AI Overviews and assistants moved the point of decision earlier. The work is still SEO. What counts as winning is different.
The shape of the shift
For twenty years the job was to be the result someone clicked. Increasingly the job is to be the source someone is told about. The buyer still arrives, but they arrive later and better informed, having formed a shortlist you were either on or absent from.
Write to be quoted
A 2024 study by researchers at Princeton and IIT Delhi tested what makes a page more visible in AI-generated answers. Adding citations, quotations and statistics raised visibility by up to 40% across a benchmark of 10,000 queries. In practice that rewards a clear claim near the top, specific figures with sources attached, and structure that does not bury the answer under six paragraphs of preamble written for word count.
Entities before keywords
A model needs to know what your brand is, what it sells, and why it should be trusted on a subject. That comes from consistent naming, structured data that matches the page, and corroboration on sources beyond your own site. It is closer to the old work on authority than to the old work on keywords.
What has not changed
Crawlability, site speed, information architecture and useful content still decide whether any of this works. Google's guidance for AI Overviews and AI Mode lists no additional requirements beyond being indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. The foundations did not stop mattering because the interface changed. Anyone selling AI search as a replacement for technical SEO is selling the fun part without the part that makes it function.
