AI Ready SEO: Ensuring your website is setup for AI driven search

SEO isn’t dead - but it’s definitely evolving. 

For a long time, SEO has largely been based on foundational elements such as conducting keyword and competitor research, following technical best practice, creating strategic content, building high quality links and ensuring a good user experience on site. 

However, the emergence of AI is transforming the way people are searching, with algorithms capable of analysing user behaviours, content relevance and search intent with more precision than ever before.

Whilst many of the foundational areas remain similar, SEO strategies are being re-defined as AI technologies advance. 

People are referring to this new age of SEO in a range of different ways: AI SEO, GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), LLM SEO (Large Language Model SEO), GenAI Search Optimisation, AI Search Optimisation and so on.

Despite these evolving names and approaches, the fundamental aspects of an SEO strategy haven’t changed all that much. But there are important new considerations to ensure your website is truly AI-ready and poised for future search success. 

Google shared the following article which provides a brief overview of how to succeed in AI search experiences, highlighting the fact that the core SEO principles of ranking well haven’t changed all that much. 

In our guide, we delve deeper into AI SEO, how search behaviours have changed, and the key components required to ensure a website is well setup for AI-driven search. 

This guide covers: 

• What is AI SEO? 
• Difference between traditional & AI driven SEO 
• How AI is changing the way people search 
• Key components of an ‘AI-Ready’ website 
• Tracking brand presence in AI search 
• Using AI Tools as part of an SEO strategy 
• Futureproof your digital presence 

What is AI SEO?

AI SEO (Artificial Intelligence SEO) combines traditional best practices with AI techniques, to optimise your content specifically for AI-driven search engines such as AI Mode & AI Overviews (Google/Gemini), ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and so on. 

Instead of relying solely on traditional keyword-driven strategies, AI SEO focuses on positioning your brand as a trusted authority within AI-generated search results and answers. This means understanding how AI systems choose, interpret, and display information - enabling you to proactively influence where and how your content appears in an AI-dominant search environment. 

In today’s digital world, AI has changed how users find information. Modern AI-powered search engines no longer depend purely on conventional indexing methods; instead, they prioritise understanding user intent, context, and personalisation. They analyse factors such as past behaviours, device types, and geographic locations to deliver tailored results. AI-driven search engines generate insights directly from large language models (LLMs) and advanced NLP techniques. 

AI SEO is all about adapting your strategy to ensure your website and content are discoverable in a fast-changing digital environment where personalisation and contextual understanding are now king.

Staying ahead means integrating AI-driven tactics into your overall SEO strategy, ensuring your brand remains visible and relevant when your customers are searching in smarter, more personalised ways. 

What is the difference between traditional and AI-driven SEO

Traditional SEO relied on more of a reactive approach - studying algorithms, implementing changes, and then waiting to see results. The core SEO tactics as part of this were fairly straightforward: identify high-volume keywords, incorporate them into content, build high quality and relevant backlinks around those keywords, with the aim of improve rankings gradually. 

AI-driven SEO revolutionises this process by emphasising different methodologies and approaches: 

• Methodology: While traditional SEO centres on keyword targeting and technical adjustments, AI SEO prioritises understanding user intent to deliver comprehensive, relevant content. Instead of just matching keywords, AI delves deeper into context, creating more meaningful and engaging search experiences. 

• Adaptability: Traditional SEO often reacts slowly to search engine algorithm updates. Conversely, AI SEO responds in real-time, analysing fluctuations in rankings and refining strategies. 

• Scalability: Managing large-scale websites or extensive campaigns manually can be challenging. AI can simplify this by automating certain types of content generation (with a human element included) and performance monitoring. 

• Efficiency: Traditional methods require significant human effort for research, implementation, and ongoing optimisation. AI-powered tools can drastically reduce this workload. 
• Data Processing: Conventional SEO techniques often struggle with analysing vast amounts of data. AI excels at processing large datasets quickly and accurately, providing actionable insights into customer search behaviours and preferences. 

AI-powered SEO signifies a major shift in how to improve search visibility. While traditional SEO offers value through human expertise and relationship-building, AI capabilities provide higher levels of precision, scalability, and responsiveness, bringing in a new era of search optimisation that is faster, smarter, and more adaptable. 

