🔥 SEOs Diners Club #193: AI Search Visibility - The Age of Retrievability, Not Ranking

Hello everyone,

This week, we're diving into what might be the most fundamental transformation digital marketing has seen in years: visibility in AI search. As the traditional "10 blue links" era rapidly comes to an end, we SEO professionals are taking on a new responsibility—teaching AI systems what to say about topics.

Metehan Yesilyurt, one of the industry's leading analysts, perfectly captures the essence of this transformation in his latest podcast. According to Yesilyurt, SEO had become somewhat "boring" due to repetitive technical tasks. However, with the new complexity brought by artificial intelligence, the SEO world is returning to being an exciting discipline "with its old passion." This conversation offers the strategic mental models SEO professionals need to succeed in the AI age, and I'll be sharing these insights with you in this week's newsletter.

AI Search Visibility Strategy

How Is the Search Paradigm Changing?

Artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) are fundamentally rewriting the rules of digital visibility. In a process called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), LLMs break down user queries into various sub-queries and process 40-50 sources collected from the web. They then use mathematical mechanisms like Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) to select the 12-20 most relevant sources.

This mechanism is radically changing SEO strategy. Success is no longer about perfecting a single page, but about establishing a broad presence across the relevant topic universe.

As Metehan Yeşilyurt explains in detail in his podcast, the RRF mechanism sends a clear mathematical message: The more times your brand appears among the initial 40-50 sources LLMs collect, the proportionally higher your chances of being cited.

Off-Site Brand Visibility: The New Strategic Investment Area

A surprising finding is emerging for AI search models: There's a strong 0.67 correlation between how often your brand appears in AI summaries and branded web mentions. In other words, the more different places your brand is mentioned on the web, the proportionally higher your chances of being cited by AI.

This finding inverts traditional SEO's "domain authority building" paradigm. Instead of building high-authority domains for new publishers, a strategy of being mentioned on already-ranking, trusted, and popular sites has become much more effective. While traditional backlinks still hold value, for AI models, even text-only mentions (without links) are becoming exponentially more valuable.

Target Platforms:

The domains most frequently cited by AI search models are specific. Reddit and Quora are seen as reliable by LLMs as centers of user-generated content. YouTube, with its video transcripts and videos themselves, is cited approximately twice as often as traditional text. Third-party review sites like G2, CNET, and Capterra are also among preferred sources for product comparisons.

Content Types LLMs Prefer

Research shows that LLMs prefer to send traffic to certain page types. Informational content (blogs, guides, how-to articles), comparison content (containing terms like "best," "top," "vs."), core site pages (homepage, about, product pages), and original research have high citation potential. Particularly noteworthy: Video transcripts and original research attract twice as much AI traffic as traditional search traffic.

Content freshness is also a critical factor. Systems like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini prefer much newer content than what appears in traditional search results. This significantly increases the citation chances of regularly updated content.

Optimizing Content for LLMs

BLUF Principle (Bottom Line Up Front): For both humans and AI, place the clearest and most concise idea of your content at the very beginning. Use definitive sentences instead of vague expressions. The title should be "5 Essential Tools for Business Growth" not "Some Tools for the Year."

Entity Richness: The more specific topics, brands, and entities mentioned in your content, the higher your chances of being cited by LLMs. Use specific phrases like "Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento comparison" instead of generic "e-commerce tools."

Synchronized Publishing: Distributed Brand Presence

As Metehan Yesilyurt emphasizes, "you need to be visible on every channel where your audience lives." However, synchronized publishing isn't about copying the same content to every platform. Success comes from adapting content to each platform's dynamics and audience while maintaining the core message. Professional analysis on LinkedIn, short and visual formats on TikTok/Instagram, value-adding contributions in the right subreddits on Reddit, in-depth videos on YouTube, and direct question answers on Quora.

Redefining the Concept of "Ranking" in LLMs

In the LLM era, the concept of "ranking" itself is now obsolete. We must redefine success not as tracking a fixed position, but as the ability to maximize the probability of a brand appearing in a response. LLMs are not deterministic due to internal mechanisms like "temperature settings" and re-ranking layers. They can produce different answers and varying citations to the same question at different times.

