Mani Karthik is an SEO and growth consultant who’s helped scale traffic for SaaS brands like Dukaan, HappyFox, SuperMoney, and Citrix. With over 15 years of hands-on experience, he blends deep technical SEO know-how with a product-led growth mindset. Mani has worked inside high-growth teams, fixed what agencies missed, and built content engines that compound. He now works directly with founders to turn search into a reliable growth channel - no fluff, no shortcuts, just strategy that works.
I spent the last few months analyzing what actually gets cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Not what should get cited based on theory. What actually does. The patterns are clear. AI tools have strong preferences for specific content formats – and most SaaS companies are producing exactly the wrong types of content […]
I have seen this pattern play out dozens of times now. A SaaS founder reads about AI traffic growing 527%. They hear that ChatGPT visitors convert 23x better than Google organic. They panic about being left behind. So they hire someone to “do GEO” or pivot their entire content strategy toward AI optimization. Six months […]
Here is a question I get asked constantly. “Why does ChatGPT recommend our competitor but not us?” The answer is almost never about content quality. It is about trust signals – the specific patterns AI tools use to decide which brands are safe to recommend. Understanding these signals is the difference between hoping for AI […]
Here is a problem I see constantly. SaaS companies are getting traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. They just do not know it. Their analytics show “referral” or worse – “direct” – and the actual source gets buried. Meanwhile, that AI traffic is converting at rates 4-6x higher than Google organic. But nobody is measuring […]
I get this question constantly from SaaS founders. “Should I focus on blog content? Product pages? Comparisons? Where should I actually invest?” The honest answer is more nuanced than most agencies will tell you. Different page types serve different functions in AI search. And the data on what AI tools actually cite might surprise you. […]
Short answer: yes. Longer answer: in some ways, you have advantages the big players do not. I have spent years watching small SaaS companies get crushed by enterprise brands in traditional Google search. The pattern was predictable. Big brand launches a mediocre page. It ranks on page one within weeks because of domain authority. Your […]
Here is something most SaaS founders do not realize. When someone asks ChatGPT “What is the best CRM for startups?” – the answer is not random. It is not based on who paid the most. And it is definitely not pulling from some magical database of truth. AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini […]
LLMs are obsessed with fresh content. I’ve watched pages drop out of ChatGPT citations overnight because the data was from 2022. Meanwhile, a competitor’s page with 2024 data took their spot. Google cares about recency for news and trending topics. LLMs care about it for everything. Your 18-month-old guide might be perfectly accurate. But if […]
Authority snippets are the difference between getting cited and getting skipped. I started tracking this when ChatGPT launched. Some pages got cited constantly. Most never did. The pages that won had something in common: they packaged their expertise in bite-sized, citation-ready chunks. Clear claims. Visible credentials. Data with sources. That’s what authority snippets are. And […]
I’ve tested 47 different content formats across SaaS clients over the last year. Most got ignored by LLMs. A few got cited consistently. The winners? Tables, step-by-step lists, and side-by-side comparisons. Not because LLMs have aesthetic preferences. Because these formats communicate information density with minimal cognitive load. LLMs are optimizing for the same thing your […]
