SEO Is Still Important. AI Search Changes What Marketers Need to Optimise For.
For years, search marketing has revolved around a familiar set of questions.
Where do we rank? How much organic traffic are we getting? Which keywords are driving clicks? Which pages convert?
Those questions still belong on the dashboard but they are no longer the whole dashboard.
ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity and other AI search experiences can now answer the customer’s question directly, drawing information from multiple sources and deciding which businesses, brands and experts are worth mentioning.
Your customer may discover you without ever seeing a conventional search results page. AI Search Optimisation is about improving the chances that, when an AI system goes looking for an answer, your organisation provides information it can understand, retrieve, verify and reference.
For marketers at every level, this adds a new layer to search strategy.
Ranking number one does not tell the whole story
The behavioural change is already becoming visible. A Pew Research Center study analysed almost 69,000 Google searches from 900 US adults. When an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits, compared with 15% when no AI summary appeared. Only 1% clicked a link contained within the AI summary itself.
Those figures should not be projected across every audience or market, although they show why organic visibility increasingly needs to include mentions, citations and influence inside AI-generated answers alongside rankings and clicks.
A potential customer could now ask:
“Which CRM is best for a growing professional services business?”
“What should I look for when choosing an SEO agency?”
“Which UK companies provide sustainable packaging for ecommerce brands?”
“What are the best AI marketing training options for my team?”
Your brand may appear in the answer, appear as a cited source, appear indirectly through information you have published, or be absent completely. That creates a new marketing challenge.
Do not throw away your SEO strategy
AI Search Optimisation is not a replacement for SEO. Google explicitly says that its existing SEO best practices remain relevant to AI features and that there are no special files or secret schema required to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.
Pages still need to be crawlable and indexable. Internal linking, page experience, accurate structured data and accessible textual content still count.
The same principle applies to other AI search systems. If important information sits inside an image, behind an interface that a crawler cannot access, or on a page you have blocked from indexing, an AI system has less information available to evaluate.
Technical SEO has therefore acquired another job. It helps search engines find your content, and increasingly helps AI systems retrieve and interpret it too.
Write content that can actually be cited
A beautifully written page can still be difficult for AI to use. AI search systems frequently retrieve individual passages rather than digesting an entire article in the way a human reader might. Your content therefore needs to make its meaning clear.
If you sell software, explain which customers it is designed for, which integrations it supports, how implementation works, what the limitations are and how pricing is structured.
If you provide consultancy, describe your methodology, sectors, evidence, experience and outcomes.
If you manufacture a product, publish specifications, test conditions, installation information and documentation.
Descriptive headings, clear definitions, direct answers, comparison tables, numbered processes and evidence close to the claims it supports all make information easier to retrieve and interpret.
Marketing copy can still persuade and it also needs to explain.
AI needs evidence, not just confidence
We have spent years teaching brands to sound authoritative. AI search raises the value of proving that authority. Authorship, credentials, methodology, first-hand experience, original research, technical documentation and reliable external references all provide useful evidence.
This reaches beyond your own website. Industry bodies, universities, regulators, reputable media, trade publications and specialist communities can all help establish independent connections between your organisation and the subjects you claim expertise in.
This gives digital PR a particularly interesting role. A generic backlink has value, because a specific, accurate third-party reference explaining what your business does and why it is relevant may be even more useful in an AI search environment.
Keyword research needs a new companion
Do not stop doing keyword research; Add prompt research.
Talk to sales teams. Speak to customer service. Look at support tickets, enquiries, procurement questions and customer conversations. Then collect the questions people actually ask.
Group them around needs such as:
definition
comparison
cost
suitability
implementation
risk
availability
diagnosis
eligibility
People increasingly ask AI complete questions rather than assembling a search from two or three keywords. Your content planning should reflect that behaviour.
A marketer writing an article around “email marketing software” might therefore also consider the questions surrounding it:
Which email platform is best for a small B2B team?
How much should email marketing software cost?
What should we migrate from Mailchimp to?
Which platforms integrate with our CRM?
What are the risks when moving our customer data?
One strong, well-structured resource may answer many of those retrieval needs.
Seven practical changes marketers can make now
- Audit whether AI systems can understand your business – Ask ChatGPT, Google AI and Perplexity questions your customers are likely to ask. Record whether you appear, how you are described and which sources are being used.
- Make important information explicit – Check your main product, service and category pages. Remove vague language where customers need specific facts.
- Build content around customer questions – Combine keyword research with the natural-language questions coming from sales, service and customer conversations.
- Strengthen the evidence behind your claims – Add sources, methodology, dates, authorship, expertise, specifications and limitations where they genuinely help someone evaluate the information.
- Improve entity consistency – Use consistent brand names, product names, company descriptions, locations and ownership information across your website and important external profiles.
- Create content worth citing – Original research, useful data, expert commentary, clear comparisons, technical guidance and first-hand experience give other publishers and AI systems something substantial to reference.
- Measure more than organic traffic – Track rankings and clicks, but add AI mentions, citations, attributed claims, branded searches, assisted conversions and what sales teams hear from customers.
Do not chase an “AI ranking”
There is an important limitation to all of this. It is that there is no guaranteed number-one position in ChatGPT.
AI results can change according to the question, location, language, model, available sources and the way the user’s request is phrased. A source can be cited one day and absent from a similar response later. Even when your page is cited, an AI-generated answer can summarise it imperfectly or miss an important qualification.
AI Search Optimisation should therefore be treated as improving your eligibility to be found, understood and referenced, rather than attempting to manipulate a fixed ranking system.
Give people a reason to visit
There is another challenge. If AI answers the question, why should somebody click? The answer cannot simply be “because we want the traffic”.
Websites increasingly need to offer value beyond information that can be summarised in a few paragraphs. That could include calculators, diagnostic tools, original research, product configurators, demonstrations, detailed templates, expert advice, communities or interactive experiences. Your content can provide the answer. Your website should provide the next step.
Search visibility is becoming bigger than search rankings
SEO remains a core marketing discipline. The change is in where discovery now happens.
Sometimes the customer will search Google and click a blue link. Sometimes they will see an AI Overview. Sometimes they will ask ChatGPT for a shortlist. Sometimes Perplexity will assemble an answer from several sources before the customer has visited a single website.
Marketing teams therefore need content that works across all of those environments.
Keep your technical foundations strong. Answer real customer questions. Make important information easy to find. Demonstrate expertise with evidence. Build external authority. Keep commercial information current. Test how AI systems describe your organisation.
And start measuring whether your brand is becoming part of the answer, as well as whether your website is appearing in the results.
