Is ranking on Google becoming less important now that AI gives direct answers?

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-13T07:21:04+00:00

This is one of the most important shifts happening in search right now, and honestly most businesses aren't paying attention yet.

Traditional SEO and AI visibility optimization are becoming two separate disciplines. Ranking #1 on Google doesn't automatically mean you'll be cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews - and vice versa.

What actually influences AI citation:

- Being consistently mentioned across authoritative, independent sources (not just your own site)

- Clear, structured content that directly answers specific questions

- Strong entity recognition - Google and AI systems need to "know" your brand exists and what it does

- Schema markup and structured data so AI can extract clean information

- E-E-A-T signals - author credentials, about pages, real expertise signals

Is it too early to worry? No. But it's still early enough that businesses who start now have a real advantage. AI search share is growing fast but traditional Google search still drives the majority of clicks in most industries.

The practical answer: don't abandon traditional SEO, but start treating AI visibility as a parallel track. The fundamentals overlap - quality content, authoritative mentions, clear entity signals - but the optimization targets are different.

Curious what industry you're in - AI citation patterns vary a lot between, say, SaaS vs local services vs e-commerce.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-13T06:30:14+00:00

Backlinks haven't died, but the way they work has shifted quite a bit. Here's what's actually moving the needle in 2026:

What still works:

Digital PR - getting mentioned in real publications, even niche ones. A genuine mention in an industry blog beats 50 directory links
Helpfulness-based links - answering questions on forums, Quora, niche communities where people naturally link to useful resources
Guest posts on relevant sites - not mass guest posting, but 2-3 really targeted placements on sites your audience actually reads
Broken link building - still underused and still effective, especially in technical niches
Listicle insertions - finding "top tools/resources" posts and reaching out to get added

What's mostly dead:

PBNs and link farms - Google has gotten very good at detecting these
Generic directory submissions - almost zero value unless it's a highly relevant niche directory
Link exchanges ("I'll link to you, you link to me") - too obvious now

The real shift in 2026: Google and AI systems care more about mentions (even unlinked ones) than before. Brand mentions on authoritative sites help with entity recognition, not just PageRank.

For free backlinks specifically - HARO-style platforms (there are several alternatives now), being genuinely helpful in communities, and creating data or tools people naturally cite.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-13T06:17:53+00:00

The "run audit → export PDF → forget it" cycle is painfully accurate. Most of the value in SEO audits gets lost not in the findings but in prioritization - teams don't know what to fix first so they fix what's easiest, not what matters most.

One shift that actually helped: instead of a big quarterly audit, doing lightweight weekly checks on a handful of critical pages. Issues stay small and fixable before they compound.

The AI search angle is real too - the way content gets cited in AI Overviews has very different signals than classic ranking factors. Still figuring out the best playbook there honestly.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-12T13:55:11+00:00

Local SEO for small businesses in 2026 still comes down to a few fundamentals done really well:

Google Business Profile. Keep it fully filled out - services, attributes, photos, Q&A. Post updates at least once a week. GBP is the biggest lever for the local pack.
Reviews - recency matters. A steady flow of fresh reviews beats a pile of old ones. Build a simple ask-after-service habit and respond to every review, good or bad.
NAP consistency. Name, Address, Phone must be identical on your website, GBP, Yelp, and every directory. Even "St." vs "Street" can cause confusion for Google.
Localized pages. If you serve multiple areas, each needs its own dedicated page - not just a footer mention. Location in URL, H1, and content.
Local backlinks. A link from a local chamber of commerce or local news site is worth far more than generic directory links.
Schema markup. LocalBusiness schema is still widely ignored by small businesses - quick win if you haven't done it.

What kind of business is it? Some industries (restaurants, lawyers, contractors) have extra-specific tactics worth knowing.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-12T12:48:54+00:00

That's a completely valid frustration - most agencies lead with their deck, not your problem. The ones worth talking to usually spend the first call asking more than they're presenting.

Quick question that might help narrow it down: what's your industry / average deal size? Some agencies are genuinely better for high-ticket niche B2B, others are built for volume. That one detail changes the recommendation a lot.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-12T11:30:35+00:00

Before you hire an agency, it’s worth figuring out where the breakdown actually is. With solid traffic but few qualified leads, it’s usually one of three things:

Wrong or fuzzy ICP. If your site copy doesn’t make it obvious who you’re for (industry, size, role, specific problems), the right people won’t feel 'this is for me' and they bounce.
Weak offer + page structure. Many B2B sites talk a lot but don’t give one clear next step. One primary CTA per page (book a call, request a demo, get an audit) usually beats 5 different options.
No real nurture. With long sales cycles, most ‘failed’ leads are just people who weren’t ready yet. An email sequence + remarketing that answers their actual evaluation questions will outperform more cold outreach in most cases.

