Andriana BoyrikovaThere is a groundswell of misinformation about AI search optimization, and I, just like you, fell into the trap of believing everything I read. But enough is enough. That’s why I put my journalistic cap on to investigate what is really going on in SEO and AI search. Unlike other websites that publish such articles with the intent to convince people to buy their AI search optimization software, I offer a more nuanced perspective. I want to provide you with every angle on this, without any fear-mongering, so that you and your team can see the whole picture.
What is AI search optimization?
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), also called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), is the practice of making your content referenced or cited by AI-powered assistants such as Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Mistral, AI Overviews. The goal is straightforward: after someone prompts such a tool with “Give me a list of the best companies in Amsterdam specializing in HR onboarding software for mid-sized firms,” your company appears in the response. It is similar to ranking in the top organic search results in a search engine like Google or Bing. AEO is, therefore, an opportunity for more brand visibility.
So, what would happen to your business if it doesn’t show up in AI search results? Is it doomed to a digital death as some marketing gurus are trying to persuade us? You do need to be found when and where people search, but being seen is not the same as being chosen. B2B buyers know full well that results in AI search don’t mean those are the best products or services but that the content is well optimized for AI search.
The B2B buying journey may start in AI search but doesn’t end there.
On top of that, AI search isn’t the ubiquitous digital search place. Semrush analyzed 260 billion rows of clickstream data between January 2024 and June 2025 to examine people’s Google Search behavior before and after their first interaction with ChatGPT search. The results showed there was no significant change in daily Google Search sessions once people started using ChatGPT.
In a separate study by BrightEdge, which analyzed thousands of queries and websites, the results showed that AI search accounted for less than 1% of referral traffic while organic search remained the primary driver.
Let’s not forget that digital search isn’t the only way B2B buyers gather information, and word-of-mouth remains your strongest accomplice. That said, investing money in AI search optimization is worthwhile, but AI search is just one touchpoint in the buyer journey. You need to approach it as one piece of your content strategy, not as the end goal.
Although the B2B buying journey is getting shorter, with an average buying cycle of 9.8 months in Europe, it still involves multiple parallel sub-journeys.
B2B buyers cross-check choices and revisit steps, using Google or Bing to find your website and validate information, LinkedIn for thought leadership content and recommendations, forums for reviews, a chatbot for a comparison with competitors, and conversations with people about their experiences with your company.
What are AI Overviews?
I promised you the whole picture, so I can’t possibly sweep AI Overviews under the rug. AI Overview is an AI-generated summary of search results, appearing at the very top of the results page across browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, both on desktop and mobile. It synthesizes third-party content to answer a search query and displays a list of links to the pages it has used as sources. When an AI Overview appears, it is the first thing a person sees; on mobile, it often fills the first page.
Right now, the question on every marketer’s lips is: “How do we appear in the list of links that an AI Overview adds to its summary?” And while they are wrestling with that question, they are avoiding the elephant in the room. An AI Overview doesn’t distinguish between an official company’s website and an opinion, so someone’s snide remark about your business on Reddit might appear in an AI Overview presented as factual information. By the time a potential buyer reads it, the damage is done, and you don’t know how many other people saw the same thing.
Even though Google has laid out how to appear in AI Overviews, given the black-box and fast-moving nature of generative engines, you have little to no control over how and when your content and company’s name are surfaced.
And this is only part of the problem. Equally concerning is that AI Overviews are reducing clicks to your website. People are more likely to end their browsing session after visiting a search page with an AI Overview, according to an analysis by Pew Research Center of web browsing data of 900 US adults. The people didn’t click on a link in the AI-generated summary: this occurred in only 1% of all visits to pages with an AI Overview.
A study conducted by Ahrefs, which selected 300,000 keywords and compared the clickthrough rates before and after the rollout of AI Overviews, showed a 58% reduction in clicks for top results. But context is important here. A Semrush analysis of more than 10 million keywords revealed that 91.3% of queries that triggered AI Overviews had an informational intent. While this is alarming for businesses that rely on informational traffic, it also means queries with commercial and transactional intent see notably fewer AI Overviews.
In my next section, I share how matching your content to search intent might help you avoid the worst of the traffic erosion AI Overviews are causing.
How to optimize content for AI search: a practical AEO framework
Jumping on the bandwagon of “The future of search is AI” isn’t the sharpest approach. To do it properly, you need a holistic content optimization strategy that makes your company visible and discoverable in all the digital places where your audience consumes content, including search engines, social media, chatbots, and niche platforms.
And those digital places are more interconnected than you realize. For example, a fact that gets overlooked is that chatbots don’t rely on training data alone. ChatGPT primarily uses Bing’s index, Claude appears to be using Brave Search, and Gemini taps into Google’s search infrastructure. So, your visibility in AI search will vary depending on which chatbot(s) people are using as well as on how they phrase their prompts since small changes in wording can make a chatbot give totally different outputs.
