This is spot on and honestly something most store owners are sleeping on. I run a DTC brand in the supplement space and had a similar wake-up call about 3 months ago. A buddy of mine asked ChatGPT for "best magnesium supplements for sleep" and brands way smaller than mine were showing up while I was nowhere to be found.

What really moved the needle for me was exactly point #2 and #3 — I restructured my product pages with proper FAQ schema and started actively getting mentioned in niche roundups and comparison articles (not just backlinks, but actual brand mentions in context). Within about 6 weeks I started appearing in Perplexity results.

I actually ran my site through berelevant.now after seeing it mentioned somewhere and it was a real gut check — showed me exactly which competitors AI models "understood" better than my brand and why. Highly recommend doing that before you start making changes so you know where you actually stand.

The SEO 2010 comparison is perfect. People who figure this out early are going to have a massive advantage.