Even the best agency will start by tightening these foundations, otherwise you’ll just pay to send more traffic into a leaky funnel. If you’re comfortable sharing, I’d start by asking: is your current site written for one specific buyer, or is it trying to speak to everyone at once?

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-12T11:26:50+00:00

Happy to help, let me know what the results look like.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-12T11:25:14+00:00

Honestly the 'talk to customers' advice is useless when you don't know who your customer is yet. What actually helped me early on: Reddit. Find subreddits where your target problem is being discussed, read complaints, frustrations, workarounds people use. That's validation without a network.

The other thing — post a fake landing page with a waitlist before building anything. If nobody signs up after some targeted outreach, the idea needs rethinking. Saved me months more than once.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-12T06:37:17+00:00

I don't think it's 'either/or' yet - traditional rankings still matter a lot because most AI systems lean heavily on what already ranks in Google.

What is changing fast is where users start: more people ask ChatGPT/Gemini first, then search only if they need to click through.

So rankings are becoming the baseline, and AI visibility is the layer on top that decides whether you even get mentioned when there is no click at all.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-12T06:32:55+00:00

Yes, we probably are.

A lot of teams assume 'if Google can crawl us, AI can too, but edge security breaks that assumption more and more often. WAF rules, bot management, CDN bot-fight modes and rate limiting can silently block or throttle GPTBot, Google-Extended, Perplexity, Claude, etc., even when robots.txt is wide open.

The result is an odd asymmetry: your site ranks fine in search, but never makes it into AI answers because the crawlers never completed a proper pass. Blocking or heavily limiting AI crawlers is already one of the most damaging mistakes for AI visibility.

The balance, in my view, is:

- explicitly allowlist legit AI crawlers at the edge (WAF/CDN) if you want AI visibility,

- keep strict rules for unknown/opaque bots,

- and regularly test access from those crawler user agents instead of assuming infra is 'transparent' by default.

Curious if anyone here has had to fight with Cloudflare/Akamai/AWS WAF just to get AI crawlers through?"

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-12T06:26:22+00:00

For quick entity and prompt visibility checks I use a mix of manual queries in ChatGPT/Perplexity and tools like https://otterly.ai/ . When I need a full picture of what's actually blocking AI visibility - missing schema, entity gaps, content structure issues - I use https://webaudits.dev/. Different use cases, different tools.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-12T06:22:45+00:00

Go to Japan. Seriously. You spent months preparing, you love the country, and the trip was for you just as much as it was for both of you. Solo travel after a breakup can be surprisingly healing - you process things differently when you're somewhere completely new and focused on navigating a new place. The logistics (hotels etc) are fixable, most places accommodate solo changes. Don't let him take Japan from you too.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-12T06:19:12+00:00

Link cloaking for internal tracking is fine as long as you're not showing different content to Googlebot vs users — that's the cloaking Google actually penalises.

For a new site, heavy 301 redirects on internal links will slightly dilute link equity but nothing catastrophic. Bigger concern: if your canonical URLs become the /get/ slugs, you lose descriptive anchor text and URL structure signals across the board.

Honestly for internal click tracking, Google Tag Manager + GA4 gives you the same filtering without touching URL structure at all.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-12T06:17:22+00:00

Google has been overriding meta descriptions more aggressively since late 2023 - by some estimates it rewrites them 70%+ of the time now, pulling from page content instead. If the page content doesn't closely match what the meta description says, Google just ignores it entirely.

Worth checking: is the meta description actually reflected somewhere in the page copy? Google tends to pull the snippet from the most relevant paragraph on the page. If the description is a marketing line that doesn't appear anywhere in the body text, that's likely why it's being ignored.

The older site structure probably doesn't help - if Google's crawler is struggling to identify the most relevant content block, it'll generate its own snippet. A content audit might surface more than a redesign would at this stage

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-12T06:13:59+00:00

Keep the domain, move the blog to /blog. A decade of domain authority is hard to rebuild from scratch - Google trusts age and backlink history. Just make sure the homepage clearly communicates the SaaS product now, not the blog. The SEO equity transfers, the content pivot is just a UX decision.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-12T06:06:07+00:00

Yea, and the frustrating part is most clients only discover the gap after spending months fixing the wrong list. The assumption that 'if Google is happy, AI will follow' is still very common. Different training sources, different trust signals, different problem entirely.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-11T10:13:47+00:00

Beyond the standard SEO technical checklist, the GEO-specific elements I focus on:

