Search has changed: today, a growing share of people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google SGE instead of typing into traditional Google. These generative AI tools only cite as a source sites that load fast, have a clear structure, and answer the question within the first few sentences — a practice known as GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).
That means the corporate site built a few years ago, full of heavy images and with no clear content structure, is becoming increasingly invisible both to Google and to AI-powered searches. In this article we explain, without technical jargon, what actually matters for your site to be found today.
What Core Web Vitals actually means in practice
Core Web Vitals is the set of metrics Google uses to measure the real experience of someone visiting a site: how long it takes for the main content to appear, whether the page "jumps" while loading, and how long it takes to respond to the first click. "My site opens fast on my phone with good internet" isn't the right metric — what matters is how it behaves for a visitor with an average connection, which is most of the audience across much of Latin America.
A heavy background video, uncompressed images, and multiple third-party scripts loading at once are the most common causes of a slow site — and yes, each of these has a direct technical fix, with no need to rebuild the site from scratch.
How generative AI decides which site to cite
- It prioritizes pages that answer the user's question right at the start of the content, with no fluff
- It favors sites with structured data (Schema.org) that make clear what the page is about
- It avoids citing sites that are slow to load or that break during automated crawling
- It values content with verifiable information — numbers, processes, concrete examples — over generic copy
This also changes how site content should be written: direct paragraphs that answer the main question in the first few sentences have a better chance of being cited by these tools than generic marketing copy padded with empty adjectives.
Simple signals any business owner can check
You don't need to know how to code to spot the first warning signs: does the site take more than 3 seconds to fully load? Do images look "pixelated" or overly heavy when opened on mobile? Do the menu or buttons take a while to respond to a tap? Any "yes" to these questions already points to a technical problem that's costing you Google rankings — and visibility in AI search.