The New SEO Game: How To Get AI To Cite You

By Rachel Seymour, Senior Marketing Strategist at The Preppy Family

I’ve been watching the SEO world shift under our feet, and I’m convinced most people still haven’t caught on to what’s actually happening. SEO didn’t die. It simply evolved, quietly and dramatically, into something far more aligned with how people search today. We’ve officially entered the era of AEO—Answer Engine Optimization—and GEO—Generative Engine Optimization. And the goal is no longer to rank number one on Google. The new objective is to become the answer AI chooses to cite.

That’s the real game now.

The old SEO playbook was built around keywords. You picked a keyword, wrote a blog post, and hoped it climbed the rankings. But people don’t search like that anymore. They ask questions. They move through stages: the problem stage (“why are my email open rates tanking”), the solution stage (“how to improve email deliverability”), and the buying stage (“best email platform for ecommerce,” “Klaviyo vs Mailchimp,” “Postscript pricing”). Instead of creating six separate posts that each answer a fraction of the journey, the brands winning today are building one comprehensive page that answers the entire thing. One page so complete that AI looks at it and says, “This is the source.”

Because AI isn’t ranking pages. It’s assembling answers. And if your content is scattered across multiple posts, AI will skip you and cite the competitor who put everything in one place.

One of the biggest missed opportunities I see every day is the lack of FAQs. Adding FAQ sections to major pages—product pages, landing pages, podcast episode pages—is one of the simplest, highest‑impact moves you can make. I’ve watched brands add six well‑structured FAQs with proper schema markup and suddenly start appearing in AI‑generated answers everywhere. It’s not magic. It’s simply making your content easy for AI to read, understand, and cite. AI loves structure: clean HTML, comparison tables, scannable sections, and content that doesn’t hide behind scripts or fancy interactions. If your sales team hears the same questions every week, those questions should live on your site in a format AI can digest instantly.

Freshness has also become a ranking factor again. AI engines want content that looks alive. They want pages updated this year, with current stats, new examples, and visible “last updated” dates. This isn’t busywork—it’s a competitive advantage. Refreshing your best pages once a month is far easier than doing a massive overhaul later, and it signals to AI that your content is trustworthy and current.

But here’s the part most designers don’t want to hear: your beautiful, JavaScript‑heavy website might be hurting you. If your content is hidden behind scripts, AI can’t read it. And if AI can’t read it, you don’t exist. You can still have a gorgeous site, but your core content—your FAQs, your tables, your definitions—needs to be in plain HTML. Make it easy for AI to find, and you’ll make it easier for customers too.

Another major shift is happening off your website. Brand mentions have become the new backlinks. AI engines care less about traditional link authority and more about whether your brand shows up consistently across the web. If people are talking about you on YouTube, Reddit, industry publications, review sites, and partner pages, AI interprets that as consensus. And consensus equals credibility. This is where PR becomes measurable again.

Publishing expert perspectives, sharing data‑backed opinions, releasing benchmarks, and getting mentioned in trusted places all contribute to your authority in the eyes of AI.

And because AI wants diverse sources, off‑site content is more valuable than ever. Reddit threads, YouTube videos, review platforms, and LinkedIn posts all reinforce your narrative. When AI sees the same message across multiple platforms, it treats it as validated truth. That’s how you win in an answer‑driven world.

Finally, we need to rethink how we measure success. Keyword rankings don’t tell the full story anymore. The real metric is presence. Are you showing up in AI answers? How are you being described? Who are you being mentioned alongside? What sentiment is attached to your brand? Start by identifying the twenty to forty buyer questions you want to own, then track how often you appear in the answers. And make sure your sales team is asking every prospect how they found you and what they searched or asked. Those prompts become your new optimization targets.

The bottom line is simple: SEO didn’t disappear. It transformed. We’ve moved from optimizing for Google to optimizing for the engines assembling answers. The brands that win in 2026 and beyond will be the ones who understand this shift early—brands that own questions, structure content for AI, refresh consistently, build brand consensus, and show up everywhere their buyers look.

This is the new organic playbook. And it’s wide open for anyone bold enough to adapt.