Your website is doing its job, but that might not be enough to build the authority needed to win in AI search.
There was a good amount of time when AIOs were first rolling out, where inclusion correlated heavily with Google rankings, and I remember people talking a lot about the correlation between ChatGPT mentions and Google rankings, too.
But new data suggests that’s increasingly not the case. For example, Semrush found that when ChatGPT cites webpages, about 90% of those pages rank at or below position 21 in traditional search results.
At the same time, it’s important to remember: Google still drives the vast majority of organic traffic — AI platforms account for just 0.15% of global internet traffic compared to 48.5% from organic search.
Two different, yet intertwined strategies are necessary. As organic content marketers, we’ve got to think bigger now.
AI search doesn’t pull only from your website. It pulls from everywhere your name (or brand) is mentioned. That means YouTube, review sites, LinkedIn posts, Reddit threads, press mentions, newsletters, etc.
If your brand shows up in those places with authority and consistency, you’re in the conversation. If it doesn’t, you might not be, even if your on-site SEO is perfectly dialed in.
On-page isn’t enough anymore
When someone asks an AI engine for a recommendation, it isn’t crawling your site in real time. It’s often drawing on sources it’s already decided to trust, and those sources go well beyond your website.
Semrush analyzed 89,000 LinkedIn URLs cited in AI responses and found LinkedIn is now the #1 cited domain for professional queries across every major AI platform. We’re talking posts and articles tied to real experts.
YouTube’s share of social citations in AI doubled from 18.9% to 39.2% in just four months. And AirOps analyzed 5.5 million LLM responses and found that across Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google AI Mode, the top three most-cited domains all come from user-generated and community platforms.
The channels you actually control, and consistently publish on, are citation surfaces. 🥳
And every chance for inclusion across these surfaces is a huge opportunity.
Your blog is table stakes and should still serve as an SEO traffic driver, but we’ve got to work to influence the broader picture of our expertise on the web.
What authority engineering looks like
A piece of content shouldn’t just live in one place. A client I worked with saw strong AI citation results simply by repurposing authority-backed informational articles into YouTube videos, social posts, and newsletter content.
Same core material, more surface area for any algorithm (or heck, person) to find it. More places to build trust, and more chances to earn a click.
That’s authority engineering in practice: taking what you know and distributing it into the places AI is already pulling from.
This could look like:
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Deciding who the “voice” of the brand is. Whose expertise are you trying to amplify?
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Extracting the knowledge, tying it to customer queries/topical interests
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Turning that knowledge into a solid post that lives on-site, bylined (or “reviewed”) by the expert
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Atomizing content to live in spaces AI pulls from: video, think pieces, social posts
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Highlighting off-site research, contributions, mentions of your brand or voice throughout
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Treating every off-site touchpoint as a credibility signal
The framing I keep coming back to: we’re trying to create a web of authority that’s all interconnected. It should feel like a complete journey, no matter where someone finds you. They should all reinforce each other.
Would love to hear about any studies ya’ll are seeing that support/refute this! There’s so much new info coming out all the time.
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Karli is content marketing consultant behind Wild Idea, a content marketing and SEO collective focused on driving big results. With over 12 years in the marketing industry, she’s worked with brands large and small across many industries to grow organic traffic and reach new audiences. She writes on everything from marketing, social, and SEO to travel and real estate. On the weekends, she loves to explore new places, enjoy the outdoors and have a glass or two of vino!
