How to Win in AI Search (Real Data, No Hype) | Ryan Law (Ahrefs)

AI search is exploding — and everyone wants to teach you how to show up in ChatGPT.

But in this new “Wild West,” who can you actually trust?

Meet Ryan Law, Ahrefs’ Director of Content Marketing.

Ryan and his team have carried out some of the largest studies on AI search, backed by millions of data points, to understand what actually works when it comes to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

If you’ve been waiting for a credible, data-backed guide to getting your brand and content visible in AI search — this is it.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

00:00 — Intro

01:06 — The Current State of AI Search

03:46 — 3 Ways to Influence Your AI Visibility

07:55 — The “Era of Off-Page SEO”: Why Mentions Are the New Backlinks

14:48 — Optimizing the Content Types AI Prefers to Cite

18:33 — How to Write for AI (and Humans)

25:51 — Finding and Fixing “Hallucinated URLs” from AI

27:18 — The Untapped Training Data Sources LLMs Love

28:37 — How to Perform a Content Gap Analysis for the AI Era

32:56 — The #1 Technical Mistake in Answer Engine Optimization

34:40 — Fan-Out Queries: How AI Actually Searches Google

39:50 — The Spam Strategy You Must Avoid

41:00 — A Simple 2-Category Framework for AEO

42:32 — AI Search vs. Google’s AI Overviews

44:50 — Outro

Connect with Ryan:

LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/thinkingslow/

X — @thinking_slow

Connect with Tim:

LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsoulo/

X — @timsoulo

Website — https://www.timsoulo.com/

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to follow the Ahrefs Podcast and share it with a friend.

Referenced:

Ahrefs Brand Radar — https://ahrefs.com/brand-radar

Ahrefs Site Explorer — https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer

Ahrefs Web Analytics — https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools

Clearscope — https://www.clearscope.io

G2 — https://www.g2.com

Reddit — https://www.reddit.com

Quora — https://www.quora.com