SEO is Dead (Again)

Your competitor just got recommended by ChatGPT to 400M users last month. You weren't even mentioned.

Welcome to AI SEO warfare.

I've helped brands rank on search engines for 15+ years. But lately? Every founder asks me the same urgent question: "How do we rank in ChatGPT?" The interface has changed. The game has changed. And there's an entirely new playbook you need to master before your competitors do.

Today we’re breaking down:

📊 Some brands are already seeing 10x+ traffic from AI referrals—one case study showed 2,300% growth by aligning content with AI Overviews.

🧠 AI Overviews are Google's new top-of-page answers—generated by Gemini, shown before ads, and often without showing your actual site.

📈 You can track your brand mentions in AI Overviews using tools like Ahrefs Brand Radar or Dejan's AI Rank Tracker.

✅ Your new playbook: summarize smart, speak conversationally, and seed content on trusted surfaces—Wikipedia, Reddit, and anywhere AI scrapes first.

📈 AI Search is exploding — ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are driving serious traffic. Canva's Head of SEO reports a 300% YoY surge.

💡 Gemini's "memory" is programmable. With dynamic thresholds for grounding, your brand description can flip on/off in real-time.

📉 Clicks convert worse—20–30% drop vs classic SEO—but volume is rising, and influence is compounding.

✅ New playbook: Forget keywords. Engineer summaries. Seed citations. Feed the machine what you want it to remember.

Most marketers have heard of 'zero-click search' where Google answers the question right on the results page, and users never visit your site. That's been a problem for years.

But AI search? It's far more dangerous.

It doesn't just answer—it decides. ChatGPT and Gemini pick the brand, summarize the value, and move the user along. If you're not in that answer box, you're not even in the conversation.

ChatGPT Search went live on October 31, 2024, and by February 2025 it rolled out to everyone. In just a few months, it's changed how hundreds of millions find information—and make buying decisions about your products.

And the traffic converts. Canva's Head of SEO confirmed the users coming from these models aren't just curious—they're clicking, designing, and buying.

There are exactly three places AI scrapes first when forming opinions about your brand. Most companies completely ignore the second one. Keep reading to find out what they are.

📣 TAKEAWAY: Forget the "0-click panic." Clicks are still happening. They're just coming from chat boxes instead of search results.

Here’s the part nobody tells you:

Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity don't just "search."

They summarize, often using scraps from Reddit threads, old press articles, and scraped blurbs from the SERP.

When was the last time you checked how your brand appears in these models? You might be horrified by what you find.

Gemini’s response JSON includes a field called <additional_info>—an AI-generated brand blurb stitched together from the search index.

Dan Petrovic (Dejan) ran a teardown. The results? Wildly inaccurate.

One brand was described using copy from a 10-year-old blog post and a Reddit comment—neither of which were on the brand's site.

🧠 Rule: If you're not explicitly feeding the machine, you're implicitly trusting its improv skills.

What happens if you don't?
Your competitors or random disgruntled people on the internet will shape your brand narrative for you. This is your life’s work. You DO NOT want to be defined by some rando online.

This is the easiest way for a busy person wanting to learn AI in as little time as possible:

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Old SEO tracked positions. Modern visibility tracks influence inside the model's mind.

If you want to show up consistently in AI answers, you need to understand the two layers of LLM memory:

Its retrieval engine grounds live search results only when confidence dips below a certain threshold. Default: 0.3. (Source: Google Developers Blog)

What does this mean for your brand? You can subtly influence whether Gemini pulls new info... or defaults to stale summaries burned into its brain.

You don’t need to throw out your SEO playbook.
But you do need to layer in new tools built for AI-first visibility.

If you've ever wished you were earlier to Google... this is your shot.

Because this moment? It rhymes with 2005.

Back then, the game was decoding PageRank quirks and backlink tricks before Google patched the loopholes.

Now, the edge lives in reverse-engineering LLM behavior. Figuring out how Gemini chunks SERP data, how ChatGPT dedupes sources, how Perplexity chooses "related links."

The rules are foggy. The results are erratic. That's your opportunity.

The brands that learn to plant the right "memory atoms" now will compound authority while everyone else is still fiddling with H1 tags.

This is pre-algorithmic ossification. You've got 12–18 months before the window tightens and Google bakes this behavior into its broader search ecosystem.

Remember how you asked ChatGPT about your brand at the beginning of this article? Go check that screenshot again. That's what millions of potential customers are seeing right now.

The question isn't whether AI will describe your brand. It's whether you'll control what it says.

The model is learning. Are you teaching it?

🎁 Get rewarded for sharing! My team grew NEW accounts to over 50 million views in just a few months. We made an AI viral hook generator so you can follow the same hook frameworks that we do.

Invite your friends to join, and when they sign up, you’ll unlock our AI Viral Hook Generator—the ultimate tool for creating scroll-stopping content.

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Let's turn those random AI mentions into an engineered narrative that drives traffic.

Smart brands don't leave their AI visibility to chance. They systematically plant memory hooks, seed strategic citations, and build algorithmic gravity that pulls customers in.

Book a Strategy Session 🔥