Your customers no longer just Google you — they ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. In 2026, being findable means winning in two arenas at once: classic search rankings and AI-generated answers. Here's what has changed, and exactly what to do about it.
What's changed
Classic SEO still matters — most buying journeys still touch a Google results page. But a growing share of questions now get answered directly by AI: summarised, cited, and often never clicked through. If AI engines don't know who you are, you're invisible in those conversations.
What still works (classic SEO)
- One page per intent — a dedicated page for each service and each niche you serve.
- Fast, clean pages — Core Web Vitals remain a ranking signal, and slow sites lose visitors anyway.
- Titles and descriptions written for the click, at the right length.
- Consistent publishing — topical authority compounds; one good post a week beats twenty in January.
What AI search adds (AEO/GEO)
- Answer-first content — put a clear, extractable answer in the first 200 words; AI engines quote what's quotable.
- Structured data — Organization, Service and FAQ schema help machines understand exactly who you are and what you do.
- Entity clarity — describe your business the same way everywhere: site, socials, directories.
- List and comparison content — "best of" and "X vs Y" formats earn a disproportionate share of AI citations.
- Open the gates — allow AI crawlers in robots.txt and publish an llms.txt summary of your site.
The practical checklist
Audit your titles and descriptions, add FAQ blocks with schema to key pages, answer the real questions customers ask (in their words), keep your pages fast, and make sure every service has its own page. Then measure: search Console for Google, and periodically ask the AI engines about your own category to see if you're cited.
The good news
The fundamentals overlap almost completely. Clear structure, genuine expertise, fast pages and content that actually answers questions win in both arenas — so you don't need two strategies, just one done properly.
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