For two decades, the brief from the client was effectively the same: get us to position one on Google for the queries our buyers type. Everything we did — keyword research, on-page, off-page, technical SEO — was in service of that single number on a single SERP.
That world is now optional. Google AI Overviews ship in front of organic results on a growing share of queries. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini answer the same questions without ever showing a SERP. The position-one URL is often hidden inside a synthesised answer the user never clicks.
The brief has changed
Three years ago the working definition of success was traffic. Today it is citation. The new winning state is being named inside the AI answer before the click ever happens — because that is what determines who makes the buyer’s shortlist.
This is not a small adjustment. It is a different game, with different mechanics, measured differently.
What we measure now
- Citation rate. How often your brand is named when LLMs answer your buyer-intent queries. Tracked weekly across six surfaces.
- Share of voice in answers. Of all the brands cited for a given query, what fraction is yours?
- Citation source. Which of your pages got lifted into the answer? Often it is not the one you would expect.
- Conventional organic. Still measured. Still matters. But no longer the only number.
What changed in the work
Three things, in order of impact:
- Page structure. LLMs lift passages, not pages. Pages organised around explicit claims with attributable evidence get lifted; meandering listicles do not.
- Named-entity discipline. Your brand needs to exist as a clean entity in the model’s world. That means structured data, consistent naming across the web, and presence on the third-party pages models trust.
- Topic coverage. The old playbook was depth-first (an “ultimate guide”). The new one is breadth-first (a constellation of focused pieces, each citable on its own).
What hasn’t changed
Everything underneath. Site speed, internal linking, schema, editorial quality. The fundamentals are the same; what they are in service of has shifted. If you skip the fundamentals, no amount of AI-optimisation tactics will save you.
The brief has changed. The craft has not.