How Important is SEO for AI Visibility (AIO/GEO/SEO for AI)?

DO NOT quit SEO: It remains (and will remain) fundamental to AI visibility 👇🏻

The search industry is definitely changing due to the rapidly evolving AI technology. And these changes are dramatic on many levels, including:

• Searching behaviors and expectations (People are trained to search in prompts and expect quick answers in return)

• Less predictability: AI answers are dynamic and personalized. If you search twice a day, for the same exact prompt, you can get different answers, different entities and different citations

• Client expectations: Businesses are very confused how to translate tactics into expected results or ROI

As a result, you hear “SEO is dead” claims even more often than before. (To be clear, we’ve been hearing these since day one of SEO existence).

But how important is SEO for AI visibility and how is that changing?

First, before I answer this question:

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An ever-increasing reliance of AI platforms on traditional search

When generative AI entered our lives almost two years ago, they were 100% reliant on training data.

Well, it didn’t sustain them too long.

These days ChatGPT and Gemini run behind-the-scene searches for many prompts.

And guess what?

They both rely on Google, it looks like!

While it is well-expected from Gemini and AI Mode (both Google’s products), ChatGPT has surprised many by having silently switched to Google about two weeks ago (I shared an experiment proving that here)

How do AI platforms use Google search, and what should we do about that?

• For product and entity recommendation, both ChatGPT and Gemini (and AI Mode) find and cite listicles (Top XX lists). It is important to get included in as many as you can!

• For most prompts, AI platforms run “fan-out” queries to give a more helpful answer to a user. These are separate searches

• For many prompts, ChatGPT also runs site:reddit.com search to find (and cite) user-generated content on the topic.

All this search-driven research is consolidated into an answer. Note an interesting phenomenon here: People no longer need to search to find answers and brands. All these searches are run by AI, but these are still using traditional search engines.

So buying decisions are still made based on traditional search, which also means:

Traditional SEO is key to AI visibility (and it looks like it’s getting more important as AI agents are increasingly using search engines to give answers)

• Being in Google’s index is fundamental to being included in AI answers

• Creating relevant content is key to being part of AI training data

• Getting cited by other publications is crucial for being discovered by AI platforms

• Having strong visibility on Reddit is important for being included in answers (OK, this is somewhat new)

No wonder there are multiple studies showing the huge overlap between AI visibility and organic top rankings:

• 76% of AI Overview Citations Pull From Top 10 Pages (by Ahrefs)

• Google AI Mode vs. Traditional Search & Other LLMs [Study] by Semrush: AI Mode citations had a 51% domain overlap and 32% URL overlap with Google’s top 10 search results.

And let’s not forget that Gemini (which runs AI Mode) is likely to be using organic search signals, i.e, PageRank.

Naturally, visibility in AI answers is not as predictable as organic positions due to obvious reasons:

• AI answers address not just the direct question in a prompt; they provide additional information (they fan-out).

• AI answers are very dynamic: They pick new URLs to cite each time they answer the same (or similar) question. Also, all platforms pick different URLs to cite or use for answers.

That being said, the game is definitely changing, but organic visibility (and hence SEO) remains fundamental. There is a reason why official “AI Optimization” guidelines from both Google and Bing suggest no new tactics apart from traditional SEO ones :)

If you need a comprehensive AI audit and roadmap, this is what I do. Reach out!