SEO & AI Search
Search is changing quickly, but the basics still win. These playbooks cover technical SEO, content, links and the new layer on top of it all: getting your brand into AI answers. Everything here comes from work I've done for agencies, publishers and my own products.
What you'll learn
- Run an SEO audit that ends in fixes, not a PDF
- Find striking-distance keywords and win them first
- Get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews
- See AI assistant traffic in GA4
Start with these
How to use these playbooks
If your site already gets some traffic, start with the 30-day SEO audit. Fixing what you already have is faster than publishing new pages, and it usually pays off first on keywords where you're already on page two.
If you're starting from zero, pick one topic you know better than anyone and write the most useful page on the internet about it. Then link to it from everything else you publish.
SEO and AI search are the same job now
Most AI answers start with a web search. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews pull passages from pages that are indexed, fast and clear, then cite the ones they used. So the work that gets you ranked is also the work that gets you cited. The extra habits are small: open each section with a direct answer, keep your brand facts consistent across the web, and measure AI referral traffic so you know it's working. GEO in plain English covers all three.
What I focus on, in order
- Crawling and indexing. If Google can't render a page, nothing else matters.
- One page per keyword, and one job per page.
- Internal links from your strongest pages to the pages you want to rank.
- Content that answers the question better than what's ranking today.
- Links and mentions from sites your buyers already trust.
It isn't glamorous, but it's what grew organic traffic 68% for an agency in Dubai and 55% for a group in Italy.
Questions people ask
Yes. Most AI answers start with a web search, so pages that rank well are the ones that get cited. AI search adds a few habits on top, like answer-first writing and tracking AI referrals.
Fixes to existing pages can show results within weeks, especially for keywords where you already rank on page two. New content and new links usually take three to six months to show their full effect.
With an audit of what you already have: crawling and indexing, keyword mapping and on-page fixes on your top pages. It's faster than publishing new content and often brings the quickest gains.
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