I've been building websites since the World Wide Web became a thing. Over three decades of watching search evolve, algorithm updates, SEO pivots, content strategies.
But this shift is different.
ChatGPT hit 800 million weekly users as of October 2025. Google's AI Overviews now appear on more than 55% of searches. Your prospects aren't clicking through to your carefully crafted HubSpot pages anymore.
They're getting answers without ever knowing you exist.
Not because your content is bad. Because it's formatted for humans only.
Here's what I'm seeing with our clients at 30dps.
Someone types "how to improve customer retention" into ChatGPT or Perplexity. The AI delivers a comprehensive answer in seconds, pulling from multiple sources, synthesizing insights, formatting it beautifully.
Your blog post on customer retention? The one with 2,000 words of expertise? It doesn't get mentioned.
The traffic numbers tell the story. Traditional click-through rates have collapsed by 61% for organic results when AI Overviews appear. Your paid ads? Down 68%.
But here's the part that keeps me up at night: brands that earn citations in AI responses see 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks.
The winners are winning bigger. The invisible stay invisible.
I spent the last six months studying how AI engines evaluate and cite content. Not theory. Actual testing with client websites, tracking what gets cited and what gets ignored.
The patterns are clear.
Length matters more than you think. Content expanded to 1,500+ words shows a 180% higher citation probability. Not because machines love reading. Because comprehensive answers signal authority.
Your 500-word blog post isn't comprehensive. It's a fragment.
Structure trumps style. FAQ sections with proper schema markup get cited 200% more often than regular content. The machines need clear, extractable answers.
That beautiful narrative arc you crafted? The AI skips right over it looking for the answer capsule.
Data is currency. Content with statistics, quotes, and citations gets mentioned 30-40% more often in LLM responses. Research from Onely shows concrete statistics boost visibility by up to 28%.
Your opinion pieces without data? Invisible.
A colleague ran a controlled test that made me rethink our entire content strategy.
Two identical pages. Same topic, same word count, same quality. One had comprehensive schema markup. One didn't.
The page with schema was the only one to appear in an AI Overview. The page without schema? Not even indexed.
For our manufacturing clients managing complex product catalogs in HubSpot, this matters. Products with comprehensive schema markup appear in AI-generated shopping recommendations 3-5x more frequently.
Schema isn't optional anymore. It's the difference between existing and not existing in AI search.
Here's what I'm implementing across every client site now.
Open every page with a 40-80 word "quick answer" that directly addresses the core query. Then expand with context, examples, and depth.
This is the opposite of how we've been trained to write marketing content. No narrative buildup. No context-setting. No gentle introduction.
Answer first. Explain second.
The machines extract that capsule. Humans who want more keep reading.
I tested this approach on client pages last quarter. Citation rates jumped an average of 43%.
This is where it gets complicated.
ChatGPT prefers comprehensive discussions with multiple expert perspectives. Perplexity favors recent, highly-engaged content with current information. Claude values detailed explanations with logical progression. Gemini emphasizes community consensus.
Perplexity averages 6.61 citations per response and loves YouTube content. ChatGPT pulls from longer-form articles. Claude wants academic rigor.
You can't optimize for all of them with one approach.
What I'm doing: identifying which AI platforms our clients' prospects actually use, then optimizing content specifically for those engines.
Here's the data point that matters most.
According to Yext Research from October 2025, 86% of AI citations come from brand-managed sources. That analysis covered 6.8 million AI citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
Read that again.
You control 86% of what AI engines can cite about your business. Your website. Your documentation. Your structured data.
The businesses getting cited aren't lucky. They're intentional about how they structure information.
Every HubSpot site we build or optimize now follows a new protocol.
Comprehensive schema on every page. Product schema, FAQ schema, article schema, organization schema. If there's a structured data type that fits, we implement it.
Answer capsules at the top of every page. The quick answer goes above the fold, before any marketing copy or context.
Statistics and citations embedded throughout. Every claim backed by data. Every insight linked to a source. The machines reward this.
Content expanded to 1,500+ words minimum. Surface-level posts get ignored. Comprehensive resources get cited.
FAQ sections on every service page. Not hidden in an accordion. Visible, structured, schema-marked.
Most businesses don't know what GEO/AEO is yet. Generative Engine Optimization or Answer Engine Optimization is still obscure enough that your competitors aren't doing it.
That window is closing fast.
AI Overviews grew from 6.49% to over 50% of queries in less than a year. Projections show 70-80% of informational queries will have AI Overviews by the end of 2026.
The businesses that optimize now will have a multi-year head start.
I've been doing this for over 25 years. I've seen every major search shift. Google's launch. Mobile-first indexing. Voice search. Local search updates.
This one feels different because the stakes are higher.
You're not just competing for rankings anymore. You're competing to exist in the answer.
If you're managing content in HubSpot, here's what I'd do first.
Audit your top 10 pages. Do they have schema markup? Do they open with direct answers? Do they include statistics and citations?
Add FAQ schema to your most important pages. Structure your questions and answers properly. Mark them up. Make them extractable.
Expand your thin content. Those 500-word posts need to become 1,500-word resources. Add data, examples, and depth.
Test your content in ChatGPT and Perplexity. Search for topics you cover. See who gets cited. Study what they're doing differently.
Track AI citations. Set up monitoring to see when your content gets mentioned in AI responses. Measure what's working.
The technical implementation isn't complicated. HubSpot makes schema markup straightforward. We've written special code that automatically creates well-structured schema in HubSpot once the page content has been saved. The hard part is changing how you think about content structure.
Your prospects are getting answers from AI engines right now. The question is whether they're getting answers that mention you.
Most businesses will figure this out eventually. The ones who move now will own the citations while everyone else is still trying to understand what changed.
I've spent three decades helping clients communicate complex ideas in simple, powerful ways. This is the most fundamental shift I've seen in how people find and consume information.
The machines are reading your content. Make sure they can see it.