The big question on SEO-ers and SAIO-ers minds: What does Google’s search bar expansion and AI-first announcement mean for organic search traffic?

Short answer: it’s too soon to tell, especially given Google also announced a May 2026 core update of its search algorithms last week, too.

But we have some considerations to share and impact premonitions:

Consideration 1: A recent analysis of user behavior when presented with an AI Overview included on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) found increases in time users spent on the SERP and increased scrolling activity as they reviewed the range of information being presented. The implication is many users needed the time to review all the results on the SERP to confirm the AI Overview and/or decide which result they want to click for more information.

Consideration 2: A McKinsey survey of US consumers showed “research and understand general topics” as the top use of AI by task. “Discover and/or decide on brands, products, or services” was the third-highest use of AI. (We added the italics on “decide” to reinforce the consideration aspect.)

Premonitions: Based on Google search and analytics data we were analyzing before the AI-first announcement, we foresee:

• Impressions in Google Search Results will continue to increase but click-through-rates (CTR) will drop — so Organic Search Traffic volume will be lower than previous averages.

• However, the value of the Organic Search clicks you get (whether from AI Overviews or other traditional Google organic results) will increase as the user has considered your content to be more relevant to their needs. This will result in higher conversion rates and reduce the impact of fewer visits.

Stay tuned for more updates as we develop a clearer picture of the SEO/SAIO search road ahead.

You walk into a crowded room — a soiree of sorts. Around you, the crowd breaks into whispers. It’s people you know and people you’ve yet to meet. You may think they’re talking about your sick get-up or new haircut. Or are they actually talking about somebody else?

The thing is you can never be truly sure what’s being said in those whispers.

Today’s content marketers are faced with this dilemma as they try to align content with the whispered prompts being asked of AI search bots.

We know Search AI Optimization (also called SAIO, GEO, AIO, AEO, etc.) FAQs, whitepapers, and other answer-rich content can help gain visibility in AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.

As search behemoths roll out AI-integrated features like Google’s new search bar, people are asking their full questions directly into AI chatbots as well as traditional search engines.

Here are some considerations for gaining insight into the right questions to guide your answer-driven content:

• What questions are people asking?
• Which questions are worth answering through content?
• How should you answer these questions?

What Questions Are People Asking?

Sales & Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) Knowledge

These are — hands down — the best knowledge mines, as they are directly interacting with customers. Most of us are aware of marketing/sales silos — content marketers can break through this divide by getting experts’ inputs early in the content planning process. If your sales/SME professionals are strapped for time, consult their notes, AI notetakers, and/or meeting recordings to unearth the most asked questions about features, offerings, processes, and more.

AI Platform Prompting

This seems simple and it could be, but AI tools still need to be prompted correctly. Be specific about your audience and the buying stage they’re in throughout the prompt because questions from the general public may be vastly different than the audience you’re targeting. Here’s an example prompt:

I am making [an FAQ/whitepaper/video script/other content] on [topic] for [specific target audience] as [your brand or non-branded industry]. Please provide a list of questions people ask about [topic] to AI platforms. They should appeal to people in [specific stages of sales/buying process]. [Include any extra clarification relevant to your needs like technical you want the questions to be.]

Now, put this prompt in multiple chatbots (at least 3). Compare the responses. You may notice very similar questions worded differently. Take this all as directional data. Note which ones are very applicable to what you know about your brand and how many times a core question is reiterated across AI responses.

Third-Party Tool Research

There’s a plethora of AI research tools out there that can help generate questions, including Moz, Answer the Public, and SEM Rush. Normally, we’ll start out with Google Keyword Planner to inform the keywords we use for this third-party tool research. Then, our team uses Answer the Public to generate long-tail keyword and question variations.

Also take this as directional data, especially if the tool offers a competitive research component. Every response is different in the AI — no general rankings to which to adhere — so if your brand is not mentioned in a sample response your tool pulls up, it doesn’t mean it is never cited. Always take variability between responses into account.

Review Websites

This is a reminder that you can use reviews from Amazon, Reddit, Google, etc. to see the questions people are asking about your brand’s offerings. Be sure to remember that most reviews are polarized one way or another. But, if a bunch of people have the same comment or question, this is a great place to gain insight.

