It is a fair question, and we hear it most weeks now: if people can ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity for a recommendation and get a direct answer, does ranking on Google still matter? Is SEO money spent on yesterday’s channel?
The short answer is yes, SEO still works, and no, it has not been replaced. Search engines still carry an enormous share of buying intent, especially locally. And here is the part most commentary misses: the same work that earns you Google rankings is what gets you noticed, trusted and cited by AI assistants. It is one body of work with two kinds of visibility.
This guide explains how the assistants choose what to recommend, what genuinely changes for your marketing, what does not change at all, and how to make sure your business shows up in both places.
How AI assistants choose what to recommend
An AI assistant does not know your business exists unless the open web tells it. When someone asks for, say, a good accountant in Galway, the assistant leans a little on what it learned from crawling the web, but for a live local question it usually cannot answer from memory, so it runs one or more web searches behind the scenes and reads the results before replying. Those results are the ordinary ranked pages, the same ones a person would scroll through. Either way, the raw material is the same: your website, your reviews, directories, articles, and every mention of your business it can find.
That means the businesses that get recommended tend to be the ones whose sites are easy to crawl, clear about what they do and where they do it, and vouched for by other trusted sources. If that sounds familiar, it should. Those are the same forces that decide Google rankings, the ones we walk through in our pillar guide to how SEO works. The assistants did not invent a new standard; they inherited the web’s existing one.
What has changed
Plenty, in fairness, and it would be spin to pretend otherwise.
- More questions get answered without a click, so being the source an answer cites matters more than ever.
- Buyers arrive later and better informed, having done their comparing inside the assistant before they ever reach you.
- Your reputation across the wider web, mentions, reviews and consistent business details, feeds directly into whether you get named.
- Questions are asked conversationally, so content that answers real questions in plain language gets picked up more readily.
The practical shift is that visibility no longer lives only on the search results page. You now want to be the business the answer names, not just a blue link sitting somewhere below one.
What has not changed
Underneath the noise, the fundamentals are untouched. People still turn to search engines in huge numbers, especially when they are ready to act locally: a burst pipe, a toothache, a table for Saturday night. Those searches still end with a website, a phone call or a visit through the door, and a strong Google presence still captures them. Walking away from that to chase the new thing would be trading a working channel for a rumour.
The work is the same too. A technically healthy site, content that genuinely answers what your customers ask, authority earned through links and mentions, and a fast, secure experience on every device: that recipe served Google rankings for years and it now feeds AI visibility as well. Nothing about it needed to be thrown out; it simply gained a second audience.
Even the timeline holds its shape. Foundations go in first, early signals appear after a couple of months, and meaningful movement typically arrives from months four to six, exactly as we set out in how long does SEO take. The AI era rewards shortcuts no more than Google ever did.
One body of work, two kinds of visibility
So the sensible response is not to abandon SEO but to extend it. The foundations stay exactly as they are, and a new layer goes on top: checking whether the assistants actually mention you when people ask about your market, structuring your content so it is easy to quote and cite, and keeping your business details consistent everywhere they appear, because an assistant cannot independently verify which business is best; it cross-checks the signals around you and trusts the one whose story stays consistent from source to source.
That layer has a name, generative engine optimisation, and we offer it as AI visibility optimisation; but it is better understood as the same SEO discipline aimed at AI answers than as a separate product. If you want to understand exactly how it differs from classic SEO and where the two overlap, we have compared them properly in GEO vs SEO. The honest summary is that neither works well without the other, because the assistants lean on the same signals search engines spent two decades learning to read.
What we would caution against is anyone selling AI visibility as a replacement for SEO, or as a trick that skips the groundwork. There is no shortcut layer on top of a weak site. If Google struggles to crawl, understand or trust your pages, the assistants will struggle in exactly the same way.
See where you stand, in both worlds
If you are weighing up whether SEO still deserves a place in your budget, do not settle it on opinions, ours included. Start with data. Our free SEO audit shows where your site stands today: what you already rank for, what is holding you back, and where the opportunities are that both Google and the assistants would reward. There is no obligation attached.
And if you want the full picture of the work itself before you talk to anyone, our pillar guide to how SEO works lays it out in plain English. The tools people use to search will keep changing. The value of being the business they find has not changed at all.
