Search didn’t “start changing.”
It already changed. And most founders didn’t notice.
While everyone was busy refreshing dashboards and tracking keyword drops, Google quietly replaced large parts of the search experience with AI-summaries. ChatGPT is racing to become a full-blown search engine. Perplexity is rewriting how people discover brands.
And the only metric that matters now is brutally simple: Does AI choose you or ignore you?
This week made something extremely clear: We’re not living through an SEO shift. We’re living through a discovery reset.
If your brand isn’t visible, understood, and defensible inside AI search, it won’t matter how good your content is, how strong your product is, or how much traffic you used to get.
The internet just changed the rules. And nobody is coming to warn you.
This Week in AI Search
Google quietly pushed Gemini 3 + Nano Banana Pro deeper into global Search
AI-summaries are no longer an experiment. They’re the default layer above classic results.
India is now part of the rollout, which means AI answers will influence millions of new queries overnight.
The shift: Google is training users to trust AI explanations more than links.
Your content is now competing inside a paragraph, not a page.
OpenAI declared an internal “code red” as ChatGPT races toward search dominance
Pressure is rising: Gemini added 200 million users in 3 months.
ChatGPT is being re-architected for faster, search-style responses and real-time accuracy.
Expect more “search-native” features inside ChatGPT in the next few weeks.
Discovery is fragmenting. You must be optimized for multiple AI engines, not just Google.
The legal earthquake: NYT vs Perplexity + India proposing AI royalty rules
NYT sued Perplexity for using paywalled content in training and outputs.
India proposed making AI companies pay royalties for training data.
These aren’t isolated incidents; they’re the start of a global policy shift.
First-party content and proprietary insights will soon become monetizable assets. Content quality now has both SEO and legal upside.
AI infrastructure signals a new reality: energy, cost, and consolidation
Reports flagged the exploding cost of running large-scale AI search systems.
Companies are realizing AI isn’t a “feature”; it’s infrastructure.
Big players will double down. Smaller ones will vanish.
Search is becoming an AI arms race. Staying visible requires consistent evidence, not occasional blog posts.
The Diagnostic: 30 AI Search Queries Every SaaS Founder Should Test
Most founders have no idea how their brand actually appears inside AI search.
These 30 queries expose the truth. They test your visibility, authority, trust, positioning, narrative, and competitive strength across every layer of AI-driven discovery.
Use them exactly as written. They’re long, unfair, and intentionally designed to break your assumptions.