36.4% of content marketers reported a decline in traffic between 2024 and 2025 with the rollout of AI Overviews and AI Search. With this in mind, learning how to rank in AI search results has never been more important.
As AI-driven search results become more prevalent, they’re reshaping how users discover and engage with content. Unlike traditional search engine rankings, AI Overviews and AI-powered search pull information dynamically, often prioritizing sources that provide clear, authoritative, and structured data.
For content creators, SEO strategists, and business owners, adapting to this shift is crucial. Optimizing for AI search isn’t just about ranking higher; it’s about ensuring your content is surfaced in relevant AI-generated responses.
In this guide, we’ll explore how AI search engines work, what factors influence AI-generated results, and the best strategies to optimize your content and website for visibility in this evolving search landscape.
- What Is AI Search?
- Benefits of Optimizing for AI Search Engines
- How To Rank in AI Search Results
- Content Optimizations for AI Search
- Optimizing Technical SEO for AI Search
- Authority and Trust Signal Optimizations for AI Search
- Voice Search Optimization for AI Search
- Don’t Forget To Optimize for Bing
- Master Traditional SEO
- Future-Proof Your SEO Strategy for AI Search
What Is AI Search?
AI search technology leverages artificial intelligence, including machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), to understand user intent and context. It delivers more relevant and personalized search results than simple keyword matching and traditional search engines.
Some of the main AI search engines include:
- ChatGPT Search
- Google AI Overviews and Gemini
- Perplexity AI
- Bing with Copilot
- Brave Search
- You.com
AI search is still in its early growth stage, and as the technology evolves, we can expect this list to expand with new platforms. Staying informed about emerging AI search engines will be key to maintaining visibility and driving more traffic.
Benefits of Optimizing for AI Search Engines
A recent study found that although only 14% of people use AI tools daily, 71.5% have started using them to some capacity. This number will only grow over time. With that in mind, here are several reasons why you should start adapting your SEO strategy today:
- Drive traffic from AI search: AI search traffic is a new channel that will only grow, so by embracing that and optimizing for it, you can have an additional channel that sends users to your website.
- Rank better for voice search: Similar to AI systems, voice assistants favor natural-language content, so by optimizing for long-tail keywords, you will rank better for both AI and voice search.
- Better target semantic search and user intent: AI prioritizes semantic relationships, so creating content that is more in-depth and answers the target user intent, plus other relevant topics, creates a better user experience and improves your chances of ranking in AI search results.
- Take advantage of zero-click searches: Zero-click searches occur when users find the information they need directly on the search results page without clicking through to a website. There is a clear trend in the rise of zero-click searches, which result in less organic traffic going to websites. However, if you can show up in these results, you can build brand authority and mindshare, which can result in increased conversions from direct traffic.
- Create a competitive advantage: AI search is currently in its early adoption phase, so if you can optimize your website for it now, you can become an authority in the space and hold a majority share of the market.
- Future-proof your SEO strategy: Optimizing for AI search shouldn’t replace traditional SEO but rather be a more improved and advanced SEO strategy that ensures your website will perform well no matter what search may look like in the future.
Optimizing for AI search engines helps you stay ahead of the curve and strengthens your overall SEO strategy for the future. Now, let’s explore the key tactics to improve your rankings in AI search results.
How To Rank in AI Search Results
Understanding what areas of your website you should improve and how to optimize your content to rank in AI search results is essential if your business wants to stay competitive. Below are the main areas to focus on if you want to see success with both AI and SEO.
Content Optimizations for AI Search
To rank in AI search results, content must be clear, well-structured, and optimized for AI-driven understanding. AI models prioritize context, semantic relevance, and concise, authoritative answers. By refining your content for these factors, you can improve its chances of being surfaced in AI-generated responses.
Align Content With Semantic Depth and User Intent
Create in-depth content that covers your main topic and include other related or relevant questions around that topic.
The additional questions can be found by:
- Conducting long-tail keyword research
- Reviewing the People Also Ask boxes on Google’s search engine results page (SERP)
- Going into a generative AI chatbot and looking up information around your topic to see the related questions they recommend
AI algorithms prioritize content that addresses both direct and latent user intent. Direct user intent refers to a searcher’s immediate, explicit goal, such as looking for a specific product or answer.
