Where decisions happen in 2026: Google AI Mode & AI answer engines

Awesome. Thank you, Erin. And yeah, let's move right through. I mean, you've already you guys have already been primed with with Lily's chat and with Erin talking a lot about what's been changing on on the internet recently. And yeah, my talk is all about that same thing, too. While also going to dive a bit deeper in the end into the the tactics of it and and into how SE ranking can help you with all of that, I think we can just start with getting out of the way. The first and major point of what I want to tell you is why you want to why you want to be aware and why you want to invest into AI search. The thing that we are noticing and that everybody's noticing probably is that the internet is experiencing the fragmentation in search like never before right now. And if if just some time ago your your optimization strategy was purely focused on your Google search, it's no longer the case. And we're going to first dive a bit deep deeper into why why you want to care about more systems and not just Google. So first of all, a lot of you are probably just looking at your organic traffic and not seeing a lot of any any

significant change there, right? And a lot of a lot of our customers don't we ourselves don't see the volume of organic traffic changing significantly with with AI. Although a lot of people are talking about zero click, right? But zero click has been here forever. Yes, it impacted some industries more than others, but most of us we have not yet seen a significant impact on organic search. Why do we still want to care about AI? You would you would ask? Well, the answer is fairly simple here. We can look into how many times people are searching on different platforms. And yes, Google is still king, right? I've seen somebody mention in the comments that Google is also the boss of AI right now. Yes, they are. They are the boss of the the regular search with more than 14 billion searches per day. But at the same time at the same time we a lot of other systems that are chipping into the search volumes. You can see perplexity you see cloud you see Chad Chad GPT Meta AI obviously Google's Gemini is also big. It's almost as big as Chad GPT

right now. So all of this together, all of the LLM chats, searches, they add up to about 20 to 30% of all the searches happening globally. And yes, right now we know that about half only half of them are not generative. So even if it's like 10 to 15%, it's already a lot. On top of that, there's another big change that's been quietly happening in the background over the last 5 to 10 years, and it's social. Social has been steadily growing as a traffic source for a lot of the businesses right now. Globally, what we're seeing is that social media brings about 10% of all the referral traffic. While AI, you look at this number, it's still abysmal. 18%, let's call it 2. This is this seems like nothing, but we've just looked at the search volumes. This means that the AI search for the most part, this is what this is what you'd call zeroclick search. And what we see on our end and what our experts are seeing is that when

your visibility in AI improves, you see the quality of all the rest of the channels improve. Now moving into social media for a few more countries like US is obviously leading the charge and I think we can expect something similar for the rest of the world soon in the next few years where social media grows from 10 10% average to 15% average of all traffic. EU is catching up with 11.5%. So social is big and why it's big is because people us we like to see the content from other people. That's why I personally search for a lot of things yes on chipino but also on YouTube and my wife would search for a lot of things on Tik Tok or Instagram. The reason for that is that we prefer the content generated by other users or UGC as they call it and that's something that Google knows too nowadays and that's what systems that's what teams behind Chad GPT and perplexity and other and other AI engines know too. Right now, if you

take any keyword in Google, there's a 50% chance that in top 10 you're going to see a social link. And it's similar and it's a similar situation with AI. In AI overviews, the sources there's going to be a 20 there's a 20% chance there's going to be a a social source for a response. In AI mode, it's even higher. It's like 35 to 40%. And when we look into um a lot of the types of the social systems that are being mentioned, obviously YouTube is the biggest one. You will also hear a lot about Reddit. YouTube is still number one because it provides this kind of rich content that users love and that's that's what you want to optimize too. Now what I was leading to is that what you want to do and what we're doing at S Ranking is you want to meet your users where they are. If 5 to 10 years ago, what you could only think of is Google and how do I make sure that my website comes up comes up at the very top in the blue links, right? It's number one, two, or three spots to grab

that share of the organic traffic. Well, the situation has changed significantly and now users are searching across the board. Yes, Google is still big and it's probably going to continue being big for some time. But at the same time, social media became a thing and it's big now and LLMs are even bigger and people are combining multiple sources, multiple places where they're searching nowadays. And on top of that, they can even go ahead and that's the way I make my purchases these days. I'll just go ahead start a deep research in Chad GPT or in Gemini and I'll ask it to find me whatever like the new iPad stand that I'm looking for telling them hey you know what I just want a really small one that I can take into my backpack or like something that that can put into my pocket and it will actually find me the models saving me those 15 20 30 minutes that I would have spent myself and we need to be in as businesses we need to optimize for all of these channels at once especially because they're all interconnected because of that we had ranking decided to bring to market