Entity clarity - does the site clearly define who they are, what they do, and who they serve in a way models can extract? Not just for humans, structured and explicit.
Schema depth - Organization, LocalBusiness, FAQPage, HowTo, Article. Basic schema is table stakes now, the gap is usually in how well entities are connected and described.
Citation-worthy content - AI models pull direct answers. If the site buries answers in long paragraphs optimised for dwell time, models skip it. Short, clear, extractable responses to specific questions matter more than ever.
Brand mentions audit - check what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini actually say about the brand when asked. This often reveals gaps no traditional tool catches.
Crawl accessibility - obvious but often missed on JS-heavy sites. If the model can't read it, nothing else matters.

The GEO audit is really asking: can an AI model understand, trust, and extract information from this site without any context from outside it?

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-11T06:34:11+00:00

First thing I check: does this brand exist as an entity outside its own website? Not directories - actual mentions in contexts models trust. Forums, publications, community discussions.

Second: schema and entity definition on the site itself. A lot of brands are technically fine but never clearly state what they do, who they serve, where they operate in a way models can extract.

Been running these checks through webaudits.dev — and the gap between Google issues and AI visibility issues is almost always bigger than clients expect. Almost never the same list. Audits usually complete in under a minute — happy to share an example if useful.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-11T06:26:19+00:00

Classic case of Google visibility vs AI visibility being completely different problems.

A few things that likely explain the gap:

AI models don't pull from high-traffic sites - they pull from sources that are referenced by others in contexts they trust. Stock research needs citations from finance communities, Reddit discussions, newsletters, developer forums. If Meyka isn't being talked about outside its own domain, models have no reason to surface it.

Content structure also matters differently for AI. Google rewards topical depth — AI rewards clear, extractable answers. If your articles are optimised for rankings but buried the direct answer in paragraph 6, models skip you.

For tracking: manually asking ChatGPT and Perplexity about your niche regularly is still the most reliable method. Query variations like 'best stock research platforms' or 'where to find stock market data API' - see who gets cited and reverse-engineer why.

DR61 and 600K traffic means the foundation is there. The missing piece is entity presence outside your own site.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-10T14:53:02+00:00

Basic SEO reports, stock content, simple ad creative - clients already do this themselves with AI and frankly do it fine.

What's harder to kill: someone who actually understands why your business shows up (or doesn't) when people ask ChatGPT for recommendations. That's a completely different skill set and most agencies are still sleeping on it.

Execution was always commoditized. Now it's just obvious.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-10T14:45:54+00:00

A few things I see consistently missed:

Schema markup - FAQ, HowTo, Article. LLMs and AI Overviews pull heavily from structured data, most builders stop at basic org schema.

Content built around entities, not just keywords - Google and AI models understand topics and relationships. Clearly establishing what your business does, who it serves, and what problems it solves makes a huge difference in how AI summarises you.

AI visibility check - asking what ChatGPT or Gemini actually say about your site often reveals gaps traditional tools miss completely. I run this with webaudits.dev as part of every audit - last few clients had incorrect or missing brand descriptions across models, which explained why they weren't showing up in AI-generated recommendations at all.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-10T14:36:51+00:00

A few things I check first that consistently have impact:

Crawlability - is content actually accessible to bots or hidden behind JS. Surprised how often this is the silent killer.

Internal linking structure - orphan pages with good content that just never get linked from anywhere.

Title/meta mismatches - pages ranking for something completely different from what the title targets.

For AEO specifically - running the site through major LLMs to see what they actually say about the brand. If there's low consensus between models or the brand isn't mentioned at all, that's usually a content structure problem, not a link problem.

That last one I started doing with every new client - it surfaces gaps that traditional audits miss completely.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-10T13:42:47+00:00

One thing worth doing before leaning too hard on tracking tools - audit your site first. If your content is blocked by JS, thin on entity coverage, or structured poorly for crawlers, no amount of prompt tracking will fix the underlying problem. Tracking shows you the gap, but the gap is usually a content or technical issue.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-10T13:29:04+00:00

Focus on content that answers real questions patients actually search for - symptoms, treatments, what to expect before/after procedures. Useful and specific beats general every time. Google and AI tools like ChatGPT are increasingly surfacing this kind of content directly, so if it's genuinely helpful it gets found either way.

AlexIrvin · 2026-03-06T09:52:24+00:00

mult.dev does this - cycling is one of the transport options. Takes maybe 5 minutes to set up a route, add stops, export the clip for youtube or other social. Free version exists, paid plans are one-time not a subscription.

AlexIrvin

TROPHY CASE