AI Visibility

Get cited when buyers ask a model instead of Google.

The click is dying. Pew tracked 68,000 real Google searches in 2025 and found that when an AI summary sits on top of the page, people click a normal result 8% of the time instead of 15%, and they click a link inside the summary just 1% of the time. Your next customer now reads about you in a sentence a model wrote, and never lands on your site. This section is about becoming the source that sentence is built from. It moves faster than anything else in the book, so treat the specific numbers as live and re-check them before you bet on one.

Each play below is its own chapter. The numbers here are already sourced and verified, but the field moves monthly, so re-check them before you bet on one.

The plays

• Rank the whole cluster, not the keyword. Cover the whole topic cluster, because AI Mode fans one question into many.
• Get into Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the most-cited domain across every engine.
• Seed the Reddit thread. Community posts are among the most-cited sources in AI answers.
• Put original numbers in the copy. Models lift concrete numbers and quotes, and skip the fluff.
• Get onto other people's "best X" lists. Listicles are the most-cited format for buying-intent questions.
• Answer first, in a capsule. Engines retrieve passages, so every section has to stand alone.
• Win Bing, not just Google. ChatGPT search runs on Bing, so your Bing rank decides if it finds you.
• Earn the mention, not the link. Off-site brand mentions predict AI visibility better than backlinks.
• Be on YouTube. YouTube mentions are the strongest single correlate of AI visibility.
• Clear the review-site gate. Review presence is the near-universal ticket to being recommended.
• Keep it fresh. AI answers skew hard toward recently updated content.
• Measure your share of voice, then copy the winners. AI visibility is invisible in Analytics, so measure it directly.
• Own your entity. Entity schema helps a model resolve who you are.
• Stop shipping schema that no longer renders. FAQ and HowTo rich results are dead, so stop shipping them.
• Publish llms.txt only if you run docs, and expect nothing from search. Publish llms.txt for docs, and expect nothing from AI search.
• Instrument the influence, because the click is gone. Most AI visibility never produces a click, so measure the influence.

One to watch: the standard Google actually signals interest in is WebMCP, which lets an agent take actions on your site, not llms.txt. If AI visibility becomes AI action, that is where it starts.