How I think about SEO and AI search
Most AI search advice is a checklist: add more numbers, more lists, more tables. I tested it against Microsoft Copilot's citations of 1.3K of my own pages. Pooled together, pages with more numbers looked far more likely to be cited. Site by site, that held on two sites and disappeared on three. So I don't sell a checklist. I start from the people a site serves, test on the site in front of me, and build what that audience actually needs.
- 1Get foundCan the person with this need find the right answer?
- 2Get understoodCan they quickly tell what the answer means for their situation?
- 3Get chosenWhat makes this answer worth trusting and acting on?
New to all of this? Start with what I do, in plain English.
What I look for in a new site idea
The big sites answer the obvious questions. The real opening is the question people keep asking that nobody answered well. A page built for it is hard to copy, people trust it, and AI answers lean on it.
| The opening | What I built | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Own the game-day questions the team site doesn't answerFor example, “providence park bag policy” | Title Town PDX: Game-day guides with the practical answers fans need, like bag policies and parking, instead of fighting the official team sites for schedule searches. | 1.50% click rate on the guides, against 0.46% on schedule pages. Search Console, Jun 12 to Oct 7, 2026. |
| Keep one page current when everyone else publishes onceFor example, “oregon ducks football injury report” | The Quack Report: A weekly injury report page, kept current through the season. | #4 average Bing position for those searches, against 22.5 on Google. Bing and Search Console, four weeks to Oct 8, 2026. |
| Lead with the answer where everyone else publishes a spec sheetFor example, “most reliable sedans 2026” | Car Fact Sheet: Answer pages that lead with the answer, not another spec sheet. | 3x the AI citations of the site's spec pages (median 558 vs 172). Bing AI Performance, through Aug 26, 2026. |
| Rebuild a page around the job the reader is actually doingFor example, “dungeon crawler carl halloween costume” | The Crawler's Cookbook: A costume guide rebuilt around the real job, with the quick answer first. | 3.7x growth in clicks per day, while the rest of the site grew 1.6x. Search Console, 28 days before and after Aug 17, 2026. |
The SEO system this thinking became
Those three outcomes are reached through six pillars I work by on every site, each with a real example, and seven steps to build them. Why a system beats a one-off strategy: SEO strategy vs SEO systems.
Or watch it happen: the real prompts I give AI, dated, with the project each came from.
SEO is GEO
AI answers, answer engines, generative search: new names keep showing up. Underneath, it's still SEO.
The new surfaces change how I prioritize: clear answers near the top, the facts a machine can quote with a source and a date, a site that's plainly about one thing, a name other people mention. They don't change the job, which is being the most useful and most trustworthy result for the person asking.
In the last three months, Microsoft Copilot cited pages from 5 of my sites about 467K times, by Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report (screenshots captured October 11, 2026; WireRef is the biggest share). On my sites, the work that ranked was the work that got cited.
How an AI answer actually reads a page: how AI search understands your content.
Others in the field Lily Ray found that ChatGPT now checks trusted sources through ordinary search before it answers, which she calls fundamentally an SEO problem (August 17, 2026). Wil Reynolds pushes back that GEO isn't a performance channel and needs its own measures (October 2, 2026). He's right that showing up isn't the win, though: an answer can name you and still send people elsewhere, which is why I measure citations and visits separately.
"From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO."
What I've changed my mind about
Search changes every week, and I'd rather change with it than defend what worked last year. Complacency is what kills a site. So the system is built to change: every miss becomes a rule, and every rule stays open to being wrong.
I used to treat Google as the whole game.
Now I go where the readers already are. My reference sites get almost all their search traffic from Bing, and I'd have missed it by watching only Google. The WireRef story
I used to think more pages meant more reach.
Now I build only what I can keep correct. My biggest catalog went from 1.6K pages in Google's index to 218. The CheckMyTap story
I used to trust AI to check its own work.
Now a second reviewer and a set of build checks do that, and I make the call. I ranked the nine ways it failed on my reference sites. The personal audit
I used to think my framework was finished.
Then I sorted 2.2K of my own messages about how I work, and they didn't fit it. Six pillars, built from those messages, are replacing it. The system
What I'm still figuring out
- Whether WireRef's growth on Bing would have happened without anything I did. What the data can and can't say
- Why Google dropped most of CheckMyTap's pages. I can measure the decline; I can't explain it yet. The miss, in full
- How many AI citations turn into visits. A citation isn't a click, and nobody reports the link between them well yet. How I measure it so far
- Whether six pillars hold up against another six months of real work. The system as it stands
When I bring other people in
SEO rarely wins on its own: the fix usually needs a developer, a designer, data, PR or paid search. I bring those people in before anything gets built.
A fix that arrives after launch costs a ticket, a sprint and somebody's patience. The same idea in the planning meeting costs a sentence. So I plan it from the ground up with the people who will build it.
| Who | What they see that SEO alone misses |
|---|---|
| Developers | What's actually buildable, what the templates can carry, and where a check can stop a mistake for good. They come first. |
| Design | Whether the page helps the person on their phone, in the moment they searched, before anyone reads a word. |
| Data | What to measure before launch, so "did it work" has an answer later. |
| Digital PR | The stories and original data that get a brand mentioned and linked, which search engines and AI answers both notice. |
| PPC | Which searches already convert, what people click on, and what to test before betting a whole section of the site on it. |
How I use AI in SEO work
I use AI every day. It's good at systems, data and research. The creative work stays human, on purpose.
What I hand to AI
- Writing the code and templates
- Pulling and cleaning data
- Research, with every claim checked against its source
- The checks that block a wrong fact before it ships
What stays with me
- Finding the opportunity nobody else saw
- The roadmap that actually moves the needle
- The voice, and the opinions
- Deciding what's worth building at all
Automate the left-brain work well, and the right-brain work gets the time it needs. Lose the manual, creative part, and every site starts to look like every other site, which is exactly what search engines and readers have learned to skip. This site is built that way, and the colophon shows how.