AI Search for Beginners, episode 1: the one-page checklist

This is the page episode 1 points at. The episode is about what AI search actually is: AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity, how they decide what to show you, and the one fact that should calm you down a bit. The checklist is short on purpose. Every number from the episode is at the bottom, with where it came from and when.

The four front doors

• AI Overview. A summary stuck on top of the normal Google results. It's built from pages Google has already crawled and ranked, and it shows up on some searches and not others, mostly the ones that are questions. The little cards underneath are called citations.
• AI Mode. A separate way of searching Google. It's a chat: you ask, it answers, you ask again. When you ask it something it quietly runs a bunch of searches at once (there's a name for it, query fan-out), reads the best pages from each one, and writes you one answer. Same index underneath, different front door.
• ChatGPT search. The same job outside Google, with its own model and a web index it reads from.
• Perplexity. Built as an answer engine from day one. It shows its sources more plainly than any of them.

Four places an answer can come from now, before anyone has seen your website.

The calming fact

The machines are mostly quoting the pages that already won. Semrush found 76% of AI Overview citations were pages already in the normal top ten for that search; Ahrefs, with a different method, found 37.1% of AI-cited pages ranking top ten for the same query. Two methods, and they point the same way. If your page ranks, it can get cited. If it doesn't, there's no new acronym that fixes that for you.

The checklist

Three things change. None of them is "start again".

1. Make the page quotable. These machines lift sentences out of pages, so give them good ones to lift.

• The question the page answers is in the heading, in the words a person would type.
• The answer is near the top, in one or two plain sentences, before the detail.
• The page carries a date and a name. Who wrote it, and when.

2. Put two new numbers in your reporting. Clicks on their own are going to undercount you from here on.

• How often you're cited: your pages showing up as sources in AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity.
• How often your brand is mentioned in AI answers, cited or not.

3. Keep ranking. Everything in this course sits on top of normal SEO, not instead of it.

• The normal checks still run: the page is indexable, it loads, it's linked from inside your site, and it ranks for the question it answers.

Every number in the episode

Number	What it is	Where it came from, and when
Past 1 billion a month	AI Mode users	Google, at its developer event, May 2026 (as reported)
About 3 times longer	AI Mode questions, compared with a normal search	Google, at its developer event, May 2026 (as reported)
76%	AI Overview citations that were already in the organic top ten for that search	Semrush, 2026
37.1%	AI-cited pages ranking in the top ten for the same query	Ahrefs, March 2026
25%	The predicted fall in search traffic by 2026	Gartner, 19 February 2024
About 2.5%	The measured fall in organic traffic across 40,000 large US sites	Graphite and Similarweb, 2026
0.28%	Share of visits from all AI chatbots put together, across 74,752 sites	Ahrefs, March 2026
206%	Growth in ChatGPT referrals, year on year, from almost nothing	Semrush clickstream study, April 2026

Next episode

GEO, AEO, LLM SEO. What the words actually mean, which ones are real, and which ones are just a new invoice.

Jamie runs Sequentis, an SEO and AI-search agency.