5 Ways to Optimise Your Blog for AI Search Engines
The old Search Engine Optimisation tricks aren't enough anymore
Keyword stuffing is dead.
In fact, stuffing your page with invisible keywords hasn’t worked for a long time. Whilst it’s still worth including keywords in the headings and body text of your blog posts, it won’t be enough.
Google has dominated search for the last few decades. But ChatGPT, Perplexity and Bing Copilot have taken search in a new direction — and, judging by the amount of ground they’re taking, it’s going well for them.
So, to keep up with the competition, last month Google came out with its own AI Mode.
AI search isn’t going anywhere, and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as a field will change a lot over the next few years.
Here’s what we’re exploring this time around…
How AI scans blog posts differently to search engines of the past
The methods which will propel us to the top of AI search
The key difference between what will rank in traditional vs AI search engines
How is AI changing search?
Similar to traditional search engines, AI search engines use ‘crawlers’ to ‘crawl’ (or, scan) web pages. But the way AI search engines consume and index content is massively different.
Traditional search engines search for backlinks and keyword density to rank pages (called ‘technical SEO’). Now, AI can read blog posts and contextualise them in their entirety. Not just this, but they can loosely fact-check and estimate the quality of each piece too.
We can, therefore, imagine AI asks questions like these about a blog post when ranking it.
What value does this blog post bring? It could be funny, educational or inspirational. AI has a much better idea of how educational or inspirational someone’s writing is compared to the older search engines. As for whether it can really detect humour…who’s to say? 🤷♂️
Can this content be easily found across the internet? Having a story/opinion/guide which is only on your website will signal higher value to the crawler.
Is this blog post genuinely worth recommending? If it was written by AI, you haven’t told the bot anything it doesn’t already know.
How do we get AI search to recommend our blog?
Let me repeat: AI-generated blog posts are a big no-no.
By all means, use AI to help you with the creative process. But don’t take an AI-generated post wholesale and just dump it onto your blog.
Otherwise, without further ado, here are 5 tips for making sure your blog is optimised for AI searches!
#1 Get your basic SEO in place
Yes, even the old methods will still have a place.
At least for the time being, several of these AI searches are running the same search on Google or Bing in the background anyway. If you aren’t visible to them, you aren’t visible to chatbots.
So, no — traditional SEO isn’t completely finished.
Keep getting those image file names and alt tags sorted out. Make sure the site is responsive and accessible. Yes, it’s still worth having keywords in the page, but it’s not worth shoehorning them into your text at every opportunity.
Traditional SEO will show results, but in the future it will just be the foundation. The better you’re doing with older search engines, the more likely it is you’re doing well in AI search.
#2 Answer questions conversationally
People don’t speak in keywords.
If you’re writing for a cooking blog, you might target the keywords “cuisine”, “recipe” and “pasta”. Before, you might have just typed “bolognese recipe” into Google if that was what you wanted. But this isn’t how you talk to AI chatbots (or is it? Let me know your experience).
A header like, “Here’s how you cook an amazing bolognese!” gives the crawler more context of what’s on the page than “Bolognese recipe”.
…it’s also a little more creative.
#3 Write clear, well-structured content
This has been necessary for a long time, but it’s true more than ever now.
For AI to recommend your content, it needs to understand it. And to understand it, you have to format the page with clear sections and headers.
Only a single Heading 1 per page. Other headings should hierarchically use Heading 2 and beyond.
Give each section a clear title (remember, ‘clear not clever’). AI crawlers need context.
Further to point #2, some section headings could even be questions. After all, if a section perfectly answers a question which someone might type into ChatGPT, why not signal to the crawler the answer is right there?
#4 Share expert analyses
AI chatbots will favour the EEAT system: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.
They also love details. Long-form, detailed content written by someone with credentials to back them up will be preferred. Remember to add links to reputable sources.
On that note, use plain language unless your audience is technical. They’ll also assume you’re speaking to a general audience unless you make it explicit (a line near the start saying who the post is for will work).
#5 Share first-hand experiences
Not an expert in anything? Not to worry.
(I mean, that’s probably not true; everyone’s really good at something.)
First-hand experiences might seem only worth sharing on travel blogs. But if you’ve had good results with a tip on eCommerce or (or, heck, even SEO), it’s worth writing about how that went for you too.
And remember to frame it in first-person! Heck; this is solid advice for writing compelling content to start with. Tell a story. If you’re learning a new skill or trying a new strategy, go into detail about how it went for you. If it was an interesting experience, let everyone know how it affected you.
Here’s the deal with points #4 and #5: AI is looking for things it can’t do itself.
And as quickly as AI can churn out blog posts, it can’t yet launch an eCommerce business or fix a radiator.
AI search vs traditional search
At the end of it all, these AI search engines are trying to do what Google has been trying since its inception: give the most relevant search results.
ChatGPT, Perplexity and the others are going to use everything they can to find content worth recommending. As the technology improves, the tools they use to achieve this are going to change over time.
Which leads me to secret tip #6: keep your finger on the pulse. Keep up with the literature in the field. Subscribe to blogs or newsletters which cover it (like this one).
Keep up with the trends as they develop and you’ll easily outclass competitors still playing by old rules.
‘Til next time,
-tommy