If you’re a CMO, I feel your pain. For years, decades even, brand visibility has largely been an SEO arms race against your competitors. And then along comes ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, not to mention Google’s new AI-powered search features: AI Mode and AI Overviews. Suddenly, you’ve also got to factor in your brand’s visibility in AI-generated responses as well.
Unfortunately, the technical shortcuts that helped your brand adapt quickly and stay competitive over the years have most likely left you with various legacy issues. This accumulated technical SEO debt could potentially devastate your AI visibility.
Of course, every legacy issue or technical problem will have a solution. But your biggest challenge in addressing your technical SEO debt isn’t complexity or incompetence; it’s assumption.
Assumptions are the white ants in your search strategy, hollowing out the team’s tactics and best efforts. Everything might still seem structurally sound on the surface because all the damage is happening inside the walls of the house, or between the lines of your SEO goals and workflows. But then comes that horrific day when someone inadvertently applies a little extra pressure in the wrong spot and the whole lot caves in.
The new demands of AI search are applying that pressure right now. How solid is your technical SEO?
Strong Search Rankings ≠AI Visibility
One of the most dangerous assumptions you can make is thinking that, because your site ranks well enough in Google, the technical foundations must be sound. So, if the search engines have no problem crawling your site and indexing your content, the same should also be true for AI, right?
Wrong.
Okay, there are actually a couple of assumptions in there. But that’s often the way: One assumption provides the misleading context that leads to others, and the white ants start chewing your walls.
Let’s deal with that second assumption first: If your site ranks well in Google, it should enjoy similar visibility in AI.
We recently compared Ahrefs data for two major accommodation websites: Airbnb and Vrbo.
When we look at non-branded search, both websites have seen a downward trend since July. The most recent data point we have (Oct. 13-15, 2025) has Airbnb showing up in ~916,304 searches and Vrbo showing up in ~615,497. That’s a ratio of roughly 3:2.
Image from author, October 2025But when we look at estimated ChatGPT mentions (September 2025), Airbnb has ~8,636, while Vrbo has only ~1,573. That’s a ratio of ~11:2.
Image from author, October 2025I should add a caveat at this point that any AI-related datasets are early and modeled, so should be taken as indicative rather than absolute. However, the data suggests Vrbo appears far less in AI answers (and ChatGPT in particular) than you’d expect if there was any correlation with search rankings.
Because of Vrbo’s presence in Google’s organic search results, it does have a modest presence in Google’s AI Overviews and AI…
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