How to Get Found Online in the Age of AI
The way people search has changed. Here's what I'd be doing now if I wanted my business to actually get found.
For a long time, getting found online basically meant one thing: Google. Someone needed a brand photographer, accountant, therapist, travel advisor, marketing agency, restaurant, plumber, whatever. They opened Google, typed a few words into a box and started clicking. And so an entire industry grew around getting your business as high up that list as possible: SEO, keywords, backlinks, metadata, blog posts, domain authority and the never-ending quest to get yourself onto page one of Google.
None of that has suddenly become irrelevant. But the way we search is changing very, very quickly. I know because I've changed how I search. I'll still Google something when I know roughly what I'm looking for, but increasingly I'll ask ChatGPT. I'll explain exactly what I need, add a ridiculous amount of context, ask a follow-up question, narrow it down and expect it to do some of the legwork for me.
And I'm not alone. Google itself is changing in response. AI Overviews and AI Mode increasingly answer questions directly, and Google says searches in AI Mode are, on average, three times longer than traditional Google searches. We're not just typing marketing agency Toronto anymore. We're asking things like: I'm a service-based business owner doing around $10k a month. Most of my business comes through referrals and I want a more predictable way of getting clients, but I don't have time to post on Instagram every day. What should I do?
That's a completely different type of search. And if you want your business to keep getting found, I think you need to understand the difference.
SEO isn't dead. Search has just got bigger.
There seems to be a new acronym every five minutes. SEO. AEO. GEO. AIO. Personally, I don't think most business owners need another acronym to worry about. The important thing to understand is that people are still searching, they're just searching in more places and in much more natural ways.
They Google. They ask ChatGPT. They use Google's AI results. They search Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Reddit. They use voice. They upload a photo and ask a question about it. They ask one question, read the answer and then ask another one. In fact, more than one in six Google searches in the US now involves voice or images, and Google says AI-powered search has encouraged people to ask longer, more complicated and more specific questions.
So we're moving away from a world where getting found was largely about matching a few keywords to a world where the internet needs to understand what you know, who you help and what you're genuinely useful for. And that's actually quite exciting, particularly if you're a small business.
Because AI still needs somewhere to get its answers from
This is the bit I think gets lost in all the AI panic. ChatGPT doesn't make the entire internet disappear. Neither does Google's AI. When these systems need current information, recommendations or evidence, they can search and use information from websites and other sources to help construct an answer.
Your content can be one of those sources.
Google is very explicit that the fundamentals of good SEO still apply to its AI search experiences. There isn't a magic piece of code you add to your website that suddenly makes Gemini fall in love with you. OpenAI says public websites can appear in ChatGPT search too, provided they're accessible to its search crawler.
So yes, you still want a technically sound website. You still want Google to understand it and keywords still matter. But I think the bigger opportunity now is to stop creating content purely because you've found a keyword and start creating content because you have a genuinely useful answer to something your customer wants to know.
That brings me to what I'd actually do.
1. Answer the questions your customers are really asking
This is probably the biggest one. Don't start with What should we write a blog about this month? Start with: What are our customers typing into Google, ChatGPT or Reddit at 11pm because it's driving them mad?
For us at Eighth Era, our customers probably aren't searching integrated omnichannel customer acquisition strategy. They're asking Why am I posting on Instagram but not getting clients? How do I get clients without relying on referrals? Do I actually need a personal brand? What should I post when I have absolutely nothing to say? Is SEO worth it for my business? When should I hire someone to do my marketing?
Those are real problems, and that's exactly the sort of content we're now deliberately creating. Think about the questions you get asked on discovery calls, the things clients email you about, the objections people have before they buy and the questions you see people asking in Facebook groups, Reddit threads and comments. Write those down. That's your content plan.
2. Get specific about what you actually do
This sounds ridiculously obvious, but go and look at your website. Could someone who knows absolutely nothing about you work out, within about ten seconds, who you help, what you help them with, where you work if location matters, what makes your approach different and what they can actually buy from you?
There are still far too many websites saying things like Empowering ambitious founders to step into their fullest potential. Lovely. But what do you DO?
AI systems are trying to understand expertise, relationships and context. Humans are trying to work out whether you can solve their problem. Make it easy for both of them. Be explicit about your services, your audience, your expertise and the problems you solve. Don't be clever at the expense of being clear.
