AI Search Is Changing How Content Gets Found
What happens to ranking and crawlability when the reader is increasingly a language model.
1 min readSearch & AI
For the last two decades, search meant Google. You typed a query, you got ten blue links, and if your site wasn't in the top three, you might as well not exist. That model is cracking.
AI-powered search — think Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, Bing Copilot — doesn't just return links. It reads, synthesizes, and answers. The user never leaves the search page. That fundamentally changes what "ranking" even means.
If your content gets cited by an AI overview, that's arguably more valuable than ranking #1 for a keyword. But how do you optimize for that? How do you make sure an LLM understands your structured data? How do you signal authority to a model that's read a billion pages?
I don't have all the answers yet, but I'm digging. This is the conversation the SEO world needs to be having right now — and as someone who builds with LLMs every day, I think I have something to contribute.