Dear GTM Strategist,

"How is AI changing SEO - and what should we do about it?"

That’s one of the most frequent questions I hear from founders, marketers, and growth leaders these days. The rules are shifting fast. With ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini shaping how buyers discover, evaluate, and engage with products, traditional SEO isn’t just evolving - it’s being rebuilt from the ground up.

To help us all stay ahead of the curve, I invited Jairo Guerrero, founder of Organic Hackers, to break it down for us. Jairo isn’t just following the trends. His team has helped brands 5x their daily traffic and land in top results of AI search tools, often in less than 24 hours.

In this tactical guest post, Jairo shares:

How to build an SEO strategy for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google, and beyond

Why content alone isn’t enough - and how to win with distribution and multichannel signals

The framework behind GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and how to make your brand “token-friendly” to LLMs

Step-by-step actions from a real-world case study that grew both traffic and leads

If you're building a brand today, you need to rank not just on Google. You need to build the authority to rank everywhere.

Now, let’s hear it from Jairo.

This post is sponsored by Ahrefs - a leading SEO & marketing intelligence platform that helps you accelerate the growth of organic traffic to your website.

With Brand Radar by Ahrefs, you can now track your brand’s visibility in AI search in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overview, and other major chatbots.

Learn more

After you read this post, I want you to understand:

If you have to invest into AI search

When is the best time to invest in AI search

How to invest into growing in AI search

I will do it using the experience I gained by growing my clients traffic, leads and revenue from search channels:

Google

ChatGPT

Perplexity

Gemini

Etc

You get the point. I want you to understand how to make your brand appear on all search engines or search tools.

How we 5x daily traffic of a +50M tech business

Let me pick up this particular case study:

I grew 5x daily organic traffic of a +50M tech company

I have been doing SEO for over a decade. Now with the rise of AI search tools (i.e. ChatGPT) we also offer specific approaches to our clients to appear on all new search tools. I want to show you how it’s done with examples.

We started working on this case study in April 2024. This is how it is going:

Daily leads on this website grew by 30% too. Traffic is cool, leads and customers are cooler.

We managed to appear on major AI search engines (Search GPT, Perplexity, etc.), including AI Overviews, which picked up our content #1 in less than 24 hours:

Example of how fast you can rank on AI Overviews

SEO has evolved and has become the base for a new marketing approach:

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) which targets not only regular search engines but also AI tools as a marketing channel

You will find references to this new approach as AEO: Answer Engine Optimization, as in optimizing your content so it becomes an answer in AI search tools or LLMs.

Long story short, we are all working on setting the pillars of what SEO will be in the upcoming 10 years, so do not be surprised to find yet another acronym like LLMo, LEO, AiO, etc.

Even the actual meaning of the acronym is evolving from Search Engine Optimization to Search Everywhere Optimization, meaning you need to be found with content across different platforms and formats.

New meaning of SEO: Search Everywhere Optimization - be found on any platform in any format

Today, rankings and mentions (in Search GPT, for example) are the core focus in terms of KPIs. Traffic altogether is decreasing because the search tools just summarize and compound all results, so the user has to browse a little less.

Note: We have seen that eCommerce still remains with good traffic growth.

Traffic has become a much less relevant metric. Rankings and mentions have instead taken a much stronger position. If you do not rank nor get mentioned, you will hardly thrive as a business or organization.

Lower traffic does not mean less customers in a 1-to-1 ratio. But lower rankings and fewer mentions is what actually affects your business. If search engines and search tools do not even consider your website, there is 0% chance you will get a visitor or a customer.

If you want to rank and get mentioned, you still need to invest in SEO.

In this case study, I will explain how I helped multiple clients to achieve:

5x Daily traffic and higher rankings on all search engines

Top Google positions

Top AI Overviews

Top GPT Search

More leads

More revenue

Ready? Let’s go…

1) SEO in the AI era (GEO, AEO)

AI is used mostly to create content, which is a basic use of the technology.

The real use of AI in marketing is not creating content.

AI is a new marketing channel.

SEO/GEO is the method to appear on the new AI Search Engines.

SearchGPT and other AI search engines made the SEO market bigger

“We need to create 1000s of articles and pages”... you might be thinking.

No, you do not need to create much content.

We experienced significant growth after writing a few blog articles.

The truth is, you cannot treat “search” as an isolated marketing channel anymore. You might not need to create 1000s of pages, but one thing is true:

SEO has evolved with AI to become a multichannel approach

Let me explain why SEO (GEO/AEO) is a multichannel approach.

