More Visibility In AI Search: What Your C-Suite Needs To Know

This recap is pulled directly from the webinar transcript. Get instant access to the full on-demand webinar.

The State of AI-Influenced Search

The confusion in the SEO industry over terminology:

“I want to say that SEO space or AI search space, whatever this space is called, became truly a notion of confusion with so many different opinions with people talking about authority, brand building, pr, E-E-A-T, E-E-E-A-T. Long tail LLM takes them. And with all of these challenges, whenever I have five SEOs in the room, I have more than 11 opinions. So today we’re going to dive deep into it and see how we can go through this huge conundrum of geo. We cannot even agree on the name of GEO, LMO, AEO, AI SEO and so on.”

Difficulty tracking the right metrics in an AI-dominated search environment:

“We’re still looking at clicks. There is more. There are multiple posts on LinkedIn every single day. I’m looking at that LM OE come, all of the software is come. That does it. How do you measure conversions? If you track 700 prompts, that actually coming from zip data very often is which ones are actually important. And then we’re looking at the biggest challenge I believe is where do we see geo a IO sit? So SEOs cannot fully solve the problem because reddit, because all of these other challenges, very often you have to tackle some of the product or deeper marketing challenges. So there is also a problem of our community teams shifting quite a bit. If we look at that, sorry, the biggest data point, and this is something I just found out, this is a piece of content that I found a week ago, a CEO of CloudFlare mentioned how the crawl-to-click ratio has drastically changed. This leads directly into the declining value of clicks as a reliable metric.”

Declining value of traditional SEO metrics like clicks and rankings:

“This is a piece of content that I found a week ago, A CEO of CloudFlare… 10 years ago, for two pages, visited, crawled, scraped by Google, we had just one click. Six months ago for six pages we had one click, but over the last six months for Google only, this has changed three times. For 18 pages crawled by Google, we have one click. The important aspect here is the crawl ratio, crawl amount or how many pages are crawled by Google hasn’t changed significantly according to CloudFlare over the last 10 years. So we can see that the traffic is declining significantly… clicks and traffic is going away and we need to look at a new set of metrics.”

The Rise of Real Human Insight

The shift from polished marketing to trusted peer reviews (e.g., Reddit, forums):

“Right now the biggest challenge that I see outside of AI search is we want really trusted peer advice, not the corporate marketing lingo. And that shows in Reddit exploding, that shows in how we ask questions that show that we need to look at reviews for even no consideration or low consideration items. That’s coming from Google. So we need to have at least 5, 6, 7 touch points even if you’re buying something for 10 bucks.”

“So we can see open AI making the deal with Reddit, perplexity, Bing is trying to negotiate with Reddit because… Bing is not really crawling and rendering Reddit ever since Reddit said you have to pay to crawl us. So Bing is not indexing new content from Reddit. So ChatGPT now is fetching directly content from Reddit.”

“Just as I would have a peer review… I would come to you and say, I don’t know, Steven, how do you like your Tesla? And your trust? Your opinion is going to be much more valuable to me than something I’m going to read on tesla.com.”

A New SEO Scoreboard: From Inclusion to Influence

New focus: being the recommended solution across the user journey:

“So I want to propose this new scoreboard. This is what we’re looking at and some of the case studies we’re going to go over today, I believe some of the best case studies… come from basically just a shift of let’s try to track different stuff metric. So the first one is I will look at the recommended solution, not just mentioned. Even if my domain is not listed as a source, but if I’m listed as a preferred recommended solution, that’s amazing. But that’s not enough. I want to be a recommended solution throughout the customer journey. So from the first question of what’s the best electric TV or what’s the best car for me with two kids in text, blah, blah, blah, to the moment of what is the best lease deal for this car that they’ve chosen?”

How Brands Can Win in AI Search

Importance of appearing as a recommended solution in different LLMs:

“We want to show that customers nowadays we are customers, like every single one of us. We want to be seen, we want to be understood. So just having a very nice polished copy that starts with you and that talks about the benefits of the product. I believe this is in the nineties. This is a vintage approach to marketing. It’s nice to see, but it’s not what I’m looking for online. I want to see contextual advice.”

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Role of strategic content in shortening the user journey:

“Sometimes this customer journey is just one prompt. Because in this case, Perplexity fetched the answer for: why is it better to use a Dyson on the wool carpet? This is a screenshot from ZipTie.dev, and you can see that the leading brand is Miele. So within the first question, Perplexity’s answer basically was: for wool carpet, it’s recommended to use a suction-only vacuum. It even listed examples of suitable models. So it is a very, very simple answer that shortened my customer journey from multiple questions to just one. Instead of needing to ask three or four follow-ups, I was able to immediately see that Miele is a safe and preferred brand, and I could move forward with confidence and make a purchase without hesitation.”

Practical Framework for Content Strategy in AI Search

Aligning product messaging with actual user language and concerns:

“We need to shift our product descriptions in our experiments we’ve run within Ziptie.ai, we’ve seen that using real customer terms, real customer problems in product description in three bullet points can massively boost conversions to the point that we had to wipe our screens because that is what we need to do.”

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Replacing corporate jargon with human-centered problem solving:

“We need to adjust our language to what people expect from Reddit. We need to use very, very simple lingo to get that across.”

Synthesizing prompts and responses to understand intent and context deeply:

“So how do we understand context and real user journeys? All we can just ask, how do we optimize for a search? This is all the same. Whether we’re trying to understand how someone interacts with a search engine, or how someone moves from a problem to a solution, the mechanics are similar. For the sake of this presentation, context is the user’s problem. So if I have a problem that might end up in a purchase—like a vacuum not working on a certain type of carpet—let’s use that as a context. And the second aspect is the user journey, or what we like to call the hero’s journey. This is the adventure we’re going to go on to solve this problem. From the moment of frustration, to the moment of asking a question, to discovering a brand or recommendation, to ultimately making a decision—that’s the full arc we need to understand and influence.”

Q&A Session

Q1: How do we track success in a world where clicks and rankings are declining?

Bart: “The scoreboard has to evolve. Instead of obsessing over traffic and clicks, we have to track whether we’re being recommended by AI tools—whether we’re the go-to answer. Visibility isn’t just about appearing in a search result; it’s about being cited as the preferred solution in a customer’s journey.”

Q2: How can we create content that shows up in AI-generated answers?

Bart: “It starts with understanding what people actually ask and what language they use. Then you reverse-engineer what kind of answer the LLMs would prefer—clear, specific, grounded in user pain points. Forget corporate speak; write like you’re answering a Reddit post.”

Q3: Should brands chase visibility on forums like Reddit directly?

Bart: “Not just visibility—participation. You want to be the trusted brand people naturally bring up. And if LLMs are learning from Reddit, then your influence there echoes across AI-generated experiences. It’s not a one-channel play; it’s ecosystem influence.”

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