AI SEO agency insights; how to show up in AI search results

As an AI SEO agency there's a hot topic of conversation we're having more than any other right now.

Something's shifted in how businesses get found online. You may have already felt it already; traffic that used to be consistent is now inconsistent, enquiries that used to come from search are harder to explain, your rankings look fine on paper, but something has changed.

This isn't a coincidence. It isn't a bad month. It's a structural shift in how search works, and most businesses are still optimising for a version of the internet that no longer exists.

Why your traffic has dropped, and why it's not what you think

Before we get to solutions, it's worth understanding what has actually changed. Because the instinct is often to do more of what worked before. More content, more backlinks, more keywords....

The reason your traffic may have dropped isn't because your SEO is broken. It's because the search journey has changed fundamentally.

A growing proportion of searches never result in a click at all. AI search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Mode, Claude, and others, now answer questions directly. The user gets what they need without ever visiting a website. This is zero-click search, and it's changing how your content is discovered online.

In 2024, more than half of all Google searches ended without a click. By May 2025 that figure had risen to nearly 70%. That trend is only rising.

So if your traffic has dropped, the honest answer is this: some of those visitors are getting their answers elsewhere, before they ever reach you. The question is whether you are the source those AI systems are drawing from, or whether you're invisible to them entirely.

How AI search actually works

Traditional SEO was built around a simple idea. Rank for keywords. Get clicks. Convert visitors.

AI search works differently. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Mode and similar systems don't simply return a list of ranked pages. They synthesise information from multiple sources and construct an answer. They're looking for sources they can trust, summarise and cite.

That means the signals they respond to are fundamentally different from the signals Google has rewarded for the past decade.

Traditional SEO optimises for:

• Keyword density and placement

• Backlink volume and domain authority

• Click-through rates and dwell time

• Technical page speed and crawlability

AI search optimises for:

• Entity clarity — is it obvious who you are and what you do?

• Topical authority — do you consistently cover a subject with depth?

• Structured meaning — can the content be easily summarised?

• Trust consistency — does your identity match across your website, LinkedIn, press mentions and third-party platforms?

• Original thinking — do you say something distinctive, or are you recycling what everyone else has already published?

• Quotable insight — is there a sentence or paragraph an AI system could extract and use as a direct answer?

This is why the businesses showing up in AI search are not necessarily doing more SEO. They are doing different things, and in many cases, doing less volume with significantly more depth and clarity.

What Google's AI Mode means for your business

Google's AI Mode isn't a feature update. It's a repositioning of what Google is. Rather than showing ten blue links, Google is increasingly constructing answers, pulling from sources it considers authoritative and presenting a synthesised response at the top of the page.

For businesses, this has two consequences.

The first is that appearing in AI Mode carries significant commercial value. If Google's AI surfaces your business as part of an answer, you are being endorsed by the most visited website in the world to an audience that is actively looking for what you offer. The visibility is different from a ranked result, it is contextual, credible and much harder to earn through volume alone.

The second is that traditional ranking positions matter less than they used to. Position one used to mean the most clicks. In AI Mode, the answer often appears before any ranked results at all. Businesses that have invested years in ranking fifth or sixth for competitive terms are now being bypassed entirely.

Your SEO strategy isn't about to become outdated. It already has, if it's still built entirely around rankings.

How to show up in ChatGPT and AI search results

This is the question most businesses are now asking. Here is the honest answer.

There is no shortcut, and there's no single tactic. Showing up in ChatGPT recommendations and appearing in AI search results is the result of being genuinely well-structured, consistently authoritative and clearly understood. But there are specific things you can do to accelerate that.

1. Define your entity clearly, and repeat it consistently

AI systems build an understanding of what your business is by cross-referencing multiple sources. Your website, your LinkedIn company page, your founder profiles, your press mentions, your Google Business Profile, your reviews on third-party platforms, all of these contribute to an entity picture.

If those sources are inconsistent, different descriptions, different positioning, different language, the AI picture of your business is blurred. A blurred entity doesn't get cited.

Start with a clear, single-sentence definition of what your business is and what it does. Use it consistently everywhere. Not the same paragraph cut and pasted, but the same core idea, expressed clearly and repeatedly across every platform where your business exists.

