AI Overviews take center stage in search experiences and marketers are being pushed to shift from SEO to brand visibility. It’s no longer just about showing up in Google, it’s about being recognized across the entire internet.
AI agents now scan the web for authentic, helpful content that genuinely responds to user intent. With traditional click-through rates eroding, the challenge for brands isn’t just ranking, it’s being seen and understood wherever people (and machines) look.
Even businesses with a solid SEO strategy are seeing drops in organic traffic lately and it’s not because you’re doing something wrong.
Search in 2025 just doesn’t look like it used to.
Traditional SEO – meta tags, keyword density, backlink building – it’s no longer the full picture. What matters now is how well your brand is understood and trusted across the internet.
The LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT and Gemini aren’t reading your meta tags.
They’re scanning the web for relevant and fresh content. The AI overviews are piecing together your presence from your structure, your schema, your backlinks, and how often your brand appears in forums, roundups, directories, social media and conversations.
The winners in search aren’t just optimized. They’re trusted.
Here’s how to stay relevant for AI overviews:
- Your website to answer real questions, not just check SEO boxes.
- Your content needs to sound like it came from someone who’s done the work: authentic, specific, and helpful.
- Your brand authority to go farther than blogs. In expert interviews, user-generated content, reviews, and LinkedIn posts.
- Video matters now—shorts, reels, explainers, whatever people are watching.
- Schema still helps, but only if the content it’s marking up is worth reading.
For small businesses, this is a huge opportunity. You can build trust and relevance before your competitors even realize the rules have changed. Because the rules have changed.
You’re not just optimizing for Google anymore. You’re teaching the web – and the AI searching through it – to recognize and recommend you.
Relevance is the new baseline. Visibility is built everywhere, from everywhere.