different tools and combine different tools that are available in the market. We still have our own platform that's been with us for a very long time which is SE ranking um our online solution that's based on all the needs of the SEO teams and it's advancing into the AI age. But we've also recently joined forces with Plannable's team who is focusing on letting the teams plan their content and optimize for social. And the last part that we've recently launched is SE visible which is a new product that focuses just on AI search visibility and making sure that you understand your position there and you know what to do next. And we're going to dive into a few of these tools just in a few moments. So yeah, I'm hoping that you're interested in understanding where you stand in AI search and how to get into it. So we're gonna we're going to dive into the demo very soon. But before that again, let me lay lay lay down the foundation for the practical tips that that Lily has shared just now and

reshare with you some of the the studies that we've done recently. And for this study that I'm going to be showcasing, we actually took a million keywords/prompts and we ran them across AI mode and Chad GPT and then we've looked into all of the sources that were that popped up which was about bit more than 3 million different sources I believe. We ran them against the panel of on page and off- page factors. It was more than 50 about 60 of them. And then we've also on top of that we've explored the volatility of AI mode. This is data as of middle of August. So, it's still relatively fresh and you can trust most of what you're going to see here. So, this slide is the beady part. This is it. This is the result of the study. I know it can be quite a bit hard to read and we're probably probably not worth our time spending and like reviewing everything that you see here. So, I'm going to make some of the highlights here and then the summary for you. Feel free to take a screenshot. Uh, this is actually a very good piece of data. You can find this in better quality on my

LinkedIn too if if you want to and you don't make the make the screenshot on time. So what you're seeing on the screen is the top 19 top 20 factors that were most influential more most impactful had the highest correlation in the likelihood of a of a page of a website becoming a source for either AI mode or Chad GPT. So as you can see the there are a lot of and lots and lots of similarities between the two. They all rely on your total domain traffic and the number of referral domains. They all look into your page optimization, the page trust, a lot of a lot of things that we're used to from the regular SEO work. You still want to work in your backlink profile and make sure that your website is mentioned, but what's new is the these new engines, they also track your overall brand presence online. And then Lily has been mentioning some of the tools available for this for you to understand how often your brand is mentioned online. But you can also go ahead and just focus on how often it's mentioned in social and how

much brand search volume you're getting. These are some good proxies if you don't have a separate tool. On top of it, what might be new for you on this slide or something that you might have not taken into consideration as much is that the content freshness plays much bigger role than it used to. and some little optimizations with the content and I think we've talked Lily has talked about some of them like how you work with your title and metad description and how you update your content frequently to make sure that it comes out on top because LLMs are really really lazy the both OpenAI and Google they're trying to save their research and provide the best experience possible while spending as little as possible. So they won't be often times or most times they won't be parsing your page in full. They'll just look at the title and the description that was provided by their partners. That's specifically the Chad GPT that would be the case or Plexity that would be the case. They'd be just looking at what the search engine is providing to pick the to pick the source. And so that's your biggest tool the how fresh

the content is. And you know sometimes you can just go ahead and update the date of the content update and that will work although I would not recommend doing that. So just to quickly sum summarize this and you can dig into that slide separately and feel free to follow up with any questions if you've spotted any interesting numbers to summarize this there are a few groups of criterias and directions of work for your teams that really matter and the first two they come handinhand these are domain power and authority combined with brand power where domain power and authority is something that I've talked about overall how wellknown your your website is how many backlinks you've by how much total traffic you're you get. This is a good proxy for how likely CHP and AI mode are to to mention you. But then something relatively new is the brand power, meaning how often your brand appears online. It doesn't have to be a link. And that's that's something that we're still getting used to and a lot of the teams are still getting used to. So that's something that you want to keep in mind. especially mentions on on

social like YouTube, like Reddit, like Instagram and Tik Toks. Those are taking up a significant share of sources. The the third group is the technical SEO. This is your good good old factors with just use Lighthouse to see how quickly your website loads and optimize for that. We've looked into a lot of the numbers there. My my team strongly advised me against sharing any any specific guide guidance here, but what we've seen is that essentially if you're in the green on the lighthouse, the likelihood of you becoming a source is higher than if you are in the yellow to red zone. So performance matters as well as good old technical optimization of with titles, meta, and including your including your keywords into page URLs and titles. And the last but not least is something you're probably already working on is content optimization. The only thing that's different is there's just a bit of a twist to it where the twist is that with traditional SEO, you typically don't want to focus on these super big content pieces that go into

detail details of everything. You don't want to spoil your content in metad description and title because well, if people see everything in search results, why would they open the page? Now you actually reverse that and you go and you try to optimize your content to to answer all of the possible questions the user would have and include the questions themselves into headings and actual answers in the content as soon as possible. So that's the summary and there's obviously a lot more to it but instead of diving into the numbers more we're going to do a bit of a practical practical part very very soon. Just one more number if you are in the in the local marketing space like if you're running any kind of working for any kind of franchise or you are you have to do with medical or with any other industry where Google tends to show essentially local pack the map results you might want to care about this number what you're seeing on the screen is the 85% is essentially the the volatility of AI

