We Tested Programmatic SEO vs AEO: Wise Won, Zapier Mostly Lost
Wise's pages got cited almost everywhere. Zapier's integration pages, 2 times out of 6. The gap says a lot about which templates still work.
Wise’s pages got cited almost everywhere. Zapier’s integration pages, 2 times out of 6. The gap says a lot about which templates still work.
Where the data comes from: eight questions we ran on September 26, 2026, through the APIs behind ChatGPT and Perplexity and through Google’s AI Overviews, each aimed at pages Wise or Zapier have built at scale.
- Medium post: We Tested Programmatic SEO vs AEO: Wise Won, Zapier Mostly Lost
- RankControl, an AI SEO and AEO platform
- Google Sites page: What Decided Whether Wise or Zapier Got Quoted
Numbers in the post
| Number | What the post says | Source | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | That was one of eight questions we ran on September 26, 2026, through the APIs behind ChatGPT and Perplexity and through Google’s AI Overviews, each aimed at pages Wise or Zapier have built at scale. | Search Shift test | September 26, 2026 |
| three; five | We pointed three of the eight questions at Wise and five at Zapier. | Search Shift test | September 26, 2026 |
| all three | We asked ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google for the best way to send money from the US to India. All three cited Wise’s India transfer page. | Search Shift test | September 26, 2026 |
| four | four Wise pages in Google’s AI Overview, all in one answer | Search Shift test, “is wise cheaper than a bank for international transfers” | September 26, 2026 |
| 2 of 6 | Add it up and that’s 2 citations out of 6 chances. | Search Shift test, Zapier’s integration pages | September 26, 2026 |
| five | Perplexity cited those docs as well, plus HubSpot marketplace listings and integration pages from five competitors (Whalesync, Integrate.io, Tray.ai, Unito, Make), and left Zapier out. | Search Shift test, HubSpot and Airtable | September 26, 2026 |
| 207 to 13 | Their Google clicks went from 207 a day to 13 inside 48 hours, during the August 2025 spam update. | Swivl postmortem in r/TechSEO, posted by someone who works on Swivl, a field-service software company | August 2025 spam update (postmortem posted Sept 2026) |
| 74,876 to 9,311 | They cut the sitemap from 74,876 URLs to 9,311. | Swivl postmortem in r/TechSEO | August 2025 spam update (postmortem posted Sept 2026) |
| 0.3% | The programmatic sections brought in almost all of Swivl’s organic clicks, but at a 0.3% click-through rate from an average position around 18. | Swivl postmortem in r/TechSEO | before the drop (postmortem posted Sept 2026) |
| 2.15 million | an indie founder on X said they took a startup to 2.15 million Google impressions in three months by turning a proprietary dataset into thousands of long-tail pages. | A post on X | Jul 2026 |
Question by question
| Question | What the post says | Source | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| “usd to eur exchange rate today” | Wise was the top organic result on Google, and Perplexity linked straight to the converter. | Search Shift test | September 26, 2026 |
| “is wise cheaper than a bank for international transfers” | four Wise pages in Google’s AI Overview, all in one answer. Perplexity went past a dozen. | Search Shift test | September 26, 2026 |
| Slack and Google Sheets | Perplexity cited the integration page.; ChatGPT went with Slack’s help docs, and Google’s AI Overview linked a thread on Zapier’s community forum | Search Shift test | September 26, 2026 |
| HubSpot and Airtable | ChatGPT went to Airtable’s help docs.; Perplexity cited those docs as well, plus HubSpot marketplace listings and integration pages from five competitors (Whalesync, Integrate.io, Tray.ai, Unito, Make), and left Zapier out.; Only Google’s AI Overview cited Zapier there. | Search Shift test | September 26, 2026 |
| “how to automate workflows between apps without code” | Zapier ranked second on Google for it, and the AI Overview on that same search linked someone else’s article about Zapier. | Search Shift test | September 26, 2026 |
| “zapier vs make for non technical users” | ChatGPT’s API went to Zapier’s and Make’s pricing pages, plus a review site.; Perplexity cited both companies’ comparison pages.; Google’s AI Overview cited Zapier’s, then filled out the answer with blogs and Reddit. | Search Shift test | September 26, 2026 |
| “best integration platform for a small ops team” | Google’s AI Overview named Zapier in the answer and then linked only third-party pages.; ChatGPT’s API, meanwhile, cited the pricing pages of Zapier, Make and Workato. | Search Shift test | September 26, 2026 |
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