AI and SEO: What Does AI Search Mean for Your Business?
AI and its impact on SEO is probably one of the subjects I’m asked about most at the moment; my clients’ questions often fall into the categories below, and these are all reasonable questions. Search is changing quickly; there is no shortage of new terminology, and businesses understandably want to know whether their existing SEO strategy is still relevant.
Is AI replacing Google?
Do we still need SEO?
Should we be optimising the website for ChatGPT?
What are AEO and GEO?
Do we need to change all our content?
Traditional SEO still matters, and considerably more than some of the headlines suggest. Recent search behaviour research discussed by Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SparkToro, found that traditional search engines accounted for around 10% of website visits in Q4, compared with approximately 1% from AI tools.
Rand described AI tools as “additive rather than replacing traditional search right now”, with the focus remaining on both traditional and AI search optimisation.
That distinction is important. This isn’t a case of abandoning everything we know about SEO and starting again for AI. Following the usual best practices in SEO, with useful content, good website authority, and making sure search engines can properly understand your website are still fundamental.
What is changing is how and where people discover information, and therefore how we need to think about search visibility as part of a wider SEO strategy.
How Is AI Changing Search?
Previously, we’ve all just typed in a search term into Google or another search engine and seen the list of results; however, that experience is changing.
Google now incorporates generative AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode into Search. Rather than simply returning a list of pages, these experiences can bring information together from multiple sources and provide a generated response, alongside links to supporting websites.
Google has explained that these AI features still use its core Search ranking and quality systems to find relevant content from its search index.
Alongside Google, people are also using platforms such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and other AI tools to research products, businesses, services and topics.
For marketers, that means visibility is no longer only about whether your website appears in position one, five or ten in a conventional list of search results. Increasingly, we also need to consider whether a business, brand or website is being found, understood, mentioned, referenced or cited within an AI-generated answer.
Does Traditional SEO Still Matter?
Google’s own guidance is clear that its established SEO best practices continue to be relevant to generative AI search.
For a page to appear as a supporting source within Google’s AI features, it still needs to be discoverable, crawlable and indexed.
There is no separate technical requirement or special piece of AI markup that suddenly replaces everything we have been doing for SEO.
So the fundamentals haven’t disappeared.
Businesses still need to think about:
Technical website health and crawlability
Clear site structure
Internal linking
Search intent
Relevant and informative content
Page titles and headings
Website authority and reputation
User experience
Accurate business information
Measurement and reporting
AI search just adds another dimension to SEO. It doesn’t make all the work that came before it redundant. That is something I think is particularly important for clients and stakeholders to understand. AI visibility, whilst new and exciting, should not automatically replace traditional organic search performance as the primary measure of success.
So What Are AEO and GEO?
You may have started hearing terms such as AEO and GEO used alongside SEO.
AEO generally stands for Answer Engine Optimisation. It describes efforts to make information easier for search and answer-based systems to find and use when responding to a question.
GEO generally means Generative Engine Optimisation. This tends to refer more specifically to improving visibility within generative AI responses.
The terminology is still developing, and different platforms, agencies and marketers sometimes use the terms slightly differently. Personally, I find it more useful to think about search visibility as a whole rather than getting too caught up in the acronyms.
The objective is still to make sure your business provides clear, useful and trustworthy information that search engines, AI systems and, most importantly, people can find and understand.
Do We Need to Rewrite Our Website for AI?
There is currently no requirement to create an entirely different version of your website content for Google AI Overviews, AI Mode or other generative search experiences. However, it is worth reviewing whether your existing content genuinely answers the questions your audience has. Some examples are:
Does your website clearly explain what you do? So often I see “marketing waffle” that makes no sense to a customer who may be searching online.
Does it answer common customer or stakeholder questions?
Does your content demonstrate real knowledge and experience?
Are important facts buried underneath vague marketing language?
Are your services, products, people and areas of expertise clearly defined?
Does your content add anything beyond what dozens of other websites already say?
That last point is becoming particularly important. Useful, specific content based on genuine knowledge and first-hand experience has always been valuable for SEO, and I think it becomes even more important as AI makes generic content much easier to produce. For many businesses, improving visibility in AI search may therefore involve making existing content better, rather than simply creating more of it.