Metehan Yesilyurt's approach perfectly summarizes this balanced strategy: The fundamental elements of SEO—technical health, quality content, and authority—form the "foundation" needed to succeed in LLMs. Without these fundamentals, being taken seriously by AI is nearly impossible.

Action Item: This week, select one of your most important pieces of content and restructure it according to the BLUF principle. Then, identify platforms where your brand is mentioned but not linked, and engage in these conversations in a value-adding way.

Algorithm & Search Engine Updates

• This past weekend, particularly between October 28-31, the SEO world was active again. Although there was no official announcement, many SEO experts and automated tracking tools reported significant fluctuations in Google rankings. This volatility, dubbed the "Halloween Update," saw some sites experience drops of up to 42% in UK and US traffic. It once again demonstrates how dynamically Google is testing its AI-based systems.

• A more concrete development came from Google. The new "Query Groups" feature added to Search Console Insights automatically groups similar search queries using artificial intelligence. This eliminates the query clustering work we used to do manually, allowing us to identify our audience's main areas of interest and content opportunities much faster.

Action Item: Review this new report in Search Console Insights, analyze which topic clusters your audience is focusing on, and shape your content strategy around these groups.

AI World Developments

One of this week's most disruptive developments was Google beginning to roll out its new "AI Mode" experience to broader audiences, which completely eliminates the traditional 10 blue links. This mode provides users with directly chat-based, synthesized answers. The meaning for SEO is very clear: Either you're cited as part of the answer, or you're invisible.

AI Mode's impacts on SEO are significant. Visibility is decreasing (you're either cited or you're not), some sites have lost 20-60% of traffic, but here's what's interesting: The quality of incoming traffic is increasing. The NerdWallet example illustrates this well: They experienced a 20% traffic loss but achieved a 35% revenue increase. This emphasizes the importance of the "OmniSEO®" approach—search optimization everywhere, not just Google.

Meanwhile, the AI tools ecosystem is also growing rapidly:

• Grammarly has rebranded as Superhuman after acquiring Superhuman and launched its new AI assistant "Superhuman Go". This assistant works integrated with Jira, Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar to make the writing process smarter.

• OpenAI's more affordable plan, ChatGPT Go, has been made available in 98 countries, including Turkey. It stands out with more GPT-5 access, image generation, and a large context window.

• An exciting tool for marketers, Amplitude AI Visibility, allows you to analyze your brand's visibility on platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overview and your position against competitors. You can see the reality that "your customers are no longer searching on Google, they're asking AI" with concrete data.

Applied SEO Tips: Clarity Beats Everything

As emphasized in an excellent article published on Search Engine Land, the key to success in the AI age can be summarized in one word: Clarity. Your content must be both simple enough for a child to understand and structured enough for an AI model to easily process.

Blogging isn't dying; rather, it's transforming into a brand platform. We can no longer just publish an article and wait. We must think of our blog sites as "living systems"—everything connected, internal links strong, author bios optimized for E-E-A-T, and external authority signals clear.

The concept of "Retrieval Era" is also very important. As Duane Forrester says, instead of asking "Where do I rank?" we should now ask "Am I retrievable?" Mike King's "relevance engineering" concept supports this: AI systems look at how consistent, how well-connected, and how authoritative your content is.

Recency Bias shouldn't be forgotten either. LLMs prefer fresh content. Keeping your "Last updated" dates fresh significantly increases your chances of being cited.

Action Item: This week, select your top 3 blog posts and update their "Last updated" dates. Enrich the content with fresh information and make your titles clearer and more definitive.

Closing

The search world is experiencing perhaps the biggest transformation in its history. But this isn't an end—it's a new beginning. Instead of panicking, we should see this new era as an opportunity. In Warren Buffett's words: "Be greedy when others are fearful." For those with solid foundations, producing quality and clear content, and intelligently distributing brand presence, the coming years will be exciting.

If you're unsure how to position your brand's strategy in this new search world, we can always have a coffee with our team at Stradiji. By combining artificial intelligence and human vision, we can chart the right path for your brand together.

See you next week,

Mert Erkal

AI-Driven SEO Consultant

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