AI is reshaping how information is discovered and evaluated across tech, fintech, and martech ecosystems. For years, visibility meant ranking in Google — optimize keywords, build backlinks, win Page One. With tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s SGE, users — especially in tech-driven markets — bypass results entirely and expect instant, synthesized answers.

This shift has created a new reality: it no longer matters only what Google shows — it matters how AI systems describe you. If an AI assistant cannot confidently explain who you are, your expertise, and why you’re credible, you simply disappear from the conversation.

The Decline of Traditional SEO

For decades, SEO rewarded technical precision: keyword strategy, link-building, metadata, website hierarchy. But AI doesn’t operate through ranking. It operates through reasoning. Instead of showing ten blue links, AI models generate an answer built from data points they trust.

If those data points are inconsistent or missing, no amount of SEO optimization will compensate. A perfectly optimized website can still be ignored by AI if the expert behind it has a weak or unclear digital identity.

Traditional SEO is becoming less relevant not because search engines are failing, but because AI has become the new interface of search. People now ask:

• “Who is this person?”
• “Can I trust them?”
• “What have they done?”

AI assistants must answer — and they answer only about individuals who have a sufficient, verifiable digital footprint.

How AI Decides Whom to Trust

AI systems determine credibility the same way search engines once evaluated websites — by looking for consistent, verifiable signals across the internet. When someone asks ChatGPT or any other assistant about a person, the model doesn’t make assumptions. It checks whether enough digital assets exist to confidently reconstruct who that person is.

From my experience, the signals that matter most strongly resemble the classic SEO toolkit, but now they apply to individuals. A clear and structured biography serves as the anchor. Professional profiles must align with one another. Media mentions, interviews, and published articles validate expertise. A personal website — ideally with structured data — gives AI a reliable canonical source. Listings on Crunchbase or TheOrg act like trusted nodes in a knowledge graph, strengthening the overall signal.

When these elements support each other, the model can “understand” the expert well enough to include them in its responses. When they don’t, the assistant defaults to caution and leaves the person out entirely. That’s why a senior professional with decades of experience but no documented digital footprint may remain invisible, while a less experienced competitor with consistent online signals appears everywhere in AI-generated answers.

Personal Branding as the New SEO

In the AI era, personal branding has shifted from storytelling to something much more technical. This means that personal branding today is closer to data engineering than to classic PR. To appear in AI-generated answers, you need a structured biography that matches your other profiles, reliable sources that confirm your expertise, and enough publicly available context for a model to understand who you are and why you matter. If those signals line up, AI can describe you with confidence. If they don’t, it will simply leave you out.

For SEO and martech professionals, this shift opens an entirely new technical field. The same skills we once used to help websites rank in Google — content optimization, structured data, link-building, digital audits — now determine whether an expert appears in AI-driven results. The mechanics haven’t disappeared; they’ve moved from pages to people.

What Professionals Should Do Now

For professionals who want to appear naturally in AI-generated answers, the first step is to establish a clear and structured foundation. A well-crafted biography becomes the anchor for all future visibility: media profiles, interviews, speaking engagements, and industry mentions all rely on the facts it contains. A personal website serves as the central hub for that information, and structured data—such as schema markup—helps AI systems interpret it correctly.

From there, it is important to appear in credible directories and to secure several media mentions that confirm one’s expertise. These don’t have to come from major publications; in my experience, niche or local outlets often provide signals that AI models treat as equally reliable. Platforms like PRNEWS.IO make this step more accessible by offering a broad selection of verified media where experts can publish their stories.

Trust Is Now Algorithmic

Finally, every professional should check whether Google has generated a Knowledge Panel for them and claim it if it exists. If it doesn’t, building the right digital groundwork often leads to one being created over time. Knowledge Panels remain one of the strongest identity signals AI relies on — often the first and most authoritative source in reconstructing who a person is.

About the Author

Alex Nigmatulin is the co-founder and Marketing Specialist of PRNEWS.IO, a platform that helps brands and experts build structured, verifiable digital footprints across 100,000+ publications. With more than a decade of experience in SEO, digital visibility, and media publishing, he works at the intersection of search, reputation, and online discoverability.