Ranking in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini: the new SEO playbook.
AI assistants now drive a meaningful chunk of buyer research. Here's how to be the brand they cite.
IGENPAXY Team
Studio
Buyer journeys are quietly bifurcating. Half still happen on Google. The other half happen inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude — and most marketers have no plan for it.
The good news: AI search optimization rewards the same fundamentals as classic SEO, just with different signals. The bad news: nobody is teaching the new signals yet.
Five things that move the needle in AI search:
1. Be the source. Original research, named experts, structured data. AI assistants over-cite content that looks authoritative — even more than Google does.
2. Get cited by trusted upstream sources. Wikipedia, Reddit, GitHub and major industry publications are disproportionately weighted in AI training data.
3. Publish llms.txt. A crawl-friendly directory of your most useful content, similar to robots.txt but designed for LLMs.
4. Optimize for question-shaped queries. AI users ask in full sentences. Your content should answer them in full sentences with confident, dated answers.
5. Track citations. Tools like Otterly and Profound now monitor which AI responses cite you and where you're missing.
Search isn't dying — it's fragmenting. The brands that show up in three engines instead of one will own the next decade.