Showing Up Where People Search -- Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Everything in Between

If you're only optimizing for Google, you're optimizing for last year's search landscape.

That's not a criticism -- Google still processes the majority of searches, and traditional SEO still matters. But the way people find information is fracturing. Google's AI Overviews now answer questions directly on the results page. ChatGPT and Claude handle research queries that used to mean ten tabs of Google results. Perplexity has become the go-to for people who want sourced answers fast.

Each of these surfaces has its own logic for selecting and presenting content. Google ranks pages. AI Overviews select sources to synthesize. LLMs cite content based on authority, clarity, and structure. Perplexity prioritizes recent, well-sourced material. Optimizing for one while ignoring the others means leaving visibility on the table.

Most marketing teams know this intellectually. The problem is operational: they don't have a workflow for it. They have an SEO tool that tracks Google rankings, maybe a content optimization platform, and a vague sense that they should be thinking about AI search. But "thinking about it" and "doing something about it" are different things.

The three layers of search visibility

At Admirate Agency, we think about search visibility in three layers. Not because we like frameworks, but because each layer has different mechanics and needs different tactics.

Layer one: Traditional SEO. The foundation. Technical health, site structure, content quality, backlinks, schema markup. This isn't going away. If your site is technically broken, no amount of AI optimization will save you. Every content strategy still starts here.

Layer two: AI Overview Optimization (AIO). When Google's AI Overview synthesizes an answer, it selects sources based on entity clarity, structured data, and how directly the content answers the query. Being "one of the sources" in an AI Overview is the new position one -- often more valuable because the user sees your content quoted in the answer.

Layer three: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). When ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity answers a question, they draw on content that's authoritative, clearly structured, and factually precise. Getting cited by an LLM isn't about keywords -- it's about being the most useful, trustworthy source on a topic.

These layers aren't independent. Content that's well-structured for SEO tends to perform better for AIO. Content that's authoritative enough for AEO usually ranks well in traditional search too. But each layer has specific optimizations that the others don't address.

How Skills and Plugins handle this

The operational challenge is doing all three simultaneously without tripling your workload. This is where having an integrated workflow makes the difference.

Technical SEO as automated hygiene. A Skill runs technical audits regularly -- crawl errors, broken links, page speed issues, missing schema, duplicate content. The kind of work that SEO agencies charge retainers for but that's fundamentally pattern recognition. The Skill flags issues, prioritizes them by impact, and in many cases suggests the specific fix.

This isn't revolutionary -- plenty of tools do this. The difference is that it's the same Skill that handles the other layers, so the recommendations are coherent. A schema markup recommendation from the SEO audit is aligned with the entity strategy for AIO, which is aligned with the content structure for AEO.

Content creation that speaks to all three layers. When we create content, a Skill structures it with all three surfaces in mind. That means:

• Clear entity definitions that help AI Overviews understand what the content is about
• Direct question-and-answer patterns that LLMs can cite cleanly
• Proper heading hierarchy and schema markup for traditional SEO
• Factual precision and source attribution that builds the kind of authority LLMs value

This isn't about gaming any system. It's about creating content that's genuinely useful and structured in a way that machines can parse it correctly. Good content, well-organized. The tactics aren't secret -- they're just tedious to do manually at scale.

Programmatic pages where they make sense. For certain content types -- comparison pages, location-specific landing pages, feature breakdowns -- programmatic generation makes sense. A Skill generates these at scale using templates and data, but not the lazy kind of programmatic content that's just keyword-stuffed templates. Each page is substantive because the Skill understands the topic and can produce genuinely useful content for each variation.

Monitoring across all surfaces. This is where most teams have a blind spot. They track Google rankings but have no idea whether their content is being cited by LLMs or appearing in AI Overviews. A Plugin monitors visibility across these surfaces -- not just "did we rank" but "did we get cited" and "were we included in the AI Overview for this query."

This monitoring feeds back into content strategy. If a piece ranks well in Google but never gets cited by LLMs, the Skill analyzes why and suggests structural changes. If content appears in AI Overviews but doesn't drive traffic, the approach gets adjusted.

The compounding advantage

Search visibility has always been a compounding game. Sites that invested in SEO early built authority that's hard to replicate. The same dynamic is playing out now with AI search -- teams that figure out how to be cited by LLMs and selected by AI Overviews are building an advantage that compounds over time.

The tactics aren't secret. Structured content, entity clarity, factual precision, schema markup, authority signals -- none of this is hidden knowledge. What's rare is having the operational capacity to execute it consistently across all three layers, for every piece of content, at scale.

That's the actual moat. Not knowing what to do -- knowing what to do and having a system that does it. The teams that build these systems now, while most competitors are still treating AI search as a future problem, are going to be hard to catch.