The new language of AI search
For about 15 years, digital marketing had its own vocabulary: keywords, Google rankings, backlinks, organic traffic.
Those words infiltrated marketing plans, board reports and agency conversations right alongside KPIs, feasibility studies and ROI assessments. Everyone came to know what success looked and sounded like.
It took the better part of a decade for that language to become commonplace. ChatGPT has been around for only a few years and already we're learning a new batch of terms.
So we pulled together a quick primer for place marketers. Here is what we’ll cover:
Keywords -> Query fan-outs
Keyword mapping -> Query mapping
Keyword rankings -> AI visibility percentage
Search intent -> AI sentiment
Backlinks -> Citations
Click-through rate -> Zero-click
What are query fan-outs?
One phrase you'll be hearing a lot (if you haven't already) is "query fan-outs." It sounds technical, but the idea isn't.
Ask an AI search tool, "Where should I expand my manufacturing business?" and it can break that question into a series of related searches covering workforce, costs, infrastructure, supply chains and more. Those are query fan-outs.
They give us clues about the information an AI tool needs to build its answer. And for place marketers, those clues can be quite useful.
Keywords still matter, of course. But answering one search term well only gets you so far when AI is looking across a much wider set of connected questions.
If you want your place associated with a particular industry, you may need credible content covering its workforce, infrastructure, housing, universities, supply chains, quality of life and business costs. The goal is to build authority around the themes your place can credibly own.
Query mapping is where AI prompts should start
SEO teams have spent years mapping the keywords they want to own and tracking how they perform.
Query mapping takes that exercise further. Once an AI search fans a question out into related queries, you can start piecing together the information it may be looking for and where your content has gaps.
One of the harder parts of measuring AI visibility is figuring out which prompts to test in the first place. Query mapping can help there too.
A question about the "best European locations for advanced manufacturing" might branch into energy costs, industrial sites, workforce availability, logistics connections, incentives and proximity to suppliers.
Lay those queries out and you get a much better picture of the information surrounding that initial question. You might also spot some pretty obvious holes in your website.
Existing keyword maps are actually a good place to start. Build outward from there based on the questions and related topics your audiences are likely to explore.
Understanding AI visibility percentage
We've all become used to assessing where we rank on Google and for how many keywords.
Now we're starting to ask how often AI mentions us. And when it does, how often are competitors appearing alongside or ahead of us?
Specialist tools like Peec AI track this by running hundreds of prompts across different AI platforms and measuring how often a place appears compared with competing locations.
We recently ran one of these exercises for a few investment promotion organisations. When prompts included the region's name, visibility was strong. Remove the place name and ask broader questions about industries, expansion or investment opportunities, and visibility dropped sharply.
Sound familiar?
IPAs and EDOs have had a similar problem with traditional search for years. People rarely begin their research knowing exactly where they want to invest, live or do business. They start with broader questions.
If your region rarely appears in those answers, you're missing part of the discovery phase.
AI sentiment as an upgrade over search intent
This comparison isn't quite apples to apples. Still, AI gives us something interesting that traditional search didn't tell us very easily: what the machine thinks about our place.
Traditional SEO spent a lot of time thinking about search intent. Was someone looking for information? Comparing options? Ready to take action?
With AI, we can also look at sentiment.
A region could have excellent AI visibility for semiconductor investment while repeatedly being described as expensive, short on talent or difficult to do business in. Another might appear less frequently but receive much stronger recommendations when it does.
AI sentiment analysis tracks whether those mentions are positive, negative or neutral. More useful for place marketers is digging into the reasons why.
Which strengths does AI consistently associate with your place? Which weaknesses keep appearing? Where does the picture being presented differ from what's actually happening on the ground?
That's potentially a rich source of digital perception research.
Goodbye backlinks, hello citations
When ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity answers a question, the sources behind that answer create another route to visibility.
That puts more attention on citations: which websites, publications and other sources AI tools rely on when generating answers about a particular topic.
Backlinks still matter and remain part of the wider search ecosystem. AI gives place marketers another reason to care about where their region is being talked about online, including coverage that doesn't contain a link.
Our own testing pointed in the same direction. For our U.S. clients, industry publications like Site Selection, Business Facilities and Area Development appeared repeatedly among the sources AI relied on when answering investment-related prompts.
That's good news for place marketers who've struggled to earn backlinks from certain media organisations. Coverage can still carry weight without one.
We all want coverage for our places in prestigious international press. But for certain topics, a story in the right trade publication can be every bit as strategic. It now has 2 audiences: the people reading it and the AI tools deciding which locations deserve a mention.
The wonderful world where no one clicks anymore
We've spent years reporting website sessions, click-through rates and organic traffic because they were some of the best indicators we had that our brand was gaining traction.
Search and social platforms are now answering more questions within their own experiences. The result is a growing trend called "zero-click content" that's working its way deeper into search.
Zero-click content gives someone enough information that they don't need to click anywhere else. On social media, that might be a carousel or video with no outbound link. On search, it might be an AI Overview that answers the question well enough that you never visit one of the bright blue links below.
A corporate executive might ask ChatGPT where advanced manufacturers are expanding. An engineer might ask Google which cities have the strongest aerospace clusters. A family considering relocation might ask Gemini about places with affordable housing and good career prospects.
If your place is recommended, you've influenced part of the decision before anyone visits your website. They may never visit it at all.
That makes early-funnel activity a critical area to measure. Website traffic remains useful, but we're gaining ways to see influence that happens well before the click.
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The terminology will keep changing. Six months from now, there will probably be another acronym involving {something}-EO that we're all pretending we've known for years.
For now, this list is a decent start.
SEO gave us about 15 years to get comfortable with keywords, rankings and backlinks. We probably won't get another 15 to learn this vocabulary.