mode for local searches if you are searching on the dressed up. What it means is that if you search the same thing twice, like, hey, the coffee shop, nearest coffee shop, you will see 85% different sources between these two queries. And even when when you dive deeper into the city level, like imagine you're in the same in the same city in the same spot and you ask nearest coffee place near me, you will still see over 50% difference in sources. And what we've seen there is that Google tends to pull a much broader range of sources at this point and they're probably still learning from their audience, from us into what people are clicking. So at this stage, you probably want to optimize for more local blogs, local content to make sure that you show up in localized searches in Google's AI mode. So that's a short and hopefully sweet tip for you. Now, obviously, when you do this, one of the biggest questions is

which prompts will actually work best for us and how to track the success there. And that's what we're going to dive into right now. Let me just go ahead and share my screen and show you how you can do this. Just a moment. All right, we'll kick it off with our dedicated product, which is SE Visible. What this does is it focuses you on a single metric right away. What is your visibility score? or rather how often do you come up in the prompts that you've selected? That's essentially what you want to optimize for. We're also working in the background on letting you understand the impressions that you're likely getting from these prompts. And that's something that you're probably going to see from SE Ranking later, like in the first quarter of 2026. But for now, this is the the best the best you can get, I think, across most of the tools on the on the internet. So, your visibility score is what you want to optimize for. And then on top of it, obviously we had a lot of complimentary information that can help you make the tactical decisions that will help you grow your rank. First and foremost, you

can go ahead and look and look at this number by topic. So here I'm looking at Panadoc as a brand. Panodoc is a um is a B2B sauce for electronic signature. There there's a few segments of the market where it's present. So I'll look into a proposal software which is a software for for commercial teams for sales teams. Here my visibility score is actually perfect. So let me go and look into something where where I might actually have to apply more work with this signature. It's like it's even better with doc gen. I'm also doing good I'm assuming. So here this brand is doing good. Still I can appear on top more frequently and I see that occasionally docysine would beat me or their other competitors. I can also look into which new competitors are coming up. What is the position that they're getting and what is the sentiment that they receive? The sentiment side here is quite interesting. What it tells you essentially is how often when you're mentioned, AI talks about you in a positive light, negative light, or neutrally. For the most part, what you'll see is most mentions for most

brands and most questions are going to be neutral. AI does not tend to add a lot of adjectives that will be descriptive of whatever the business is. Sometimes though, it would include the positive mentions and negatives come up rarely unless it's like a very well-known brand or there's there's a real PR nightmare going on or people are really bedmoting your product on on social and that's something that you will be able to spot with this tool. Now, the next thing that you probably want to care about is sources. Lily has talked plentiful about the the impact of listical and different domains and sources here. So what you want to care about is here rather you'll be able to find those listicles and find the domains which you might want to optimize for. The way you do this is you simply filter by URL and you'll right away you'll see okay hey here are some of the blog posts that are ranking online that are coming up frequently that I might want to work with. And you

can go for a bigger date range to find more of them and even open them in a separate view. So it's easier to just navigate the list and go page by page review everything that you care about within the particular topic or across multiple topics. Here in this case I see that Zapier is a big thought leader. So it's a good opportunity for me to go and try to do some kind of co-arketing with them and to get some good visibility. On top of it, in terms of understanding your visibility, we obviously help help you pick just just a particular system to look into like you can go into seeing just perplexity or multiple systems at once where it's AI mode and perplexity. But then once you know the visibility, it's awesome. But probably the first question that you've had is well Mike, I mean visibility is cool, but what do I track? So here with SE visible, we make it quite easy for you to get the prompts people are most likely searching you with. So the way you do it is you put in your brand name, you put in the website, you pick the location where you want us to run the queries for. In this case,

