SEO (search engine optimization)

SEO is the work of being found. A person types or asks a question; a search system decides which pages answer it. SEO is everything a site does so that its pages are among them, and so the person who lands there finds what they came for.

Google's own definition is short: SEO is about helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site.

What does SEO cover?

Three layers, each controlling something different:

• Technical

  What it controls

  Whether engines can reach, read and index a page

  Examples of the work

  robots.txt, sitemaps, canonical URLs, server rendering, speed

• On-page

  What it controls

  Whether a page answers the search it targets

  Examples of the work

  the question in the heading, a direct answer, structure, internal links

• Off-page

  What it controls

  Whether others vouch for the page

  Examples of the work

  links, mentions, reviews, coverage on sites the audience trusts

A failure in an earlier layer cancels the later ones. The best answer on the web does not rank if a stray rule blocks the crawler.

How does a page get from published to ranked?

1. Crawl. A search engine's crawler finds the URL, through a link or a sitemap, and fetches it.
2. Index. The engine processes the page, works out what it is about, and stores it.
3. Retrieve and rank. For each search, the engine picks candidate pages from its index and orders them by how well they answer, how trusted they are and how usable they are.
4. Show. The page appears as a result, a snippet, a rich result or a source in an AI summary. See SERP.

Google says some changes take effect within hours and others take months, and suggests waiting a few weeks before judging one.

What carries over to AI answers?

Most of it. AI assistants that answer with the web search an index first: their own, Google's or Bing's. So the technical and on-page layers transfer directly: a page that cannot be crawled or does not answer the question is not read by ChatGPT or Perplexity either.

Our own data shows how much AI answers lean on classic search sources. Attensira tracks 61 questions about AI search, asked of ChatGPT and Perplexity daily. In the 30 days to 4 October 2026, developers.google.com, Google's documentation for site owners, was cited 4,381 times, second only to OpenAI's help centre at 5,052, and was one of the six sources that most decided the answer to 15 of those questions.

What changes is the finish line:

• The unit is a passage, not a page. Engines lift the paragraph that answers the question.
• The goal is being named, not only ranked. An answer recommends a few brands. Being one of them is the result.
• Other people's pages carry more weight. Answers about a category are built from roundups, reviews and forums, so off-page work matters more.
• Each engine is different. Each AI engine searches its own way and reads its own sources, so results have to be checked engine by engine.

Even the vocabulary has stretched. Asked for an "LLM SEO tool" on 3 October 2026, ChatGPT answered that such tools are usually called LLM SEO, GEO or AI visibility tools, and cited six tool-roundup pages inline, none of them ours.

What do people get wrong about SEO?

• Treating it as keywords. Engines model meaning and intent; repeating a phrase does not help, and Google's spam policies prohibit keyword stuffing.
• Expecting quick, permanent wins. Rankings move with competitors and with the engine.
• Measuring only traffic. More searches now end without a click. Visibility in the answer is a result too.
• Declaring SEO dead. AI answers are built on retrieval, and retrieval is what SEO prepares a site for.

Who does the work, and how?

Traditionally, a team or an SEO agency: researching, writing, fixing pages and building links, through people, on a monthly retainer. Attensira is an AI-native SEO agency run by software: the service of an SEO agency at the price of a tool. A crew of AI agents learns your business, reads what Google and the AI engines answer every day, finds why you are missing, and does the work, from rewriting a page to fixing a crawler rule to earning a placement on the pages answers cite. Workspaces start in Draft, where nothing ships without your approval; claims such as a price or a number wait for you in every mode. Every change is measured afterwards with its sample size. See how it works for the full loop.