Tips for Adapting to AI-Driven Search Engines

My last couple of posts have been heavy on this theme: The website isn’t the marketing hub anymore. AI is rewriting the rules. Now, I've gotten some pushback, and I get it. This idea is still cutting-edge in many industries and will be for a while—think the local remodeling contractor, who will remain dependent on Google map packs for some time, but . . . Shout out to John Andrews and Sam Harding for this idea to help make this point. Remember the Browser Wars of the ’90s? That battle wasn’t about browsers; it was about who controls distribution. The winner decided how users experienced the web. Sound familiar? We’re back in a similar fight. But this time, it’s not about browsers or websites. It’s about AI. And the harsh truth? Your website is no longer the center of your marketing universe. It’s just another client in an AI-driven ecosystem. If you're still building everything around your website, you’re missing where the customer journey actually starts today. AI is the new gatekeeper. Large language models are the new homepage. What to do: ~ Structure your content for clarity: headers, bullets, short paragraphs. ~ Feed your own materials into tools like ChatGPT custom GPTs. ~ Submit links to AI-friendly aggregators like Perplexity or Bing. Prompt-ready content is the new SEO. Search engines indexed keywords. AI indexes answers. You’re not writing for spiders anymore, you’re writing for synthetic assistants. What to do: ~ Write in question/answer format. ~ Use schema markup and structured data to help AI extract the right info. ~ Test your content through ChatGPT—does it summarize your message well? AI-native collateral is the new lead magnet. PDFs and landing pages are fine, but imagine giving your audience a branded GPT or app that solves their exact problem. What to do: ~ Create AI-guided chat tools (ManyChat, Intercom, GPT bots). ~ Turn key insights into prompt libraries for your audience. ~ Train a micro-assistant that delivers value in your voice and framework. The ecosystem is greater than the standalone domain. Your website is part of the story, not the whole book. You need to meet your audience inside other platforms, other feeds, other tools. What to do: ~ Cross-publish with intent: blogs become emails, videos, Shorts, GPT inputs. ~ Format content for syndication: highlights, quote blocks, stat cards. ~ Embed value inside tools—calculators, diagnostics, AI-guided quizzes. ~ Ask better questions: Can this be summarized by AI in under 60 words? Would AI recommend this if asked? Are we surfacing this in multiple ecosystems? Is this referenceable—not just linkable? We’re not in a web-first world anymore. We’re in an AI-first marketing environment. The tools have changed, but the principle hasn’t: Be where your customers are, and make it ridiculously easy for them to know, like, and trust you. Don’t just optimize your website. Optimize your ecosystem.

AI Agents Are Booking Hotels. Is Your Direct Channel Ready to Compete? OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent Mode has transformed hotel bookings. AI is no longer just suggesting options. It now books directly on behalf of travelers. Instead of comparing hotels across websites, guests simply ask ChatGPT for what they want, and the AI searches, selects, and completes the reservation, often through OTAs. If your hotel content isn’t structured in a way AI systems can read and trust, your brand is effectively invisible. Traditional SEO tactics focused on human search behavior are no longer enough. Hotels must shift to Answer Engine Optimization, using structured data and clear content that AI agents can easily process. Most hotel teams are not ready for this shift and may already be missing bookings without realizing it. 📢 THE PIVOT FOR HOTEL COMMERCIAL TEAMS: Hotel commercial teams need to rethink their entire approach. This is not about improving your Google rank. It is about making your hotel visible to AI agents that now complete bookings for your guests. ⚠️ The rules of the direct channel have changed. Your content needs to be structured for AI discoverability. Your team needs to understand how AI agents make decisions. Without that, you will be bypassed without even knowing it. The direct channel is at risk unless your teams become AI-literate and start building content for machines as well as humans. FIVE ACTION STEPS FOR HOTEL TEAMS: 1️⃣ Audit and Optimize Structured Data Review your website and booking platform to ensure correct schema markup is in place. AI agents rely on machine-readable data to process your rates, amenities, and availability. 2️⃣ Implement Answer Engine Optimization Move beyond traditional SEO. Focus your content on clear, factual, structured property details across all platforms where AI agents can find them. 3️⃣ Upskill Your Team on AI Literacy Train your marketing, revenue, and sales teams on how AI agents function. AI is now a participant in the booking process. Your teams need to understand how to influence its choices. 4️⃣ Track AI Visibility and Recommendations Start measuring how often your hotel is seen or selected by AI systems like ChatGPT. Visibility is now invisible. Without tracking, you won’t know what you are losing. 5️⃣ Strengthen Direct Channel AI Readiness Ensure your website, booking engine, and voice assistants are optimized to serve both human guests and AI agents. Using AI Voice Agents can help capture direct bookings that might otherwise be lost. If your team needs help optimizing your direct channel, developing AI skills, or driving immediate revenue, reach out. Whether it’s training your team, creating structured content, or helping you track AI-driven visibility, I can support you. Consider me a gig member of your team, ready to help you drive results.