2. Create definition-level content

AI systems are drawn to content that clearly explains concepts. Not content that sells, or content that tells people how great you are. They like to cite content that teaches, defines and illuminates.

You need pages and articles that clearly define the concepts you want to be associated with. Written in plain English. Structured with clear headings. Answered directly, without fluff.

3. Add structured FAQ sections to every key page

This is one of the highest-return, lowest-effort changes most businesses can make right now. FAQ sections work because they mirror the way people actually search, and increasingly, the way they ask AI assistants questions.

When a user types a conversational query into ChatGPT or Perplexity, the system looks for sources that answer that specific question clearly. A well-written FAQ section on your services page or your homepage is a direct answer to a direct question. That is exactly what AI systems want to retrieve.

Every service page, every key landing page and every major blog post should have a FAQ section at the bottom. Write the questions the way your ideal client would actually ask them.

4. Build structured proof into your content

AI systems favour concrete, measurable claims. Vague statements like 'we help businesses grow' isn't retrievable in any meaningful way. Specific outcomes are.

If you have strong proof, and most established businesses do, it needs to be built into the structure of your content, not buried in a case study PDF that requires a download.

Numbers, outcomes and results should appear in your hero sections, in your article introductions, in your FAQ answers and in the body copy of your service pages. Not as boasts. As evidence that what you are saying is grounded in real commercial outcomes.

5. Build off-site entity authority

Your website alone isn't enough. AI systems cross-reference what your website says against what the rest of the internet says about you. If the two don't align, or if the wider internet has very little to say about you at all, your entity authority is weak.

This means your LinkedIn presence matters for AI search. Any press mentions, podcast appearances, award wins or guest articles contribute to an entity picture that AI systems can verify and trust.

This isn't a reason to chase every PR opportunity. It's a reason to be consistent and deliberate about where your name appears and what it is associated with when it does.

6. Earn internal and external links, but for the right reasons

Links still matter. But the reason they matter has shifted slightly. In traditional SEO, links are primarily a signal of authority and popularity. In AI search, links, particularly internal links, help AI systems understand the relationship between ideas on your site.

A blog post about AI search should link to your services pages. Your services pages should link to relevant case studies. Your case studies should link back to the strategic thinking that underpins them. This isn't just good UX. It is how you teach AI systems what your business is about and how your ideas connect.

Think less about link building as a volume exercise. Think about it as mapping the intellectual territory your business owns.

Hot take from Ouma, an AI SEO agency; The future of search isn't rankings. It's reputation.

Here is the shift that is hardest for most businesses to accept. For the past decade, search success was measurable in a very direct way. You either ranked or you didn't. Page one was good. Page three was invisible.

AI search is less binary and harder to measure, but significantly valuable when you get it right. If an AI assistant recommends your business unprompted, if it cites your thinking in response to a client question, if it surfaces your content as the authoritative answer to a problem your ideal client is trying to solve, that isn't a ranking. It is a referral. At scale.

The businesses being cited in AI search right now aren't showing up because they've found a new technical hack. They're showing up because they have built genuine authority around a clear area of expertise. They've said something original.

What this means for your AI SEO strategy

Your SEO strategy isn't dead. Technical SEO still matters, site speed, crawlability, clean structure and proper schema markup are still foundational. The rules around duplicate content, page titles and meta descriptions haven't gone away.

What's changed is the layer above that. The content strategy that sits on top of the technical foundations needs to shift from volume to depth, from keywords to concepts, from ranking for terms to owning ideas.

The businesses that will struggle in the next two to three years are those still publishing high volumes of thin content built around keyword clusters. AI systems are increasingly good at identifying content that adds nothing to what already exists.

If you are looking for an AI SEO agency that understands both the technical and strategic shift required, the starting point is always the same: build genuine authority, structure your knowledge clearly, and give AI systems something worth citing.

Rachel Lyndon-Jones is CMO and Co-Founder of Ouma, a strategic growth partner helping ambitious UK businesses build connected growth systems. Rachel's work sits at the intersection of marketing psychology, brand trust and commercial strategy, helping businesses understand not just what to do, but why it works.