For the past decade, search engine optimization was the playbook every developer, content team, and growth marketer lived by. You researched keywords, built backlinks, tuned page speed, and waited for Google to reward you with traffic. That playbook has not disappeared, but a second and increasingly influential layer is being built on top of it.
When someone asks ChatGPT to recommend a tunneling tool, or queries Perplexity for the best self-hosted alternatives to Ngrok, or reads the AI Overview Google surfaces above its own blue links those responses are generated by large language models synthesizing content from across the web.