How To Crush Your AI Search Goals

Athyna has not yet solved AI search, according to a guest post in the Open Source CEO newsletter by Bill Kerr, which describes what has held up at the company so far. The newsletter, which reports 553,429 subscribers and 1,710 new readers since its last edition, frames the piece as an account of Athyna's AI search efforts.

- Open Source CEO by Bill Kerr ../ - Posts - How To Crush Your AI Search Goals How To Crush Your AI Search Goals Nobody has solved AI search yet. Here's what's held up at Athyna so far. 🧪 👋 Howdy to the 1,710 new legends who joined since our last edition You are now part of a 553,429-strong tribe outperforming the competition together. LATEST POSTS 📚 If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions. 🗺️ The Four Types Of Managers & How To Manage Them https://www.opensourceceo.com/p/four-manager-types . A leadership performance matrix to assess your team. 🤝🏻 Trust, Transparency & 400 Million Reviews https://www.opensourceceo.com/p/adrian-blair-interview . An interview with Adrian Blair, CEO at Trustpilot. 🛹 The Wikipedia Paradox: Fully Editable, Fully Trusted https://www.opensourceceo.com/p/the-wikipedia-paradox . Seven rules, one encyclopedia, and a lesson every founder can steal. PARTNERS 💫 You know the moment. 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See our partnership options here https://www.passionfroot.me/open-source-ceo?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals . HOUSEKEEPING 📨 Real estate was my first true love. I bought my first house at 19, and had three properties by 22. Now, at 40 and not having given two seconds to real estate for a decade and a half, I’m back with renewed vigor, racing out to properties, snapping images of the yard and asking ChatGPT to mock up a second Airbnb dwelling in the space for me see below . I also purchased an apartment this weekend in a group to paint, carpet, and flip, something I’d only recommend doing in a hot market, if at all. In this case, by buying as a group the entire block , we scored 20-30% equity at purchase. I don’t know what it is, but now that I have a little more expendable income, I’m determined to pour a good chunk of it into real-world assets. I might even document some of the more interesting stuff in here. Enjoy today’s piece GUEST POST 💄 How To Crush Your AI Search Goals Remember back in high school when a new student showed up and became the talk of the canteen? Everyone wanted to figure out how he or she fit into the school's social structure. Is he a jock? Is she a nerd? Which table, which crew, which rung on the ladder? That's where marketing is right now with AI search. Every team on earth is trying to work out which table it sits at. Most have decided it's SEO with a new haircut, so they've dusted off the old playbook: get ranked, or in today’s valence, get cited , then high-five and move on. And while it's true this new kid could totally rearrange the schoolyard, we're still firmly in the getting-to-know-each-other phase. But a few people have their hands dirty enough in the sandpit these analogies are bombing, I know to be making real progress. One person I know who fits that bill is my colleague Fernanda https://www.linkedin.com/in/fernandacarolinasilva/?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals , who runs organic growth and GEO at Athyna https://partnerslink.athyna.com/Axis-LP-opensourceceo?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals . She's spent the last few months working out what happens after the citation. I'll let her take it from here. Firstly, W-T-Heck is GEO? Hey, I'm Fer https://www.linkedin.com/in/fernandacarolinasilva/?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals , a Digital Strategist at Athyna https://partnerslink.athyna.com/Axis-LP-opensourceceo?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals , where I lead organic growth, SEO, and GEO initiatives. I've spent the last six years building organic growth for B2B, B2C, and influencer brands, and lately I've been all in on GEO Why? Well, there's so much potential there, and it's still massively underrated. Every week there's a new how to win at AI search https://www.opensourceceo.com/p/newsletters-guest-post , get cited by ChatGPT, structure your content for Perplexity https://www.opensourceceo.com/p/what-is-perplexity-computer post. Some of it is genuinely useful, but a lot of it is just old SEO advice with AI bolted on. Citations soon to be mogged. We've been growing our AI citations at Athyna, and honestly, that's a big win. Our GEO strategy is still new, so seeing that traction show up is real progress. But what's eaten up my last few months is a different side of this. People are fairly obsessed with citations and mentions. And okay, we get the citation, but then what? It builds brand awareness. Does it drive conversion? While most teams focus on getting citations again, important too , almost none ask the question that actually matters: how are people using AI search differently than they used Google, and what does that do to our funnel? Right goal, wrong read on the signal I'm not here to tell you to stop caring about appearing in AI answers. That's still the goal. I think most teams get it wrong once they read that signal. A citation gets treated like a win condition, the finish line. That's basically the old SERP mental model. But that model no longer holds because it's rarely the end of the interaction. Someone asking an AI assistant about a topic, service, or product isn't running one query and bouncing to a results page. They're having a conversation. It doesn't stop at ‘what is this?’ It keeps going. ‘How does this compare?’ ‘Does this work for my situation?’ ‘Is this worth the switch?‘ All in the same thread, sometimes in the same five minutes. That changes what ‘getting cited’ actually needs to mean. It's not about whether you showed up once. It's about how often you show up, and whether you show up across the whole conversation. The question worth asking isn't ‘did we get cited?’ It's ‘did we hold up across the rest of that conversation, or did we disappear the moment it got specific?’ And for that, you need to understand not only how to get cited in AI but also your ICP behavior in AI search https://geodde.com/article/geo-works-the-full-buyer-funnel?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals . The funnel became a conversation For so many years, the search funnel had a structure we all understood. Someone searches a broad question and lands on a top-of-funnel piece. They come back later, more specific, and land on a comparison page. Later still, they're ready to buy, and they land on a pricing or product page. AI search collapses that https://www.semrush.com/blog/ai-tools-the-modern-buyer-journey-study/?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals . One person, one session, can move through all three intents without ever leaving the conversation. <sub Doc BIll here again. While preparing the piece, both Fer and I created images to represent the phenomenon mentioned above. Putting them side by side below, so you can guess which is which.</sub This means the funnel shifts from being spread across separate visits to being spread across turns in the same conversation. And the AI isn't necessarily pulling all three answers from you. It's stitching pieces together in real time, sometimes from your top-of-funnel piece and someone else's comparison page, sometimes swapping sources entirely between one turn and the next. Your citation on question one doesn't guarantee anything about question two. Here's what that actually changes: content used to be built assuming the reader would leave and come back later, more informed, ready for the next stage. The reader doesn't leave. They escalate in place, in the same thread, seconds later. So a piece of content isn't just competing to get cited once. It's competing, turn after turn, to stay the source the AI keeps pulling from as the question gets sharper. Lose that competition on turn two, and it doesn't matter that you won turn one. What's actually working for us I'm not going to pretend I've solved this. Nobody has. We're all mid-experiment, but here's what's held up in the work we've actually done at Athyna https://partnerslink.athyna.com/Axis-LP-opensourceceo?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals . Step one is just getting mentioned at all, and that part is mostly what we see out there. Clean technical SEO, schema markup, structured content that answers a question directly instead of burying it. Get that right, and you start showing up. So other than those general strategies for showing up, this is our secret sauce to cover prompts and the whole funnel until conversion. 1/ We map the conversation before we build the content For each content cluster, we start by mapping the paths a conversation can take: what our ICP would ask first, what they'd ask next, and what would make them decide—all across the same funnel. This isn't guesswork. We test real prompts against real AI tools to see how the conversation actually unfolds, which angles come up unprompted, which follow-ups keep repeating, and where the AI itself steers the exchange next. Then we build. Mapping the paths doesn't mean spinning up a new page for every single one. Most of the coverage happens through storytelling inside content that's already being produced. Our top-of-funnel blogs are still top-of-funnel, answering the same broad questions they always did. But mid-funnel pieces now open with a brief intro that orients the reader inside the wider theme, not just the narrow query the piece was technically written to answer, so the reader isn't left stranded the moment their question moves past that one angle. Source: Answer the Public https://answerthepublic.com/en?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals . Then it gets tracked That tracking is what surfaces the real gaps. A funnel stage we know matters, with no page behind it at all. A prompt where a competitor keeps getting pulled in instead of us, over and over, on a question we thought we owned. Those gaps are where the work goes next. It's slower than publishing on instinct, but it means content gets structured around how the funnel actually behaves, instead of guessed at and hoped to line up. 2/ FAQs became one of our sharpest tools FAQs used to get treated as three or four questions bolted onto the bottom of a page, mostly there for schema markup, barely read, and rarely planned with any intention. That changed once the FAQ block started getting built as funnel coverage. Now, each FAQ still covers the questions the article itself is about, but it's also mixed in with questions from other stages of the funnel. The mix comes straight from the mapping work, and it's given us some of our best results, both in what gets cited and in how much of a conversation one page ends up covering. 3/ None of this works without the fundamentals Technical SEO matters just as much for GEO as it ever did for classic search, arguably more, because an AI system has to be able to parse and trust a page before it can ever decide to cite it. Schema markup in particular has been one of our strongest levers. We've put real time into getting it right across the site: clear entity definitions, structured data that matches what the page is actually about, consistent markup across content types instead of a patchwork applied page by page. But make sure you understand, schema doesn't create trust directly; it makes trust verifiable https://www.searchenginejournal.com/schema-ai-citations-trusted-source/586785/?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals by helping AI systems confirm claims and decide whether to feature a brand. Source: Ahrefs https://ahrefs.com/blog/schema-markup/?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals . What this meant for Athyna Numbers are our best friend here and a fair way to check whether any of this actually works, so here's where we landed https://partnerslink.athyna.com/Axis-LP-opensourceceo?