# How AI Is Changing Where Your Work Gets Found [00:00:00] **Tiana Ned:** So I wanna start this episode with a little experiment And I want you to do this after you listen to the episode and not just, not along while I'm describing it. Open up ChatGPT or Perplexity or just Google with AI Overviews [00:00:19] And type in the question your ideal client would ask to find someone like you. If you're a brand designer, it can be something like, " Who's a good freelance brand designer for a food company?" Uh, if you're a copywriter, it can be, " who's a reliable freelance copywriter for software as a service brands?" [00:00:39] if you are a podcast editor, it can be something like, "Where do I find a good podcast editor for a business show?" And then read what comes back. Are you in there? Is your name mentioned? Is your website referenced? Or basically, is there any trace of you at all? [00:00:58] ' 'Cause here is what's happening [00:01:00] A meaningful and growing number of potential clients are starting their search for creative professionals, not on Google, not on LinkedIn, not on Behance or Dribbble or Upwork. They go to a chat window, then they type a question in plain English, and AI gives them a name or a couple of names, and they go from there. [00:01:24] and if you're not in that answer, you're invisible to that person completely [00:01:29] so I went deep on the research for this episode 'cause I wanted to know how real this shift is, and what the numbers are like, and specifically what creative professionals need to do differently. So some of what I found was expected, But some of the findings surprised me. [00:01:47] And also a couple of things that I thought I knew turned out to be a bit more complicated than I'd assumed [00:02:11] Hey there, creative people. So this is a research episode, and I'm gonna be citing studies and numbers today [00:02:18] Cause I think this topic has a lot of general vibes based, takes floating around, and I wanted to cut through that and find out what's going on [00:02:27] Also fair warning that some of these stats are vendor sourced, meaning they come from companies that sell AI visibility tools. so you know, not gonna pretend that a number is more certain than it is, [00:02:39] But the overall direction is pretty consistent across, these independent sources that I'm pretty confident in the picture, even where, you know, specific percentages should be taken as directional rather than precisely exact. [00:02:56] All right, let's talk about where your work actually gets found in 2026 Okay, let me start with the headline. I think it's important before we get into, nuance. Um, Google is not dead, okay? So it's not even close because Google still handles around 90% of global search traffic, and it still drives the vast majority of discovery [00:03:21] for almost every creative professional out there. But Google's share fell to a 10-year low in 2025, down from a peak of nearly 93% in 2023. And the thing that's eating into it slowly but consistently is AI chat tools. And here's the number that caught my attention. Semrush analyzed over a billion lines of US clickstream data and found that ChatGPT's outbound referral traffic, meaning clicks from ChatGPT out to the rest of the web, grew [00:03:59] 200 and... 206% year over year from January 2025 to January 2026. So that's more than double in just one calendar year. I mean, that for sure sounds massive, right? but the context that makes it land correctly is that AI referral traffic still only accounts for roughly 0.1 to 2.8% of most sites' total traffic. [00:04:27] So what we're talking about here is a very fast-growing, very small number, okay? So it's not a massive number. And the thing to watch is the trajectory, okay? instead of the current absolute size, and by the way, trajectory is clear because AI referred traffic grew from 357% across 2025 versus the year before. [00:04:53] So ChatGPT alone sends roughly 87% of all AI referral clicks. Gemini is growing fast also, nearly 400% in the recent three-month window. And then Perplexity is smaller but dedicated, okay? Meanwhile, Google itself is trying to absorb the shift rather than lose ground to it, as we can tell, right? So we have those AI overviews, it's a panel of AI generated text at the top of many search results. [00:05:26] They now show up on a large and growing share of queries, okay? And Where does that get relevant to you? Because when AI overview appears on a search result, Pew Research found users only click a traditional result 8% of the time versus 15% without one, and only 1% of people click a link inside the overview itself. [00:05:51] So even on Google, the game is changing. getting someone to click through to your website from a search result is getting harder. But getting cited inside an AI answer, that's the new version of ranking number one. Uh, one piece of data on that. So brands that are cited inside Google AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than brands that aren't. [00:06:19] being in the AI answer is actually better than being in the organic results below it. [00:06:27] Okay, so let's bring this down from the abstract and talk about what this means for you specifically. as we can see, the discovery journey has basically collapsed, okay? We have the old version where potential client Googles your service, opens five tabs, compares different portfolios, spends 30 minutes to an hour deciding, right? [00:06:48] , And then we have new version. So a potential client asks ChatGPT, "Who's a good freelance designer for this specific project?" And AI gives them a couple of names, they check out one, and they reach out, okay? This is already happening for some creative professionals. [00:07:06] The most documented examples right now come from interior designers [00:07:10] A designer named Rachel Moriarty in San Diego was hired for a full condo project by a client who found her via ChatGPT, which had pulledfrom her Instagram. she described it as a wild modern marketing moment. Then another designer, Nicole Fisher of BNR, BNR Interiors in Hudson, New York, realized mid-call with a prospect that they'd found her by typing interior design full service Hudson Valley into ChatGPT. [00:07:41] Hmm.she said the lead felt almost pre-vetted because they already knew what she did, they already wanted what she offered, and they were essentially just confirming that she was real. Okay? Now, I