How to make LLMs suggest your practice to potential clients

For about a decade the work was to rank. You wrote the pages, you climbed the results, and being at the top was the same thing as being found. That has not been deleted. It has been covered by something sitting on top of it, and the thing on top answers the question before anyone reaches your link.

The size of that shift is measurable. Pew Research followed real browsing and found that when an AI summary is on the page, people click a result in 8% of visits instead of 15%, and that only 1% clicked a source inside the summary itself (Pew Research Center, browsing data from March 2025, 900 US adults and 68,879 Google searches).

Ranking is also no longer the ticket in. Ahrefs tracked which pages Google’s AI Overviews cite, and the share of those citations that also ranked in the top ten of the same search fell from about 76% in July 2025 to about 38% in March 2026 (Ahrefs, 863,000 result pages and 4 million cited URLs, March 2026). Being on page one used to be most of what got you quoted. Now it is about a third of it.

Which makes the old discipline more load-bearing, not less. Crawlable pages, plain text a parser can lift, consistent facts, a clear entity behind the name: those were SEO hygiene and they are now the raw material of somebody else’s answer. Every one of these models reads the internet. If your text lives inside an image, or your numbers contradict each other across four pages, you are not in the raw material at all.

The new layer is being the source that gets named when a prospective client asks who to hire, and being named is its own problem. In one study, 62% of the time an engine used a page as a source, the brand behind that page was never named in the answer. The information gets used, the credit does not. The same study found comparison content produces about 2.4 times more brand mentions than informational content (Semrush and Kevin Indig, 115 prompts and 3,981 domain appearances across 14 countries and 4 engines, October 2025; a small sample, worth saying out loud). That gap between “used” and “named” is most of what the five moves are about.