For a long time, “rank #1 on Google” was the whole game. If you owned that spot, you owned the traffic.

That’s not how people find things anymore. A growing share of searches never produce a click at all — they end with an answer from ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews, generated from whichever sources those models trust enough to cite.

Which means the real question isn’t “am I ranking?” anymore. It’s “does the AI actually know who I am, and does it trust me enough to mention me?” Those are different questions, with different answers, and most brands haven’t caught up yet.

Over the next few posts I’ll be digging into exactly what’s changed, and what to do about it.