AI Search Terms, Explained Without the Jargon
AI search has about ten terms in it and most people selling it are charging you for those ten words. This page defines them in plain English, explains the one mechanism that changes how you should build your site, and names two things you can stop paying for today.
I run a $2M junk removal business from 1,200 miles away in under an hour a day. Everything here is what I use on my own company.
The ten words
Information gain. Saying something nobody else has said.
Crawlability. Whether a machine can actually read your website. If your page builds itself with JavaScript after it loads, the answer is no.
Fan-out. You ask AI one question, it quietly runs several searches in the background and builds the answer out of all of them. More on this below.
Getting cited. AI used your page as a source. Not the same as AI recommending you — you can get quoted in an answer that sends the job to somebody else.
Topical authority. Being the obvious answer for one thing instead of a maybe for twelve.
Original data. Your numbers. What a job costs, how long it takes, what you charge. The stuff no machine can make up.
Digital PR. Other people writing about you. Everything on your own site is you saying you're good, which counts for very little.
Reviews. Your customers backing up what you claim, in public, where a machine can read it.
Answering intent. Getting to the point. If somebody asks what it costs, the price goes near the top, not after four paragraphs about your family values.
Page speed. Make it fast, then stop. Ignore the score out of 100 — that's a simulated test on a simulated device. What counts is what real visitors experience.
That's the whole vocabulary.
Fan-out is the one that changes how you build
When someone asks AI about your industry, it doesn't run one search. It breaks the question into subtopics and runs several searches at once, then builds an answer out of what comes back.
This one isn't a theory. Google described it publicly when it launched AI Mode, and its own documentation says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use a query fan-out technique, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources.
So somebody asks for the best junk removal company in their town. Behind that, the system may be quietly checking what it costs, how fast they come, whether they take appliances, whether they're insured, what people say about them.
You never see any of those searches. But that's what you're being judged on.
Which means ranking first for your main search doesn't save you. You can win that and still lose the answer, because you never covered the questions underneath it.
Two things follow from that.
Answer the small questions. Every question you get on the phone is a fan-out search waiting to happen. What does it cost. How fast can you get here. What can't go in it. Put those on your site as their own pages.
Some of those searches aren't about your site at all. They're about what other people say about you — reviews, mentions, somewhere you got written about. You don't control those, and that's exactly why they carry weight.
Two things to stop paying for
An llms.txt file. This is a text file people will sell you as a way to feed AI a summary of your site. Ahrefs looked at server logs across 137,210 domains and found that 97% of llms.txt files got zero requests in a month. Not low traffic — none. And the biggest single category of requests to the ones that did get read was SEO audit tools, checking whether you have one.
It's a file that exists so people can sell you a file. Google's documentation says Search ignores it.
A separate invoice for "AI search" on top of SEO. Same work. Same crawlers, same pages, same content. If somebody is billing you twice for one job, ask them to explain what the second invoice pays for that the first one doesn't.
Old way versus what works now
Old: rank on page one of Google. Now: that, plus AI Overviews, plus Maps, plus ChatGPT. Page one didn't get replaced. It got added to, which is why people who tell you SEO is dead are wrong in an expensive direction.
Old: chase exact keywords. Now: make sure the internet agrees on who you are. Same name, address, and phone number everywhere you exist. Machines cross-check that, and when the story doesn't match they get careful.
Old: total review count. Now: what the reviews say. A hundred that say "great job" tell a machine nothing. Twenty that say "cleaned out my mother's estate in Hartford in one day" tell it exactly what you do and where. Recent beats old, too — nobody trusts a five-star from 2021.
Old: buy links from random sites. Now: be visibly part of your town. Chamber of Commerce. Sponsoring a team. The local paper. Real businesses in your area mentioning you. That's slower, and it's also the part a competitor can't buy in an afternoon.
What's worth your time, ranked
Roughly how I'd rank the common tactics for a home service business:
Worth the most. Reviews that name the service and the town. Your own numbers — what a job costs, what you charge, what went wrong. Other people saying your name somewhere that isn't your website.
Worth real effort. A page for every service and every town you actually work.
Better than people think. Schema markup. It's boring and cheap, and machines read it.
Fix it, but for the money. Page speed. It's a real ranking factor and a small one. A slow site costs you booked jobs, which is the better reason to fix it.
Skip. Blog posts like "5 Tips For Spring Cleaning" — already written a thousand times, and nobody hires you off it. Domain authority scores — that's a number a software company invented, not something Google has.
Worst. Buying leads from lead-generation marketplaces. You're renting customers. Stop paying and it stops cold. The same money spent on your own site compounds.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need an llms.txt file?
The evidence says no. Ahrefs found 97% of them received zero requests across 137,210 domains, and Google's documentation says Search ignores the file. If you already have one that generates itself for free, it costs you nothing to leave it.
Is AI search different work from SEO?
Largely the same work — same crawlers, same pages, same content. Be skeptical of anyone billing you separately for both.
What is query fan-out?
Google's term for breaking one question into several related searches run at the same time, then building a single answer from all the results. Google's documentation confirms AI Overviews and AI Mode may use it.
Does page speed affect whether AI cites me?
Not directly in any documented way. What matters far more is whether your content is in the page file at all rather than built by JavaScript after loading. Speed matters because slow sites lose customers.
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