AI in SEO

RIP SEO. Today was the first time Google automatically pushed me into AI Mode for a basic search. I wasn’t on Labs. I didn’t opt in. No blue links. Just a clean AI-generated answer, with no website listings in sight. This isn’t an experimental feature hidden away anymore. It’s becoming the new default in our #AnswerEconomy. As someone who’s spent 20+ years leading web strategy and SEO efforts, I’ve never seen such a dramatic shift in how information is presented for search. We began moving beyond traditional SEO to GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) in late 2023. ChatGPT’s launch three years ago shifted the web from a search economy to an answer economy. At first, it felt like a challenge to Google’s dominance. (The number I’ve seen most often is that Google owns about 90% of the search market.) Last year, I asked myself whether “Google it” would still be a verb in 10 years. Now, after seeing Google’s AI Mode in action, I think the answer is yes, but not in the way we’re used to. The traditional cluttered Google search results page is being replaced by an AI-first interface. If your content isn’t structured, factual, and optimized for AI engines, you risk becoming invisible. The future isn’t just about ranking first. It’s about being the trusted source the AI quotes. No clicks. No CTRs. Just answers. Welcome to the next era of search. #SEO #GEO #AIEO #AIsearch #DigitalStrategy #ContentMarketing #GenerativeAI #SearchRevolution #DigitalMarketing #Marketing

I run an SEO company. And we just changed how we measure success for our clients. We stopped celebrating ranking improvements. Started tracking something else entirely. Traditional SEO is becoming table stakes. The real game is happening somewhere else. Last week, We audited where our clients' target customers are actually getting their answers. The results were eye-opening. → 67% of technical queries never make it to a Google search → They're being answered directly by ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity But here's what I noticed: The companies winning in this new landscape aren't the ones with the highest domain authority. They're the ones whose expertise gets synthesized into AI responses. Example: One of our B2B clients created a unique "Revenue Attribution Model" for their industry. Now when prospects ask AI about attribution, they get referenced as the source. Not because they rank #1, but because they created something worth citing. The shift I'm seeing: ▸ Instead of optimizing for crawlers → we're optimizing for comprehension ▸ Instead of chasing keywords → we're building knowledge assets ▸ Instead of link building → we're building authority that AI systems naturally want to reference This doesn't mean SEO is dead. It means it's evolving. The clients who get this are: →Creating frameworks → Coining terminology →Building thought leadership that transcends traditional search The ones still stuck in 2019 SEO tactics? They're wondering why their traffic is declining even with perfect technical optimization. As an SEO company founder, I had to make a choice: ❌ Keep selling the old playbook ✅ Help clients prepare for what's coming I chose the future. Because in 12 months, the companies dominating their categories won't just be the ones ranking well. They'll be the ones that AI systems consider the definitive authorities in their space. Are you positioning your company to be that authority? Tools mentioned: AI Answers Check: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini Question Discovery: AlsoAsked, WriterZen Citation Tracking: Twin, Glasp, app.slatehq.ai ( By TripleDart) Content Optimization: Clearscope, Surfer, app.slatehq.ai ( By TripleDart) Content Orchestration: app.slatehq.ai ( By TripleDart) #aiso #geo #seo

How AI will impact your specific job depends on how AI is changing the specific business you are in. Case in point: If you're in digital publishing/online media/content marketing, you need to read this. The Wall Street Journal just published some of the implications of Google's move to AI results - answering questions directly instead of sending people to websites. The result? Traffic to major news sites is collapsing. HuffPost lost over half their search traffic in three years. Business Insider's traffic dropped 55% and they just cut 21% of their staff. The Atlantic's CEO told his team to assume Google traffic will hit zero and plan accordingly. This goes beyond news sites. Google's AI Overviews now appear at the top of searches for vacation guides, health tips, and product reviews. AI Mode gives you conversational answers with barely any links to click. This is the way things are going. Think about your own behavior. When was the last time you clicked past the first result on Google? Now imagine that first result is a complete AI-generated answer. Why would you click anywhere else? The Washington Post's CEO put it perfectly: "Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine." ++++++++++++++++++++ Three lessons for anyone whose business depends on online traffic: FIRST: Stop waiting for this to blow over. The Atlantic is working on building a stronger app, investing in live events, and focusing on direct subscriber relationships. Business Insider is emphasizing audience engagement over search optimization. SECOND: If your current strategy is "create content and hope Google sends people to it," you need a new strategy. These companies are learning to connect with audiences directly through newsletters, conferences, and improved user experiences. THIRD: This is bigger than just media companies. Any business that relies on organic search traffic - from local service providers to e-commerce sites - needs to think about what happens when AI answers questions without sending people to your website. You need to start adapting, now. (An idea on how, below.) Huge thanks to The Wall Street Journal's Isabella Simonetti and Katherine Blunt for the great article! +++++++++++++++++ UPSKILL YOUR ORGANIZATION: When your organization is ready to create an AI-powered culture—not just add tools—AI Mindset would love to help. We drive behavioral transformation at scale through a powerful new digital course and enterprise partnership. DM me, or check out our website.

