How to Adapt Your SEO in the AI Era

SEO doesn’t look the same as it did 2 years ago.

We saw organic search clicks trend downwards across the industry — even when rankings held steady.

AI is answering more queries directly, where your brand either shows up in those answers or it doesn’t.

That’s where the problem lies:

Most SEOs struggle to understand whether they’re showing up in AI Search (AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, etc.).

And even MORE SEOs are confused on what exactly they should be doing (and changing) to drive more sales from AI Search.

I’ve spent the past 6 months closely following the latest developments and testing tactics directly with clients.

Below, I’ll share what’s actually working: what to keep doing, what to change, and how to report on performance to prevent budget cuts.

The Traditional SEO Tactics That Still Matter and How to Adapt

AI search is getting most of the attention right now, but traditional SEO isn’t going away.

According to an Ahrefs analysis, the most popular AI platform, ChatGPT, has around 12% of the search volume of Google. And while that number is expected to keep chipping away at Google’s market share, Google will remain the dominant search platform for years to come.

On top of that, our own research found that your organic ranking in traditional SERPs is a major factor in appearing in AI results too.

In other words, the fundamentals aren’t just still relevant — they’re part of what gets you visible in AI search.

That said, new tactics are emerging to help SEOs rank in AI answers. So let’s break down which SEO tactics AREN’T changing and what does require adaptation.

Technical SEO

You still need a fast site, clean architecture, and solid internal linking.

What’s shifted is WHY certain technical elements matter more now.

Structured data and schema markup have become more important than ever. Adding schema markup used to be more of an “extra” tactic you could implement on a page to MAYBE win some type of rich result in a SERP.

But now, AI systems, especially AI Overviews, use schema to quickly extract and surface information in answers.

In fact, studies are finding correlations between pages used as sources by AI and those that also use Schema. Schema App reported a 19.72% increase in Google AI Overview visibility after implementing stronger entity linking within advanced schema markup.

AI crawler access is an underrated risk. Some site configurations block AI crawlers either intentionally or by accident. If the major AI platforms can’t crawl your site, they can’t cite it. Check your robots.txt and make sure you’re not inadvertently blocking Googlebot, GPTBot, or PerplexityBot.

Core Web Vitals still matter, but the reason for AI is that AI needs to be as efficient as possible when using compute power to crawl a page for info.

Content Quality

Google’s content quality guidelines haven’t changed dramatically.

The golden rule of content created for humans, backed by real experience, and written with a clear purpose still wins.

What’s changing is how strictly those standards are being enforced, and why.

AI has flooded the web with generic, algorithmically optimized (soulless) content.

Google’s response has been to double down on signals that are harder to fake:

EEAT isn’t a new concept, but it carries more weight now precisely because low-quality content has become so easy to produce at scale.

Keyword Research

With AI chatbots handling more queries, users are making longer, more specific, and more conversational searches.

We used to primarily see generic searches like: “best running shoes for men”

But now, thanks to hyper-personalized AI answers, we’re seeing a rise in searches like: “What’s the best running shoe for experienced marathon runners? Rank them by price”

Traditional keyword research is still useful — especially for understanding the search demand for key topics in your industry. But your content strategy needs to account for this shift toward specificity.

Backlink Building

A strong backlink profile still matters for traditional rankings, and links remain a meaningful signal.

But in the AI era, brand mentions are more important than backlinks alone.

Brand mentions actually outperform backlinks when it comes to AI visibility.

An Ahrefs study analyzing 75,000 brands found that brand web mentions had the #1 impact on showing up in Google’s AI Overviews, while the number of backlinks ranked #7.

A brand mention is exactly what it sounds like: It’s when your brand name is mentioned as a solution for your product category.

These are mainly found in “Best [type of product]” listicles, where it’s especially important to be mentioned because AI uses these to recommend products for bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) searches that drive sales.

However, brand mentions from social media posts, Reddit threads, YouTube, and other sources matter too.

