Getting your business mentioned in AI search has become a multi-billion dollar industry. Venture capital money is funding countless new companies that promise to increase your visibility while consultants are selling their services at exorbitant prices. It's hard to separate fact from fiction, the real advice from the hype and the legitimate strategies from the snake oil. If we haven't met, I'm Matt and I work exclusively with businesses as an independent growth partner, helping them increase their brand visibility across organic channels, including both traditional search and AI search. I am in the trenches running experiments, performing audits, and seeing firsthand what works and what doesn't. And there's a lot of misinformation going around. So, in this video, I want to debunk some myths and provide clarity on what truly helps increase your brand visibility in AI search. This way, you can spend time on things that truly matter and stop wasting time on things that don't.
We're going to look at four big myths in AI search. Starting with number one, and probably the most prevalent, that chat GPT killed SEO. Now, when people say this, what they actually mean is that chat GPT has killed Google search, not SEO. Remember, SEO simply means search engine optimization. There's no specification as to which search engine we're talking about. But because SEO has long been synonymous with Google and because I mean, let's be honest, you're going to get a lot more clicks when you say SEO is dead, this myth has been going around quite a bit since Chat GBT's release. And honestly, the data shows that this couldn't be further from the truth. According to a study by Semrush that analyzed 260 billion rows of analytics data between January 2024 to June 2025, search tools like ChatGpt aren't killing Google search, they're expanding it.
Based on the data, ChatGBT adoption did not reduce Google search usage, but actually slightly increased it. Another study from Href shows that Google still maintains nearly 90% of the market share when it comes to AI assistance. And because Google's AI overviews are still pulling from top ranking pages in Google, there's never been a better time to continue or even double down on traditional SEO efforts. But detractors will say, "Yeah, okay, fine. JGBT hasn't killed Google yet, but just wait until more people adopt it for search. It's only a matter of time." At the core of this idea is our next myth, namely that AI search optimization requires completely different strategies and tactics than traditional search.
How many times have you seen this on social media, blog posts, YouTube, or even from a colleague that if you don't adapt to the new way of search optimization, you'll be left behind? I would humbly submit to you that the new way of SEO is really just a return to SEO fundamentals. It's a classical SEO renaissance, if you will. Yes, quite so. See, if you were to believe most people on the internet, you'd think the overlap between Google SEO and AI SEO would look something like this. In reality, based on my experience and the available data, it looks more like this, with SEO encompassing AI SEO almost entirely. I think this partially comes from the fact that many people see chat GPT as this mystical black box that has its own mysterious ways of collecting and indexing web data, some secret method completely separate from Google.
This would logically lead to the belief that you need to optimize specifically for how chat GPT gathers information. However, multiple experiments have shown that AI assistants rely almost entirely upon existing legacy indices. Lee over at Back Linko ran an experiment that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Chad GPT is just straight up using Google's index. And Claude uses an index by Brave Search, a more privacy focused alternative to Google to retrieve and present data. The only major AI company that I know of right now that's building their own in-house web index is Plexity. And even so, their results still heavily mirror the results of Google search. So, it wouldn't be incorrect to say that these AI assistants are largely just AI rappers for existing search engines. Now that we've pulled a Scooby-Doo and unmasked ChatGpt to reveal that it's basically just using Google, we have more clarity into the tactical side of ranking in AI search.
The truth is, I have not found a single AI search optimization tactic that isn't equally relevant to traditional SEO. And if you hold this view, I defy you to comment below and let me know. I'm willing to have my mind changed. But most of these things are just best practices that search professionals have been using for over a decade. Well, that's not true. I mean, it's super important to have contextincclusive language in your content. You know, having entire ideas summarized in sections, paragraphs, and sentences to make it easy for the large language models to extract. Yeah, we've been doing that for featured snippets since 2014. Rest in peace, featured snippets.
By the way, you were a real one. Okay, fine. But what about query fanout, right? AI is conducting all of these hidden searches behind the scenes. That's different from traditional search. You're right. That is different from traditional search. But we actually already made a YouTube video all about this. Link will be in the description where we go over Yakub's research on this topic. It turns out the solution to query fan out and ranking in traditional search is the exact same thing. building topical authority through core groups of related pages targeting similar keywords. We call these topical clusters.
