AI Search Changed. Your Strategy Didn’t.
Google used to send you customers. Now AI is answering their questions instead of you.
Your customers are getting answers without ever visiting your website. Google’s AI is reading your content, summarizing it, and giving people what they need right in the search results. They never click. You never know they were there. And it’s getting worse fast.
Most of the advice about what to do about it is often confusing, sometimes recycled SEO techniques with a new label slapped on, or complete fabrication. This site is different. These are research-backed guides to AI search optimization, built by someone who is obsessed with how AI is changing the way people find businesses online, and has zero patience for fake metrics and vague promises.
By Tim Dini | Last updated February 2026
Your Competitors Haven’t Started. That’s Your Window.
When someone asks ChatGPT “best personal injury lawyer in Chicago” or tells Perplexity “find me a plumber who does emergency repairs,” those AI systems don’t show ten blue links any more. They give one answer. Maybe two. And they pull that answer from websites structured in a way the AI can understand.
If your website isn’t one of those sources, you’re not part of that conversation. And unlike traditional SEO where page two still gets a trickle of traffic, in AI search there’s the answer and there’s everything that wasn’t included.
The shift is already measurable. Zero-click searches (when someone gets an answer without needing to click anything) jumped from 56% to 69% in a single year. Seer Interactive tracked over 3,000 queries and found organic click-through rates dropped 61% when Google showed an AI Overview.
Pew Research tracked nearly 69,000 real Google searches and found that only 8% of users who saw an AI Overview clicked a traditional result. Seer Interactive analyzed 25 million impressions and found that brands cited within AI Overviews earned 35% more clicks than brands that weren’t. The data isn’t ambiguous. Being cited is the new ranking.
That’s what this site is for. Five research-backed guides covering everything from content structure to schema markup to the authority signals AI systems actually care about. No fake metrics, no recycled SEO advice with a new acronym. Just what the research says and what to do about it.
The Guides
Five guides. Every claim backed by named sources. Every limitation honestly acknowledged. Start anywhere, but if you’re new to this, the AEO Guide is the foundation everything else builds on.
What You Won’t Find on This Site
Fake Testimonials. I don’t have a “Sarah Chevette, VP of Marketing at TechFlow SaaS” telling you how brilliant I am. (If you see that on a website, Google her. She doesn’t exist. You’d be surprised how common this is.)
Made-up Metrics. No “5,000+ Active Users” counters. No “240% Citation Growth” stats pulled from nowhere. When I have real numbers, I share them with the methodology so you can judge for yourself.
Claims Nobody Can Back Up. This space is brand new. Anyone selling “proven AEO results” or “guaranteed AI citations” is making promises the industry isn’t mature enough to keep. I tell you what I know, what I’m testing, and what I think. I label each one clearly.
A Sales Funnel Masquerading as Education. The five guides above are the core: research-backed, clearly sourced, and designed to be useful the day you read them. The Punch List (the monthly blog and email) is where the evolving stuff lives: new tools worth testing, AI developments that actually affect your business, results I can prove so far, and the occasional shiny object that all of us need to figure out together. Everything is genuinely free and genuinely useful. Nobody’s going to call you because you downloaded a checklist.
Who’s Behind This
I’m Tim Dini. I spent 32 years managing plumbing operations (not as a plumber; managing the business, the crews, and the 2 AM emergencies). I’ve been running an online business since 2008. I wrote a book called Effective Marketing In The Digital Age. I’m currently the Director of Operations at SearchLab Digital, a local SEO and PPC agency that works with businesses in industries where a single click can cost $50 or more.
I built this site because AI is fundamentally changing how people find businesses online, and the “advice” industry that’s sprung up around it is following the same playbook I’ve watched fail three times: Yellow Pages reps who oversold every business owner in America, SEO charlatans who promised page-one rankings with “secret” tactics, and now AEO “experts” who’ve been in the space for about fifteen minutes.
I’m not claiming to be an established AEO practitioner. I’m researching this obsessively, testing what I can, and sharing what I find. I call it “building in public.” It means I tell you what the research says, what I’m testing, and what I’ll report back on. When I’m wrong, I say so.
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