if AI decides which brands people see, are we basically doing SEO for machines now?

maybe this is a dumb question but i keep thinking about this we’ve spent years optimizing websites for google.
keywords, backlinks, technical seo, content, all of it.
basically the goal was always:
get the page to rank ,get the click ,get the person on your site.
but now i’m seeing more and more searches where the user doesn’t really need to click anything.
they ask chatgpt / gemini / whatever:
“what’s the best software for X?”
and the AI just gives them 5 options.
maybe it mentions your company.
maybe it doesn’t.
and that’s kinda crazy because your website could be objectively better, you could have spent years building it, ranking for everything etc…
but if the AI doesn’t understand your brand or doesn’t include it in the answer, none of that really matters in that moment.
so what are we actually optimizing for now?
being #1 on google?
or being one of the 3 companies the AI decides is worth mentioning?
and then there’s the weird part…
how do you even know why the AI picked someone else?
was it the content?
citations?
brand mentions?
reviews?
something completely random from a page you didn’t even know existed?
feels like SEO is slowly becoming less about “how do i rank this page”
and more like
“how do i make sure AI understands that my company exists, what it does, and when it should recommend it”
idk.
maybe i’m overthinking it but it feels like there’s a pretty big measurement problem coming too.
what are people actually tracking for this right now?