Every major AI answer product has a retrieval step that behaves like a search engine. If your pages are not indexed, not relevant, or not trusted, they never enter the set the model reads, and you cannot be cited at all. That is SEO. Technical health, crawlability, titles, internal links, local relevance and credible mentions all still do their jobs exactly as before. The plumbing underneath did not change when the interface did.
What changed is the payoff. A page one ranking used to mean clicks. Now it can mean being summarized without a visit, so some informational traffic is gone and will not come back. The sensible response is to shift weight toward content that still requires a click or a call: pricing, availability, booking, quotes, local specifics, before and after work, financing options. And to accept visibility, not just sessions, as a real business outcome.
The failure mode is reacting to headlines by cutting SEO entirely, which guarantees you are invisible in search and in AI answers at the same time. The other failure mode is paying extra for an AI package that duplicates basic SEO you are not actually getting. Ask any vendor to show you where the work differs. At Heights Digital the monthly program covers SEO for Google and AI search together at $399, no contract.
Send the site over. We will tell you what is broken, what you could rank for, and whether AI search knows you exist. No charge and no pitch deck.
