I’ve written a guest article for the Advanced Web Ranking blog on how to spot SEO and AI search gaps before Black Friday. Peak is on 27th November, and the next few weeks are when that work either gets done or gets missed, so here’s what it covers and where to read it.
It starts from a simple problem. A discount can go live in an afternoon, but the reviews, coverage and content that decide whether an AI assistant recommends you build up over months, so by the time the offers go live most of that work has either been done or missed. The article walks through how we track this at SOZO in AWR on a live Black Friday project, starting months before peak.
What the article covers
- AI search converts better than it gets credit for. Adobe found AI referrals converted 38% better than other traffic on Black Friday 2025, yet most of it sits in Direct and Unassigned in GA4, where nobody credits it.
- Being in the answer isn’t the same as being recommended. Smart Home Sounds ranked first on Google for a Sonos Black Friday query and were cited in the AI Overview, but came fifth in ChatGPT’s answer to the same buying question.
- Why November is too late to start, both for building pages that need time to be found and for having a baseline to compare peak against.
- Where the evidence comes from. Across 28 brands we analysed, 82% of the citations behind AI answers came from sources other than the brand’s own site, so the article shows how to find the handful of sites assistants quote for your category.
- How we track it in AWR, with four short walkthroughs: giving peak its own keyword group, planning on November’s search volume rather than the annual average, tracking AI Overviews alongside rankings and reading position next to pixel position.
Read it on Advanced Web Ranking
The full article has the screenshots, the AWR walkthroughs and what I’d want any ecommerce brand to have in place before peak.
For the wider picture, Black Friday is won in search covers why the work that decides peak happens in September and October, and my Black Friday SEO and PPC hub brings together everything I’ve published for this year’s peak.
