The AI Search Trifecta: Visibility, Citability, Retrievability

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For as long as I can remember, my mom has called Google "Mr. Google."

As in, "I asked Mr. Google for flights, and that's what he said was available." (Apparently, Ask Jeeves left a lasting impression.)

But a few weeks ago, Mr. Google disappeared. Suddenly, I started hearing about “the AI."

As in, “I asked the AI, and that's what it said!"

I was floored. My mom is a 72-year-old veterinarian with limited tech literacy. I would not have bet on her using ChatGPT.

"You used ChatGPT?" I asked.

She had not. Instead, Google had prompted her to try AI Mode — and she’d given it a whirl. She went from Luddite to daily AI user overnight.

This is why I’m so bullish on AI Search. If adoption depended on everyone switching from Google to ChatGPT, it’d take 50 years to go mainstream. But when AI Mode becomes the default for most people, likely within the next 6-9 months, it’ll remove the friction of opting in or learning a new platform.

Instantly, the majority of the world — everyday folks like my mom — will be turning to “the AI” for answers.

As marketers, we need to take advantage of this opportunity now. As I wrote last week, 90% of the game in marketing is just being early on a big channel. It’s a career-defining opportunity for all of us.

So, where do you get started? At Pepper, we’ve developed a three-pillar framework for cracking AI Search (a.k.a., GEO, AIO, Conversational Search, LLMO, or whatever new buzzword pops off on LinkedIn tomorrow).

The 3 Pillars of AI Search: Visibility, Citability, Retrievability

LLMs are fundamentally different from search engines. They don’t crawl the web; instead, they retrieve answers from indexed knowledge. With traditional SEO, the entire game is getting pages on your site to rank. With AI Search, it’s about getting your brand mentioned in the right way on the sites that LLMs are most likely to pull from.

When putting together an AI Search strategy, we start with three magic questions:

1. Visibility: Can LLMs see your content?

Visibility in AI Search means ensuring our content is visible to AI engines, even if users never click a link. Increasingly, the goal will be driving mentions in AI answers rather than just clicks. At Pepper, we focus on contextual relevance and authority so that generative models surface our content in LLMs’ responses.

1. Citability: Can LLMs trust your content?

Citability is your content’s authority and trustworthiness, according to the LLMs. When generative systems answer questions, they often cite or paraphrase sources, and there are specific tricks for structuring and writing content so that LLMs reference it.

These are largely the same tactics we’ve been using for contextual search for the last six years, but AI Search prompts us to take things to another level — and with some new twists.

1. Retrievability: Can LLMs use your content?

Retrievability means making content findable by AI retrieval systems. Pepper uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): When someone asks a question, the LLM first retrieves relevant text chunks from a knowledge base before generating an answer. To ensure our content is pulled, we optimize for retrieval by breaking content into atomic “chunks.”

Over the next three editions, we’ll be doing a deep dive into strategies and tactics for mastering each of these three pillars of AI Search. Be sure to subscribe so you won’t miss a beat.

AI Search news is coming in hotter than your laptop running Claude on six different browser tabs. Here’s a recap of the top stories you need to know since last week:

• Google has started quietly prepping advertisers for AI Mode, hinting at new ad formats baked directly into generative answers.
• Organic search traffic from AI answers has exploded — it’s up 527% since last year.
• Cloudflare is calling out Perplexity for using “stealth” bots to scrape content from sites that explicitly block crawlers.
• Content creators are increasingly prepping for a “Google Zero” scenario — where generative answers kill traditional click-throughs. Publishers are bracing for impact (and dusting off their paywalls).
• Reddit’s not just for messy AITA threads anymore. It’s building a search engine, and people are actually using it.

Joe Lazer is the best-selling author of The Storytelling Edge and fractional CMO at Pepper.