The world of search engines is changing with many people using AI assistants like ChatGPT and Google Gemini as search engines to find what they need. Now questions are being raised as to whether businesses need to completely rethink how they optimise their website for AI search.
The good news is that optimising your website for AI search isn’t too different from the best SEO practices you already should be implementing. That said, AI website crawlers don’t think exactly the same as the crawlers that search engines use. In this blog, we break down EXACTLY what you can be doing to ensure you’re website is not lost in AI search!
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Ensure Your Content is Relevant and Clear
AI understands website pages by using “natural language processing” to analyse content, extract key points, and generate summaries that satisfy their users’ queries. Businesses can optimise for this by tailoring their website content marketing strategy to create pages that have a clear and direct discussion of services or products. Staying on-topic is key, as “waffling” and going on tangents can confuse the AI crawler.
This will make it easier for AI to extract those key points and understand the purpose of the page. Think about the queries the end user will ask the AI, and account for that in your content marketing strategy with direct answers and long tail keywords.
For example, if you are an accommodation business, insert long tail keywords like “dog-friendly cottage with hot tub” and answer questions related to dog-friendly accommodation policies. These are just a few ways to ensure you are following best practices for AI optimisation.
Use Structured Data to Help With AI Optimisation
As of writing, the majority of AI crawlers have a hard time understanding text when it is hidden in JavaScript. This is typically used by website developers to create animated, dynamic websites that change the page content and load more text as you scroll through. While beautiful to behold, it does risk the AI missing important content on the page.
Structured data is a standardised format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. This isn’t just optimal for AI, but search engine optimisation as a whole. There are two main types of structured data to account for, and those are HTML and Schema.
HTML Code
Good AI optimisation practice is to have pages constructed with standard HTML to notate headings, paragraphs, bullet lists, and tables. Most website builders and premade website themes simplify turning your content inputs into HTML coding already. Though one aspect easily missed is the use of HTML to note the meta title and meta description. Your website builder will have instructions or a plugin that helps you with this essential part of search engine optimisation.
Schema Markup
Schema is the more complicated form of structured data that essentially “tags” more complicated concepts like products, reviews, events and publications for AI and search engine crawlers to understand. The good news is that most modern website builders and prebuilt themes cover basic schema markup, though custom websites or custom-made themes may not.
Schema is also useful for e-commerce AI optimisation. We’ve found that a common query when asking for product recommendations with good reviews. An easy way to do this is to embed Google Reviews within relevant pages of your website or 3rd party apps like Trustpilot that submit review schema.
You can check what schema is present on your website by passing the address through Google’s Rich Results Test. It will tell you what type of schema is present on the page, and if there are any problems with it. If it’s missing, chat with us today about our newly launched AI Optimisation service to ensure you cover this essential area of search engine optimisation.
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Have a Well-Organised, Easy to Discover Website
This is another core principle of strong search engine optimisation that will also benefit your AI optimisation. If your website’s main pages aren’t easy to navigate, your visibility in both traditional SEO and AI queries can be impacted. Our biggest tips are:
- Have a clear main menu structure with pages organised under logical structures. For example, glamping pitches under a glamping tab and cottages under a cottage tab.
- Ensure all service/product pages are easy to access and not buried. They should be reached from the homepage in less than 3 clicks.
- Link related content together with linked buttons or text to naturally create a clear connection for strong search engine optimisation and AI optimisation.
- Ensure you have a sitemap uploaded to help crawlers discover more obscure pages. Your Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools account will tell you if your sitemap is discoverable.
- Don’t block AI crawlers from accessing your website. Some websites, security plugins and even developers will block AI crawlers within the website’s “robots.txt file”.
- Have “link breadcrumbs”, a secondary navigation aid that shows users their current location within a website’s hierarchy with clickable links for each step. For example, Shop > Fragrances > Women’s Perfume. This helps AI crawlers find content faster within deeply buried categories.
Get Ahead in AI-Powered Search
We’ve learned that AI optimisation goes hand in hand with good search engine optimisation and content marketing strategy. We’ve also learned some very technical aspects that are easy to overlook and can make or break your ability to be included in AI-driven searches.
AI Optimisation is an ongoing process; in some aspects, it is just like optimising for a search engine, but the way it understands context, trust signals, and the end user’s intent is different.
InSynch’s AI Optimisation service is designed to help your business appear in a range of new search results, where traditional search engine marketing won’t cut it. This includes zero-click searches, AI-generated summaries, and conversational results. If you want increased visibility in this new era of organic search, click the button below to get started on your quote.