2) AI Search as a multichannel approach

I'll always reference SEO as the science behind the entire search market. So, let me explain why and how SEO went truly multichannel.

To grasp this multichannel approach, we need to understand a core concept: Tokenization.

In simple terms, Tokenization is how LLMs (what we call AI) process language. Imagine an LLM's vocabulary is the entire internet. To 'understand' and store all those webpages, words are 'tokenized.' This means they're compressed into a much more efficient format the system can actually handle.

Once tokenized, the LLM then builds semantic understanding and contextual relationships between these 'words'. It operates on statistics: predicting which word is most relevant and 'statistically accurate' to put next. The core output is the probability of a word appearing within a specific context.

Semantics and context are a crucial detail for our marketing game. You see, if your brand is mentioned frequently and consistently across the internet, it becomes statistically more likely for LLMs to include it in their responses.

It's not a new strategy, it is “simple” positioning. Repeating what your brand and organization do, everywhere: podcasts, YouTube, social media, news sites, etc. has become more critical than ever.

To win on AI engines, a multichannel approach is fundamental.

3) How to win AI search - 5 Practical Steps

Cool message you want to receive from an old client:

This eLearning business was getting leads from Perplexity and ChatGPT.

Never forget, the ultimate goal of your search strategy has to align with your business goals.

3.1 - Setup the “ai search market” strategy

It is fundamental to start with your ICP (Ideal Client Profile). Any data you can gather from them will serve to narrow down your content strategy.

The ICP definition study is a full understanding and alignment of:

Vision and mission

Your business goals

Your target audience

Audience pain points

How you solve your audience’s pain points

How to translate everything into an AI search content strategy

What you should do

For the case study, I run the ICP definition study like this:

Video meeting with the team: C-level, sales team and customer support team.

Video meetings with end clients.

Analyze every single aspect of the call.

Analyze all business data:

Survey’s data

Google ads

Brand book

Products

Sales calls

Decks

Anything that gives me information about the business.

This analysis is translated into The ICP Definition Analysis documentation which I use during the whole SEO campaign.

Now with AI you can use your entire organization’s data and create fantastic ICP documentation which can be used for every single marketing channel. I use it primarily for SEO/GEO.

Example of The ICP Definition Study of a Tech Brand - touching all business aspects to translate them into SEO content

Once the ICP is clear, doing content research is a lot easier. I aimed for +20k keywords in this project, yet I do think regular 5k-size keyword lists are more than enough for 90% of the cases:

Example of keywords found that fit the ICP3.2 - Technical SEO

If everything is done by AI, is technical SEO dead?

According to a LinkedIn Survey I did, technical SEO is not dead

And the sentiment across the industry is that technical SEO roles are even more crucial to have in your team…

Pedro Dias’ post about technical SEO

I will make it easier for you this time. If you are a startup or your website is rather small, the chances you have to focus on technical SEO are low. Technical SEO has the most impact on bigger websites. That being said, you still have to make sure some basics are covered.

Without getting too technical, websites are still crawled (read) by machines.

What you should do

Ensure your website is flawlessly functional and easy for AI to read. This means perfect crawlability, precise structured data (Schema), and avoiding rendering issues (like heavy JavaScript) that make your site invisible to AI.

Technical SEO actions I took for this case study:

Internal links from blogs to product pages (as a “recommended pages” block), it was implemented in every single page, so the impact was significant. Internal links create a solid website structure which helps the most important content to be discovered and ranked.

Removed all JavaScript-rendered content: my client had navigation and on-page content rendered with JavaScript. JavaScript rendering is not plain text. If the text is loaded with JavaScript, it won’t be visible for crawlers.

A few more technical tasks for website performance were executed, but it was not so much for SEO purposes but for usability.

This AI search case was for a B2B business. In general, for B2C or D2C websites, the technical upgrades alone might be longer to explain than this very article.

For now, structured data is not reported to be used as much by ChatGPT as much as by Google. Yet, in the upcoming years, I believe LLMs will use more Schema, especially with the rise of AI e-commerce.

Structured data is accurate data provided by websites that can be used for search results. Things like prices or product titles cannot be left to an LLM’s interpretation. Currently, RAG solves the problem of having accurate data, but I will leave that topic for another time.

3.3 - Content Distribution: Backlinks & Digital PR

You can rank #1 on Google or appear in top mentions in ChatGPT by being present on other major websites.

Let’s say you are building a CRM. People will prompt things like “best crm software”. The first organic results are an opportunity for you. Reach out to those websites, build a relationship, and try to get them to talk about your brand. It is not easy, but super effective as you will be #1 in ‘no time’.

