AI search is exploding — and everyone wants to teach you how to show up in ChatGPT.
But in this new “Wild West,” who can you actually trust?
Meet Ryan Law, Ahrefs’ Director of Content Marketing.
Ryan and his team have carried out some of the largest studies on AI search, backed by millions of data points, to understand what actually works when it comes to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).
If you’ve been waiting for a credible, data-backed guide to getting your brand and content visible in AI search — this is it.
What you’ll learn in this episode:
00:00 — Intro
01:06 — The Current State of AI Search
03:46 — 3 Ways to Influence Your AI Visibility
07:55 — The “Era of Off-Page SEO”: Why Mentions Are the New Backlinks
14:48 — Optimizing the Content Types AI Prefers to Cite
18:33 — How to Write for AI (and Humans)
25:51 — Finding and Fixing “Hallucinated URLs” from AI
27:18 — The Untapped Training Data Sources LLMs Love
28:37 — How to Perform a Content Gap Analysis for the AI Era
32:56 — The #1 Technical Mistake in Answer Engine Optimization
34:40 — Fan-Out Queries: How AI Actually Searches Google
39:50 — The Spam Strategy You Must Avoid
41:00 — A Simple 2-Category Framework for AEO
42:32 — AI Search vs. Google’s AI Overviews
44:50 — Outro
Connect with Ryan:
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/thinkingslow/
X — @thinking_slow
Connect with Tim:
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsoulo/
X — @timsoulo
Website — https://www.timsoulo.com/
If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to follow the Ahrefs Podcast and share it with a friend.
Referenced:
Ahrefs Brand Radar — https://ahrefs.com/brand-radar
Ahrefs Site Explorer — https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer
Ahrefs Web Analytics — https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools
Clearscope — https://www.clearscope.io
G2 — https://www.g2.com
Reddit — https://www.reddit.com
Quora — https://www.quora.com