Jan-Willem Bobbink shared a take on X , that AI visibility trackers are quietly breaking the analytics of brands who are paying them to track for them. It’s time we put more focus on this issue, as it is causing misalignment, misreporting, and misspending of resources and marketing budget in the clamor to be more visible in AI.

Screenshot from X, April 2026

Jan-Willem hits on the issue of the lack of attribution in RAG loops. When a tracker triggers a prompt, and that prompt triggers a fetch, the brand is essentially paying a tool to generate its own AI visibility, and it begins to report on itself.

This is known as being ouroboros , which is a word you will likely see appearing more and more in the SEO industry as we describe AI/LLMs.

The ouroboros effect of how AI starts to quote itself, something that Pedro Dias has covered recently .

A large number of AI visibility tools have received significant amounts of funding in recent months, and some of them charge brands tens of thousands of dollars to…