Competitor Websites

Your competitors are doing something right in order to be your competitor. There are two ways to find how their content supports your shared audience:

1. Search through their content to see what questions they’re answering and topics they’re covering.
2. Go to AI platforms and search engines and prompt/search the topics/questions on which you compete for brand visibility. Are you competitors showing up with you/instead of you?

In both cases, you don’t ever want to copy (or reword) competitor content. (Ew, that’s not cute.) But you can put your own spin on the topic with your brand’s unique differentiators and experience. The reason (and we’ll talk about this more later) people click onto your website from AI citations and search engine results is because they in some way trust you — your experience, expertise, authority — as a source.

You may also notice topic gaps from your competitors and dive right in there with your own content to gain early visibility/authority for it.

Customer Interviews

If your company already does interviews, these can most certainly be repurposed in content. Here you can utilize a lot of the advice from previous sections: uncover their common discussions and questions on the process, product/service, etc. that could use clarification on your website.

Which Questions Are Worth Answering Through Content?

Let’s start by blowing up the bubble of positivity: answering questions on your site can get you cited in AI chatbot citations.

Now, let’s pop it: Unfortunately, there are more things that need to be considered before spending time and resources answering every viable question.

Namely, the big one is if the question can be easily answered in an AI summary in a sentence or two. If yes, the question could be answered as a part of a larger piece but not the sole focus. Examples: What is a pool vacuum? Is composting good for the environment? There’s already a plethora of content around these topics. The way to get clicks is by activating the unique brand spin, which brings us to E-E-A-T….

E-E-A-T stands for Experience – Expertise – Authority – Trustworthiness, and that is what your content should flaunt. Google recently released guidance on AI optimization and AI Search linking enhancements. Both pieces emphasize making relevant, helpful, E-E-A-T-based content. Why, you ask? Let’s discuss!

AI & Experience/Expertise: While AI has the expertise to easily answer questions like “What are good humidifiers for large rooms?” It has never actually experienced owning a humidifier to offer solid, all-encompassing advice. AI is just summarizing.

AI & Authority: Yes, AI does have authority, but only as much as its sources do. Your brand is endowed with its own authority by the content and products/services it puts out. You are the only one with your unique authority in what you do. Own it.

AI & Trust: Well, this one is tricky but gives brands the leg up. We trust AI to answer easy questions with nothing crucial riding on their responses. You may ask: “Who starred in this movie?” But you might not check beyond it to find out it was, in fact, not that actor. Having said this, you want to choose questions that people will want reassurance on, for example: “What’s the benefit of choosing this computer security platform over this one?” Questions like these are a bit further down the funnel where people are more primed for conversion.

So, the question for pondering is: how can you weave in your own brand experience, expertise, authority and trust to make people want to click through?

How Should You Answer These Questions?

Answers can not only be laid out in a FAQ format, but in a multitude of creative ways like videos (make sure to include a transcript), whitepapers, social posts, articles, etc.

What matters is that people get their answer in a clear way from a source they trust. After you’ve done your research, you’ll likely have a few topics you can use to expand your experience, expertise, authority, and trust through your website’s content. That will help drive AI visibility to your site!

Happy optimizing!

It appears Google is trying to drink its own E-E-A-T Kool-Aid with respect to the 5 AI search linking enhancements being rolled into AI Overviews and AI Mode:

1. “Explore new angles.” Here Google is anticipating potential fan-out queries and is prompting you to dive deeper into your prompt topic with links to articles, analyses, and other related content. It’s definitely an attempt to improve the user Experience.
2. “Easily access your news subscriptions.” This feature will highlight links from your news subscriptions in AI Mode and AI Overviews. It clearly amplifies the Trust factor (provided you trust the sources you subscribe to). One question is if it also might skew the AI algorithm to narrow the breadth of content presented, aka “preaching to the converted or choir”?
3. “Get advice from people who have been there.” AI responses will now include links that “provide a preview of perspectives from public online discussions, social media, and other firsthand sources.” Human Experience, check. Expertise, Authority, and Trust, TBD based on the quality of links and content being presented.
4. “See links right where you need them.” More links will be embedded directly within AI responses right next to the relevant text. This could be a plus for user Experience, but the rest of the E-A-T depends on how relevant the content presented really is.
5. “Get more context on linked websites.” Another attempt to provide elements of Expertise, Authority and Trust to preview and prompt a link click…

…Hmm, wait a minute as a cynical idea coalesces…

Is Google really adding these enhancements to help the user with a better AI response? Or is it just trying to bolster the reportedly very low Click-Through-Rates on AI Overviews and AI Mode citation links? Let’s go with both things so Google can have its cake (link clinks) and E-E-A-T it, too.

