AI/ML
August 16, 2025
AI is reshaping how people search for and discover answers. Google’s AI Overviews, along with chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, now answer a large share of queries directly. The result is a visible decoupling: impressions can hold steady or climb while organic clicks drift into AI experiences. For marketers, the message is simple:
It is no longer enough to rank. You must be cited.
Google still sets the pace for discovery, handling far more searches than ChatGPT. Traffic volume, infrastructure, and crawl depth remain unmatched, so inclusion in Google’s index is crucial to appearing in AI-generated answers, summaries, and recommendations.
Modern language models lean on retrieval and tool use. They reward content that signals authority through structure, schema, clean internal links, and tightly interlinked topic clusters. If an AI answer engine can fetch your page and lift a precise, self-contained passage, you are far more likely to appear inside that answer.
So what should teams change right now? Create well-structured, authoritative, and comprehensive content that people can read quickly and systems can parse reliably. Prioritize human comprehension, then reinforce it with strong SEO signals: clear topical relevance, demonstrable authority, consistent schema markup, semantic clarity, and clean internal linking.Extend those signals beyond your site as well. Ensure the same validated facts appear across reputable third-party domains, partner properties, and reference listings to create cross-source agreement, the “consensus bias” many retrieval and AI engines favor. With this foundation in place, search and AI systems are more likely to retrieve, cite, and reuse your material.
Early results are encouraging. We launched an AI-friendly text passage on a brand’s homepage in late June 2025 and saw rapid inclusion inside AI Overviews. In some queries, earned citations appeared above top medical sites. Within a week, the site recorded gains in impressions and clicks and showed presence across hundreds of keywords with meaningful monthly search volume.
KPIs are shifting. Success now looks like being reusable inside an answer. Track AI mentions and citations, AI Overview inclusion, and coverage of key entities, alongside traditional rankings and traffic. In short, write for people, structure for machines, and package your facts so an AI answer engine can quote you cleanly. Consider how these touchpoints contribute to the broader decision journey, especially in complex categories where people consult multiple sources before acting.
Focus on lasting authority, not short-term tactics. Create content that search and AI systems can identify and reuse without confusion. Teams that do this earn steadier visibility inside AI results even as user click behavior changes. The payoff is information people can find, understand, and trust, with or without a click.