The AI era has created a dramatic shift in the way people search for information. Prior to AI, traditional search engines provided a list of links for users to browse. The more first page links your website received on Google, the greater the likelihood users would click through to your website, read your content related to their search query and (hopefully) continue exploring to learn more about your brand and your offering. The goal of traditional SEO was to drive as much traffic as possible to your website.
AI-driven search has changed the process entirely by providing direct, conversational answers tailored to user intent. They do this by processing and synthesizing information from a variety of sources to generate direct answers to your question, often eliminating the need for users to click through to specific websites to find the information they’re seeking.
The end result of this shift that the search world you know is shrinking. Gartner, a leading technological research and consulting firm, is predicting a 25% decline in traditional search volume by 2026 due to AI search eliminating the need for users to click through to specific websites to get the information they need.
We’re already seeing the effects of AI search in some major ways:
- AI overviews appear in approximately 47% of search results in 2025, compared to just 25% in mid-2024
- 60% of Google searches never result in a click through to another website from the results page
- When AI overviews are present in a search result, clickthrough rates decrease by 34.5%
Does this mean that SEO is dead, as many prognosticators have already pronounced? Not exactly. A more accurate statement would be to say that the game has changed. It’s no longer enough to focus your SEO efforts on achieving first page rankings on Google. Your content creation and SEO tactics must also ensure that your content is structured in a way that allows AI models to easily interpret and use the information in their responses to user search queries.
First page rankings are rapidly becoming replaced by AI citations as the primary goal of SEO. These citations in AI overviews help you improve brand visibility and enhance your brand’s authority, providing a far more powerful tool to grow your business than traditional first page rankings and their corresponding website traffic could achieve.
Understanding How AI Search Works
Traditional search engines rely on a complex algorithm that emphasizes keyword matching, user experience, backlinks, meta tags and a variety of other factors to determine which pages rank well for a specific search query. AI search, on the other hand, has a greater ability to understand meaning and relevance in order to deliver more personalized results for each specific search query.
AI-powered search differs from traditional search in several important ways:
- Semantic Search Ability – AI search models have the ability to analyze the meaning behind a specific search query, whereas traditional search primarily matched keywords to determine the results they’d provide. This allows AI models to deliver responses that are more relevant to the specific query they receive.
- Context Awareness – Many AI search models have the ability to retain contextual memory, making it possible to generate follow-up responses that build upon previous queries. This creates more of a conversational exchange than was possible with traditional search.
- Multimodal Search – Some AI models are able to integrate a variety of content types, such as text, images and videos, to deliver more complete answers for a specific query than was possible with traditional search.
These differences have important implications for the way you approach content creation. For your content to be included in AI search results, it must:
- Answer questions directly
- Provide structured and authoritative insights
- Be formatted in a way that will be easy for AI models to parse and synthesize
Language Model Optimization (LMO) – A New Approach Focused on AI Search
While traditional SEO strategies are still important to generating search results, they’re no longer sufficient if you’re going to leverage the opportunities presented by AI search. If your goal is to generate citations in AI overviews – and this should be a primary goal of your efforts moving forward – then it requires a slightly different approach that is more geared towards the nuances of AI search. This approach is referred to as language model optimization (LMO).
LMO is an approach that focuses on optimizing your content for the way AI models interpret, summarize and present information. It includes many of the best practices traditionally associated with SEO, but with a few important alterations. LMO best practices place a heavy emphasis on:
- Conversational Clarity – Content that contains natural, conversational language and direct, well-structured answers will be more likely to receive citations in AI results.
- Authoritative and Well-Cited Content – AI models favor high-quality, credible sources when determining the resources to cite in their responses. Including quotes containing expert insights, external links to authoritative sources and validated data will improve your content’s credibility and increase the chances that your content will be cited by AI models.
- Long-Form, Structured Content – Creating long-form content allows AI models to extract the key insights that are most applicable to a specific search query they’re addressing. The more comprehensive the content, the greater the likelihood AI models will find information to extract, which increases your chances of receiving a citation. When creating long-form content, it’s important to use clear headings, bullet points and concise summaries to make it easier for AI models to extract relevant information.