want to be upfront here. these documented examples of creatives getting clients through AI recommendations right now are mostly interior designers. [00:08:02] I didn't find well-sourced named examples of a graphic designer or a or a podcast producer saying ChatGPT sent me a client who signed. So I'd rather mention that gap in evidence, but the pattern that exists is there, and it's real, okay? documented examples in our specific corner of creative work are still sparse. Also, here's what's relevant while we wait for the examples to catch up. The clients are already using AI to find people, okay? A Bright Local survey found around forty-five percent of customers used AI tools to find a local business in the past year, up from roughly six percent a year before that. [00:08:45] a third of US adults now use personal AI agents to discover or interact with brands at all. That behavior is happening, but the question is whether you're showing up when it does. Now, what about platforms? Behance, Dribbble, LinkedIn, Upwork Et cetera so Behance and Dribbble are not dying as portfolio platforms, but as discovery engines, they are fading a bit, okay? So the SEO driven passive discovery that used to come from Behance, someone Googles a specific kind of illustration, and then they find your projects page. [00:09:25] That is getting chipped away at the same AI overview dynamic which I described a few minutes ago, and neither platform is natively integrated into how AI tools answer questions. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is a completely different story, and this is the stat I found most counterintuitive in all the research for this episode. [00:09:47] So Semrush analyzed three hundred twenty-five thousand prompts and found LinkedIn appears in 11% of AI responses on average. On ChatGPT search specifically, 14.3%. On Google's AI mode, 13.5%. That makes LinkedIn the second most cited domain in AI answers overall, behind Reddit, ahead of Wikipedia, and ahead of every major news publisher. [00:10:17] And here's the detail that matters most for individual creators. Roughly 59% of the LinkedIn content being cited in those AI answers comes from individual creators, okay? Not the company pages, but individual profiles, individual people [00:10:34] that are writing posts and articles. So if you are a creative professional who's been treating LinkedIn as an afterthought, well,This is kind of the moment where it becomes a strategic mistake rather than a missed opportunity. [00:10:50] And before I get into what to do about all of this, I wanna share one more piece of data that changed how I think about this topic, because the story can easily read as AI is eating your traffic and you're getting less discovery. And while that's true for some people, for some types of content, [00:11:10] There's also the other side of it. Seer Interactive did a case study, one B2B client, seven months of data, and found that visitors who arrived via ChatGPT converted at about 16% versus 1.8% for Google organic traffic. So that's roughly nine times higher conversion. Now, that's one company, one time window, right? [00:11:35] So we cannot exactly call it an industry benchmark, and other studies show anywhere from two to 23 times higher conversion for AI-referred visitors. so the range is wide enough that I wouldn't take any specific multiple as gospel, okay? [00:11:52] But the direction is consistent, is when AI recommends you and someone clicks through, they are much more pre-qualified than someone who clicked a Google result. And that kind of makes sense when you think about it, because the person who Googled freelance designer and clicked your website is at the very beginning of their decision. [00:12:15] But the person who asks ChatGPT, "Who should I hire for this specific kind of project?" and it gave them your name, that person is much further along in their journey of hiring ''cause the AI already did the filtering. Okay? They're not casually browsing, they are checking [00:12:34] So the shift here is that AI is changing the quality of how people arrive at you, it's fewer clicks, but the clicks that do happen are more likely to turn into something, and I think this info matters a lot for how you think about the effort of showing up in AI answers [00:12:52] So it's basically about showing up earlier in a higher intent version of the client journey. Okay, let's get practical here. What determines whether an AI tool mentions you when someone asks a relevant question? There's a formal name for this now. It's called GEO, which stands for Generative Engine Optimization. [00:13:14] It builds on SEO rather than replacing it, and I wanna say that clearly 'cause there are people that are selling GEO as some totally new discipline that makes traditional SEO irrele- irrelevant, and that's not really accurate. The foundations are basically the same, but there are specific things that matter for AI citation that traditional SEO didn't really emphasize, okay? [00:13:36] Here's what the research said matters most. First, specificity beats everything. There was an academic study out of KDD 2024. It's a peer-reviewed research that found specific verifiable claims with real numbers get cited in AI answers 30 to 40% more often than vague ones. [00:14:01] The average project takes three weeks," for example. that sentence gets cited more than, "Projects typically have a reasonable timeline." Or, " I specialize in brand identity for food and beverage companies with other 50 employees," gets cited more than, "I help brands tell their story." [00:14:22] AI models are trained to find specific and trustworthy sounding claims. If you have vague positioning, that sounds like marketing copy. But if you have specific positioning, that sounds like you are a real person with specific knowledge. Then second, we have entity consistency. [00:14:41] What does that mean? This is the one that I think most freelancers are completely underestimating because AI models build a picture of who you are by aggregating mentions of you across the web, and that picture is much stronger when every mention uses the same language to describe what you do. [00:15:01] An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found that the single strongest predictor of showing up in AI overviews was the number of web mentions. So that's not backlinks, page authority, or any traditional SEO metric. Brands earning the most