It’s hard to believe it’s only been 3 years since DBE was one of the first agencies to recognize the marketing opportunities inherent in Search AI Optimization (SAIO) and publish a framework for brands to leverage them.

There have been many changes since then in the form of new AI search engines, new AI search capabilities, new AI search tools, and (of course) new AI search acronyms (AIO, AEO, GEO).

What hasn’t changed, and what is now generally accepted within the search industry, are the 4 core strategic elements we introduced as a formula to gain AI search visibility and citations: Technical, On-Website Content, Off-Website Content, and Analytics.

And, while the strategic core remains, the tactics used to deliver AI success across these 4 pillars have evolved. So here is DBE’s 2026 Framework for AI Brand Visibility and Citations:

Nat: When AI citations and clicks are coveted and search engine rankings are constantly fluctuating, what do you need to know to keep your site optimized? From new acronyms to helpful tools to AI opt-out options, Marc Engelsman, our VP of SEO and SAIO at DBE, shared some major tips on LinkedIn, and we’re here to dive deeper to help you stay up to date. Hi Marc!

Marc: Hi Nat, what questions do you have for me?

Building Online Brand Authority

Nat: There was a post you did comparing “building a brand” to Build-a-Bear. Your website is the skin of your bear. You can dress it up however you want, but you need the proper optimization or “stuffing” inside it. Can you explain the elements to which you are referring and how people can start optimizing for them?

Marc: First, let me be clear, when we talk about proper optimization stuffing, it’s very much not about keyword stuffing. It’s all about getting keyword alignment throughout your page from top down – the URL, the Page Title, the meta description, the H1 tag, the content, and the alt tags. If you get all these done “just right” (as Goldilocks would say), then you will have built a well-optimized bear of a website.

Benchmarking SEO Data

Nat: Speaking of bears, you talked about being smarter than the average bear (a Yogi Bear cartoon reference) through benchmarking your own SEO data instead of comparing solely to industry averages. When do you recommend benchmarking the data, and which metrics should you focus on?

Marc: First you need to do an audit of what metrics are already available. Are you currently using GA4 or some other platform that provides website traffic data by channel/source? Have you identified Key Events aligned with the customer journey through to acquisition? Do you have an average value for a new customer that can be used to determine Return-On-Ad-Spend (ROAS for Paid Search) or Return on Investment for other channels like SEO? Have you already been doing SEO or SAIO and, if so, can you share past keywords/ranking data? If you have all this, you already have a good benchmarked data set. If you don’t you need to quickly fill in the gaps so you have a basis for creating your new SEO/SAIO strategy and for benchmarking it.

AI Feature Opt-Out Debate

Nat: AI opt-out features are available to website publishers and users. Both have benefits and pitfalls, but if one does not subscribe to AI opt-in features, the connection between publisher and user may not be made. What considerations should publishers and users mull over when making the decision?

Marc: It’s pretty simple. If you are a publisher and you opt-out of having AI bots crawl your site due to copyright concerns, you sacrifice visibility and authority for your website. If you are a user who opts out of allowing AI bots to “personalize” results based on your previous history, you sacrifice getting better results to your queries. Even if only the publisher or only the user opts out, then both may suffer less-than-optimal AI visibility.

AI Optimization Acronyms

Nat: AIO, SAIO, GEO, AEO… Search AI Optimization has many names, but we’ve been pointing out in our newsletter, Perceptive Marketer, (subscribe below) that the tactics are mostly aligned between acronyms. When a company is hiring an agency with these service offerings, what questions should they be asking?

Marc: I’m going to give you three related questions for both the hiring company and the prospect agency.

