AI Search Optimization Best Practices: SEO and AI Visibility

Key Takeaways

• The current SEO landscape is characterized by a drop in organic traffic resulting from a spike in AI overviews and LLM answers.
• The most impactful SEO trends include the rise of AI overviews and LLM extractions, respect for EEAT, and an appetite for authentic content.
• Best practices for adapting include implementing Schema markup, following EEAT principles, and structuring content for LLMS and AI overviews. 

AI in Search Today

Artificial intelligence has taken over the search landscape, bringing a sharp decline in organic search traffic. Whether it’s the AI overview at the top of Google SERPs or people skipping Google entirely to plug their questions into ChatGPT or related tools, people are being driven away from organic clicks on new content. 

As much as 16% of keywords trigger AI overviews in search queries, with informational keywords accounting for around 57% of those queries, causing a significant drop in traffic to informational content. In order to stay relevant in a changing search landscape, SEO marketers must strive to build authority and relevance to maintain visibility. They must be capable of strategically structuring their website content and the backend code to resonate with the algorithm without abandoning what’s worked traditionally.

This guide highlights some of the current AI SEO trends, how they require marketers to adapt, and key AI search optimization best practices marketers can follow to keep up. 

The Most Impactful AI SEO Trends

The search landscape recently has been characterized by the need to speak to the preferences of AI overviews and LLM extractions that are currently absorbing treasured search traffic. Below are some of the most impactful AI search trends shaping the world of search, along with how experts respond.

AI Overviews and LLM Extractions

AI overviews and LLM extractions have spiked in prominence, reshaping the world of organic search by extracting, summarizing, and synthesizing information from other content sources. The common theme between both of these features is the pretty drastic hit to organic search traffic across the board.

The consequence of these overviews has included some pretty staggering statistics:

• 15-64% drop in organic traffic for informational content
• As much as a 10% increase in zero-click rates for keywords with an AI overview compared to keywords without
• 52% of adults use LLMs, with two-thirds using them as search engines 

Both AI overviews and LLM extractions favor robust, informative content that deeply covers a topic in an organized and easy-to-understand manner. As AI algorithms continue to dominate search trends, we’re likely to see content that considers these preferences up front pull away from the pack.

Generative Engine Optimization

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the concept of optimizing for LLMs and AI overviews by structuring content in a manner that makes it easier for these tools to extract the information and present it to those using search engines or LLMs.

GEO has largely been a buzzword across the digital marketing space recently, but there’s value in recognizing its value as a big trend. In my opinion, though, the discussion around GEO serves as a valuable reminder of the fundamental SEO best practices that have long existed, given how similar the two concepts really are.

Key GEO principles include: 

• Strategically structuring content for extractability
• Creating answer-based content, with direct questions and direct answers
• Including expert insights, citations, and third-party mentions
• Using structured data and Schema markup

Whether you refer to the latest best practices as SEO or GEO, the reality is that creating quality content and structuring it with the algorithm in mind makes an important difference.

Value of Authoritativeness

Google, LLMs, and other tools value and prioritize content quality, brand strength, and site authority when ranking information. Authoritativeness builds trust with your audience and demonstrates credibility to algorithms. Important aspects of site authority include content author information, team credentials and awards, the use of statistics, and backlinks across the web.

Authority is often a tiebreaker for LLMs or AI tools when deciding between two pieces of equally informative or valuable content to rank. If two sources have equally accurate and valuable information and similar coverage of a topic, Google will choose to favor the option that has greater authority. While creating long-form content and sitemaps going forward, SEO experts must be extra conscious of how to build this authority into their site and content.

Desire for More Authentic Content

AI has infiltrated not only search engines but the content itself. With the continuous rise of AI content writing tools, content on the web is increasingly becoming AI. While exact numbers are disputable and hard to come by, some say as much as half of the content on the web may be AI-generated at this point. 

This isn’t exactly a welcome change, as still around 74% of people say they prefer to see content written by humans. Whether it’s case studies or personal anecdotes, these aspects are critical to making content not only more palatable but more valuable and meaningful to readers, offering unique perspective you won’t find elsewhere.

With the world becoming increasingly overtaken by generic AI-written content, we’re likely to see a pretty drastic swing towards preferring content that is insightful and cannot be duplicated by AI.

Entity Building

Entities are single, unique pieces of information, like a person, place, organization, or event, that search engines can recognize and associate with specific topics. Rather than relying on keywords to define a topic, topics are defined by the contextual information and related topics surrounding them.

Entities are beneficial for further understanding a topic and the context behind it. For example, building an entity around the brand “Apple” with surrounding contextual information about the topic in content allows the algorithm to distinguish searches for “Apple” the brand from searches for “apple” the fruit. 