Latent user intent includes the underlying needs or related interests that influence their search, even if they don’t state them outright. This is why long-form content often gets pulled into AI results since it covers a topic with multiple questions and answers surrounding that main topic.
You’ve likely noticed if you use an AI search engine or chatbot that the answer to your question is also coupled with additional information on the topic. This is because AI search attempts to predict the true intent of your search and provide relevant answers or follow-up questions.
Pro Tip: You can take this a step further by using ChatGPT or another generative AI model to create a Python script that breaks down your keywords, topics, and content and turns them into vector representations using embeddings.
From there, you can ask ChatGPT to generate another Python script that uses cosine similarity to tell you how relevant your content is to a specific keyword or topic.
Then, you can go to Google Colab and run the scripts. Google Colab is great because it’s free to use, runs in your browser, and is beginner-friendly. Just copy and paste the Python scripts into a “New Notebook” and run each cell step by step.
Finally, you can take the output from Google Colab and ask ChatGPT to:
- Analyze if the article is well-optimized for the keywords based on the cosine similarity.
- Provide the strengths and opportunities for improvements.
- Give actionable recommendations to improve the article.
This is the same process that AI search engines use, so by doing the same, you can better understand what they are likely seeing and how you can improve your content to rank better.
Structure Content for AI-Friendly Scannability
Creating content that is structured efficiently with hierarchical headings and upfront answers or summaries will help AI easily extract information.
By using a structured heading system where you label the main topic as an H1, with subtopics progressively organized under H2s and H3s, you can create a clear hierarchy that enables both users and AI scrapers to scan the copy and find information quickly.
AI crawlers also appear to favor content with bullets and short, scannable paragraphs. It’s common for AI citations to pull information structured as a question as a heading followed by a concise answer as a bullet.
Pro Tip: Adding a quick answer box or key takeaways box at the top of your content is a great way to increase your chances of getting featured in both AI results and Featured Snippets on Google.
Create and Get Featured on Best “X” Roundups
Best “X” roundups are another great way to get pulled into AI search results.
Listicles work well for AI search results because their clear structure, concise points, and digestible summaries align with how AI processes information. They also often present results in bulleted or numbered list formats.
You can create best “X” roundups, such as “best call center software,” for any industry. Siege has found that listing your own website in the article and objectively comparing it to competitors is a great way of getting your name out there and being part of the conversation.
Pro Tip: We have found that even paying to be a sponsored company on a best “X” roundup can correlate with being pulled into AI results since you are mentioned in more content, and AI sees that as a positive signal.
Build Authority with Topic Clusters
Creating topic clusters in a hub-and-spoke model ensures comprehensive coverage and can position you as a great source of information.
AI crawlers look for authoritative sources when scraping content, so establishing yourself as a trustworthy source can increase your chances of ranking in AI search results.
This typically involves writing multiple pieces of cluster content on one main topic covered in a piece of pillar content. It’s important to ensure that each piece of content you write is thorough and includes subtopics since AI tends to favor in-depth information, as we mentioned above.
Once you’ve created different articles on the same main topic, you can connect them using optimized internal linking. Optimized internal links will help AI crawlers, search engine crawlers, and users navigate your website and content.
Use Semantic URLs to Help AI Understand a Page’s Topic
Ensure your content has a semantic URL. A semantic URL is an SEO-friendly URL that is readable, meaningful, and structured to convey the content of a page clearly.
This is important because it helps AI quickly understand the page’s topic. AI crawlers aim to go through content as fast as possible, as they must process a massive amount of data to provide an accurate answer. Therefore, making your content easy to understand increases the chance that AI will reference it.
Optimizing Technical SEO for AI Search
AI search engines rely on structured data, fast-loading pages, and clean site architecture to understand and surface content effectively. Optimizing technical SEO ensures that AI models can easily crawl, interpret, and prioritize your content, improving its visibility in AI-generated results.
Maximize AI Visibility with Structured Data and Schema Markup
Schema markup, or structured data, is a code added to your website that helps search engines understand the context of your content. Having schema markup on your website is essential since AI search engines rely heavily on structured data to parse and contextualize content efficiently.
Some of the most important schema to include on your website are:
- FAQPage schema helps search engines recognize and display frequently asked questions and their answers directly in the search results, enhancing visibility and user engagement.
