How to Manipulate and Predict Most AI Answers

As of May 2025, everyone is crying about "LLMs are stealing traffic to websites!!!" and for all the people that do cry, it shows how much lack of expertise there is around.

Their reasoning is: "AI steals my traffic -> now my business is gonna fail -> therefore, SEO is dead."

Does that logic truly make sense to you?

Let me ask you a question: What is the default behavior of AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Bing Copilot, Grok, etc., when you search "best travel company"? As of 23 May 2025, the default behavior of all these AIs for that keyword, is to run a SERP analysis and extract content from the SERP.

So if they extract content from the SERP, it means that they're literally just showing what exists (essentially what you produced) but in a summarized way to the user. How does this kill your business?

Actually, I know who will die.

The only way where AI "kills" your business is if you have a website that purely relies on search engine rankings and is purely informational (meaning you don't offer ANY product or service, but you own just an affiliate site or an information-focused site with the sole purpose of earning ad revenue). (Actually though, there is one use for information-focused sites, I'll tell you about it later.)

Now, if that's your case, I'm sorry for you but if you even believe that in 2025 unless you're NerdWallet (which they have it hard it too) users will trust your top 15 gadgets review you should rethink your strategy.

Now, of course search engines still need people to write reviews etc. otherwise they have no food to feed to users, BUT your main goal in 2025 shouldn't be having an affiliate website. (I won't even touch on people that wanna earn from just ad revenue).

You should start thinking about building service/product-based businesses.

Yeah, that’s the first thing you need to figure out.

Find something you truly like to do, have expertise on and also can make you tons of money, then build either a product or a service out of it.

It could even be related to your old affiliate site, let's suppose you had a website reviewing gaming keyboards, I believe you should have enough expertise to now create your own keyboard, beat the competition, since you know all their weaknesses, and go out there and sell it!

Or maybe create a service where people need to hire you to have consultations about analyzing their new gaming setup, what they should improve etc. (Even though being a consultant like that in gaming in my opinion won't get you much money since there's no demand).

Now, let's get back to the main topic.

Now that you have your product/service, how do we get cited by AIs?

Very simple, apply SEO as you always did (hopefully you know how to do it) and own the SERP.

Remember, I mentioned earlier that the default behavior of most major AIs is to visit the SERP -> extract information from websites -> summarize the information -> display the information.

So if you own your SERP, you should easily predict and manipulate any AI-made answer.

Going back to the "best travel company" example. If I own the top 4 listings, and in all the top 4 listings there's my brand cited as the best of the best, then what do you think AIs will do?

Now, you might say, "yeah sure, let's be realistic, how do I even own the top listings for such hard keywords?"

If you truly don't know how, keep reading.

I'll tell you some suggestions:

• Contact the current top-ranking sites (or even the whole top 10) and do whatever it takes to convince them to feature you as the best solution. Sometimes it requires money, sometimes a referral partnership or even a complete brand partnership, or a combination of all, depends on the niche.
• You thought informational sites were dead? I tricked you, they're not for this example. You could build multiple sub-brands (informational sites) -> create topical authority on them -> get links -> make your top listing and show up in the tops. Yes, it will require time and a lot of effort, but are you serious about your brand or not? Do you seriously want to beat multi-million dollar brands showing up in the SERP in 1 month with $2,000? If you have no budget, switch niche. If you don't wanna put the effort, go back to your 9-5.
• Build guest posts and have a T2 link strategy for them.
• This is specific to Google but as everybody knows, it currently loves Reddit. You can definitely build strategies around that.

That's it, now you know how to manipulate most AI answers.

Good to read:

• What Are Google AI Overviews and How Do They Work?