AI broke search engine optimization. For higher or worse.
For twenty years, Google and SEOs labored underneath a silent settlement: we construction the online, when you ship us customers. However AI and reply engines breached it, inviting a clickless enterprise mannequin that plunged the entire business into panic.
Very like anybody dealing with a sudden loss, SEOs and entrepreneurs are at the moment biking by means of the 5 phases of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, melancholy, and acceptance.
Our aim right here is that can assist you course of the change and unemotionally come to phrases with the components of search engine optimization which have modified (and the components that haven’t), so you may focus your vitality on the methods and techniques that also work in 2026.
Google’s AI Overviews, initially launched in Might 2024, have been a laughingstock at first.
The AI-generated textual content summaries advisable glue as a pizza topping, amongst different wild hallucinations. The consensus was clear: the US rollout can be an enormous flop, customers would hate it, and Google would shortly roll again its “featured snippet on steroids”.
This denial was additionally rooted in a standard perception that Google would by no means cannibalize its personal visitors. That it could by no means have the ability to monetize AIOs. That on a regular basis searchers would miss the ten blue hyperlinks too a lot.
However whereas SEOs have been busy laughing on the pizza glue, they have been ignoring the writing on the wall. Only a yr earlier, ChatGPT grew to become the primary app on the planet to acquire 100 monthly active users, proving that individuals do, in truth, want immediate solutions over clicking a bunch of internet sites.
The anger began to construct when SEOs realized that AI Overviews weren’t simply non permanent volatility exams. They have been infrastructure replacements right here to remain as soon as Google rolled out the feature globally and used Gemini 2.0 as the under-the-hood engine.
But the anger finally burst with the arrival of the dreaded “crocodile charts” in Google Search Console.
SEOs and marketers alike watched their dashboards in horror as the lines diverged like an open-mouthed crocodile: with impressions soaring and clicks plummeting.
The “great decoupling” directly coincided with the massive rollout of AI Overviews following Google’s March 2025 Core Update, which saw the presence of AIOs almost double overnight.
Not surprisingly, AIOs reduced clicks to top-ranking pages by 34.5% in the following month, with informational keywords taking the heaviest hit.
The March Core Update introduced another twist: automatic translations.
Google began to systematically siphon international search traffic. It did so by translating pages for queries that lacked sufficient native-language content and hosting them on its own subfolder (rather than sending the translated traffic to your own website).
In short: if your site wasn’t fully localized, you were handing your international traffic over to Google on a silver platter.
Publishers realized they were trapped. If they blocked AI crawlers from scraping and *cough* plagiarising their content, they risked disappearing from search results altogether.
So they fought back with lawsuits and lobbying. Not just against Google, but against all AI chatbots that were gaining popularity:
- OpenAI was sued by The New York Times for having ChatGPT scrap thousands and thousands of their articles
- Anthropic confronted a $1.5 billion lawsuit for allegedly coaching Claude on thousands and thousands of books pirated from pirated libraries like LibGen
- Google acquired hit with a major antitrust lawsuit for utilizing their monopoly to drive publishers into handing over their content material to AI Overviews
Regardless of this, conversational chatbots continued to rack up extra customers.
With the knife at their throat, SEOs did what they know greatest: sport over-optimize the system.
After clicks plummeted, model mentions grew to become the brand new visibility metric. As a result of the extra model mentions you will have, the extra touchpoints LLMs need to cite your model as the reply.
The desperation dragged the entire business into a brand new black-hat era, this time manipulating any online asset that could potentially influence a brand’s AI visibility. I’m talking about:
To many experienced SEOs, these tactics felt less like optimization, and more like capitulation.
“Welcome to the zero-click search period, please go away your visitors on the door,” as Ahrefs’ Louise Linehan brilliantly put it.
Google’s clickless model wasn’t a novelty. SparkToro found out in 2024 that roughly 60% of all searches ended in no clicks (each throughout the US and Europe).
Once more, the true blow got here when AI Overviews virtually doubled in a single day. In response to a current Ahrefs’ examine, these now change each two days by way of the textual content generated, URLs cited, and types talked about. So count on your model mentions and AI citations to be risky.
Talking of metrics, SEOs are additionally caught with the great outdated attribution dilemma. Aside from Bing introducing an AI performance report for Microsoft Copilot, not one of the AI platforms are disclosing their prompts and search quantity. In contrast to conventional engines like google, reply engines are non-deterministic: no two questions, nor two outcomes, are the similar.
Due to this, search quantity is much less related for AI search. Any search quantity supplied by the brand new AI visibility instruments is, at greatest, directionally correct – together with Ahrefs’ (though we floor our prompts in actual key phrases from actual customers).
But, most CMOs will urge their search engine optimization groups to purchase an AI visibility instrument so their model magically reveals up in ChatGPT or AI Overviews. As Eli Schwartz argued, this isn’t a job for SEOs. It’s a job for model entrepreneurs and PR groups who’re higher suited to fabricate demand for a model.
Nonetheless, count on search engine optimization budgets to be cannibalized as AI continues to favor essentially the most referenced manufacturers on the net, even when they’re pretend ones. We ran our personal AI misinformation experiment…and it labored.
What would possibly the ultimate part of search engine optimization grief look like?
Earlier than displaying you what issues within the new search engine optimization period, it’s value summarizing (and accepting) what has completely modified:
- The ten blue hyperlinks should not coming again. And that is by design. With AI engines like google, you don’t must click on by means of a number of pages anymore, until you particularly need to analysis a subject or product in additional depth. Look no additional than Google’s AI Mode, which now delivers customized, ChatGPT-like experiences proper above the SERPs, and also you get the level.
