SEO in an AI Era: How to Become the Business AI Recommends

Why your digital footprint matters more than your rankings now, and where to start

My mother is in her seventies. She knows what AI is, and she wouldn't have a clue what SEO is. When I started in business at 18, I wouldn't have known either, and the phrase "SEO in an AI era" would have meant nothing to me.

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. For a long time, if you needed traffic to your website, you invested time or money in making search engines, Google above all, put your site in front of people searching for what you offer. That meant labelling your images properly, structuring headings so the search engine could read your pages, and writing blogs and page copy that mirrored the words your audience typed in.

I remember the early days, when Yahoo was as popular as Google and people got clever. They'd stuff keywords into a block of tiny text in the footer of their website so they'd rank for those terms. I did it myself, a very long time ago, because that was the tactic. Google became the dominant search engine by being stringent about quality, so the results matched what people were looking for.

How Search Has Changed

Much of that still applies. What's changed is how people search. Many now go straight to ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity, often by voice, and ask a question in their own words. Even on Google, plenty of us skip the websites and read the AI answer at the top, from Gemini, which has already done the homework across the whole web and offers to take you deeper.

With traditional SEO you could feed the machine. With AI, someone asks for a recommendation, and the AI decides who to recommend. That's where I see real pros and cons.

The Good News and the Catch

The good news is that to get picked, you need to be good. Good at what you do, with good reviews and a track record behind you. I think that's a healthy thing for business and for the people we serve.

The catch is that AI doesn't do context and it doesn't do time. You could have twenty years in business and a thousand glowing reviews from the last twelve months, and one bad review from three years ago still sits in the mix. A human reading TripAdvisor can read between the lines of the one angry review among five hundred happy ones. The AI doesn't make that judgement, and it won't know the business has changed hands or improved since.

Why Your Own Website Isn't Enough

The AI pulls from a vast range of sites. If all the great things said about you live on your own domain, it treats them a bit like an echo chamber. You could publish hundreds of excellent blogs and be a real authority on your topic, and it will still count them as one source and go looking for evidence elsewhere.

This works a lot like backlinks did in old-school SEO. Appearing on other people's websites, in the press, on podcasts and in publications puts your voice and expertise on other URLs, and that counts in your favour. It reminds me of what I was doing around 2014, when I ran a PR campaign for a book and there were very few other ways to get your message out. We've drifted away from those fundamentals while chasing busy social platforms, and they matter again.

So instead of writing fifty blogs for your own website, write five for yours and forty-five for other websites and publications. If you host a podcast, go and be a guest on other people's and share something of real value with their audience.

Think About What People Ask

Consider what someone would type or say to AI when they're looking for what you do. Who's the best in the country at this, can you recommend someone near me, who would be a great fit for me. If your location is part of your edge, make it clear in your content, even if you deliver online, because people still like the idea of someone nearby.

Instead of treating this as another obstacle that makes business harder, I'd encourage you to see it as leverage. If it raises the bar, the businesses that rise to it get more business and their customers get a better experience. The only reason to worry is if you're cutting corners. Make sure you're brilliant at what you do, and make sure the world can see it from more than one place. If you're starting out, you have a blank slate to build that footprint from day one.

If this resonates, I invite you to listen to the full episode here: Born To Be Brilliant Podcast

We're running a training and implementation session on this inside eSCHOOL, so you can get your digital footprint in shape ahead of time.

Find out more here: Entrepreneurs School