With how people search for information changing, it is important for businesses to know how to optimize for AI Search.
SEO for AI Search consists of providing valuable, unique, easy-to-read content that focuses on topical authority. Have strong technical SEO on your website and demonstrate EEAT. Then, distribute your content across platforms where your customers are, and focus on expanding your brand’s visibility.
Learn more about what SEO for AI Search is and why it is important.
What is SEO for AI Search?
Search engine optimization (SEO) has traditionally focused on how to get a website or post to rank on the search engine results page (SERP), such as Google or Bing.
SEO for AI Search aims to get a website or post to “rank” with AI chatbots (such as ChatGPT or Gemini) and appear in the AI Search overview and citations on search engines.
This is the next evolution of SEO.
Why do we need to try to rank in AI?
AI has changed the landscape of the internet.
More and more people are using AI instead of relying on the SERP. According to a Future AI report, in the US 55% of people are now using AI for things they previously used search engines for, and that percentage is even higher in other countries. A questionnaire by Innovating with AI showed that 83% of users prefer AI search over traditional search.
Search engines also have their own AI chatbots, such as Google’s Gemini and Bing’s Copilot. Not to mention that search engines’ AI Mode is becoming more and more popular. Google has announced over 100 million monthly users of their AI Mode.
Even when people do use traditional search engines, the SERP has significantly changed. According to Google, the Google AI Overview (the AI-generated answer at the top of the SERP) has over 2 billion monthly users in more than 200 countries.
The AI Overview has significantly increased zero-click searches (searches that result in the user getting their answer on the SERP and not clicking over to a website). A 2024 study found that almost 60% of searches are zero-click searches. And this number will rise.
All of this means that websites are getting significantly less traffic, with some niches and websites seeing an up to 70% drop.
Fortunately, the numbers aren’t all bleak.
Semrush found that visitors from AI Search are 4.4 times more valuable based on conversion rates than those from the traditional SERP. So you may be getting fewer clicks, but each click is worth more sales. They also found that half of ChatGPT’s responses cite business websites.
All of this means that if businesses optimize for AI Search, they can have a good chance to “rank” with them and make sales from the visitors.
How to optimize for AI Search on your website
SEO for AI Search includes many of the established SEO best practices for websites.
Provide valuable content
The most important thing hasn’t changed: provide your audience and customers with valuable content.
It is important to still consider the search terms and keywords related to the topic. Then, make content that is useful, directly answers their questions, and offers actionable advice (including step-by-step) to solve their problem.
Write an appealing title and description, and immediately make it clear what a post is about.
Keep your content organized and up-to-date so both users and AI know the latest information (especially about your products and services). Collect and show testimonials that highlight the value of your products or services.
Make content scannable
You also want to focus on making your content scannable (to both AI and users) by:
- Having a summary at the beginning of the post (AI often uses these summaries for featured snippets)
- Using headings, tables, and bullet points
- Keeping paragraphs short (2-4 sentences)
- Using media, such as videos, infographics, charts, images (more interesting for the reader, and they can be featured directly by AI)
- Add FAQs to posts
Demonstrate EEAT
It is more important than ever to demonstrate EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).
Show EEAT by:
- Creating unique content (using personal experiences or research)
- Including facts and data as well as citations to authoritative sources.
- Having author bios that show their experience and any credentials
- Using consistent name, address, and phone numbers (NAP) on all platforms
Focus on topical authority
Websites need to build topical authority. This can be done by choosing the core topic you want your business to be known for and writing a pillar post on the topic. Then, build a comprehensive content cluster around that covers the areas of that topic, and interlink between the posts and back to the pillar post.
Have strong technical SEO
Pay attention to all the traditional technical SEO requirements:
- Fast site speed
- Secure connections (HTTPS)
- Mobile-friendly
- Easy navigation and clear sitemap
- Use content tags and headings
- Apply structured data (or schema markup) to the relevant pages, such as article, products, FAQ, how-to, and author. Be precise (don’t use it sitewide and use Google’s rich results tool to check accuracy).
Most important: Make sure your site allows crawlers so your content can be viewed by AI to potentially be referenced. This means:
- Don’t block LLM crawlers (you can check for any disallow lines in your robots.txt file)
- Don’t use client-side JavaScript rendering (CSR) because most LLM crawlers cannot render it
Distribute content and expand brand presence
The goal is to increase your brand being associated with all relevant topics in your niche so the AI recognizes you as related to those topics.
Push content on multiple platforms
You want to expand your brand’s presence by having marketing activity across the internet, including:
- Social media
- YouTube videos (many citations come from YouTube videos)
- Email newsletter and campaigns
- Participate in forums, like Reddit, Quora, Slack, or Discord (not just posting a link, but participating in conversation)
- Get in business directories
- Have a Google Business Profile
- Encourage customers to leave reviews
Repurpose your content to appeal to each medium and maximize your presence.
Mentions and links
Backlinks have been a big part of SEO for a long time. Getting links from authoritative sites and publications is still great.
A switch here is that even brand mentions are valuable towards showing up in AI Search. Getting mentioned by trustworthy sources and industry publications expands your brand’s presence, authority, and influence. This improves your business’s trustworthiness to AI.
Try to participate in roundups, Q&A forums, interviews, or podcasts.
Your website being talked about in your industry builds your credibility and authority and helps you become a citation.
Establish new KPIs to track and experiment
Businesses need to establish new KPIs besides SERP rankings. These could include:
- Share of voice (SOV) analysis: how often your brand is mentioned
- Citation frequency
- Content in AI response
- Mentions on AI
- Searches for your business name
- Conversion rates
- Sentiment of your business in mentions online
There are a lot of tools that can help you track these metrics, including:
- UberSuggest’s AI Visibility Report
- SEMrush
- Brandwatch
- Moz
- Ahrefs
- Otterly
- Knowatoa
- Mangools
- PeecAI
- Profound
- AmIOnAI
Once you know what you are tracking and have a tool to track it, experiment with content formats to see what works best for your business.
Hire professionals to make SEO for AI Search easier
Creating valuable content, ensuring technical SEO, and having brand marketing across platforms requires a lot of time and effort. Hiring professionals can help you ensure your website is optimized, so you can spend your energy focusing on what you do best: running your business.
Partnering with a professional digital marketing team like Awebco can ensure your content creation and SEO are meeting all the best practices for AI Search. We also offer social media management and local business listings to expand your brand’s presence online.
Give us a call or request a quote to learn more about how we can help your business stay competitive in the changing digital landscape.