3. Stop producing generic AI content
The irony of trying to get found in the age of AI by publishing 47 articles written entirely by AI is not lost on me. And I say this as someone who loves AI. I use ChatGPT every single day. It helps me research, organise my thoughts, challenge ideas, edit things and occasionally decipher the chaotic voice note I've just dictated while doing three other things.
Use it. But give it something to work with.
Your experience, your opinion, your methodology, your client stories, your mistakes, your data, your examples and the thing everyone in your industry says that you completely disagree with. Google itself talks about creating unique, valuable, non-commodity content for people, which makes perfect sense. If AI can generate the exact same article without you, why would the internet particularly need yours?
Your advantage isn't producing more content than AI. It's producing content that contains something AI couldn't know without you.
4. Make your content really easy to understand
You don't need to start writing like a robot so another robot can understand you. Please don't. But structure helps. Give an article a clear title that reflects the question you're answering, use headings, answer the main question relatively quickly rather than making someone read 800 words of waffle first, and break complicated subjects into sensible sections.
Use FAQs where they're genuinely useful. Link to other relevant pages on your website. Use real examples. Keep your service pages current. Make sure important information isn't buried exclusively inside a graphic or Instagram post. Essentially: write like a human, but structure it like you want to be understood.
That's useful for Google, useful for AI and, conveniently, much nicer for the person reading it too.
5. Build a body of evidence around what you want to be known for
This is perhaps the biggest shift in how I'm thinking about content. I don't want us to publish random articles because somebody told us blogging is good for SEO. I want Eighth Era to build a body of useful information around the problems we want to be known for solving.
For us, that's getting better clients, building a personal brand, creating a predictable marketing system, using AI without losing your personality, getting found online and creating content that actually supports your business. One article leads to another. Our service pages support those subjects. Our social content talks about them. We have opinions about them. Our client work proves them. Our website makes it very obvious that this is our territory.
Over time, you're not just trying to rank for one keyword. You're building a much bigger digital footprint that says: we know this stuff. And that's valuable whether the person discovering you is using Google, ChatGPT, Instagram, Reddit or whatever comes next.
So, what happened to SEO?
Nothing. You still need it. Google itself says its existing SEO best practices remain relevant to its generative AI results. Your website still needs to be crawlable, your pages still need sensible titles, search engines still need to understand what they're about, and keywords still help connect what people are looking for with the information you've created.
But I think we need to stop thinking about SEO as gaming Google into putting us at number one for a magic phrase. Search is becoming much more conversational, specific and contextual. And increasingly, the search engine isn't just giving us ten links and asking us to figure it out ourselves. It's trying to construct an answer.
So the question for businesses becomes slightly different. Not just How do I rank? but when someone asks a question I am genuinely qualified to answer, have I given the internet enough useful information to know that?
If the answer is no, that's where I'd start.
Five things I'd do this week
1. Write down the 20 questions your ideal clients ask you most often. Look at discovery calls, emails, DMs, Reddit, comments and your own conversations with clients. Don't translate them into marketing language. Use the words your customers actually use.
2. Check your core website pages for clarity. Make sure they clearly explain who you help, what you do, what problems you solve and what someone can actually buy from you. If a stranger has to decipher what you mean, you're making everyone's job harder.
3. Create genuinely useful content answering those questions. You don't need to publish three blogs a week. One brilliant, specific answer based on actual experience is worth far more than ten generic AI-written articles that could have appeared on anybody's website.
4. Add more of you. Your opinions, examples, experience, proof, stories and perspective are increasingly the bit worth publishing. Use AI to help you create the content, absolutely. Just don't let it remove the very thing that makes the content yours.
5. Connect everything. Link useful articles to services, services to relevant articles and related articles to each other. Your website shouldn't be a collection of little islands. Make it easy for someone to go deeper into the subjects you're genuinely knowledgeable about.
You don't need to predict exactly what search will look like five years from now. None of us can. And you definitely don't need to panic every time somebody on LinkedIn announces that SEO is dead and you now need a seventeen-step GEO strategy before breakfast.
People are still looking for answers. They're still looking for experts. They're still looking for businesses that can solve their problems.
Where and how they're asking those questions is what's changing.
So make useful things. Be specific about what you know. Put your actual experience and opinions into the content you create. Make your website easy to understand. Keep showing up around the subjects you want to be known for.
Then, when someone goes looking for the thing you're really bloody good at, there's enough evidence online for them, and increasingly their AI assistant, to find you.
And that, for me, is what getting found online means now.
