The new world of organic search is here. The time to adapt is now.

Organic search is about to go through more change in the next 6 months than it has in the last 10 years. Content teams know something big is coming, but most aren’t prepared. Teams continue to create new content for old world SEO. To keep winning, brands need a new strategy for AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). While there’s tons of uncertainty, we know three things to be true:

Losses are already happening.

Users aren’t clicking the ten blue links as much. They’re getting full answers from agent-led engines like ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode. We’ve watched the emergence of the "zero-click query" as people get their question answered inline with no further navigation required.

SEO and AEO are overlapping – for now.

Right now, many of the signals that matter most for AEO resemble those of  traditional SEO. But this is changing. Search is splitting into two tracks: content that wins with humans (SEO) and content that wins with agents (AEO).

We need to build winning content that prepares agents to speak on your behalf.

That doesn’t mean starting over. It means leaning into freshness, structure, and authority for the content you already have. It means answering questions directly and playing to Agent preferences. And it means modifying strategies and tactics with best practices like schema, heading structure and question and answer content to increase likelihood of citations.

Agents are your new priority audience

Agents are powerful gatekeepers choosing who gets cited, which means you can’t hide behind old content. If it’s stale or inaccurate agents will bury or misrepresent you. No scrolling through SERPs. No clicking to a webpage.

Before we go any further, which Answer Engines are powered by “agents”?

Agents are AI systems that actively interpret queries, generate answers, and decide which sources to cite, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews.

How do you create winning content?

AirOps is here to help you adapt for this new audience by keeping existing content ready for both the current and coming world. We have helped hundreds of brands like Descript, Lightspeed, and Webflow nail precise content refresh.

Content Refresh is our first solution for this new era of organic, designed to take an existing piece of content, leverage its strengths and update it. Updates happen along three important dimensions: the existing world of SERP, the new world of AEO or agent-led search and readability, and brand accuracy to ensure accurate brand information is out there for all readers.

Content Refresh helps teams adapt by giving them an automated, recurring way to update existing content for the new world because it is modeled after what agents look for; freshness, authority, and structure.

Winning content in this new era is defined by three essential characteristics.

1. Freshness

Agents prioritize recency. 95% of ChatGPT citations came from content less than 10 months old, and pages with a visible "last updated" timestamp earned 1.8× more citations. This bias toward fresh, updated information means outdated content becomes invisible fast. Even subtle alignment updates like brand voice or product naming can increase LLM citations by 41%.

2. Authority

Generic informational content is dead. AI systems are capable of generating quality answers, which means brands must provide unique POVs, expert-backed insights, and verified, trustworthy information. Clear writing, concise answers, and references to authoritative sources are critical. Structured responses and lists can boost visibility by 74%. Authority today is about being trusted, cited, and distinctly valuable to both human readers and machines.

3. Structure

If content isn’t structured, it won’t get surfaced. Agents like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews rely on clear hierarchies, schema markup, and scannable formats to parse and cite information. Pages that use schema like FAQ or HowTo are 78% more likely to be cited, and proper heading structure alone boosts citation rates by 63%.

Structured content with clear labeling, consistent formatting, and strong internal linking gives agents what they need to understand and recommend your content with confidence.Even without schema, clear organization can make the difference between being cited or skipped.

To view a deeper analysis on how and when brands are being cited by answer engines, you can see this report: 2025 AEO Readability Leaderboard & Insights.

Under the hood, Content Refresh uses three categories of powerful steps to improve content unique to the requirements for human-led or agent-led search. With recurring audits, briefs, and refresh updates, content teams don’t need to worry that their content will fall behind current or future trends.

Step 1 Audit: Evaluate how well a page performs with agents and search engines by scoring agent readiness, assessing topical authority, brand accuracy, and identifying SERP content gaps. Get notified on content drops and performance changes.

Step 2 Rewrite: Generate targeted briefs to boost agent citations, outperform SERP competitors, and strengthen brand consistency across your content.

Step 3 Refresh: Generate refresh briefs and high precision rewrite flows on performance signals that put brands in full control based, improving traffic, fixing internal links, and optimizing meta tags to keep content competitive.

AirOps is your “North Star” for what’s coming

We’ve helped hundreds of teams build content that ranks. Now, we’re helping them engineer content that agents can find, understand, cite, and trust.

AirOps turns your content team into future-minded content engineers. Our Content Refresh solution helps you stay cited, stay visible, and stay ahead. If your content isn’t ready for agents, let’s fix that.

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