What About AI-Generated Content?
Using AI to help create content isn’t automatically a problem for SEO. AI can be extremely useful for research, brainstorming, organisation, summarising information and helping to structure content. The issue comes when businesses use it to produce large volumes of generic pages that add very little original value.
That distinction is important. Publishing hundreds of articles that reword information already available across the internet isn’t the same as producing something useful based on genuine expertise and human input still matters.
Your own data, experience, opinions, examples, expertise and understanding of your customers are what turn generic information into something worth reading. Ironically, as AI makes it easier for everyone to create more content, original experience potentially becomes more valuable, not less.
What Should Businesses Be Doing Now?
Follow best practices, as good technical and on-page SEO still matters. Your website pages should be crawlable and indexable to search engines, and your site structure should be clear, with any internal links relevant for users and search engines to understand your website content.
1. Make Sure Search Engines Can Properly Access Your Website
Good technical SEO still matters. Your website pages should be crawlable and indexable to search engines, and your site structure should be clear, with any internal links relevant for users and search engines to understand your website content
2. Be Clear About What Your Business Does
Avoid assuming that Google, an AI platform or even a potential customer automatically understands your business - services, products, locations, expertise and specialist areas should all be clearly explained.
I often see businesses using internal terminology, company-specific phrases or technical language that their customers would rarely use when searching. In some cases, you can read the entire homepage and still be unclear about what the business actually does.
That is why keyword research and search behaviour still matter. Look at the language people are actively using to find the products, services or solutions you offer, and make sure your website reflects that language naturally.
Consistency also matters. Your website, business listings, social profiles and other credible online references should tell a broadly consistent story about who you are and what you do.
3. Create Content Around Genuine Questions
Some of the best content opportunities are often sitting in your inbox, sales conversations or meeting notes.
What do clients repeatedly ask?
What does your sales team constantly have to explain?
Which subjects create confusion?
What questions keep appearing in stakeholder meetings?
These questions can become useful website content, whether that is a blog post, service-page section, guide or FAQ. The important thing is to answer the questions your audience is genuinely asking, using clear language and providing enough detail to be genuinely useful.
For example, AI and SEO is a subject I am regularly asked about, which is why it made sense to create a dedicated article answering those questions in more detail here.
4. Add Real Experience
Where possible, include information that genuinely comes from your organisation.
That might include:
Original research or data
First-hand experience
Expert opinion
Detailed product or service knowledge
Customer questions
Case studies
Practical examples
Industry expertise
You don’t necessarily need to reveal confidential client information to demonstrate expertise. Sometimes explaining how you approach a problem and why is far more useful than publishing another generic case study.
Read more about how I work with my clients here.
5. Keep Existing Content Accurate
AI search is another good reason to review older website content regularly.
Out-of-date information, contradictory pages and duplicate content can make it harder for both people and search systems to understand which information they should trust.
Keeping important pages current has always been part of good SEO, and that remains true as search continues to evolve.
Can We Measure AI Search Visibility?
This is one of the areas developing particularly quickly. Traditional SEO reporting has relied heavily on measures such as organic sessions, impressions, clicks, click-through rate, keyword rankings and conversions.
Those measures are still important, but AI search introduces some additional questions: Is our business or brand being mentioned in AI-generated answers?
Is our website being cited as a source?
Which pages are being referenced?
Which topics and questions are we associated with?
How does our visibility compare with competitors?
Are people visiting our website from AI platforms?
Are those visits resulting in enquiries, sales or other meaningful actions?
There are now tools available to help monitor this. The next step is to decide which measures matter most for your business, review them regularly, and use them to understand whether AI search is increasing visibility, citations and meaningful visits. For most businesses, the key is to treat AI search as part of the wider SEO picture, not a replacement for it.
For example, I use Semrush for SEO research, competitor analysis and reporting, and their AI Visibility Toolkit now provides additional insight into AI search.