- Alignment with User Intent – AI models are looking for content that closely aligns with the user intent of specific search queries, and LMO addresses this by emphasizing content that is relevant and useful rather than content that is focused on target keywords.
By leveraging these LMO best practices as part of your content creation, you can increase your chances of getting citations in AI-generated responses. These citations are an important tool to improve your visibility and grow your brand in this evolving search landscape.
The Opportunity Presented by AI Search
AI search, and the corresponding loss of organic website traffic it causes, has led many businesses to panic. This is understandable – if you’re still thinking about SEO from a traditional lens, you’re likely concerned about diminishing results and struggling to adjust to this new paradigm in search. The good news is you don’t need to panic, you just need to adapt.
AI search presents you with an opportunity that can create a competitive advantage if you learn how to leverage these models to improve your online visibility. Smart businesses aren’t cutting SEO from their marketing budget, they’re adapting it for AI. In the past year, 82.5% of marketers have increased their SEO budgets. But there’s an important point to emphasize with this statistic – these marketers aren’t using their increased budget to double down on traditional tried-and-true tactics. Instead, they’re reallocating these resources toward strategies that will generate citations in AI search results.
If you’re viewing website traffic as the primary driver of quality leads in the AI search era, you’re going to struggle to adapt. However, by changing your mindset to embrace a goal of improved brand visibility, you can leverage the power of AI search to grow your business.
While citations in AI search results don’t necessarily result in direct traffic to your website, they provide several important benefits that are powerful drivers of business growth:
- They increase your brand visibility, helping you get on the radar of potential leads even if they don’t directly engage with your brand during this initial search
- They position your business as a trusted source that AI models reference to deliver the information users need
- They build credibility for your brand in ways that simply aren’t possible with a first page listing on Google
Brands that understand the value of this shifting paradigm and embrace leveraging AI citations to improve brand visibility have the ability to dominate their industries in the coming years.
Optimizing Your Content for What AI Platforms Reward
With traditional SEO, optimizing your content to address the most critical elements included in search engine algorithms plays a critical role in your ability to achieve first page rankings. With LMO, the principle is similar – if you want to increase your chances of earning citations in AI responses, you need to optimize your content to focus on the traits that AI models typically reward.
In order to optimize your content for AI models, make sure to include:
- Depth and Detail – Comprehensive, visual content is citation bait. Longer, more comprehensive articles containing relevant, compelling images such as charts and graphs tend to perform better with AI models since they provide more opportunities for these models to extract information that will be relevant and useful to users.
- Statistics and Quotes – AI rewards credibility, and these models commonly reference data points and expert opinions in their responses. Recent research has demonstrated that content that includes citations, quotes and statistics is 30-40% more visible in AI search results.
- Links to Reputable Sources – External links to authoritative websites, scholarly research studies and other reputable sources will help boost your content’s credibility in the eyes of AI models.
- Long-Form Lists – Structured, list-based content consistently gets AI visibility.
- Clear, Structured Formatting – Content that has a strong organizational structure, logical flow and clear formatting including headers and subheaders is easier for AI models to interpret and parse.
- Original Analysis – Factual accuracy, hard data and authoritative sources are critical for establishing credibility, but these elements must also be supplemented with original analysis. AI models favor content that provides new information and perspectives over articles that simply regurgitate information previously published on the internet.
- Updated Information – Periodically updating existing content with new data and insights as they arise will help ensure your content remains relevant over time.
How to Optimize Content for User Intent and Conversational Queries
AI models are de-emphasizing the importance of keywords in favor of helpful content that addresses the intent of the user’s search query and provides clear, direct answers to their questions. Content that is optimized for user intent and reflects the conversational queries used in AI search are most likely to receive citations in AI answers.
The following tips will help you align your content with these goals:
Structure Content as a Q&A Session
Start off by providing a concise, engaging answer to a common question your audience might ask. This delivers the immediate value that is prioritized by AI models. Then, follow your concise answer with more detailed explanations that provide a comprehensive discussion of the topic.
Use Natural Language and a Conversational Tone
Natural language and conversational phrases more closely align with how users ask questions than emphasizing specific keywords. Writing content in a conversational tone also makes it more relatable and improves readability, which provides value to AI models and users alike. AI models are designed to interpret meaning and perform semantic analysis, so this conversational tone will allow you to speak the same language prioritized by AI and your audience.
