On my first encounter with the press release from Stan Ventures’s titled “AI SEO Service to Help Brands Earn AI Visibility,” I just said: all right, this is starting to get real.
They say they help businesses show up in the answers that AI search engines spit out — and not just in search rankings.
Published this week, the announcement underscores that the days of “blue link” are rapidly fading.
The summary: brands “today are operating in a search ecosystem where the queries have become conversations” and which means that no longer do you compete for 10 blue links, rather it’s “the one-sentence summaries extracted by large language models and AI assistants.”
Stan Ventures, the creator of the service, claims it is about “answer acquisition” rather than traffic.
That’s optimizing for: Referenced, Cited, The authoritative source in a story generated, rather than just ranking for something.
It’s not just marketing jargon. The internal print for their data (yes, they have one) – which is in the range of 40,000 URLs tested for over 300 clients – identified some shocking patterns: AI engines do not always prefer top-ranked content that Google indexes.
They would rather have organised entities, trusted sources, and sites with schema markup and brand mention signals.
In other words: You can be ranked out of the stratosphere for “best sofa” and you’re still invisible when an AI asks the question, “Which sofa brand is most durable?” unless you have sown the proper signals.
What struck me: how quickly things were changing. Another recent industry piece contends that this entire transformation is part of something now referred to as “Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)” and less than 10% of sources cited by AI-answer engines appear in the top ten positions in traditional search.
So if you’re still investing entirely in traditional SEO (link building, keywords etc.) then you might be missing a trick.
Here’s something actionable: Brands must consider entity authority, schema markup, structured data — in other words, making your site highly readable by A.I. systems — and not simply for humans or classic search engines.
And yes, it might seem that you’re optimizing for machines. But more and more users are ending up with the machines.
On a personal note: this algorithm shift happening so quietly makes me a bit nervous. As the “blue link” vanishes, what becomes of websites that depend on clicks and traffic? This isn’t just technical — it’s economic, and it’s strategic.
Stan Ventures warns they’ve already seen rapid adoption among ad agencies, SaaS brands, and multi-location businesses who “feel the pressure of maintaining visibility in this new AI-first world.”
What’s so fascinating about this is that it really is not just, are we ranking? anymore. Skipping “is AI using us?” — and that means brands need to reimagine how they show up in search, discovery and answer-generating.
To put it in a bow: This launch tells us we’re turning the page on a new era of visibility online. Old-school SEO isn’t dead, but the game is changing.
If I were counsel to a brand right now, I’d be saying just go check in with your structured data look at all of your branded mention links talk to your agency about, “Are we visible in AI answers?”
All because what they are optimizing is no longer for human clicking but is instead for machine recommending.