AI Optimisation Explained

Users are trending towards favouring using LLM services like Chat GPT and Gemini to get answers to their questions instead of searching for keywords and phrases using a search engine like Google. Some browsers are even default their search bar to use AI tools to find answers. This means that instead of seeing a ranked list of relevant websites, they are seeing a generated human-readable answer to their question which can cite relevant websites but already includes processed content from the website in the copy. Traditional search engines like Google are also adapted their results to include AI-generated answers above website listings.

These new methods mean users are less likely to click on websites as they may already have their "answer" in the generated text, pointing towards a shift in focus from clicks to brand visibility and awareness.

Google's AI overview for a question about the best bakeries shows a conversational summary with some small links and thumbnails surrounding the content. Underneath it still displays traditional website links.

Google's AI overview for a "how to" question gives the user a lot of information up front, meaning they are less likely to click through to a source website. In this case a video link may be the obvious "next click" for the user if needed.

ChatGPT shows it's results in a different format. In this case it's given a top three with photos and dot points.

SEO is a great starting point for thinking about AIO. It's all about content and ensuring you're giving that content the best chance to be seen by search engines.

AIO is about optimising your site structure and content to be easily readable by answer engines like Chat GPT and Google's search overview.

There's always been a lot of hidden "secret herbs and spices" behind the scenes of how search engines like Google have created algorithms to read websites and rank the results. There are even more unknowns behind how AI search results work and they can vary even more than traditional search engines.

What this space!

This is an evolving space and we've got our finger on the pulse to ensure we stay up to date with the latest trends and techniques. At the moment there is a lot of crossover between traditional SEO and AI optimisation. We've highlighted some the of the key focus areas to take a look at:

AI-crawler friendly

An important first step for AIO is making sure your website is readable for AI crawlers. Sometimes Cloudflare or server settings can prevent your site from being accessed by bots and crawlers - these settings can be tailored to allow in the friendly crawlers and keeping blocking the bad bots.

Brand trust

It's more crucial than ever to ensure your brand and website are recognised as being trustworthy. This can relate to mentions in news sources and other websites, Google Reviews, reliable and original content, as well as legitimate back-links.

Helpful content

Your content needs to be relevant, recent and readable for audience. It needs to speak directly to it's intended users with a clear intent and it needs to answer relevant “who, what, why, when, how” questions using concise natural language.

Structured website pages

Just like with SEO, we recommend keeping a clear hierarchy with the content and code structure. Formatted JSON-LD Schema.org data is also important in helping answer engines and AI tools understand your content, products and service offerings.

We'd love to share our AI wisdom with you - get in touch to book in a conversation over a coffee.

Here's how we can help:

General Content Advice

We recommend making sure every page has a clear purpose, explaining who it’s for and what problem it solves right from the introduction. We'll help you strengthen user experience and AI discoverability by pinpointing where helpful FAQ sections that answer the common “who, what, why, when, and how” questions in natural, conversational language would be most effective.

AIO Site Review + Content Strategy

We can review your website through the lens of large language models (LLMs) to see how well it can be understood and surfaced by AI systems. From there, we can help identify the best opportunities for optimising or expanding content to align with AI-driven search visibility.

Implement Structured Markup

We can enhance your site’s structure with detailed Schema.org markup. Clean, validated JSON-LD and structured data feeds help search engines and AI tools better interpret and display your content for richer, more accurate results.

Welcome to the forefront of website optimisation. We're now no longer just optimising for search engines, we're also needing to optimise for AI platforms and chat tools. Your website needs to consider how it's content will reach it's audience through chat answers and summaries in services like Chat GPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google. Giving your brand and website visibility by being mentioned and cited in answers is crucial.

So what are all these fancy new acronyms?

• SEO Search Engine Optimisation
• AIO Artificial Intelligence Optimisation
• AEO Answer Engine Optimisation
  
• GEO Generative Engine Optimisation
  
• LLMO Large Language Model Optimisation