At Duda, we’ve analyzed traffic across more than 1 million websites published on our platform, and the trend is clear: AI-driven traffic is growing extremely fast, especially from ChatGPT.  That doesn’t mean SEO is dead. Far from it, Google is still generating significantly more traffic to websites than all AI platforms combined. But it does mean that web professionals need to adapt their strategies to make sure their clients’ websites are discoverable in both traditional *and* AI search. The good news is a lot of the best practices to rank for traditional search are still relevant in the age of AI discoverability - with some new considerations… ✅ What still works: Authoritative, well-structured content, following E-E-A-T principles   Strong technical SEO (Core Web Vitals, mobile responsiveness, fast load times) Focus on genuinely helpful content, not just ranking tricks 🆕 Where to renew focus in the age of AI: LLMS.txt files (think robots.txt, but for AI) to help LLMs understand your site Structured data like Local Business, FAQ, and Product schema to surface in AI answers IndexNow & Google Search Console integrations to get new content discovered quickly Server-side rendering (SSR) so content isn’t hidden behind JavaScript 🚫 What to avoid: Keyword stuffing Generic backlink strategies Prioritizing visibility over value At Duda, we’re building tools to help agencies and SaaS platforms stay ahead of the curve, including being the first website builder to automatically generate LLMS.txt for all sites built on our platform. If you’re a web pro building websites at scale, it’s time to optimize for both search engines and AI assistants. Learn more about how to future-proof your sites for AI discoverability here: https://lnkd.in/dA_3YrG6

It will happen slowly, then all of a sudden. Your customers will shift how they search for information about your products. They will use: 1) Decision engines like Google, designed to help them compare products, confirm product details and make purchases. 2) Information engines like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews that feel more like a conversation with a trusted expert or knowledgable friend. Traditional search engines hand you a research project — many pages to sift through to find the information you seek. Generative AI search engines give you direct answers — with a chance of hallucination and inaccuracies. Here's what marketers need to understand: 🔹 Acknowledge the shift: Your customers are learning how/when to use two different types of search engines. There's the traditional "decision engine" like Google, and the "information engine" like chatGPT. 🔹 Accept that humans are lazy: Humans will choose the most convenient option. It’s human nature. Your customers prefer speed and convenience over absolute precision. 🔹 Information queries are moving to AI: When your customers want to learn about their problems, they’ll have conversations with AI instead of reading your blog posts. If your brand isn't appearing in these AI responses, you're becoming invisible to a growing audience. 🔹 Prepare for reduced website traffic: Expect fewer visits from basic informational queries as AI handles these directly. However, the traffic you do receive will be higher-intent visitors, closer to making a decisions, that should convert better. 🔹 Update your content strategy: Create different content for different search engines — intent-targeted informational content for generative AI search, and conversion-focused content for traditional search. 🔹 Build content AI can't summarize: Create interactive content, like calculators and data-driven content that requires user input. This ensures your brand stays visible even as AI handles informational queries. 🔹 Focus on intent, not keywords: The old approach of targeting high-volume keywords is outdated. Instead, understand and align with your customers' search intentions. The key takeaway? Humans are lazy. Your customers will consistently choose the convenience of direct answers from generative AI, even if those answers are sometimes inaccurate. They want to avoid sifting through pages of search results. As marketers, we need to adapt to this new reality. We must create content that caters to both types of searches: (1) content that helps your brand appear in generative AI responses for informational queries and (2) content that attracts and converts for decision searches on traditional search engines. How are you starting to search differently with generative AI?

