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SEO in the Age of Google and ChatGPT

Shlomi Asaf2 min read

For two decades, SEO meant one thing: earn a spot on the first page of Google. That game is changing. People now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's own AI Overviews for answers — and those engines summarize the web instead of just linking to it.

This does not make SEO obsolete. It makes it broader. The same foundations that win on Google also help you get cited inside AI answers.

Why AI engines still rely on classic SEO

Large language models do not invent facts about your business — they retrieve them. When ChatGPT browses the web or Google generates an AI Overview, they pull from pages that are crawlable, well-structured, and trustworthy. Those are the exact qualities technical SEO has always rewarded.

A page that Google cannot crawl is a page no AI engine can cite. A page with no clear structure is hard to summarize. Clean HTML, fast load times, and proper headings are now table stakes for both audiences.

Entities matter more than keywords

Old SEO chased keywords. Modern search understands entities — people, brands, services, and the relationships between them. When your business is described consistently across your site, your structured data, and the wider web, engines build confidence about who you are and what you do.

That confidence is what gets you named in an AI answer instead of a competitor.

What to do now

  • Keep your site fast and fully crawlable — render content as real HTML, not JavaScript-only.
  • Use clear, descriptive headings that answer real questions.
  • Add structured data so engines understand your entity, not just your text.
  • Write content that directly answers the questions your customers actually ask.

Go deeper: the full playbook

This post is the short version. If you want the complete framework — the exact moves that get a business mentioned and cited by AI search — read The AI Search Visibility Playbook. It breaks the work into six concrete moves (entity, schema, pillar & cluster, technical, crawler access, and citable content) and includes a self-check you can run on your own site this week.

The shift toward AI answers rewards the same discipline good SEO always demanded: be fast, be clear, and be trustworthy. Do that, and you stay visible — on Google and inside the AI answers that increasingly sit on top of it.

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