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One of the biggest AI-driven changes in marketing we’re experiencing now is how search is evolving, moving away from Google’s supremacy and its list of 10 blue links towards AI-generated answers to the queries we type into Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLMs.

The latest estimates suggest that Google still accounts for 75% to 80% of all search queries, but ChatGPT now already accounts for 12% to 17%.

For us marketers, that means adjusting our SEO strategies to incorporate new “ranking factors” for AI Search.

Since Generative Search Optimization (GEO) is a big topic that deserves a lot of attention, we won’t cover everything in one newsletter. Instead, we’ll dedicate the coming issues to this topic so you can learn everything you need to boost your brand’s visibility in AI Search.

In this issue, we’ll start with the most important AI search “ranking factors,” so you can get your GEO off to a good start.

Let's go! 🚀

Google Is Changing AI Search to Keep the Web Visible. Google’s latest updates to AI Mode and AI Overviews show that the company is aware of this concern. In its latest announcement, Google introduced five new features aimed at helping users discover websites, expert analysis, original reporting, and human discussions directly through AI-powered Search. [Source: Ciol]

Why good content still loses in Google Search. Strong content can still fail when positioning barriers limit visibility. Content can be well researched, technically accurate, and aligned with search intent, and still struggle to rank. The issue is usually positioning. When good content fails to rank, there’s often a barrier underneath it: technical limitations, authority gaps, weak entity recognition, or misaligned competition. [Source: Search Engine Land]

Five Ways AI Search Beats an Old-School Google Search. Google’s A.I. search technology is far from perfect (don’t count on it for celebrity news), but it excels at tasks like picking out groceries and detecting scams. [Source: New York Times] 

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Traditional search optimization was built around one mechanic: get Google to rank your page above your competitors. The user clicked your link, landed on your site, the traffic flowed, and the attribution was easy to track.

AI search rewrites all of that. The system reads your content, extracts what it needs, blends it with other sources, and serves the answer directly. The user often never visits your site. Your content shaped the answer, but you may see no click, no conversion signal, no easy way to measure your contribution.

That's the new game. The good news is that the early ranking factors are clear enough to start working on today, and that once you start showing up in AI-generated responses, your conversion rates are much higher.

Brand mentions across the internet are the most important ranking factor for AI Search.

A December 2025 Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found that mentions on platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and Wikipedia correlated roughly 3x more strongly with AI citations than just having backlinks did.

Translation: what the internet says about your brand now matters more than who links to your site.

Where to focus: brand mentions on Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn, “best of" listicles on third-party sites (hello, link-building 😉), and industry podcasts. LLMs read these as confirmation that your brand is real, discussed, and worth citing.

AI systems are built on knowledge graphs and entity recognition. They strongly prefer sources with a clear, consistent identity: a named author with credentials, a brand with a Wikipedia or Wikidata entry, a publication with a track record.

This is why Healthline gets cited in medical AI responses and a random wellness blog doesn't, even when the wellness blog has better writing. Healthline has built entity authority.

What to do:

A long, flowing brand narrative is hard for AI systems to parse. Short, declarative, well-structured content with clear headings, factual specificity, and proper schema is what gets lifted out and cited.

Industry research suggests the sweet spot for AI citation is self-contained passages of roughly 134 to 167 words: enough context to stand alone, short enough to be quoted directly.

Practical moves:

AI systems cite sources they recognize as the authority on a specific question. For big publishers, that authority comes from breadth and brand. For everyone else, the realistic path is depth, covering one topic comprehensively enough that you become the go-to source on it.

A new brand publishing 100 thin posts across an entire category will struggle to be cited on any of them. The same brand publishing 10 genuinely thorough pieces on one tight topic has a real shot at owning it in AI responses.

Pick the topic you want to be cited on and go deep before going wide.

You also need to actually let the LLM crawlers in. Check your robots.txt for GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, and OAI-SearchBot. If any of those are blocked, you've taken yourself out of the running on that platform.

Also, many AI crawlers still struggle with JavaScript-heavy sites compared to Googlebot. If your key content only loads after client-side JS runs, much of it is invisible to AI systems. Server-side rendering matters again.

AI systems love content they can't find anywhere else.

Original surveys, proprietary data, named frameworks, and first-hand case studies. These are citation magnets because they give AI systems a specific, attributable claim with a clear source.

The reverse is also true. If your content is a competent summary of what's already on the internet, AI systems will paraphrase it without crediting you. To earn citations, publish things that can't be paraphrased away from your brand.

AI search isn't a brand new playbook. Brand authority, structured content, and depth were already moving up the SEO weighting before LLMs arrived. AI search has just collapsed the timeline and made these factors non-negotiable.

If you only do one thing this month, audit your brand mentions across YouTube, Reddit, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn. That's where the biggest gap usually sits, and it's the factor that compounds the slowest, so the earlier you start, the better.

Use this prompt with your preferred LLM to audit your brand's AI search visibility and identify high-leverage moves to improve it.

The Scenario: You are the Head of Content at a […] company with a well-established blog and strong traditional SEO performance. You've noticed that informational queries in your category are increasingly being answered directly in Google AI Mode and ChatGPT without driving traffic to your site, and you need a clear action plan.

The Prompt:

Act as a senior content strategist who specializes in AI search optimization. I need you to help me audit our brand's visibility in AI-generated search responses and build a 90-day action plan to improve it.

Here is the context about our current situation:

Current Situation:

Questions:

These are the most popular AI tools we use at Rise Up Media. If you're not using them already, they're worth a look.

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There's no algorithm to crack here in the traditional sense. What's being built is a trust layer, and trust in this context means something specific: clear authorship, verifiable expertise, structured information, and consistent presence across the Internet that LLMs already respect.

Your content strategy should be built around named expertise, specific perspectives, and depth that only your brand or you as an individual can provide. There, you have a durable advantage regardless of how the discovery layer evolves.

Until next time, keep exploring the horizon. 🌅

Alex Lielacher

P.S. If you want your brand to show up in Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, reach out to my agency, Rise Up Media. That's what we do.