How to get to the bottom — and then the top — of AI search patterns

Since their advent, search engines have completely changed the way businesses market themselves for an Internet-driven world, so much so that terminology like SEO or search engine optimization has cropped up around these changes.

But now artificial intelligence and massive Large Language Models (LLMs) have once again disrupted the field, meaning that the term de rigueur is no longer SEO but AEO or Answer Engine Optimization. This refers to the AI overviews that pop up on Google or search engines at the first click, usually responding in the form of an answer to a question that a user might commonly search and often referencing further sourcing in the background. With the rise of AI overviews has come a decrease in search traffic, or users who eventually access a webpage off of Google to get their answer, and an increase in companies trying to market to this tactic.

The question, from marketers and companies alike, is what is the best course of action? How does one make their small business or professional service company stand out from competitors in a world of AEO and not SEO? The answer, from multiple marketing companies in the region and their clients, is not as complicated as you might think — just as things have changed, they have also stayed the same. 

The advent of AI 

At Fort Myers-based marketing agency Priority Marketing, the real shift didn’t happen with the November 2022 release of ChatGPT to the public. Right away, says Ryan Soper, a senior SEO strategist with Priority Marketing, clients were asking how they could better show up in AI overviews. But in the last year to six months, the marketing firm has seen a real shift in the data.

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Soper’s colleague Manny Gonzalez agrees. 

“Where we have really seen and experienced a shock when it comes to results, performance or key performance indicators, for business websites has been more so in the past six months,” says Gonzalez, senior director of web services at Priority Marketing. “It’s where we have truly experienced not only the demand from clients, but the demand and requirements from the engines.” 

From an external perspective, AI overviews have led to decreased search traffic for many companies due to users who might have once clicked through to their site for an answer now finding it summarized directly through their Google search. One study published this year on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), found that AI Overviews on Google reduced organic clicks to external websites by 38%. Industries that once relied on search traffic, like news publishers, have seen a major collapse of that segment. A 2025 Wall Street Journal article reported that The New York Times’ overall traffic from search went down from 44% in 2022 to 37% in 2025. 

Another recent study, from Tampa-based Evoke Strategy, tracked how 28,488 Florida businesses showed up in search results on four major AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. After testing three types of questions a potential customer might ask to find the businesses online, only 1,676 — roughly 5.9% — ever showed up in the search results. And even businesses that made the cut often showed up inconsistently. 

Photo by Alison Frank Photography

But marketers like Mara Gordon, director of digital marketing at Fort Lauderdale-based BoardroomPR, says reduced search doesn’t necessarily mean a reduced customer base. The clients who do find these businesses are likely more informed and more motivated. 

“Organic search traffic is down across the board for a lot of people, but the users who do end up on websites now are usually more educated,” Gordon says. “They’ve done this research on their own separately and they come to the website a little bit farther down the customer journey, so they’re ready to take action more so than earlier, when people were kind of browsing websites a little bit more.” 

And much of the strategies that held true for SEO still hold true for an AEO-based world. What marketers say is that it’s more about depicting the content in a certain way or including certain prompts and best practices rather than throwing out the playbook and starting from scratch. 

“We have AI search now, but really, it relies on the backbone and the foundation of SEO,” Gordon says. “A lot of our practices are exactly the same, but we just have this added layer of trying to give the AI search engines these signals that it’s looking for so that our clients can show up as a citation or as the answer.” 

That can materialize in different ways, according to marketing leaders. Sometimes, that means creating copywriting more conversational and hitting on common topics or adding Frequently Asked Questions to a website rather than focusing, in the case of SEO, on certain keywords, according to Soper. Gonzalez also advises adding what’s known as a llms.txt file to the back-end of websites to make them more visible and easily legible to the LLMs that now power search engines. 

The key is a matter of presenting information in a palatable way rather than overhauling the entire system. Soper uses the example of this article — an SEO-friendly approach may headline the piece “what Southwest Florida business owners need to know about AI” whereas an AI Overview strategy would ensure that the headline is posed in the form of a question. 

“AI search engines like information formatted in a certain way so that when it’s crawling a website, it can read and understand that information really easily and quickly,” Gordon says. “One of those ways is, at least right now, a question and a relatively short or brief answer.” 

Move fast

Despite any downturn in organic search traffic, not all businesses have experienced this shift as a negative. Much like Gordon implies, some of these companies have actually seen an uptick in real interest because AI has prioritized experts in the space over those who simply know how to pump their website with keywords.

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And even for the businesses that haven’t seen much of a change in either direction with AI Overviews, marketing leaders like Gonzalez and Soper say there’s no need to really reinvent everything. SEO remains important. 

“Just because technology is evolving fast with the whole rise of AI and the AI Overview supremacy, it doesn’t mean that we need to change the foundation,” Gonzalez says. “It’s like building a smart home. Everybody wants to add all of the widgets. But they take the foundation for granted. And if you take the foundation for granted, then you’re going to do a mediocre job.”