Transcription
Is SEO dead? And why did 90% of founders and marketeers say that AEO was the biggest revenue opportunity in 2026?
I've identified four steps that will take you from a complete beginner to being able to drive revenue from AI. I'll explain exactly what AI search is, why it works differently to Google, and more importantly, the practical steps that you can take right now to get your business showing up.
My name's Chris Donley, and I spent 20 years in SEO. I bootstrapped a 100 person agency, Verb Brands, running SEO for companies like Bugatti and Aston Martin. And I have never seen a shift move this fast. And today I run Searchable, which is a SAS business that provides analytics and aentic workflows to help companies improve their AI SEO.
So, let's start with a reality check. Most self-titled SEO gurus are screaming that Google is dead and that you need to abandon everything and focus only on AI search. And although chat GBT is the fastest consumer adoption of technology ever, if you look at this data from Spark Toro, Google is handling 13 to 14 billion searches every single day. If you look at OpenAI's own data, the majority of their queries are things like reformat this email. How do I respond to this? And the truth is right now people are sticking with what they know, Google.
So Google isn't dead, but the tides are beginning to shift. And the point that most marketeteers or founders are overlooking is that Google itself has now pivoted. More than 50% of searches end with AI overviews. And this behavioral change is going quietly unnoticed as more and more people want their answers to be served conversationally, not just in keywords.
So when 7 billion of Google searches end with AI overviews, you want to create highly citable pieces of content. The good news is is that AEO and GEO are just an additional layer that you need to add to your existing SEO strategy. And that all the tactics that I'm about to cover apply across Chat, GBT, Gemini, Claude, and Google's own AI overviews. All of these are technically now powered by large language models.
So, how do you get your business to be recommended at a specific time that your customer is looking for your product? Number one is writing content that AI search platforms will use. In short, AI search platforms pull the top ranking search results and trusted sources on the web already. They compose answers made up of several different sources. So, if you take a look at this graph here, you can see that it varies across LLMs. Chat GBT uses different sources compared to Gemini when it generates its answers.
So, when we used to optimize for SEO, you would structure everything around a specific keyword, CRM software for example, and that simply won't work with LLM. So instead, you need to build it far more conversationally. Structure it around many queries. For example, what is the best CRM software to help SMMES generate leads? You're answering an exact question. And then you want to focus on your headers, H1, H2, H3, and so on, and build the entire piece of content on natural humanlike sentence questions. Then your role is to answer that in a very conversational way. So, in this instance, try and give an expert answer regarding why a certain CRM is better for a small business that wants simplicity and a fast setup. So, one tip I'd give here is to download a tool like Whisper Flow or even record a Loom and then talk to your laptop as if you're describing the answer to a friend. And this can form the basis of your article and I guarantee it will be written far more naturally than if you didn't do that.
So the second thing I want to focus on to make your content work in AI is EAT and Google has focused on EAT for years. Experience, expertise, authoritiveness, and trustworthiness. AI focuses here very deeply with answers being increased by up to 30% for chat GBT and perplexity when brands are including clear sections, expert commentary, and clear FAQs. So how do you create content that aderes to the EAT principles? It's actually very straightforward and it goes back to my point that AI platforms weigh content with real expert commentary. So EAT means sharing real life experiences including expert advice, commentary, showcasing case studies and testimonials in the content that you are writing. So ensure that you're including quotes and statistics from high authority sources or individuals and aim to try and give multiple perspectives on complex topics. And lastly, use your own content to address known limitations and objections to your product or service that exists today. And this will allow you to control the narrative in the answers that LLM provide and give you a positive sentiment when LLM talk about you.
