Baidu still drives B2B demand, while AI and ecommerce platforms reshape discovery. Here’s how to stay visible across both.

In February 2025, the world watched as a small group of humanoid robots took the stage at the CCTV Chinese New Year show for the very first time. It was a charming performance, even if the steps were shaky and the movements were mostly limited to the arms.
Just one year later, at the Spring Festival Gala, the shaky steps were gone and the humanoid robots were able to actually run and do standing somersaults and full kung fu routines with swords and nunchaku. The message was clear: in just one year, we have witnessed a decade’s worth of advancement.
The 10-year leap in technology is real and not limited to robotics. Which raises a critical question for every digital marketer eyeing the world’s largest web population: How has search in China progressed in recent years?
A parallel in the Chinese search landscape
The answer is that we’re witnessing the first, calculated tremors of a massive shift. AI models have not yet replaced traditional search. The evolution isn’t happening through a single “big bang,” but through a constant, iterative pulse. 
New LLM models are surfacing every few months, each more specialized than the last. Chinese tech giants are increasingly open-sourcing their models, and even industry leaders are hedging their bets. Baidu, for example, is integrating DeepSeek into its search experience, even as its own Ernie (Wenxin) model remains a formidable powerhouse.
Let’s look at how users actually search in China today — and what this nuanced shift from links to reasoning means for your 2026 SEO strategy.

  
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The great narrative fallacy: Is web search dead in China?
In many marketing circles, a specific narrative has been repeated so often it has become an article of faith: “Traditional search on Baidu is dead — and has been for years. Websites are obsolete. In China, everything is WeChat.”
This narrative is almost always driven by service providers whose business models depend on WeChat, Douyin, Weibo, or Xiaohongshu marketing. To them, the “open web” is a ghost town. But is this actually true?
The social supremacy argument
There’s a grain of truth in the hype. The Chinese web is a mobile-first multiverse. Users access and explore the web through super-apps:
RedNote (Xiaohongshu / Little Red Book): This is the de facto engine for lifestyle research and travel planning.
Pinduoduo and Douyin: These are the juggernauts of social commerce and impulse buying.
WeChat: The absolute center of daily life, where everything from a quick message to a utility bill payment via QR code happens.
In this environment, social media isn’t just a channel. It’s the air people breathe. For B2C brands, social ads can — and often do — exceed website-driven sales by orders of magnitude.
The B2B reality check
For those of us working with B2B companies that need real visibility in China, the “Baidu is dead” narrative falls apart the moment you look at the analytics. Clients who invest in Baidu SEO and Baidu search engine advertising (SEA) continue to see a steady, high-volume stream of real human visitors — in many cases generating more qualified leads and higher conversion rates than their counterparts in the UK or Germany.
Why? Because when a B2B procurement officer or a technical engineer needs a specific industrial solution, they don’t just scroll until they find it on a social media feed. They search for a verified, authoritative source. In other words, they look for a website.
Is the social media narrative a lie? No. But ignoring a channel that — at least in the B2B sector — remains more effective in China than in many search-first Western countries is simply bad business. The goal isn’t to choose one over the other; it’s to understand how they coexist. 
And just as we’ve settled the debate between web marketing versus app marketing, a new challenger — the LLM — has entered the battleground to disrupt both.
Mapping the 2026 landscape: Intent-based specialization
To a Google-first marketer, the idea of searching anywhere but a search engine feels like a detour. In China, it’s the standard operating procedure. Users don’t just “Google it.” Instead, they choose the tool that fits the intent.
As a Baidu specialist living and working in China, I see this daily. While I might be optimizing a B2B landing page for Baidu, my wife is likely on Pinduoduo, finding household deals, or on Xiaohongshu, planning our next weekend trip. 
The “everything app” exists, but the “right app” always wins the click.
1. Traditional web search: The authority tier
Despite the “death of the web” narrative, traditional web search remains the primary battleground for B2B and high-authority research. If a user needs a technical whitepaper, a government regulation, or a verified corporate headquarters, they go here.
Baidu: Still the mobile heavyweight, with a ~70% mobile market share. Its structural advantage is massive: The Baidu app is installed on over 724 million monthly active devices (as of early 2026). It has evolved into an AI-first portal, but for SEOs, it remains the place where the open web lives and breathes.
Microsoft Bing: The professional’s sanctuary. It has claimed a massive chunk of desktop search for those seeking a cleaner, international, or technical experience.
Haosou (360 Search): The enterprise default, often pre-installed on corporate PCs and known for its security focus.
Sogou: Deeply integrated with WeChat, it’s the bridge between the walled garden and the web.
Google: Yes, Google. Despite the firewall, a significant population of tech-savvy professionals and researchers use it via VPN for global technical data and academic resources.
2. Social discovery: The inspiration tier
This is where search becomes discovery. Users don’t always have a keyword, but they do have an interest. In this context, SEO is about social indexing: ensuring your brand appears when a user looks for proof and not just products.
WeChat (Weixin): The internal search for official brand news and private traffic.
Xiaohongshu (RED): The ultimate product-discovery engine. If you aren’t on RED, you don’t exist in the lifestyle or luxury sectors.
Douyin: Visual, video-first search. Users search Douyin to see how something works.
Kuaishou: The powerhouse for lower-tier cities and raw, authentic grassroots content.
Weibo: Real-time search — what is happening right now in the public eye.
Bilibili: Long-form video search for deep dives, tutorials, and Gen Z subcultures.
3. Ecommerce: The transactional tier
In the West, users often start on Google and end on Amazon. In China, the journey frequently starts and ends in the same place.
Taobao / Tmall: The grand bazaar. If you want variety and brand stores, this is the first stop.
JD.com: The Amazon of China for logistics and high-end electronics.
Pinduoduo: The favorite for daily essentials and group-buy deals. Its search logic is entirely driven by value for money.
Douyin Mall: The rising star of “impulse search,” merging entertainment with immediate checkout.
Xianyu (Goofish): The go-to for the thriving second-hand market and hobbyist niches.
4. Generative AI (LLMs): The reasoning tier
This is the newest layer of the map — the “thinking” search. These AI models don’t just produce lists of links. They are assistants that synthesize the web for the user.
Doubao (ByteDance): Currently the most popular consumer AI assistant, used for casual, conversational queries.
DeepSeek (Domestic): The choice for developers and those in need of “deep thinking” logic. It’s the engine currently getting tested inside WeChat’s search bar.
Kimi (Moonshot AI): The king of long-context. Users use Kimi to search through 50-page PDFs or complex financial reports.
Qwen (Alibaba): Powerfully integrated into the Alibaba ecosystem for business and coding tasks.
Tencent Yuanbao: The “AI brain” for WeChat content.
Wen Xiaoyan (Baidu): The AI-facing evolution of Baidu search.
5. Hyper-local and logistics: The utility tier
For the physical world, search is about “now” and “near me.”
Meituan / Dianping: If you’re hungry or want to see a movie, you don’t use Baidu. You use Dianping for reviews and Meituan for transactions.
Amap (Gaode) / Baidu Maps: The “search engines of the real world.” SEO on these platforms is purely about point-of-interest (POI) optimization.
Ctrip (Trip.com) / Railway 12306: The specialized gates for the massive domestic travel market.
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From mapping to maneuvering: The Baidu specialist’s edge
Baidu SEO isn’t dead; your website just isn’t the sole focus of web search anymore.
The ‘walled garden’ SERP: A decade of distraction
If you’re a Google-centric SEO, there are some notable differences when working with Baidu:
The ad-heavy layout: It isn’t uncommon to see ads claiming the top, middle, and bottom of a Baidu search engine results page (SERP), occupying nearly 50% of the visible real estate.
The Baidu monopoly: The most coveted organic positions are almost always reserved for Baidu’s own properties. Baidu Baike (the encyclopedia), Baidu Zhidao (the Q&A hub), and Baijiahao (the news/blogging arm) are the permanent residents of Page 1.
The portal giants: High-authority giants like Zhihu (China’s Quora), Bilibili, and Sohu take up whatever space is left.
Riding the Chinese SERP dragon
In this environment, ranking a corporate homepage for a high-volume keyword is a fool’s errand. Instead, we’ve mastered the art of the “long-tail dragon.”
In the West, we talk about the long tail of search as a small, niche opportunity. In China, with its linguistic complexity and massive user base, the long tail is a winding, multi-layered beast that is often more lucrative than the head terms. 
And we don’t just rank a website; we piggyback on the authority of the platforms Baidu already trusts. If you can’t beat Baidu Baike, you become the verified entry inside it.
Interestingly, it is these very platforms — the ones we’ve been using to bypass the “blue link problem” — that have now become the primary focus of the next generation of search.
What is changing in Baidu SEO?
In China, there is no brand loyalty toward particular AI models, as Westerners have toward platforms like ChatGPT and Claude.
The AI-switching reality
Chinese users are restless. They don’t stick with one model. They switch — sometimes because a hyped model hits a downtime wall, and sometimes because a new model claims the throne of the “most intelligent AI.” In this cycle of competition and user preference, an SEO can’t just focus on the “big sources.”
If you’re following the Western playbook, you’re likely chasing Reddit, Quora, and YouTube as your “sources of truth” for AI training. But in China, that focus is dangerously narrow. To win the reasoning battle, you must understand the investor-source connection.
Brainstorming the wisdom platforms
If you want to train AIs to see your brand in China, you have to look at the platforms they were built on:
Tencent is invested in Sogou. In 2021, Tencent fully privatized Sogou. This means Sogou Baike is no longer just a Baidu alternative — it is now a core training set for Tencent’s Yuanbao. If you ignore Sogou Baike, you’re invisible to the AI search bar inside WeChat.
Bytedance owns Baike.com. Bytedance bought Baike.com (formerly Hudong Baike) specifically to fuel its search ambitions. If you want to get cited by Doubao, your content needs to be mirrored here and not just on Baidu.
The neutral giants: Keep an eye on Zhihu. Because both Tencent and Baidu are heavy investors in Zhihu, it remains one of the few neutral high-authority sources that almost every Chinese LLM uses for opinionated or expert reasoning.
The new SEO commandment
We’re no longer just optimizing for a search engine. We’re optimizing for a data pedigree.
If your client is B2B, you might still prioritize the Baidu ecosystem. But if your client is in ecommerce and you aren’t feeding the Qwen engine via Alibaba’s ecosystem, or the Doubao engine via Baike.com, you’re limiting your visibility across key AI systems.
The 2026 China SEO/GEO blueprint: From keywords to semantic saturation
If you’re waiting for a “DeepSeek optimization checklist” or a “Doubao ranking guide,” you’ve already missed the point. Because users switch models as often as they switch takeout apps, you can’t afford to be “Baidu-only” or “WeChat-centric.”
Here is what’s actually working for SEO in China in 2026:
Optimize for citations and not just clicks
While SEO in the West is focused on generative engine optimization (GEO), in China, it’s all about fact density. 
The logic: When Kimi or DeepSeek performs a reasoning query, the AI looks for verifiable facts.
The tactic: Stop writing marketing fluff. Start using the inverted pyramid writing style. Lead with a direct, data-backed answer in your first paragraph. Use hard statistics, expert quotes, and structured lists. If a model can’t extract a fact from your content in 200 milliseconds, it might hallucinate a competitor’s data instead.
Build an entity moat across wisdom platforms
As we brainstormed earlier, every AI has a “parent” with a preferred data source. But since models are now open-sourcing their weights and distilling each other’s intelligence, your brand must achieve entity consistency.




The goal: Your brand name, headquarters, and core product claims must be identical across Baidu Baike (Baidu), Sogou Baike (Tencent), and Baike.com (ByteDance).
The result: When these models cross-check their reasoning, they find a consensus. In 2026, consensus is the new authority.
Leverage information gain
Chinese AI models have a well-observed recency bias — they prefer sources that are roughly 25% fresher than traditional search results.
The tactic: Don’t just regurgitate what’s already on Zhihu. Provide a “unique data slice.” If everyone says “The best time to post on Douyin is 6 PM,” and you publish a case study proving “11 AM is better for B2B industrial leads,” the AI will cite you as the “nuanced exception.” That citation is worth more than ten #1 rankings.

