I’ve worked in SEO since 2008. For most of that time, “search” meant Google, and the playbook was easy to follow. You had to find the search queries your customers type, publish pages built for those search queries, and rank high enough to earn the click.
I’ve watched that playbook get rewritten before through major Google algorithm updates like Panda, Penguin, the move to mobile-first, and the rise of featured snippets, but none of those compares to what is happening now.
This rewrite is bigger with AI, and it is moving much faster than any updates before.
A Clear Spark Digital survey of 2,127 U.S. adults in April 2026 found that 76% use AI tools at least weekly, and 78.5% have made a real decision based on what AI told them.
When a buyer asks AI about your category, the answer they get is often the only answer they see. So the question worth your attention is simple. When that happens, does your business show up?
AI Is Changing How People Search Online
Apart from Google, the AI LLM that dominates AI search is ChatGPT, with over 900 million weekly active users in February 2026, more than double the 400 million it reported a year earlier.
Google’s AI Overviews, the AI summary that sits above the blue links, now reach more than 2 billion users a month, across 200 countries and 40 languages.
It is estimated that AI Overviews now show up in nearly half of all Google searches and most of those search result in zero clicks to websites.
Pew Research Center found in an August 2025 survey of 5,153 U.S. adults that 65% of Americans encounter AI summaries in search at least sometimes, and 45% see them often.
Bain & Company’s September 2025 survey of 1,500 U.S. adults found 44% of U.S. online buyers now start in an LLM or split their search between AI tools and Google.
What this reveals is that AI is now a primary place people go to find things, including businesses.
The Trust Shift Is The Biggest Change We’re Seeing
Adoption is one story. Trust is another, and it moved further than I expected when I first started testing these tools against client queries.
The Clear Spark Digital survey found that 68% of Americans trust AI search results as much as or more than traditional Google. That is a high number for a tool that did not exist in mainstream form three years ago.
The age data runs against the usual assumption. Adults 61 and older trust AI more than Gen Z does. 33% of Boomers say they trust AI search more than Google, against 23% of Gen Z.
Adobe’s Holiday 2025 consumer survey found the same direction. 66% said they believe AI tools give accurate results, and shoppers using AI reported feeling 65% more confident in their purchases.
Here is the line that should make you sit up. The survey found that only 17.4% of AI users always verify what AI tells them. Of the people who do verify, 72% use Google to do it.
So for most people, whatever AI says about your business or your category is the answer. There is no second opinion at the moment of decision.
The 3 Most Important AI Search Platforms
The mistake I see most often is treating “AI search” as one thing. ChatGPT, Google, and Gemini surface businesses in different ways, and the differences change what you should do.
Here is how each one works differently:
1. ChatGPT
ChatGPT is where the bypass is most direct. People skip Google entirely and ask ChatGPT to compare options, name the best companies in a category, or build them a short list. It is the leading consumer LLM with over 900 million weekly users sending more than 2.5 billion prompts a day, and a large share of those prompts are commercial.
When ChatGPT answers with search on, it pulls from across the web through Bing’s search index, not the pages that rank highest on Google. That matters for smaller businesses because in my experience, a page that sits on Google’s second or third page can still get pulled into a ChatGPT answer if it is clear, specific, and backed by outside coverage.
ChatGPT tends to lean on a tight set of trusted publishers, so a single placement in the right outlet carries weight. A study of 366,087 AI search citations found the top 20 news sources account for 67.3% of OpenAI’s citations.
2. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode
Google now has two AI surfaces, and they behave differently.
AI Overviews is the summary box at the top of normal search results. It correlates fairly closely with traditional rankings, so the pages Google already trusts tend to feed the summary. AI Overviews now take up roughly 42% of the desktop screen and 48% of mobile, pushing the old blue links well below the fold.
AI Mode is the newer, chat-style version of Search for complex questions. At Google I/O in May 2026, Google said AI Mode had passed 1 billion monthly users and now runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash by default.
AI Mode breaks the old rules harder, and this is the finding that changed how I think about ranking. Moz analyzed nearly 40,000 queries in February 2026 and found that 88% of AI Mode citations are not in the organic top 10 for the same query. Only 12% match the URLs Google ranks first, so this means ranking on page one no longer guarantees you appear in the AI answer for the same search.
Pew Research watched real behavior in a study of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025 and found that when an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional link only 8% of the time. Without a summary, they clicked 15% of the time and 26% of sessions with a summary ended with no click at all.
3. Gemini
Gemini is the one to watch on distribution. The Gemini app reached about 750 million monthly active users by early 2026, up from 450 million in mid-2025.
The app is only part of it. Gemini is the model behind AI Overviews and AI Mode; it sits inside Circle to Search across hundreds of millions of Android phones, and Google is folding it deeper into its products. That gives Gemini a footprint inside Google Search itself, where most people still start.
For your business, Gemini and AI Overviews are effectively the same retrieval problem. Win one and you tend to win the other, because the same model and the same sources feed both.
It’s also important to note that Gemini’s models now power Apple’s Siri AI on iOS devices.
How AI Cites Who Talks About You
This is the finding that owners need to sit with, because it overturns the homepage-first instinct that years of SEO advice built up.
AI does not return a list of links. It returns a synthesized answer built from across the web, and it builds that answer mostly from third-party sources, not from your own site.
A Muck Rack study in May 2026, which analyzed more than 25 million links across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, found that earned media accounts for 84% of all AI citations while paid placements only made up 0.3%.
