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This guide brings together insights from Amazee SEO 2025 and real audits across industries to show what’s actually working in AI SEO.
I have written this for marketers, founders, and SEO professionals preparing for 2026, which is going to be a special year where search visibility won’t depend on where you rank, but how you’re retrieved, and I can already see things happening in 2025 right now.
Ranking on Google isn’t enough anymore. As we prepare for 2026, AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and even Google’s AI Overviews are deciding what users see, not just what they search.
AI SEO is shifting from rankings to retrievability.
It’s about whether your brand gets cited, mentioned, or referenced by AI systems and not just whether your page appears on the first page of Google.
You might still rank #1 for a keyword, but it does not guarantee that #1 position traffic you are used to. And I tell you why…
Because this generation, and the upcoming generation is trusting AI summaries over manual searching.
This is the main reason why Google started AI overviews, as they also noticed, competition is providing short and quick answers to user queries, thus intercepting the coveted CLICKS, that Google built its core business model on.
And I am not just speculating.
Between March 2024 and May 2025, traffic to major publishers dropped from 2.3 billion to 1.7 billion visits. Meanwhile, AI platforms like ChatGPT grew from 400 million to over 800 million users.
Half of search volume is expected to migrate away from traditional search engines by 2028, according to Gartner.
So, if you are wondering if that SEO shift is happening, it has already started.
Yes, this generation is not typing queries into a search bar anymore; they’re asking questions conversationally.
You might think this doesn’t apply to your business because you target an older audience.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but even millennials and Gen X are moving toward fast, conversational answers.
In fact, the older audience is getting trained by Gen Zs on voice search.
AI agents like Siri, Alexa, and ChatGPT are now getting tons of voice queries, and not just informational ones. These are intent-based voice commands, like:
“I want to buy the latest PS5 pro, where do I buy it?”
They get instant responses, personalized and location-specific, complete with links and recommendations..
Here are some more examples:
Instead of “best online MBA programs India,” now users now ask either via typing or via voice:
“Which is the top-rated online MBA program recognized in India that offers scholarships?”
So it’s not just the medium of search that’s changing, it’s the structure of the query itself. Queries are getting longer, more contextual, and deeply intent-rich.
Did you know that the average ChatGPT query length is eight words?
And here’s the bigger shift:
Now, your visibility now depends on whether these systems understand and trust your content enough to reference it in their responses.
Traditional SEO metrics like your rankings, backlinks, and organic clicks are starting to lose meaning.
I’m seeing this firsthand, both at the forefront of my own marketing work and across multiple businesses where I serve as a fractional CMO or AI marketing strategist.
In one recent audit for a medical discount card company, I compared their traditional SEO performance with their AI visibility.
They were ranking for almost all of their local keywords, yet still losing traffic to competitors who showed up inside AI Overviews and ChatGPT results.
If you’re still optimizing for keyword position alone, you’re fighting yesterday’s battle.
The new KPI isn’t “position” anymore, it’s “retrievability.” Here are the top 3 questions, I ask any business owner and their marketing team:
Retrievability is the new visibility.
AI search doesn’t have one algorithm, it has layers. Here is a “3-Layer Architecture” that perfectly explains how AI search sees your content.
This is where historical knowledge lives, it is the static data an LLM was trained on.
You can’t directly edit it, but you can influence future training by strengthening your brand mentions across high-trust sources like Wikipedia, Substack, and GitHub.
If your brand becomes part of that pre-trained memory, it pays dividends across every AI platform.
This is where real-time competition happens.
RAG systems pull data live from the web, from articles, structured data, and knowledge graphs, and then integrate it into AI responses.
Your content must be accessible, structured, and quotable for these systems to find it.
That’s where schema, answer-first writing, and entity clarity matter most.
This layer is still emerging and it’s where AI doesn’t just retrieve but acts.
Agentic AIs can reason through multiple sources, use tools, and even execute multi-step plans.
Influencing this means creating tool-ready, structured data and API-accessible information, something that AI agents can fetch or calculate from your site.
For example, If Primotech publishes and maintains a “Top Performing Marketing Agencies Dataset” that tracks campaign ROI benchmarks across sectors, and ranks itself amongst the top 10.
That’s how you move from being “ranked” to being “referenced.”
It means SEO is no longer about optimizing for one engine.
You’re optimizing for systems that read, summarize, and reason.
Your goal isn’t to win clicks anymore, it’s about winning mentions.
