A new acronym turns up every month, and a lot of promises come with them. It is worth separating what genuinely changed from what is simply good search work under a new name.
What stays exactly the same
- content that genuinely answers is still the base;
- a title that says what the page is about is still decisive;
- being cited by other sites is still what separates a reliable source from any old site;
- a slow, broken site still gets in its own way.
Anyone saying “SEO is dead” is selling something.
The answer has to come first
In classic search, the person clicks and reads. In an AI answer, the system lifts out a passage. If your page takes six paragraphs to say anything, there is nothing to lift.
Format weighs more
Lists, tables and marked-up questions are read more easily than running prose. This is not about looks: it is what makes extraction possible.
Being mentioned matters more than ranking
An assistant can cite a site that is not in first place, if it answers better and appears in more places. That opens room for smaller sites — and it is the best news in this whole shift.
Freshness weighs
Some systems prefer recent content. Maintaining pages and dating the revisions is worth more than it used to be.
What is invented
A tool promising to “optimise your site for AI” in one click, or to guarantee a citation. Nobody controls what an assistant answers, just as nobody controls a position on Google.
Where to start
Take the five pages that matter most, put an answer paragraph at the top of each, turn the subheadings into questions and mark up the frequent questions. Then work on appearing in more places — that is the heavy half, and the one that keeps paying.
