What’s your plan to show up in AI Search?

There’s now a clear path to dominating AI results in the zero-click search world.

In this edition:

• 🧠 A 90-day SEO playbook for AI-driven search visibility
• 💸 Getting the SEO + PPC budget mix right
• 🗞️ Stories to not doomscroll

🧠 A 90-day SEO playbook for AI-driven search visibility

In SERPs with AI summaries, users click traditional results roughly 8% of the time.

That means ranking alone isn’t enough anymore. You need to be a source AI systems trust.

Here’s a simple 90-day action plan.

Weeks 1-2: Pick the topics you want AI to associate with you:

• Choose 5-10 core topics
• Map the questions, comparisons, and “best” queries buyers actually search
• Make sure those topics align with your product, its use cases, and your ICP. 

This is essentially deciding what you want your brand to be known for, so AI models can train themselves accordingly.

Weeks 3-6: Make answers easy to extract from your content:

• Put the answer immediately after the header
• Use clear question-based headings
• Break explanations into bullets or steps
• For “best” listicles, add a table of contents to summarize that list
• A schema to your pages’ code (I use a combo of ChatGPT and Claude for this, BUT make sure all of the info is correct)

Pages that resolve the question fast get surfaced more often.

Weeks 7-10: Prove experience, not just knowledge:

• Show who wrote it and why they’re credible with an author bio + links to their LinkedIn profile
• Use first-person POV language and real examples
• Explain WHAT your experience is in the intro
• Add original visuals, data, or screenshots (GIFs or vids are great too)

If your content could belong to anyone, AI is more likely to ignore it.

Weeks 11-12: Reinforce beyond text:

• Add descriptive alt text to images
• Create videos with transcripts
• Repurpose core answers across formats AI already crawls (YouTube vids, LinkedIn posts, Medium articles, etc.)

What to watch now:

• AI Overview appearances
• Featured snippets
• Brand mentions across AI chatbots
• Search Console impressions, even without clicks

💸 Getting the SEO + PPC budget mix right

The mistake most teams make is treating SEO and PPC like interchangeable levers. They aren’t.

PPC buys speed. SEO builds long-term leverage.

What you’re paying for:

• PPC: Immediate visibility. Predictable. Turn it off, results stop.
• SEO: Delayed impact. Compounds over time. Harder to forecast early.

They solve different problems, so the mix should be driven by timing, not preference.

Let urgency decide:

• Need leads this quarter? PPC should carry more weight.
• Need lower CAC six to twelve months out? SEO needs consistent funding now.

SEO looks inefficient early because it isn’t built to perform like paid. Expecting that is how teams kill it too soon.

AI hasn’t killed SEO, but it changed it:

AI Overviews reduce clicks even when rankings hold. That means SEO spend now needs to cover:

• Answer-first content
• Pages that show up in AI summaries
• Technical work like schema and content refreshes

But MOST importantly: You need to be getting your brand surfaced in AI Overviews + ChatGPT.

How to explain this to leadership:

Paid delivers monthly results. Organic reduces long-term risk and makes paid cheaper over time. You need both, or you’re either renting traffic forever or waiting too long to grow.

Revisit the mix quarterly as results change.

👇 A thread on what you need to know about AI (1/27)

 You’ve seen this guy before.

🗞️ Stories to not doomscroll

Microsoft and Google leaders are reframing AI criticism. Instead of addressing output quality and publisher impact, they’re blaming semantics debates or user burnout, even as traffic losses mount.

Brand mentions now drive AI and SEO visibility more than links alone. LLMs reward repeated context and co-occurrence, making PR, data assets, and authoritative references essential in 2026.

PPC in 2026 will reward fundamentals, not hacks. AI automation is accelerating, but structure, clean signals, authentic creative, and human oversight are what still separate winners.

Email marketing isn’t dead. Budgets are mostly holding or rising in 2026, signaling reliable ROI even without major innovation.

UX and CRO aren’t flashy, but they’re becoming unavoidable. As ad costs rise, more companies are increasing CRO spend in 2026 because it’s the cheapest way to grow.

Search results are no longer universal, they’re personalized by user, context, and AI. Brands need unified signals across SEO, AI platforms, and on-site experiences to stay visible in fragmented discovery.

John Mueller says SEO vs GEO isn’t a naming debate, it’s a prioritization decision. Check your own analytics to see how much traffic actually comes from AI tools before reallocating time or budget.

🤝 Need content marketing that actually gets paying customers?

I run Stat Digital, a fractional content marketing team for B2B SaaS companies.

We can help you:

• Create blogs that capture ready-to-buy leads from AI Search & SEO.
• Launch and run newsletters to nurture the thousands of neglected contacts going stale in your CRM (like this one)

Want to uncover your top opportunities to generate new customers from your content? Schedule a free strategy session here.

Thanks for reading! See ya next week.

~ Jacob Statler

Contact me at jacob@jacobstatler.com or by replying to this email.