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals over the past three months: 13,147 brand mentions from prompts we started using to position ourselves in the first 3 months, 3,117 citations across LLMs, and a visibility score of 32.3%. Organic traffic ticked up modestly too, about 5%, though the more meaningful change was in the quality of that traffic, since it's increasingly aligned with the actual ICP journey we've been mapping rather than just volume for its own sake. Visibility at the top of the funnel is only half the argument we've been making here. The real test was whether it carried through to something that actually moves the business. And it showed up where it counts most. The number that actually got our attention internally was leads, a roughly 4x increase. The numbers alone are worth writing about, but the leads coming in now aren't just more numerous; they're noticeably more qualified, arriving with context and intent that we expect. The SEO content work happening alongside GEO played a role too. But it's hard to ignore that things picked up right around when we started treating AI search like its own thing. Being consistent about it built authority, and that authority just kept feeding more growth. And the bigger picture: Athyna Intelligence Over the same stretch, alongside market growth in AI training, we've also worked hard to position Athyna Intelligence https://partnerslink.athyna.com/Intelligence-open-source-ceo?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals . In a market moving that fast, you need to show up as a credible answer and never lose the momentum. That's exactly what our GEO strategy also focused on. We can't cleanly separate how much of our lead growth is Intelligence-specific positioning versus the broader GEO and content work happening across the whole site. But the pattern is hard to dismiss: as Intelligence content matured alongside the rest of our GEO foundation, we started landing bigger, more significant clients & projects https://partnerslink.athyna.com/Intelligence-open-source-ceo?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals . What's been most interesting is watching Intelligence specifically start to carry its own weight in that pipeline. This isn't a vertical riding on the coattails of Athyna's established hiring reputation; Intelligence is earning its own visibility. And no, we didn't build a new playbook for Intelligence. Applied to a brand-new vertical, that same groundwork produced the same kind of results: stronger visibility, more qualified leads, and a pipeline with real momentum behind it. How you can apply this - Answer directly, structure clearly: Write content that answers plainly and early. AI models pull answers apart, so burying the point three paragraphs in makes it easy to miss. Back it with clean schema markup. - Map paths, not keywords: Keyword research tells you what someone types once. Prompt testing tells you where the conversation goes from there, and where it can go next. Run real prompts across every funnel stage and track where they lead. - Let existing pages absorb it: You don't need a new page for every question a conversation might drift into. Weave those adjacent funnel stages into content you already have. It keeps your site from fragmenting into thin, one-off pages. - Rebuild FAQs on purpose: Most FAQ blocks only answer questions about the page they're on. Mix in questions from other funnel stages too, so the FAQ becomes a small conversation. That's the structure AI models can actually lift from mid-conversation. - Track citations, read the gaps: Find out which pages get cited for which prompts, and which prompts nobody's covering at all. Missing coverage isn't a dead end. It's your next content brief. Future GEO isn't a channel you set up once and walk away from; what worked last quarter can quietly stop working without you noticing. So we're keeping a closer eye on a few things. First, dig deeper into prompt research. We're not just running the prompt mapping; we're expanding the number of real-world queries we test against each content cluster, going beyond the obvious and seeing how it goes. Then, strengthening brand presence on other platforms. Being technically citable isn't enough if the model doesn't already know who you are. Off-site brand mentions correlate far more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks do https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-brand-visibility-correlations?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals , so we're putting more weight into where and how often Athyna gets mentioned across the web, not just what we publish on our own site. Source: Ahrefs https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-brand-visibility-correlations/?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals . And finally, cross-model consistency checks. The same query can hold up conversationally in one AI engine and fall apart in another. Testing across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and others is on our roadmap; this way, we can keep expanding the GEO strategy and build a competitive advantage. Usage is genuinely fragmenting across platforms https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/ai-vs-google/?utm source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm medium=referral&utm campaign=how-to-crush-your-ai-search-goals year over year, and a brand that checks visibility in only one is seeing only part of the picture. Extra reading / learning - The Unexpected AI Hero Newsletters https://www.opensourceceo.com/p/newsletters-guest-post - August, 2026 - Marketing Has Too Many Humans In The Loop https://www.opensourceceo.com/p/doug-tallmadge-interview - July, 2026 BRAIN FOOD 🧠 TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️ Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. 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