Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The practice of improving a page's visibility in unpaid search results through technical, content, and authority work; its foundations still underpin AI visibility because AI systems retrieve from the same web.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving how visible a page is in the unpaid results of search engines. It covers three areas: technical work that lets a crawler reach and index a site, content work that matches what people search for, and authority work that earns the links and citations signalling a page is trustworthy.
SEO predates AI search, and its foundations still hold under it. AI systems answer by retrieving pages from the same web index and reading them, so a page a crawler cannot reach, cannot parse, or has no reason to trust is invisible to an AI system for the same reasons it was invisible in classic search. Crawlability, clear relevance, and earned authority remain prerequisites.
What changes is the target. Classic SEO optimises for a ranked list of links a person clicks; our work optimises for being retrieved, grounded, and cited inside a generated answer. We treat AI SEO as an extension of SEO rather than a replacement, and AI Visibility as the outcome it works toward. The newer labels, AEO and GEO, name the same shift under different names.
Mentioned in
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Finding High-Value Converting Queries That Mainstream Tools Miss
How to uncover high-converting, commercial search queries that show zero volume in mainstream SEO tools while keeping your sites invisible to competitors.
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How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor's websites
A test that hijacked the Chrome back button to send visitors to a fake Google results page, then to mirrored competitor pages where heatmaps, sessions and typing were recorded. Google de-indexed the whole domain.
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Why do we link to other websites?
A 2016 study of 2000 respondents in Australia and the USA found most people believe the main reason one page links to another is marketing, advertising or revenue, not relevance.
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Hello, this is an extortion email.
A blackmailer demanded $1,500 to not point 20,000 XRumer forum profile backlinks at our site. Here is the email in full, Google's response to the campaign, and a 2016 follow-up DDoS extortion attempt.
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Google is Aware of Temporary Link Schemes
Google's webspam team knows about rotating link schemes. John Mueller confirmed that a reconsideration request can cite a link found only in Google's cache, because the live page has already dropped it.
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How I Hijacked Rand Fishkin's Blog
In 2012 we copied four pages, including Rand Fishkin's blog, onto our own subdomains and watched Google swap the originals out of its index. The test cases, the search theory behind them, and what webmasters can do to defend against result hijacking.
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Impact of Rankings on SERP CTR
Original 2011 study of organic clickthrough rate by ranking position, across more than a million Australian retail and e-commerce search queries. Position one took 43.2% of clicks, position ten took 8.3%.