  
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The era of the entity architect
We’ve come a long way from the shaky steps of the 2025 CCTV Gala.
In 2026, China’s search ecosystem is no longer a directory of links. It’s a living, reasoning entity. 
For the Western search specialist, the lesson is clear: The “super app” was a distraction. The real story is the fragmentation of intent.
My wife still goes to Pinduoduo for the best price. My colleagues still go to Bing for technical sanctuary. And the “I, Robot” enthusiasts of 2026 are using a rotating door of LLMs to find their answers.
As a Baidu specialist, my job has shifted from “ranking a website” to “architecting an entity.” We no longer build for the bot; we build for the source. If you’re the undeniable source of truth across the platforms that shape China’s information ecosystem, it doesn’t matter which model delivers the answer.
You’ll be the one they’re cheering for.

How China’s fragmented search ecosystem is reshaping SEO in 2026

<div><img width="2048" height="1152" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/LevelAgency-20250505-v3-scaled.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" fetchpriority="high" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/LevelAgency-20250505-v3-scaled.jpg 2048w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/LevelAgency-20250505-v3-768x432.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/LevelAgency-20250505-v3-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/LevelAgency-20250505-v3-1200x675.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px" /></div>Your customers see the whole SERP. You should too.

<div><img width="2048" height="1152" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/LevelAgency-20250505-v3-scaled.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/LevelAgency-20250505-v3-scaled.jpg 2048w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/LevelAgency-20250505-v3-768x432.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/LevelAgency-20250505-v3-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/LevelAgency-20250505-v3-1200x675.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px" /></div><div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img decoding="async" width="2048" height="1152" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/LevelAgency-20250505-v3-scaled.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-475001" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/LevelAgency-20250505-v3-scaled.jpg 2048w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/LevelAgency-20250505-v3-768x432.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/LevelAgency-20250505-v3-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/LevelAgency-20250505-v3-1200x675.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px" /></figure>
</div>


<p>In February 2024, <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-02-19-gartner-predicts-search-engine-volume-will-drop-25-percent-by-2026-due-to-ai-chatbots-and-other-virtual-agents" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">Gartner predicted</a> that traditional search volume would drop 25% by 2026. It didn&#8217;t. <a href="https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/alphabet-earnings-q4-2025/" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">Google&#8217;s search revenue</a> accelerated to 17% year-over-year growth, crossing $63 billion in Q4 2025 alone. But clicks per search are falling while query volume explodes. The pie got bigger. The slices got redistributed. And most search teams are still optimizing for the old pie.</p>



<p>Are you still poring over spreadsheets full of organic keyword rankings like it&#8217;s 2003? Your customers don&#8217;t care where they&#8217;re getting their answers. They&#8217;re just looking for answers they can trust. And they&#8217;re finding those answers across more surfaces than your rank tracker knows exist.</p>



<p>If your organic strategy lives in one spreadsheet, your paid strategy in another, and your AI search strategy in a third (or nowhere), you&#8217;re optimizing for a search experience that no longer exists.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-search-actually-looks-like-now">What &#8220;search&#8221; actually looks like now</h2>



<p>Google &#8220;best tax software&#8221; right now. Go ahead, I&#8217;ll wait.</p>



<p>Count the surfaces on that single results page. Sponsored ads across the top. An AI Overview with its own recommendations and citations. A Reddit thread (because Google knows people trust other people more than brands). Organic listings from CNET, H&amp;R Block, and others. A video carousel. Discussion forum links. A product carousel with images and prices. More sponsored results at the bottom. And a &#8220;People also search for&#8221; section feeding the next query.</p>



<p>That is one search. One keyword. And nobody owns it.</p>



<p>Now think about how different people actually use that page. I scroll past everything to find the Reddit thread, because I want to know what real humans recommend. My dad clicks the first sponsored ad because he doesn&#8217;t understand paid advertising (sorry, dad!) and just trusts Google to surface the best option up top. Someone else reads the AI Overview, gets a good-enough answer, and never clicks anything at all. A fourth person watches the Smart Family Money video and leaves.</p>



<p>Same query. Four completely different paths. Four different &#8220;winners.&#8221; And if you&#8217;re the brand celebrating a number-three organic ranking on this page, you may be missing that most of the real estate, and most of the user attention, lives somewhere other than those blue links.</p>



<p>This is what I mean by the total SERP experience. Your customer sees the whole page. You should too.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-ai-layer-changes-the-math">The AI layer changes the math</h2>



<p>AI Overviews now appear on <a href="https://www.semrush.com/blog/ai-search-seo-traffic-study/" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">roughly 25% to 48%</a> of Google queries, depending on the study. <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/21/chatgpt-users-send-2-5-billion-prompts-a-day/" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">ChatGPT processes 2.5 billion prompts a day</a>. <a href="https://www.businessofapps.com/data/perplexity-ai-statistics/" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">Perplexity is up 239% year over year</a>. These are real numbers from real platforms where real buyers are forming opinions about your brand, or not forming opinions because you&#8217;re nowhere to be found.</p>



<p>But before the panic sets in: AI tools still account for <a href="https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-google-search-grew-20-in-2024-receives-373x-more-searches-than-chatgpt/" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">less than 1% of U.S. web traffic</a>. Google sends 300x more referral traffic than all AI platforms combined. The sky isn&#8217;t falling, but the ground is shifting.</p>



<p>The shift that matters most is behavioral. <a href="https://wynter.com/post/how-b2b-saas-cmos-buy-software-in-2026" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">Wynter&#8217;s 2026 research</a> found 68% of B2B buyers now start their research in AI tools before they ever open Google. They ask ChatGPT to narrow the field, then Google the shortlist to validate. AI evaluates, Google verifies, and your website converts. If your brand is missing from that first AI conversation, you&#8217;re not even on the shortlist when the Googling starts.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-why-the-click-data-is-more-interesting-than-scary">Why the click data is more interesting than scary</h2>



<p>A <a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-overviews-drive-drop-organic-paid-ctr-464212" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">Search Engine Land analysis</a> of 25 million organic impressions across 42 clients found organic CTR drops 61% when an AI Overview appears. In addition, paid CTR drops 68%.</p>



<p>EVERYBODY FREAK OUT!!! Right? Not quite.</p>



<p>Here&#8217;s what the panicked LinkedIn posts leave out: brands <a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-overviews-drive-drop-organic-paid-ctr-464212" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">cited inside AI Overviews</a> see 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks. Being in the AI Overview doesn&#8217;t cannibalize your traffic. If anything, it amplifies it. The AI Overview functions like a trust signal, a stamp of &#8220;this brand is relevant to your question&#8221; that makes people more likely to click your listing below.</p>



<p>The real twist, though, is that ranking well in organic doesn&#8217;t guarantee you show up in AI. <a href="https://moz.com/blog/ai-mode-citations" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">Tom Capper&#8217;s research at Moz</a> found 88% of AI Mode citations are NOT in the organic SERP for the same query. Organic and AI are pulling from different source pools. You can be number one in Google and completely invisible in ChatGPT&#8217;s answer to the same question.</p>



<p>And the small amount of traffic that does come from AI? It <a href="https://www.semrush.com/blog/ai-search-seo-traffic-study/" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">converts at more than quadruple the rate</a> of organic, according to Semrush. These visitors arrive more informed, more intentional, and more ready to buy. Which makes sense, because they&#8217;ve already done the evaluation inside the AI interface. By the time they click, they&#8217;re just confirming and often converting.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-org-chart-is-the-problem">The org chart is the problem</h2>



<p>Most companies have SEO reporting to content, PPC reporting to demand gen, and AI search reporting to nobody. <a href="https://www.brightedge.com/news/press-releases/brightedge-survey-reveals-68-marketers-are-embracing-ai-search-shift" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">BrightEdge found</a> 54% of organizations have handed AI search to the SEO team alone, which is a little like asking your plumber to also handle the electrical work because, hey, it&#8217;s all in the same house.</p>



<p>The waste from this setup is real. One branded Performance Max campaign paid roughly $500,000 for clicks that would have come through organic anyway. <a href="https://research.google/pubs/impact-of-ranking-of-organic-search-results-on-the-incrementality-of-search-ads/" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">Google&#8217;s own research</a> confirms: when you rank number one organically, only half your paid clicks are truly incremental. The other half? You bought what you already owned.</p>



<p>Meanwhile, <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/new-front-door-to-the-internet-winning-in-the-age-of-ai-search" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">McKinsey found</a> that a brand&#8217;s own website makes up only 5% to 10% of the sources AI references. AI pulls from Reddit, review sites, affiliates, publishers, and user-generated content. You can have the best SEO program in your category and be completely absent from AI search results because AI is reading what other people say about you, not what you say about yourself.</p>



<p>The <a href="https://searchengineland.com/end-seo-ppc-silos-unified-search-strategy-ai-era-463006" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">unified approach works</a>. Level cut acquisition costs 18% and boosted SEO leads 22% by merging paid and organic for a B2B SaaS client. And we can use tools in our <a href="https://www.level.agency/level-intelligence-suite" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">Level Intelligence Suite</a> to connect performance signals across search surfaces. The channels compound each other. Treating them as separate line items on separate P&amp;Ls leaves that compounding on the table.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-three-audits-you-can-run-monday-morning">Three audits you can run Monday morning</h2>



<p>You don&#8217;t need a six-month transformation to start seeing the gaps. Three lenses, applied to your top 20 keywords, will show you where the opportunities and the waste are hiding.</p>



<p>Lens 1: Where do you actually appear? Check your organic rankings, paid ad coverage, and AI visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini for the same set of keywords. <a href="https://www.semrush.com/free-tools/ai-search-visibility-checker/" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">Semrush has a free AI visibility checker</a>. Most teams have never looked at all three surfaces side by side, and the gaps are almost always larger than they expect.</p>



<p>Lens 2: Where are you paying for traffic you already own? Cross-reference your number-one organic rankings with active PPC bids on the same terms. Start with branded keywords, where the waste is usually largest and the test is cleanest. If you rank first and you&#8217;re still bidding, you&#8217;re probably buying your own clicks.</p>



<p>Lens 3: Where is AI ignoring you? Compare your organic rankings with your AI citation presence. Only 11% of domains get cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity, so strength in one guarantees nothing in the other. And check your robots.txt while you&#8217;re at it. If you&#8217;re blocking AI crawlers like OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot, you&#8217;ve pulled yourself off those shelves entirely.</p>



<p>This diagnostic shows you the full picture. What to do about it, the actual unification framework, is what I&#8217;m laying out at SMX Advanced.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-window-won-t-stay-open">The window won&#8217;t stay open</h2>



<p>Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) keyword difficulty <a href="https://www.frase.io/blog/what-is-generative-engine-optimization-geo" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">currently averages 15 to 20</a>, compared to 45 to 60 for equivalent SEO terms. That gap will close. Once an LLM selects a trusted source, it reinforces that choice across related prompts. The brands getting cited now are training the models to keep citing them. Winner-takes-most dynamics are being baked into the weights.</p>



<p>Many companies are seeing search traffic drop significantly. Those same brands, the ones that get it right, are seeing the inverse when it comes to business growth. Rankings and revenue have decoupled. The brands that win from here are the ones that stopped measuring channels in isolation and started measuring the search experience their customers actually have.</p>



<p>We’re presenting a search unification framework at <a href="https://searchengineland.com/smx/advanced/agenda/?sessId=3388" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored nofollow">SMX Advanced</a> in our session, &#8220;Organic, paid, and AI search: one strategy to rule them all.&#8221; If you want to stop optimizing for three separate channels and start compounding performance across every search surface, join us for the session or come find the Level team at Booth #9.</p>



<p>Remember: The search experience that existed in 2023 is gone. The strategy should be too.</p>


