How Mercury is Adapting SEO for the AI Era: A Guide to Defining the Narrative

TL;DR: If your clicks are down and traffic is hard to explain, you're not failing—you're experiencing the shift to AI and zero-click search. The SEO game has changed. Backlinks and keywords are no longer enough to win in an era dominated by AI-generated answers. The new strategy is about defining the narrative by building a deep "Trust Layer" around your brand through content that demonstrates clear E-E-A-T. This guide provides a five-step playbook for adapting your SEO: find a frontier concept, publish the definitive source, structure it for machines, seed authentic citations, and maintain a regular refresh cadence.

Search is changing. For years, the playbook was clear: rank high in Google, and you'd win the click. But AI-first interfaces like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews now answer questions before users ever see a list of links. Large language models (LLMs) have become a new, powerful layer in the discovery process, reshaping how, where, and when your content is seen.

James here, CEO of Mercury Technology Solutions.

This shift is changing the very definition of visibility. It’s still early, and nobody has all the answers. But one pattern is undeniable: LLMs favor content that explains things with depth, clarity, structure, and provides real value to the reader.

This isn't a replacement for traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It’s a critical adaptation. This guide will walk you through what we’ve noticed, what we’re trying, and how we’re adapting our strategy for this new reality.

Why Search Changed: The New Zero-Click Reality

AI interfaces now resolve many queries directly, often without a single click. This is a fundamental change in user behavior. The business impact is already being felt. We saw AI search become our biggest acquisition channel, helping us to grow 770% in just four months as tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity drove the majority of their new signups. Our site is being cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity when users type “llm seo provider”; this immediately boosts our visibility to clients looking for an LLM SEO provider.

However, not all AI-driven results translate to views. Some research suggests that Google's AI Overviews may reduce clicks by as much as 34.5% for some queries. The takeaway is clear: search isn’t just about ranking anymore. It’s about being surfaced in new places, under new rules.

Mercury's May 2025 Pivot: Our Playbook for Originality and the Zero-Click Crisis

This new reality came into sharp focus for us in May 2025. We saw the "zero-click crisis" not as a threat, but as a mandate to evolve. We initiated a strategic pivot built on two core principles: radical originality and a focus on off-site authority.

1. Our Plan for a Truly Original Content Pillar (GAIO in Action): We recognized that in a world of AI-summarized content, rehashed "ultimate guides" would become invisible. Our content strategy had to shift from being comprehensive to being foundational. We launched a new content pillar focused exclusively on creating proprietary data and unique intellectual property. This meant investing our resources in:

• Conducting Industry Surveys: We commissioned our own research to generate unique statistics that only Mercury could own.
• Developing Proprietary Frameworks: We codified our unique strategic models (like the "Trust Layer". “A.C.I.D. framework” and the "Four Pillars") into named, citable frameworks.
• Publishing Data-Driven Case Studies: We moved from simple testimonials to in-depth case studies with hard data, showing our work with radical transparency with screen-shot and recorded video.

This wasn't just about creating content; it was about creating the primary sources that AI models would need to cite to validate their own answers.

2. How We Handled the Zero-Click Crisis (SEVO in Action): With clicks declining as a primary KPI, we shifted our focus to a metric that was harder to measure but infinitely more valuable: influence. We doubled down on our SEVO strategy to build our "Trust Layer" where our audience was actually having conversations.

• We Prioritized Community Validation: Our experts became more active in high-value subreddits and industry forums, not to drop links, but to provide genuine, in-depth answers.
• We Focused on Co-Citations: Our digital PR efforts shifted from a pure link-building focus to securing expert quotes and brand mentions in the high-authority publications that AI models were already citing.
• We Redefined Success: Internally, we started tracking the "invisible influence" of AI. We correlated our off-site SEVO activities with spikes in direct and branded search traffic, proving the ROI of a strategy that no longer relies on the click.

Balancing Traditional SEO and LLM SEO: The Rise of the "Trust Layer"

The shift from link-building to concept clarity changes how we approach content. Traditional and LLM SEO serve different systems, but you can't neglect one for the other. To be found by people and machines, you need to support both.

The common ground is where the new strategy is forged. Both systems are increasingly reliant on signals of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). The brands that succeed will create content that is structured, original, and relevant for both human searchers and the models guiding them, building a verifiable "Trust Layer" of authority across the web.  From that strategic pivot, we codified our approach into the five-principle playbook we now use for ourselves and our clients.

