Ask ChatGPT where to find a good hiking boot and it won't just scrape Google's top ten. It'll pull from articles, reviews, news stories — stuff written by actual humans on actual websites. And that's got a lot of businesses rethinking how they show up online.
I run a website. I write about travel, adventure, life on the road after 70. And lately I've been asking myself the same question a lot of business owners are asking: if people stop typing into Google and start asking an AI assistant instead, does my work even show up?
Turns out there's real data on this now, and it's worth paying attention to.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
A Malta-based agency called Woya Digital just expanded its digital PR services, and the reason why caught my attention. They pointed to a study that looked at more than 25 million links cited across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. The finding? Twenty-seven percent of those citations came from journalistic sources — actual news and media coverage, not company websites.
Steve O'Brien, who runs Woya Digital along with something called Fleet Street News, put it simply: "A brand can no longer think only about where its own website ranks. It also needs to consider where it is being discussed, referenced and represented across the wider web."
That's a bigger idea than it sounds like at first. For years, SEO was about one thing: get your own site to rank. Now it seems the game includes a second layer — getting other credible sites to talk about you, link to you, mention you. Because that's apparently what AI tools are leaning on when they decide what to tell a user.
Why This Matters Beyond the Marketing World
I'm not in the market for an SEO agency. But I am curious about how discovery works now, because my own readers find me through a mix of search engines, social shares, and lately, more AI-driven queries than I expected.
Here's what strikes me about Woya's approach. They're not chasing individual AI mentions like some kind of lottery ticket. O'Brien said it himself: "The objective is not to chase individual AI citations. It is to build a credible and consistent online presence."
That's a healthier way to think about it, honestly. You can't game an algorithm you don't fully understand — and nobody fully understands how ChatGPT or Gemini weighs its sources yet, because those systems keep changing. What you can do is build something real. Get quoted. Get covered. Show up in places that have earned trust over time. The AI visibility, if it comes, comes as a byproduct of actually being worth mentioning.
Woya Digital works mostly with UK businesses in finance, healthcare, legal, property, sport, and travel — high-stakes industries where trust matters enormously. They call their combined approach "SEO 2.0," folding in traditional SEO, answer engine optimization, and generative engine optimization into one package, delivered through what they call a nine-step process built from more than a thousand campaigns. They're also the marketing partner for a children's charity called The Atlas Foundation, which tells you something about the kind of outfit they're trying to be.
So What Do You Do With This?
Whether you run a business or just a personal site like mine, the lesson's the same. Don't put all your visibility eggs in one basket. Google rankings still matter. But so does who's writing about you, linking to you, mentioning your name in a context that makes sense.
I've learned this the hard way over years of traveling and writing — the opportunities that changed my path rarely came from me chasing them directly. They came from being visible in enough different places that the right person stumbled onto my story at the right time.
Maybe that's exactly what's happening with AI search too. You don't control the algorithm. You control whether you're worth talking about.
So here's the real question worth sitting with: are you building a presence, or just a ranking? Because increasingly, it looks like those are two very different things.
Source: TechBullion
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