- Visitors from informational key phrases is diminishing. Who desires to learn a 1,000-word definitional article about investing, when an AI can immediately summarize from a number of sources? Within the outdated search engine optimization world, top-of-the-funnel content material existed to push customers in the direction of extra certified pages. With zero-click search and AI Overviews (now powered by Gemini 3) probably eroding traffic for both publishers and Google itself, the normal funnel is perpetually damaged.
These modifications should not all unhealthy information, although.
Listed here are the techniques that matter within the new AEO/GEO/AI search engine optimization world:
1. Fanout queries are the brand new key phrases
While you ask a query in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude, LLMs use a framework known as Retrieval-Augmented-Technology (RAG).
This course of refers to AI methods drawing info from real-time searches on Google, Bing, and different conventional engines like google.
Once they already “know” a solution, they use their very own coaching knowledge. However once they encounter a brand new or nuanced query, they carry out a reside search in search of the freshest and most related info through rising matters known as fanout queries.
Consider these fanout queries as constructing blocks on your topical clusters. Perceive how LLMs construct these fanout queries, create content material to cowl essential matters and sub-topics, and also you’ll increase your probabilities of displaying up in AI search.
To trace them, go to Brand Radar, search for AI responses for your brand, and check the Fanout queries column.
2. Brand IS the new moat: go multi-platform
In AI search, most of your mentions and citations in AI conversations will come from third-party websites, and not your own content.
For example, looking at the top sources for Ahrefs’ brand mentions in AI responses, ahrefs.com wasn’t cited as a primary source in ChatGPT.
We fared much better in AI Overviews on position #7, yet we still weren’t showing up in the top three.
What does this mean?
SEOs and marketers have a new job overnight: to proactively monitor mentions of your brand on other websites that can potentially influence a brand’s AI visibility.
AI doesn’t just favor the company with the biggest SEO budget anymore. It favors the brand with the strongest narrative across a wide range of off-site touchpoints: videos, podcasts, PR, community forums, and even OOH advertising.
These touchpoints were always essential to a brand’s health. But AI has elevated them to a first-rate brand signal—a thesis confirmed by most CMOs on the Ahrefs podcast.
In fact, YouTube and Reddit are the second and third most cited sources in AI search, according to this Ahrefs study.
This means that SEO now needs to work much closer with brand and PR teams to secure brand mentions by pitching journalists, influencers, podcasters, advertisers, and community moderators.
You can already start monitoring multi-platform brand mentions in Ahrefs’ Brand Radar, which aggregates indexes from YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit.
For example, the YouTube report highlights brand mentions across video titles, descriptions, and even timestamped transcripts. Just jump straight to the minute when your brand was mentioned in case you’re looking for warm partnerships.
3. Track fluid AI metrics
AEO fundamentally breaks static SEO KPIs.
Answer engines are probabilistic by nature, meaning the exact same question can return different results. Ranking positions are not fixed either, and they also operate in a black box system that won’t show prompt search volume.
While fanout queries are incredibly helpful, they are also long-tail, low-volume questions that might often be totally unique, even never searched before. Don’t fall into the hyper long-tail trap of chasing every single prompt.
Instead, do this:
(a) Go for aggregate prompt tracking
This evens out the data and gives you a clear picture of how much market your own. Tags are available in Ahrefs’ Brand Radar for saved reports, making it easy to track AI visibility across broad topics and themes.
(b) Track your AI Share of Voice (SOV)
Non-deterministic AI answers shouldn’t stop you from tracking your AI market share.
The secret is to track your relative market share across a set of thousands of prompts, against the same competitors, on a consistent basis.
This ties back to the previous point. Don’t ask: “Did my brand appear for this exact query?”
A better question is: “Across thousands of prompts, how often does AI connect my brand with this topic or category?”
To do so, enter your brand in Brand Radar, add competitors, and check your AI Share of Voice percentage across Ahrefs’ 250+ million search-backed prompts. Then save the report for later monitoring.
4. SEO is no longer a zero-sum game
Before, going up in the rankings meant replacing someone else.
But the introduction of AI has actually enlarged the search market because people are searching more across all platforms. Adobe’s 2025 study backs this up: 3 in 10 U.S. respondents now belief ChatGPT greater than conventional engines like google, whereas 36% found a brand new product or model by means of it.
Briefly, the “search pie” hasn’t shrunk. Quite the opposite, it acquired greater!
The earlier you cease stressing about misplaced conventional rankings, the earlier you can begin claiming your share of this new AI-driven demand.
Advice
In response to it, AI visitors hit an all-time excessive in July 2025, however is making a comeback as of January 2026.
Whether or not you name it AEO, GEO, or LLMO, it finally boils all the way down to the identical actuality: AI search is a layer on high of search engine optimization.
There’s a huge overlap between the 2 disciplines. Foundational search engine optimization greatest practices—like crawlability, website construction, and high-quality content material—nonetheless apply. In any case, conventional net visibility closely impacts the RAG course of in AI search.
Nevertheless, the nuances of execution have shifted. You now need to play each video games concurrently: conventional search engine optimization to make sure your content material can truly be discovered and retrieved, and AEO to construct the off-site model authority required to be cited because the go-to reply in your area of interest.
The grief of shedding the outdated search engine optimization world is actual. However when you attain acceptance, you’ll understand the brand new sport isn’t about combating the reply engine.
It’s about changing into the model they’ll’t afford to disregard.
