Search Console used to be the dashboard that mattered. Then AI Overviews shipped, ChatGPT browse rolled out broadly, and Perplexity quietly took a chunk of the top-of-funnel that Google used to own. Buyers ask the model the question. The model answers. The buyer clicks a citation or, increasingly, doesn't. If your brand isn't in the citation set, you don't exist for that query, period.
Full draft coming. The Principal Harbor blog is reserved for writeups that come straight from engagements, the patterns we keep noticing, the calls we keep making, and the times we were wrong. This index entry stakes out the topic; the long-form draft will land here on the next publishing cycle.
Why this one
We hold blog posts to a higher bar than the social and short-form stack. If something is worth a post, it's because we've seen it play out across multiple clients, not because the topic is trending. When this post ships, it will include the specific moves we'd make, the metrics we'd watch, and at least one example of what went wrong before we got it right.
