How SEO Will Change in a World of AI Search

Recently, we’ve seen more leads coming from ChatGPT than any other source.

In the past month alone, 71% of our new leads came through ChatGPT.

Our clients are noticing the same shift — mentioning it in emails and bringing it up on our monthly calls.

So the natural questions we’re asking are:

• How do we scale this?

• What’s influencing whether we’re a recommended solution in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLMs, and how does that differ from ranking on Google?

There’s a strong correlation between ranking on Google and being mentioned by AI tools, but there’s also an important difference.

Specifically, we think chatting with an AI tool leads these platforms to recommend brands and products far more based on the details of their content — and far less on superficial SEO metrics like backlinks.

We’ll spend the rest of this post explaining what we mean and why we think this has real implications for how brands should execute content strategy and what they should focus on writing and publishing.

In AI Search, Top-of-Funnel Content is Dead

Back in 2018, we wrote a blog post called Pain Point SEO. We argued that companies should focus first on bottom-of-the-funnel, pain-point-focused keywords, then work their way up.

In our experience, bottom-of-the-funnel keywords convert 10x to 25x better.

The thought process behind this SEO strategy is that customers search around problems they’re trying to solve:

• “What’s the best way to measure conversions?” (JTBD keyword)

• “What are the best content marketing agencies?” (Category keyword)

• “What are the best alternatives to X?” (Competitor/Alternative keyword)

Showing up as a solution to those pain-point searches is far more likely to drive conversions than the top-of-funnel queries many content teams were targeting to grow traffic. Since then, we’ve published multiple case studies with data to back this up.

Now, in the world of AI search, we think this bottom-of-funnel strategy is paramount.

If you search a large language model (LLM) or Google for a top-of-funnel query, there’s no incentive for the AI to mention your business. So going forward, there’s little to no value in writing about those topics. In that world, top-of-funnel content is essentially dead.

Take a typical top-of-funnel query in our space:

What is content marketing?

In the old SEO world, this is a classic keyword that companies in content marketing target (despite us talking about Pain Point SEO since 2017).

Ahrefs shows 8,000+ searches a month and a keyword difficulty of 85, meaning it’s competitive — tons of big-name sites are ranking already:

But look what happens when you ask ChatGPT:

ChatGPT answers your question but doesn’t link to anything.

In a world where people are using AI search instead of Google, top-of-funnel content like this gets zero traffic.

Plus, Google’s starting to answer these queries itself and push organic results further down:

The first organic result doesn’t even appear above the fold. In this case, Google gives a dictionary definition. In others, you get the dreaded “Google AI overview.”

Both ChatGPT and Google now default to answering the question themselves instead of sending traffic to a blog post. For top-of-funnel queries, Google might still toss you some traffic, but ChatGPT won’t. Either way, using top-of-funnel content as a traffic driver is a dying strategy.

Why don’t these AI tools link to sources for top-of-funnel topics? Because they don’t need to. The information is commoditized. There’s little to no differentiation between one definition and the next, so there’s no reason to send users to a page when they all say the same thing.

But with true bottom-of-funnel queries, the user is actively seeking product recommendations — and that’s where AI fulfills intent by naming brands or linking to products. The marketer’s goal is to figure out how to get their brand into that response.

And here’s the key: information commoditization fades as you move down the funnel.

AI is built to tailor answers based on context, using conversation history to deliver relevant, specific information. It doesn’t just serve generic pages like Google, hoping to answer the user’s question.

We’ll dive into that next.

With AI Search, People Search Specifically, Not Broadly

People used to type short, broad queries into Google and get a list of pages covering that topic in more depth:

It was up to you to click through each page, read the content, and decide what seemed like the best fit based on what you read and what aligned with your goals. But you never gave Google the full context of your query.

For example, you wouldn’t type in your company size, marketing budget, which channels you’ve already tried, or other relevant details. Yet we all have that context — and it matters when making a purchase decision. We just don’t type it into Google. Instead, we click in and out of results, scanning for signs that someone understands us and our problems, and might be a good fit.

But with AI search, people do give it their context. It’s a conversation, not a search. That’s the whole point.

For example, someone might start by searching “What is the best SaaS content marketing agency?” They’re then presented with a list, and from there, they refine their query — adding context about who they are, what they’re trying to achieve, and ultimately asking for the best fit based on that information.

