AI Search Winners, Pipeline Pillars, and 2 Internets: Takeaways from Eli Schwartz, Kevin Indig, and Ross Simmonds

AI search doesn't reward the same move twice. If you're building your content strategy around last year's citation tactics, you're already behind. Across three recent AirOps Growth Leader webinars, Eli Schwartz, Kevin Indig, and Ross Simmonds each dug into a different layer of how your buyers discover, evaluate, and decide when AI sits between the question and the answer. Here's what you need from each conversation.

Finding a new scoreboard for AI search with Kevin Indig

Kevin Indig walked through a dataset of over a million AI answers and 100,000+ citations, built in partnership with AirOps. He opened with something rare for a research talk: an admission that watching AI reshape search cost him some conviction in a career he built on SEO. Then he showed you the new scoreboard.

Takeaways:

1. Search rank still predicts AI citations, hard. Ranking #1 for your most important fan-out queries earns 58% of citations, four times more than rank #10. SEO and AO overlap by roughly 70-80%, but that remaining 20-30% is where the game is won or lost.
2. YouTube is the kingmaker for AI mentions. It's one of the top three most-cited domains in AI, and the strongest single correlation with showing up as a brand mention in an AI answer is being mentioned on YouTube. B2B companies like Shopify, HubSpot, and Ahrefs are leaning in for a reason.
3. How-to and informational content is the yellow pages of 2026. Clicks to that content type are down 35-60% over the last 12 months as AI answers absorb it directly. Build content AI can't easily replace: proprietary data, expert opinion, non-commodity perspective.
4. AI Overviews send more traffic to UGC platforms, not less. When Google shows AI Overviews, clicks to Reddit and YouTube rise 66%, because your buyers want to fact-check the AI's answer against real humans.
5. The scoreboard is shifting from traffic to trust, and from answers to audiences. Indig's closing framework: you're moving from a world of prompts to one where rank still matters, from traffic to trust, and from answers as your growth lever to audiences as your growth lever. His unifying thesis: AI changes humans more than it changes search.

See the full list of winners and losers with Kevin Indig.

Analyzing 380k answers and winning AI discovery with Ross Simmonds

Ross Simmonds, CEO of Foundation Inc., joined AirOps to unveil a joint research report analyzing 380,000 AI answers and 3+ million citation events across 81 B2B software categories. His core finding: there isn't one AI search landscape for you to optimize for. There are two.

Takeaways:

1. Google Surfaces and the Assistants behave like two different internets. On Google (AI Overviews/AI Mode), Reddit shows up in 39-52% of answers and YouTube in 38-47%. Inside the assistants, your off-site product and comparison pages dominate at 52-72%, review platforms run 16-21%, and Claude doesn't cite Reddit or YouTube at all.
2. E-E-A-T is the throughline across every surface. Content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authority, and trust gets cited more. Build author pages on every post, use firsthand language ("we tested," "we analyzed"), show credentials, and promote press mentions.
3. Comparison and product pages are your highest-leverage citable assets. Across 380,000 B2B answers, comparison pages dominated citations. Build alternative pages too, and don't treat them as the same page: someone searching "X alternatives" is a different buyer than someone comparing "X vs. Y."
4. Review sites carry outsized weight for commercial-intent prompts. Review platforms account for 15%+ of all citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude for "what's the best" style queries. If you don't have an active review-generation motion, you're leaving citations on the table.

Go deeper into the data with Ross.

Building for pipeline, not just visibility with Eli Schwartz

In "The 4 Pillars of AI Search: From Visibility to Pipeline," Eli Schwartz, author of Product-Led SEO, argued that AI search changed the interface, not the job. The fundamentals of understanding your buyer and building something worth citing haven't moved.

Takeaways:

1. AI search is a layout change, not an SEO overhaul. "This is not an SEO overhaul, this is a layout change," Schwartz said. AI Overviews and AI Mode shift how results display, but the underlying mechanics of search stay the same.
2. Not every company should overinvest in SEO. If your customers don't actually use search to solve their problem, pouring budget into SEO is a weak lever. Validate that search is part of your buyer journey before you scale investment there.
3. Top-of-funnel content increasingly belongs to the LLMs. Generic informational content gets answered before your reader ever clicks. Your better opportunity sits in mid- and bottom-funnel assets: comparisons, pricing, use cases, and adoption content that drives someone toward a next step.
4. Every asset needs a conversion path. "Most important is that it has to have some sort of conversion path," Schwartz said. He uses his THRICE framework (Time, Headcount, Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) to score initiatives instead of treating your roadmap like an idea dump.
5. AI visibility is a brand game now. Mentions, reviews, PR, and off-site citations carry as much weight as your on-site optimization. His advice: "Skip all of the spammy, scammy steps, and go directly to being the brand."

Get more takeaways with Eli Schwartz.

What this means for your team

All three conversations point to the same shift: being cited isn't the finish line. Your buyers are using AI to research, shortlist, and decide, and the brands that win aren't the ones chasing the latest citation hack. They're the ones treating owned content, third-party placements, reviews, and community presence as one coordinated system instead of five separate channels with five separate owners.

AirOps brings these channels under one roof. Our platform tracks your citations and mentions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews, and our team builds and runs the strategy that turns that data into pages, placements, and community presence that get you chosen, not just cited.

Work with AirOps.