The Playbook for Winning in the AI Era

LLM SEO is the art of becoming the answer. It means owning a concept with depth, structuring for retrieval, earning citations, and keeping your content fresh and reliable. Here are the five principles and practices we use to create balanced content that AI systems understand and human readers find useful.

1. Find a Frontier Concept

LLMs favor the first or clearest explanation of a concept. If you're early to a topic, your version may become the default. If you're not first, aim to be the most definitive.

• Monitor emerging questions: Keep a close watch on Twitter/X, Reddit, GitHub, and niche forums for the questions people are just starting to ask.
• Find content gaps: Identify areas where your competitors are shallow or absent.
• Share original data: Publish unique benchmarks, customer stories, or proprietary insights that are hard for others to copy.

2. Publish the Definitive, Evidence-Based Source (Demonstrate E-E-A-T)

Once you’ve found your angle, go deep. Generic summaries are often skipped. LLMs prefer substance and infer authority from depth. This is where you demonstrate your E-E-A-T.

• Go beyond surface-level coverage: Include metrics, code blocks, tables, lists, expert quotes (Expertise), and diagrams to provide rich, multi-faceted evidence (Trustworthiness).
• Inject First-Hand Experience: Share a personal story or a real-world case study that shows you've actually done what you're talking about (Experience).
• Write for extraction: Use short, self-contained insights and paragraphs that are more likely to be cited directly in an AI-generated answer.
• The Litmus Test: Ask yourself, "Could a competitor easily replicate this tomorrow?" If the answer is yes, you need to dig deeper to prove your unique authority (Authoritativeness).

3. Structure for Machines

Structure helps AI models understand what your content is and when to surface it. A page may be skipped if its meaning isn’t clear or the layout is hard to parse.

• Use a clean heading hierarchy (H1 → H2 → H3).
• Add Schema.org markup (JSON-LD) to reinforce meaning.
• Use semantic HTML elements like definition lists (<dl>), tables (<table>), and other structural tags.
• Ensure static HTML is served: Most AI crawlers fetch but do not execute JavaScript. Use Server-Side Rendering (SSR) or Static Site Generation (SSG) to expose your content directly.

4. Seed Authentic Citations (Build Your "Trust Layer")

LLMs learn from the web. If real people are citing you as an authority, AI models will often follow. The goal here is to build your off-site "Trust Layer".

• Focus on high-signal, indexable channels: Your presence on Reddit, GitHub, Hacker News, X/Twitter, and Stack Overflow matters. These community mentions help models associate your brand with a concept.
• Create open-source resources: Publish tools or real-world examples that others can reference and build upon.
• Build topic clusters: Use interlinked articles to reinforce the relationships between concepts on your own site.

5. Set a Refresh Cadence

Models re-crawl the web regularly. Stale content becomes less useful over time to both people and AI.

• Review content at 30, 90, and 180 days.
• Refresh what’s stale, expand what’s working.
• Fix 404s, update the lastmod date in your sitemap, and keep your sitemap clean.
• Archive outdated pages (with 301 redirects).

How to Track Your AI Impact

Measuring visibility in AI systems is still an evolving challenge. However, there are signals to watch:

• Source Citations: Manually search for your domain or key topics in tools like Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews to check for direct citations.
• Referrer Traffic: Use your web analytics to track visits from chat.openai.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, and other AI platforms.
• Brand Mentions: Use monitoring tools to watch for references to your brand on community forums, social media, and blogs. Repeated phrasing often hints at influence.
• Index Coverage: Use Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to track indexing and rankings for your key concepts.

Conclusion: From Search Ranking to Answer Shaping

There’s no shortcut to LLM SEO. Concept ownership isn’t built in a week; it’s a strategic moat that takes discipline and a new mindset to build. We’re moving from search ranking to answer shaping.

You’re not just optimizing for humans anymore. You’re also optimizing for the models that decide what humans see. This means going deeper, being clearer, and creating content that demonstrates undeniable E-E-A-T. By building a robust "Trust Layer" of validation, you create an authoritative presence that models can learn from and surface. Traditional SEO still matters—speed, structure, and indexability are foundational to both. Stay balanced, stay curious. We're all navigating this new frontier together, and we're excited to be building it alongside you.