What I learned About AI Search

As a founder doing my own marketing, "how do I get my brand to show up in AI search?" has been the question in my head for years.

Here's what I actually learned.

If you want to show up in AI search (undoubtedly the future), you only have two ways.

The first: get your brand into the training data of LLMs. If they know you by heart, they'll spit your name automatically.

Until recently, this was the best tactic for AI mentions. But training cycles last 12-18 months, so you'd better hurry up and be all over the internet by the time big-tech crawlers scrape it for their next cut-off. This is becoming less effective anyway, because turns out nobody likes outdated info in answers.

The second way is retrieval. When you ask something, the AI searches the web and gives you fresh results. This is far more important than training data.

And how does it work? The AI actually uses Google. It uses "fan-out" queries: it analyzes your prompt and runs 3 to 15+ related searches, then combines them into one answer.

Which means AI search (GEO, whatever) is again about showing up on Google (SEO).

Because of fan-out, ranking for a specific keyword only gets you into one of those searches. You need to be in MOST of them to get cited. No keyword will guarantee a #1 position or predictable traffic anymore.

SEO is transitioning from KEYWORDS to ENTITIES. An entity represents a person, place, idea or brand, built on relationships with others in a "knowledge graph". That's what search engines (and LLMs) use to identify things on the open web.

Most "traditional" content marketing doesn't work either. The classic playbook (top-of-funnel how-to articles to bring massive traffic and convert a fraction into customers) stopped working. Users ask AI, AI solves it on the spot, nobody visits your site.

But there's hope: because entities weigh more now, writing genuine content about your niche (the less generic the better) reinforces your entity in the graph (topical authority) and puts you on the AI results map.

The simple solution is: be everywhere on the internet. This time you don't strictly need backlinks but lots of web citations. Make people talk about you within your topical authority everywhere, especially on social media and video, which is still harder to fool with AI.

SEO has been killed uncountable times over the last 20 years. I'm afraid it will survive this one too.