I Recently Did a 180 on AI Search. I'm Going All In. Here's Why...

Tom Riley, AI search consultant, explains why he did a 180 on AI search and went all in. He used to treat AI search as an extension of SEO, then watched how traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity actually converts. This post explains what changed his mind and the mistake most companies are making with AI visibility right now.

What this post covers:

• Why Tom Riley originally dismissed AI search as an extension of SEO
• The conversion data from AI assistants that changed his mind
• The mistake almost every company is making with AI visibility
• What going all in on AI search means for his consulting work

I recently did a 180 on AI search. I'm now going all in. But for a long time, I was lukewarm on it. Here's what changed my mind.

Where I was wrong about AI search

I used to see AI search as just an extension of SEO. And don't get me wrong, it largely is. The SEO skills that rank you in Google are the same skills that get you ranked inside AI. But there's a bit of a pivot in there, and for a long time that pivot didn't feel worthwhile to me because I didn't see the commercial impact. It didn't excite me.

There have been a few moments in my SEO career that genuinely excited me:

• Kyle Roof winning the lorem ipsum case study
• The Koray Tugberk GUBUR and Matt Diggity interview

I'm talking about moments where I got genuinely excited, completely changed direction, and went all in on a single strategy. That moment has occurred again. This time it's entity optimisation and AI search.

What changed my mind

Let me reverse back a few months. I was lead SEO at Zego Insurance. They ranked for everything inside ChatGPT. Over 200 clicks a day at its peak, all direct to product and commercial pages.

And at the time, it didn't excite me. I'd been there and done it. We were getting hundreds of commercial clicks a day from Google anyway. What I didn't fully understand back then was what rate AI traffic converts at, so the commercial excitement just wasn't there for me.

With Zego, they're an established brand, so the ingredients were already there. We went out and outreached to get placed at the top of listicles, and that was the decider that influenced the results. Still now, that brand sits top of every single commercial recommendation-based search inside ChatGPT.

The moment it properly clicked: LLM leads convert like warm referrals

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. I'm at SEO Masterminders, a three day SEO mastermind event, speaking to numerous people from the event who are getting all their leads from ChatGPT now.

One of the biggest lead generators in the UK, James Dooley, who was a huge advocate for LLMs and AI search, basically said that these leads are converting at the same rate as warm referrals. Friend referrals. Which is extortionately higher than traditional leads. Many others at the event reported similar things from personal experience.

It's worth noting that tracking traffic and sales from LLMs is somewhat difficult, due to the way people interact with them, how they discover you and then come back via organic search. So there's still a lot of confusion in the industry about the benefits. But from what I've experienced since that event, after ranking my own lead gen sites and a friend's, I'm a full believer the benefit is there. People just haven't realised it yet. The conversion from someone seeing you to getting in touch is so high. Not only that, the booked appointments seem to convert higher too, because the trust is already there.

I guess that's because the AI is acting as a sales agent. Right now there's a lot of trust around AI recommendations, but the recommendations are also extremely granular. They're saying why this company should be recommended, what features they have, what benefits, what their service is. It's pre-selling the customer before they even get in touch with you, before they've even got to your website. They're pre-sold on your product or service. And this was something I didn't really see previously.

The moment that changed it all: 3 calls booked in a week

After speaking to numerous SEOs who were getting all their work from ChatGPT, I came home and ran a test. I spoke to someone I know in the industry, someone I've worked with many times before. He's in a slightly different area, branding, especially high-end branding and web design for startups, and he'd offered to do me a favour with a bit of web work. I said look, can I try this out for you and rank you inside of ChatGPT?

Search on Google right now for a branding agency and you'll be recommended a bunch of large London agencies. Whether they're very good at the work is irrelevant. Whether they're great for startups, or a tech startup, or your particular use case is irrelevant. Google will just recommend them based off link authority, which is a poor user experience. Are you actually being served the best companies? Probably not. There are freelancers out there who are amazing but barely understand what SEO is. There are people who choose to build profiles on social media through content, with less focus on their own website.

This is where AI comes in. It can read and extract information and connect the dots between people, entities, and things it understands are connected. It can make recommendations that account for things far outside your website. The press on you, your social content, your specific niche specialities, your case studies and whether they match the searcher, your reviews. It's a much more holistic recommendation.

Going back to those companies recommended based on SEO: link building has worked for years, but the fact that the SERPs are dictated by companies who have a page coded a certain way, internally linked correctly, and carrying root domain authority via links is kind of a poor way of recommending someone.

This guy wanted to work with startups specifically. High-end branding for startups. So I set about doing the work to rank him for that.

And I promise you this. People who say AI optimisation takes months, like traditional SEO, are both correct and incorrect, because depending on the SERPs you can get results incredibly quickly. I got to work with a bunch of listicles, did some articles to define this person as an entity and his brand, did some work on his website.