Because once an AI mentions your brand as a source, it becomes part of the answer.
That’s how you have future-proof visibility.
Now, let me break down how AI search actually sees and understands your brand, and what you can do right now to show up inside LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
AI doesn’t look at your website the way Google once did.
It doesn’t crawl, rank, and list results in order.
It reads, relates, and reasons.
When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question, these systems scan multiple data points to find the most relevant, trustworthy, and complete source.
Your brand shows up only if it’s understood at an entity level and trusted across multiple layers.
That’s what AI SEO is really about now. It is about being understood, retrievable, and cited.
The simplest way to look at this is through three words: Presence, Accessibility, and Recognition.
Together, they decide if your brand appears in AI answers or gets left out completely.
Most brands assume they exist in AI systems just because their website is live and indexed.
That’s not true.
AI platforms don’t see the whole web. They read a filtered version. They pick the content that’s clean, structured, and verified by trusted data sources.
Think of it as a “training pool.” If you’re not in it, you don’t exist in AI search results.
In one audit we did for a healthcare services platform, the brand had thousands of indexed pages but almost no visibility inside AI systems. They were ranking well on Google, yet when tested on ChatGPT and Perplexity queries, their name never showed up.
Why?
Because their brand was invisible where it mattered.
No mentions in public datasets. No structured signals that AI could identify as an entity.
To build presence, you must focus on:
In short, don’t just publish. Make sure you exist in the places AI learns from.
Even if you exist, AI systems still need to reach your data easily.
That’s where most businesses fail.
In one of our audits for an international service brand, we found something surprising. Out of 8,000 total URLs, over 7,000 were marked “noindex.” Even worse, the main landing pages were linking to those noindex URLs.
So while Google could crawl their site, AI crawlers and retrieval systems couldn’t access the real content structure. Their internal links were sending mixed signals, breadcrumbs pointed to blocked pages, and schema was misused.
Article schema was designed for editorial or blog content, not for commercial or conversion-oriented pages.
As a result, LLM search engines may misclassify these pages as informational articles rather than transactional or service pages.
It’s like inviting AI to your store but keeping all your doors locked.
Accessibility means:
Even basic errors like canonical tags pointing to global pages instead of regional ones can make your content invisible to AI.
This is where the real game begins.
Even if your site is accessible and present in data pools, AI will not quote you unless you appear credible.
And credibility today isn’t about backlinks. It’s about entity trust and authentic signals.
We saw this clearly in an audit for a large home services marketplace. They had more than a million pages indexed, but most of them looked fake, thin, generic, or misleading.
Their “reviews” were duplicated from other sites.
Category pages had irrelevant listings.
There were no author bios, no transparency, no E-E-A-T signals.
When we tested their name on ChatGPT, it barely appeared.
Meanwhile, a smaller competitor with verified business listings, real user content, and clear authorship was being mentioned repeatedly.
AI trusts content that feels human, verifiable, and complete. If your content looks artificial, repetitive, or disconnected from real data, you’ll be ignored.
So, you can only build recognition by:
A strong recognition layer ensures AI knows who you are, believes you’re legitimate, and feels confident referencing you.
Let’s look at this from a real-world perspective.
In one of our marketing audits, we compared two competing healthcare brands. Both ranked for the same set of high-volume service keywords. Both had good backlinks and identical technical SEO scores.
But when we tested twenty common conversational queries on ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, one brand showed up in six answers. The other didn’t appear once.
The only difference?
The visible brand had its key data sources connected including FAQ schema, JSON datasets, entity markup, and real PR mentions.
The invisible one was doing everything “right” by 2019 SEO standards but was invisible to modern AI retrievers.
Retrievability isn’t a technical metric. It’s an outcome.
It’s proof that your data, content, and entity reputation are strong enough for AI systems to use confidently.
Here’s something simple I often ask my marketing teams to do.
Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and type:
“Tell me about [your company name].”
Then note what shows up.
If the AI says it has “limited data,” or gives outdated info, or skips your brand entirely, that’s your sign that you don’t exist in AI search yet. You need to start by auditing your brand’s retrievability and building layers of data AI can actually read.
Okay, so that’s it for part 1 of this AI SEO 2026 series. In the next part, I’ll break down from how AI sees your brand to how you can structure your website and content for it, and finally what actually gets cited by AI.
Because AI doesn’t just care about what you publish, it cares about how your information is designed and connected.
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11 Oct 2025
