By Andrew Blackman
The rules of search are changing. And it's forcing a lot of companies to ask themselves a fundamental question: How do we get noticed now?
For two decades, companies have relied on search-engine optimization, or SEO, to battle for customer attention online -- tuning keywords and backlinks to climb Google's rankings. Now, as AI systems like ChatGPT and Claude increasingly answer questions directly, visibility depends less on ranking first and more on being the source those systems trust.
Half of consumers polled in an August 2025 McKinsey survey specifically seek out AI-powered search engines. And by 2028, McKinsey projects, people will spend $750 billion on goods and services they find through AI-powered searches.
All of this means that companies may have to find new ways to get attention. Unlike Google, AI doesn't have consistent search standards that companies can follow; in fact, it is very tough to tell what sites AI will use or recommend when answering a question.
The changing landscape also matters for the consumers who use search. For a long time, people's experience of the internet has been shaped by SEO and the tactics companies use to boost their rankings. Now, the online experience may be affected by very different standards -- how companies package their information for AI. And understanding those tactics will help consumers make more-informed decisions.
Experts are already cooking up new ways for companies to boost their AI visibility. Here are some of their recommendations.
Don't abandon tradition
One caveat right off the bat: Although AI search is growing fast, many people are still using traditional search engines and clicking on links. And even when people do use ChatGPT or other large language models (LLMs), the chatbots are often doing good old-fashioned web searches under the hood -- even if they aren't giving priority to the same stuff that regular search engines do.
The bottom line is that the SEO fundamentals still matter. "This is not the end of SEO," says Kelly Cutler, associate professor of digital marketing and visual communication at Northwestern University. "This is the next iteration of SEO." Businesses should still make sure that their sites load quickly, for instance, and that they're set up for easy indexing.
Talk to customers
At the same time, a lot of rules are changing. For instance, with traditional SEO, getting a single link from a very authoritative site meant more for ranking purposes than hundreds of mentions on other sites.
But experts say AI favors tons of customer reviews and comments, drawing heavily on sites like Reddit, G2 and Quora. For instance, Reddit is ChatGPT's go-to source for consumer electronics, followed by Tom's Guide and then Wikipedia, according to marketing-software company Semrush. (An OpenAI spokesperson says, "ChatGPT search is designed to provide people with timely, high-quality answers they find helpful. We surface relevant information from a range of sources, and we're constantly refining our search indexing, ranking, and model behavior.")
"AI search is inextricably linked to user-generated content, what people are saying about your brand," says Andrew Warden, chief marketing officer at Semrush. "AI favors firsthand experience, specificity and continuously refreshed discussions. So the more activity that is happening around your brand, the more likely you are to be propelled into the conversation."
To gin up that kind of visibility, companies are likely to engage more with customers online, like answering people's questions, or encouraging them to leave honest reviews.
Structure matters
AIs focus on facts they can easily grab and include in their answers. So companies will try to give their sites a clear structure that makes information easy to identify.
For instance, traditional SEO strategies advise users to put plenty of subheads in their content. But AI chatbots want even more subheads, along with bulleted lists, FAQs and quick "TL;DR" summaries of the article's main points.
Add details -- even really obvious ones
When people search using AI, they get specific and conversational. They won't tell AI just to look for a "black zip-up fleece"; they will tell it that they're going hiking next week in the Smoky Mountains and need a slim-fitting fleece to keep them warm. So AI will favor sites that add exactly that kind of contextual information to product listings -- even if it seems really obvious.
"It's about putting yourself in your customers' shoes and thinking about all the contextual information you could add," says Rachel Klein, a senior vice president at digital-marketing agency Wpromote.
Different tactics for different AIs
In traditional SEO, techniques that worked for Google would generally also work for Bing, Yahoo and other search engines, and what worked for sites in one industry would usually work in others. AI throws all that out the window.
"All of the platforms have a different weighting of ingredients," says James Cadwallader, co-founder and chief executive of Profound, a company focused on helping brands gain visibility in AI search. "Gemini pulls from YouTube results far more than ChatGPT does, for example." Gemini also relies on a wider range of sources than others do, he says.
"We see demand for original perspectives, rich visual formats like video, and information that helps people learn something new," says a spokesperson for Google, which runs Gemini. "Across Search and Gemini, we don't aim to show content from any particular site or platform. Rather, we pull together a wide range of the most relevant insights and perspectives from sites across the web."
Different chatbots also rely on different sites depending on the industry or type of search. "In e-commerce, social channels like Reddit play a huge role, but in fintech, we see [articles on a company's own website] being successful," Cadwallader says. So a financial firm could benefit from adding authoritative articles to its own website, while an e-commerce firm might be better off asking customers to leave reviews and start social-media conversations about the products.
Consider sponsored content
Traditional search engines usually give less weight to sponsored content: articles or blog posts that a company pays for but that look like regular editorial content. AI, though, seems to treat that information the same as other articles, Klein says.
"We're seeing lots of instances where a chatbot is referencing information from sponsored content, but they aren't disclosing that," she says. "So there's an opportunity for brands to influence the types of conversations that they're in and what they're associated with."
Get ready to adapt
The old SEO world got shaken every time Google changed its search algorithm. Strategies that used to work suddenly brought massive drops in traffic. But AI models get updated far more frequently: every 17 days on average, according to Jesse Dwyer, chief communications officer at AI company Perplexity, and that pace will increase as AI models increasingly update themselves. So what works today may not work even a few weeks from now, let alone a few years.
"There were more model updates in 2025 than Google has had algorithm updates since 2018," says Dwyer. "You can still game these systems at this point, but the rate of acceleration of AI makes it very, very difficult. The models are becoming so sophisticated so fast that this idea of being able to reverse-engineer them and game the results is just untenable and unrealistic."
Embrace uncertainty
In traditional search, the rules of the game were simple, and success was easy to quantify -- where your company showed up in search and how many people clicked on it. AI search, however, is much harder to measure. Many searchers get their answers from AI and never click through to a company's website. And AI search results vary wildly.
In June and July of last year, Profound ran thousands of prompts through four major AI platforms. The company found that 40% to 60% of the domains cited in AI responses were completely different just a month later, even when they asked identical questions.
Dwyer at Perplexity adds that AI search pulls in much more information about the person asking the question, making search results highly customized for individual users and therefore difficult to predict or measure.
He advises companies to direct their optimization efforts at improving their products and the quality of the information they share, not on technical tweaks aimed at moving an elusive needle. "Marketers have the option to follow fake numbers or to focus on building great things," he says. "Time will tell which of those strategies is better."
Andrew Blackman is a writer in Serbia. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 22, 2026 12:00 ET (16:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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