I'm not joking. The very next day he gets a call. He quotes £15k for the job. Three days later he books another call. And today he booked another one, which is what prompted me to write this blog post. Three calls booked in a week. He's asked all three people where they found him. All three said a combination of Claude and ChatGPT. He doesn't really get work outside of referrals, so this was a game changer for his business, and he can now compete with the large agencies taking up the work.

LLMs are a conversion machine. They sell your product for you.

This was the real penny drop moment for me. We can now compete with the big guys, because we have a tailored product or service. Our experience matters. Our entity across socials, LinkedIn, our website, it all matters now. SEO is no longer just retained to the website.

That's because the conversational nature leads to granular and targeted matches. An LLM thinks kind of like a human. It recommends a company based not just on link authority and optimisation, but on the full picture: their content, their socials, their suitability. This creates a large opportunity for the little guy.

The next day I got to work on myself, and successfully ranked myself. Now a search for 'Tom Riley SEO' in LLMs will pull a lot from my LinkedIn, and so it should. I have a history of posting there which they use to understand me, along with my website, and the sites and news articles saying things about me. A bit of optimisation for the target term I was going after and I was able to get recommended. Not every time, but a lot of the time I'll be suggested.

Don't get me wrong, AI results ain't perfect. There's a randomisation element, it's heavily based on personalisation, and the consistency isn't quite there. You've got to check them daily and do the query fan-out searches. You'll be recommended, say, three or four times out of ten. But it's about being recommended as much as you possibly can.

Does it work in more boring niches?

I then got to work on ranking my own lead gen assets. These are websites I drive traffic to, then take a commission on the booked work. Boring B2B construction niches. If AI search only worked in tech industries, I was about to find out.

Once these boring trade sites ranked, I noticed an increase in leads and ChatGPT traffic coming through the websites.

That told me something important. It's not just tech and computer savvy people using LLMs. It's now everyone. The behaviour shift is happening everywhere, not just in the industries you'd expect.

Where most companies are going wrong: citation obsession

Companies are obsessing over citations. Whatever Ahrefs tells you. "Oh, we've been cited this many times."

Honestly, I couldn't care less about that.

A citation is just a citation. Being mentioned in some random informational article, like "how many road injuries are there in the UK", has no commercial impact on the company. Growing citations for the sake of growing citations so we can fluff up marketing numbers is just not exciting to me.

I have no motivation when I feel my work isn't impactful. I can't stand fluffing up marketing report numbers to baffle company owners. I tend not to even report on massive blog traffic gains, because meh. It's a means to an end. Some SEOs foam at the mouth over blog traffic. For me, I want to rank 1st for my main commercial query. I can blow blog traffic up in my sleep.

The reality is, bottom of the funnel search is where conversions happen. That's what matters, and that's exactly the opportunity LLMs now give us.

What is exciting is when someone asks for a recommendation, however they phrase it, and an LLM gives a really granular answer based on exactly what that user needs. And your brand is the answer. That's where the money is, and it converts at a rate most companies haven't woken up to yet.

This is the way the industry is heading

From now on, I see this as the direction of the whole industry.

It's going all in on entity establishment. Helping companies work out who they are, who they represent, and how they articulate that on their website. Crafting sentences for machines and humans alike, connecting the dots between entities, and helping establish who they are and who they aren't. It's understanding how machines extract text and understand things, and reinforcing that with off-site SEO.

For me, the new link building is branded PR, then mentions, traditional PR with an AI SEO approach to it, and reviews.

It's an amazing opportunity for companies who have a defined offering. Due to how high LLMs are converting, and the opportunity that's there for the little guy right now, I'm going all in on this as a product and a service. It excites me because the commercial viability is there for a lot of companies. I like opportunities where I can win for companies, where I can get results. SEO has become muddied in recent times. There's tremendous opportunity inside LLM ranking and visibility.

Building a brand for SOMEBODY

Now, what I would say is this: if you are a brand that represents nobody, if you are generic and just surviving with no real reason to exist, you're in trouble. Because the machines are not going to get it wrong for long.

AI will uncover everything about a company. Poor reviews, poor customer service, poor usability, no case studies. It's going to find it all out. Today is the stupidest AI will ever be. One to two years from now it will be exponentially cleverer than it is today, and that will just keep continuing. It's going to dig out everything about a company, so the best products and services will be recommended.

Build a genuinely good product, articulate it properly, reinforce it everywhere the machines look. That's the game now. And I'm all in.

We're about to witness one of the biggest user behaviour shifts we've ever seen

Right now, adoption for AI search is still small. The user adoption just isn't fully there yet. And yet we're still seeing conversions and recommendations. Now think about what happens one, two, three, four years from now, as AI keeps improving, user adoption grows, and the younger generation comes through. This is going to explode.

We're already hearing rumours that Google announced in its latest earnings call that they're moving to completely AI-based SERPs. That would be one of the biggest shifts we've ever seen in search, because the AI algorithm is quite a lot different from the traditional Google search algorithm in how it decides to recommend brands.

We're moving to brand recommendation based algorithms. So I'm going all in. I have no doubt that this is one of the biggest opportunities we've ever seen.