About OppAlerts
OppAlerts is a marketing platform created by Ben Wills. It helps you find links, brand mentions and marketing opportunities based on how closely the content relates to your industry. That is semantic similarity. It also monitors news, blogs and podcasts for mentions of your brand and your competitors, and publishes original research on AI search visibility.
Spokesperson
Ben Wills has spent more than 26 years in marketing and engineering. He directed teams of 70 to 80 people responsible for over 1,400 SEO client accounts and led international SEO campaigns across 30 to 40 countries. He also built web scraping and indexing systems that process billions of records. For the research here, he builds the systems that collect and process the data, then runs the analysis himself.
For an interview, get in touch. You can also read more about Ben Wills and watch or listen to his podcast and interview appearances.
Research
Each page walks through what I found, the figures and quotes you can use, and what the study does and does not establish. You can also find story ideas for different audiences, a shorter research overview, and a link to the full blog post.
Backlinks from contextually relevant pages track AI rankings
Across 100 industries and 17 AI channels, brands with more backlinks from contextually relevant pages get higher AI scores. Also covers unlinked mentions, PageRank and hallucinated domains.
An irrelevant detail in a prompt changes which brands AI recommends
One hotel prompt, run 1,374 times across six models. Changing only the car the traveler picks up changed the hotels recommended.
AI Search Visibility and Ranking Factors, July 2026
The 18 signals measured against AI recommendations across 100 industries and 1,100 buyer personas, and what changed since May.
Where Reddit shows up in search engines and AI search
Reddit across Google, Bing and Brave, and across five AI models that were each given a web search tool.
How Claude turns Brave Search results into citations
Claude's web search relays Brave's results. This study follows 1,100 responses from search query to citation.
LLM Ranking Factors, May 2026
Which signals correlate with ChatGPT's recommendations: 145 industries, 1,595 buyer personas and 13 signals.
Find a story by topic
Start with the topic you cover to find the relevant studies and story ideas.
Using the research
- Please credit OppAlerts and link to the page for the study you use.
- Each kit page explains what to keep in mind when reporting the findings. These studies measure correlations in the data. Please make that clear in your coverage.
- You can find the charts in the blog posts.