- HowTo schema marks up step-by-step guides or instructions, allowing search engines to showcase them in rich snippets with detailed steps and visuals.
- Article schema helps search engines understand the structure of an article, improving the chances of rich results for news articles, blog posts, or reports.
- Speakable schema identifies content suitable for voice assistants, making it easier for search engines to extract and read aloud relevant information.
- Organization schema provides structured details about a company or business, including its name, logo, and contact information, helping search engines display accurate brand info.
- Author or Person schema marks up personal or author information, helping search engines associate content with its creator for better credibility and visibility.
- Video schema helps search engines understand and display video content more effectively in search results, often resulting in rich video snippets or previews.
- Image schema enables search engines to better understand the context and content of images, potentially leading to enhanced image search results or carousels.
- Product schema helps search engines showcase detailed product information such as price, availability, and reviews directly in the search results, improving product visibility.
- Review & Rating schema marks up user reviews and ratings, allowing search engines to display star ratings and reviews directly in search snippets, increasing click-through rates.
- Event schema marks up event details like dates, times, and locations, enabling search engines to feature events directly in search results or local listings.
- Recipe schema marks up recipes, including ingredients, instructions, and cooking times, allowing search engines to display detailed recipe snippets in search results.
These all enhance algorithmic comprehension and increase the likelihood of being included in AI search results and summaries.
Optimize Core Web Vitals to Improve Page Speed
AI crawlers prioritize pages with fast load times to provide users with fast responses and a smooth user experience.
AI systems often have tight timeouts when retrieving content and will aim for response times under 1-2 seconds, with around 5 seconds as a maximum.
Some key technical benchmarks for Core Web Vitals (CWV) to strive to achieve are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Under 2.5 seconds
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Below 0.1
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Below 200ms
Since Google officially stated that Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor as of June 2021, when they released their “Page Experience” update, you will perform better in both traditional and AI search if you optimize CWVs.
Don’t Block AI Crawlers in Your Robots.txt File
Blocking AI crawlers in your robots.txt file will hurt your chances of appearing in AI search results. AI search prioritizes structured, fast-loading, and accessible content.
Below is an example of a robot.txt file that blocks AI models from crawling any areas of your website.
If there are specific parts of your website you don’t want AI to crawl, but other sections would be okay, then it’s recommended to selectively block areas you don’t want indexed.
You can then use the robots.txt “Allow” rule for important content you think will rank in AI search results so AI crawlers can still access those parts of your website.
Pro Tip: Monitor your server logs to see how AI bots interact with your site before deciding what to block. This can help you:
- Identify which AI crawlers are accessing your content.
- Understand the potential impact on your traffic.
- Determine if certain bots need rate limiting instead of full blocking.
If you are looking at your log files, here are some of the AI bot names to keep an eye out for.
- Open AI:
- ChatGPT-User
- OAI-SearchBot
- GPTbot
- Other AI bots:
- ClaudeBot (by Anthropic)
- Claude-Web (by Anthropic)
- Anthropic-ai (by Anthropic)
- PerplexityBot
- Bytespider
- CCBot
- Amazonbot
- FacebookBot
- Meta-ExternalAgent
- YouBot
Authority and Trust Signal Optimizations for AI Search
AI search prioritizes content from authoritative, trustworthy sources to provide accurate and reliable answers. Strengthening your site’s credibility through expert-driven content, high-quality backlinks, and online reputation management can improve its chances of being featured in AI-generated results.
Demonstrate E-E-A-T To Build AI and User Trust
AI systems prioritize content that demonstrates E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) through peer citations, institutional affiliation, and author expertise.
Other factors that can help establish E-E-A-T signals to AI systems are backlinks from high-authority websites and case studies on your page that showcase tangible results from real-world examples.
Lastly, it’s important to include author credentials and bios in your content. Stating any certifications, achievements, or even years of experience can quickly showcase why your author is qualified to write on a topic for both users and AI systems.
Leverage Authoritative Backlinks to Build AI Search Credibility
As mentioned above, backlinks impact E-E-A-T, which is a factor that AI systems consider. However, AI also uses backlinks to measure credibility and values natural language understanding and contextual meaning over the number of backlinks.