• First question from the company: How do you approach optimizing for traditional search engines and for AI platforms?
• First question from the agency: Do you see SEO and the fill-in-the-blank-acronym you use for SAIO as an integrated strategy or do you want to optimize for each as a separate channel?
• Second question from the company: What makes your approach to SEO/SAIO different from what other agencies are doing?
• Second question from the agency: Has your organization done SEO and SAIO work before? If so or if not, what’s prompting you to talk with us now?
• Third question from the company: How do you price your services?
• Third question from the agency: Do you already have a budget for this work? If not, what is your process and timeline for getting budget approval?

Answers to these questions will help companies and agencies assess how best to move forward with each other.

New Google ROAS Tool

Nat: Google Ads rolled out a Return-On-Ad-Spend-based tool to let advertisers calculate conversion value for new customers. You mentioned a potential new setting that could be a helpful feature. Can you explain what it was and the meaning behind it?

Marc: LTV stands for Life-Time Value and I was suggesting that a conversion setting that includes LTV would provide an even better way to look at the payoff of a new customer acquisition. Granted, LTV is not always the easiest thing for companies to assess, but we always ask about it during our Discovery and Benchmarking phase of work; and will work with companies to come up with at least a conservative estimation for reporting purposes.

Organic SERP & AI Citation URL Overlap Rates

Nat: The SEO tool, Moz, compared the URLs that show for Google organic search (AKA SERPs), AI Overviews, and AI Mode. Research on 40,000 keyword searches/queries across these platforms shows AI Overviews citations have an 88% overlap with Top 10 SERPs. AI Mode citations only have a 12% overlap with Top 10 SERPs. Why is there such a disparity between AI Mode citations and the organic SERP URLs?

Marc: AI Mode isn’t just searching for the specified keyword query – it’s building off the keyword to conduct broader, more topical “fan-out queries” to formulate responses. So, it’s not apples to apples in terms of keyword comparisons… more like apples to MacIntosh apples and Granny apples and Gala apples, etc. or maybe even apples to pears.

Nat: With that in mind, what does that mean for optimizing your website? Should we be doing anything different for AI Mode optimization?

Marc: It appears we can teach the new AI Overviews dog with relatively old, but proven, SEO “tricks” like tags and content alignment around target keywords on individual pages. As for AI Mode, the question is how much effort should be made to gain more visibility in AI Mode (that has less user volume than the other two)? My thought, at least until we have more data that suggests otherwise, is don’t let the AI Mode long-tail wag your SEO/SAIO strategy dog.

The Future of SEO Strategy in 2026

Nat: Keep appraised of new musings from Marc through DBE’s LinkedIn and our Perceptive Marketer newsletter. Is there anything you want to leave us with, Marc?

Marc: Stay tuned as all things SEO and SAIO are moving faster and faster. Are there any tips you would give, Nat?

Nat: I would say to use AI as a member of your content creation team. It shouldn’t be a one-bot show. Yes, it can help in aspects of the process like brainstorming or outlining, but people yearn for authenticity, originality, and connection. So, keeping humans as an integral part of the content creation process (like editing and writing) is crucial for developing higher performing content. Just be sure you keep SEO and SAIO best practices in mind as you craft it! Happy optimizing!

Marc: Happy optimizing indeed!

When we launched our AI optimization strategy over 2½ years ago, the search engine industry was struggling with what to call this newfangled thing. It didn’t help that the new AI platforms kept changing how they referred to themselves.

Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) led some to talk about Generative Experience Optimization (GEO) which also led to GEO gaining traction for Generative Engine Optimization. But then, after over a year of being in testing mode, Google launched SGE with a new name – AI Overviews – and the AIO acronym for AI Optimization gained some traction. 

Then there was some push back on using AIO as a generic acronym that was tied to Google. Answer Engine Optimization – or AEO – got some favor as it expanded beyond the Google connection.

Two and a half years and we still don’t have industry consensus on what to call optimizing for AI engine citations. Neither GEO, AEO, AIO, nor DBE’s original coinage, SAIO.

We went with SAIO – Search AI Optimization – from the start for a couple reasons. 