In February 2024, Gartner predicted that traditional search volume would drop 25% by 2026. It didn’t. Google’s search revenue accelerated to 17% year-over-year growth, crossing $63 billion in Q4 2025 alone. But clicks per search are falling while query volume explodes. The pie got bigger. The slices got redistributed. And most search teams are still optimizing for the old pie.
Are you still poring over spreadsheets full of organic keyword rankings like it’s 2003? Your customers don’t care where they’re getting their answers. They’re just looking for answers they can trust. And they’re finding those answers across more surfaces than your rank tracker knows exist.
If your organic strategy lives in one spreadsheet, your paid strategy in another, and your AI search strategy in a third (or nowhere), you’re optimizing for a search experience that no longer exists.
What “search” actually looks like now
Google “best tax software” right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Count the surfaces on that single results page. Sponsored ads across the top. An AI Overview with its own recommendations and citations. A Reddit thread (because Google knows people trust other people more than brands). Organic listings from CNET, H&R Block, and others. A video carousel. Discussion forum links. A product carousel with images and prices. More sponsored results at the bottom. And a “People also search for” section feeding the next query.
That is one search. One keyword. And nobody owns it.
Now think about how different people actually use that page. I scroll past everything to find the Reddit thread, because I want to know what real humans recommend. My dad clicks the first sponsored ad because he doesn’t understand paid advertising (sorry, dad!) and just trusts Google to surface the best option up top. Someone else reads the AI Overview, gets a good-enough answer, and never clicks anything at all. A fourth person watches the Smart Family Money video and leaves.
Same query. Four completely different paths. Four different “winners.” And if you’re the brand celebrating a number-three organic ranking on this page, you may be missing that most of the real estate, and most of the user attention, lives somewhere other than those blue links.
This is what I mean by the total SERP experience. Your customer sees the whole page. You should too.
The AI layer changes the math
AI Overviews now appear on roughly 25% to 48% of Google queries, depending on the study. ChatGPT processes 2.5 billion prompts a day. Perplexity is up 239% year over year. These are real numbers from real platforms where real buyers are forming opinions about your brand, or not forming opinions because you’re nowhere to be found.
But before the panic sets in: AI tools still account for less than 1% of U.S. web traffic. Google sends 300x more referral traffic than all AI platforms combined. The sky isn’t falling, but the ground is shifting.
The shift that matters most is behavioral. Wynter’s 2026 research found 68% of B2B buyers now start their research in AI tools before they ever open Google. They ask ChatGPT to narrow the field, then Google the shortlist to validate. AI evaluates, Google verifies, and your website converts. If your brand is missing from that first AI conversation, you’re not even on the shortlist when the Googling starts.
Why the click data is more interesting than scary
A Search Engine Land analysis of 25 million organic impressions across 42 clients found organic CTR drops 61% when an AI Overview appears. In addition, paid CTR drops 68%.
EVERYBODY FREAK OUT!!! Right? Not quite.
Here’s what the panicked LinkedIn posts leave out: brands cited inside AI Overviews see 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks. Being in the AI Overview doesn’t cannibalize your traffic. If anything, it amplifies it. The AI Overview functions like a trust signal, a stamp of “this brand is relevant to your question” that makes people more likely to click your listing below.
The real twist, though, is that ranking well in organic doesn’t guarantee you show up in AI. Tom Capper’s research at Moz found 88% of AI Mode citations are NOT in the organic SERP for the same query. Organic and AI are pulling from different source pools. You can be number one in Google and completely invisible in ChatGPT’s answer to the same question.
And the small amount of traffic that does come from AI? It converts at more than quadruple the rate of organic, according to Semrush. These visitors arrive more informed, more intentional, and more ready to buy. Which makes sense, because they’ve already done the evaluation inside the AI interface. By the time they click, they’re just confirming and often converting.
The org chart is the problem
Most companies have SEO reporting to content, PPC reporting to demand gen, and AI search reporting to nobody. BrightEdge found 54% of organizations have handed AI search to the SEO team alone, which is a little like asking your plumber to also handle the electrical work because, hey, it’s all in the same house.
The waste from this setup is real. One branded Performance Max campaign paid roughly $500,000 for clicks that would have come through organic anyway. Google’s own research confirms: when you rank number one organically, only half your paid clicks are truly incremental. The other half? You bought what you already owned.
Meanwhile, McKinsey found that a brand’s own website makes up only 5% to 10% of the sources AI references. AI pulls from Reddit, review sites, affiliates, publishers, and user-generated content. You can have the best SEO program in your category and be completely absent from AI search results because AI is reading what other people say about you, not what you say about yourself.
The unified approach works. Level cut acquisition costs 18% and boosted SEO leads 22% by merging paid and organic for a B2B SaaS client. And we can use tools in our Level Intelligence Suite to connect performance signals across search surfaces. The channels compound each other. Treating them as separate line items on separate P&Ls leaves that compounding on the table.
Three audits you can run Monday morning
You don’t need a six-month transformation to start seeing the gaps. Three lenses, applied to your top 20 keywords, will show you where the opportunities and the waste are hiding.
Lens 1: Where do you actually appear? Check your organic rankings, paid ad coverage, and AI visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini for the same set of keywords. Semrush has a free AI visibility checker. Most teams have never looked at all three surfaces side by side, and the gaps are almost always larger than they expect.
Lens 2: Where are you paying for traffic you already own? Cross-reference your number-one organic rankings with active PPC bids on the same terms. Start with branded keywords, where the waste is usually largest and the test is cleanest. If you rank first and you’re still bidding, you’re probably buying your own clicks.
Lens 3: Where is AI ignoring you? Compare your organic rankings with your AI citation presence. Only 11% of domains get cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity, so strength in one guarantees nothing in the other. And check your robots.txt while you’re at it. If you’re blocking AI crawlers like OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot, you’ve pulled yourself off those shelves entirely.
This diagnostic shows you the full picture. What to do about it, the actual unification framework, is what I’m laying out at SMX Advanced.
The window won’t stay open
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) keyword difficulty currently averages 15 to 20, compared to 45 to 60 for equivalent SEO terms. That gap will close. Once an LLM selects a trusted source, it reinforces that choice across related prompts. The brands getting cited now are training the models to keep citing them. Winner-takes-most dynamics are being baked into the weights.
Many companies are seeing search traffic drop significantly. Those same brands, the ones that get it right, are seeing the inverse when it comes to business growth. Rankings and revenue have decoupled. The brands that win from here are the ones that stopped measuring channels in isolation and started measuring the search experience their customers actually have.
We’re presenting a search unification framework at SMX Advanced in our session, “Organic, paid, and AI search: one strategy to rule them all.” If you want to stop optimizing for three separate channels and start compounding performance across every search surface, join us for the session or come find the Level team at Booth #9.
Remember: The search experience that existed in 2023 is gone. The strategy should be too.

Your customers see the whole SERP. You should too.

Unifying the search experience for real growth in 2026 by Level Agency

<div><img width="360" height="200" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/04/mt_360x200_smxnow_april.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" /></div>Join us May 6 for the second SMX Now, featuring Ameet Khabra on how to spot and stop PPC drift before it hurts performance.

<div><img width="360" height="200" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/04/mt_360x200_smxnow_april.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" /></div>
<p>Automation doesn’t fail on its own — it does exactly what it’s trained to do. The problem is that when Google Ads is fed incomplete, misaligned, or overly broad signals, it can optimize toward the wrong outcome faster than most advertisers realize.</p>



<p>In our second installment of SMX Now, our new monthly series, Ameet Khabra of Hop Skip Media will break down a real account where a 417% jump in conversions turned out to be the wrong kind of success. She’ll use that case study to explain the four key ways automation drift enters an account: signal drift, query drift, inventory drift, and creative drift.</p>



<p>You’ll leave with a practical framework for diagnosing drift early, understanding where human oversight matters most, and managing automation more deliberately so it works toward real business goals — not just platform-reported wins.</p>



<p>Join us May 6 at noon ET.</p>



<p class="has-text-align-center"><a href="https://www.bigmarker.com/third-door-media/the-automation-drift-and-how-to-correct-course?utm_bmcr_source=Editorial" type="link" id="https://www.bigmarker.com/third-door-media/the-automation-drift-and-how-to-correct-course?utm_bmcr_source=Editorial" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Save your spot</strong></a>


Automation doesn’t fail on its own — it does exactly what it’s trained to do. The problem is that when Google Ads is fed incomplete, misaligned, or overly broad signals, it can optimize toward the wrong outcome faster than most advertisers realize.
In our second installment of SMX Now, our new monthly series, Ameet Khabra of Hop Skip Media will break down a real account where a 417% jump in conversions turned out to be the wrong kind of success. She’ll use that case study to explain the four key ways automation drift enters an account: signal drift, query drift, inventory drift, and creative drift.
You’ll leave with a practical framework for diagnosing drift early, understanding where human oversight matters most, and managing automation more deliberately so it works toward real business goals — not just platform-reported wins.
Join us May 6 at noon ET.
Save your spot

Join us May 6 for the second SMX Now, featuring Ameet Khabra on how to spot and stop PPC drift before it hurts performance.

SMX Now: The automation drift and how to correct course

<div><img width="800" height="450" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2019/02/google-search-console-interface-ss-1920-800x450.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Screenshot of Google Search Console" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2019/02/google-search-console-interface-ss-1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2019/02/google-search-console-interface-ss-1920-600x338.jpg 600w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2019/02/google-search-console-interface-ss-1920-200x113.jpg 200w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2019/02/google-search-console-interface-ss-1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2019/02/google-search-console-interface-ss-1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2019/02/google-search-console-interface-ss-1920-150x84.jpg 150w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2019/02/google-search-console-interface-ss-1920.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></div>The data going forward should be correct but the 50 weeks or so of data in the past will not be fixed.

<div><img width="800" height="450" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2019/02/google-search-console-interface-ss-1920-800x450.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Screenshot of Google Search Console" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2019/02/google-search-console-interface-ss-1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2019/02/google-search-console-interface-ss-1920-600x338.jpg 600w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2019/02/google-search-console-interface-ss-1920-200x113.jpg 200w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2019/02/google-search-console-interface-ss-1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2019/02/google-search-console-interface-ss-1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2019/02/google-search-console-interface-ss-1920-150x84.jpg 150w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2019/02/google-search-console-interface-ss-1920.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></div>
<p>Google said it has &#8220;resolved&#8221; an issue with logging data within Google Search Console reporting. The logging issue happened between May 13, 2025 through April 27, 2026, about 50 weeks.  The resolution did not fix the past data, but it did fix the issue going forward.</p>



<p><strong>What Google said. </strong>Here is what Google <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6211453?hl=en#zippy=%2Cperformance-reports-search-results-discover-google-news">posted</a>:</p>



<p>&#8220;A logging error prevented Search Console from accurately reporting impressions from May 13, 2025 until April 27, 2026. This issue has been resolved. As a result, you may notice a decrease in impressions in the Search Console Performance report. Only impressions and related metrics &#8211; CTR and average position &#8211; were affected; clicks were not affected by the error, and this issue affected data logging only.&#8221;</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="1556" height="880" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/google-data-issue-resolved-update-1777810799.png" alt="" class="wp-image-476443" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/google-data-issue-resolved-update-1777810799.png 1556w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/google-data-issue-resolved-update-1777810799-768x434.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/google-data-issue-resolved-update-1777810799-1536x869.png 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1556px) 100vw, 1556px" /></figure>



<p><strong>What was fixed. </strong>Just to be clear, Google has not fixed the data from May 13, 2025 through April 27, 2026 but just fixed the data going forward. So keep this in mind when reviewing the data in that date range.</p>



<p>John Mueller from Google confirmed on <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/johnmu.com/post/3mkx7smlf6c25">Bluesky</a> that this is only fixed going forward and the old data will not be fixed.</p>



<p><strong>Why we care. </strong>When reviewing your Search Console data, please note that for about 50 weeks, almost a year, the reports may be off and you may see a decrease in impressions, and thus click-through rate and average position data are also impacted.</p>


Google said it has “resolved” an issue with logging data within Google Search Console reporting. The logging issue happened between May 13, 2025 through April 27, 2026, about 50 weeks.  The resolution did not fix the past data, but it did fix the issue going forward.
What Google said. Here is what Google posted:
“A logging error prevented Search Console from accurately reporting impressions from May 13, 2025 until April 27, 2026. This issue has been resolved. As a result, you may notice a decrease in impressions in the Search Console Performance report. Only impressions and related metrics – CTR and average position – were affected; clicks were not affected by the error, and this issue affected data logging only.”




What was fixed. Just to be clear, Google has not fixed the data from May 13, 2025 through April 27, 2026 but just fixed the data going forward. So keep this in mind when reviewing the data in that date range.
John Mueller from Google confirmed on Bluesky that this is only fixed going forward and the old data will not be fixed.
Why we care. When reviewing your Search Console data, please note that for about 50 weeks, almost a year, the reports may be off and you may see a decrease in impressions, and thus click-through rate and average position data are also impacted.

The data going forward should be correct but the 50 weeks or so of data in the past will not be fixed.

Google fixes Search Console’s year-long data logging issue – well, kind of…

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Why-brand-authority-beats-topical-authority-in-AI-search.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Why brand authority beats topical authority in AI search" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Why-brand-authority-beats-topical-authority-in-AI-search.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Why-brand-authority-beats-topical-authority-in-AI-search-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Why-brand-authority-beats-topical-authority-in-AI-search-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Why-brand-authority-beats-topical-authority-in-AI-search-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>More content won’t make you an authority. AI search rewards brands with visibility, mentions, and real demand.