As AI overviews and LLMs build more comprehensive answers for topics while touching on subqueries, entity building will become an increasingly important priority. Sites that do the upfront work of building entities through strong content clusters, Schema markup, topical depth, and a wider digital footprint are going to have the advantage in search going forward.

SEO Best Practices for AI and Search Visibility

Generally, the principles behind ranking high in search engines translate to the principles that lead to strong performance in AI overview and LLM extractability. While there is no perfect correlation between LLM citations and Google rankings, there is some overlap to factor in and general strategies to follow. Consider the following AI SEO best practices as you aim to improve your site’s visibility.

Implement Schema Markup

Schema markup and structured data help boost your search visibility by making your site easier to understand for search engines and AI models. Schema markup is a vocabulary of code that tags and defines the structured data on your website so tools can understand what the content is and why it’s valuable, ultimately making it easier to organize and present in overviews and answers.

Some of the most common Schema markup include:

• Organization 
• Business data (such as LocalBusiness or Restaurant)
• FAQPage
• ContactPage
• Product
• Event
• Person

JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) is the definitive standard method for Schema markup, as the format is easily editable and explicitly recommended by Google. Building this markup into your site is becoming an important step for improving your site’s and your content’s rankability going forward.

Lean on E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T is Google’s principle of Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. In other words, people who know the topics best should be the ones writing the content, because they are likely to provide the most reliable and accurate information. Content that speaks to these principles is favored for search rankings and extractability.

While EEAT is still not considered to be a scored ranking factor, it is often a tiebreaker between multiple sites for AI extractability and preference in search rankings. Prioritize these elements to improve your site’s credibility and authority:

• Building out content “Author” pages
• Creating a company “About” page
• Showcasing team awards, credentials, and affiliations
• Writing in-depth and insightful content

Continue to Create High-Quality Content

High-quality content remains a critical component of a strong SEO strategy. When I say high-quality, I mean it features extensive topical depth and coverage to achieve stronger query fan-out coverage for natural extractability. 

Query fan-out is an AI search process where a single query is split into multiple sub-queries to generate a more comprehensive answer. By creating content that provides information about not just the main query but related subqueries, you position content to be pulled and highlighted by AI tools and LLMs for a comprehensive answer.

Keep in mind that these concepts don’t mean you are writing just for the algorithm, but you should be working to make content more in-depth and engaging. Speak to the intent of your target audience, answer key questions, and make content palatable and useful. 

Ultimately, just as it’s always been, content that is extremely valuable to humans will look better to search engines and AI.

Adapt Content for the Algorithm

As the new juggernauts of search, AI overviews and LLMs preferences should strongly influence how you organize and structure your content for success. Consider the following strategies to appease the algorithm:

• Structure content into fraggles, or information-rich groups for easier extractability.
• Present information through a clear and direct question and answer format.
• Demonstrate authority in content through the use of case studies, proprietary data, and insightful statistics.
• Use clear formatting with concise language, short paragraphs, bullet points, and strategic headings.
• Target high-intent keywords that provide value to readers and speak to real needs rather than focusing on keyword stuffing.

Still, let’s be clear — adapting for the algorithm doesn’t mean making it your target audience. What works for the algorithm generally works well for people, too. Well-organized content that combines fraggles and follows a clear structure is more conducive to scanning and readability. 

How We’re Adapting at collystring

At collystring, we’ve been taking a dynamic approach, balancing fundamental, tried-and-true SEO best practices with new strategies to become a trusted source of information for search engines and LLMs to highlight.

We’re taking the following steps to adapt our approach:

• Improving Schema markup and FAQs across client sites
• Exploring tools to assist with tracking mentions
• Continuing to create quality content 
• Analyzing content through a modern search engine lens to understand opportunities to improve query fan-out coverage
• Monitoring shifts in click-driving queries and optimizing key conversion points in response to these trends
• Monitoring AI overview and LLM mentions and making resulting optimizations

By building out quality content and strategic site maps on the front end and a foundation of Schema markup and code on the backend, we build a comprehensive foundation for each of our clients that communicates authority and relevance for better rankings and results.

Navigate Today’s SEO Landscape with collystring

Today’s SEO landscape is much different from even a year ago, with sharp rises in AI use causing organic traffic to plummet. To adjust for AI overtaking the user search experience, SEO teams must know how to strategically structure website content for AI and LLM extractability.

Our SEO team at collystring is consistently working to adapt to the unique search landscape. We’ll start with an initial audit of your site and then begin optimizing for quick wins. Whether it’s building out a comprehensive Schema markup or working with our Content team to improve the structure and depth of your content, we remain committed to helping our clients weather the latest complexities of search to continue to drive organic traffic and conversions.

Contact us to learn more about how to succeed with your SEO strategy despite the continued shifts in the algorithm and search landscape.