Why I renamed SEO on our site

Last week I renamed a service on this site from "SEO & AI search" to "answer engine optimization." A friend asked whether that's a real discipline or a term agencies invented to sound ahead of the curve. Honest answer: it's both. The name is marketing. The problem underneath it is measurable, and the numbers changed my mind about how we describe what we do. Here's the case, with receipts.

People click less than they did, and it's not a vibe

Pew Research tracked the real browsing of about 900 adults, with their consent, through March 2025. When a Google search returned an AI summary, people clicked a regular result 8% of the time. Without the summary: 15%. The source links inside the summary itself got clicked 1% of the time. One percent.

Ahrefs measured the same thing from the publisher's side across 300,000 keywords: when an AI Overview appears, the #1-ranked page loses about a third of its clicks. Their follow-up study put the damage at 58% for top-ranking pages, and even position ten loses about a fifth.

Sit with that. You can win the ranking and still lose the visit, because the machine read your page and answered on your behalf.

Where the questions went

They didn't disappear. A lot of them moved. ChatGPT reported 900 million weekly users in early 2026, handling billions of prompts a day. Some unknowable slice of those prompts is "who's the best accountant near me" and "which agency should I hire," the questions that used to be Google searches with ten blue links. An assistant answering that question names two or three businesses. There is no page two.

So what earns a mention?

Less mysterious than I expected, going by the research that exists so far. Semrush studied 50,000 brands' visibility in ChatGPT and found it works at the topic level: models favor businesses that cover the real questions in their category, and that show up in the places models read, like review sites, industry press, and forums. Entity signals matter too, which is a technical way of saying the machine can tell exactly who you are, what you do, and where. Consistent naming everywhere, structured data on your site, that unglamorous layer.

One detail from Otterly's citation report that stuck with me: ChatGPT mentions brands about three times more often than it links to them. Being talked about beats being linked. That inverts a decade of SEO instinct, where the link was the whole game.

What we're doing about it

For ourselves and for local clients, the work is unglamorous: a complete Google Business Profile with real reviews, because assistants lean heavily on it for anything "near me." Structured data and one consistent business name across every listing. Pages that answer actual buying questions in plain sentences a machine could quote without embarrassing anyone. And earning mentions in places other than your own website, which is just PR wearing a new hat.

Will all of it work? I think so, and I can't fully prove it yet, which you should factor in. Measurement is genuinely murky right now: a customer who found you through an assistant often shows up in your analytics as a mystery direct visit, or never shows up at all until they email you. Anyone selling a guaranteed AEO formula is ahead of the evidence.

Two things I'm confident about. The direction is real, the studies above agree on that much. And doing the unglamorous work costs you nothing even if the timeline is slower than the hype, because every item on that list also helps plain old Google.

This site is a few weeks old and we're running the whole playbook on ourselves. When there's enough data to be honest about, I'll publish what happened, numbers included.