On "How AI Search Works"

AI search is still search, and Ahrefs knows it — the real lesson here isn't that AI changes how discovery works, but that it's forcing us to rethink what "search" even means when the query interface disappears and the answer engine takes its place. For SEO practitioners, this is less about panic and more about recognizing that AI abstracts away the keyword layer without eliminating the need for authoritative, well-structured content that AI systems can actually cite and trust. If you're still optimizing only for click-through on SERPs, you're already late; the move is positioning your content as the source AI models want to reference when they answer queries directly.