Search has fractured. Where Google once controlled nearly every discovery moment online, users are now researching through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google’s own AI Overviews, often getting complete answers without ever clicking a link. For SEO professionals and business owners, this shift is creating both anxiety and opportunity. Anshul Rana, a technical SEO and AI search specialist with over eight years of experience and clients across four countries, shares his unfiltered take on where search is heading and what needs to change.
THE INTERVIEW
Q: You work with clients across healthcare, legal, SaaS, and IT services. Are they all feeling the impact of AI search the same way?
A: Not equally. Clients in sectors where users ask research questions before making a decision are seeing the most significant impact. Healthcare and legal clients, for instance, have always relied on informational content to attract patients and prospects. That traffic is now being intercepted by AI Overviews and chat-based answers. If their content is not structured to be cited inside those answers, they are invisible during the most important part of the buyer journey. B2B IT and SaaS clients are seeing the same thing. Research from 2026 suggests that over half of B2B software buyers now start their vendor research with an AI chatbot rather than a search engine. That is a fundamental change in how deals begin.
Q: Let us talk about the numbers. What does the landscape actually look like in 2026?
A: The data is striking. ChatGPT is processing around 2.5 billion prompts per day. Google AI Overviews now appear in a significant share of all search queries. Nearly 60 percent of US searches end without a click. And Gartner projected that traditional search engine volume would drop 25 percent by 2026 as users migrate to AI interfaces. What this means practically is that the channel split between traditional and AI search is now real and measurable. You cannot ignore either. But most businesses are still only tracking Google rankings and organic traffic, which means they are flying blind on a channel that is growing faster than anything we have seen.
Q: GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, is the term you use most in your work. How do you explain it to a client who has never heard it?
A: I tell them: SEO was about being found. GEO is about being recommended. When someone asks an AI which accounting firm handles Australian SMBs, or which managed services provider works with healthcare organizations, the AI synthesizes an answer from multiple sources and names specific brands. GEO is the practice of making sure your brand is one of the names mentioned. It requires content that AI systems can extract cleanly, entity signals that establish your brand as a credible authority in your category, and third-party mentions that validate what your own website claims. Research from Brandlight suggests the overlap between top Google results and AI-cited sources has dropped below 20 percent. Ranking on Google no longer guarantees AI visibility.
Q: What are most SEO agencies getting wrong about this transition?
A: Two things. First, they are treating GEO as a completely separate discipline and selling it as an add-on. In reality, GEO builds on strong SEO fundamentals. Clean site architecture, fast load times, quality backlinks, and authoritative content all feed into AI visibility because most AI search systems use retrieval-augmented generation, pulling from live web search. If your SEO foundation is weak, your GEO results will reflect that. Second, they are focusing on content volume when the real leverage is in content structure and off-site authority. Research is clear that 68 percent of AI citations come from third-party sources, not the brand’s own website. Building digital PR, getting featured in industry publications, and seeding mentions on Reddit and LinkedIn matter more than publishing fifty more blog posts.
Q: You mentioned AI Overviews specifically. How should businesses be thinking about that channel?
A: AI Overviews are Google’s integration of generative AI directly into search results. They appear above organic results for a significant portion of queries and answer the question without requiring a click. For businesses, this is where the zero-click problem is most acute. The position-one CTR drops dramatically when an AI Overview is present. However, if your content is cited inside the AI Overview, you still get brand visibility even without the click, and the users who do click through tend to be higher intent. The strategy is to focus on being the source the AI Overview pulls from, not on displacing it. That means answer-first content structure, strong E-E-A-T signals, and accurate schema markup.
Q: What is the one thing a business should do this week to improve its AI search visibility?
A: Run a manual citation audit. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Ask the exact questions your clients ask when researching your services. See whether your brand appears. See whose brand does appear. That gives you your gap clearly in ten minutes. Most businesses have never done this. They do not know whether they are cited, misrepresented, or invisible. The audit is the starting point for everything else.
Anshul Rana is the founder of The Digital Geek, a digital marketing agency based in Derabassi, Punjab. He is a Top Rated Plus freelancer on Upwork specializing in Technical SEO, AEO, and GEO. Connect at anshulrana.in.
