AI Search is Not SEO: Why Your Brand Needs an Answer Engine Optimization Strategy
Profound, an Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) platform, recently revealed startling data from an analysis of over 41 million AI Prompts across platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot. The core message: AI search is fundamentally different from traditional search engines, forcing a complete overhaul of digital strategy.
The Great Divergence in Search
The analysis found that the overlap in citations between ChatGPT and Google Search Results is only 12%. This means that 88% of traditional SEO assets—including keywords, backlinks, and domain authority—do not port through to AI answer engines. This fundamental difference is due to the distinct architectures:
ChatGPT's Search: It first regularizes the query (turning a full sentence prompt into 5-7 keywords), then uses Bing's API, and finally relies on WebGPT—a 2021-trained model—to make the final decision on which content to cite.
Perplexity's Search: It is semantic and embedding-based (vector-based), encoding the user's query and finding the single best-match content from its proprietary index, making it fundamentally different from a standard search index.
New Rules for Earning AI Citations
The study identified several key biases and strategic levers for winning visibility in the new AI landscape:
Traffic is Irrelevant, Backlinks are Inverse: Traffic only accounts for 5% of AI citations, meaning high-traffic sites often go uncited. Even more surprisingly, sites with fewer backlinks were found to be cited more often.
Content Bias: Listicles and Comparative Content win overwhelmingly, accounting for the single most cited form of content at 32%. Answer engines are inherently "lazy," preferring to pull definitive answers from existing comparisons rather than synthesizing information from multiple sources themselves.
Recency Bias: Answer engines, especially ChatGPT, have a strong bias toward freshness. Content is picked up and cited on the scale of days and weeks, not months and quarters. Refactoring a piece of content can quickly restore its ranking.
Technical and Strategic Optimization
To control the new narrative, marketers must focus on:
Bing Indexing: Being indexed on Bing is foundational for being seen on ChatGPT, as the overlap between Bing and ChatGPT is only 26%.
LLM.txt: This new protocol acts as a roadmap for AI crawlers, making content extremely digestible and is currently being picked up just as often as sitemaps.
Spoil Your Content: Use descriptive URL slugs and write meta descriptions that clearly call out the value (e.g., "The best business credit cards are A, B, and C") to signal value to the AI, increasing the chances of citation.
The rise of the AI model as an intermediary means most brands are about to lose the direct relationship with their customers. Therefore, companies like Profound are providing tools like Conversation Explorer to track Conversation Volume and brand mentions daily, allowing marketers to fight for a position in the AI-controlled narrative.