A growing share of searches now end in an answer rather than a list. The reader takes the summary, and the links underneath get a fraction of the attention. Nobody clicked, and you were never in the room.
The industry response has been a rush of confident advice about ranking inside those answers. Most of it can't be tested. No reliable report exists for what an assistant told somebody yesterday, and anyone selling you one is guessing.
What can be checked is whether these systems can read your site, whether they cite you, and whether the pages they might quote actually say something worth quoting. That's a smaller promise and it's the honest one.
