Make yourself discoverable and stay agile

Reena says: “Make sure that you are discoverable, and be agile with optimizing your business for AI-driven search and answer engines. We're also talking about GEO and AIO, not just for traditional search.

To be discoverable and agile, you need to be proactive and not just reactive to market changes because things are moving fast.”

How would you summarise the key elements of making your brand discoverable in the age of AI, and how has that changed in the last few years?

“Not only have things changed in the last two years, but things have changed more than they have in the last 10 years.

Just when you think that SEO is going to become boring, it becomes less boring once again. Gone are the days of just building pages for SEO: looking at your keywords, publishing content, and then waiting a few months for the results. Things have changed so much recently, but things are changing again very fast.

The question is, how do you remain discoverable and remain visible in this world? You have to work on your assets and materials (whether that’s information or insights – including those that are owned, earned, and paid) to continue being visible in that new AI world, but it's also important to be mentioned in citations.

To remain top-of-mind and visible, there are a number of things that you can do to make sure that you continue being SEO-friendly, but you are also AI-friendly. However, it's important to be recognised by the outside world as well. Off-page SEO and, increasingly, digital PR are gaining importance. All of these high authority, trusted sources are becoming very important, as are citations.

It's important to understand what AI is looking at when it's looking for information about you. That is where I see the game changing.”

How do SEOs stay on top of the game and know what to listen to and what to be doing with their time right now?

“There are so many books, podcasts, and different things to listen to at the moment. Once again, we are going into an age of information overload, so it's really important to pick the things that are going to matter for the business.

Think about the way that people were looking for information twenty years ago, with the birth of many different search engines. Before that, with things like the Yellow Pages and Yell.com, we were looking at directories. If you boil it right down, it's people looking for information and making sure that information is available to them.

When you boil it down, it’s about your customers. Where is your target audience? Where are they engaging? Where are they getting their information? Today, they are getting their information using AI search, so one of the things that you need to be looking at is making sure that you're visible in LLMs.

Whatever business you're in, you need to go back to your consumers, understand where they're getting that information, and make sure that information is still available in the places they're looking at.”

Is it possible to optimize for both humans and AI?

“There are things that you can do. You can make your information factual, relevant, and structured. That is true for humans, but now it's true for AI as well. Make sure that you are organising that information.

I'm purposely saying ‘information’ and not content because information today is not only content, it's also looking at video, and what people say about you, not specifically what you say about yourself.

More and more algorithms are fact-checking what's on your site and in your assets, and then what other people are saying about you. I’d like to think that is acting as an AI guardrail, but a lot of these algorithms are fact-checking as well, and I hope that will be the future of the AI era.

It's really important that your information matches and is structured, factual, and relevant. Also, you need to look at your brand signals and the information that is being presented about your brand. Look at the citations. Where is AI getting that information? There are a number of analysts and thought leaders doing research into that.

You will find your usual suspects, search engines, but you're also going to have Wikipedia, Reddit, and several social media platforms in there as well. That’s not so surprising because people are searching a lot on social media.

Your Facebook is going to be important; that's one of the areas where AI gets its facts. Your LinkedIn and your Google are going to be in there as well, as is Bing. Obviously, Bing has a partnership with OpenAI for ChatGPT-5. Some research shows that 87% of ChatGPT citations matched Bing's top results in 2025, year-to-date, compared to just 56% for Google.

Things will change, so it's great to keep an eye on those things and track them. I have put together a watch list, looking at exactly where AI get its facts and what the top citation domains are. I believe that is already changing, as we speak.

When you look at where AI is getting its facts, you need to make sure that you're looking at where humans are getting their facts as well. Make sure that you are tracking those trends, at least on a monthly basis. In some industries, it might even be on a weekly basis, but for others, maybe it's quarterly.

The bottom line is that things are changing really quickly. Algorithms are changing really quickly. Something new is coming up in the market tomorrow. KPIs and SEO metrics have changed, are changing, and will continue to change. To keep on top of that, you need to have a watch list.”

What should SEOs do about the rising number of zero-click searches?

“Research is showing that 60% of searches are ending in zero clicks, but analysts have shown that this number could move from 60% to 80% in the near future. In the world we operate in now, we’re seeing a lot less traffic coming from organic search straight to the site because, when a search is carried out on those search engines, all the information is right there.

This takes me to the ancestor of search: schema markup. Back in the day, I used to implement schema because I wanted featured snippets. It’s not a silver bullet; sometimes you would have a featured snippet, and sometimes Google would just not give it to you. Then, on some of the authoring, I would probably not put schema markup because I would want to get the conversion into the site and get the traffic.

Featured snippets are almost the ancestors of zero-click searches. Things have evolved, but I can still relate to how it was at the beginning of search, 15-20 years ago. What information do you want to have there, what information would you rather not have there, and how does that help your business?

Something I want to mention here is gated assets. For users to access your gated content, they will have to log in or fill in a form. Obviously, LLMs will not be able to do that in the same way. Therefore, you need to think about the importance of gating and ungating that content. If you ungate it, you will have the opportunity to be visible in AI overviews and AI search, including AI results on the SERP. That's a decision you have to make.

Going back to the increase in zero-click searches, those clicks coming straight from organic search to your website are going to decrease. That presents an interesting challenge, but it also presents opportunities. We know that traffic is going to be coming less directly from a click, but at the same time, people are becoming more qualified through AI search. They are getting that information narrowed down to what they really want.

They are having conversations with AI companions, which almost act like friends. People are now starting to rely on them for information, and we’re seeing a difference in the way that people are searching. AI search is very conversational, and that's different from the type of searches that we see on traditional search engines, which are keyword-based.

In traditional search, people use a keyword, they finish that search, and if they want to dive in further, they need to carry out another set of keyword searches. They're narrowing those keywords down. When you compare that to AI search, it’s much more of a one-to-one. People are having those conversations, and it is really different.

Having those conversations means that not only can you follow up, but you can teach your AI companion about yourself and where you're going. If those AI companions understand where users want to go, you're now getting searchers coming to your site who are already qualified. Some research has shown that traffic and queries coming from AI search are 4.4 times more likely to convert than traditional search.

Yes, we are moving more and more into a zero-click world, but that’s helping you to get more qualified queries to your site. We need to shift the way that we measure our SEO efficiency and business, and in the metrics that we use. In the future, once things have stabilised and we have gone through the AI transformation, hopefully, we will have a set of metrics that is completely different from what we're seeing now.

There’s one more thing I wanted to add. As a French native, with English being my second language, I have researched the impact of AI search and AI behaviour. Again, it's very new and it's very recent, but when people search for information using AI, we're seeing a rise in the use of native languages.

Until I saw that research, I didn't realise that I was doing this myself. I was speaking to my AI companion more in French than I would on traditional search engines. I rarely research in my mother tongue on Google, but I'm doing that with AI. That is another shift. I don't know how many people are already looking at optimizing in local languages, but that's one of the things that we need to look at.”

Reena, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“You want to be discoverable and you want to be visible. It's important to remain agile.

SEO is changing more than we expected, so be agile and optimize your business. Consider the information out there about your business and your offering. Look at commercial aspects as well, and not just the top-of-funnel terms that you used to look at for SEO research and information.

Be bold, be agile, and optimize your business for both AI-driven search and traditional human search. Make sure that you know where your users are looking for that information and looking for you, because that might have changed, and you'll have huge opportunities there.”

Reena Bowden is Marketing Manager at SAS Software. Find out more over at SAS.com.