AI Search Has Opened Up a Whole New Category of Entry Points

AI has changed SEO in a lot of meaningful ways, but one shift I've been thinking about a lot lately is entry points, specifically, how AI search has genuinely opened up new ways for people to discover a business, in situations where traditional SEO simply couldn't help.

The Old Problem: Nobody Searches for What They Don't Know Exists

In traditional SEO, there's really one central goal: rank at the top of Google when someone searches for the type of product or service you sell. And to be clear, this is still the single most valuable entry point in AI search too. There's no more valuable moment than someone actively, specifically searching for exactly what you offer.

But here's the problem that's always existed alongside that goal: what if you offer something genuinely useful, but people simply don't know it exists? What if the solution to their problem has a name they've never heard, or belongs to a category they don't know to search for?

This has historically been an extremely difficult position for SEO to help with. My advice to businesses in this spot has usually been to look elsewhere first, social media advertising being the most common recommendation, because traditional search fundamentally depends on someone already knowing what to type.

Why AI Search Changes This

With AI search, this problem doesn't disappear entirely, but it becomes considerably less severe, because AI search creates far more entry points into discovering a solution than keyword-based search ever did.

Think about how traditional Google search actually works. People type in keywords. If they don't know what something is called, or don't realise a specific type of product or service could solve the problem they're facing, there's no meaningful search for them to run. They don't have a conversation with Google. They simply don't search at all, and the opportunity to find your business never arises.

AI search behaves very differently. People are now having genuinely long, exploratory conversations with tools like ChatGPT, and even typing unusually long, descriptive prompts directly into Google. As a result, real discovery is happening inside AI search in a way that essentially never happened with traditional keyword search. In traditional Google search, you typically found exactly what you already knew to look for. In AI search, it's entirely common to learn about a solution you didn't previously know existed.

And this shift doesn't just benefit businesses selling something obscure or hard to categorise. It creates new entry points for every business, including ones that already rank well for their obvious, primary keywords.

How to Actually Find and Use These Entry Points

Understanding that this opportunity exists is one thing. Actually taking advantage of it requires a specific process.

Step one: build a long list of example prompts.

There's genuinely no reliable data source telling you exactly what kinds of prompts people are entering into ChatGPT or Google. Keyword data and Reddit threads can help point you in a rough direction, but honestly, the best ideas tend to come from your own imagination. As a business owner, you almost certainly already have a strong intuitive sense of the kinds of conversations people are having with AI before they eventually land on your product or service. Write those prompts down. Be specific. Think about the version of the conversation where someone doesn't yet know your brand, or even your category, exists.

Step two: track those prompts systematically.

You need some kind of software that runs those prompts on a recurring basis and tracks exactly which websites AI is citing before it recommends you, or recommends a competitor instead.

Step three: work through the cited pages, page by page.

Once you know precisely which pages AI is citing before it makes its recommendation, you have everything you need to build a real strategy. These are the exact pages shaping the answer AI gives for the prompts you're tracking. For each one, ask yourself a simple question: is there any realistic way I could get this exact page to recommend my brand as the solution?

If the answer is yes, or even just maybe, act on it. Send the email. Leave the genuinely useful comment. Reach out and start the conversation. These pages are, quite literally, shaping whether AI recommends you or your competitor the next time someone has that conversation, and influencing even a handful of them can meaningfully shift how often your brand shows up.

The Bigger Opportunity

What makes this genuinely exciting is that it isn't just a new tactic bolted onto old SEO thinking. It's a fundamentally different kind of opportunity, one built around the fact that people are now discovering solutions through conversation rather than only through keywords they already knew to type. For businesses that have historically struggled to be found because what they offer doesn't fit neatly into a search term, this is the first real opening in years.