The pattern holds across studies. University of Toronto research found AI engines cite earned media roughly five times more often than brand-owned content. Stacker and Scrunch ran a controlled test across 2,600 prompts and found that distributing the same story through earned media produced a median 239% lift in AI visibility, with 64% of citations coming from third-party publishers.
The reason is structural. AI systems are trust-routing before they are traffic-routing. A page on your own domain explains what you do. A credible outside publication confirms that you matter. AI reuses the confirmation.
So the old goal was to rank so people would click through to you. The new goal is to be in the answer at all, and the answer is assembled from what other people have published about you.
Why This Hits B2B And High-Consideration Buying Hardest
If you sell to other businesses, the shift is sharper.
Bain found that B2B buyers at small and mid-sized companies are already building vendor short lists inside LLMs. They ask the AI who to consider, get a list of names, then go validate those names through sites, reviews, and demos.
That short list decides more than it looks. Research from 6sense shows the winning vendor is already on the buyer’s initial short list 95% of the time, and 80% of deals go to the vendor the buyer contacts first.
Put those together. If AI builds the short list and your name is not on it, the deal is often decided before you knew it existed.
The Traffic Paradox: Fewer Clicks, Better Clicks
There is an upside, and it is real.
Overall click-through is down. Bain estimates AI summaries and chatbots have cut organic web traffic 15 to 25%. Zero-click search in the U.S. has risen toward 64%.
But the visits that do come through from AI are worth more. Adobe Analytics, drawing on more than a trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, reported AI-driven traffic grew 393% year over year in Q1 2026. In March 2026, AI-referred visitors converted 42% better than non-AI traffic, a full reversal from a year earlier when AI traffic converted 38% worse. Those visitors also spent 48% more time on site and viewed 13% more pages.
Google reports the same shape from its side. It says people who click a citation inside an AI Overview spend 27% more time on the destination than people arriving from a standard result.
The logic is plain. Someone who reaches you through AI has already asked the question and read the answer. They are closer to deciding than someone who just opened a list of links. The catch is that you have to be in the answer to get the visit.
How To Position Your Business For AI Search
The shift changes which work pays off. Here is what I focus on now, based on client work and what the research supports.
Get covered in the places AI actually reads. AI builds answers from articles, interviews, podcasts, comparison pieces, and editorial coverage, because outside sources signal independent credibility. If your visibility plan is your company blog and your LinkedIn page, AI will mostly skip you. Brands that appear on four or more third-party platforms are 2.8x more likely to be cited in ChatGPT, per Muck Rack’s analysis of more than a million prompts.
Make every page easy to lift. AI extracts passages, not whole pages. Lead each section with a direct answer in plain language. The Princeton GEO study found that citing sources raised visibility 40%, adding statistics 37%, and adding expert quotes 30%, while keyword stuffing lowered it by 10%. Specific numbers, named sources, and clear structure get you pulled into answers. Marketing fluff does not.
Build a body of work that carries your point of view. Founders who have published commentary, expert quotes, and bylined pieces across reputable sites surface far more often than founders who only polished their homepage. AI is looking for a recognizable presence in your space.
Check that you are not blocking the door. Each AI platform crawls with its own bot. GPTBot and ChatGPT-User belong to OpenAI, PerplexityBot to Perplexity, ClaudeBot to Anthropic, and Google-Extended covers Gemini and AI Overviews. If your robots.txt disallows any of them, that platform cannot cite you. Read your robots.txt and confirm the search bots are allowed. This is the kind of thing I check first on any new account.
Audit what AI says about you today. AI often pulls from outdated articles. If you raised a round, changed direction, or rebranded, old coverage may still be shaping the answer. You cannot fix what you have not read.
Keep investing in Google. Both Pew and the Clear Spark Digital survey show Google is still the default fact-checker. When someone hears your name in an AI answer, the next thing they often do is Google you. What they find there closes or loses the sale.
A Baseline you Can Run In 10 Minutes
Open ChatGPT and ask the question your ideal customer would ask. “What are the best [your category] companies?” or “Who should I hire to solve [your problem]?”
Note who shows up and note what gets said about you, if anything.
Run the same prompt in Gemini, in Perplexity, and in Google’s AI Mode. The answers will differ, and the differences tell you which platforms already know you and which do not.
The gaps you find are the work ahead. This is the first thing I run for a client now, before anything else.
Where This Leaves Us For Doing AI SEO
AI search went from novelty to default in under three years. The Clear Spark Digital survey shows most Americans use it weekly, trust it broadly, and act on it. Pew, Bain, Adobe, Muck Rack, and Moz show the same shift from different angles.
Discovery has moved from a list of links to a synthesized answer built mostly from what other people publish about you. Your homepage matters less than it did. The coverage that exists about you across the web matters more.
In 15 years of SEO, I have learned that the one thing surviving every algorithm change is the same. Real coverage in real places, expert commentary, interviews, and a clear point of view are what make businesses credible to people, and they are what make you visible to AI.
The AI search medium is new but the SEO work hasn’t actually changed all that much.
I believe the future of education starts with helping people find their "zone of genius" so they can develop their uniquely human ability to create meaning, connection and community (that A.I. can't replicate).
I'm also big on completely unplugging from tech to recharge on nature retreats and trekking adventures. That led me to start my most recent company Sacred Treks.
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