Want to get into AI? Here’s what you really need to do
Open Google, do a search, and you’ll come across an AI Overview dominating the top of the SERP. Use ChatGPT and you’ll find competitors mentioned. Switch to Gemini and you’ll notice that certain sources keep popping up. It’s clear: part of today’s visibility is at stake there. And your brand isn’t showing up.
“I want to be in AI” becomes a legitimate goal. But getting into the answers isn’t a single technical action: it’s the result of different mechanisms operating at different levels.
That’s why it’s not enough to make generic changes to your content. You need to understand what AI has already memorized about your brand, where you’re being selected in real time, and which competitive spaces you’re losing in the AI Overview. Only by working on these three levels in a coordinated manner can you build a stable presence in generative answers. And this is exactly the kind of control that SEOZoom provides you with: measuring, comparing, and taking action where needed, transforming a generic desire into a concrete strategy.
Where AI decides whether you exist or not
Online search has undergone a transformation and today feeds on answers, no longer just links. Artificial intelligence has helped eliminate exploratory browsing because today users are “accustomed” to receiving a ready-made answer and accept it as definitive truth. We are all learning to prefer the speed of an artificial intelligence that synthesizes, selects, and recommends.
If a brand does not appear in the summaries of generative search engines, the business disappears from the customer’s radar at the exact moment of decision.
So “being in AI” becomes the way to protect your visibility from changing search habits, safeguard your authority, stay connected with your audience, and influence purchasing decisions.
Your brand must appear in these summaries, and you must make every piece of information understandable to machines if you want to keep growing. This complex system (which we have defined as SEO for AI) is a challenge of algorithmic traceability in which you have the support of SEOZoom, which allows you to look inside the response engines and provides you with the data to measure your presence in LLM indexes, guaranteeing you control over this new search architecture.
How a generative response works
Be careful, though: the desire to appear in generative responses is vague if you don’t understand how the process works before the response is displayed,
The first level concerns the deep structure of the model, the one built during the training phase. At this stage, which we call GEO, the AI creates associations between entities, competencies, and contexts. If your domain is consistently linked to a specific thematic scope, the model recalls the brand as soon as the topic emerges in a conversation. It’s a matter of weights and connections: if your associations are fragmented, generic, or inconsistent, the brand remains marginal in the algorithm’s semantic network. At this stage, it’s not the latest published article that matters, but the solidity of the identity that the model has “internalized.”
The second level, which we call AEO, is activated in systems that use retrieval (RAG) to answer current questions. Here, the AI queries the web, scans available content, and selects the most relevant pieces to integrate into the response generation. It is no longer a matter of historical memory, but of immediate technical performance. What counts is the data structure, the coverage of the topic, and the page’s ability to respond with pinpoint accuracy to the query. If the page is unreadable or the content is unfocused, the algorithm moves on to the next source in a fraction of a second.
The third level is the visible one: the explicit citation within an AI Overview, an Answer Engine, or a conversational assistant. At this stage, competition is brutal and limited to very few players. Your brand’s appearance in the priority box depends on the perfect alignment between the identity stored by the model and the relevance of the content retrieved in real time. It is the final funnel where the AI decides which sources deserve the user’s click and which must remain in the background of the summary.
The overarching element governing the entire process is the nature of the question. Prompts are not simple queries, but vectors that guide the model toward different associations. A comparative request (“Which is better, X or Y?”), an evaluative question, or an exploratory prompt generates selections of different sources. Understanding which formulations produce relevant citations and which instead lead the model to ignore your business is the only way to control the brand narrative in the generative era.
The Constraint of Visibility Space
Presence in generative responses therefore depends on model memory, live retrieval, and source selection—and this leads to another problem: how much visibility is actually at stake?
The field is narrow, contested, and increasingly competitive. Let’s look at the numbers to see this.
Traffic generated directly by conversational tools is still limited. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude together account for less than 1% of total digital events: 0.77% in the United States and 0.89% in Europe. The phenomenon is growing, but it does not yet carry the structural weight of traditional search.