1. We foresaw the impact these AI models would have on traditional search behavior. 
2. We developed our AI search optimization best practices as an extension of our SEO services. We preferred to keep the “S is for Search” value first.

Regardless of the name kerfuffle, the search community is increasingly aligning on one thing we’ve said from the beginning and have proven over time: AI optimization best practices are interconnected with SEO best practices.

Perhaps Rand Fishkin was right when he said maybe the collective industry “we” shouldn’t worry about what acronym we use for AI optimization and simply say we do SEO for AI. The idea being optimizing for AI is a subset of SEO which is a subset of digital inbound marketing. 

We at DBE are okay with that. We’re okay if you or company prefers AEO, AIO, GEO, SAIO, or something else. 

After all, it’s not the name that drives the success. 

Two questions on digital marketers’ minds these days are:

• “What is the impact of AI platforms on my organic search and paid search success metrics?”
• “What metrics should I be focused on to show digital marketing success moving forward?”

Let’s break it down and offer some answers.

What were the core SEO and Paid Search metrics before the AI era?

Historically, SEO success was tracked using keyword rankings, organic traffic, click-through rates (CTR), bounce rates, conversions (as possible), backlinks, and indexed pages.

Paid Search focused on impressions, CTR, cost-per-click (CPC), conversions, quality score, and impression share.

These metrics were rooted in how and where pages/ads appeared in traditional search engine results pages (SERPs), and how often these impressions were clicked relative to their exposure. ​

Why are these metrics less relevant in today’s AI-inclusive landscape?

• From an SEO perspective, the traditional SERP layout has changed. Google long ago shifted priority to the appearance of paid ads and other search features to the top of the page, pushing the natural search results down (and often below the fold on a mobile phone). Not only does the inclusion of Google AI Overviews content further this downward push of natural positions, its direct, conservational answers have reduced or zero-ed out organic and paid search clicks and CTR. ​
• Another issue facing Paid Search is Google’s double-serving policy shift earlier this year. This means an advertiser’s ad may appear in multiple positions in the same auction. The result is increased impression counts without driving a comparable rise in clicks. The impact of declining CTRs and diluted impression share are making these old benchmarks unreliable.

How else are AI chatbots and generative search agents (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, etc.) changing search performance measurement?

• AI search and chatbots tend to “summarize” their answers from a variety of sources that often do not include direct brand citations with links. In some cases, brands are actually competing for visibility with their product distributors or being cited with competitors based on competitive reviews on publisher websites.

• The traditional digital customer journey has been upended as AI-focused search results and AI chatbots are gaining traction as key steps in the brand discovery and research phases. While there is growing evidence that people are not leveraging AI platforms as their only search vehicle, we now have a chicken/egg attribution challenge as to where, when, or even, if a click or conversion was impacted.

What are the important metrics for search marketers moving forward?

• Conversions and Conversion Value: We’re still going to track traditional metrics like clicks, CTR, etc. as they are good signals of optimization gains and opportunities for improvement. However, the most important success metrics in this AI era should be overall Conversions and Conversion Value that can be used to determine ROI. This is why Conversion Goal Setting is a critical part of our client onboarding Discovery Phase.

• Brand Authority and Visibility: Authoritativeness is one of Google’s E-E-A-T core ranking/relevancy guidelines. Authority is also widely viewed as a significant factor behind brand citations/links. We track Moz Authority scores to demonstrate improvement over time. We also track Target Keyword Visibility through Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) over time as indication of optimization success. Impressions can also be used as an indicator here.

• Competitive Presence and Advantage: One of the great things about digital marketing is you can track and compare competitive authority and visibility to demonstrate success. Even paid search offers Auction Insights to show your share of voice vs. competitors.​

Final Thoughts

In today’s digital landscape, the most valuable question on search metrics is no longer “How many clicks or impressions did I get?” Instead, marketers must now focus on “How visible and trusted is my brand before a click ever happens?” To thrive, embrace search measurement frameworks that prioritize conversions, brand perception, and competitive positioning that are consistent with search and consumer journeys as they evolve in the AI era.

Can you believe we’ve reached the end of the 3rd Quarter 2025? January seems both long ago and yesterday at the same time, especially in the ever-changing world of SEO/SAIO.

