SEO, what now? The plain-English guide to AI search
Search is turning into answers. Here's what changed, what still works, and the five things to do first, whatever platform you run.
If your search traffic has gone soft while your rankings look fine, you’re not imagining it. Search is turning into answers. Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot now respond to a lot of questions directly, and fewer people click through to the sites those answers came from.
That’s the “what now” in our name. This guide explains what changed, what still works, and where to start.
What actually changed
Three things happened at once.
Answers moved above the results. Google’s AI Overviews reach more than two billion people a month. When one appears, clicks to the regular results drop. In early 2026, about 68% of US Google searches ended without a click, up from about 60% in 2024.
People started asking chatbots instead of searching. ChatGPT passed 900 million weekly users in February 2026, and Gemini and Perplexity are growing fast. Many of those conversations are searches by another name.
Being cited became the new ranking. Seer Interactive looked at 2.43 billion impressions and found organic click-through on informational queries of 3.35% with no AI Overview, 2.07% when the brand was cited in one, and 0.94% when it wasn’t. Showing up inside the answer roughly doubles your clicks compared with being left out.
What it isn’t
It isn’t the end of SEO. Google’s own guidance from May 2026 says optimizing for AI features “is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO”. AI answers are built from pages that search engines can crawl, understand and trust. The same foundations still decide who gets quoted.
It also isn’t a reason to panic-buy. AI sends real visitors, but still a small share: about 0.32% of all website traffic in 2026, though that’s up 16 times since 2024. Classic Google search still sends far more. Plan for both.
About the acronyms
You’ll hear GEO, AEO, LLMO, AIO, SXO and AI SEO. They mostly describe the same job: making sure AI tools can find your site, understand it and cite it. GEO is the most searched term right now. We say “AI search” because it’s what people actually understand. Our jargon decoder has the full list, with a verdict on each.
The five things to do first
These apply on any platform. Our WordPress, Drupal, Shopify and headless playbooks go deeper.
- Make sure AI crawlers can actually read your pages. Check that your robots.txt, security plugin or CDN isn’t blocking bots like OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User and PerplexityBot. If your site renders content with JavaScript, confirm the text is in the raw HTML, because most AI crawlers don’t run scripts. Here’s how to check.
- Answer the real questions, clearly, near the top. AI answers quote pages that state things plainly. Lead with the answer, then explain. Use headings that match how people ask.
- Be specific and original. Generic content gets summarized without credit. Original numbers, real examples, tested steps and a clear point of view are what get cited.
- Make your brand unambiguous. Consistent name, address and descriptions everywhere; a solid About page; Organization structured data that links to your real profiles. AI systems need to be sure who you are before they recommend you.
- Start measuring the new way. Write down 20 to 25 questions your customers ask, run them in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google every month, and record who gets cited. It’s free, and it tells you more than traffic alone. Most marketers don’t track this at all.
What to skip for now
Paying for llms.txt. It’s a proposed file that gives AI a map of your site. Ahrefs found 97% of llms.txt files got zero requests in May 2026. If your SEO plugin makes one for free, fine. Don’t spend money on it. Our full take.
Schema as an AI hack. Structured data is still worth doing for rich results and for making your brand clear to machines. But an Ahrefs test of 1,885 pages found no meaningful lift in AI citations from adding it. Do it for the right reasons.
Anything sold as a guaranteed AI ranking. Nobody controls what an AI model says. Anyone promising otherwise is selling.
The bottom line
The sites that win in AI search are the same ones that deserved to win in regular search: readable, specific, trustworthy and easy for machines to parse. What changed is how little room there is for anything less. Start with the five steps above, then pick your platform playbook.