There’s a fundamental battle happening in search right now.
On one side is topical authority — the darling phrase of every SEO consultant who needs to sell more content. 
On the other is brand authority — something marketers have talked about for decades, while much of search treated it as optional, vague, or something the brand team could handle after the sitemap was fixed.
Now AI has walked into the room, kicked over the furniture, eaten half the traffic, and exposed the real problem. 
Search still matters. The global economy runs on people looking, comparing, buying, and solving problems through it. But the industry has a marketing problem.
And it shows. Too many SEOs have lost the plot on why people choose, remember, trust, search for, recommend, and buy from brands. AI search is making that ignorance harder to hide. That’s why brand authority wins — but not in the way most SEO dashboards suggest.
Topical authority was never supposed to mean content landfill
Before we get to AI, we need to define what topical authority was meant to be. At its best, it’s simple. 
You publish useful work, create evidence, and share expertise. Others cite you, journalists mention you, communities discuss you, and customers search for you. Over time, your brand becomes associated with the topic. That’s authority. It’s also brand building.
The problem is that much of the SEO industry hasn’t sold it that way. In practice, topical authority became a convenient commercial wrapper for content production.
SEO retainers were built around three pillars: technical, content, and links. Technical SEO became more specialized. Links were outsourced, packaged, renamed, earned through digital PR, or bought in one way or another. 
Content, meanwhile, remained the dependable agency engine — easy to sell, scope, and report. Think 4-8 blog posts a month, a topical map, a content hub, a cluster, a pillar page, and another 2,000 words on something nobody asked to read.
This wasn’t always wrong. In the pre-AI search world, content had real labor behind it. A decent article required research, writing, editing, optimization, internal linking, and promotion. That work had value. Good content could rank, attract links, build email lists, support commercial pages, and create some advertising effect through exposure.
Back in the day, we built what were often called power pages — strategic assets designed to earn links, rank, get shared, and pass equity to commercial pages. They had a purpose. They weren’t created just because the spreadsheet had another empty cell.
Topical authority changed that logic. It turned “let’s create something worth citing” into “let’s cover every possible keyword in the topic map and hope Google mistakes volume for expertise.” That was the original sin.
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Authority is what others say about you
Authority isn’t created by what you publish on your own site. It’s created when you become a recognized source.
Former Google engineer Jun Wu described this in terms of “mention information” — how search engines analyze natural language, identify topic phrases and sources, cluster related terms, and map associations between sources and topics. 
In plain English, they can recognize when certain brands, people, domains, and entities are repeatedly mentioned in relation to specific topics.
Today, SEOs call that brand co-occurrence. The idea isn’t new. When authoritative sites, journalists, communities, reviewers, experts, and customers consistently mention your brand in relation to a topic, you become associated with it — not because you published hundreds of near-identical articles, but because the wider web treats you as relevant.
Topical coverage is what you say about yourself. Authority is what the market says about you. AI search makes that difference hard to ignore.
The smash burger test
Suppose you want to become an authority in the smash burger industry. You probably don’t, but some topical authority consultant calling themselves a “semantic SEO” is likely pitching it to a fast food brand right now.
An SEO version of topical authority would probably begin with a map:
What is a smash burger?
Best meat for smash burgers.
History of smash burgers.
Smash burger recipes.
Smash burger toppings.
Smash burger glossary.
Best smash burger restaurants.
How to make a smash burger at home.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. If you run a serious smash burger publication, restaurant group, food brand, or equipment business, some of it might be useful. But authority doesn’t come from publishing those pages.
Real authority looks different. You create original data on the fastest-growing smash burger chains. You publish an index of the best-rated smash burger restaurants in the U.S. and U.K. You interview chefs, test meat blends, and produce videos people actually watch. 
You become a source journalists use when covering the category. Food creators reference your data. Restaurant owners subscribe to your newsletter. People search for your brand plus “smash burger report.”
That’s topical authority. It’s also brand authority.
The thin SEO version is publishing thousands of keyword pages and internally linking them until your CMS starts begging for death. The real version is becoming known.
AI has broken the old content economics
The old commercial defense of topical authority was traffic.
Brands didn’t hire search marketers because they had a deep spiritual yearning to become encyclopedias. They hired them for organic revenue growth — to appear when customers searched, and to drive clicks, leads, and sales.
Informational content was sold, in part, as advertising. Someone searches a question, lands on your article, and sees your brand. Maybe they join your email list, return later, or buy.
That model was always more fragile than the industry admitted. Most users don’t sit around thinking about your B2B SaaS platform, your dog food brand, or your running shoe category page. 
Ask someone to name 10 toothpaste brands, and they’ll struggle, despite a lifetime of exposure. Ask them to recall the last ten TikToks they watched, and watch their face collapse.
Advertising works through memory structures, distinctive assets, repeated exposure, and relevance. A single accidental visit to a generic “what is” article was never the brand-building miracle some content marketers claimed.
Now AI has made the economics worse. For many informational searches, answers are increasingly synthesized before the click. From the user’s point of view, that’s often a better experience.
My dad is in his 70s. He loves AI Overviews. He doesn’t want to click through three ad-infested recipe pages, dodge newsletter popups, reject cookies, scroll past a life story, and finally find how long to boil an egg. He wants the answer.
Users aren’t mourning your lost organic session. They’re getting on with their lives. That’s the uncomfortable truth.
If the click disappears, much of the supposed advertising effect of informational content disappears with it — no logo exposure, no distinctive assets, no remarketing pixel, no email capture, and no carefully designed journey. Just your content absorbed into a synthesized answer, and maybe a small source link on the side.
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AI citations aren’t the same as human citations
This brings us to another emerging industry obsession: AI citations. 
The small source boxes in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews, and other AI search experiences are being treated as the new holy metric. Agencies, tools, and consultants are already building around it.
The SEO industry loves a single metric — domain authority, traffic, keyword positions, share of voice, and now AI visibility. The problem is that an AI citation isn’t the same as a human citation.
An AI citation is often a helpful link — a reference, a retrieval artifact. It’s directionally useful. It can show what sources a system uses to support an answer, and whether your content is accessible, relevant, and being surfaced in certain contexts.
But it’s not the same as:
A journalist choosing to cite your research. 
A customer recommending you in a forum.
A creator reviewing your product.
A trade publication naming your brand as an expert source.
Human citations are evidence of market recognition. AI citations are evidence of machine retrieval. Don’t confuse the two.
The goal isn’t to be scraped. It’s to be recommended.
Brand search is the cleaner signal
If you want a better proxy for whether your authority is growing, look at brand search.
People search for brands they know, are considering, have bought from, or were recommended. Brand search isn’t perfect, but it’s much closer to commercial reality than counting how often a chatbot footnotes your blog post.
That’s why share of search matters. It gives you a directional view of market demand and mental availability. If more people are searching for your brand relative to competitors, something is happening. Your advertising, PR, product, reviews, word of mouth, content, partnerships, social presence, and customer experience are creating demand.
This is where the “but this is just SEO” crowd starts clearing its throat.
It’s not “just SEO.” Or rather, it’s only SEO if you define it so broadly that it includes every activity that might influence a search result. That’s strategic ambiguity. It lets everyone claim they were doing the future all along.
Most SEO retainers weren’t building brand fame. They were producing content, fixing technical issues, buying or earning links, and reporting rankings. Sometimes it worked — sometimes very well. But the average topical authority strategy wasn’t a sophisticated brand visibility program.
Traditional SEO still matters
None of this means you abandon traditional SEO. Buyer-intent rankings, category pages, product pages, local pages, technical SEO, internal linking, structured data, reviews, and crawlability matter. 
Search still works as a shelf. Many brands are discovered for the first time in supermarkets. The same is true in Google. If someone searches “emergency locksmith near me,” “best trail running shoes,” or “meeting intelligence software,” you want to appear.
Being found still matters, but it’s not the same as being recommended. Traditional SEO helps you get found, while brand authority drives recommendation. 
AI search shifts the balance toward the latter, synthesizing options, reducing uncertainty, and often naming brands, products, and solutions directly.
The new job is meaningful visibility
Semrush accidentally said the quiet part out loud with its April Fools’ “Brand Visibility Expert” stunt, where employees changed their titles on LinkedIn. It was a joke, but not entirely. 
The company later described AI visibility tools that track brand visibility, mentions, prompts, perception, and competitor presence in AI search. That’s where the market is going.
The future of search marketing isn’t just search engine optimization. It’s brand visibility across the network.
That means increasing meaningful visibility in the places where humans and AI systems encounter information: 
Search engines.
AI answers.
Review sites.
Communities.
YouTube. 
Reddit.
Trade media.
News sites.
Podcasts.
Influencers.
Comparison pages.
Customer reviews.
Social platforms.
Partner ecosystems.
Your own site.
The web is now the surface, and your website is just one part of it. This is the shift many SEOs don’t want to face. Many are used to optimizing owned pages for search engines. 
The next era is about optimizing a brand’s presence across the web. That requires different work.
Start with positioning
If you want to build brand authority in AI, start with positioning.
Who are you for?
What problem do you solve?
How do you solve it better?
What should the market associate with you?
What proof supports that claim?
These aren’t fluffy brand questions. They’re search questions now.
A locksmith isn’t only an emergency locksmith. They may install commercial locks, repair window locks, replace garage locks, secure doors, and provide security advice. 
A running shoe retailer may want to be known for trail running expertise, fast delivery, wide range, gait analysis, competitive pricing, or specialist advice. 
A SaaS platform may want to be known for extracting meeting intelligence that helps sales teams improve conversion.
These are performance attributes — the reasons people choose you. Your search strategy should reinforce them.
If your pet food brand specializes in sensitive stomachs, you need to be visible around dog dietary problems — not just on your blog, but in vet commentary, buyer guides, reviews, creator content, journalist coverage, customer stories, comparison pages, and data studies. 
These are the places where humans and AI systems learn what’s credible. That’s brand authority.
Create things worth being cited by humans
The rule for AI-era content is simple. Every piece of content should have real-world marketing value at publish.
If one person encounters it, they should understand your brand better, feel more positively about it, remember something useful, or be more likely to trust you.
If content only makes sense as an SEO asset after it ranks, it’s probably weak.
This means you stop creating “dead” content. Instead:
Create original research. 
Publish category data. 
Build useful tools. 
Share expert commentary. 
Produce strong product comparisons. 
Release reports journalists can cite. 
Create opinionated guides. 
Review products properly. 
Explain problems better than competitors. 
Make videos people want to watch. 
Turn internal data into public insight. 
Build assets that earn links and mentions.
Do fewer things. Make them better. Promote them harder.
Brands have limited budgets — smaller ones have even less room for waste. Spending thousands on a content library that repeats known information may be less effective than using the same budget to create one excellent data study, seed it with journalists, get creators talking, earn reviews, improve product pages, and run ads that make people search for your brand.
Ask yourself, “What use of this budget is most likely to increase brand search, links, mentions, reviews, and recommendations?”
Fitness times visibility equals success
A useful idea from network science applies here: success is driven by fitness multiplied by visibility.
Fitness is your ability to outperform alternatives — product, service, price, expertise, speed, range, design, convenience, proof, reviews, and customer experience.
Visibility is how often and how meaningfully the market encounters those signals.
Fitness without visibility is a brilliant brand nobody knows. Visibility without fitness is hype — and it usually collapses. 
That’s how preferential attachment starts. Brands that are talked about get talked about more. Brands that are searched get searched more. Brands that earn links earn more links. Brands that become default sources are cited more often. Brands that sell more get more reviews, more mentions, more data, and more presence.
AI accelerates this dynamic, consuming the web faster than humans and reinforcing those signals at scale. If your brand has dense, consistent, and credible associations with the problems you solve, you reduce uncertainty that you’re a good recommendation.
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What actually wins in AI search
Brand authority wins in AI — because real topical authority was always brand authority.
The version of topical authority that deserves to survive is the one where a brand becomes a genuine source in its category — creating useful information, earning mentions, building demand, getting searched, getting cited, and becoming associated with the problems it solves.
The version that deserves to die is the one where a brand publishes endless keyword-targeted sludge and calls the result authority.
AI hasn’t killed SEO. It’s killed the illusion that mediocrity deserves traffic.
The search marketers who win next won’t be the ones who publish the most. They’ll be the ones who make brands more meaningfully visible across the internet. They’ll understand positioning, PR, content, technical SEO, reviews, creators, category demand, links, mentions, and brand search as one connected system.
The goal isn’t to optimize for search engines, but for the network they use to understand the world.
Build the brand. Make it visible. Make it worth recommending. Everything else is just content with delusions of grandeur.