Due to this, earning fewer high-quality backlinks to your well-optimized content is more important than gaining a large quantity of average to low-quality backlinks. AI systems detect and devalue low-quality or irrelevant backlinks, making link building strategies more about quality over quantity.
Monitor and Manage Online Sentiment
AI agents also incorporate sentiment analysis from social media, review platforms, and online discussion forums to influence ranking decisions. This is most commonly used for branded, e-commerce, and local searches.
Getting consistent positive sentiment through reviews and mentions can improve your brand’s rankings in AI search results. Some key areas to monitor and manage include:
- G2
- Capterra
- Google Reviews
- Trustpilot
- Any other social media platforms your business uses
If you have an e-commerce business, reviewing your product rankings on any merchant websites you sell through, such as Amazon or Google Shopping, is important. AI prioritizes listings with high ratings, positive feedback, and detailed reviews.
Voice Search Optimization for AI Search
AI and voice search favor conversational language, regional dialects, and structured data to deliver accurate spoken responses. Optimizing for natural phrasing, long-tail keywords, and Speakable schema helps AI better interpret and surface your content in both voice and AI search results.
Align Your Content with Natural Search Phrasing and Long-Tail Keywords
With AI becoming a more integrated part of phones and other smart home devices, there has been a rapid increase in AI voice searches. Due to this, there has also been an increase in natural phrasing and long-tail keywords.
For example, the search query “natural sleep aid” had 9,600 monthly searches at the time of writing this since users typing a search query use broad terms to get results. However, with the rise in voice AI search, we have seen an increase in long-tail specific queries like, “What is the best natural remedy for sleep?”
It’s expected that these types of queries will become more popular since that is how people naturally speak and phrase questions. With the help of AI search, these hyper-specific questions will give users results.
Here is a breakdown of the main differences between voice search and traditional text search.
| Voice Search | Traditional Text Search | |
|---|---|---|
| Query Type | Natural language queries with complete sentences | Often short, keyword-based queries |
| Example Queries |
|
|
| User Interaction Method | Spoken queries using voice assistants on mobile devices, smart speakers, or cars. | Text-based input via keyboard on desktops, tablets, or smartphones. |
| Search Results Format | Direct answers, summaries, and sometimes follow-up questions or actions | List of webpages with links, snippets, and ads. |
| Typical Search Intent | More immediate and action-oriented, frequently used for local information or quick facts. | Often informational, navigational, or transactional with a focus on browsing. |
| Nature of Search Type | It uses natural language processing and contextual understanding and aims for one-shot, precise responses. | Relies on keyword matching and SEO to rank pages; requires user scanning of results. |
| Contextual Considerations | Users are often seeking rapid, actionable information in a hands-free, on-the-go context. | Users are often in research or planning mode, taking time to review multiple sources. |
| Follow-Up Interaction | Often designed to handle follow-up questions seamlessly through conversational context. | May require additional queries or clicking through multiple pages. |
You can optimize your content to increase your chances of being used as the answer to these questions by formatting your content as FAQs and how-to guides.
You can also include headings that match the format of these natural long-tail searches, even if there currently isn’t search volume matching the direct wording.
Pro Tip: Optimizing for voice search is similar to optimizing for featured snippets.
If you have content that includes the question as a heading and then follows up with a concise answer in the copy immediately below the heading, you will be more likely to rank or be used as the answer for AI voice search.
Localize Your Content for Regional Dialects
Another important area to focus on is regional dialect. AI search engines are getting better at understanding localized languages and dialects, so by tailoring your content to that specific region, you can increase the chances your content ranks for AI voice searches.
If you were writing an article about renting apartments in the most expensive cities and had a blog for both the United States and Europe, then you would want to tailor your content to each region’s local terms.
For example, instead of using “apartment,” you’d change it to “flat” for your European audience.
By localizing your terminology, you can increase the relevance of the content. This is especially important for tourism, service-based businesses, and local SEO that rely heavily on geo-specific search intent.
Use Speakable Schema To Enhance AI and Voice Search Results
Speakable schema allows you to tell search engines and devices which parts of your content are most important for them to read aloud. This can help AI voice systems and assistants quickly find your content and use it for answers in voice search results.
As of March 2025, Google’s speakable schema is still in the Beta stage and works for users in the U.S. using English. You can learn more about its current state on Google’s speakable structured data page.
