I’ve spent twenty years watching people fight over the wrong battlefield. They obsess over the moment of the click, the position on the page, the conversion event at the bottom of the funnel. Two recent conversations on my podcast convinced me that the real action happens somewhere else entirely: in the place where someone’s mind is already made up before they ever land on your site.
The Decision Is Already Over By the Time You See It
Stephan Bajayo, co-founder of Vibe Logic and one of the people who helped build the enterprise SEO industry at Conductor, put it to me bluntly. We spend all our reporting energy on the channels we can measure, and almost none on the places where opinion actually gets shaped. Reddit threads. Comparison articles. A partner’s blog post that a buyer read three weeks before they ever typed your brand into a search bar.
“Be where decisions are formed, not made. You form an opinion on Reddit. You form an opinion reading an article. Those are the places that aren’t on any channel’s KPI — and they’re where the actual buying decision begins.”— Stephan Bajayo
That reframes the whole job. If the decision is formed in a dozen places you don’t own and can’t tag with a UTM parameter, then chasing last-click attribution is measuring the wrong end of the process. The buyer who converts “organically” already decided. You just happened to be standing at the exit.
There Is No Rank in an LLM
This is where the AI search conversation goes sideways for most people. Everyone wants to know how to “rank” in ChatGPT or Perplexity. Stephan’s answer is that the question is borrowed from a paradigm that no longer applies.
As Stephan put it, “There is no rank in an LLM. You’ve been trained to believe that ranks. That’s because you’ve been trained in the wrong things. The real question is: what are you giving them to interpret?”
An LLM doesn’t sort ten blue links. It interprets and synthesizes from whatever it was trained on and whatever it can retrieve. So the lever isn’t position, it’s substance. What does your content actually say about the questions a buyer is wrestling with? Stephan’s line that’s stuck with me for months: someone’s bullet point is someone else’s entire universe. The throwaway list item on your services page — “we handle divorce-related coverage changes” — is a person’s worst week of their life. Go into that universe fully, or get skipped by the model that’s looking for the answer, not the keyword.
I dug into the same tension between visibility and substance in my conversation with Greg Merrilees about the AI sameness problem, and it’s the through-line in how I think about AI search and generative engine optimization generally. The mechanics changed. The mandate — be genuinely, specifically useful — did not.
AI Search Is Not SEO With a New Coat of Paint
Brittany Trafis, founder of the AI-native agency Saurian Digital, took the same idea and pointed it at the agency world. Her warning is for anyone whose vendor just bolted “AEO” onto an existing SEO retainer.
“AI search is not SEO 2.0. If you keep treating it like just keywords and rankings, you’ll get keywords and rankings — in Google. If you’re trying to show up in ChatGPT and Claude and Perplexity, you’re not going to see it.”— Brittany Trafis
She compared it to running Facebook ads with Google ad logic when Facebook first launched. Same screen, completely different channel, completely different behavior. Schema is a good example. Google trained us to be technically rigid — validate or be ignored. LLMs care less about whether your schema passes the validator and more about what it actually communicates. FAQ schema works because it hands the model a question and an answer in one clean unit. That’s a difference in kind, not a difference in degree.
Ask Three Questions Deeper
Brittany’s most practical advice was for the business owner sitting across from a vendor who claims to have AI search handled.
Her exact words: “If your SEO agency says ‘we got it, we’re doing AEO, we’re doing AI search’ — really lean in, ask three more questions deeper. I think you’ll find they’re just treating it like SEO.”
I’d add: ask them where opinion forms for your buyer, and what they’re doing to be present there. If the answer is a keyword list, you have your answer.
Why This Is Good News for Small Businesses
Here’s the part that genuinely excites me. For two decades, small businesses lost the SEO arms race on budget, domain authority, and link equity before they ever wrote a word. Brittany sees AI search resetting some of that.
She told me about clients running a quarter of their competitor’s ad budget who are showing up with higher presence in AI results than the giants — because they move faster and write with more specificity. That maps to what I keep hearing across the network. Benas Leonavicius made a similar case for freelancers and small operators: speed and depth beat scale when the model is hunting for the best interpretation, not the biggest brand. It’s the kind of leveling I keep coming back to on the Unscripted Small Business show, and it’s why I send local owners in our Cookeville entrepreneur community at the Digital Christian Collaborative straight at AI search instead of telling them to wait their turn behind enterprise SEO budgets.
What I’d Actually Do
Map where your buyer forms an opinion — the subreddits, the comparison posts, the partner sites, the review threads — and get genuinely useful content into those rooms. Stop reporting only on the last click. Take your thinnest, most-skipped bullet point and turn it into the deepest, most human page on the topic, because that’s what a language model pulls when someone asks a real question. And pressure-test anyone who tells you they’ve got AI search covered.
The click was never where the decision happened. It’s the receipt, not the choice. If you want to win the choice, you have to show up earlier, with something worth interpreting. Both of these full conversations are up on Unscripted SEO, and if you want the tools I lean on to put this into practice, that’s what I build over at SEO Arcade.