Are you sure your SEO strategy is ready for LLMs? Most contractors think they have an SEO problem... But here’s what’s really going on: - They stick to the same old SEO tactics. - They copy strategies that “worked” for others. - They ignore how AI is changing search results. Here’s how top performers optimize for LLMs based on search intent: 1️⃣ Full Site SEO Audit Spot crawl errors, broken links, and mobile optimization issues with tools like Google Search Console. 2️⃣ Structured Data Add schema like FAQ and Service to help LLMs understand your content and improve your AI rankings. 3️⃣ AI-Friendly Content Format content with clear headers, bullet points, and concise paragraphs that LLMs can easily read. 4️⃣ Smart Keyword Strategy Use semantic and long-tail keywords that align with user intent, powered by AI insights. 5️⃣ Featured Snippets Target question-based queries with concise answers to land in AI-driven answer boxes. 6️⃣ Consistent Business Info Ensure your N.A.P. (Name, Address, Phone) is consistent across your website and directories. 7️⃣ Backlink Relevance Build high-authority local backlinks that LLMs trust and disavow low-quality ones. 8️⃣ Performance Monitoring Use AI-powered analytics to track and optimize your performance across key metrics. 9️⃣ AI-Generated Content Leverage LLMs to generate and refresh your content based on current AI-driven search trends. 🔟 Regular SEO Audits Keep your content fresh with quarterly LLM audits to stay aligned with evolving AI algorithms. Each step drives better rankings, more traffic, and improved SEO performance. 📌 Save this if your SEO isn’t performing like it should. Follow Josh Crouch 🐂🎯 for more tips on optimizing your SEO and leveraging AI!

🚨 SEO is in crisis—double-digit traffic drops across industries! 🚨 🔥 Key takeaways from Lindsay Boyajian Hagan (Conductor): 🔹 Fewer searches—Users are turning to AI for direct answers. 🔹 Organic results pushed down—AI Overviews, ads, and image carousels now dominate the top. 🔹 40% of searches display AI-generated summaries. 🔹 Reddit & Quora are outranking brands—Forums are seen as more “authentic.” 💡 What can you do? ✅ Ditch generic content—Double down on expertise. AI-generated content is everywhere—your edge is experience, authority, and trust. ✅ Meet your audience where they are—Create content on Reddit, Quora, and forums that Google prioritizes. ✅ Rethink your KPIs—Traffic is down, but brand impressions in search engines are up (thanks, AIO!). Measure what matters. ✅ Remember: Your great content is feeding LLMs. Don’t just create—strategize. And then, Chris Andrew (Scrunch AI) dropped this bombshell: 🔹 AI crawlers—not humans—are now your biggest site visitors. 🔹 Browsing is dead. AI delivers answers, not links. 🔹 2B+ users search in AI tools every month. 🔹 Optimize for AI search: • Give AI access to your content. • Create conversational, persona-adjusted content. • Ensure your site’s infrastructure is AI-friendly. At the Chief Marketing Officer Summit by CMO Alliance, the conversation was clear: Google Search is transforming at an unprecedented pace, and brands must adapt—fast. SEO isn’t dying—it’s evolving. The question is: Are you keeping up? Would love to hear—how is your brand adapting to AI-dominated search? #SEO #AI #Marketing #DigitalMarketing #CMO #SearchOptimization #AIO #MarketingStrategy #CMOSummit #CMOAlliance