If you want to be mentioned by AI… You have to be mentioned by people first. I just had a fascinating conversation with Jeremy Rivera on his Unscripted SEO podcast. And I have to admit that when he first reached out to me, I was very skeptical: Why does an SEO guy want to talk to a brand awareness ad guy turned publicist like me? I thought the conversation would be about how social media is essentially turning into search, and how important SEO has become for creating content. But then he started talking about AI. He talked about how more people are using AI to search for things, which is disrupting the SEO industry in a major way. He talked about how traditional SEO was about engineering discoverability. But AI doesn’t search like a robot anymore. It searches like a person. He talked about how AI doesn’t just look for keywords. It looks for relevance. Context. Consensus. He talked about how, when answering a query, AI asks: – Who’s being talked about? – Who’s being quoted? – Who’s showing up everywhere? He talked about how if AI is now the search engine… Then, attention is the new ranking factor, and therefore, fame is the new domain authority. He talked about how SEOs' integration with social media makes them even more relevant. And then HE (not me) talked about how the best SEO strategy isn’t keyword stuffing anymore. It’s publicity. So he wanted to speak with me to learn more about it and how it works And that blew my mind. Because I never would have in a million years thought to frame the benefits of publicity and what I do this way. But when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. What comes up when you search for your name on ChatGPT or Perplexity? When you ask AI for the top people doing what you do, does your name come up? When you ask AI for knowledge about something, does it cite you? Or does it say someone more famous than me? The answer to these questions is obvious. Being casually mentioned, my AI is a limitless test of who has the most attention and who doesn’t But what’s not so obvious to SEO people anymore is how to make that happen. My advice: 👉 Leverage personal brands to build a publicity-first model of visibility 👉 Make your people unignorable in the places AI now learns from 👉 Use organic social + performance ads that get press and attention, not just clicks. That’s the future of SEO. This might be the most important shift you haven’t considered yet. Of course, we went much deeper into these things on the podcast, which I really look forward to being released. I’ll put a link in the comments so you can subscribe to it. But if you can’t wait till then, you should sign up for my free two-day LinkedIn Genius Masterclass, where I teach these things that aren’t taught. And if you can’t make the masterclass, you can also learn these techniques from my newsletter (which just passed 500 subscribers). I’ll put a link to both in the comments.