Here’s a month-by-month recap of some of the industry’s key news stories as covered in our Perspective Marketer newsletter with our perspective on how the impact of the story has changed over the course of the year:

January

Are People Clicking Links In ChatGPT Search? Brands Say Yes. The sub-head summary was: “Brands report anecdotal evidence that users are clicking links in ChatGPT and Google Gemini search results, driving traffic and sales.” What’s changed since then:

• There is now definitive analytical evidence that people are using AI engines and clicking on links as part of their purchase journey. In fact, we call ChatGPT the “Google” of AI search in terms of the percentage volume of clicks it delivers to websites.

• We’ve learned ChatGPT is using Google rankings as part of their algorithm for including link citations (see August below).

• We liked that ChatGPT had a search mode but the interface no longer supports that mode with a clickable button. In many cases you now have to prompt ChatGPT to provide its citations and links via prompts.

February

DeepSeek Now In Perplexity’s AI Search—U.S. AI Dominance Challenged. This story suggested Perplexity’s adoption of DeepSeek’s “innovative R1 reasoning model” solidified Perplexity as a leader in AI-powered technology. What’s changed since then:

• DeepSeek itself has not become a SAIO target for optimization as a stand-alone AI platform, and Perplexity is nowhere close to dominating the AI search space. According to Perplexity’s link citations, Perplexity has an estimated 22-30 million monthly users while ChatGPT has 782-838 million estimated monthly users. We are seeing corresponding disparities between ChatGPT and Perplexity in terms of the sessions and conversions data being captured in GA4. That said, we still believe Perplexity is an important independent AI search platform.

March

Google begins testing AI Mode while rolling out Gemini 2.0 AI Overviews. AI Mode was only available in Search Labs. It appeared to be Google’s response to DeepSeek “thinking” as a way to go deeper in your searching in ways that AI Overviews did not. With respect to a question posed in the article about Search Console filtering AI queries and data separately from Organic Search data, Google said “We currently don’t have anything to share about the reporting tools for this experiment, but will let you know if that changes.” What’s changed since then:

• Google opened AI Mode to all users in May – much faster than it took them to get AI Overviews out of the lab. According to Perplexity’s link citations, AI Mode is estimated to have 100 million monthly users.

• What hasn’t changed – Google Search Console is still not filtering AI Mode or AI Overviews usage data. It’s all wrapped up with the organic search data which has some in our industry speculating about what Google may be hiding.

April

Google officially rolls out links in AI Overviews to its own search results. Yes, it’s worth repeating, Google AI Overviews started including links back to its own search results. This further fueled industry speculation about the motive for this “enhancement.” Some saw it as an effort to monetize AI Overviews by moving searchers back to the traditional platform that includes ads. What’s changed since then:

• AI Overviews still includes links to Google search engine results pages. There is now discussion that in addition to the monetization aspect, Google is trying to bolster the losses of search referral clicks due to the zero-click aspect of AI Overviews results (an issue we also discussed in Perceptive Marketer in April).

May

Turn chats into checkouts. ChatGPT Shopping Search announced a pending feature that allows merchants to submit product feeds to allow Instant Checkouts with a sign-up waiting list. This feature will put ChatGPT more in direct competition with Google and Amazon shopping features. What’s changed since then:

• ChatGPT Shopping Search launched in September. Details on purchase volume are not yet available but consider that an estimated 60% of shoppers use AI recommendations for product searches.

June

90% of AI search traffic comes from desktop: Report. Surprised? We were, too, but there were reasonable technology issues with mobile (e.g., lag times in results displays and click functionality in AI apps) that affected referral clicks. What’s changed since then:

• Another surprise – not much has changed. Seems people who are using AI to research topics and/or create content are more likely to want to use desktop over mobile.

July

Explaining The Great De-Coupling To C-Level. Remember that story in March about AI Overviews impacting Google’s traditional search click-throughs? This story explains how AI Overviews and AI Mode data are dramatically increasing search Impressions in Google Search Console reporting but the Click-Through Rate is dramatically dropping which in turn translates to a drop in reported Organic Search Clicks. In fact, if your website shows up in both AI Overviews and traditional search results, Search Console will capture that as two Impressions when the likelihood is you will only Click on one of those Impressions. What’s changed since then:

• There has been growing discussion about what success looks like in SEO/SAIO. Should we just be counting Impressions as a sign of brand visibility? Should we ignore Impressions and just be counting combined traditional Search and AI referral clicks to the website? Stay tuned for developments and industry consensus on how best to align available data with brand KPIs.

