Aleyda Solis warns AI search tactics can damage brands long term

Aleyda Solis is drawing a hard line between quick wins and durable visibility in AI search. Her warning is simple: tactics built to game citation systems or flood the web with AI-specific pages may lift a brand for a moment, but they can weaken trust as the systems get better at judging what deserves to surface.

Solis has spent years arguing that AI search optimization is not a new loophole to exploit, but a different way of earning the same fundamentals search has always rewarded. She has pointed brands toward crawlability, indexability, topic clusters, chunked content, authority, and trusted third-party citations. That fits the way she has positioned her own consultancy, Orainti, which she founded in 2014 and describes her as having more than 15 years of SEO experience and speaking at more than 100 events in more than 20 countries.

Her latest market read makes the stakes more concrete. In April 2026, Solis analyzed 87 million AI search visits across 10 markets using Similarweb data and found that AI search clicks often went to local domains rather than global defaults outside the United States. The examples matter because they show where visibility is actually landing: Bol.com, MercadoLivre, Bahn.de, and Lefrecce.it were outperforming larger international competitors in some countries. The message for brands is blunt. Local authority can beat generic scale when AI systems decide which source is most useful.

That warning lands harder because other research is showing the same pressure on discovery. Pew Research Center reported in July 2025 that Google users were less likely to click result links when an AI summary appeared. Seer Interactive found that organic click-through rate on informational queries with AI Overviews fell 61 percent, from 1.76 percent to 0.61 percent, while paid CTR dropped 68 percent. In the same period, Google leadership has described AI answers as the product of query fan-out and background searches, which makes the old fantasy of “tricking” the machine look even weaker.

Solis’s case for future-proof AEO is more conservative and more demanding at the same time. Earn authority where people already trust the brand. Build content that is clear, useful, and tied to the full customer journey. And treat positive third-party citations, community mentions, and strong brand signals as strategic assets, not decorative extras. The short-term exploit may still work for a while. The brands that last will be the ones that stop chasing loopholes and start giving AI systems a reason to trust them.