.svg)
Get a Demo
Interested in trying Goodie? fill out this form and we'll be in touch with you.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
.svg)
.svg)
If you thought that retaining the same SEO strategy you’ve been using since 2016 would get you by in 2025 and 2026, think again.
The future of search isn’t being defined by competing for rankings and keywords (and yes, we’re there). As more people turn to LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for their search needs, your goal should be to gain visibility in these platforms.
You may be wondering, though: How do you optimize for platforms that don't have traditional ranking factors like backlinks and keywords? The answer is a shift from SEO to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).
While SEO focuses on making your content discoverable by Google's algorithms, AEO is about making your content understandable and trustworthy to the AI, so that it cites you as a trusted source of information. This means a focus on clarity, accuracy, and providing direct, concise answers to user queries, as AI often summarizes and synthesizes information rather than sending users directly to a source.
Now, the battle for visibility will be won not by who ranks highest on a SERP, but by whose information is chosen by the AI to answer a user's question.
Google’s primary function is to serve as a catalog-based system, providing a ranked list of relevant web pages for a user to click on (almost like a library). This made the quintessential SEO strategy simple: get your website to the top of the list.
Success was measured by familiar metrics like rankings, organic traffic, and click-through rate (CTR). SEO strategies relied on technical optimization, building backlinks, and using targeted keywords to signal a page's relevance to the search engine's algorithms.
AI search, on the other hand, is an answer-based system. Instead of a list of links, it gives you a direct, synthesized answer from the information it has "read." The goal is to solve the user's problem immediately, often bypassing the need for a click.
This shift means that most of the old KPIs are no longer the only ones that matter; the new metrics of success are brand mentions, citations, and the sentiment of those mentions, all of which contribute to your brand’s AI visibility.
Google's AI Overviews are a hybrid model: an AI-generated answer that lives on a SERP and still relies somewhat on Google's search index. Notably, Ahrefs found that 76% of citations in the AI Overview rank in the top 10 in the SERP. The strategy to improve visibility in these overviews is to double down on long-standing SEO tactics, while structuring your content to be easily scannable and quotable.
The broader LLM ecosystem, though, operates far more independently. Platforms like Claude and Gemini have their own crawlers, separate from Googlebot, and often rely on a different set of data sources.
Claude, for example, favors social signals like likes, comments, and other social media interactions far more than Gemini, which prioritizes credible, semantically strong sources.
This is where the divergence from traditional SEO becomes most apparent, as your brand's authority and content structure, among many other distinct factors (not just its Google ranking) determine its AI visibility. The strategy here is to establish yourself as the authoritative source of truth across a wide range of channels.
By this point, you might be wondering how to optimize for AI visibility. The good news is that strong SEO acts as the backbone for AEO. Your content and website don’t need to be re-designed from the ground up, but there are strategies you can take to achieve machine-readable, trustworthy, and easily digestible content.
Think of an LLM as a highly advanced pattern-matching system, not a traditional database. It doesn't simply retrieve a web page; it synthesizes information based on the patterns it has learned. To win AI visibility, your content needs to be factual and easy for an AI to parse.
Make your content scannable by using H2s, H3s, and H4s that are phrased as questions, mimicking how users interact with AI. Provide direct, concise answers in the first paragraph of each section; cut the fluff. Use bullet points, numbered lists, and tables to break down complex information into digestible "chunks" that can be easily extracted and summarized by an AI.
While there's debate on whether LLMs "read" schema directly, it's a non-negotiable part of your strategy. Schema (such as FAQ, How-To, and QAPage) provides explicit signals about your content's structure and purpose, helping AI validate that your page is a credible source of structured information, increasing its likelihood of being cited.
Building trust is an essential part of creating your AEO strategy, as LLMs become the main messengers for information. AI doesn't just want to know what you say; it wants to know who you are and whether you can be trusted, a critical factor in achieving visibility.
The established H-E-E-A-T framework (Helpfulness, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) by Google is more important than ever. Ensure your content is tied to a named author with a bio and verifiable credentials, and cite reputable sources. Linking to third-party sources signals to AI that your information is well-researched and grounded in fact.
A brand mentioned alongside other authoritative sources in a single piece of content creates a powerful trust signal for an LLM, even without a hyperlink. The goal with this is to become part of the trusted knowledge graph that an AI draws from, which directly contributes to your AI visibility.
LLMs are being increasingly trained on user-generated content (UGC) from platforms such as Reddit, Quora, and YouTube. Engaging and building a presence on these platforms is crucial, as authentic discussions and mentions on these platforms can directly influence how a brand is perceived and cited by an LLM.
Optimizing for AI visibility isn't just about content; it's about ensuring your site is technically sound to a new category of crawlers.
Beyond GoogleBot, you must consider AI crawlers like GPTBot (OpenAI), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), and others when crafting your content. To do this, you need to manage your robots.txt file to allow these crawlers to access your content. Blocking them, or neglecting your robots.txt, means your content can't be used to answer queries, and the LLM will learn about your brand from less reliable sources.
While robots.txt controls access, the emerging LLMs.txt is a proposed standard that provides a personalized map of your site's most valuable content in a simple, machine-readable format. While not universally adopted yet, it allows you to provide a "shortcut" for LLMs, guiding them to your best content and ensuring they pull the most accurate information.
LLMs, like humans, prefer fast and clean websites. Ensure your site has fast load times and clean, semantically correct code. Avoid burying critical text in JavaScript or other complex elements that AI crawlers may struggle to render, which makes it easier for the AI to parse your site and use your content.
The relationship between traditional SEO and AI visibility is a symbiotic one. A strong SEO foundation is the prerequisite for success in achieving AI visibility, but you have to build upon it.
While traditional SEO makes your content discoverable and trustworthy to Google's algorithms, those signals of authority and expertise are what many LLMs then use to select your content. Additionally, without a solid foundation of technical SEO, backlinks, and content quality, your content may never be considered by an LLM in the first place.
We may be biased, but Goodie provides a comprehensive view of your AI visibility that's unmatched by any other. Goodie tracks brand mentions and sentiment across a wide range of LLMs, including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
When evaluating a tool, look for key features such as multi-LLM coverage, real-time citation analysis, and competitive benchmarking to ensure you can effectively measure your AEO efforts.
The traditional SEO dashboard is not enough. To measure your success in the LLM ecosystem, you need to track a new set of KPIs:
You can also begin by manually testing prompts and tracking your results, but Goodie makes it much easier.
While some may see AI as a threat to SEO, we like to treat it as a natural evolution. The core principles of SEO, which are creating helpful, authoritative, and trustworthy content, are still important; it’s just that their application has changed.
The future of your content strategy is not about choosing between SEO and AEO; it's about embracing a hybrid approach. As the goal has shifted from being at the top of the SERP to becoming the authoritative "source of truth" that a machine will choose to cite, the brands that win will be the ones that have invested in a strategy that is not only algorithm-proof but also future-proof.
By creating content that is factual, meticulously structured, and consistently present across a diverse ecosystem of platforms, you are building a lasting digital presence that will thrive as gaining AI visibility becomes the new goal.
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