The center of gravity remains Google, with a European market share between 94% and 96% and about 10% of global desktop events. This means that AI has not replaced search: it has integrated into its interface.
And this is where the space is shrinking.
Data from the SEOZoom Observatory confirms that 42% of monitored keywords trigger an AI Overview box, effectively turning the SERP into a system of concise answers. The user receives the solution before scrolling through the organic results.
This area, however, is not an expansion of the SERP, but a reduction: only 0.13% of Italian domains pass the filter of the AI Overview. Out of over 168 million known sites in the Italian database, 216,023 are selected to power the concise answers. And 9% of total visibility here is in the hands of social networks alone—YouTube is the second most cited domain after Wikipedia. In some vertical sectors, such as health, competition is even fiercer because 41.9% of queries trigger an AI Overview, and the distribution of sources is heavily concentrated in the hands of a few giants.
The impact on clicks is consistent with this selection: exclusion from the list can result in a loss of up to 61% of organic clicks; the average organic CTR dropped from 2.74% to 1.62% between the summer of 2024 and September 2025. Even when the AI Overview is not present, user behavior has changed.
The point, then, is not that AI is “replacing everything”: it is that when it comes into play, it drastically reduces the number of visible players. And this changes the weight of every single exclusion.
How to take concrete action: the workflow for entering the AI
With such a selective space and a decision-making process that occurs on multiple levels, intervention actions must also be well-structured and follow a precise sequence. You don’t start with content; you start with the diagnosis—and if you skip a step, you’re only addressing part of the problem.
- Start with the identity that AI has already memorized about you
Before even asking why you aren’t mentioned, you need to understand which representation of your brand is already present in the models’ memory. The GEO Audit works on this level: it analyzes the semantic identity associated with your domain and verifies whether the attributed competencies are consistent with your actual positioning. It is the level that affects memory, not the individual response. Here, any inconsistencies emerge between the strategic positioning you declare and what the AI has assimilated. Without this snapshot, any subsequent intervention risks reinforcing an already distorted semantic identity.
- Monitor the conversations that trigger document selection
AI Prompt Tracker allows you to identify which phrasings make your pages selectable as sources and to monitor the presence of your domain in those contexts. This way, you can understand where you are already detectable by AI and where, conversely, adequate documentary coverage is lacking. The goal is not just to “appear,” but to build content that can be chosen at the moments when the conversation becomes decision-making.
- Check what is being said in real time
The third level is that of live responses. When AI uses real-time retrieval systems, the description of your brand may diverge from its historical representation. The AEO Audit analyzes active generative responses and shows how you are portrayed, which competitors appear alongside you, and which thematic areas remain uncovered. This is the level that connects memory and current content, the one that shows you the path to the most immediate and urgent corrections.
- Check your presence in generative interfaces
Then move on to the more concrete dimension: your presence in Google’s AI Overview, which provides actual feedback on your brand’s visibility in summary responses. You can check which keywords you’re mentioned for, how frequently, in what position, and alongside which other sites. And the analysis of the AI Overview content gap highlights where other brands occupy the space you could be claiming, and which topics you’ve neglected or handled poorly. Here, visibility becomes measurable in a direct way.
- Intervene with content built specifically for AI
Once the gaps have been identified, the focus shifts to targeted production. Your overall goal is to strengthen thematic coverage and consistency with respect to the contexts that trigger selection, and AI Engine is your ally, because it allows you to build content ready for extraction and summarization by algorithms. Start with the text and verify whether it is clear to AI, whether you’ve struck the right chord for selection, and whether you’ve addressed doubts and needs better than your competitors. Or go back and rephrase, verifying the effects of your changes in real time.
“I want to be in the AI” is not a technical request. It is a strategic stance.
Space is limited, selection is strict, and the criteria no longer align solely with traditional SEO. Those who manage identity, conversations, and sources have room to maneuver. Those who merely hope for an occasional mention remain outside a system that is reshaping the distribution of attention.
