For twenty years, SEO has been about one thing: ranking high in Google search results. That way of finding information is now changing. Gartner forecasts traditional search volume will drop 25% by 2026. Statista shows ChatGPT has over 800 million weekly users finding information through conversation rather than a search box. In that world, partly different rules apply — and most websites aren’t yet built for them.
AI search changes how information is distributed
Google AI Overviews reached 2 billion users per month in 2025. ChatGPT has 800 million weekly active users. Perplexity, positioning itself as an AI-first search alternative, is growing 400% year over year. Together, Gartner describes this shift as "the great search unbundling" — the traditional search flow fragmenting.
The practical consequence: when someone asks ChatGPT about a service or vendor in your industry, you want your business to be one of the answers — with correct information and the right positioning. That requires your website to be readable for AI systems, not just for human visitors.
SEO used to be about ranking in Google. Now it’s about being cited by AI. The game has changed fundamentally.
Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro, 2025
Structured data: machine-readable information about your business
Schema.org is a shared vocabulary for marking up web content in a way machines understand. By adding JSON-LD code to your website, you explicitly tell search engines and AI systems what your page is about, who you are, what your prices are and how you can be contacted.
A study published in SearchEngineJournal (2025) showed that websites with correct Schema markup are 2.5 times more likely to be cited in AI-generated answers. It’s the simple, technical action with the biggest impact on AI visibility.
- Organization schema: tells AI who you are and how to contact you
- FAQPage schema: your common questions and answers extracted directly by AI
- Service schema: your services indexed with price and description
- LocalBusiness schema: your geographical presence and opening hours
- Article schema: your blog and articles tied to you as the expert
E-E-A-T: why AI prioritizes experts with proven experience
Google’s E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) has long governed how search engines rank content. In the AI era it has become even more central. A 2025 study from SearchEngineJournal showed that 96% of content cited in AI Overviews came from sources with strong E-E-A-T.
The practical implication for your website: you need clear "about us" pages with real credentials, named authors for all content, transparency about pricing and services, and a consistent pattern of updated content. AI models reward freshness — content older than three months sees declining citation frequency.
llms.txt: the new way to introduce yourself to AI
llms.txt is a new, community-driven format that lets you present your website to AI systems in a simple Markdown document. It’s a file placed in your website’s root that contains a summary of what you do, which your most important pages are, and what information is relevant.
Think of it as a welcome letter for AI agents. Instead of forcing the AI to interpret your entire website to understand who you are, you give it a clear, concise introduction. Adoption of llms.txt among leading tech sites grew from 2% to 15% during 2025 — a fast move toward a new industry standard.
Websites built with AI search in mind include structured data, llms.txt and optimized E-E-A-T from the start. It’s not an advanced add-on but a fundamental part of a modern website project, because visibility in AI search is just as important as visibility in traditional search.