How to Rank Your Site in AI Search Engines

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SEO isn’t dead—it’s just evolving.

That’s a thought I keep coming back to as I watch the market share of traditional search engines like Google slipping, while new AI entrants like Perplexity and DeepSeek quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) eat their lunch.

I was skeptical about AI search at first. Getting people to change a deeply ingrained process—like turning to Google to look up information—takes time. And Google can always co-opt other AI solutions by baking AI into their own platform, as they’ve done with AI overviews.

But AI search engines seem to be growing. People seem to like them. And so, for creators, it’s becoming more and more important to get your content ranked in AI search engines like Perplexity, SearchGPT, and yes, that old stalwart, Google Gemini.

How do you do that?

Well, it looks a lot different than traditional SEO.

Old-fashioned SEO (itself, a silly concept) focused on metrics—how many links your site had, how many times you could squeeze your target keyword into each page of your site without sending completely like a robot (BTW, most SEOs got a big old F on that front), and more recently, how long people spend browsing each page.

AI-powered SEO is less about metrics, and more about a feeling. LLMs learn not by running equations (as in traditional machine learning) but by aggregating tons of informattion from multiple sources, and thus figuring out—generally speaking—what people think of stuff.

AI-powered search, in other words, runs on vibes. If lots of people are saying something about your company, LLMs will start to believe it—and repeat it in their search results.

For that reason, ranking in LLMs is less about the stuff you put on your own page, and more about the stuff others say about you.

On a recent Niche Pursuits podcast episode that I co-hosted, Jared Bauman and I got deep into that topic, drawing on a new study that looked at 40,000+ queries sent to AI search engines.

Our conclusion was that external mentions of your site and brand matter a hell of a lot for AI search, even though they matter almost not at all for traditional SEO.

There’s a lot of nuance, though. Depending on where a customer is in their research process, AI search engines will show them different things.

For example, if I’m planning to buy a toaster but I’m still in an early exploratory phase, I’m likely to see AI results from lots of comparison sites and independent blogs.

In contrast, if I ask Perplexity “How big is the Cuisinart TOA-85 air fryer?”, it’s likely to direct me to a webpage on the Cuisinart website.

This has massive implications for how creators and publishers handle content and marketing.

Before, links were king. Now, it’s clear, opinionated mentions of your brand and products on authoritative, external websites—coupled with equally clear details about those products/services, published on your own domain.

In other words, you need to build up good vibes about your brand in places like review blogs, YouTube, Reddit, and legit news sources. Then, you need to publish lots of very detailed info about your products and services on your own site, for people who are nearing the point of wanting to buy from you.

It’s a big shift—and one I’ll be following in a lot more detail as these new AI search engines evolve.

Watch the full episode for lots more data from the study and insights on it.