AI Search vs SEO: How AI Agents Rank Businesses and Products
A series of systematic experiments on how AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude) rank business services and products, compared with Google and Bing search, and what that means for anyone who pays for SEO.
Start Here
Start with Part 1, which explains why I am running these experiments; Part 2 compares ChatGPT with Google and Bing for "top business near me" queries.
Questions This Series Answers
- How does ChatGPT decide which businesses to recommend?
- Does ranking #1 on Google mean anything inside an AI chat?
- Which index does each AI assistant actually search?
- Is paying for SEO still the way to buy visibility?
Key Themes
- AI search
- SEO and AEO/GEO
- Local business ranking
- Product listings in AI answers
- Measured experiments
Why I am running these experiments
For years, a business owner who wanted to be found had one main online lever: pay for SEO and try to rank on Google. It was expensive, but you could see the results page, check your position, and argue with the agency about it.
Now customers ask an AI assistant the same question and get a short list of businesses back. Nobody can audit that list. The assistant does not publish how it chose, and the same question can come back with a different answer tomorrow.
I would rather measure than guess. This series is a set of experiments: the same questions, asked repeatedly, across AI assistants and search engines, with the results published whether or not they flatter SEO. I assume throughout that businesses and products continue to rank for human readers, even as the agents learn more about us than the stores do.
Articles in This Series
- Part 1: Why I Am Running These Experiments
AI assistants now answer ‘who should I hire?’ from indexes that are not Google’s, with lists that can change between runs. This series measures what that does to a business that paid for SEO.