More content won’t make you an authority. AI search rewards brands with visibility, mentions, and real demand.

Why brand authority beats topical authority in AI search

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Tools-for-doing-AEO-right-now.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Tools for doing AEO right now" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Tools-for-doing-AEO-right-now.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Tools-for-doing-AEO-right-now-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Tools-for-doing-AEO-right-now-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Tools-for-doing-AEO-right-now-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>From AI assistants to analytics platforms, here’s how to use today’s tools to understand and work on your visibility in AI answers.

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Tools-for-doing-AEO-right-now.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Tools for doing AEO right now" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Tools-for-doing-AEO-right-now.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Tools-for-doing-AEO-right-now-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Tools-for-doing-AEO-right-now-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Tools-for-doing-AEO-right-now-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p>The other day, I was putting together my version of a Lumascape of <a href="https://searchengineland.com/answer-engine-optimization-ai-models-453509">answer engine optimization</a> (AEO) tools — I’m kidding, my computer doesn’t have that kind of bandwidth.</p>



<p>Instead of mapping every tool — which would be outdated in minutes — I’m focusing on the ones I actually use to grow clients’ AI search presence.</p>



<p>This is a deliberately short list: four tools I rely on, plus three I’m testing before adding them to my team’s stack.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-1-ai-assistants-chatgpt-claude-perplexity">1. AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity)</h2>



<p>Used thoughtfully, large language model (LLM) assistants are research and analysis tools in their own right. For AEO work specifically, they serve several distinct purposes:&nbsp;</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Competitive landscape research.</li>



<li>Content gap analysis.</li>



<li>Prompt testing.</li>



<li>Entity and topical coverage audits.</li>



<li>Structured content drafting. </li>
</ul>



<p>The key distinction from passive use is intentionality — using these tools with a defined AEO research methodology rather than ad hoc.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-why-they-re-essential">Why they’re essential</h3>



<p>AEO requires a fundamental understanding of how AI systems process and represent information. The most direct way to develop that understanding is to work regularly and analytically within those systems.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Querying AI assistants with the same prompts your target audience uses — and carefully analyzing what they return, what sources they cite, what entities they associate, and how they structure answers — gives you peerless ground-level intelligence.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-competitive-strengths">Competitive strengths</h3>



<p>Each platform has its own strengths worth noting:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>ChatGPT is widely used and offers broad general knowledge synthesis, making it useful for understanding how mainstream AI handles queries in your category.</li>



<li>Claude tends toward more nuanced, caveated responses and is strong for analytical tasks.</li>



<li>Perplexity is citation-heavy by design and particularly valuable for AEO research precisely because it surfaces its sources explicitly. You can see in real time which domains are being pulled and why.</li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-you-can-t-do-without-them">What you can’t do without them</h3>



<p>Firsthand research on your brand’s current AEO status, which includes:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Manual prompt testing</strong>: See how your brand and content are being represented.</li>



<li><strong>Competitive research:</strong> Query AI systems with category-level questions to see which competitors appear and how they are framed.</li>



<li><strong>Topical gap analysis:</strong> Identify questions AI systems answer where your brand is absent.</li>



<li><strong>Structural content analysis:</strong> Understanding the answer formats (lists, definitions, comparisons, how-tos) that AI systems prefer for your query types.</li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-caveats">Caveats</h3>



<p>AI assistant outputs are non-deterministic and vary by platform, model version, session context, and even time of day. Manual prompt testing is qualitative and difficult to scale. These tools are best used to build intuition and generate hypotheses, which should then be validated with quantitative data from platforms like Profound.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Also worth noting: querying AI systems for competitive research can quickly become a rabbit hole, so before you truly dig in, build a structured testing framework and stick to it.</p>



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<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-2-profound-nbsp">2. Profound&nbsp;</h2>



<p>Profound is purpose-built AEO intelligence that monitors how AI platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, etc.) discover, surface, and cite your brand and content.&nbsp;</p>



<p>It also tracks brand mention frequency and sentiment, competitors’ share of voice, and the specific prompts or query types that trigger your content to appear in AI-generated answers.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-why-it-s-essential">Why it’s essential</h3>



<p>If you want to understand where your brand stands in the AI answer ecosystem, it’s currently the most direct way to get that data. It shifts the question from “where do we rank?” to “when AI answers a question in our category, are we in the answer?”</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-competitive-strengths-0">Competitive strengths</h3>



<p>The cross-platform coverage is the tool’s most distinctive feature. Rather than measuring a single AI engine in isolation, it provides a comparative view across the major platforms simultaneously. The competitive benchmarking functionality is particularly useful: you can see both your own AI citation share and how it stacks up against named competitors. It’s the kind of context that transforms data into strategy.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-you-can-t-do-without-it">What you can’t do without it</h3>



<p>Some fundamental capabilities, like:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Quantifying your brand’s presence in AI-generated answers at scale.</li>



<li>Tracking citation share over time and across platforms.</li>



<li>Identifying which content types and topics drive AI mentions — and which competitors are winning the queries you’re losing.</li>
</ul>



<p>It’s a pretty expensive tool. If you want to justify the expense to your C-suite, tell them, “This will show us exactly where we’re losing to {most hated competitor}.”</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-caveats-0">Caveats</h3>



<p>The tool is evolving quickly, which it needs to do as the AEO landscape morphs in real time. The data it surfaces reflects AI outputs at the time the query is made. Outputs are inherently variable because AI systems don’t return the same answer to the same prompt every time.</p>



<p>Treat metrics as directional signals and trend data rather than precise, static rankings. It also won’t tell you why you’re being cited or not. That’s on you and your team to analyze.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-3-google-trends-and-google-keyword-planner">3. Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner</h2>



<p>Google Trends tracks the relative search interest for queries over time, across geographies, and in comparison to related terms. Google Keyword Planner provides search volume estimates and demand forecasting, originally designed for paid search planning but equally useful for organic and AEO strategy.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-why-they-re-essential-0">Why they’re essential</h3>



<p>AEO strategy lives and dies by understanding demand signals. Before optimizing content to appear in AI answers, you need to know what questions people are actually asking, how that demand is trending, and whether the topic has enough volume to warrant investment.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Google’s tools remain the most reliable source of this data at scale — and crucially, they reflect the same underlying search behavior that feeds into AI engine training data and query patterns.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-competitive-strengths-1">Competitive strengths</h3>



<p>Google Trends is uniquely powerful for directional trend analysis. It doesn’t give you absolute volume, but it gives you relative momentum — which is often more strategically valuable when you’re trying to anticipate where audience interest is heading rather than just where it has been.</p>



<p>For AEO specifically, rising query trends can signal emerging answer opportunities for you to address before your competitors do.&nbsp;</p>



<p>In my experience, Keyword Planner’s forecasting features are underused. They can help you prioritize content investment based on projected demand rather than historical data alone.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-you-can-t-do-without-them-0">What you can’t do without them</h3>



<p>Build a truly dynamic AEO strategy in which you:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Understand whether demand for a topic is growing, stable, or declining before building content around it.</li>



<li>Identify seasonal patterns that should shape content publishing calendars.</li>



<li>Surface related queries and rising breakout terms that expand your AEO content coverage.</li>



<li>Validate whether a topic has enough search demand to justify the content investment.</li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-caveats-1">Caveats</h3>



<p>As you probably noticed when I recommended those tools, neither reflects AI-native query behavior directly. They measure traditional search, not prompts submitted to ChatGPT or Perplexity.&nbsp;</p>



<p>As information-seeking behavior shifts toward AI interfaces, these tools will increasingly undercount true demand. Use them as a strong proxy and directional guide, not as a complete picture.</p>



<p>Worth noting: Keyword Planner also requires an active Google Ads account, and volume estimates in low-competition or niche categories can be imprecise.</p>



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<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-4-google-search-console-and-google-analytics">4. Google Search Console and Google Analytics</h2>



<p><a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-seo-guide-443942">Google Search Console</a> (GSC) provides direct data on how your site performs in Google Search: which queries trigger impressions, click-through rates, average positions, and indexing status.&nbsp;</p>



<p><a href="https://searchengineland.com/guide/how-to-use-google-analytics-4">Google Analytics 4</a> (GA4) tracks on-site behavior — how users arrive, what they do, how long they stay, and where they exit — including referral traffic sources that reveal whether visitors are arriving from AI-adjacent platforms.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-why-they-re-essential-1">Why they’re essential</h3>



<p>For AEO practitioners, these tools serve critical diagnostic functions.</p>



<p>GSC tells you whether the content you’re optimizing for AI citation is also performing in traditional search, which matters because Google AI Overviews and traditional organic results draw from overlapping content pools.</p>



<p>GA4’s referral traffic data is increasingly important for detecting direct traffic from AI platforms: as users click through citations in tools like Perplexity or ChatGPT’s browsing mode, that activity shows up as referral or direct traffic. That’s worth segmenting and monitoring, even if, given the scorching rise of zero-click activity, it paints a very incomplete picture of your AEO impact.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-competitive-strengths-nbsp">Competitive strengths&nbsp;</h3>



<p>GSC’s query data is irreplaceable. No third-party tool has access to the same level of Google-sourced search performance data. The ability to see exactly which queries are driving impressions (even without clicks) is foundational for identifying content that has topical authority but may not be converting visibility into AI citations.&nbsp;</p>



<p>GA4’s cross-channel attribution and audience analysis capabilities help you understand where AEO-driven traffic comes from and what that traffic does when it arrives — which is the commercial case for the discipline.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-you-can-t-do-without-them-1">What you can’t do without them</h3>



<p>Develop a true understanding of AEO business impact — and AEO blockers — by:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Measuring whether your AEO content investments translate into actual traffic and engagement.</li>



<li>Identifying content with high impression share but low CTR — a common signal of AI Overview cannibalization.</li>



<li>Monitoring referral traffic from AI platforms as that ecosystem matures.</li>



<li>Diagnosing indexing or crawlability issues that prevent AI systems from accessing your content.</li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-caveats-2">Caveats</h3>



<p>GSC data has well-documented limitations: it samples at scale, attribution can be murky, and data is typically available with a 48-72 hour lag. Critically, it only reflects Google. It tells you nothing about how you perform in Bing-powered AI search or standalone AI platforms.&nbsp;</p>



<p>GA4 still has UX rough edges, so you’ll need to confirm that your event tracking and conversion configuration is solid before drawing strategic conclusions from the data.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-rapid-fire-roundup-nbsp">Rapid-fire roundup&nbsp;</h2>



<p>That shortlist leaves, oh, thousands of tools left to consider. I recommend putting these on your radar and testing them to gauge their value as the AEO ecosystem develops.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-5-ai-trust-signals">5. AI Trust Signals</h3>



<p>AI Trust Signals focuses on the credibility and trustworthiness signals that influence whether AI systems choose to cite a source. </p>



<p>This is an emerging and underexplored dimension of AEO: it goes upstream from content relevance and helps brands understand whether an AI system “trusts” a domain enough to surface it as an authoritative reference. It’s worth monitoring as the understanding of AI citation mechanics matures.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-6-ahrefs">6. Ahrefs</h3>



<p>Ahrefs is a mature SEO platform with deep backlink analysis, content gap tooling, site auditing, and keyword research capabilities.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Its relevance to AEO is primarily indirect, but it’s significant: authority signals, including referring domain quality and topical authority depth, are widely believed to influence AI citation likelihood. Ahrefs is a benchmark tool for understanding and building that authority infrastructure.</p>



<p>Its Content Explorer is also a practical tool for identifying high-performing content in your category that AI systems are likely to draw from.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-7-roadway-ai">7. Roadway AI</h3>



<p>Roadway AI positions itself as an AI-native platform with a focus on scaling growth marketing activities. Where it helps is building agents that can help attribute AEO signals into revenue, so you can better understand impact.&nbsp;</p>



<p>As a newer entrant, it’s worth evaluating as part of a toolkit audit, especially if you’re looking for tooling built specifically for AEO use cases. The category is moving fast, and platforms like Roadway AI may gain significant mindshare within 12 months, which also means more competitors are coming soon.</p>



