AI search tracking

We're entering the next chapter of Google Search, where AI features aren't just in search. Google Search is AI search through and through.

That's a direct quote from the head of search at Google, Liz Reid, announcing at Google I/O something I've been predicting would happen by the end of 2026, but it looks like it's coming a lot sooner. Traditional search is breathing its last breath.

All search will be AI search. Let's talk about what this means for businesses and anyone who's doing SEO.

If you weren't aware, Google's big annual conference, Google I/O, just happened. This was by far their biggest Google I/O to date.

We have lots of other videos talking about Gemini 3.5 and Web MCP and LLMs.txt, but it was also the biggest change we've ever seen to Google Search, and that's what we're talking about today. Google has switched to an intelligent search bar, which allows and encourages longer searches.

It also allows you to include images and files with your searches. For SEO, this means we can expect longer search queries on average...

heck on the status of something, and every day it'll give you a notification on your phone, and all that's really cool. But the thing that actually has an impact on how we do SEO is that all these results are being orchestrated by AI.

Yes, we will still have blue links to websites in the search results. The process Google uses to select which blue links show up now has an added AI layer on top of it.

Instead of the human interacting directly with the search algorithm, the human is merely passing their prompt or query off to an AI. And it's the AI interacting with the algorithm.

So the human never even sees the raw website rankings. Instead, it's an AI looking through those rankings, curating them, and deciding which ones to show to the human.

And so traditional rank tracking breaks down. You have to be simulating the types of prompts and queries your users are entering and tracking the responses...

Ranking an AI search is so easy right now, and I think the main reason is that no one's tracking it. When I talk with businesses that are doing SEO, or even other SEO agencies, they often talk to me about manually going to Google's AI mode or ChatGPT and asking about their industry to see if their brand is mentioned.

And that blows my mind when the software exists to track this at scale and not just to see where your brand and your competitors are mentioned, but why. So I want to talk about the software we use, why tools like hrefs and Semrush aren't sufficient, and how this data informs most of our strategy.

But first, if you're thinking, why should I care so much about ChatGPT and Google's AI mode, Google's already told us that all search will be AI search soon. I think it'll happen by the end of the year.

And when you start tracking AI search results, you see they're quite different from traditional search results. So while traditional search isn't dead yet, I do think our focus should be on AI search entirely...

y good idea of what people are searching for before they hire a company like them. The goal should be to gather a representative sample of prompts people might type into AI.

And in most of those prompts, you should include a demographic or a use case. Something like, I'm an X looking for y to solve Z.

Can you recommend a company? The idea is to simulate the information an AI would have when it does a search and returns a recommendation.

Like 50 or more prompt examples like this, you can use AI to help you and then start tracking them every day. In ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, and Google AI Overview, we use peak that AI.

I'm a big fan of their team. But there are a lot of tools to do this.

Since these are probabilistic models, you want to run these prompts many times. We run them four times a day at first and then go down to once per day.

And this will, of course, help you see how visible you are in AI recommendations. But the real magic is in the citations...