The Companies Winning at AI Search Mostly Just Did the Boring SEO Work Years Ago
When buyers started asking ChatGPT and Perplexity which software to buy instead of opening ten browser tabs, a lot of marketing teams braced for a reckoning. So far, the reckoning has been uneven and not in the way many expected.
The tools doing the recommending don't invent answers. ChatGPT with Browse, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews all sit on top of a retrieval layer that indexes and ranks web pages by roughly the same criteria search engines have used for two decades: authority, relevance, the quality of the content and its structure, and signals of endorsement from elsewhere on the web. The interface in front of the buyer is new. The machinery underneath is mostly not.
That distinction matters, because it reframes a question companies have been treating as existential. The shift is not about your content being optimized for AI, but about whether you did the slower work of...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to hackernoon.com. To see the full text click HERE