I'll just keep stick to United States. Right now, only support English, but there are quite a few more languages coming soon. So you can have those projects and picking and searching rather assessing visibility across multiple languages, multiple locations at the same time. And what happens is for each language and location, we are helping you understand the niches that this product is most likely present in. And within those niches, we are finding and generating prompts that people are most likely asking. This is something that takes this hustle of, hey, I need to go and find what are the prompts that people are actually searching and pick just the ones that will work for me. We're actually doing a lot of this for you. And so once that's done, you'll be able to go into the list of prompts and see all of them and decide maybe some of them you don't want to track. Maybe you want to add a few others. You'll be able to remove the prompts that that you don't like fairly easily or at your own custom prompts just just typing them in if you feel like something specific is

missing. Now that's is a visible ass visible is your high level tool that'll understand that'll help you understand your visibility how competitors are doing um if you're if you're getting any kind of bad or good PR recent rec recently which sources have been on been top of mind recently to find the co-arketing opportunities or find those listicles that you want to optimize for. Now there's also a more granular granular tool that we provide as part of our SEO package and I'm going to show that in a moment right I hope you guys can see my screen ranking we've talked with SE visible I've started with showing like how you how you see the visibility I think here I'll do the same and then we'll look into how you understand uh which prompts to to add to the to your project. So in S ranking we have this solution that's called the air results tracker and what it does is it helps you understand which brands and what kind of sources come up for each for each prompt

and how frequently they do. So in this case I'm tracking Penoduct again in Portugal with Chad GPT but I also have quite a few other engines and um obviously what's most important to me is hey what is the same visibility score? what is my mention and link presence and here's my 50% visibility score for for brand mention that's my top of my metric then as we as we've just discussed I need to work with sources and this solution actually goes deep into into sources it helps you find the the sources that that have come up recently in this case there are nine new sources that I can work with or it helps me find the sources that within the content of those pages don't mention me or they're boosting my competitors while without mentioning me. And I can quickly hit the view sources button to see those right here in the list. So these are my 19 sources that not that are not mentioning me, but at the same time mentioning my

track competitors that I've set up and I can go ahead and I can pick the ones that I can work with and try try and do the outreach. What's going to happen next is every day our system is going to check these sources for other competitors being mentioned or you being mentioned and the moment you appear there you will know. One more thing that's worth mentioning here before we go further is that there's a very easy way for you to understand if you're if you're being your visibility is coming from sources or mentions. With this visible, we we focus on you appearing as a brand mention and here we actually analyze both in depth because we see that some teams actually focus on becoming a source themselves too in a lot of cases which is especially the case if you are running an uh anformational business or or similar endeavor. Actually see that we're short on time. So I'm going to I'm going to go and show you guys how you would how you would understand your overall presence across different search engines with SE

ranking. Let's go with the same brand Pinadog. This is for France. For consistency, let's go with the United States. So here we give you a really quick overview of how this brand appears across multiple different systems including AI overviews, AI mode, Chad GPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. And with all of these systems, you can dive deeper into the prompts where you get a brand mention or where you get a link presence. So if you click on that number, what you're going to get is you're get going to get a list of all these prompts with the understanding of what is the type of mention you're getting. For me right now, this is this is a tool that helps me find the prompts where I'm already tracking. And for now, I'm focused on proposal software, let's say. And I'll just type in the search query like proposal. And I'll get a new list of prompts here. The moment I've got this, I can go ahead and pick the pick the keywords and start tracking, add them to the right project. In this

case, it's going to be Penadoc. And add them to this to the AI engines that I care about. I'll just add them to all of them. Once I've edited this, they're going to appear in my AI rank rank tracker and I'll start tracking them daily. I think with us being short on time, I'll just wrap it up here and move into questions to see what you guys care about and what what I've shown and maybe we'll cover a few more things depending on where you want this to go. >> Thank you, Mike. Wealth of information there. Do have one question from K Hune Marie 6767. Among the four categories, domain authority, brand power, technical SEO, and content optimization, which one would you consider the primary priority for achieving visibility in LLM search results? >> That's a great question. I'd rather, if we were talking about the primary priority, I'd rather not pick an entire category, but rather cherrypick single like lowhanging fruit among the four of them. like with with content, the lowhanging fruit would be to go and work

some short and sweet updates and optimizing your titles and metad description and URLs. So that would give you a quick a quick win. Technical SEO, there's a lot to consider. So depending depending on where you're at with your website, it's it's probably not going to be a lowhanging fruit, but you still want to do this. Uh so it's more of a long-term project with dominant authority. That's definitely something that I'd invest into specifically from the perspective of getting mentions from YouTube and Reddit and other social social systems because those are as Lily has has shared too, those are in favor right now and that's what you want to optimize for. Although you have to be careful when listening to advice online because there's Yeah, there are a lot of potentially toxic techniques that in a few years may do more more stuff to you than the good stuff. >> Yeah, absolutely. All right. Uh, Mike, valuable information. We certainly want to dive into SC Visible because that's what we're looking for these AI tracking agents where we can really get a handle

and predictable visibility. So, certainly implore everybody to check the tool out. I've done it myself and it is amazing. So, Mike, thanks so much for your presentation today. And uh again, everybody who's watching right now, share this this video after after this so we can get others involved and be able to see what we're doing at on this online conference. Thank you so much, Mike. Appreciate it.