Forbes estimates 60%+ of organic traffic is being effected due to the introduction of AI summaries, the adoption of LLMs, and ultimately the changes in SEO. I recently spoke at Affiliate Summit East on the emergence of AI and the impact to eCommerce. I touched on SEO and the move to SGE (search generative experience), the issues facing identity capture and noise created by bots as well as AI-generated content, and how content goes viral with changes to TikTok & Meta's algorithms. Sharing some of the learnings (and slides) on AI summaries and rankings: Impact - Google's AI summaries can take up to 3 full mobile scrolls or 2 desktop scrolls (1500 pixels) - LLM search went from 0.25% of traffic to 2.25% in <12mo - 60% of organic site traffic is impacted meaning the CTR drops aka people do not end up landing on your site. How to adapt - SEO & SGE are underpinned by the same recipe: content. - How to show up as the featured AI summary or authority? 1. Create unique content and lots of it 2. Build contextual content At Checkmate we get 1.5M+ unique visitors/week to our public-facing product pages. We also are featured on 1700 ChatGPT pages. How we were able to do that is by pulling in long-form structured content for the products we help sell as well as using LLMs to generate some unique content. For those in eCommerce I featured Stanley 1913 with what I think as a really strong product pages that rank well for SGE. If you look at any of their products they have extremely rich, unique content. They leverage product descriptions, product specs, related other products, reviews (not hidden or collapsed) & FAQs. For SGE shorter isn't better, the more unique content the generally better the indexing. Stanley 1913 also has a really strong formatting structure with clear H1, H2 tags, and containers. You have to remember if a bot can't make sense of the text then it won't surface in AI summaries. This will also be extremely important in the future of agentic commerce. 2. Building contextual content The way people are searching is moving from "black shoes" to "best shoes for running a marathon". Context is key. To be able to show up in LLMs or AI summaries, you need to associate your products within that context. 3 easy ways to do that: 1. Create and leverage a PR strategy 2. Build your own written contextual information in a blog on your website 3. Contribute/invest to review sites If you are able to both create unique content with a strong structure and build contextual content AI summaries and LLMs can be a great source of traffic. It is early days so investing in content and structure is a must. Drop me a note if you have other tips you see working or other brands doing it well!

AI Overviews is here to stay; SEO needs to strategically adapt, not wish it away. Instead of hoping for a full retreat and a return to the pre-AI-Overiews era, SEO must do these 4️⃣ things right now: ➡️ Audit your existing traffic-generating keywords in Google Search Console and assess what is clearly a top-of-funnel keyword that AI could disrupt. Don't give up on those, but mentally prepare for that possibility. And communicate to stakeholders that this is possible. ➡️ Identify your potential mid-funnel keywords and be sure that you have addressed these on your site. (read my newsletter on this topic). If you have not created content for mid-funnel queries, do so immediately. ➡️ The impact of links is always up for debate regarding SEO, but one thing is absolute for the AI Overview era, brand building links are incredibly powerful. Rather than just focusing on inbound links, make sure you are getting mentions in many places. (I know some great agencies that do this, so let me know if I can introduce you.) These mentions will feed the call-outs you get in AI overviews. ➡️ Look at your top-of-funnel content and ensure you have optimized for micro-conversions rather. Your top-of-funnel content could get pulled into an AI Overview, and rather than expect a user to convert from that click, develop triggers and actions to move them down the funnel. (Newsletter signups, read more, watch videos. ) Many mainstream media articles, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and others, have discussed Google's supposed "failure" to anticipate LLMs' search flaws. Most of the articles agree that those flaws will always exist, meaning that users will get used to an acceptable failure rate. Even Google has responded to the online furor by saying they are leaning from it but are not backing down. They have reduced (probably temporarily) the queries where AI Overviews show up, but many queries still generate AI overviews. Prepare for when it is a lot more.

