instead of pretending the fence wasn’t there.
AI search is running a version of the same play, just faster, and I recognize the shape of it because I’ve watched a wide-open field get fenced off before. Tepper’s argument, and the one his data backs up, is that the fencing has already started, and the brands that establish themselves before it’s finished are the ones who’ll still have ground to stand on once it is.
The Window Isn’t A Date. It’s A Race Against Your Competitors
Tepper pointed me to an audit from Fuel Online that checked 1,000 enterprise domains. Sixty-two percent came back technically invisible to AI models. Ask those same brands a plain, unbranded question about their own category, the kind a buyer actually types, and the models fail to mention them 81% of the time.
That’s the size of the opening. Most of the field hasn’t shown up yet.
What closes it is speed, not scarcity. Profound’s data puts the median time to first citation for new content at 6.81 days. Get…
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