Digital Marketing in the Age of LLMs

Something quietly broke in the last two years: the click stopped being guaranteed. You can hold the number-one organic spot and still lose the visit, because an AI Overview already answered the question above you. Christopher Gimmer watched it happen to pages he’d ranked for years — “even if you’re ranking number one, the AI Overviews are answering some of those things, and we’re losing out on some of those clicks.”

So the goal shifts. It’s not just ranking anymore — it’s being the source the machine trusts enough to cite.

Stop porting your rankings mindset

The first mistake is assuming AI search is just SEO with a new coat of paint. Brittany Trafis is blunt about it: “AI search is not SEO 2.0. If you keep treating it like just keywords and rankings, you’ll get keywords and rankings — in Google. If you’re trying to show up in ChatGPT and Claude and Perplexity, you’re not going to see it.” Stephan Bajayo goes further: “There is no rank in an LLM. The real question is: what are you giving them to interpret?”

It ranks entities, not pages

What LLMs actually reward is being a well-defined entity the model already understands. As Federico Fancinelli says, “it’s not ranking blue links, it’s not ranking pages, it’s ranking entities. And bigger companies are entities by definition.” Your job is to become one: consistent naming, clear associations, and a footprint of third parties who describe you the same way.

Cite your sources — and fix the product

Two practical levers keep coming up. First, sourcing: Drew Dorenfest notes that “the key to getting cited is to cite your sources. Point to where you got the information — they can verify it, then they go, okay, this is legit.” Second, reality: Patrick Stox reminds us the model is reading the whole internet’s opinion of you. “If you’ve got a problem with your product, the easiest way to get the AI to say something different? Go fix that. Because if people are complaining, that’s what it’s gonna say.”

The reframe that makes it simple

Mark Pearson’s line is the one to tape to your monitor: “SEO has graduated into the agentic world. AEO is an evolution of SEO — as you do really good SEO, you are doing AEO.” The takeaway isn’t panic. It’s rigor. Get found, get chosen, get paid — now by humans and the machines answering on their behalf.