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<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-reality-of-aeo-tools-fast-moving-and-imperfect">The reality of AEO tools: Fast-moving and imperfect</h2>



<p>AEO tooling is still catching up to AEO as a discipline, which will likely be the dynamic for the next few years, at least. </p>



<p>Everything is changing so fast, and AI-driven discovery is evolving as users adopt new behaviors that vary by vertical. What matters is consistently applied measurement, strong analysis, and testing that lead to actionable insights.</p>



<p>You won’t get your setup perfect. Like much of marketing, solidly directional is probably as good as you’re going to get. With any tool, if you can explain and measure how it improves your AEO efforts, that’s a great start.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Before you sign any contracts, see if you can find an industry colleague with real-life experience using the tool, and ask them for their take. Unless they’re staunch advocates, chances are you can either find an alternative that does the same thing better or cheaper, or you can wait another month for one to emerge.</p>

The other day, I was putting together my version of a Lumascape of answer engine optimization (AEO) tools — I’m kidding, my computer doesn’t have that kind of bandwidth.
Instead of mapping every tool — which would be outdated in minutes — I’m focusing on the ones I actually use to grow clients’ AI search presence.
This is a deliberately short list: four tools I rely on, plus three I’m testing before adding them to my team’s stack.
1. AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity)
Used thoughtfully, large language model (LLM) assistants are research and analysis tools in their own right. For AEO work specifically, they serve several distinct purposes: 
Competitive landscape research.
Content gap analysis.
Prompt testing.
Entity and topical coverage audits.
Structured content drafting. 
The key distinction from passive use is intentionality — using these tools with a defined AEO research methodology rather than ad hoc.
Why they’re essential
AEO requires a fundamental understanding of how AI systems process and represent information. The most direct way to develop that understanding is to work regularly and analytically within those systems. 
Querying AI assistants with the same prompts your target audience uses — and carefully analyzing what they return, what sources they cite, what entities they associate, and how they structure answers — gives you peerless ground-level intelligence.
Competitive strengths
Each platform has its own strengths worth noting:
ChatGPT is widely used and offers broad general knowledge synthesis, making it useful for understanding how mainstream AI handles queries in your category.
Claude tends toward more nuanced, caveated responses and is strong for analytical tasks.
Perplexity is citation-heavy by design and particularly valuable for AEO research precisely because it surfaces its sources explicitly. You can see in real time which domains are being pulled and why.
What you can’t do without them
Firsthand research on your brand’s current AEO status, which includes:
Manual prompt testing: See how your brand and content are being represented.
Competitive research: Query AI systems with category-level questions to see which competitors appear and how they are framed.
Topical gap analysis: Identify questions AI systems answer where your brand is absent.
Structural content analysis: Understanding the answer formats (lists, definitions, comparisons, how-tos) that AI systems prefer for your query types.
Caveats
AI assistant outputs are non-deterministic and vary by platform, model version, session context, and even time of day. Manual prompt testing is qualitative and difficult to scale. These tools are best used to build intuition and generate hypotheses, which should then be validated with quantitative data from platforms like Profound. 
Also worth noting: querying AI systems for competitive research can quickly become a rabbit hole, so before you truly dig in, build a structured testing framework and stick to it.
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2. Profound 
Profound is purpose-built AEO intelligence that monitors how AI platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, etc.) discover, surface, and cite your brand and content. 
It also tracks brand mention frequency and sentiment, competitors’ share of voice, and the specific prompts or query types that trigger your content to appear in AI-generated answers.
Why it’s essential
If you want to understand where your brand stands in the AI answer ecosystem, it’s currently the most direct way to get that data. It shifts the question from “where do we rank?” to “when AI answers a question in our category, are we in the answer?”
Competitive strengths
The cross-platform coverage is the tool’s most distinctive feature. Rather than measuring a single AI engine in isolation, it provides a comparative view across the major platforms simultaneously. The competitive benchmarking functionality is particularly useful: you can see both your own AI citation share and how it stacks up against named competitors. It’s the kind of context that transforms data into strategy.
What you can’t do without it
Some fundamental capabilities, like:
Quantifying your brand’s presence in AI-generated answers at scale.
Tracking citation share over time and across platforms.
Identifying which content types and topics drive AI mentions — and which competitors are winning the queries you’re losing.
It’s a pretty expensive tool. If you want to justify the expense to your C-suite, tell them, “This will show us exactly where we’re losing to {most hated competitor}.”
Caveats
The tool is evolving quickly, which it needs to do as the AEO landscape morphs in real time. The data it surfaces reflects AI outputs at the time the query is made. Outputs are inherently variable because AI systems don’t return the same answer to the same prompt every time.
Treat metrics as directional signals and trend data rather than precise, static rankings. It also won’t tell you why you’re being cited or not. That’s on you and your team to analyze.
3. Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner
Google Trends tracks the relative search interest for queries over time, across geographies, and in comparison to related terms. Google Keyword Planner provides search volume estimates and demand forecasting, originally designed for paid search planning but equally useful for organic and AEO strategy.
Why they’re essential
AEO strategy lives and dies by understanding demand signals. Before optimizing content to appear in AI answers, you need to know what questions people are actually asking, how that demand is trending, and whether the topic has enough volume to warrant investment. 
Google’s tools remain the most reliable source of this data at scale — and crucially, they reflect the same underlying search behavior that feeds into AI engine training data and query patterns.
Competitive strengths
Google Trends is uniquely powerful for directional trend analysis. It doesn’t give you absolute volume, but it gives you relative momentum — which is often more strategically valuable when you’re trying to anticipate where audience interest is heading rather than just where it has been.
For AEO specifically, rising query trends can signal emerging answer opportunities for you to address before your competitors do. 
In my experience, Keyword Planner’s forecasting features are underused. They can help you prioritize content investment based on projected demand rather than historical data alone.
What you can’t do without them
Build a truly dynamic AEO strategy in which you:
Understand whether demand for a topic is growing, stable, or declining before building content around it.
Identify seasonal patterns that should shape content publishing calendars.
Surface related queries and rising breakout terms that expand your AEO content coverage.
Validate whether a topic has enough search demand to justify the content investment.
Caveats
As you probably noticed when I recommended those tools, neither reflects AI-native query behavior directly. They measure traditional search, not prompts submitted to ChatGPT or Perplexity. 
As information-seeking behavior shifts toward AI interfaces, these tools will increasingly undercount true demand. Use them as a strong proxy and directional guide, not as a complete picture.
Worth noting: Keyword Planner also requires an active Google Ads account, and volume estimates in low-competition or niche categories can be imprecise.
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4. Google Search Console and Google Analytics
Google Search Console (GSC) provides direct data on how your site performs in Google Search: which queries trigger impressions, click-through rates, average positions, and indexing status. 
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) tracks on-site behavior — how users arrive, what they do, how long they stay, and where they exit — including referral traffic sources that reveal whether visitors are arriving from AI-adjacent platforms.
Why they’re essential
For AEO practitioners, these tools serve critical diagnostic functions.
GSC tells you whether the content you’re optimizing for AI citation is also performing in traditional search, which matters because Google AI Overviews and traditional organic results draw from overlapping content pools.
GA4’s referral traffic data is increasingly important for detecting direct traffic from AI platforms: as users click through citations in tools like Perplexity or ChatGPT’s browsing mode, that activity shows up as referral or direct traffic. That’s worth segmenting and monitoring, even if, given the scorching rise of zero-click activity, it paints a very incomplete picture of your AEO impact.
Competitive strengths 
GSC’s query data is irreplaceable. No third-party tool has access to the same level of Google-sourced search performance data. The ability to see exactly which queries are driving impressions (even without clicks) is foundational for identifying content that has topical authority but may not be converting visibility into AI citations. 
GA4’s cross-channel attribution and audience analysis capabilities help you understand where AEO-driven traffic comes from and what that traffic does when it arrives — which is the commercial case for the discipline.
What you can’t do without them
Develop a true understanding of AEO business impact — and AEO blockers — by:
Measuring whether your AEO content investments translate into actual traffic and engagement.
Identifying content with high impression share but low CTR — a common signal of AI Overview cannibalization.
Monitoring referral traffic from AI platforms as that ecosystem matures.
Diagnosing indexing or crawlability issues that prevent AI systems from accessing your content.
Caveats
GSC data has well-documented limitations: it samples at scale, attribution can be murky, and data is typically available with a 48-72 hour lag. Critically, it only reflects Google. It tells you nothing about how you perform in Bing-powered AI search or standalone AI platforms. 
GA4 still has UX rough edges, so you’ll need to confirm that your event tracking and conversion configuration is solid before drawing strategic conclusions from the data.
Rapid-fire roundup 
That shortlist leaves, oh, thousands of tools left to consider. I recommend putting these on your radar and testing them to gauge their value as the AEO ecosystem develops.
5. AI Trust Signals
AI Trust Signals focuses on the credibility and trustworthiness signals that influence whether AI systems choose to cite a source. 
This is an emerging and underexplored dimension of AEO: it goes upstream from content relevance and helps brands understand whether an AI system “trusts” a domain enough to surface it as an authoritative reference. It’s worth monitoring as the understanding of AI citation mechanics matures.
6. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a mature SEO platform with deep backlink analysis, content gap tooling, site auditing, and keyword research capabilities. 
Its relevance to AEO is primarily indirect, but it’s significant: authority signals, including referring domain quality and topical authority depth, are widely believed to influence AI citation likelihood. Ahrefs is a benchmark tool for understanding and building that authority infrastructure.
Its Content Explorer is also a practical tool for identifying high-performing content in your category that AI systems are likely to draw from.
7. Roadway AI
Roadway AI positions itself as an AI-native platform with a focus on scaling growth marketing activities. Where it helps is building agents that can help attribute AEO signals into revenue, so you can better understand impact. 
As a newer entrant, it’s worth evaluating as part of a toolkit audit, especially if you’re looking for tooling built specifically for AEO use cases. The category is moving fast, and platforms like Roadway AI may gain significant mindshare within 12 months, which also means more competitors are coming soon.
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The reality of AEO tools: Fast-moving and imperfect
AEO tooling is still catching up to AEO as a discipline, which will likely be the dynamic for the next few years, at least. 
Everything is changing so fast, and AI-driven discovery is evolving as users adopt new behaviors that vary by vertical. What matters is consistently applied measurement, strong analysis, and testing that lead to actionable insights.
You won’t get your setup perfect. Like much of marketing, solidly directional is probably as good as you’re going to get. With any tool, if you can explain and measure how it improves your AEO efforts, that’s a great start. 
Before you sign any contracts, see if you can find an industry colleague with real-life experience using the tool, and ask them for their take. Unless they’re staunch advocates, chances are you can either find an alternative that does the same thing better or cheaper, or you can wait another month for one to emerge.

From AI assistants to analytics platforms, here’s how to use today’s tools to understand and work on your visibility in AI answers.

7 tools for doing AEO right now

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Why-AI-visibility-starts-before-search-and-ends-with-citations.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Why AI visibility starts before search and ends with citations" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Why-AI-visibility-starts-before-search-and-ends-with-citations.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Why-AI-visibility-starts-before-search-and-ends-with-citations-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Why-AI-visibility-starts-before-search-and-ends-with-citations-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/Why-AI-visibility-starts-before-search-and-ends-with-citations-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Most visibility is shaped before the query. Learn how influence, entity signals, and original data determine who AI systems cite.