You know when you have those conversations with people that open up your mind to new things? I legit just had one recently with my man John Kunz of VELOX Media talking about SEO and AI and all the impacts of what is happening. I had to share some of his thoughts, so with his permission, wanted to share these 8 points to be aware of in 2025 for AI and SEO: AI Changes the Rules, Not the Game SEO isn’t going anywhere, but AI is rewriting how it works. Google doesn’t just reward keywords anymore—it prioritizes user intent, trust, and authority. Focus on quality content and clear relevance. Schema Markup is Critical AI algorithms use schema to understand content structure. If your schema markup isn’t optimized, you’re invisible. Schema connects intent to authority, making it the backbone of future rankings. Intent Beats Keywords Google and AI-driven search tools like ChatGPT prioritize why people search, not just what they type. Are they learning, acting, or solving a problem? Create content aligned with intent, or you’ll miss the mark. Trust and Authority Decide Winners AI-generated content floods the web, but trust still rules. Build backlinks from respected sources and focus on producing content that helps, not just ranks. AI rewards authority, not fluff. Black Hat Tricks Don’t Work AI doesn’t fall for hidden keywords or cheap SEO hacks anymore. Trying to game the system will get you penalized. Focus on ethical, white-hat strategies that deliver long-term value. AI Content Needs Human Hands Flooding the market with AI content doesn’t help if it’s generic. Use meta-prompting to guide AI outputs, then refine them. High-quality content wins—quantity alone won’t cut it. Long-Tail Keywords Matter AI tools focus on long-tail keywords and context. They read between the lines of a query to understand the whole picture. Your content should do the same—comprehensive, clear, and contextual. AI Doesn’t Replace Fundamentals AI speeds up SEO but doesn’t replace the basics. Backlinks, linking strategies, and strong site structures are still essential. AI enhances what already works—it doesn’t reinvent it. AI elevates SEO, but it can’t fix bad strategy. Align your efforts with intent, trust, and authority while using AI to support instead of replacing your expertise. Thank you John Kunz! #AI #SEO #SearchStrategy

If you are losing search volume on Google to AI overview (AIO) answers, this is how we are counteracting this… And first, a quick disclaimer. Search is fundamentally changing and a lot less searches result in clicks today. One way to better understand the full picture of search intent towards your brand or related keywords is to use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to see how you rank in respect to AIO citation to get a more complete picture. But back to specific tactics that have been working for us… 1) More links are showing up from sites like Linkedin, Reddit, X and social sites (see image on this post). Time we have spent writing high performing answers across these platforms has helped to have our content showing up in AIOs. I have found that posts I write that more naturally and directly answer a common search query rank better than clever hooks. The average Linkedin post of mine that shows up in an AIO has around 70k views and around a 4-5% engagement ratio. 2) One thing we have started to do more of is comprehensive FAQs or “People Also Ask” sections at the end of content. If it comes from a high DR source, these get cited a lot in AI Overviews. 3) Focus on creating video content. We have ranked a handful of videos in the top 3 featured videos for desired keywords over the last quarter. Many of these videos range from 5-10k views and have 200-400 likes and 50-100 comments. We have clear descriptions and chaptering in the Youtube video description. Again, we see new content, published within the year, grabbing a lot of ranking in the featured Google video tab. 4) Mentions from high DR sites for your brand rank well for AI overviews. Sites like Smart Company, Zapier, Forbes, Ahrefs etc. have done well to help us rank for AIO results. When I search for keywords in my space I see a lot of links to McKinsey, Wharton, Stripe, Mailchimp etc.. But an interesting ripple and difference we have found from standard Featured Snippets (search result zero) of old, is the importance of timeliness. Meaning more recent high authority articles perform better, and there is more inclusion of multi-media (podcasts, videos etc) 5) AI Overviews seem to prefer more natural sounding queries. So for example, structuring content closer to natural speech, “What email marketing tool is best for an online creator?” is more natural than “Top email tool for creators”. What is working for you to capture more search intent in these changing times?