AI Search Is Changing SEO. Here’s How We’re Adapting.

A year or two ago, ranking on page one of Google was the whole game. Now there’s a second page one: the AI-generated answer sitting above every result, summarizing the web before anyone scrolls past it. Whether that answer mentions your business or a competitor’s is quickly becoming as important as where you rank underneath it.

What actually changed

Search engines used to send a searcher to ten blue links and let them do the reading. AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the assistant baked into more browsers every month do the reading first, then hand over a synthesized answer with a few citations attached. That’s fewer clicks overall, but the clicks that do happen go to sources the AI trusted enough to cite — which means getting cited is the new getting ranked.

The mechanics behind that trust aren’t a mystery, and they’re not that different from good SEO fundamentals: clear, specific, well-structured content; real expertise instead of thin rewrites of what’s already ranking; and pages that answer the actual question instead of circling it for 800 words before getting to the point.

What we’re doing differently

Structured data is no longer a nice-to-have. Schema markup — the invisible layer that tells search engines and AI crawlers exactly what a page is, who wrote it, and how it’s organized — is one of the clearest signals we can hand an AI system that’s trying to summarize a page correctly. Every service, FAQ, and article on a site we build carries it.

We’re also writing more directly. AI summarizers reward pages that state an answer plainly near the top, then support it, instead of pages that make a reader — or a crawler — hunt for the point. It’s a good discipline even for humans.

And we’re not abandoning traditional SEO to chase this — the two overlap more than they compete. A fast, well-linked, mobile-friendly site with genuine authority in its niche still ranks well and gets cited well. The businesses getting hurt by AI search are the ones that were coasting on thin content, not the ones doing the work.

The part that hasn’t changed

For all the new terminology, the goal is the same one it’s always been: be the clearest, most useful answer to the question someone’s actually asking. AI search just changed who — or what — is reading your answer first.

If your site hasn’t been touched since before “AI Overview” was a phrase anyone used, that’s a good place to start looking.