How is AI changing the way people search?

Until AI was introduced, searches followed a relatively predictable pattern - users would type a keyword or phrase, browse the results shown and click on a link. However, AI powered search engines are changing this behaviour in multiple ways. 

Conversational & Natural Language

Users are now typing their questions and search phrases in a similar way to how they speak. For example, ‘how do I know how much flour to use when baking cookies?’ rather than something more direct, ‘how much flour when baking cookies?’. 

This enables users to offer more context so that search engines give them exactly what they are looking for, meaning search queries are becoming longer. AI search engines can more effectively interpret these nuanced, context-rich search phrases. 

It doesn’t stop there either, because users can now interact with AI search engines, asking follow-up questions to refine or broaden their search further. This is making a user's online searches feel more like human interactions that they may have in person. 

Contextual Understanding & Intent

Advanced AI algorithms and large language models have improved the ability of search engines to grasp the context and intent behind a user’s search query. This means that rather than simply showing results based on a specific keyword, search engines can provide more relevant, comprehensive and intent matched results. 

Rise in Zero-click searches

Search features such as AI Overviews on Google, have led to a rise in ‘Zero-click searches’ where a user finds the information they’re looking for directly within the search results, so they no longer click on any website. This is drastically different to the old search journey of a user whereby they had to visit a website to get the information. 

As a result of this, many websites are reporting less traffic when these types of search features are present. 

The following study shows that in the EU and UK, 26.10% of searches ended without a click in March 2025 vs 23.6% in March 2024. This is an increase of more than 10% YoY. 

Even though clicks are decreasing, if you’re not present within these AI features and your competitors are, your brand is losing out on potential awareness at every stage of a user’s journey. As a result, it’s still crucial that you strive to be visible across search engines driven by AI. 

Key Components of an ‘AI-Ready’ website

An ‘AI-ready’ website is optimised for both traditional search engines and AI-driven search engines. It should be technically sound, contain contextually rich and trustworthy content, and be structured in a way that allows AI crawlers to understand and use it effectively. 

If you’re unsure whether your website is geared up well for AI search engines, you should look at running a full AI SEO audit. 

Below, we’ve detailed the core areas that need to be considered for your website to be ‘AI-ready’. 

Technical Foundations 

Solid technical foundations are crucial if your website is going to rank well in both traditional and AI search engines. Simply put, if your website and content can’t be easily accessed by crawlers of any kind, it may not even get indexed, let alone rank within the search results! 

Some of the key technical areas to review as part of an AI SEO audit are detailed below: 

Crawlability & Indexability 

• You need to ensure all important pages are crawlable and indexable by search engines. 

• You should look for any rogue ‘noindex’ tags or robots.txt disallow rules. 

• Ensure your XML sitemap is fully up to date and only includes live indexable pages. 

• Ensure there are no broken pages or internal links to redirects throughout your website. 

• Identify incorrect usage of canonical tags as this can impact the indexation process. 

JavaScript 

• AI crawlers have been struggling to crawl and render JavaScript. Whilst AI crawler technology is expected to improve, for now you need to ensure any important content isn’t being hidden behind JavaScript. 

Site Speed & Core Web Vitals 

• Site speed and Core Web Vital metrics are still a key ranking factor for both traditional and AI search engines. As a result, you need to ensure your website is performing well here. 

Mobile Friendliness & Accessibility 

• The content on your website must be mobile-friendly and accessible to all users. 

Schema Markup (Structured Data) 

• Implementation of schema markup ensures AI crawlers can fully understand the meaning and context of your content. 

Nosnippet Meta Tag 

• Review whether your website uses any ‘nosnippet’ tags within the source code as this prevents Google and other search engines from showing a text snippet or video preview within the search results. 

Internal Linking 

• Review whether your website has a good internal linking strategy in place. This is crucial to ensure related content is connected, helping AI crawlers understand context and relevance of the pages on your website. 

Content Structure, Formats & Readability

The structure, format and readability of your content plays an important role when it comes to ranking well in AI search engines.