The third thing I want to talk about is how AI chatbots prefer semantic richness and context. So unlike in SEO where we used to repeat the same keyword again and again and again to try and get it ranked, you want to be using many natural variations explaining the same thing or explaining related concepts around the same topic. So if you're talking about your CRM, you want to have multiple different descriptions and multiple different questions about the CRM rather than just plugging the CRM term. So, ensure that you're using clear structures and headings to separate your text and your content into really clear, logical sections. Focus on trying to separate your content into bite-sized question answer content. Try and use bullet points more and lists. And tables are even shown to improve your ability to be answered. And it makes sense. If an AI is asked a very specific question and you have the answer as a header and that specific answer in a bullet point, it's much more likely to mention and site you and drive traffic towards you because it's easy to retrieve the answer. Another way that you can think about using tables is for comparisons of features and for comparisons of pricing. And using a table in this regard is an excellent way of passing the information straight through to AI machines.
Which takes us nicely on to the fourth part, which is FAQs. This is quite literally gold right now. If an AI is asked a very specific question and you have that exact question as a header with a clear answer underneath, it will probably site you.
So those are the four points to focus on to really get your content cited by AI. But the problem that most marketers have faced for years is there hasn't been a reliable way to track traffic from LLMs. There is no Google search console. So how do you know if it's working? So tracking clicks also isn't as helpful as it used to be as most people will get the answer to their question conversationally right there in the chat. And right now the best way to track your success in AI search therefore is how often your brand is mentioned in the answers and how often the LLM will link to your website as the source in their answers.
So how do you do that? How do you get mentioned? How do you get cited? And that question was the fundamental reason that I launched searchable earlier this year. It lets you automatically pull data from your business and your website and create relevant prompts so you can immediately start tracking how you are performing versus your competitors and see which LLMs are actually citing you and mentioning you every single day. Honestly, try it. I've dropped a link below in the description for you to give it a go.
So, the next part of your AI optimization is schema. So, what is schema and how can you use it? Schema markup is a specialized form of structured data that is used to tell a search engine or AI exactly what content you are showing. It's literally code that machines read that humans don't see. And there are two core types of schema that you need to focus on to really win in SEO. One is foundational and is known as your organizational schema. This tells the AI about your brand, your business, and directs them towards your social channels. In the eyes of AI, this is fundamentally what it sees you as. It's what it knows you as. And that is why I think it's so important to work hard on ensuring these elements are very clear that your social profiles are set up and posting consistently as this forms your social fortress around your entity. So AI really understands what your business is.
The second type is article schema. This is the machine code that is used to communicate the author, the date of publication, the meaning of the article. It's the core element and therefore it's how you're going to be understood by AI. Think of it as labeling your content. It helps AI quickly search through to spot any relevant articles before citing. So, three quick wins for article schema. First, attach it to a real expert, not like an admin as part of the company. Use a proper author with credentials and a bio. AI trusts people, not anonymous brands. Second, don't just mark up the page. Mark up the details. You need a headline, publish date, last updated, and author, and the key entities that you mention. Third, I want you to keep it fresh. If you update the article, update the schema. AI systems favor content that's maintained and current.
So, that might have sounded complicated, but here's three quick wins for article schema. So, the first point sounds technical, but it's truly not. You need to ensure that the majority of your content, which is what you want to get mentioned and cited for, is in HTML rather than in something like JavaScript. AI systems mostly read raw HTML. So, if it's not in that format, you simply cannot get read by an AI machine right now. Similarly, AI bots aren't yet very good at capturing images or videos from your website. So, if you have images or videos, the most important thing to do is to add clear alt text to your images and to add transcriptions to your videos to make it as easy as possible for the AI to understand what those pieces of content actually are.
The second technical point is you need to ensure that your website's site map and site structure are very clear. A few years ago, there was a trend to push all of your content onto one single page. But these design styles make it extremely confusing for an AI to understand what your site is, what's more important than anything else. So instead, you want to lay it out in a very logical human hierarchy that helps a crawler to understand your business and what the key of your website actually is. And then make sure that your highly valuable content that you actually want to be read is not hidden away. And I thought I'd end the technical section on a very quick one, but just make sure that you're not disallowing Google crawlers or Microsoft Bing or Chat GBT's bot from actually being allowed to crawl and scrape your website. So to do this, you just need to submit site maps in two places. Number one, Google because Google is still the dominant engine and as we covered earlier, receives 7 billion AI summaries a day, but also Bing because Bing, if you didn't know, is what powers chat GBC. You can update your robot.ext text file easily in your website control settings. And if you don't know how to do that, you can simply work with your existing developer cuz they will know how to do that. There is some controversy around LLM.ext files. However, my view is that providing additional context to crawlers cannot hurt the outcome as to whether you are answered within a chat service.