Anticipate and Address Follow-Up Questions
The conversational nature of AI search increases the likelihood that a user may ask a follow-up question. In addition, Perplexity and Gemini (Google’s AI search model) will typically generate follow-up questions after providing an answer to the initial query. By brainstorming and incorporating these follow-up questions within your content, you’ll create comprehensive resource pages and provide opportunities for this content to be cited in multiple related searches. Receiving multiple citations can significantly boost your credibility among your audience.
To generate your list of follow-up questions:
- Enter a broad search query related to your content topic into Perplexity or Google Gemini
- Look at the follow-up questions generated by your query (Perplexity lists “Related” questions below their answer, while Google Gemini will give you a “People Also Asked” section that covers related questions)
- Jot down all the related questions that are most relevant to your initial topic
- Click on some of these questions to dive deeper and generate a longer list of relevant questions
Create Comprehensive FAQ Sections
Creating a comprehensive FAQ section with your follow-up questions will help you align your content with a format highly valued by AI models. When deciding which questions to include in your FAQ section, prioritize the ones that are most relevant to your topic. Then, create comprehensive, accurate answers to each question that will provide AI models with a wealth of information to include in their answers to user queries.
Address Relevant Questions Comprehensively in Your Content
You can enhance the value of your content by incorporating answers to the most important follow-up questions throughout your content in addition to including them in an FAQ section. For maximum impact, use the most important questions as headings or subheadings, and provide in-depth explanations within that section. Whenever possible, include data, quotes from experts and visual enhancements that provide additional context and credibility to your answers.
Leverage Bullet Points and Numbered Lists
Bullet points and numbered lists are powerful ways to organize your content, allowing AI models to easily extract the most important points as part of their answers.
Include Brief Summaries and Key Takeaways
Summaries and key takeaways reinforce the main points for your readers and give AI models a concise, extractable summary of your content. These summaries should be concise (2-3 sentences) and focused on the most important information in your article. Including a brief summary at the beginning of long posts as well as bullet lists of key takeaways at the end of each major section will provide value that will improve your chances of receiving AI citations.
Include Data Visualizations
AI models like content that uses diagrams, charts and graphs to make complex data more accessible and easier to understand. Providing these visualizations alongside your text explanations will enhance the value of the content you’re providing.
Build a Strong Online Presence Across Multiple Channels
AI models draw their data from a wide range of sources, including reviews, forums and media platforms:
- Google’s AI (Gemini) Loves Both Community and Video – Gemini cites Reddit in 21% of their responses and YouTube in 18.8% of their responses.
- Embedding relevant YouTube Videos boosts Your Odds in Perplexity – Perplexity cited videos in 70% of general queries.
Strengthening your brand’s online presence across multiple channels will help maximize your visibility in AI search results.
Engage in Online Discussions
Whenever possible, contribute to online discussions about the most relevant topics associated with your industry. Contributing to these discussions will increase your brand awareness and help you build relationships with community members that improve your credibility. When participating in these discussions, keep your focus on providing valuable insights and answers to questions posed on the forum, and resist the urge to post promotional content. This will help establish your brand as a trusted authority.
Don’t overlook forums like Reddit, either. Perplexity and OpenAI (the maker of ChatGPT) have Reddit API integrations, while Google has a partnership with Reddit.
Monitor and Respond to Reviews
Online reviews have been an important way to build trust and credibility with both search engines and your audience, so it should come as no surprise that reviews will play a role in the way AI models assess your credibility as well. Being proactive about cultivating and maintaining a positive brand reputation online will help improve your ability to generate AI citations. This involves:
- Encouraging satisfied customers to leave reviews and share their positive experiences with your brand
- Addressing negative reviews in a timely manner to maintain a positive brand perception
- Using customer feedback to improve products and services (this will also help demonstrate your responsiveness to customer needs)
Invest in PR and Media Presence
AI models leverage licensed news content from major media outlets as part of their process. When you have a strong media presence, it will help improve your visibility and credibility among the AI models. OpenAI has licensing agreements with a variety of major news publishers, and this content is used to train ChatGPT’s search model.