The below areas should form part of your AI SEO audit: 

Clear headings (H1, H2, H3 etc) 

• Your content should be structured in a logical way with a clear hierarchy of headings. This enables AI crawlers to understand the flow of information along with identifying key topics areas and sub-topics. 

Short paragraphs & concise sentences 

• AI crawlers favour content that is easy to scan and gets to the point quickly but then elaborates on this below. You need to strike a balance between providing enough information but not overloading. Sentences should be concise for maximum clarity. 

Content layouts 

• Certain types of information are better suited to bulleted or numbered lists. This tends to be the case for more complex information, allowing you to break this down into easily digestible lists so AI crawlers can extract key points of interest. 

• Some information may be better suited to a table, such as comparison data. 

• You should always review the AI search engine results (including AI Overviews) to assess the content layouts being preferred for each group of search phrases and use this information to inform your layout of content. 

Content formats & diversification 

• Certain types of search queries and phrases may require a wider range of content formats, rather than just a text response. This could be videos, images, audio or more detailed graphics with annotations. 

• For example, searching for - ‘can I cut wood with an angle grinder?’ - within Google, shows that video content is being preferred here within the SERPs. 

• You should review the content formats being used more often in the SERPs for your target search phrases and ensure you’re catering to this preference. 

Easy to understand definitions, frameworks & guides 

• Think about how an AI crawler synthesises your content. It’s looking to easily pull-out definitions, explain frameworks or summarise key points. As a result, you need to make it easy as possible for the AI to achieve this. 

Factual and informative tone 

• Whilst brand tone of voice is still important, you should also be looking to provide a factual and informative tone where possible. You should avoid too much hyped up or promotional language. If you think about an encyclopaedia entry, it’s written in a clear, factual and objective manner. 

Semantics & Natural Language

Keywords are still relevant for now, but AI-driven search is more about understanding the ‘meaning’ or context behind peoples search queries. This is where semantic search comes into play and we’ve detailed below the ways in which you can ensure your content is geared up for this: 

Natural, question-based language 

• Where possible, you should write how people talk. Users are searching with more of a conversational tone so we should attempt to match this by incorporating natural language throughout your content. 

• Identify the types of longer tail questions users are actually asking around your target topic areas and look to include these directly within your content (where possible). 

Entities, synonyms and related phrases 

• Entity SEO has been a buzzword within the industry for a few years now, but it becomes more important in the age of AI search engines. 

• Your content should use a rich vocabulary of synonyms, related entities and semantically connected terms or phrases. This shows you have a deeper understanding of the topic as a whole. 

Answer questions directly 

• Your content should anticipate what the AI and user is looking for, by providing direct, concise answers to the most important questions. You should be looking to structure your content so it can be easily extracted as a snippet. 

Topic optimisation 

• Going back several years, we would create a piece of content for a specific keyword or group of similar keywords in attempts to rank for these within the search results. However, AI SEO now requires a focus on comprehensive coverage of a topic, not just targeting specific keywords. 
• AI crawlers and search engines are looking for content that demonstrates depth and a breadth of knowledge. Are you covering a topic area in enough depth to be considered an expert? 

Source Attribution & EEAT Guidelines 

Google’s EEAT guidelines (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) have been around for some time now, but they become even more important in the age of AI-driven SEO. AI algorithms are assessing the credibility and trustworthiness of sources and as a result, you need to signal to these AI search engines that your content is reliable and authoritative. 

Author expertise 

• You should seek to establish your content’s authority by using subject matter experts. They could play a part in creating the content or they could review the content after its creation. 

• If possible, you should include expert bios to really showcase the expert’s credentials as this highlights your content can be trusted and has been created or reviewed by a true expert in their field that has plenty of experience. 

Linking to credible third-party sources 

• To provide more credibility behind your content, you should be linking to reputable sources such as studies, journals and industry publications. 

Trusted domain 

• High quality external websites linking to your domain act as a signal that your content can be trusted. As a result, gaining backlinks from reputable and authoritative sources, will provide AI search engines with more signals that your content is trustworthy. 