The conversation has shifted. We’re spending less time optimizing for clicks and more time trying to fix the AI ROI story. AI now sits at the center of discovery, shaping what gets seen, summarized, and cited.
Here’s what’s working right now, what your peers are doing, and why SMX Advanced will feel different this year.
The SparkToro wake-up call: Influence happens everywhere
The foundation of any serious 2026 content strategy has to start with Rand Fishkin’s landmark March 2026 study, “Influence Happens Everywhere,” an analysis of the 5,000 most-visited sites on both mobile and desktop. 
The finding that rattled the industry: while Google still commands 73% of search traffic, search itself is merely a response to influence created elsewhere.
People don’t wake up and search for a brand in a vacuum. They read, watch, and listen across a fragmented web of news, social media, and niche communities before they ever hit a search bar. 
AI tools, despite their rapid growth, still account for a fraction of total web visits compared to the “big incumbents.” But the trajectory is unmistakable.
The fundamental problem with attribution in 2026 is that search gets over-credited because it captures demand at the finish line, while the fragmented channels — email, news, specialized content — get under-credited for creating that demand in the first place. 
When creating content, your job is to win the influence phase so thoroughly that when a user eventually turns to an AI assistant or a search bar, your brand is the only logical answer.
That framing is the strategic backbone behind sessions at the upcoming SMX Advanced in Boston, June 3-5, and the lens through which your entire editorial calendar should be rewritten.
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What your Search Engine Land colleagues are already doing
Before we discuss tactics, it’s worth pausing to note that this publication’s own contributor base has been sounding the alarm in complementary ways. Read them together and a clear picture emerges.
Dave Davies, principal SEO manager at Weights & Biases and a regular SMX Advanced speaker, published a rigorous piece in December 2025, “Mentions, citations, and clicks: Your 2026 content strategy.” 
Drawing on Siege Media’s two-year content performance study covering more than 7.2 million sessions, Grow and Convert’s conversion research, and Seer Interactive’s AI Overview findings, Davies made the case that the metrics we’ve lived by — impressions, sessions, CTR — “no longer tell the full story.” 
Mentions, citations, and structured visibility signals, he argued, are becoming the new levers of trust and the path to revenue. 
Carolyn Shelby, who appeared in a recent SMX Munich 2026 recap for her session “Inside Google’s Head,” crystallized what many of us have only half-articulated: AI doesn’t discover new brands — it selects from known entities. 
The implications are stark. If you haven’t built entity recognition across the web’s key reference points — Wikipedia, Reddit, LinkedIn, authoritative press coverage — you don’t get selected. 
My own October 2025 piece for this publication compared how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek differ in their data sources, live web use, and citation rules. The conclusion I reached then is truer today: a single-platform AI strategy isn’t a strategy. Each model has different retrieval logic, different trust signals, and different recency weighting. 
Jordan Koene made the same point in January 2026, noting that different LLMs win different jobs. This heterogeneity is the fundamental reason why “write good content” is both correct and insufficient as advice.
What ‘full-stack content’ actually means
In 2024, we were impressed if an AI tool could write a decent 500-word blog post. Today, writing is the least interesting thing AI does.
Jasper’s 2026 Enterprise Suite is a useful illustration. It doesn’t just draft text, it:
Pulls real-time performance data from Google Search Console.
Identifies content gaps where competitors are gaining ground.
Generates a multimodal package: a 1,500-word deep dive, three vertical videos for YouTube Shorts, and custom infographics, all calibrated to a brand-voice model trained on your last five years of successful campaigns. 
We have moved from “Help me write this” to “Help me dominate this topic.”
But tools don’t solve strategy problems. The harder question is “what should the content actually say?” AI can’t produce the original research, the proprietary case study, or the hard-won perspective that makes an LLM choose you over a dozen lookalike alternatives.
This is why the most interesting SMX Advanced session on content this year may be the one by Purna Virji of LinkedIn, who opens the conference with a keynote on fixing the broken AI ROI story before budgets get cut. 
Her argument — that AI investment must generate measurable business outcomes “at the P&L level,” not just activity, efficiency, or content volume — is a direct challenge to teams that have been celebrating output metrics while their revenue dashboards flatline.
Google Vids and the democratization of video: A genuine inflection point
Perhaps the most significant platform shift for content creators in 2026 was Google moving Google Vids out of its Workspace-only silo. You can now create, edit, and share videos at no cost directly within the Google ecosystem, powered by the Veo 3 generative model.
For years, video production was protected by a high barrier to entry: expensive tools, specialist skills, and days of editing time. Google Vids collapses that barrier. Drop a Google Doc or a URL into the “Help me create” prompt, and you get a full-motion storyboard with AI-generated voiceovers, licensed music, and transitions in minutes.
The practical consequences are arriving fast:
Small agencies are now producing video-first content calendars that previously required five-figure budgets. The “if only we had video” excuse has expired.
Hyper-localization is becoming a baseline expectation. Using Vids’ automated dubbing and visual swapping, a single “hero” video can be localized for 20 different markets in an afternoon.
AI-generated summaries are already threatening video metadata. YouTube recently tested swapping video titles for AI-generated summaries. Brands that have not invested in clear entity signals and structured descriptions may soon find their video content renamed by an algorithm — not a person.
The strategic implication is the same as it was for text: AI tools lower the floor but raise the bar. Every competitor now has access to cheap video. But who has something worth saying in that video?
GEO, AEO, and the language problem
Depending on which Search Engine Land article you read in the past few weeks, the dominant framework for surviving this shift is either generative engine optimization (GEO) or answer engine optimization (AEO).
A growing number of contributors argue these terms are marketing noise for what is, at bottom, just good search everywhere optimization plus structured data plus earned media.
That debate is genuinely worth having, and it will be had at SMX Advanced. But for the practitioner who needs to make decisions next week, here’s what the evidence actually supports:
eMarketer’s Nate Elliott put it plainly in a recent FAQ: “Almost every GEO response is different from every other GEO response.” Between 40% and 60% of cited sources change month-to-month across Google AI Mode and ChatGPT, making AI visibility far less stable than organic search rankings. That volatility is the real risk, not the terminology debate.
Similarweb’s 2026 GenAI Brand Visibility Index, reported by Digiday, found that major publishers like Reuters and The Guardian receive less than 1% of referral traffic from AI platforms despite being frequently cited. Yet, The Washington Post found that visitors arriving from AI platforms convert to subscriptions at four to five times the rate of traditional search visitors. The volume-versus-value tension has never been more acute.
The practical translation of all of this:
In 2006, we optimized press releases for keyword density: In 2026, optimize for entity association: linking your brand to specific solutions in the AI’s knowledge graph.
Long-form blogs become modular content: Snippets, FAQs, and data tables designed for “chunk-level” ingestion by fetcher bots.
Gated white papers become open data: Making unique research crawlable so AI credits you as the source in an overview, not a competitor who summarized your findings.
Your robots.txt file now has strategic consequences: Allowing OAI-SearchBot but blocking GPTBot is a choice — one that determines whether you show up in real-time AI search citations versus model training data.
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The human premium isn’t a platitude
As AI-generated content reaches its peak volume, the value of the human voice has skyrocketed — but not for the reasons most think-piece writers suggest.
The standard argument runs like this: 
Audiences can smell AI slop.
Authentic human writing wins. 
That’s partially true, but it understates the mechanism. The deeper reason human-authored content is winning in AI-mediated search is structural. 
Human authors who’ve built genuine reputations across years of bylined, cited, and cross-referenced work have, in effect, built entity graphs that AI systems can navigate. That isn’t something a prompt can replicate.
The classic example: an AI-generated 2026 review of a new electric vehicle might be factually flawless, listing every spec and battery range. But it loses to a human-authored piece that says, “I drove this through a New England blizzard and the door handle froze shut.” 
AI can’t freeze. It can’t feel frustration. It can’t have a bad morning. Those human frictions are now genuinely valuable SEO assets — not because they’re charming, but because no language model can fabricate them with any credibility.
Readers, trained by years of exposure to AI content, have developed a reliable instinct for the difference.
The Siege Media data Davies cited adds a quantitative dimension: across 7.2 million sessions, the content that earned sustained citations and conversions shared a consistent profile — original data, expert voice, and clear structure that an AI system could extract and attribute. Volume without those properties is, as the headline puts it, just noise.
What to watch at SMX Advanced 2026 — and what it tells us about where this is going
The SMX Advanced agenda is the clearest available signal of where the practitioner community thinks the critical problems are right now. A few sessions deserve particular attention from anyone focused on content creation.
Virji’s keynote, “Your AI ROI story is broken: How to fix it before budgets get cut,” opens Day 2. Virji isn’t arguing that AI investment is wrong. She’s arguing that almost every organization is measuring it incorrectly — and that the correction required is organizational, not tactical.
Davies’ session, “Predicting and influencing AI citations with retrieval signals,” on June 4, is the direct technical counterpart to the strategic framing above. If Virji is asking “what does success mean,” Davies is asking “how do you engineer it.” 
SMX Master Classes ran in April, and SMX Next follows in November. If there’s a throughline across the entire 2026 SMX calendar, it’s this: the search marketing community has collectively decided that the era of isolated channel optimization is over. Content, paid, technical, and brand are now one discipline, or they are failing disciplines.
What you need to actually do in the second half of 2026
Broad strategic advice is easy to nod at and ignore. Here is the specific and uncomfortable version:
Audit your AI visibility before you touch your content: Query ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity with the prompts your customers actually use. Note which brands appear. Note which sources get cited. If you’re not among them, adding more content isn’t the first fix — fixing your entity signals is.
Stop treating your unique research as a lead-generation gate: Crawlable, citable original data earns AI attribution. A PDF behind a form wall earns nothing except a diminishing number of direct downloads as discovery migrates to AI interfaces.
Invest in community platforms as a first-party strategy, not an afterthought: LLMs pull heavily from Reddit, YouTube, and Wikipedia. eMarketer’s Max Willens has noted that Reddit alone has 100 million daily active users generating brand conversations. Your brand’s absence from those conversations isn’t neutral. It creates a vacuum that your competitors or your critics will fill.
Optimize for citatability, not just rankability: The new KPI isn’t the visit — it’s the attribution. If an AI Overview uses your data but doesn’t name your brand, you’ve been mined, not cited. Use clear entity markup, structured FAQ sections, and “quotable” conclusions that make it easy for an LLM to attribute rather than anonymize.
Diversify your robots.txt strategy intentionally: Different bots serve different purposes. Allowing OAI-SearchBot (real-time citation) while blocking GPTBot (model training) is a legitimate strategic choice. Most organizations have not made it deliberately. Make it deliberately.
Measure differently: The eMarketer-recommended framework allocates 40% of your optimization budget to core SEO fundamentals, 25% to digital PR, 20% to data and reporting, 10% to training, and 5% to experimentation. If your current allocation looks nothing like that, the gap explains more about your AI visibility struggles than any content audit will. So, combining SEO and PR is even more important today than it was back in the old days when I started speaking and writing about search.
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The bots are crawling: Are you worth citing?
The age of the proxy is over. You can no longer hide behind a ghostwriter or a simple prompt and expect to build a brand. But the deeper truth — the one that doesn’t make it into most AI content trend pieces — is that this transformation benefits people who’ve been doing the hard work all along.
If you’ve been building genuine expertise, publishing original data, earning bylines in authoritative publications, and cultivating real presence in the communities where your customers actually talk — then you already have most of what you need. The AI infrastructure of 2026 is, in many ways, a system that rewards exactly the things good content has always required.
The difference is that the competition is now generating plausible-sounding content on a scale that would have been impossible to imagine four years ago. Being good isn’t enough to stand out. 
You have to be citable, structured, and present in all the right places at precisely the right time — which is a harder, more interesting, and ultimately more durable strategic problem than keyword density ever was.
See you in Boston.

Most visibility is shaped before the query. Learn how influence, entity signals, and original data determine who AI systems cite.

Why AI visibility starts before search and ends with citations

<div><img width="800" height="450" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2014/09/ask-com-logo2-1920-800x450.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2014/09/ask-com-logo2-1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2014/09/ask-com-logo2-1920-600x338.jpg 600w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2014/09/ask-com-logo2-1920-200x113.jpg 200w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2014/09/ask-com-logo2-1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2014/09/ask-com-logo2-1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2014/09/ask-com-logo2-1920-150x84.jpg 150w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2014/09/ask-com-logo2-1920.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></div>The turn down web page says, "Jeeves’ spirit endures."

