If you follow AI search discourse on X or LinkedIn, you've seen Jake Ward's numbers everywhere: "85% of AI visibility has nothing to do with your site." "43.8% of AI citations come from best-X lists." "Reddit just lost 82% of its AI citations overnight."
Ward (@jakezward, ~32K followers on X, ~196K on LinkedIn) is one of the loudest — and most controversial — voices in what he calls LLM SEO. This deep dive unpacks who he is, what he actually argues about GEO and AEO, which of his claims hold up, and what Shopify and DTC brands should take away.
Who is Jake Ward?
Jake Ward is a UK-born growth entrepreneur who started his first SEO content agency in 2019 at age 21. Today he runs four ventures: Contact.so (an organic-growth agency whose tagline is literally "SEO has changed. So did we."), Byword.ai (a GPT-4-based bulk article writer), Kleo (a LinkedIn content tool), and — most relevant here — Mentions.so, an AI-visibility platform he launched in mid-2025 that tracks how brands appear across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Gemini, DeepSeek and Google AI Overviews.
You cannot understand his current GEO thesis without the backstory: the SEO heist.
The SEO heist: the stunt that made him famous
In November 2023, Ward posted a thread that went catastrophically viral: "We pulled off an SEO heist that stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor." He had exported competitor Exceljet's sitemap, turned its URLs into article titles, and used Byword to generate 1,800 AI articles for his client Causal — claiming 490K monthly visits at peak.
Then came the correction. Business Insider documented what happened next: shortly after the thread, Causal's traffic collapsed from 610K+ weekly visits to roughly 190K — below its pre-campaign baseline — as Google acted. The SEO community's verdict was brutal; critics called the playbook "a roadmap on how to destroy the internet."
