The AI Search Handbook cover
First edition · August 2026 · by Luke McLaughlin

The AI Search Handbook

How search really works now — and how to be found in it

A complete, self-contained guide to generative engine optimisation: how AI search retrieves, chunks, evaluates and cites information, and how to become a source an AI answer names.

Pages
391
Chapters
62
Diagrams
46
Self-check answers
172

Free download. No payment, no sign-up. Marketers, SEO specialists, content leads and founders. No coding background needed.

About this book

What it covers

AI search stopped handing people a list of links and started writing them an answer. The AI Search Handbook explains the machinery underneath that answer — crawling, indexing, retrieval, chunking and citation — and turns it into practical craft you can apply on Monday.

It is deliberately unexcited. Where the evidence is strong, the book says so. Where a widely repeated tactic has no support, or has been contradicted by data, it says that too, and shows you how to judge the next claim yourself.

What you will be able to do

  • How search engines and language models actually work, in plain language
  • AI-crawler access, rendering, structured data and llms.txt
  • Writing passages that survive retrieval and earn citations
  • Entities, E-E-A-T and authority beyond your own site
  • Measuring AI visibility honestly, including server-log evidence
  • Audits, playbooks and a 90-day plan you can start this week
Contents

Thirteen parts

  1. Part IFoundations
  2. Part IIThe Landscape
  3. Part IIITechnical Foundations
  4. Part IVContent
  5. Part VAuthority Beyond Your Site
  6. Part VICommerce and Place
  7. Part VIIMeasurement and Proof
  8. Part VIIIPractice
  9. Part IXInstrumentation
  10. Part XForensics
  11. Part XIPlaybooks
  12. Part XIIHorizons
  13. Part XIIIReference
Download free PDF 2.4 MB
Luke McLaughlin
Written by

Luke McLaughlin

Luke is an AI marketing and search specialist with more than ten years in B2B marketing across biotech, life sciences and SaaS. His work sits where technical SEO meets generative engine optimisation: making brands crawlable, retrievable and cited by AI answer engines.

He holds an MSc in Molecular Biology, works hands-on in Python, SQL and both cloud and local open-weight language models, and writes these books so that marketers can do the same.

Also free

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