Reporting

Tracking rankings, monitoring impressions and clicks in Google Search Console, and measuring conversions in GA4 — none of that has become irrelevant.

You’ll actually still find a small percentage of LLM referral traffic being properly attributed in GA4.

What’s changed is that these metrics alone don’t give you the full picture of how AI is influencing traffic and conversions.

This is because of 2 main reasons:

  1. The little bit of traffic that comes from a user clicking a source link in Google’s AI Overviews or AI Mode isn’t currently segmented in Search Console and Google Analytics.

  2. The main value of AI search is having your brand recommended when a user is looking for a product like yours. This has created a phenomenon where more searchers see a brand in an AI answer and then go directly to the brand’s homepage, making attribution tracking a nightmare.

So instead of focusing only on keyword rankings and tracking users through their clicks, brands now need to track their appearances inside AI answers themselves.

The 2 most important visibility signals are:

  1. Brand mentions (company or product names) in the generated response
  2. Link citations that reference your web page as a source.

8 AI Search and GEO Tactics that Drive Revenue

The goal of traditional SEO was to rank your website among the 10 blue links in the SERPs.

The goal of GEO (or whatever AI search acronym you want to use) is fairly different.

There’s still the aspect of ranking your website’s URLs in AI results as sources.

But the primary goal should be to rank your BRAND in AI results, so your strategies will be fairly different.

1) Refocus on BOFU Search

Since we know that only ~1% of users click the citations inside AI answers, this changes our strategy in the AI era in a few ways:

  1. Ranking your website’s page URLs as sources in AI answers should be a secondary goal, not a primary one.
  2. This is especially true for informational searches like “what is [keyword]”. AI now provides direct answers to these questions, making it less likely the user will click through to a website. And only a very small percentage of this traffic will convert, like less than 0.1%.
  3. The primary goal is now to influence AI to recommend your brand and products when a user is in-market to buy. (These are your BOFU searches.)

Owning the traditional BOFU SERP results has always been valuable for driving direct sales from SEO. If you could rank in the top 3 results for a keyword like “best CRM software,” you were pretty much guaranteed to generate customers (if you were a CRM company).

2) Publish Content Off-Website Content

Your website isn’t the only source AI platforms pull from. A Semrush study found that ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity regularly cite domains like:

This means you’ll want to start publishing content on these other platforms, or pay creators to publish content about your brand there.

3) Publish Hyperspecific Content and Pages

Unlike traditional search results, AI answers are more personalized because of a user’s chat history (which lets the AI get to know the user). They also tend to be more personalized because users can ask more specific, context-rich questions about their situation.

4) Add Schema

Schema markup gives AI systems a structured, machine-readable summary of your page content — which makes it significantly easier for them to extract and cite you in answers.

5) Build up Brand Mentions

When someone asks an AI to recommend a product, the platform draws on what it has already learned. A big part of that training data comes from listicles and comparison articles: “best [product category],” “top [product] alternatives,” “[competitor] vs. [competitor].”

6) Update Content Regularly

Updating SEO content has always been an effective way to improve rankings, but now it’s more impactful than ever.

7) Optimize Content for Quick Answers

Just like humans, AI is lazy and scans content for easy-to-extract answers. So the easier you make that extraction, the more likely you are to be cited.

8) Focus on Content AI and Competitors Can’t Easily Copy

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: AI is now better at explaining most things than most blog posts are.

How to Track and Report AI Search Performance

You can’t improve what you can’t see. And right now, most SEOs are flying blind on AI visibility.

Direct AI traffic in GA4

Brand mentions and link citations inside AI answers

Self-attribution

How to report on AI search’s compelling ROI

If you walk into a client meeting or leadership review leading with traffic numbers, you’re going to lose the room because sales generated and ROI is all that matters at the end of the day.

Increase your AI Visibility and Futureproof your Business

If your current reporting stack doesn’t include AI visibility data, you’re missing a significant part of the picture.

And the longer that gap stays open, the harder it becomes to explain declining traffic, prove SEO value, or course-correct before competitors pull ahead.