Over 3 billion users per month interact with AI-powered search through Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Gemini, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot. These platforms aren't just new search engines—they represent a fundamental shift in how people find information online.
Instead of clicking through Google, users get synthesized answers with citations. Instead of comparison shopping across multiple websites, they get curated recommendations based on consensus from multiple sources.
This is not SEO.
This is not content marketing.
This is not traditional PR.
This is a new game with new rules.
The playbook is different and understanding these rules early creates a significant competitive advantage.
When ChatGPT launched the ability to search the web in August of 2024, we already had thousands of media campaigns live across paid, earned, and organic media. We saw in real-time what AI was citing from day zero. That’s a very unique vantage point that gives us access to data that no one else has.
This guide is the result of all of our experiments and learning since AI search was born. The goal of this guide is to give you an overview of how to win customers in the first new digital marketing channel in a decade. In some places, Press Ranger directly helps and in others we’ll simply give you the best practices. In all cases, we want Press Ranger users to win and this guide is to help you do so.
Across all of the brands we work with, referral traffic from AI chatbots converts approximately 3x-7x better than traditional search traffic. Traffic that comes from AI chatbots have higher intent and is significantly more valuable. It’s also growing rapidly and is easier to get.
But most businesses are invisible in AI search. While other marketing channels remain important, AI search is an untapped opportunity for most businesses where upside is high and competition is low.
Companies that focus on AI search visibility now will benefit from the increased traffic and the results will compound over time as their content is baked into future model training data, making their position increasingly defensible over time.
If you’re old enough to remember when ranking on Google was easy, you know that digital marketing channels never get easier over time.
We're in a similar moment with AI search. The tactics that work aren't widely understood yet. Competition is still relatively low. Most businesses haven't even started thinking about optimization strategies.
This landscape will change and it will change rapidly. Ranking on AI search will never be as easy as it is right now.