How to optimise your website’s SEO for AI search

Will AI search destroy your brand’s SEO efforts? How can you keep up with AI changes to SEO?

I saw a headline today: ‘Chat GPT search will kill millions of brands!’ I thought to myself, could this be true? I’ve already started to see traffic from Chat GPT coming my way, and I know that AI search will be huge.

I decided to ask the expert themselves about this topic: ChatGPT…..

The advice it gave me to make websites friendly for AI search?

Make sure your website is clearly structured, loads fast, mobile friendly, helpful content updated regularly… and so on.

Basically exactly the same advice as would be given by a traditional SEO. Bear in mind that ChatGPT is a voice/chat form of AI, but we’ve actually been using AI in hidden contexts for quite some time. Google already uses AI to deliver search results it thinks are relevant. Meta already uses AI to deliver content to it’s users that it thinks that they’ll like. Our perception of AI in the form of voice chat is different, we finally release how advanced it is, even though marketers have been using AI to sell stuff for at least 5 years now. (or longer? I can’t even remember.)

I asked Chat GPT if the rules for traditional SEO and Chat AI SEO are the same, and it said they are and that a website that was already performing well in SEO will likely perform well in an AI chat too. So to answer the question, it’s unlikely that chat AI will kill millions of brands, actually.

Google already uses AI and has done for a long time, Chat GPT is just a different manifestation of AI.

I personally think that chat-based AI does deliver a more accurate and personalised recommendation for a business than traditional search AI. An example the LinkedIn person gave was that they Googled a hotel recommendation in London, and asked AI and both Google and chat AI gave totally different answers. This could be explained not by the strategy of each hotel brand, but by the personalised nature of each AI engine. Google knows quite a bit about us, it knows our location and has our map data, as well as our search history. Chat GPT however, may know a lot more or less about you based on your relationship with it. For example, Chat GPT may know that you would really prefer an art boutique hotel, whereas Google may recommend something based more on location.

We already know that each person will get a personalised list of search recommendation in Google and it’s been that way for a while, the same is true for Chat GPT.

How to make your website Chat AI friendly.

I don’t usually get all my answers from AI (promise). But, I thought who better to give me a guide on how to make your website Chat GPT friendly than Chat GPT?

I asked it, even though Chat AI and traditional SEO look for similar things in a website, is there anything you (Chat GPT) are particularly looking for in a website that Google isn’t. So here’s it’s little guide.

1. Natural language. As chat gpt is, well, chattier than Google, it likes content that sounds like natural speaking.
2. Make the data easy for an AI chat model to understand. It needs to be clear, concise and offer up valuable information easily. Structured data and highlighted snippets can help.

From my own observations, some brands, particularly niche ones, struggle to make it clear what their business actually is and does, and I think this could be a huge barrier to good chat-based AI search results. Just like how failing to use the actual keywords you want to rank for on your website can be a common barrier to search results.

I always think it’s worth asking someone who isn’t in the business world, or your industry, maybe your brother in law who works as a nurse or someone like that to take a look at your website and see if they understand what it is you actually do and sell without extra context or explanation. And well, you could always get it from the source and copy in some text from your site to Chat GPT and ask if it could think of anyways you could make it clearer and more concise for chat based search if it is a concern of yours.

Hope that helps 😊