https://youtu.be/7dR401iNBL4 - watch now or save for later
AI cannot recommend your business if it has sweet FA to go on.
Obvious? Apparently not.
Because the new SEO panic is here and everyone wants a trick. A shortcut. Some sort of “hack”.
But…no-one really knows what they are doing.
Shit we haven’t even decided on an acronym for this! AI SEO. AEO. GEO. LLMEO.
AIEIO Old McDonald had a farm…
The actual question is much more boring: When AI goes looking for evidence about you, what does it find?
In the livestream I focused on how businesses show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. And for once we have something slightly better than bloke-on-LinkedIn vibes because Ahrefs has been publishing a bunch of data on this.
Here’s the original post:
I’m going to pull out the main insights for you.
Your Website Still Matters
Don't hear "AI search" and decide websites are dead. We’re not there yet.
Your website is still your “source of truth”. It is where you explain who you help, what you do, where you work, what proof you have, what you've shipped, and why anyone should trust you.
Google's own guidance for generative AI search is basically: keep the normal Search fundamentals in place. Make pages crawlable. Make them indexable. Write useful content. Keep the technical structure clear. Don't fill the internet with low-quality slop and expect the system to reward you.
Shocking stuff! Basically what we’ve been doing for years anyway. Keep doing it.
What this does mean though is ignore grey-hat and black-hat tricks. When some guru is proclaiming they’ve “cracked” the AI algorithm run.
Clear homepage. Clear service pages. Real case studies. Buyer questions answered properly. Proof near the top of the page. Reviews. Testimonials. Specifics. The normal stuff honestly…
Best X Is Back, Annoyingly
One of the most practical Ahrefs findings is that "best X" pages are doing very well in ChatGPT citations.
In their study of 26,283 source URLs, Ahrefs found that "best X" blog lists represented 43.8% of all page types across the source links they looked at.
Best paddleboards. Best CRMs. Best agencies. Best accountants for startups. Best standing desks for people who think standing desks will fix their life. Blog articles that have nice tidy lists of the best 10 tools for xyz.
That sort of stuff.
On stream I used paddleboards because I was trying to get Google to show an AI Overview and, by god, it did. Google gave me a nice little summary of the best paddleboard brands, with citations from listicles and Reddit and review sites. The websites it cited were all “top 5 paddleboards”, “best 8 paddleboards for under $500” etc.
As an aside this is grim if you own one of those affiliate websites. Because historically the journey was: search Google, click the article, scan the list, click an affiliate link, buy the thing. Now Google can eat the middle bit. The AI Overview gives the recommendation upfront. Some people will still click. Plenty won't. Ahrefs has also found that AI Overviews correlate with a 58% lower clickthrough rate for the top-ranking page.
This is important. We’re not necessarily building these pages to get people to our site. Instead we are building them to make our business more visible inside AI. Subtle but super important difference - it’s not to fight against the AI models, it’s to play their game.
YouTube Is The Weirdly Big One
From Ahrefs data the biggest “aha” is definitely Youtube.
Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that YouTube mentions had the strongest correlation with AI visibility, around 0.737 across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews.
Important caveat: correlation is not causation. Don't be a LinkedIn clown and turn that into "post these three YouTube videos and ChatGPT will love you."
But still. VERY interesting. That’s one hell of a correlation right there at 73.7%. Shouldn’t be ignored.
YouTube mentions means your brand cropping up in video titles, descriptions, or transcripts. That could be your own channel. It could be someone reviewing you. It could be a podcast clip. It could be a webinar. It could be a guest appearance. It could be someone explaining your product or using your business as an example. Lots of different ways to show up on the surface.
This makes intuitive sense. YouTube is not just video. It is a giant searchable transcript database. That is what the AI is scanning and incorporating into its data.
So if you are a business owner and you have been putting off YouTube because it feels like a faff, this is another reason to have a poke around. You do not need MrBeast production. You probably need clear, boring, useful videos that explain what you do, who it is for, what problems you solve, and what proof you have.
I just watched a video with a mid-Western American guy showing me how to install a ceiling fan. Just him up a ladder with his (I like to imagine) long-suffering wife holding the camera as he extemporised on different ceiling joist types. 5M+ views.
Case study walkthroughs. Product demos. "How to choose X" videos. Webinars. Customer interviews. Founder explanations. Industry-specific answers. It doesn’t have to be sexy, it has to be useful.
Speaking of which make sure you are subscribed to my Youtube - it’s where the longer form video guides live! AI with Kyle Youtube.
Build A Trail Worth Reading
So. As always the practical move is boring.
Sorry. But I ain’t going to give you a flashy cool method that doesn’t work if there’s a boring reliable method that, you know, does work.
Build something useful. Explain it clearly. Show proof. Get other people to talk about it. Keep doing that until the internet has enough evidence to describe you properly.
Basically do interesting stuff and talk to people that will be interested.
That is ultimately what gets you noticed online. Not fancy SEO-optimised web schema. But doing shit that is worth people sharing and talking about. That is ultimately what will get picked up by AI.
To the Task,
Kyle