Businesses excelling at traditional SEO can still be invisible to AI-powered search engines. AI prioritizes structured data (schema) and directory signals differently than Google's algorithm. A separate strategy for "Answer Engine Optimization" (AEO) is now required.

Unlike traditional search which serves links, AI "answer engines" provide opinions and summaries. This creates a new marketing vector: sentiment. Brands must now track not just if they are mentioned, but *how* they are described, and analyze why that sentiment changes over time.

Unlike traditional SEO's long-tail game, gaining visibility in LLMs requires a much faster, more reactive approach. The impact is seen much quicker, making organic content strategy behave more like a paid media campaign, demanding speed and continuous experimentation from teams.

Unlike traditional SEO, AI-generated answers are personalized based on a user's entire conversation history. Two people can get different results for the same prompt. Therefore, chasing keywords is a flawed strategy. Brands should instead focus on building a deep, structured, authoritative data foundation that the AI can interpret for any context.

With the rise of AI-driven agent search, consumers use conversational prompts ('What should I pack for Greece?') instead of simple keywords. To appear in these results, brands must shift from keyword optimization to tracking data on sources, sentiment, and contextual relevance to avoid becoming invisible.

According to Expedia's Head of Organic Search, success in Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) requires influencing four areas: the AI's training data, its real-time information retrieval process, the user queries themselves, and the AI's compounding user memory.

With 80-90% of AI-powered searches resulting in no clicks, traditional SEO is dying. The new key metric is "share of voice"—how often your brand is cited in AI-generated answers. This requires a fundamental strategy shift to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), focusing on becoming an authoritative source for LLMs rather than just driving website traffic.

The first step in a modern visibility audit is to check if your brand, products, or services are cited in Google's AI-generated answers. This is a critical new battleground for visibility that precedes traditional search results and requires dedicated attention.

In AI interfaces, a brand's content can influence millions of purchase decisions without a single user clicking a link or seeing the source material. Key metrics must shift from traffic to influence, recommendation rates, sentiment, and share of voice within AI-generated answers.