Hey, its Amit here.
Here’s the last instalment of my 5-part “welcome series” of emails. After this, you’ll just get a weekly newsletter.
By now, you’ve probably noticed a pattern in what I’ve been sharing.
It’s not that SEO stopped working.
And it’s not that AI “replaced” Google.
It’s that visibility now compounds across more systems - and the rules aren’t explained clearly anywhere.
One study that illustrates this well comes from SurferSEO, published in 2025, looking specifically at Google AI Overviews and what drives citations.
They analyzed:
10,000 keywords that triggered AI Overviews
~33,000 fan-out queries
How organic rankings across those queries related to AI citations
Not sure what “fan out queries”are?
These are the long-tail variations and phrases that AI tools search on the web to find information, when you put a prompt in. The example below shows an example.
You can run your own tests using this tool from DEJAN SEO: https://dejan.ai/tools/fanout/
How a query fan out looks
A few findings stood out from the SurferSEO study.
Pages that ranked for:
the main query only accounted for 19.6% of AI citations
the main query + at least one fan-out query accounted for 51.2% of citations
That’s a 161% higher likelihood of being cited when broader query coverage was present.
At the same time:
67.82% of cited sources didn’t rank top 10 for either the main or fan-out queries
AI Overviews consistently sampled from a wider document pool than classic SERPs
So a lot of cited sources don’t even rank in organic search at all. This seems to contradict the idea that if you just appear in the SERPs, you’ll appear in AI.
My own theory at this point:
I still subscribe to the theory that the brands that do SEO well, will often have better AI visibility as well.
AI Overviews may cite beyond page one, but they don’t operate in a vacuum. LLMs still scrape Google/Bing rankings and lean on brand authority and corroboration - all outcomes of doing SEO well. So while rankings alone don’t guarantee AI visibility, strong SEO remains one of the most reliable foundations for earning it.
Anyway, all of this doesn’t mean “optimize for AI Overviews.”
It means something more practical - and more uncomfortable:
Authority compounds when link quality, relevance, coverage, topical authority and context work together.
And that’s exactly where most teams struggle.
Not with getting links - but with:
knowing which links actually matter
understanding the risk of doing it wrong
spotting low-quality or misaligned placements before they cause damage
building assets that earn links naturally
scaling link building without losing judgment
aligning digital PR, content, and SEO into one off-page system which feeds the wider SEO flywheel
That’s what our new course on The Links Guy Academy is built around.
It’s not a shortcuts course.
And it’s not theory for theory’s sake.
It’s a practical guide to modern link building and off-page SEO, covering:
how to evaluate link quality properly
what warning signs to watch for
how digital PR and linkable assets fit into the flywheel
how to think about links when building or managing a team
how to work with agencies without outsourcing judgment
Whether you execute links in-house or use partners, this understanding is what makes the difference between compounding authority — and wasted spend.
If that’s useful to you, you can explore the “Ultimate Link Building Playbook” here:
Either way, thanks for following along through this sequence.
— Amit