<div><img width="800" height="450" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2014/09/ask-com-logo2-1920-800x450.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2014/09/ask-com-logo2-1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2014/09/ask-com-logo2-1920-600x338.jpg 600w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2014/09/ask-com-logo2-1920-200x113.jpg 200w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2014/09/ask-com-logo2-1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2014/09/ask-com-logo2-1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2014/09/ask-com-logo2-1920-150x84.jpg 150w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2014/09/ask-com-logo2-1920.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></div>
<p>Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, which launched 29 years ago on June 3, 1996, before Google launched, shut down on May 1, 2026. </p>



<p>Ask.com now has a turn down page that reads:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
<p>Every great search<br>must come to an end.<br>As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com. After 25 years of answering the world&#8217;s questions, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026.</p>



<p>&#8220;To the millions who asked…&#8221;<br>We are deeply grateful to the brilliant engineers, designers, and teams who built and supported Ask over the decades. And to you—the millions of users who turned to us for answers in a rapidly changing world—thank you for your endless curiosity, your loyalty, and your trust.</p>



<p>Jeeves’ spirit endures.</p>
</blockquote>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="1574" height="1466" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/ask-dot-com-closes-down-1777809779.png" alt="" class="wp-image-476305" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/ask-dot-com-closes-down-1777809779.png 1574w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/ask-dot-com-closes-down-1777809779-768x715.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/ask-dot-com-closes-down-1777809779-1536x1431.png 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1574px) 100vw, 1574px" /></figure>



<p>Ask.com has been known as an answer engine, the Jeeves butler was who you spoke to in the early days.  With AI and all these new answer engines, Ask.com could have deployed its own unique taste for its answer engine.  But I guess with all the competition and the market being harder, IAC, Ask.com&#8217;s parent company, decided to turn it down.</p>



<p>Ask.com will always have a place in the search marketing industry and Ask, including Jeeves, will be missed.</p>


Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, which launched 29 years ago on June 3, 1996, before Google launched, shut down on May 1, 2026. 
Ask.com now has a turn down page that reads:
Every great search
must come to an end.
As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com. After 25 years of answering the world’s questions, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026.
“To the millions who asked…”
We are deeply grateful to the brilliant engineers, designers, and teams who built and supported Ask over the decades. And to you—the millions of users who turned to us for answers in a rapidly changing world—thank you for your endless curiosity, your loyalty, and your trust.
Jeeves’ spirit endures.




Ask.com has been known as an answer engine, the Jeeves butler was who you spoke to in the early days.  With AI and all these new answer engines, Ask.com could have deployed its own unique taste for its answer engine.  But I guess with all the competition and the market being harder, IAC, Ask.com’s parent company, decided to turn it down.
Ask.com will always have a place in the search marketing industry and Ask, including Jeeves, will be missed.

The turn down web page says, "Jeeves’ spirit endures."

Ask.com shuts down after over 25 years

<div><img width="800" height="450" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-800x450.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Search marketing jobs" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-800x450.jpg 800w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-600x338.jpg 600w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-200x113.jpg 200w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-768x432.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-150x84.jpg 150w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-550x310.jpg 550w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></div>Land your next job in SEO or PPC. These brands and agencies are hiring to fill open search marketing positions right now.

Looking to take the next step in your search marketing career? 
Below, you will find the latest SEO, PPC, and digital marketing jobs at brands and agencies. We also include positions from previous weeks that are still open.
Newest SEO Jobs 
(Provided to Search Engine Land by SEOjobs.com) 



Senior Product Manager (SEO)
May 4, 2026 
At NerdWallet, we’re on a mission to bring clarity to all of life’s financial decisions and every great mission needs a team of exceptional Nerds. We’ve built an inclusive, flexible, and candid culture where you’re empowered to grow, take smart risks, and be unapologetically yourself (cape optional). Whether remote or in-office, we support how you […]

Digital Marketing Manager (SEO/SEM)
April 28, 2026 
Job Description Attention: Kapitus is aware that individuals posing as recruiters may be communicating with job seekers about supposed positions with Kapitus. Kapitus has received reports that the content and method of communication can vary, but messages may contain requests for payment (e.g., fees for equipment or training) and/or for sensitive financial information. Kapitus will […]

Digital Marketing Specialist (Local SEO)
April 27, 2026 
Job Description Benefits: Competitive salary Health insurance Opportunity for advancement Paid time off Training & development Digital Marketing Specialist (SEO Focus) Company: Direct Clicks Inc. Job Type: Full-Time or Hourly Based on Experience Location: Remote Candidates must be located within driving distance of Roseville, Minnesota for occasional in-person team meetups. About Direct Clicks Inc. Direct […]

SEO Account Manager
April 24, 2026 
Remote (Canada-wide) · Full-time · $75,000–$90,000 CAD About Webserv Webserv is a digital marketing agency that helps mission-driven businesses — particularly in behavioral health — grow through SEO, paid media, and conversion-focused web strategy. We’re a tight-knit team that values curiosity, ownership, and the kind of work that actually moves the needle for our clients. […]

Sr. SEO/AEO Manager (B2B SaaS – US or Canada Based)
April 21, 2026 
The Basics: Growth Plays is hiring a Senior SEO/AEO Manager based in the US, Canada or LATAM, to support and manage ongoing customer engagements and relationships. You’ll act as the main point of contact for your clients, and focus on building relationships and trust while driving strategy-aligned growth for the long term. This role is […]

Independent Outbound Sales Representative
April 20, 2026 
Company: Local Leads DigitalLocation: RemoteJob Type: Contract, 1099Compensation: 100% Commission, Uncapped Job SummaryLocal Leads Digital is hiring an Independent Sales Representative to help grow adoption of the L.O.C.A.L. Tool, our local SEO fulfillment solution. This is a fully remote, 1099 independent contractor opportunity for someone who is confident in outbound sales and comfortable building their […]

Growth Strategist (SEO/AEO)
April 20, 2026 
We Are: NoGood is an award-winning, tech-enabled growth consultancy that has fueled the success of some of the most iconic brands. We are a team of growth leads, creatives, engineers and data scientists who help unlock rapid measurable growth for some of the world’s category-defining brands. We bring together the art and science of strategy, […]

Intermediate Search Specialist
April 17, 2026 
We are seeking an intermediate-level SEO Specialist for Hive Digital, a cutting-edge and award-winning agency that prides itself on helping change the world for the better. We offer a highly collaborative team that works together to deliver the best possible outcomes for our clients in a fast-paced, fun work environment. Are you ready to bring […]

Director, Global Digital Marketing (SEO/SEM/Email)
April 15, 2026 
Director, Global Digital Marketing, Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) Team Position Overview The Director of Digital Marketing is at the center of 10x Genomics’ digital marketing engine, delivering measurable business impact and innovating across channels to ensure leadership in scientific markets. This position reports to the Vice President of Integrated Marketing Communications as is responsible for […]

Senior SEO Analyst
April 14, 2026 
This role offers you the opportunity to deepen your SEO expertise and develop your leadership skills within a tight-knit agency team. Sr. SEO Analysts lead our client relationships and bring our outcome-driven strategies to life. They are responsible for delivering value and results to our clients through their high-quality work, commitment to building deep SEO […]

Newest PPC and paid media jobs
(Provided to Search Engine Land by PPCjobs.com) 







Marketing Specialist
May 4, 2026 
Join Our Vibrant Team at Food Trends Catering & Events! About Us: For over two decades, Food Trends Catering & Events has been redefining the art of off-premises catering from our midtown Manhattan headquarters. Whether it’s a cozy dinner for ten or a dazzling gala for over 1,000 guests, we deliver excellence with every bite […]

Digital Strategist – Paid Social
May 4, 2026 
Digital Strategist, Paid Social Media Digital Media | New Media & Internet | Marketing & Advertising Hybrid | New York, NY | United States (U.S.) $65,000-$90,000 Base + Benefits A leading, innovative digital media company seeks an experienced Digital Strategist, Paid Social Media to successfully manage paid social campaigns, analyze campaign performance, and report campaign […]

Paid Media Manager (Promotion Program)
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Job Description Job Description About the Role This is not a traditional job. It’s a fast-track growth program designed for digital paid media professionals who want to accelerate into leadership and diversify into an omni-channel marketer. At WITHIN, we’re looking for professionals with 2+ years of hands-on experience in paid media (paid social and/or paid […]

Director of AI Demand Generation
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Job Description Job Description Description: Director of AI Demand Generation Guideline | Toronto, New York, or Chicago Full-Time | On-Site / Hybrid About Guideline Guideline is a global provider of ad intelligence and media plan management technology, powering the strategy, planning, and management of advertising buying and selling for the world’s leading enterprises. Our solutions […]

Senior Director, Growth Marketing
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Job Description Job Description Company Description OUR STORY: Equinox Group is a high growth collective of the world’s most influential, experiential, and differentiated lifestyle brands. We restlessly seek what is next for maximizing life – and boldly grow the lifestyle brands and experiences that define it. In addition to Equinox, our other brands, SoulCycle and Equinox Hotels are all recognized […]

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<div><img width="1920" height="1097" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/11/microsoft-search-1920.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/11/microsoft-search-1920.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/11/microsoft-search-1920-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/11/microsoft-search-1920-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Microsoft Advertising now adds conversion and spend data to PMax placement reports, giving clearer insight into performance.

<div><img width="1920" height="1097" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/11/microsoft-search-1920.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/11/microsoft-search-1920.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/11/microsoft-search-1920-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/11/microsoft-search-1920-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p>Microsoft Advertising is expanding its Performance Max reporting with publisher-level conversion and spend data — giving advertisers more visibility into where results are actually coming from</p>



<p><strong>What’s happening</strong>. According to Microsoft Ads Product liaison Navah Hopkins, the PMax Website Publisher URL report now includes conversion and spend metrics, moving beyond basic placement visibility into actionable performance data.</p>



<p>This gives advertisers clearer insight into which placements are driving real outcomes — not just impressions or clicks.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="1476" height="294" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/1777477808889.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-476290" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/1777477808889.jpeg 1476w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/1777477808889-768x153.jpeg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1476px) 100vw, 1476px" /></figure>



<p><strong>Why we care.</strong> This update gives advertisers visibility into which placements are actually driving conversions and spend — not just impressions. That means better optimisation decisions, from scaling winning inventory to cutting wasted spend. It also makes it easier to trust and justify Performance Max performance with concrete data, rather than relying on aggregated reporting.</p>



<p><strong>How advertisers can use it</strong>. The update opens up several practical use cases. High-performing placements can now inform Audience Ads strategies, such as building remarketing campaigns or impression-based audiences from winning inventory.</p>



<p>At the same time, advertisers can identify poor-fit placements and exclude them using account-level URL exclusion lists, helping protect brand safety and improve efficiency.</p>



<p><strong>Between the lines</strong>. This is another step toward making automated campaigns more transparent. Rather than replacing control entirely, platforms are starting to give advertisers clearer signals on what’s working — and where to act.</p>



<p><strong>What to watch:</strong>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Whether this level of transparency expands further across PMax reporting</li>



<li>How advertisers balance automation with manual optimisation</li>



<li>If similar reporting features roll out across other platforms</li>
</ul>



<p><strong>Bottom line</strong>. With conversion and spend data now visible at the placement level, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/navahhopkins_im-so-excited-about-this-microsoft-advertising-activity-7455282287002218496-590z/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=member_desktop&amp;rcm=ACoAAAAOXwgBGvKJ5PG5kuwaTmFUJWimyBar5pw">Microsoft is making Performance Max a little less of a black box</a> — and a lot more actionable.</p>


Microsoft Advertising is expanding its Performance Max reporting with publisher-level conversion and spend data — giving advertisers more visibility into where results are actually coming from
What’s happening. According to Microsoft Ads Product liaison Navah Hopkins, the PMax Website Publisher URL report now includes conversion and spend metrics, moving beyond basic placement visibility into actionable performance data.
This gives advertisers clearer insight into which placements are driving real outcomes — not just impressions or clicks.




Why we care. This update gives advertisers visibility into which placements are actually driving conversions and spend — not just impressions. That means better optimisation decisions, from scaling winning inventory to cutting wasted spend. It also makes it easier to trust and justify Performance Max performance with concrete data, rather than relying on aggregated reporting.
How advertisers can use it. The update opens up several practical use cases. High-performing placements can now inform Audience Ads strategies, such as building remarketing campaigns or impression-based audiences from winning inventory.
At the same time, advertisers can identify poor-fit placements and exclude them using account-level URL exclusion lists, helping protect brand safety and improve efficiency.
Between the lines. This is another step toward making automated campaigns more transparent. Rather than replacing control entirely, platforms are starting to give advertisers clearer signals on what’s working — and where to act.
What to watch:




Whether this level of transparency expands further across PMax reporting
How advertisers balance automation with manual optimisation
If similar reporting features roll out across other platforms
Bottom line. With conversion and spend data now visible at the placement level, Microsoft is making Performance Max a little less of a black box — and a lot more actionable.

Microsoft Advertising now adds conversion and spend data to PMax placement reports, giving clearer insight into performance.

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Read the Latest Trends and Headlines in Digital Marketing.

Here are some of the latest headlines on digital marketing insights, search, and ecommerce:

Free Consultation

Reach out with any questions you might have regarding how RSO can help you with digital marketing.

All About
Digital Marketing