The best way to expand your coverage on authoritative news outlets is through expert commentary and newsworthy announcements. Press releases can be an effective way to grow your visibility on these channels.
Create a Diversity of Content Types
Text content isn’t the only way to gain visibility on AI models. Perplexity regularly cites a variety of content formats in their results, including text, video and images. Creating a variety of different content types that can be distributed across multiple channels will help you gain visibility in the different places where your audience consumes content, and it will increase the likelihood of getting noticed by AI models.
Creating unique imagery (rather than relying on stock images) and publishing YouTube content will help increase your visibility in AI search results. Make sure to cross link between different content types to create a more cohesive online appearance. While you should format each content type for the specific platform it will be posted on, it’s critical that all your messaging and branding across content formats remains consistent.
Measuring What Matters in AI Search
While it’s still valuable to track traditional SEO metrics, many of these KPIs won’t provide a complete picture of your performance on AI search. As you shift your focus from rankings and website traffic volume to brand visibility, you’ll need to adopt a new set of metrics that can help you demonstrate your success with AI search models and provide actionable steps to refine your LMO strategies.
Branded Search Growth
When you receive AI citations, it helps grow your brand visibility and improve your credibility among your target audience. Over time, this should make them view you as a trusted source for the information and products/services they need. When this occurs, you’re likely to see an increase in people directly searching for your brand.
Tracking your branded search volume will provide you with important metric to gauge your AI search performance. When people are searching for your company name and product names, it’s a sign that you’re successfully establishing yourself as a trusted authority and improving your brand visibility. This is the goal you’re trying to achieve with AI citations.
Branded searches often convert at a much higher rate than generic keyword searches. When you show up in organic searches for generic keywords, it’s often the first time customers are learning about and interacting with your brand. However, branded searches are conducted by qualified prospects who have already heard of your brand and view you as a trusted authority. The improved brand visibility provided by AI citations essentially functions in the same way as a referral, making it much more powerful than traffic obtained through organic search.
Tracking the following brand search queries can help you gauge how well your brand visibility is improving over time:
- [Your Company] vs [Competitor]
- [Your Company] pricing
- [Your Company] demo
- [Branded Product Name] pricing
Share of Voice in AI Results
This metric tracks the frequency with which your brand receives AI citations compared with your competitors. It helps you see how often you’re appearing in AI search results, and how your brand is being viewed by AI models compared with your competitors.
Since we’re still early in the AI search era, many analytics tools may not be providing this metric yet. But you can perform your own qualitative analysis to track your presence in AI overviews for your most important keywords. This type of qualitative analysis is typically most effective for product-related searches, since you can glean important insights into the way these AI models view your brand and your products.
When performing this analysis, check for patterns in:
- The way AI models describe your company
- The features of your products that are highlighted by AI models
- How AI models position your brand in comparison to your competitors
This information can provide you with important insights on how to improve the optimization of your content so that you receive better AI citations.
Webolutions Can Help You Leverage AI Search to Improve Brand Visibility
AI search represents a major shift in the ways people acquire information and interact with content. While it presents short-term challenges as you learn how to adapt to this new paradigm, it presents the opportunity for improved brand visibility and credibility which can lead to sustained business growth.
Moving forward, digital marketing success will require a blend of SEO and LMO best practices that help you leverage AI citations for improved brand visibility while still capitalizing on website traffic provided by organic search listings. At Webolutions, we can help your business navigate this new paradigm to maximize the impact of your marketing efforts.
Our team includes seasoned SEO and content marketing professionals who are constantly monitoring the latest AI trends, experimenting with different optimization strategies, and leveraging data to refine our approach. Our team can help you produce the high-quality, authoritative and user-focused content that will perform well with AI models and improve your brand visibility through AI citations.
We’ve already helped our clients achieve impressive results with our SEO/LMO efforts. The image to the right is an example of content we’ve developed and optimized for one of our clients that was able to generate an AI citation as well as the first ranking on Google’s organic listings. By taking a balanced approach that includes important elements of traditional strategies and new AI-centric tactics, we can help your business achieve results in this rapidly evolving environment.
Contact us today for a free consultation and find out how we can help you implement AI search tactics in your marketing strategy. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.
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