If you want your business site mentioned or cited by AI search engines like Google or Yandex, traditional SEO tactics alone are insufficient. Search algorithms have shifted from relying solely on factors like keyword placement and internal linking, meaning brands have to adapt their content strategies to the changing landscape. Keep reading to learn about six tactics your business can use to improve its AI visibility.
1. Optimize Your Content Structure
Any modern content strategy needs an organization that is friendly to both human readers and the bots that AI models use to generate answers to user prompts. Start by adding topic-focused headings and subheadings, along with structured elements such as bulleted lists or FAQs, at the bottom of each landing page.
In addition to these major layout concepts, your business can optimize content structure by separating all information into chunks that are easy for an AI model to digest and summarize. The bots that crawl your content are looking for discrete, separate sections of information so they can easily extract direct answers.
The objective of your content structure strategy should be to keep your paragraphs short and straightforward while still connecting to other relevant topics. Each chunk of content should be self-contained so that an AI system can extract what it needs without too much surrounding context.
2. Create Quality Backlinks
Having other sites link to yours was once a key part of traditional SEO because it helped improve your search ranking, but this digital marketing tactic now helps your site appear more authoritative to AI models. For example, a business site that sells basketball shoes will be considered more trustworthy if it has backlinks from major sports retailers and popular sports blogs.
The best way to get backlinks to your website is to create accurate, comprehensive content that other sites will find citation-worthy. Publish enough high-quality content to become an authoritative voice in your industry, which will naturally drive referral traffic. You can also form strategic partnerships with more established brands and form a collaborative backlinking plan to mutually boost your webpages.
3. Increase Brand Authority
Popular AI search engines like Google and Yandex are looking for clean and well-structured content from sources that they consider trustworthy and authoritative, so ensure that your content not only has quality backlinks but also uses good citations and has other trust signals in place.
Google’s E-E-A-T framework, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, also applies to other AI systems. Make sure that your content always has all four qualities to remain authoritative online. Part of meeting these criteria is regularly publishing quality content and staying up to date on current trends. Finally, continue building your brand authority by forming strategic partnerships with more established brands within your industry.
4. Improve Your Technical SEO
AI search engines use bots to speedily crawl your website or use pre-built indexes before they generate their answers, so you need to make that process as easy as possible by improving your site’s technical SEO.
The first step in improving your business site’s technical SEO is to ensure it loads quickly. Fix any messy coding, add any missing structured data tags, remove any content clutter, and double-check that all links function properly. You should also ensure that data formats are machine-readable and that your site does not have any code that blocks AI bots.
If improving technical SEO or schema markup sounds too advanced or technical for your business to handle right now, you can hire a premium SEO consultant to make these changes and update your content strategy as needed.
5. Work on Schema Markup
Schema markup is a more advanced technical SEO concept that helps AI models understand both the content and the context of each webpage on your business site. A schema is structured code that assigns explicit labels to each element of your content so that a machine reading it knows which part of the text corresponds to what.
Some of the most common schema markup codes are FAQPage, QAPage, and HowTo because they tell the bot parsing your page that the page contains content that provides direct answers to specific questions. If AI models think that they can easily convert your content into comprehensive answers to user queries, they are much more likely to mention your webpages.
6. Use AI-Focused Metrics
The sixth and last thing your business can do to improve AI visibility is to track site performance using AI-focused metrics. Just as with basic SEO tactics, many classic metrics, like clicks and impressions, are still important, but they no longer give the full picture you need. Your business needs to establish an AI-specific baseline and then track those metrics to understand your AI-specific success.
Mentions and citations refer to how often your brand is mentioned or cited during AI-generated summaries, and brand sentiment is a metric that reflects how positively, negatively, or neutrally your brand was represented during said mentions or citations. Share of voice is a helpful metric that shows how often your brand is mentioned relative to competitors, and share of model is a similar metric that focuses specifically on share of voice across major AI platforms.
Key Takeaways
Brands that want to thrive need to optimize their online content so that it can be easily discovered, digested, and summarized by AI models. Any business can do so by optimizing content structure, building high-quality backlinks, increasing brand authority, implementing schema markup, improving technical SEO, and tracking site performance using AI-focused metrics. If your business can perform all of these tactics, they are significantly more likely to be mentioned and cited by the growing number of AI systems.
