Call it AEO, GEO, SEO with the E changed, or AIO as that’s what Google’s AI snippets are called – there are lots of different terms being kicked around for optimising for AI search. More importantly, there is a (small, but growing) audience to be found exclusively in AI search, which means there’s business to be done if you can reach them.
As a modern digital marketing agency, we pay close attention to AI search so we can better support our clients.
As a business operating in 2026, what should you know about digital marketing for AI?
Ads in AI Search
Our last blog on AI search was written in September 2025. At the time, Perplexity was just getting ready to roll out ads in its AI search results. In April 2026, Perplexity has shut down that program – but ChatGPT is testing ads in search results in the US, with plans to roll them out more widely once they find success.
As a web user you’ll have your own opinion about how paid ads should be delivered to you and whether the format of an AI conversation is a good way to incorporate those. As a business, it’s important to be aware of any marketing channel; you may choose not to use it, but your competitors likely will be.
OpenAI have said that while ChatGPT won’t be aware of which ads a user sees by default, there will be the option to ‘show’ an ad to ChatGPT and ask questions about the product or service it’s for. As this catches on, it’ll be more important than ever that your ads are linked to good, clear information on your website.
This doesn’t change our advertising best practice, but it makes best practices much more important. For clients who don’t already take advantage of our web design and SEO services, we will often build customised landing pages designed to help ad users to make their decision. These allow us to offer extra information and persuasion points that can’t fit in a Google ad listing. As AI ads grow in popularity, that extra information will be even more important.
AI Search and SEO
How well does your business perform in AI search?
As Rand Fishkin and the team at Sparktoro discovered earlier this year, this is actually really tough to track with any precision. SEO reports containing rankings for your keywords in AI search are probably estimates at best. Even traffic driven by AI search results can be quite hard to track.
With that said, it’s definitely possible to track trends. Here are a few things that are currently true in AI SEO:
- New content can boost a brand in AI rankings very quickly. Experiments have shown AI quoting or paraphrasing information added to the internet as little as twelve hours earlier.
- The big ‘shortcut’ of AI SEO in late 2025, posting top 10 lists of your competitors with yourself ranked at the top of the list, has been closed, and a number of sites that followed this practice are now very hard to find in AI search results they previously dominated. Our blog from last September warned against shortcut misuse leading to penalties, and it looks like this has happened.
- The ‘Ultimate Guide To X’ style of content, also known as 10X content (because it was supposedly 10 times as valuable as others) which was big in SEO in the late 20teens, doesn’t perform well in AI search, which favours more focused content.
So what can we learn from this? There are definitely a few things. Let’s take these points one at a time?
The Speed of the AI Search Market
AI SEO reacts very fast to changes, and while it’s relied on currently by a small percentage of the market, a responsive brand or agency can take advantage of this to stay ahead of the pack.
If you’re getting 80% of the business from that 10% of your market, that’s still an advantage – so long as you can do it without torpedoing your performance for the other 90% of your market. Luckily, you can.
Don’t Take Shortcuts
The last quarter-century-plus of digital marketing is littered with the casualties of shortcuts that got patched out and punished, and AI search was always going to have to do the same. All the same, as a digital marketing agency we often speak to potential clients who’ve been badly damaged by a shortcut taken on bad advice.
Create Content for People
Along with ‘think about how your site design looks on mobile’, looking at your content from the perspective of people who’ll be using it has been common advice in the digital marketing industry for the best part of a decade, but it’s often missed.
Those ‘Ultimate Guide’ style blogs and articles were state of the art for a while, but think about how they are to read, especially on mobile. This blog is under 1000 words and it’s about as long as you can get! Compact pieces of content which address question clusters and link through to more for those who need it perform better in AI search results – and in regular SEO.
Set Yourself Up for the Future
The landscape of digital marketing keeps changing, but the fundamentals are still a good foundation. To future-proof your website, why not get in touch?
