Member-only story
How to Rank Your Site in AI Search Engines
It looks totally different from traditional SEO
SEO isn’t dead — it’s just evolving.
That’s a thought I keep coming back to as I watch the market share of traditional search engines like Google slipping, while new AI entrants like Perplexity and DeepSeek quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) eat their lunch.
I was skeptical about AI search at first. Getting people to change a deeply ingrained process — like turning to Google to look up information — takes time. And Google can always co-opt other AI solutions by baking AI into their own platform, as they’ve done with AI overviews.
But AI search engines seem to be growing. People seem to like them. And so, for creators, it’s becoming more and more important to get your content ranked in AI search engines like Perplexity, SearchGPT, and yes, that old stalwart, Google Gemini.
How do you do that?
Well, it looks a lot different than traditional SEO.
Old-fashioned SEO (itself, a silly concept) focused on metrics — how many links your site had, how many times you could squeeze your target keyword into each page of your site without sending completely like a robot (BTW, most SEOs got a big old F on that front), and more recently, how long people…
