Be sure to filter your search with certain key phrases. If you’re using a site that’s not Google’s official patent directory, add the search operator assignee “Google LLC” to narrow it down, for example.

You can also use CPC (Cooperative Patent Classification) codes like G06F 16/00 (Information Retrieval) to find patents grouped by technology rather than just keywords.

“I don’t browse randomly,” said Metehan Yeşilyurt of AEO Vision. “I usually start from an observed behavior in search and work backwards. My main tools are Google Scholar (citation chains matter more than single patents), arXiv to understand the research roots, and advanced Google searches like “filetype:pdf” combined with ranking or retrieval terms. I’m looking for patterns, not one document. I’m also using consensus.app, recently.”

SEO expert and consultant Marie Haynes said she doesn’t really have a solid process for finding interesting papers and patents – she just keeps her ear to the ground.

“I have an RSS reader that I vibe coded that finds me the latest Google blog posts and more,” she said. “I pay close attention to this page: https://research.google/pubs/.”

She also scours X (formerly Twitter) for interesting papers that people are talking about. 

“Most of what I find simply comes from me doing research as interesting scenarios come up,” she added.

That strategy wasn’t wrong. It was perfectly aligned with the distribution systems of the time. But as discovery began to move upstream into AI-powered summaries, re-rankers, and answer engines, the same ambiguity that once drove clicks became harder for machines to interpret.

When the selector changes, the headline has to change with it.

That same snippet-first, elimination-driven efficiency leads to a new way of thinking about titles and snippets: a concept we’ll call AI Clickbait. But unlike its human-focused cousin, it’s about radical clarity.

Let’s look at a real-world example of an old-school title and see how it would have to change for today’s game. 

To do that, we’ll pull out a certified banger from the archives, written by none other than the founder of iPullRank, 2025 Search Marketer of the Year, and my boss (please don’t be mad at me): Mike King.

This 2016 headline was a masterclass in playing to the human incentive:

“How I Sped Up My Site 68% With One Line of Code.”

Certified banger. I want to click that right now. 

But that headline would for sure be ignored by an LLM. A machine isn’t curious; it’s a logician. It can’t process the intrigue. The title offers a compelling result but hides the actual subject matter, giving the AI nothing concrete to latch onto.

For today’s AI-first world, you’d have to flip the formula and close that information gap instantly:

“How to Improve Page Speed Using the rel=prerender HTML Attribute”

Definitely not as catchy. However, that’s the version you write when the reader is a summarizer, not a person. Just topic, method, and outcome. 

Here are a couple of examples from the BBC news site. Do either of these inspire you to click and find out what they’re talking about?

We can also see where this phrase appears most often, including sites for the Department of Labor, Trinity College, Fidelity, Merrill Edge, Bankrate, and Reddit (remember these sites because they’ll appear often later in our research). 

Unlike with old-school dial-up internet, when no one in the house could use the phone while you were online, there’s no cognitive burden to AI. You can just use it easily. 

And with the creation of AI Mode and constant improvements to Gemini with each release, Google will clearly be focusing its attention on AI.

“I don’t see Google just continuing to do search,” said Christian.

As search continues to fragment and more partnerships pop up with AI companies, we’ll see changes in how we measure success. Direct purchases within LLMs will impact traffic and clicks. 

Walmart’s deal with ChatGPT for in-app purchases contributes 20% of Walmart’s referral traffic. This partnership with OpenAI means that Walmart can’t capture all the metrics that it used to, but at this point, they don’t even care. They just want the customer to check out, regardless of whether it’s on Walmart’s site or in ChatGPT. 

In fact, traffic to many sites is down, but many businesses are still getting relevant clicks because visitors to their sites likely did extensive research before arriving. 

“If they play their cards right in how they are cited and the knowledge they provide, I think they’re going to have phenomenal business outcomes,” Christian said.

However, this brings up another question. Should sites develop two types of content: one for machines and one for people? Or is a combination of the two the way to go? 

“There are so many strategic applications for that for business,” said Garrett Sussman, Director of Marketing at iPullRank. 

There’s a lot of data we still need to see to truly understand all of AI’s impacts on search fragmentation, but that probably won’t happen, and Christian says we need to just get used to that. There will be discomfort around monitoring, strategy, and search behavior as AI Search becomes a more integrated part of the way we search. We’re not going to get all of the data that helps us determine resource allocation and return on investment.

But some changes will have a more positive impact, like improvements to memory and personalization in LLMs. Memory will be the step that solidifies where and how we search.