It can monitor areas such as AI visibility, brand mentions, citations, cited pages and selected prompts over time, as well as compare performance against competitors. This means I can start incorporating AI search data into my regular SEO reporting alongside more established measures of organic performance.
AI visibility measurement is still developing, and results can vary depending on the platform, prompts and methodology being used. There is not currently one universal AI ranking or metric that tells us whether a business is performing well. That is why I use Semrush alongside Google Search Console, GA4 and existing SEO reporting to build a broader picture of how people are finding a business across both traditional and AI-led search. More importantly, I look at what happens next. Depending on the business, that could include form submissions, calls, downloads and other B2B enquiries, or ecommerce activity and sales for retail clients.
AI visibility, mentions and citations can all provide useful insight, but I view them alongside website behaviour, key events and conversions rather than as standalone measures of performance.
Should AI Visibility Be Used as a Measure of SEO Performance?
AI visibility is absolutely something businesses should start monitoring, but I would be cautious about using it as the sole benchmark for SEO performance.
This is something I am increasingly seeing in conversations with my clients.
Understandably, there is a lot of interest in whether a brand appears within ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews or other AI-generated answers, and that visibility can provide useful insight.
But it is one signal, not the whole picture.
Rand Fishkin’s description of AI tools as additive rather than replacing traditional search is particularly relevant here.
People haven’t suddenly stopped using Google, visiting websites, searching for brands or converting through established digital channels.
For me, AI search visibility needs to sit alongside the wider measures we already use to understand SEO performance, including:
Organic search visibility and keyword performance
Search impressions and clicks
Organic website traffic
Engagement with important landing pages
Leads, enquiries, sales or other conversions
Branded search demand
Referral traffic from AI platforms
AI citations and mentions, where these can be reliably measured
It is also important to understand the limitations of some of the newer AI visibility tools. Results can change according to the platform, the prompts being monitored, location, personalisation and the methodology being used. For that reason, I wouldn’t look at a competitor appearing more frequently within one AI monitoring tool and automatically conclude that your SEO strategy is underperforming.
Traditional SEO KPIs, such as organic traffic, impressions, clicks, keyword rankings, engagement and conversions, are still valuable for understanding overall performance and making monthly or yearly comparisons. AI visibility provides another useful layer of information to add to that analysis, rather than replacing these established measures.
So while I am increasingly including AI visibility within SEO reporting and conversations, I wouldn’t use it in isolation for whether an SEO strategy is succeeding.
Ultimately, the question still needs to be: are the right people finding us, and is that visibility contributing to meaningful business outcomes?
Do We Need a Completely Separate AI Search Strategy?
For most businesses, I don’t think the starting point needs to be a completely separate strategy. It makes more sense to consider AI search as part of the wider SEO and digital marketing strategy.
If a website has technical problems, thin service pages, unclear messaging, poor internal linking or very little useful content, creating an “AI optimisation strategy” before addressing those issues would be starting in the wrong place.
The priority should be to build a website that clearly demonstrates what the business does, provides genuinely useful information and gives search engines and AI systems good information to work with. From there, we can monitor how search behaviour and AI visibility develop and adapt the strategy accordingly.
Should Businesses Be Worried About AI and SEO?
I think businesses should pay attention, rather than panic. Search behaviour is changing, and we should absolutely be monitoring what that means for website traffic, content strategy and customer journeys. But I would be wary of abandoning established SEO principles every time a new acronym, platform or AI optimisation tactic appears.
It is also worth remembering Rand Fishkin’s broader point about focusing on where your actual audience and customers are, rather than automatically moving budget or resource towards whichever platform is receiving the most attention at that moment.
For some businesses, AI platforms may already play an important role in the customer journey. For others, Google organic search, paid search, email, social media or other channels may still be doing the vast majority of the work. That is why measurement needs to come before assumptions.
Strong technical foundations, useful original content, relevant expertise and clear information remain central to traditional SEO, and they also give AI search systems something credible to discover and reference. While the platforms, interfaces and measurements will continue to change, the underlying objective is much more familiar: Make it easy for people and search systems to understand who you are, what you know and why your information is worth using.
Then measure what happens, put those numbers into context and adapt as the way people search continues to change.
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