Show up where it counts
Don’t panic: if you’re following current SEO best practices, you’re still on your way to showing up in AI-driven ‘answer engines’. However, there are some distinctions you should be aware of. Here are some strategies to help you become part of the answers.
Allow AI crawlers to access your site
With a few tweaks to your site’s code, you can ensure that AI-driven bots can gather content from your site. Keep in mind that not all AI-driven search engines are the same. Here are the steps for permitting OpenAI’s search bot, for example.
Create content that’s reliable, relevant and authoritative
Like Google, AI-driven search engines will likely prefer newer, timely content to help ensure it doesn’t provide dated answers. They’ll also need to ensure the information is trustworthy, especially to overcome concerns surrounding AI’s credibility.
For this reason, we recommend publishing human-made/AI-assisted content over AI-generated content. In other words, don’t fight AI with AI.
To give your pieces more credibility, consider attributing your articles to authors, or writing a line like “Article fact-checked by humans with ideation assistance from AI” near the top or bottom.
Depending on your organization, having customer and/or client reviews could be another effective way to show AI crawlers that your site is trustworthy.
Know how AI sites find you
Here’s another reason authorship matters in an AI-driven search environment. Unlike Google, which uses keywords to surface information, many AI-driven search engines are using Large Language Model prediction – the same technology that drives predictive text when you draft a text message or an email. LLM tries to predict the next token (i.e., word) that will be likely to follow a word or phrase.
So: if a user searches for a topic, and your brand or team member’s name appears on multiple editorial pieces, news pieces, blogs, social posts, etc. on the topic, that name/authorship becomes weighted more heavily in the AI’s LLM. It can even eventually show up as the next predicted term when users input their search.
There’s an analog parallel: it’s a public relations/earned media play. PR practitioners earn their keep in part by making sure the right trades, publications, bloggers, reporters, podcast hosts, etc., are talking about, interviewing, and citing their company when they talk about issues impacting their industry.
Think of the LLM working in the same way: by ensuring your authorship is credibly and consistently linked to topics you want to be found for, the LLM starts to favour you as a source in the answers it provides.
Make information AI-friendly
AI technology is better at reading sites than typical Google crawlers. It won’t just look at text and alt-text on a page, but also text on visuals, image content, captions on videos, etc. Ensuring everything is clear and useful will increase the odds of answer engines using it.
Be ready to advertise
In time, there may be opportunities for your brand to have sponsored content in relevant answer engine results, just like you can today with Google Search Ads. Marketers can advertise on Copilot, Perplexity is exploring doing the same, and others are likely to follow.
If you’ve struggled to dominate SERPs in the past, don’t worry. Unlike people, AI-driven search engines will look at pages that aren’t top-ranking on Google. They’ll dig deeper through various websites to find the most relevant info possible, meaning you can have a stronger chance of being referenced.