A plumber, a dental practice or a family law firm used to compete for ten blue links. Now the customer often reads a paragraph first. Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity summarize an answer and cite a handful of sources, and the business that is not among them may never get the visit.
Anatoly Zadorozhnyy has spent his working life on the problem of being found. He says he began working in search engine optimization in 2008. He is co-founder of Marketing 1on1, an agency whose website says it started in 2012 and which sells organic SEO, content work and link building. He says he also runs a consultancy called Affordable SEO Expert and holds a bachelor's degree in computer security from Southern Oregon University.
His argument to owners is that AI search has changed the interface more than the fundamentals. "As ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Perplexity change how consumers research businesses, companies are rethinking their digital marketing strategies," he wrote in answers to Cranberry Journal's questions.
What the answers do to clicks
The worry is real and measurable. Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025 and found that users who saw an AI summary on Google clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits. Those who did not see one clicked on 15% of visits. Links inside the summary itself drew a click on just 1% of visits. Users ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with a summary, against 16% without one.
The summaries are not everywhere. Pew counted one in 18% of the Google searches in its sample. But they cluster on exactly the queries a small business wants. Searches beginning with "who," "what," "when" or "why" produced a summary 60% of the time, and searches of 10 words or more did so 53% of the time. One- and two-word searches triggered one only 8% of the time.
Cranberry Journal's arithmetic, from Pew's rates. Take 1,000 Google visits. Without an AI summary, about 150 end in a click on a search result. With a summary, about 80 click a traditional result and about 10 click a link inside the summary, roughly 90 in all. That is about 60 fewer visits per 1,000, a drop of around two-fifths. It is an average across all kinds of searches, not a forecast for any one business.
Cranberry Journal has looked at how publishers are rebuilding for readers who never click. Local and mid-size firms face a smaller version of the same arithmetic.
His five-part method
Zadorozhnyy frames his approach in five parts. They are his method, not an industry standard, and the platforms do not endorse any agency's formula.
The first is fixing indexing and technical problems. The second is building content around search intent, meaning what a customer is actually trying to do. The third is developing relevant third-party mentions. The fourth is applying answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization, the newer labels AEO and GEO, to the questions customers ask. The fifth is competitive research to find gaps rivals have left open.
Underneath the five, he wrote, his approach "focuses on three fundamentals: ensuring websites are technically accessible, creating content that satisfies customer intent, and developing relevant third-party references."
What Google says
On the first point, Google's own documentation lines up with him closely. Its Search Central page on AI features and your website says that to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page "must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet." It adds that "there are no additional technical requirements."
The same page tells owners they do not need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files or special schema markup to appear in these features. It lists ordinary basics instead, such as allowing crawling in robots.txt and at any CDN or host, using internal links, keeping important content in text form and keeping Business Profile details current. It also warns that meeting every requirement does not guarantee a page will be crawled, indexed or shown.
That is a useful filter for any owner hearing a sales pitch. Advice that leads with a special AI file or a new kind of markup runs against what Google has published. Advice that leads with whether Google can crawl and index the site is on firmer ground.
Third-party mentions, and the line Google draws
The third part of the method, references from other sites, is where owners need to read the rules themselves. Search engines have long treated links and citations from elsewhere as signals. Marketing 1on1's own menu includes link building and backlink packages among its services.
Google's spam policies say that buying or selling links for ranking purposes is link spam, including paying for links or for posts that contain them. The same policies say paid links are acceptable when marked with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute. An owner paying for mentions should ask how they will be labelled before any money changes hands.
The other answer engines
Google is not the only gate. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that block its OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and that changes to robots.txt can take about 24 hours to register. Perplexity's documentation recommends allowing PerplexityBot for a site to appear in its results. In both cases those search crawlers are separate from the bots used to collect training data, so a site can block one and allow the other.
A checklist built from the platforms' own rules
Compiled by Cranberry Journal from Google, OpenAI and Perplexity documentation. It is not Marketing 1on1's checklist.
| Check | Why it matters | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Pages are indexed and can show a snippet | Required to be a supporting link in AI Overviews and AI Mode | |
| robots.txt, CDN and host allow Googlebot | Google names crawl access as a basic | |
| OAI-SearchBot is not blocked | Blocked sites do not appear in ChatGPT search answers | OpenAI |
| PerplexityBot is allowed | Recommended to appear in Perplexity results | Perplexity |
| Key facts sit in plain text | Google lists text form as a best practice | |
| Business Profile is current | Google lists it among the basics | |
| Paid links carry nofollow or sponsored | Unlabelled paid links break Google's spam policies |
The bet behind the pitch
The useful test for an owner is whether the work being sold would make sense if AI answers disappeared tomorrow. Crawlable pages, clear answers to customers' real questions and honest references from other sites have been the core of search for two decades. Zadorozhnyy's bet is that they still decide who gets cited.
The platforms' published rules largely support that bet. What none of them can promise, and Google says so plainly, is that following the rules will put any one business into the answer. As AI companies start selling advertising alongside their answers, the space left for unpaid visibility may also shift.
Mr. Zadorozhnyy's career history, titles, degree and his consultancy Affordable SEO Expert are as he described them in written answers to questions from this publication. The 2012 start date for Marketing 1on1 appears on the company's website, read on 3 November 2026. His quotations are from those written answers. Google's guidance is from its Search Central pages "AI features and your website" (last updated 10 December 2025) and "Spam policies for Google web search". OpenAI's and Perplexity's crawler rules are from their published bot documentation. Click data is from Pew Research Center's analysis of March 2025 browsing by 900 U.S. adults, published 22 July 2025. The per-1,000 figures and the checklist are this publication's work.
Topics businesssmall businesssearchartificial intelligencemarketingGoogle