My last couple of posts have been heavy on this theme: The website isn’t the marketing hub anymore. AI is rewriting the rules. Now, I've gotten some pushback, and I get it. This idea is still cutting-edge in many industries and will be for a while—think the local remodeling contractor, who will remain dependent on Google map packs for some time, but . . . Shout out to John Andrews and Sam Harding for this idea to help make this point. Remember the Browser Wars of the ’90s? That battle wasn’t about browsers; it was about who controls distribution. The winner decided how users experienced the web. Sound familiar? We’re back in a similar fight. But this time, it’s not about browsers or websites. It’s about AI. And the harsh truth? Your website is no longer the center of your marketing universe. It’s just another client in an AI-driven ecosystem. If you're still building everything around your website, you’re missing where the customer journey actually starts today. AI is the new gatekeeper. Large language models are the new homepage. What to do: ~ Structure your content for clarity: headers, bullets, short paragraphs. ~ Feed your own materials into tools like ChatGPT custom GPTs. ~ Submit links to AI-friendly aggregators like Perplexity or Bing. Prompt-ready content is the new SEO. Search engines indexed keywords. AI indexes answers. You’re not writing for spiders anymore, you’re writing for synthetic assistants. What to do: ~ Write in question/answer format. ~ Use schema markup and structured data to help AI extract the right info. ~ Test your content through ChatGPT—does it summarize your message well? AI-native collateral is the new lead magnet. PDFs and landing pages are fine, but imagine giving your audience a branded GPT or app that solves their exact problem. What to do: ~ Create AI-guided chat tools (ManyChat, Intercom, GPT bots). ~ Turn key insights into prompt libraries for your audience. ~ Train a micro-assistant that delivers value in your voice and framework. The ecosystem is greater than the standalone domain. Your website is part of the story, not the whole book. You need to meet your audience inside other platforms, other feeds, other tools. What to do: ~ Cross-publish with intent: blogs become emails, videos, Shorts, GPT inputs. ~ Format content for syndication: highlights, quote blocks, stat cards. ~ Embed value inside tools—calculators, diagnostics, AI-guided quizzes. ~ Ask better questions: Can this be summarized by AI in under 60 words? Would AI recommend this if asked? Are we surfacing this in multiple ecosystems? Is this referenceable—not just linkable? We’re not in a web-first world anymore. We’re in an AI-first marketing environment. The tools have changed, but the principle hasn’t: Be where your customers are, and make it ridiculously easy for them to know, like, and trust you. Don’t just optimize your website. Optimize your ecosystem.

Holy moly. ChatGPT's Operator will be HUGE for automating SEO processes. Here's their AI agent analyzing competitors to create a content outline: Last week, OpenAI announced that they were adding Operator. This is their AI agent that can autonomously perform tasks. Operator can do things such as performing multi-step tasks. This includes interacting with web-based features such as performing searches and extracting data from them. This opens up a lot of new possibilities for SEO. For instance, instead of having to perform SEO research manually, you could specify exactly what you're looking to analyze and have an AI agent do it on your behalf. In this example, I had operator perform a competitive analysis for the query "how to ski moguls". After a pretty simple prompt, Operator did the following: 1. Performed a Google search for the query 2. Correctly clicked to just the Organic text results 3. Scrolled through and copied the text of every page 4. Analyzed the extracted text 5. Gave me insights on the most common sections competitors used and which competitors used them 6. Created a content outline based on that data So without having to even perform a search - OpenAI's Operator was able to perform a complete analysis of a target query and provide me with an outline that I could start with. However, you could use it for much more. You could have Operator do things like give feedback on your own content, automatically analyze search intent, extract the top entities and much more. All through the use of an AI-agent. Now that are a few drawbacks to Operator in it's current form: 1. It requires the $200/month OpenAI subscription. Many people won't have access to that. 2. It's slow. Some tasks took it 10+ minutes to complete. 3. The output wasn't as detailed as I would have liked. However, it was a way to get real SERP data instead of just what's in ChatGPT's knowledge base. However, this is it's earliest form and it will only get better from here. From those that are looking to automate the manual work done in SEO, it might very well be worth the costs if it saves you a lot of time.

Here's the secret to getting your brand mentioned by AI... Co-occurrence. At Ahrefs, we analyzed which factors correlate most with "brand visibility" in LLMs — specifically within Google's AI Overviews. "Branded web mentions" was a clear winner with a correlation of 0.664. In plain terms: the more your brand name appears on pages across the web, the more likely it is that AI will mention it in response to relevant queries. - “But Tim, correlation ≠ causation.” Fair point. But if you’ve read Stephen Wolfram’s excellent piece “What Is ChatGPT Doing, and Why Does It Work?” (as I urged in an earlier post), then you should know that LLMs work by predicting the next word in a sentence based on statistical co-occurrence from their training data. So if we want AI to mention “Ahrefs” when talking about “marketing tools” - there has to be a lot of co-occurrences of these two things in the training data of this AI model. And a big chunk of LLM training data is typically coming from the web. And that's basically the gist of it. P.S. Link to our full study of AI brand visibility (75K brands analyzed) is in the comments.

