There is a lot of noise out there about the impact of AI on SEO, buzzwords are flying around, scare tactics are used to sell “AI SEO Optimizers” and most marketers are having a hard time keeping up. At the same time, advances and changes in AI tools make AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) a moving target. Here is a quick overview of what we see happening in the marketplace, its impacts, and how we, as an AI SEO agency, are helping our clients avoid losing ground to their competitors in this changing landscape.
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What is happening
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) used to be simple, people searched certain “keywords” or “queries” on search engines like Google, and your website would show up as part of the results for these keywords if you had done your SEO right. In its essence, SEO means optimizing your website for search engines so you’d appear in results and get clicks for the keywords representing your organization and products. Enter AI! Two main things are happening:
1. Searches are happening inside the AI tools
2. When people search for something (especially for a quick answer) on search engines, AI-generated responses show up before the search results.
The good news: the decreased SEO traffic you’re getting is now highly relevant (if your SEO agency is doing it right!)
The bad news: your SEO traffic seems down, and you don’t get visibility into searches in AI tools.
The ugly part: losing attribution data and visibility makes keyword mapping trickier for most.
What do you need to do to set up the right foundation for AI SEO
- Get your Search Engine Optimization right: if you are not already doing SEO correctly, it means you don’t have much to build on. First, get your SEO in a good place, both technically and content-wise. Traditional SEO still matters for AI. If you don’t have the foundation, you won’t be visible.
- Content is still king: AI has made it way too easy to generate content, and so massive amounts of mediocre content are being generated every day. But make no mistake, quality still matters. Say more with less, stick to your subject matter expertise, your niche. The winners of content are those who use AI as a starting point but add genuine expertise, original sources, and unique perspectives.
- Structure for AI: If you are on top of your SEO, you can now start optimizing for AI visibility. This means continued utilization of structured data, FAQs, schema markups, so AI can “understand” your content. See the further optimizations below.
If you have these foundations right, you can start optimizing in other areas, mainly for the content as well as the technical structure of your site. Here’s what our AI SEO specialists at 1UP Digital Marketing recommend and what we currently implement for our clients.
For Content
- Topical Authority: We increase content topical authority by recommending and producing content within the niche. We prioritize content by intent and customer journey.
- Helpful Content signals: How helpful a website’s content is overall and within specific topics. We also audit the website for helpfulness by monitoring all interactions over the past year and more, and prune, update, or merge content accordingly as needed.
- EEAT(Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness): We establish trust, authenticity, and expertise through authentic, helpful content curated or fact-checked by experts.
- External Brand Mentions and Links: All existing SEO efforts improve overall website traffic within different related subtopics. As the traffic grows, mentions and links/mentions grow with website popularity.
- AI in our content strategy: We review each query for AI overview on SERP and LLMs (to better understand intent and optimize for it).
- On-page optimization elements that specifically help AI:
- Including TOC when applicable
- Including a summary satisfying search intent clearly at the top
- Breaking down the content with clear, “scanable” headings
- Including FAQs when applicable
For Technical SEO
- Use of Structured Data: FAQs schema, Author Schema site-wide, Organization Schema
- Allowing crawlability for LLMs (through robots.txt or llm.txt)
- Mentions of the brand next to desired topics
- Improving the internal linking structure to help LLMs better understand entities on the website and the contextual relationship between them
Tracking AI traffic
Unlike traditional SEO, you can’t see a clean “we rank #3 for this keyword” style report in AI search, because chatbots generate answers on the fly using probabilities rather than fixed positions. That makes exact tracking of your visibility much harder. To overcome this, at 1UP, we are working on smarter text analysis to estimate how visible our clients are: we look for when an AI tool cites your site, check how closely its answer matches your content, and see how often you’re mentioned compared with competitors. These numbers are directional, not perfect, but they’re still very useful.
In practice, you can roll this out in stages:
- First, track which AI tools are actually sending traffic to your site (we are currently doing this for all of our clients in their live and monthly reports).
- Then layer on more advanced tools that show which prompts you appear for, which pages get cited, and how often competitors get mentioned instead of you.
Some platforms give very detailed prompt‑level logs, while others give broader “visibility scores” for AI search. Either way, it’s important to set expectations: because of how AI works, you’ll never get 100% precise measurement, but you can absolutely get enough data to make smart decisions.
This new area, often called “Generative Engine Optimization” (GEO) or “Answer Engine Optimization” (AEO), is quickly becoming a core part of digital visibility. Teams that start building measurement and reporting frameworks now will be in a much stronger position as AI‑driven search grows alongside traditional search engines.
What’s coming up?
Agents are the next emerging update in this space, they are now actively visiting your websites and helping buyers and customers make informed decisions, and so B2A (Business-to-agent) is an emerging discipline most businesses consider for optimizing their websites for AI agency discovery and transaction.
This space evolves day-to-day, and we are definitely staying on top of it. Educating our clients is always a top priority for us. If you have questions, check our FAQs below or get in touch with our team!
Unlike traditional SEO, where you can track rankings precisely, LLMs generate responses by predicting tokens based on probability in a complex way; hence, making the attribution exact may be inherently hard. Natural Language Processing (NLP) helps bridge this gap through the use of citation extraction algorithms, semantic similarity scoring, and competitive mentions analyses that will provide indicative metrics, far from perfect, about how visible your content is.
The practical approach here involves a phased implementation: starting with basic traffic tracking to identify which LLMs are sending visitors to your site, then progressively adding more sophisticated tools that track specific prompts, page-level citations, and competitor mentions. While specialized platforms offer granular prompt-response tracking and Ahrefs provides high-level visibility scores, the key to this is managing expectations. Perfect measurement isn’t possible due to how LLMs work, but actionable insights absolutely are. This emerging field of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) represents a critical evolution in digital visibility strategy, and organizations that establish measurement frameworks now will gain a significant competitive advantage.
llm.txt works like robots.txt, but is designed specifically for AI agents. It’s a simple markdown file that tells AI tools what your site offers and where to find key information, making it easier for them to understand and reference your content. Over 600 sites (including Anthropic, Stripe, Cloudflare, and Perplexity) have already adopted it.
While the continued usage of this file is unlikely in the long term, there is a case for having it, and optimizing it at this point (2026).
You can track AI traffic directly in your analytics platform. Create an Exploration in GA4 filtering referral traffic to AI websites, or create a widget on Looker Studio tracking sessions by AI. Here is an example that we use in our client dashboard:
Sessions by AI