The rules of search are being rewritten. If your digital strategy still revolves around ranking in Google’s top ten, it may be time to rethink your approach.
A recent Semrush study titled “How AI Mode Stacks Up Against Top LLMs” offers powerful insights into how generative AI platforms—such as Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews—are surfacing content in search experiences. With over 150,000 citations analyzed, the study shows that traditional SEO rankings are no longer a reliable indicator of whether your brand will appear in AI-generated answers.
Google AI Mode, now in experimental release, provides users with full-page, conversational search results powered by generative models. AI Overviews, by contrast, show shorter summaries above regular search listings. Both represent a growing shift in how users access information, often without clicking through to websites.
This shift matters to marketers, content creators, and business owners who rely on organic search to drive discovery, trust, and revenue.
AI Doesn’t Just Rank—It Summarizes and Selects
Semrush found that Google AI Mode mentions brands in 90 percent of responses, while AI Overviews cite fewer sources and are more volatile. Even more telling, platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity regularly cite domains that don’t appear in the top ten of Google search results. Most citations from these AI systems come from content ranking twenty-first or lower, challenging the long-held assumption that “ranking equals visibility.”
This means content is being selectively interpreted, summarized, and presented by AI models that prioritize clarity, trustworthiness, and structure.
AI Mode also shows more diversity in the sources it references, averaging seven unique domains per response. This offers broader exposure, especially for brands that optimize their content to be clear, factual, and well-structured.
Search Intent Shapes the AI Experience
The study highlights that commercial and transactional queries, such as product comparisons or “best of” lists, produce significantly longer responses than purely informational ones. This indicates that AI systems are more thorough when user intent shows buying signals or deeper research needs.
For businesses in e-commerce, travel, education, or real estate sectors central to the Philippine economy, this matters. A consumer searching for “best resorts in Palawan” might never scroll through traditional search results. Instead, they’ll scan an AI-generated summary. If your content isn’t structured with clear headings, factual listings, and schema markup, you may be invisible to the system shaping that decision.
GEO, Not Just SEO
While there’s some overlap between AI citations and top-ranking websites, especially in Google AI Overviews, the consistency drops sharply in AI Mode and third-party LLMs like ChatGPT. The overlap between Google AI Mode and its own top ten search results is only 54 percent at the domain level and 35 percent at the URL level. For ChatGPT and Perplexity, it’s even lower.
This signals a shift toward what I call Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), a content strategy designed to make your brand discoverable in AI-generated responses. GEO prioritizes structured formatting, question-driven writing, and semantic clarity. It is more than just keywords, it is about context, presentation, and how well your content aligns with the way AI systems retrieve and assemble information.
It is important to note that traditional SEO remains foundational. Optimizing for user experience, page speed, relevance, and backlinks continues to play a key role in long-term digital visibility. GEO builds on these strengths by preparing content to perform well in AI-generated summaries—not as a replacement, but as a strategic expansion.
Local Implications for Filipino Brands and Creators
For MSMEs and digital professionals in the Philippines, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. You may not have the budget to dominate the first page of Google, but you can still be referenced by AI systems if your content is well-crafted.
Tourism agencies, local restaurants, retail brands, advocacy groups, and educational institutions can all benefit by structuring content with AI readability in mind. The more concise, factual, and useful your content is, the more likely it will be surfaced, even if it doesn’t rank highly in organic search.
A page titled “Top 5 Organic Markets in Cebu” that includes clear locations, hours, and descriptions stands a far better chance of being cited than a generic blog post with long narratives and no structure.
Even small changes matter. Adding an FAQ section, summarizing key points, or breaking up long blocks of text can significantly increase your content’s AI visibility. GEO doesn’t require a complete website overhaul. It invites you to be more intentional in how you present knowledge.
The Ethical Tension
The rise of AI search brings not only strategic shifts but ethical considerations as well. Many content creators worry about being scraped, summarized, and quoted by AI systems without attribution or traffic. While AI exposure can increase brand awareness, it may not lead to clicks or credit.
This highlights the growing need for industry dialogue on fair use, AI transparency, and proper citation standards. Encouragingly, there are ongoing efforts in the tech and content sectors to explore frameworks for ethical AI citation and digital rights. GEO helps your content be found, but broader policies must ensure creators are respected and fairly represented in these new systems.
What You Can Do Now
To adapt to this new era of AI-driven visibility, marketers and business owners can take the following steps.
- Start by structuring your content. Use subheadings, summaries, FAQs, and lists to improve AI readability.
- Answer specific questions directly. AI systems are trained to pull direct, answer-level responses. Make it easy for them to lift useful excerpts from your content.
- Apply schema markup. Especially for product pages, how-to guides, and event listings, structured data helps machines understand and surface your content correctly.
- Track your AI visibility. Use AI monitoring tools to find out if your brand is being cited by ChatGPT, Bard, Perplexity, or Google AI Mode. Awareness is the first step to optimization.
- Keep a human touch. Even as we write for AI, we must continue to write with clarity, empathy, and usefulness in mind. That’s what both algorithms and audiences reward.
Final Thoughts
AI search is changing what it means to be visible. Being on page one of Google may no longer be enough. The new challenge is to be part of the answer—quoted in a summary, selected as a source, and recognized as a trustworthy voice.
It’s important to recognize that AI citations do not always equal traffic or conversions, but they do influence brand perception, credibility, and relevance. If your brand is consistently referenced in generative search, you become part of the user’s decision-making journey earlier and more often.
Whether you're a marketer, a teacher, a founder, or a freelancer, the same principle applies. If you want to stay seen, your content must evolve with how people—and machines—search.
The age of generative search has arrived. The question now is, are you part of what AI says next?
About the Author
Janette Toral is a Digital Strategist at Dominguez Digital Marketing, where she guides brands through digital transformation using data, content, and emerging technologies. With over two decades of experience in digital marketing and education, she is also a passionate advocate for responsible and strategic AI adoption in business. Her latest book, Smarter with AI: A Confidence-Building Guide for Using Artificial Intelligence in Business and Everyday Work, explores how professionals and organizations can use artificial intelligence to boost creativity, productivity, and performance in the digital age.