The next stage that I'm going to talk about is perhaps the most vital and it's how you build authority on your own website. But because this channel is new, 82% of the people who watch the videos on this channel haven't subscribed. So if you've got this far and you like the videos, subscribe to the channel and I promise I will always deliver strategic and tactical advice on how to grow your businesses.
So thus far we've spoken about two core areas. We've spoken about the content that is on your website and how to optimize that for AI search and how to technically optimize your website so it's more easily crawled. But there's something that most people overlook entirely with regards to AI search, and that is that AI models don't just read your website. They're trained on the entirety of the internet. The sites that form the backbone of the training of the AI models carry enormous weight in how they think and answer. So, Wikipedia, Reddit, Quora, Crunchb, Yelp, Google Maps, these are primary training data sources. So getting your business accurately listed and described in these places doesn't just help humans find you. It literally shapes how AI models understand what your company is and what it does.
So there are three core things to think about here. Number one is user generated content. Places like Reddit, Quora, and other forums have millions of users and conversations happening every day and are heavily prioritized and used by LLMs to formulate answers. So, don't just set up a fake account and spam your ideal messaging into these forums. Find threads that really matter and reply with things like, "I work at X company and based on your specific understanding of the problem and the use case, here is how you fix it. Here is how you change it and here's how I can help you do that." And the point is you're trying to give context to a user who has asked that specific question because that informs how an LLM will think about you and it will inform the sentiment that the LLM has about your brand.
Number two is large knowledge basis. The LLMs are very focused on large reputable and established knowledge sources like Wikipedia, Yelp, Maps, Crunchb. These are the primary training data for most of the models and as such you should focus on getting your business listed and described in these knowledge bases as this will strengthen your entity the entity that the models are trying to understand and it will make it more likely that you are mentioned and more likely that you are cited.
Number three is publications. And so you as a business want reputable publications to write about your brand, to mention your name and to site you because when an LLM is considering an answer, they consider large publications as authoritative sources on that subject matter. And if those sources are talking about you in the context of being an authority and the context of being an answer to the question, you are more likely to show up as an answer. So the advice is reach out to journalists, offer comments, form a differentiated opinion. You want to create highly citable pieces of content. For example, at searchable, we have just created the state of AI SEO, the algorithm report, analyzing millions of data points and giving objective data on how the models are working and creating answers. And dozens of journalists want to site this content when they're talking about the evolution of technology and the evolution of consumer behavior, resulting in us getting lots of different links back, which increases our knowledge entity in the AI machine databases, meaning we're more likely to get mentioned and cited in future for topics around AEO.
So ultimately, this is what we call digital PR or link building. So you're trying to get your comments and your content to be cited by small and large publications alike. And the more established and the more authoritative, the better. So think niche blogs through to international newspapers. The more novel and on trend that your content is, the more likely it is to get cited. So reach out to journalists, build relationships, and give them something to write about. This is the new era of PR or digital PR. Earn citations, earn authority, and you will go on to earn traffic. I remember when we were first optimizing websites for Google in 2009 and it was so easy for sites to gain traffic and now that opportunity exists again. So any business can make huge leaps forward if they take advantage right now.
If you want to use searchable, I've included a link in the descriptions which will give you incredible insight and analytics on your AI search. It will give you the actions you need to take to improve your mentions and your citations and your content. and you will get a customized agent within your profile that you can work with as a co-pilot. So once you've nailed this, make sure that you check out my next video on creating adverts in chat GBT and how to drive revenue.