• This is also about brand mentions across reputable sources, not just backlinks. Whilst traditionally, Google would count links only, AI crawlers are looking at conversations. The game has shifted slightly to become voice-building. 

Ensure content is fresh and up to date 

• Fresh and up to date content is something that Google and other search engines have always looked for, but this becomes increasingly important in the age of AI-driven SEO. 

• Ensure your core content is kept fresh and regularly updated, especially for topics that evolve rapidly. One aspect that be implemented here is a ‘Last Updated’ annotation on your content (where it makes sense to do so), to show just how up to date your content is for users and crawlers. 

Cite your own sources 

• If you’re referencing your own data, frameworks or research, you should always clearly cite them within your content. 

UX & Accessibility

This has long been a ranking factor from an SEO perspective but is another area that is becoming increasingly more important. It’s crucial that your website provides users with a great experience and different accessibility requirements are met. 

Clear navigation and site structure 

• Review your website’s navigation and site structure to ensure content is easy to find and digest. Some drop down navigations can be overwhelming, and users can find it difficult to identify what they are looking for. 

Accessibility audit 

• Conducting an accessibility audit is an important step to take as this will identify any barriers to users with disabilities, ensuring you can provide an inclusive and rich experience for all. 

Forms and interactive features 

• You must ensure any forms or interactive features work seamlessly across different devices. If something doesn’t work on your website, users will get frustrated and may lead them to bounce. 

Tracking brand presence in AI search & Identifying opportunities or gaps

Just as you track your Google rankings, you now need to start monitoring your brand presence within AI search engines and in what context your content is appearing. You should also be analysing AI search results to identify opportunities and any gaps within your content. 

 Using dedicated AI visibility tracking tools

Existing SEO tracking tools, such as Ahrefs and SEMRush, have adapted their platforms to introduce AI visibility tracking features but there have also been new solutions brought to market since the boom of AI. 

Below are just a handful of SEO platforms you could explore for AI visibility tracking, alongside the traditional tracking: 

• SEMRush 

• Ahrefs 

• SE Ranking 

• Search Atlas 

• AccuRanker 

• Otterly AI 

• Rankability 

Most of these platforms will enable you to track brand presence and visibility within AI search engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode (Gemini) and other LLMs. 

These tools will start to provide you with insight into what content of yours they are using, how they are using it and whether competitors are in a better position than you within the AI search results. 

Performing AI analysis

The information gathered from AI visibility tracking tools will enable you to perform in depth analysis on these AI search engines, so you can identify opportunities and any gaps within your content strategy. 

For core groups of topic areas and search queries, you can begin to understand how AI search engines are displaying the results, which websites they are pulling information from, what formats are being preferred and which semantically related topics are being included too. 

Using this information, you can compare against your content on these topic areas, to identify whether you are covering everything that is expected from a user and AI crawler perspective. 

It may be that you need to expand depth within existing pieces of content or create new pieces of semantically related content that can be interlinked. 

With any opportunities identified, you need to ensure you’re covering off the key components that make a website ‘AI-ready’ (as detailed earlier in this guide), to ensure your geared up for performing well in AI search engines. 

Future-proof your digital presence

Advancements in AI technology is only going to continue into the future; and users’ online journeys will also continue to evolve so you must keep abreast of the landscape changes that are critical for your business. 

Online journeys are becoming increasingly fragmented over time. Customers are using different search engines and platforms to find the information or products they’re looking for, from the likes of ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode through to social channels such as TikTok and YouTube.

‘Search Everywhere’ is another buzzword you may have heard over recent years, which simply refers to ensuring your brand is visible across all the potential search platforms customers are using. 

SEO isn’t dead but is evolving and should remain a critical part of a brands overall digital marketing strategy. 

Unlock your AI search potential 

If you’ve read this guide and are left wondering whether your brand and website is well placed to rank within AI search engines, then you’re in the right place. 

To future-proof your digital presence, now is the time to ensure your website is AI-ready so you don’t fall behind the competition and lose valuable customers. 

Our comprehensive AI-SEO Audit is the ideal way to highlight the key areas that require improvement. Get in touch today for a chat!