The SEO Process in a Nutshell (Updated for AI Search)

Backlinks are links from external websites. They act as votes. The more “votes” you get, the higher your chance of outranking the competition.

Backlinks impact rankings, and rankings impact traffic. So, generally speaking, the more backlinks you get, the more organic traffic you can generate.

The difficulty here is that you can’t fully control backlinks. You can either earn them organically (wait for people to discover you and link to you) or build them (ask people to link to you). Let’s look at that in more detail.

In the picture below, you can see examples of our case studies that continue to earn backlinks organically. Publishing original, unique data is one of the best ways to attract backlinks.

And here’s an example of a content piece created specifically for an outreach campaign. Unlike the previous examples, it didn’t need any original studies: 63 SEO Statistics. Our process was:

Regarding backlinks, it’s important to know that not all links will carry the same weight.

Generally speaking, the best links you can get are “followed” links placed within the main content and those that come from relevant, authoritative websites.

Head on to the guides listed below if you want to learn more about backlinks and link building.

The final step in modern SEO is making sure your brand shows up in AI assistants. A lot of the same signals still matter, but the way they’re used is different enough that it needs its own focus. 

Our correlation study of 75,000 brands ranked search factors by how strongly each predicts AI visibility. The top of the list wasn't backlinks or Domain Rating. It was YouTube mentions (~0.737), with general branded web mentions close behind (0.66–0.71). DR sat at 0.266. Backlink count was negligible.

AI assistants are scoring brand presence, the web's consensus, not link authority. A brand discussed in many places (linked or not) is a brand the model trusts to recommend. YouTube carries extra weight because LLMs are partly trained on its transcripts, and in the case of Google's AI Overviews, it seems to be a trusted layer of information, coming from their own product.

To turn this into action, do a quarterly *mention gap analysis*. Add your brand plus 3–5 competitors to Ahrefs Brand Radar, then use the "Others only" filter on the AI charts to surface prompts where competitors get name-checked and you don't.

The Cited Pages report shows the third-party URLs feeding those mentions, which doubles as your outreach pipeline.

Because AI synthesizes responses from many sources at once, contradictions between those sources produce wrong or muddled output. The model may pick an arbitrary version, or stitch details from incompatible sources into a hybrid that doesn't match reality.

Preventing this is mostly bookkeeping. Standardize one version of your brand name, tagline, founding year, headquarters, and one-line description, then push that version everywhere it appears: LinkedIn, Crunchbase, G2, Capterra, ProductHunt, AngelList, Wikipedia, industry directories.

Mark up your homepage with Organization schema and use the `sameAs` property to link your verified social profiles together. Don't forget founder profiles, since prompts about company leadership pull from them disproportionately.

When there's no authoritative information available, AI doesn't typically say "I don't know." It grounds in whatever third-party content it can find, or it fabricates plausible-looking details. Both outcomes are bad for the brand at the center of the answer.

A made-up brand experiment we ran shows the failure mode clearly. We built a fake company, seeded the web with three deliberately conflicting third-party sources, and posed 56 questions to 8 different models. Most models repeated the planted fictions as fact, even when the brand's own FAQ contradicted them. When an AI must choose between an unspecific truth and a specific fabrication, the specific fabrication usually wins.

The practical implication is that being silent about yourself is a competitive risk. Publish an FAQ specific enough to leave nothing to interpretation, including direct denials of rumors that float around your category ("we have not been acquired," "we don't disclose unit counts").

Keep pricing, plan limits, and policies in plain HTML rather than behind JavaScript widgets. Publish original numbers when you can. Maintain head-to-head comparison pages so the framing of "you vs competitor" comes from your side, not someone else's.

When people ask AI about your product specifically, the model can reach for  your documentation, help center articles, and changelog pages on your own domain. Those pages carry strong authority for branded queries because they're explicitly about your brand and they're well indexed.

That dependency is also a liability. Old docs hand AI an authoritative source for inaccurate answers: pricing tiers that no longer exist, features you've since removed, integrations that shipped without ever making it into the docs. Run a docs audit on a quarterly cadence. Publish changelogs and release notes openly so recency signals follow updates. Roughly once a month, run a short query set against ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, and verify what they say about your product.

When something is wrong, find the page feeding the error and update it. Brand Radar's Cited Pages report shows you which of your own URLs AI is actually reading.

If your content is easy to read, technically accessible, clear, and specific, it’s more likely to be picked up and used by AI systems.

AI tools prefer content that’s easy to scan and understand.

Make your site easy for AI systems to access and interpret.

Clear writing improves both human understanding and AI accuracy.

Before your jump into the process, it’s good to have realistic expectations in terms of the time and money needed to do SEO successfully. 

Here are a couple of other things to know when it comes to the time involved in the process:

As for the cost of SEO, the least costly option is doing SEO by yourself - all you need is time to learn and experiment and tools that fit your budget.

Alternatively, you can consider hiring an agency, a freelancer, or a consultant. Read our full study on SEO pricing to know what costs to expect.

Monitor your results on a regular basis because search engine rankings tend to change. For this, it’s best to use a tool that tracks your ranking history and shows how you stack up against competitors—see our Rank Tracker, for example.

Track AI visibility on the same cadence using a tool like Ahrefs Brand Radar.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.