What you should do

There are many ways to improve your online footprint:

Social media: more of this in the next point

Backlinks: other websites talking about you

Digital PR: appear in the news

Industry events: be present

Podcasts: of course

Awards: win stuff

How backlinks help you to be ranked on search engines

My client was very present on:

international business fairs

cooperated heavily with magazines

their LinkedIn page had +15k followers at the time

My client was very good at getting noticed within their niche. What I did was translate that into the search market.

Get your brand mentioned by other trusted websites through traditional backlinks and strategic digital PR in news outlets. Even without direct links, these widespread, authoritative mentions get "tokenized" by AI, adding significant contextual value.

Expert-Commentary backlinks

One of the best methods to “create context” is you appearing as a specialist on the matter. Here is an example of an article that quotes me on the topic of AI search and technical SEO:

Example of expert commentary type of backlink to create context

But first, you need to be considered an “expert”. And the way to do that opens up the next point: social media.

3.4 - Social Media Activity

Be consistently active on social platforms like LinkedIn (frequently quoted by AI) and Instagram (content now crawled by Google). This boosts immediate results, exposure, authority, and your overall online footprint for AI search.

What you should do

If you are a founder in the B2B space, you have to master LinkedIn. The priority of any founder is to get their business to the top, and LinkedIn is the platform to do so.

Better yet, the content of LinkedIn is crawled by search engines, and it is quoted often in AI Overviews and ChatGPT.

One of the biggest creators on LinkedIn, Jasmin Alić, mentioned the power of LinkedIn on search engines.

Jasmin Alić’s view on LinkedIn + SEO

I ran a GEO experiment to see if Google or ChatGPT would quote my LinkedIn post on the topic “give me b2b seo niches”. I wanted to appear for such a query as I could get leads from those searches. But my main goal is to test.

I posted on LinkedIn and I checked the next day. I prompted ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google: "give me b2b seo niches". All 3 of them were quoting my LinkedIn Post

Benefits of LinkedIn + SEO/GEO:

Posting on LinkedIn populates to the search market

My post got more than 10k impressions

Top rankings in all search engines

A bit over 100 email subscribers

Google ranked my LinkedIn post ChatGPT quoted my LinkedIn post

I post 4-6 times per week. My entire business is based on the leads I get from LinkedIn. I am looking to expand my channels but the B2B platform without a doubt is LinkedIn.

Thanks to LinkedIn, I have been invited to podcasts, to events and I am mentioned on different websites as an expert. All of this improves the online footprint that will allow me to rank on all search engines on easy mode.

3.5 - On-Page & Content Structure

Optimize your website content for AI's "chunk-level retrieval." Include clear headings, concise paragraphs focused on single ideas, and comprehensive topical coverage to make information easily digestible and quotable by AI.

What you should do

Aleyda Solis created a great (amazing) resource on site optimization for AI search.

Aleyda’s checklist on AI Search content optimization

Here are the core 3 aspects of on-page optimization to win AI search visibility:

1. Chunk-Level Retrieval

Content is retrieved in chunks/passages, not whole pages. Each chunk must be:

Self-contained

Focused on one idea

Semantically tight

Structured with clear headings (H2/H3)

HTML formatted and accessible

2. Answer Synthesis Optimization

AI combines content from multiple sources.

Start with concise, direct summaries

Use plain, factual language

Avoid promotional tone

Add structured data

Use natural Q&A format

3. Citation-Worthiness

Only trustworthy, clear content gets cited.

Signals for citation:

Specific, verifiable claims

Sources and links to authoritative references

Author and credentials (EEAT)

Updated timestamps

Author and organization schema

Do not forget to add value. Do not write what everybody else does. Add a different perspective. My client, for example, focused on their +20 years as a manufacturer to add real-field value into the content. LLMs love added value that cannot be found anywhere else:

Example of content optimization delivering top rankings on AI OverviewsBonus - Community SEO

Reddit. Where everybody goes to talk about everything without filters. First-hand experience of peers with similar struggles and interests. Plus, all that content is crawled and indexed and quoted by AI Overviews.

What you should do

Get active on Reddit and master that platform

Create your own Reddit: create a forum around your product, let your customers talk about stuff, allow crawlers to index it and rank it. Win.

One of the best cases is Shopify. They built a forum for all Shopify users, so they are the first source search engines will show to users for most things Shopify-related.

Example of a featured section of forums in the search results

Ready for SEO growth across all search engines? Go to organichackers.com

If you enjoyed this content, I got some more for you here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdguerrerovasquez/

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