August

ChatGPT is using Google Search, multiple tests suggest. We shared reports that showed occasions where up to 90% of ChatGPT’s cited URLs matched Google’s top results. See how quickly things change as we first started talking about ChatGPT Search in January.

September

Google’s Danny Sullivan: ‘Good SEO is good GEO’ . “Generative engine optimization (or whatever the new acronym is for optimizing for AI search experiences) is the same core work SEOs have always done: creating unique, valuable content for people and providing a great page experience”.

• So, in other words, what is good for the SEO goose is good for the SAIO gander. It’s furthering the concept that SEO and SAIO are complementary in nature while allowing for differences in execution.

Stay tuned to Perspective Marketer for what changes arise in the 4th Quarter 2025 and, in the meantime, let’s all sing along…

🎵 Time May ChAInge Search, But We Can TrAIce Time

Picture the iconic “March of Progress” image in your head. You know, the one that shows the evolution of man from an essentially crawling hominid to a fully erect Homo sapien. 

Now let’s take a similar, more abbreviated view of the evolution of search. For this, we don’t have to go back millions of years — just to the 1990’s amidst the dawning era of the internet.

Early Years – Answer Engines

The earliest search engines like Archie, Veronica, and Jughead actually only indexed file names for websites and did not index the contents of these websites. Similarly, the Yahoo Directory was a list of website links organized by category and not content-based. 

According to Wikipedia, WebCrawler was the first “all text” crawler-based search engine that allowed users to search for any word on any web page. (Love the similarity of “crawling” as a start for both man and search engines.)

AltaVista introduced natural language queries and a simple interface. Ask Jeeves (later just Ask.com) is credited as the first search engine to use a natural language question aimed at providing direct answers. 

Middle Years – Search Engines

RankDex was the first site-scoring algorithm that used hyperlink analysis as an indicator of content relevance. 

Google introduced its PageRank algorithm shortly after that also ranked pages based on the quality and quantity of backlinks. Google continued to refine its algorithm and its presentation of results to deliver what the algorithm judged to be the most relevant (or in Google’s words “helpful”) website pages.

The evolution of Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) to include separate sections including the Knowledge Graph, Featured Snippets, Product Listings, Google Business Listings, etc. started to provide direct answers as well as the traditional list of links to potential websites/content pages based on the inferred intent of the searcher. 

Advanced Years – Search AI Answer Engines

Enter AI models that quickly gained the ability to crawl the web and synthesize what they found into conversational answers to prompts. Perplexity AI leans into this mission by saying it is “dedicated to building the world’s best conversational answer engine” by delivering direct, cited answers instead of just links.

ChatGPT provides similar direct-answer synopses of relevant content in response to search-like prompts and provides citation links (albeit in less prominence than Perplexity). Recent studies suggest that while ChatGPT searchers’ Click-Through-Rate (CTR) to link citations websites is low, the quality of traffic measured by user intent and conversion likelihood is notably higher. 

Google’s AI Overviews is now so geared to providing direct responses/answers to search queries that the CTR for traditional search listings have dropped significantly — even for pages ranking in the Top 3 positions. The issue has prompted Google to show upwards of 43% of its AI Overviews citation links as links to Google Search Results.

The Moral of This Evolutionary Tale

Clearly, the evolution of Search AI platforms has both advanced expectations around the modern search experience and circled back to the roots of early days to provide direct answers. 

Make no mistake, answer engines and search engines leverage different methodologies and algorithms to arrive at the results they show. So, it should be no surprise there is less of an overlap in citation sources and SERP listings than one might expect. One recent research shows “ChatGPT results overlap only 12% with the Google SERP.”

Have you evolved your search marketing strategy to include both traditional SEO and Search AI Optimization (SAIO)? It’s the best way to ensure you walk tall in this new era of search.