Speakable schema is best used for FAQs, key summaries, how-to guides, and news articles. It’s important that you only use speakable schema for the most important parts of your content you want read aloud, like FAQs, and not add it to an entire page or it will likely be ignored.
Having speakable schema will help optimize your content for AI search engines and virtual assistants like Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri.
Don’t Forget To Optimize for Bing
Since Google accounts for around 90% of all searches, people often get tunnel vision and only focus on optimizing for Google. However, it’s important to remember that Perplexity, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek all use Bing as the primary search engine to power their internet search results.
This makes optimizing for Bing a must if you want to prioritize ranking in AI search results. Luckily, if you are following on-page SEO best practices for Google, you are likely already doing well on Bing.
That said, there are a few items that are different on Bing, which we will discuss more in-depth below.
Bing SEO vs. Google SEO
Although Bing is similar to Google when it comes to SEO optimizations, there are some differences, which include:
| Bing | ||
|---|---|---|
| Keywords | Google looks beyond exact keyword matches. Google uses NLP to understand how content relates to a query and interpret context, intent, and semantics. | Bing places more weight on explicit keyword usage. This means that exact matches in titles, headers, and body content can have a stronger impact. |
| On-Page SEO | Google values semantic relevance and NLP for keyword usage. It evaluates headings, alt text, and other on-page elements and integrates them into a broader context of content quality and user intent. | Bing will directly evaluate direct keyword usage in titles, headers, meta descriptions, and image alt text. Bing also cares more about a clear HTML structure and still uses the meta keywords tag. |
| Technical SEO | Google weighs page speed and mobile performance as significant ranking factors. Google values HTTPS and uses schema markup extensively to help generate rich results on the SERPs. Google has advanced duplicate detection and is better at understanding canonicals, so duplicate content isn’t as big of an issue. | Bing values page speed, HTTPS, and schema markup, but they are not as important ranking factors compared to Google. Bing cares more about clear URL structure and is sensitive to URLs with parameters. Due to this, Bing requires canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues. |
| Indexing & Crawling | Google operates on a mobile-first index and crawls websites with Googlebot more often, so it’s more likely to index new or updated content quicker. Google’s advanced rendering capabilities allow it to index pages relying on JavaScript. | Bing uses one index for both mobile and desktop and crawls with Bingbot, which might take longer to index new or updated content. While capable of processing JavaScript content, Bing typically requires more explicit HTML content to ensure proper indexing. |
| Backlinks | Google considers anchor text, but it’s just one of many signals in a broader context of link quality and content relevance. Google values the overall quality of a backlink profile and favors high-authority backlinks. Google is also great at identifying spammy or low-quality links and devaluing or penalizing unnatural links. | Bing gives more weight to the relevance and exact match of anchor text in backlinks. Although Bing values link quality, it also factors in link quantity, even if they are less contextually perfect. Bing monitors for low-quality or manipulative links but tends to be less aggressive in its penalties. |
| Social Signals | Google has stated that social signals (from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) are not direct ranking factors. | Bing has stated that social signals— likes, shares, comments, and overall social engagement—are a factor in its ranking algorithm. |
Pro Tip: Make sure you have Bing Webmaster Tools set up for your website since it’s chalked full of helpful data and tips so you can make sure your website is optimized for Bing.
Master Traditional SEO
Studies have shown that websites ranking in the top 10 positions of Google’s SERPs have a 52% chance of appearing in an AI Overview.
Although AI Overviews operate differently than other AI search engines, this fact still holds true that the higher you rank on Google and Bing, the more you appear in AI search results.
This reinforces the fact that traditional SEO is more important than ever since it will:
- Help you rank higher to get pulled into AI search results.
- Ensure you stay competitive and can rank in the ever-changing search landscape, where the number of URLs showing up on the SERPs is decreased by new features.
Doubling down on SEO efforts, setting up AI search performance tracking, and adopting an omnichannel marketing strategy will set you up for success so your business continues to grow and bring in revenue.
Future-Proof Your SEO Strategy For AI Search
If you are looking to create best-in-class content and guarantee your website is optimized from an on-page and technical standpoint so users, search engines, and AI systems will all love your website, Siege Media can help you with our content marketing and SEO services.
