A new acronym appears every month, and plenty of promises with them. Worth separating what genuinely changed from what is simply good SEO under a new name.
What stays exactly the same
- content that genuinely answers is still the foundation;
- a title that says what the page is about is still decisive;
- being cited by other sites is still what separates a reliable source from just another site;
- a slow, broken site still gets in the way.
Anyone saying "SEO is dead" is selling something.
What genuinely shifts in emphasis
The answer has to come first
In classic search, the person clicks and reads. In an AI answer, the system extracts a passage. If your page takes six paragraphs to say anything, there is nothing to extract.
Format weighs more
Lists, tables and marked-up questions are read more easily than running text. It is not aesthetics: it is what makes extraction possible.
Being mentioned matters more than ranking
An AI can cite a site that is not in first place, if it answers better and appears in more places. That opens space for smaller sites — and it is the best news in this whole shift.
Recency weighs
Some systems prefer recent content. Maintaining and dating revisions has come to count for more.
What is invented
A tool promising to "optimise your site for AI" with one click, or to guarantee a citation. Nobody controls an assistant's answer, just as nobody controls a Google ranking.
Where to start
Take the five pages that matter most, put an answer paragraph at the top of each, turn the subheadings into questions and mark up the FAQs. Then work on appearing in more places — and that is where a network of search sites like Magneth does the heavy lifting.
The detail is in how to get my website into ChatGPT.
