We ranked on Google but disappeared in AI search. Here is what happened

This started with a comment from a potential customer.

During a call he mentioned that he had asked ChatGPT for tools in our category and our product never appeared in the answer. Not even as an alternative.

That caught my attention because our traditional SEO is actually pretty solid. We rank on page one for several keywords.

So I started looking into what people are now calling generative search or GEO. The idea is simple. AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI summaries do not just look at rankings. They also pull from sources they consider credible or structured enough to quote.

To understand where we stood I ran an audit using [Karis](https://mously. Visibility is all you need. https://karis.im/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=post_feb). The tool sends prompts similar to what real users would ask and then tracks which brands appear in the responses.

The results were humbling.

In normal search we were visible. In AI generated answers we were almost absent. Some competitors with weaker SEO were getting mentioned regularly because their content was easier for AI systems to extract and cite.

One useful part of the audit was the breakdown of what kind of content gets referenced in our category. Long comparison guides, structured FAQ pages, and third party reviews showed up a lot.

Another useful piece was the gap analysis. It showed questions users ask AI that we had never addressed on our site.

Some recommendations were obvious though. Advice like “create more authoritative content” is not very helpful on its own. I had to dig into the details to find specific opportunities.

For the next six weeks we focused on publishing content that answers concrete questions in a very direct way. We also tried to appear more often in external contexts like review sites and comparison articles.

Two months later we started showing up in roughly forty percent of the queries we track.

It is not dominant yet but at least we are visible.

The biggest takeaway is that AI search is becoming its own channel. Ignoring it now probably means playing catch up later.