AI Agents Are Booking Hotels. Is Your Direct Channel Ready to Compete? OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent Mode has transformed hotel bookings. AI is no longer just suggesting options. It now books directly on behalf of travelers. Instead of comparing hotels across websites, guests simply ask ChatGPT for what they want, and the AI searches, selects, and completes the reservation, often through OTAs. If your hotel content isn’t structured in a way AI systems can read and trust, your brand is effectively invisible. Traditional SEO tactics focused on human search behavior are no longer enough. Hotels must shift to Answer Engine Optimization, using structured data and clear content that AI agents can easily process. Most hotel teams are not ready for this shift and may already be missing bookings without realizing it. 📢 THE PIVOT FOR HOTEL COMMERCIAL TEAMS: Hotel commercial teams need to rethink their entire approach. This is not about improving your Google rank. It is about making your hotel visible to AI agents that now complete bookings for your guests. ⚠️ The rules of the direct channel have changed. Your content needs to be structured for AI discoverability. Your team needs to understand how AI agents make decisions. Without that, you will be bypassed without even knowing it. The direct channel is at risk unless your teams become AI-literate and start building content for machines as well as humans. FIVE ACTION STEPS FOR HOTEL TEAMS: 1️⃣ Audit and Optimize Structured Data Review your website and booking platform to ensure correct schema markup is in place. AI agents rely on machine-readable data to process your rates, amenities, and availability. 2️⃣ Implement Answer Engine Optimization Move beyond traditional SEO. Focus your content on clear, factual, structured property details across all platforms where AI agents can find them. 3️⃣ Upskill Your Team on AI Literacy Train your marketing, revenue, and sales teams on how AI agents function. AI is now a participant in the booking process. Your teams need to understand how to influence its choices. 4️⃣ Track AI Visibility and Recommendations Start measuring how often your hotel is seen or selected by AI systems like ChatGPT. Visibility is now invisible. Without tracking, you won’t know what you are losing. 5️⃣ Strengthen Direct Channel AI Readiness Ensure your website, booking engine, and voice assistants are optimized to serve both human guests and AI agents. Using AI Voice Agents can help capture direct bookings that might otherwise be lost. If your team needs help optimizing your direct channel, developing AI skills, or driving immediate revenue, reach out. Whether it’s training your team, creating structured content, or helping you track AI-driven visibility, I can support you. Consider me a gig member of your team, ready to help you drive results.

some say AI will make brand irrelevant. the latest data suggests the exact opposite. while AI Overviews are crushing generic search, they’re actually boosting branded search. the gap between them is widening, fast. first, the bad news for generic, non-branded terms: -> AI Overviews now appeared on 13% of U.S. searches in march (up 2x since january). -> when they show up, click-through rates (CTR) for non-branded keywords fall nearly 20%. -> for some top publishers, traffic is already down ~40%. now, the good news for brands: -> branded searches rarely trigger an AI Overview (only ~5% of the time). -> and when they do, branded CTR increases by almost 19%. the takeaway is simple. the value of ranking for your category is collapsing. the value of being searched for by name is skyrocketing. this changes where we must invest our time and energy. away from the shrinking returns of generic SEO and toward building a brand that people seek out directly. here's a quick check for your own brand: -> are your branded search impressions growing faster than your YoY revenue? -> are your branded search clicks (paid + organic) growing faster than your impressions? our job is to own a word in our customers' minds and convert that mental real estate to baseline revenue. that's the moat in the AI era.

In an unsurprising move, Google is putting generative AI at the center of its most valuable real estate. The company is redesigning its homepage to feature “AI Overviews,” a mode that uses Gemini to synthesize information directly on the results page. For users, this means fewer blue links, more summarized answers, and the beginning of the transition from search engine to answer engine. The new feature, though not widely available yet, appears directly beneath the Google search bar beside the “Google Search” button, replacing the iconic “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget. But the real story isn’t the feature set. It’s the strategy. Channeling their inner Clayton Christensen, Google is embracing the Innovator’s Dilemma: disrupt yourself before someone else does. In this case, Google is cannibalizing its own search ad model (still the company’s financial backbone) to protect long-term dominance in AI. The trade-off is clear: less immediate ad revenue per query in exchange for deeper user engagement and a more defensible moat around the future of search. AI Overviews could drastically reduce traffic to websites, particularly publishers, retailers, and content creators who rely on Google referrals. That’s a known risk. However, the existential threat isn’t from content partners. It’s from OpenAI, Perplexity, and every startup aiming to turn AI into the next search interface. The transition from search engine to answer engine is going to be a rough one. But if I had to bet who will ultimately be “Google for AI Search”, I’m going with Google. -s