web mentions got up to ten times more AI mentions than the next group. [00:15:27] and those mentions need to be consistent, so the same one-sentence description of what you do and who you serve. Use the same way on your website, your LinkedIn, your podcast bio, your guest appearances, your directory listings. [00:15:45] Fragmented descriptions split the signal, let's talk about third point. Reddit and LinkedIn specifically, okay? Reddit is the most cited domain across AI tools. Somewhere around forty percent of multi-engine citations include Reddit. And OpenAI and Google have both directly licensed Reddit's data. Ifthere are genuine discussions of your work or your expertise on Reddit, that feeds AI systems. [00:16:16] For LinkedIn, The key is substantive long form articles, okay? Not short posts. Posts do get some traction, but a five hundred to two thousand word article with specific verifiable claims gets cited significantly more. And one weird practical detail from this research, using those Unicode fancy fonts some people format their LinkedIn text with, you know those decorated ones that make text look like it's in bold or cursive, [00:16:45] It makes posts fifty-eight percent less likely to be cited by AI because AI reads the underlying encoding, which is a mess of non-standard characters. and then fourth point is transcripts. [00:17:00] This one is specifically relevant for podcasters, YouTubers, and anyone making audio or video content. Because AI cannot listen to your podcast, it cannot watch your video, it reads text. And if your episodes don't have transcripts on your website, they essentially don't exist for AI discovery purposes [00:17:18] The audio is invisible, but the text version is what gets indexed and cited [00:17:23] AI can read the titles on Spotify and Apple, but The meat of the episode, which is in the transcript, that's the more important part for AI discovery. And then fifth point is third-party mentions. So what does that mean? That means being mentioned in other credible places like other podcasts, press, directories, industry roundups, Reddit discussions, review platforms. [00:17:49] All those matter enormously [00:17:51] So mentions, not links exactly, although links also do help, but here we are talking about precise mentions. And the research is pretty consistent that off-page signals dominate for AI citation in a way that's even stronger than for traditional SEO All right, three things in order of impact. None of these require buying any tools or paying for any software, okay? [00:18:16] First, do the audit I described at the beginning of the episode right now. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google with AI overviews, and type the question your ideal client would actually ask, okay? And then see what comes back. If you show up, look at how you're described and whether it matches how you describe yourself. [00:18:37] If you don't show up, you know exactly what you're working toward, okay? So that's your baseline. Then second, write one specific sentence about what you do and who you serve. be really specific, not, vague. Like, "I help brands tell their stories." No. Use something like [00:18:56] I produce podcast episodes for B2B founders who want to sound professional without hiring a full production team. Or I design brand identities for sustainable food companies launching in European markets. And then put that sentence, exactly that sentence, everywhere. Your website header, your LinkedIn About section, your podcast bio, your directory listings, your Upwork profile, your email signature, everywhere it's supposed to go. [00:19:28] 'Cause consistency across all those surfaces is what builds the entity signal that AI systems recognize. And then third, if you do video or audio content, add transcripts, if you haven't done this yet. You can use Descript, which gives you a clean transcript. you do a light cleanup pass, you drop it on your episode page, and you put it in an expandable section so it doesn't clutter your page. [00:19:54] boom, done. That's the audio content that now exists for AI when it didn't before. And beyond those three, getting mentioned in other people's content is the highest leverage long-term move, okay? So guest appearances on other podcasts, being quoted in articles, showing up in discussions on Reddit, getting listed in industry directories. [00:20:19] Those off-page mentions are what build the kind of AI visibility that compounds over time, okay? Start with one and ask yourself, where could I show up as a guest or a source in the next ninety days? so to recap and pull this together, AI search is growing, but it hasn't replaced Google, and it's not going to replace Google next month. [00:20:44] But what it's doing is it's adding a new layer to how discovery works, a layer where the volume is lower, but the intent is higher, and where the rules are meaningfully different than traditional SEO. I think the good news for creative professionals specifically is that [00:21:01] the things that make you more visible to AI, such as specific positioning, consistent language, substantive written content, third-party mentions, are also just good business fundamentals, right? So you're not chasing an algorithm for its own sake. Okay? So that, that's useful whether or n- not AI ever sends you a single client. [00:21:24] You're essentially building a clear picture of who you are and what you do across more surfaces [00:21:30] And remember the experiment I told you to do at the beginning? Go and do it. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and type the question your ideal client would ask, and tell me what happens. Are you in there? Are your competitors in there? Is there some completely unexpected recommendation that makes no sense to you [00:21:49] And if this show has been useful to you, if anything you've heard here has changed how you think about your work or how you use a tool, a review on Apple's podcasts or a rating on Spotify would really help new people find the show [00:22:03] I would really appreciate it 'cause it makes a whole lot of a difference [00:22:07] Next week we're gonna be talking about portfolio skills that still matter in the AI market and what you should pay attention to if you haven't updated your portfolio in over a year [00:22:23] thank you so much for listening to another episode of AI for Creative Professionals, and I will catch you next week