Time to read: 6 minutes
We know that AI has been all the talk recently, and it can be incredibly overwhelming to take in all the news about it constantly. Due to this, you may be wondering if you need to change your marketing approach to make sure your brand will get exposure on popular AI platforms.
The truth is, if you’re already conducting good SEO practices, you will get good results from AI, too!
If anything, the only major things that should change are your tactic priorities within your marketing strategy. To help you with this, we’ve compiled a list of tips on how to ensure your site performs well in AI search results.
Ways to Use SEO to Increase Your Chances of Being Cited by LLMs and AI-Powered Search Results
Here are some things Google has advised marketers to do, along with insights from our team, to help ensure your content performs well in AI search.
Become an expert in your own niche
This matters for on and off your site. Not only should you ensure your website’s content illustrates you possess expertise in your own industry, but you will also want to do what you can to have other websites showcase that, too. This can include cultivating more brand exposure by getting quoted in articles and accruing more backlinks to your brand name.
Essentially, this is what is known as link building, and it doesn’t even require exclusive emphasis on DA (domain authority) or DR (domain rating). A link from a smaller, highly relevant site in your niche may be more valuable than one from a high-authority site that’s off-topic. Even unlinked mentions of your brand, when they come from high-quality and relevant sources, can ultimately be a citation that AI tools can acknowledge.
User experience matters for AI crawlers, too
If a user lands on your website and it loads slowly, they’re more likely to leave, and the same goes for LLMs. If your website content isn’t loading properly and features errors, it cannot be properly read by LLMs, so you won’t appear in their results! So, technical SEO is important not only for humans but also for AI crawler agents.
Fine-tune your brand on external platforms
While we primarily optimize for Google in SEO campaigns, AI search uses a wider playing field. Google’s AI, along with ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and others, all use a variety of sources to gain information for their output. For instance, one recent study by Profound discovered that Google and ChatGPT’s most popular sources are pretty different:
And while the above sources would be great to get mentioned on, doing so would be incredibly difficult for most businesses. However, you can easily take charge of promoting your brand on YouTube by posting company-related content and by getting involved in niche subreddits on Reddit, for instance.
Also keep in mind that different industries also have relevant directories that often rank well online, meaning that AI often pulls information from them as well if they’re relevant to the query.
For example, contractor-related questions may gather reviews from Angi, or queries about plastics manufacturers may pull a list of companies from ThomasNet. Refresh any profiles you have on those types of sites to help showcase your services and make sure that when AI tools scan those sites, your brand shows up.
Pro tip: ChatGPT uses Bing’s search data to pull results, so it might be a good idea to check that your business information is up to date on Bing Local, as well as review your search performance data on Bing Webmasters.
Continue utilizing schema markup to summarize what your brand does
Schema markup, also called structured data, is a type of customizable code you can add to your site to make it machine-readable to web crawlers. Per Google’s advice for appearing in AI search, you should make sure your structured data matches the visible content on your website so there is no confusion about your company’s important information.
Crafting helpful content is still king
There should be no surprise that Google advises that in order to succeed at AI search optimization, you need to focus on creating unique and valuable content made for humans. However, this practice should have been in your SEO strategy already, especially since the Helpful Content Update was released.
E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness) is also still highly relevant, as part of being truly helpful to a user is also proving that what you write is authentic! Case studies, customer testimonials or reviews, and your awards and certifications are all notable items to feature in your content and on your website as a whole. So, as long as you’re making content that is unique and useful to users, and isn’t just created for search engines to game the system, you should do just fine in AI search.
Pro tip: Another core aspect is making content digestible and easy to read, so along with following SEO best practices, you should:
- Use descriptive metadata and headers (H2 and H3s)
- Write each paragraph to be self-contained and informative
- Include numbered lists and bullet points for scannable information
- Add summaries or key takeaway sections near the top of the page
- Use photos and videos to support your page copy when needed
How You Can Track Traffic from AI Sources
Part of the uncertainty marketers have around AI search is how much data we will truly be able to track from all these different platforms. Since so much of what we do relies on proper attribution, we must get this information to see ROI!
The bad news is that Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode are still so new, and we are still learning just how much data we will receive on them in Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console.
The good news, though, is that there are ways to set up custom reports in GA4 to parse out traffic from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and others. And, even better, recent chatter from SEOs indicates that data is starting to pull in for AI mode:
Want to Stay In the Know?
This blog post was first sent exclusively to our email subscribers. So if you want to be in the know on all things AI, Google, and more, be sure you sign up!
