Cited or Ignored: How to Get Seen by AI

The search engine is getting skipped, with AI systems and agents operating on the web more than people do.

With Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, people are getting answers and making decisions  online without ever visiting a website. The list of links users normally get after a search now get synthesized into direct and nuanced answers. No click needed.

Now that 60% of searches end without a site visit, traditional SEO strategies are hitting a massive discovery black hole. Recent data shows that 90% of businesses are uncertain about the future of SEO due to the adoption of LLMs, and 73% of agency professionals agree that optimizing for AI will be as pivotal as the move to mobile-responsive design was in the 2010s.

For businesses that rely on their websites to be found, the question becomes about survival: How do you make sure AI recommends your brand instead of skipping right past it?

If your website isn’t structured to feed these large language models, your brand is effectively invisible to people who are trying to find you. To win, businesses must master Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to earn citations, not just rankings. 

In this practitioner-focused session, WP Engine pulls back the curtain on our own real-world tests. We put the most popular AI-search tips to the test on our own website to see what actually helped, what made no difference at all, and what is still up in the air. Joined by industry experts, we’ll cut through the buzzwords and share a practical, honest look at what it really takes to keep your business visible in this new era of AI.

Key takeaways

• What WP Engine tested to improve AI-search visibility and what we found actually works 
• How practitioners are separating foundational AI-search work from trending non tested  tactics
• Actionable steps to build an AI-discovery experimentation plan instead of blindly following a generic AI optimization checklist.
• What new metrics now matter, and what you need to be reporting to leadership.

Featured speakers

Best for:

SEO managers, digital agency leaders, and content marketers seeking technical, actionable tactics to maintain search visibility in the age of LLMs.