For about 20 years, getting found online meant the same thing.
Show up in the ten blue links on page one and hope someone clicks. We built entire strategies around that concept. Keywords, page authority, backlinks, position tracking. The whole industry ran on it.
That mechanic is breaking down and the shift happened faster than most people realize.
Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and every other major search surface are increasingly answering questions directly instead of sending people somewhere to find the answer. One response at the top of the page with a handful of cited sources underneath it. While not yet obsolete, the click is becoming a secondary habit. The citation is what matters now.
If your content isn’t structured in a way these systems can extract from, you may never get either.
What actually changed
The old game was about popularity.
Domain authority, backlink count, how many people were pointing at your site. Those signals still definitely matter but they’re no longer the deciding factor for whether an AI system uses your content in a response.
What these systems are actually looking for is clarity and structure. Can they find a direct answer to the question in your content without having to read the whole page? Are you naming specific things like tools, frameworks, people, and data points instead of gesturing at categories? Is your site set up in a way the system can actually parse?
A well-structured page from a smaller site will get cited over a vague page from a high-authority domain because the model needs something it can use, not something that’s technically impressive.
The three things that actually help
The first is writing for extraction instead of reading.
Every section of your content should open with a direct answer to whatever the heading promises. Not a buildup, not context-setting, a straight answer in the first two or three sentences. Models chunk content and they pull from the clearest, most direct blocks they find.
The second is naming specific things.
If you’re writing about marketing strategy and you say “leading CRM platforms” instead of “HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive,” you’re giving the model nothing to work with. Specificity is what lets these systems build a picture of whether you actually know what you’re talking about.
The third is structured data.
This is the one most small teams skip because it sounds technical and optional. It’s neither. Schema markup is essentially the language AI systems use to read your site’s logic. If it’s messy or missing, you’re invisible to a layer of the system that’s becoming more important every quarter. It’s not complicated to implement but it has to be done right.
What this means for how you think about content
The brands that are going to stay visible as search continues to shift are the ones treating their content like a data asset instead of a publishing calendar. Every piece should be structured to answer a specific question clearly, reference specific entities, and make it easy for a system to understand what you’re an authority on.
That’s a different brief than “write a blog post about X.” Just remember it’s not harder, it’s just a different mental model.
The good news is most of your competitors haven’t made this shift yet. The window to build a meaningful advantage here is open but it won’t stay open forever.
This is a core part of what we do for clients at And Zeros. Auditing how your brand reads to AI systems and fixing what’s broken. Get in touch if you want to know where you stand.
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