Key Takeaways Vague pricing, guaranteed rankings, and account lock-in are red flags no matter what an agency says about AI. 73% of small business owners aren't confident their current marketing strategy is working — vetting matters, AI buzzwords or not. "AI search" has become an easy label to bolt onto a pitch. Ask any agency to explain SEO vs. AEO in plain language before you sign anything. Real AI search competence shows up as citation data and schema work — not a rankings

For two decades, SEO was a game of scale. Bigger sites won. More backlinks won. Fatter content libraries won. The brand with the deeper pockets usually walked away with the top of page one, and small businesses were told to be patient, niche down, and accept the scraps. That game is ending. AI search — the answers showing up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google's AI Overviews, and Gemini — isn't ranking pages by authority alone. It's synthesizing answers from sources it tru

The Signals That Determine Your Visibility in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Beyond Beyond Traditional Ranking For two decades, SEO professionals obsessed over Google's ranking factors—backlinks, keywords, page speed, mobile-friendliness. These signals determined who appeared on page one and who disappeared into obscurity. AI search hasn't abandoned these factors. It's layered new ones on top. When Claude decides which sources to cite, when Google's AI Overview selects whi