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• 8 min read

How SEO & Web Best Practices Help Your AI Visibility

If you're already doing SEO well, you're better positioned for AI-driven discovery than you might think. The practices that make content discoverable and valuable in search engines translate directly to AI platforms and features.

Whether you call it SEO, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), or Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), the fundamentals remain the same. SEO and web best practices are essential for maximizing your digital discovery, whether in AI systems like ChatGPT and Perplexity or traditional search engines like Google. The technical foundation, content quality, and structured data that help search engines understand your site also help AI models discover, process, and cite your content. Don't just take my word for it, let's look at what the leading AI providers say about content discovery.

AI Providers in Their Own Words

Many of the leading AI providers have documentation we can reference to better understand how they work and adherence guidelines to inform an AI performance strategy.

OpenAI Models

How ChatGPT Was Developed

Three primary sources of information:

  • • Public Data: Information publicly available on the internet (such as accessible websites)
  • • Partnerships: Information from third-party partnerships (like Reddit or Yelp)
  • • Human Input: User, trainer, and researcher contributions
OpenAI Documentation ChatGPT Search

Google Gemini

How Gemini Models Work

  • • Pre-training: Models trained on publicly available data
  • • External Retrieval: Uses Google Search and user files
  • • Safety Filtering: Screens against policy guidelines
  • • Response Ranking: Presents highest quality response
Gemini Overview Policy Guidelines

Google AI Features

AI Mode, AI Overviews & More

  • • Technical Requirements: Crawlable and indexable content
  • • Quality Standards: Helpful, reliable, people-first content
  • • Best Practices: Descriptive headings, alt text, crawlable links
AI Features Guide Technical Requirements

Putting It All Together to Create an AI Visibility Strategy

Content Discoverability

  • • XML Sitemaps: Create comprehensive sitemaps and reference in robots.txt
  • • Crawlable Links: Use standard HTML anchor tags with proper href attributes
  • • Logical Site Organization: Structure content hierarchically with clear relationships
  • • Clean URL Structure: Use descriptive, human-readable URLs
  • • Internal Linking: Connect related content for comprehensive discovery

Content Accessibility

  • • HTTP Status Codes: Serve content with proper 200 OK status codes
  • • No Restrictive Directives: Avoid blocking content with robots.txt or other restrictions
  • • Bot-Friendly: Don't block legitimate AI & search crawlers unnecessarily
  • • Reliable & Fast: Ensure pages can be reliably fetched and load quickly
  • • No User-Interaction Requirements: Content visible without clicks or scrolling

Content Parseability

  • • Text-Based Content: Serve text as HTML, not embedded in images/PDFs
  • • Hierarchical Structure: Use proper heading tags (H1, H2, H3) for clear hierarchy
  • • Semantic HTML: Use elements by semantic meaning (article, section, nav)
  • • Descriptive Language: Write clear headings, link text, and metadata
  • • Web Accessibility: Implement alt text, ARIA labels, logical reading order

Content Quality

  • • Demonstrate Expertise: Show original research and practical insights
  • • Provide Comprehensive Answers: Serve user needs with thorough information
  • • Focus on User Value: Create content for people, not algorithms
  • • Follow Guidelines: Use Google's Helpful Content as a framework

Embrace New Opportunities

  • • AI-Specific Protocols: Implement emerging standards like llms.txt
  • • Structured Data: Add Schema.org markup to clarify content type and entities
  • • Test & Experiment: Try AI tools and new standards to understand how they interpret your content

Stay Informed on AI Updates

  • • Review Best Practices: Periodically assess against current standards
  • • Follow Platform Updates: Monitor OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft
  • • Join Communities: Subscribe to developer blogs and relevant groups

Assess & Improve Your AI Visibility Readiness

Ready to better understand your site's AI visibility? Use the solutions below to evaluate current performance, identify opportunities and gain actionable insights to improve your AI discovery performance.

AI Readiness Analyzer

Evaluate your site's technical foundation, structured data, and homepage for AI discovery readiness.

Analyze AI Readiness

UX Bench

Benchmark your Core Web Vitals performance against industry competitors.

Launch UX Bench