Even though individual keywords are all over the place, Yakub discovered that 84% of these fanout queries are what he calls query neighbors, meaning they share common URLs in their Google search results. So, one page, if written well, and according to SEO best practices, has the potential to rank for many of these query fanout terms. Okay, fine. Well, what about brand mentions, right? It's super important for AI search to have your brand mentioned throughout the internet, and that's new. Well, there's definitely been a resurgence in the importance of brand mentions, and I actually think that's going to be a net positive for the internet overall.
People don't always link to other brands naturally when they write about them, and now there's a way to get more credit, so to speak, for those mentions. But to say that it's new is not actually true. Having UNL brand mentions across the internet has always been helpful for brand visibility even before AI search. And sure, given the choice, you know, I'm sure we'd all rather those brand mentions be back links, but it's still something that's been seen as a viable off-page SEO strategy for years. Okay, what about LLMs.txt? Well, I'm glad you asked that actually because that is our next myth that LLMs.txt txt files will help you rank in AI search.
So, if you don't know the lore, back in September 2024, a developer named Jeremy Howard published an article proposing a new standard for websites called llms.txt. The idea was that website owners would place a text file at the root of their domain called llm.txt that would give instructions to large language models to help them better understand and crawl the site. It's basically a sitemap.xml XML file, but for AI search. Now, the proposal is actually quite good, but somewhere along the line, the unhinged telephone game known as the internet took over and LLM.txt went from a proposed standard to the absolutely essential thing that you must do to rank. Guys, this is why we can't have nice things. Turns out people on the internet like to sensationalize things. Who would have thought? Still to this day, the myth of LLM's.TXT persists despite the fact that there is zero meaningful data showing any sort of positive correlation between AI visibility and the existence of the file.
So to put this rumor to bed, Mark Williams Cook created a completely madeup nonsensical standard called cats.txt and wrote his own proposal for it. Sure enough, LLM crawlers picked it up and Mark managed to convince AI that cats. txt was essential for ranking. Now, this is funny, but it proves two important points. The first is that LLM's.txt files are largely a waste of time. Though, I mean, it takes a couple minutes to set up and it won't hurt your site. So, if you really want to knock yourself out, but the most important lesson I think in this is the bigger idea that you can't fully trust ChatGpt or Claude or Perplexity or Grock for SEO or AI search advice.
At the end of the day, they're just language prediction systems that can clearly be tricked. And this leads me to our final myth about AI search SEO that Google itself punishes AI content. It's 2025. Can we just be honest here? It's it's a safe space. All right. By the way, subscribe to this channel so that you can be part of the safe space and like the video. We we appreciate it. Anyway, we're all using AI to some extent in our content creation process. The key is avoiding AI slop, which is usually like a oneshot blog post generated entirely by Chad GBT or Claude. Now, many people believe that this type of content is not only bad for readers, it usually is, but is actually punished by Google itself.
Now, this myth was so prevalent that Google even added a clause about it in their quality raider guidelines, saying, quote, "The use of generative AI tools alone does not determine the level of effort or page quality rating. Generative AI tools may be used for highquality and lowquality content creation. In other words, good content is good content regardless of how it's created. Now, in my opinion, the best approach is a hybrid process that combines both the speed and efficiency of AI with the unique creativity and skill of a human. In fact, if you haven't, you should definitely subscribe to the channel and click the bell to get notified because we'll soon be publishing, if we haven't already, my personal five-step AI assisted content creation method. Woo, that's a mouthful, but it's super valuable and you definitely won't want to miss it. The bar has been raised with the commoditization of content through AI, and success will come to brands that focus on creating genuinely valuable, highquality content, whether AI assisted or not.
And if you want to streamline your content creation process with powerful AI tools that supplement your creativity and don't smother it, be sure to check out Surfer. The link will be in the description. Thanks so much for watching and happy ranking..
