How AI Search Engines are Rewinding Your Hard Earned SEO
I wish I could help small business owners see what's coming.
Small business owners still believe the whole discipline of “SEO” can be handled in-house.
After all, traditional SEO tactics use to be as simple as blowing into an NES cartridge.
But in the not-so-distant future, everyone is going to find them (or not find them) through a completely different type of search behavior. One that's based in an LLM like ChatGPT, not in a traditional search engine like Google.
The LLMs will use their site (not the searchers) and the complexities of preparing for this are extraordinarily different compared to the old days of SEO.
Need proof? Fifty-eight percent of consumers now turn to AI tools for product recommendations.
The Content Reality Check
When I tell business owners about the new requirements around content itself, they think I mean increasing their volume to 2 or 3 articles and social posts a week.
But the volume needs to be closer to 2 or 3 posts per day.
The requirements have been redefined from "keyword-based" to "continuous, on-trend, and original," and these posts need to show up as written, video, and social content on specific platforms that complement the business itself.
Businesses who aren't checking all these boxes are in for a rude awakening.
Personality Over Industry
Speaking of social, here's what most people get wrong about platform selection. They think a plumber belongs on different platforms than a marketing agency.
The platforms we recommend have far more to do with the personality of the business than the industry.
It's often about risk tolerance. A business that isn't comfortable pressing against cultural norms fits best on a place like LinkedIn. A company that's creative and enjoys pushing boundaries thrives in spaces like TikTok.
And remember: The AI systems evaluating your content care more about authentic engagement than polished perfection.
The Authenticity Algorithm
What we’re seeing so far is that LLMs reward authenticity and engagement more than they punish edge. If your TikTok content gets genuine interaction and shares, that signals credibility to the AI systems.
The bigger risk isn't being too edgy. It's being boring or irrelevant.
A plumber who posts funny, slightly irreverent videos about common bathroom disasters will probably get surfaced by an LLM over the plumber with perfectly polished, generic content that nobody engages with.
We're in the early days of understanding how these systems evaluate different signals. But genuine engagement and consistent value delivery seem to be the constants, regardless of platform personality.
The Infrastructure That Still Matters
Here's the thing most people miss. The underlying crawling and indexing infrastructure still resembles traditional search engines.
Web crawlers continue discovering, analyzing, and indexing web pages across the internet. This creates the information base that AI models access and process.
But AI Overviews now show for the majority of Google searches, favoring longer, informational queries with higher search volumes.
You're competing for a single answer slot instead of ten blue links.
What This Means Right Now
Small businesses are literally being erased by these changes. Every major platform that we rely on for customers is ignoring those who aren't playing by the brand-new rulebook.
The old approach of excelling in just one area no longer works. You need all three elements of visibility: Content, Connection, and Compliance.
Content means continuous, on-trend, original posts across written, video, and social platforms. Connection means intuitive layouts and people-first web presence. Compliance involves search-optimized indexing, LLM-optimized structuring, and ADA accessibility.
These new burdens are simply unreasonable for most businesses to handle alone.
If you’d like to see a deep dive on everything I’m skimming the surface on here, I’d love to take you all the way down the rabbit hole.
Here’s a link to my personal calendar.