For these bottom-of-funnel queries, AI recommends products and services — but it does so with deep context about the user’s needs and pain points.

To get recommended, your brand needs to be clearly connected to those pain points.

How You Communicate Your Company’s Value Props Will Dictate When & How You’re Recommended

In the new AI search world, it’s not just about showing up for a topic and driving someone to your website, where the site does the selling like it did in the Google search era. The first sales touchpoint has now moved to AI chat — where AI is now the one selling your solution.

You need to provide it with the content it needs to sell your solution to the right people, in the right way.

When someone prompts an LLM, it scans the web and tries to find the best answer to that person’s highly specific question — pulling from the full context of the conversation — and then delivers the solution that best fits the need.

The companies that get recommended the most will be those that have published content that clearly articulates who they’re best for, what they’re best at, and why they’re better than the competition.

And this content has to be highly specific because the conversations people have with LLMs are highly specific. It can’t be generic. If your marketing site has similar copy, benefits, and use cases as every other competitor in your space, expect to stay lost in the shuffle.

As mentioned above, information that looks and sounds like everything else won’t be presented in AI answers. Differentiated information that helps people solve specific problems will be presented as potential solutions when someone is discussing that problem with an LLM or in Google (as it continues to evolve for AI search).

For example, when I asked ChatGPT for the best SaaS marketing agencies, how did it know we specialize in content strategies that drive demos and signups, not just traffic? That we have transparent reporting and tons of case studies?

Because it scanned all of the content we’ve published on our website and surfaced the differentiators we’ve communicated to the user.

For example, check out the copy in the first “Problem we solve” right under the hero unit:

It’s eerily similar to what ChatGPT says about us above.

To boost your chances in AI results, create content that clearly states who you serve, why you’re better than the competition, and backs it up with case studies and examples.

An Actual ChatGPT Conversation of One of Our Clients

We asked a new client to share the ChatGPT conversation where we got mentioned.

Here’s her prompt:

What are the best SEO companies in your opinion who have driven massive results with endless leads for people in our kind of space?

Here’s the start of its response, where it recommends us first:

Great question — especially for a business funding company like yours, where ranking for high-intent keywords (e.g., “business loans,” “fast working capital,” “MCA for contractors”) can drive serious deal flow.

Here are some SEO agencies that have delivered real, high-volume results — especially for financial services, lending, or other lead-gen heavy industries:

1. Grow & Convert

• Specialty: High-intent content marketing and SEO for lead-gen businesses.

• Strength: They focus on bottom-of-funnel content that converts, not fluff. Real case studies where they 10X’d lead volume for SaaS and B2B.

• Why it works for MCA: They understand how to create pages that rank and convert — especially for niche financial verticals.

Notice how it knows exactly the type of business she runs: “especially for a business funding company like yours.” It even throws out examples of “high-intent keywords” that will “drive serious deal flow.”

That might sound like a small detail, but it’s a huge difference from Google. If she Googled “best SEO agencies” or some equivalent, Google would have no context about her business or her goals — it would just serve up the usual suspects with high domain authority who’ve optimized their “best SEO agency” pages.

But here, the “search engine” is ChatGPT. It knows her business, knows she wants an agency that focuses on getting leads from SEO, and is smart enough to understand that means ranking for high-intent keywords.

Given all that context, it’s no surprise it recommends Grow and Convert — we’ve spent 8 years talking about this exact topic, namely, driving leads from content through high-intent keywords.

This is exactly why your content needs to be highly specific about what you offer.

How Will Our SEO Strategy Evolve in the World of AI Search?

We believe our process is already built for AI search — we create in-depth content that clearly explains our clients’ features, benefits, differentiators, and use cases.

As we reported here, we’re already seeing 70%–80% coverage in ChatGPT and Perplexity for keywords where our clients rank in Google’s top 10 or top 3 spots.

To keep that momentum going, we built Traqer.ai, an AI search tracking tool that automatically checks rankings each week:

Looking ahead, we’re exploring more specific category keywords, testing disruption stories that highlight a brand’s pain points and solutions in greater detail, and helping clients better communicate their core differentiators in marketing copy and on their homepages.

Reach out here to work with us on a content strategy built for AI search.