In the past, getting to page one on Google was the holy grail.
Today, a new battleground is emerging, and it doesn’t involve blue links at all.
AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude are changing how people discover products and information. These tools don’t show results. They give answers. One, clean, fast response. And they’re exploding in popularity: ChatGPT alone is now one of the most visited sites in the world.
So what happens when people stop clicking blue links, and start trusting the answers generated by AI?
Why Traditional SEO Isn’t Enough
SEO helped you rank on Google. It got your blog posts indexed, backlinks counted, and traffic flowing. But AI-generated answers don’t follow that same logic.
Large language models decide what to show users. They cite Reddit threads, blog summaries, customer reviews, and public databases. Your Google rank might be #1, but if your brand isn’t part of the AI’s training data or retrieval sources, it might never be mentioned.
How AI Search Works
Instead of crawling and indexing like Google, AI tools pull from a combination of trained content and live retrieval. If your brand doesn’t exist in the right forums, documentation, reviews, or even user-generated content, it may never make it into the AI answer box.
That means visibility in AI-generated answers relies on:
- How often your brand is mentioned across trusted sources
- Whether the information is clear and factual
- If the AI has reason to prefer citing, you over others
Why This Matters for Your Brand
AI search is shaping buying decisions. Whether someone’s searching for a new SaaS tool or a skincare brand, they’re more likely to ask an AI than scroll through 10 links. And the answers they get will depend on how well your brand shows up in the AI’s "mental model."
In a world where search is changing, the brands that win will be the ones that are most visible in AI-generated answers. And that’s not something SEO alone can guarantee.
That’s why we’re building Lantern
Lantern is one of the first platforms to track and improve visibility across AI search engines. We help brands understand how often they’re mentioned, in what context, and what to do to improve.
Reach out to team@asklantern.com to know and control how you show up in AI answers.