A new branch of digital marketing appears every time search behaviour changes, and AI search has been no exception. You may already have come across terms such as GEO, AEO, AI SEO and LLM optimisation, usually accompanied by the suggestion that your existing website is suddenly invisible unless you start doing something completely different.
The reality is considerably less dramatic. AI is changing how people discover information online and it is worth paying attention to, but most of the things that make a website understandable and useful to an AI system are remarkably similar to the things that already make it useful to search engines and, more importantly, to people. Google’s own guidance is quite clear on this. Pages appearing in its AI features still need to be accessible, indexed and eligible to appear in normal Google Search. It does not currently require a special piece of AI markup or an entirely separate optimisation process.
Start with whether machines can actually understand the site
Before worrying about AI optimisation, make sure the website is technically understandable in the first place. Your important pages should be crawlable and indexable, navigation should make sense, links should actually be links, page titles and headings should clearly describe the subject, and important information should exist as real page content rather than being buried inside images or awkward scripts.
Structured data can also help machines understand what certain information represents. Products, organisations, articles, breadcrumbs and other recognised content types can all provide useful context when implemented properly. None of this is exclusive to AI. It is simply good website structure, and that is probably the most useful place to start.
AI systems are also increasingly good at understanding subjects rather than simply matching exact phrases. That means creating six nearly identical articles because people might search for six slightly different versions of the same question is becoming even less useful. A better approach is to answer the subject properly.
If you are an accountant specialising in charities, explain the problems charities actually face, demonstrate your experience, answer useful questions and clearly describe the work you do. If you sell technical products, make sure specifications, compatibility, availability and other useful information are clear. Useful, original and specific content that gives search engines and AI systems something much more meaningful to work with than another generic article repeating information already available elsewhere.
ChatGPT has its own crawlers too
OpenAI separates the crawler used for ChatGPT search from the crawler associated with training its generative models. Its OAI-SearchBot is used to help surface websites in ChatGPT search, while GPTBot can be controlled separately. This means a website owner can allow content to appear in ChatGPT search while choosing not to allow GPTBot for training purposes.
That distinction is worth understanding before simply blocking every crawler with AI in its description. It also illustrates why this is becoming a website management issue as much as an SEO one. Businesses increasingly need to understand who and what is accessing their content, what they want to allow, and what they want to restrict.
For most organisations, though, the sensible starting point remains fairly familiar. Make sure important content can be crawled, keep technical SEO in reasonable shape, write clearly about the things you genuinely know, provide useful original information and keep important business details accurate.
AI search absolutely deserves a place in your website strategy, but we would not recommend rebuilding your entire site or buying a mysterious new optimisation service purely because somebody has attached a new acronym to SEO. If you are wondering whether AI systems can actually understand your current website, that is something we can look at. Send us the site and we can tell you whether there are obvious technical or content problems worth addressing before you start worrying about anything more exotic.