If your company appears for one prompt in one chatbot, that doesn’t mean it shows up consistently for a similar prompt in all chatbots.
Ultimately, there is no silver bullet that can guarantee you a place in AI search results, at least not for now, and anyone telling you otherwise is trying to sell you something. With that caveat, I will share a few practices that can improve your chances of surfacing in AI search. Traditional SEO fundamentals such as crawlability and structured data remain essential, and the underlying principle is still the same: AEO, like SEO, is about providing value to the person searching for information.
1. Apply the E-E-A-T principles
If you have been optimizing your content for visibility in unpaid, organic search engine results, you are no stranger to E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), Google’s framework to assess the quality of online content. E-E-A-T remains foundational for AEO, too.
Experience
- What problems have you solved for your customers, what results have you achieved? You need to show proof, which can be in the form of reviews, in-depth case studies, interviews with customers, or surveys and studies you have conducted. That type of content is building credibility not only in the eyes of your target audience but also chatbots.
- AI systems favor current data, so don’t let your proof of experience go stale. Make sure you regularly refresh old case studies, success stories, and studies, adding new statistics and quotes. And what is old? Anything older than two years needs an update.
Expertise
- You need to define a core topic (if you haven’t yet) and create in-depth content around it. This signals your website is an authority on that topic. For instance, if you are a payroll software provider targeting European SMEs, it won’t do you any favors to publish content about company culture and cybersecurity. You would be better off creating content about payroll compliance.
- Choosing a core topic isn’t enough: you need to prove you are qualified to talk about that. Because when a CEO has a problem and looks for a solution, she/he needs to believe your company has the expertise. For this, you need your subject matter experts: let them share their knowledge in blog posts and include author pages with their qualifications and relevant achievements.
Authority
- Your website remains your online business card, but what others say about your company across the web is just as important. Recent comparative work shows that AI systems systematically favor third-party, authoritative sources over brand-owned and social content. Therefore, you need coverage as well as backlinks from reputable and influential newsletters, blogs, or news sites in your niche.
- However, relevance is crucial. Travel blogs linking to or mentioning your booking software are not as impactful as a link from a well-known SaaS review platform or a mention in a respected industry publication. Being talked about in the right places carries more weight than accumulating links from unrelated websites.
Trust
For 62% of people trust is an important factor when choosing to engage with a brand.
- As AI-generated content is causing trust issues and hesitation, conversations between people are becoming more and more important. Have we forgotten that people buy from people? Think about it: would your prospective buyers be more interested in a faceless blog post or an interview with your customer success manager about the three most common mistakes all users are making?
- Relationships are built offline. Meeting your ideal customers at industry events or insider sessions is part and parcel of creating trust. You can also build relationships through newsletters and online communities, but if you create, let’s say, a Slack community, you need to engage in conversations instead of just dropping links and posting AI-generated comments.
2. Align content with your buyers’ search intent
When your prospective buyer types something in a search engine or a chatbot, they have a goal in mind: to learn about something, to find a specific website, to compare products before making a decision, or to buy something. That goal is called search intent, and you need to understand it. You need to understand why your prospective buyers are typing in a query so that you can create content that matches it.
Search intent generally falls into four categories:
- Informational: searching for information (What is business storytelling?)
- Navigational: finding a specific website or platform (Reddit login);
- Commercial: comparing companies or products (best B2B email automation software in 2026)
- Transactional: buying (buy enterprise CRM software).
To illustrate my point, when your prospective buyers are comparing enterprise CRM software and land on your product page, they have specific questions in mind. And your content needs to answer them within the first 40-60 words. Well-optimized content also mirrors those questions in page titles and headings: a page title “The enterprise CRM that gives your sales team a view of 10,000+ deals and contacts” and a heading “Which CRM software is best for my enterprise team?” tell both humans and chatbots where the relevant information starts and ends.
3. Structured data is essential for AI search visibility
Search engines, including AI assistants, need to be able to understand the content on your web pages in order to present it in search results, and this is what structured data does. Schema.org, the structured data format supported by Google, Bing, and Yahoo, allows you to label elements on your page: your company name, location, address, products, prices, FAQs, events, etc.
Structured data is often added in JSON-LD format as a script in the backend of your site through your CMS like WordPress or by a developer inserting it into the page code. Does your website have schema markup? A simple way to check that is by pasting your URL in Google’s Rich Results Test tool or running it through Schema.org. Since ChatGPT draws from Bing’s index, validating your structured data in Bing Webmaster Tools is worth doing.
According to research, schema markup is the standardized way to ensure AI agents can correctly interpret and act on information from your website.
4. Optimize your robots.txt file for AI discovery
A robots.txt file is a text file that gives crawlers instructions on which parts of your website they can and cannot access. If your robots. txt file blocks AI crawlers, your website’s content is significantly less likely to be included in AI-generated answers. However, it isn’t quite that simple because not all AI crawlers check the robots.txt file and follow the instructions. I share more details about this in the last section of the article.
Things get even more complicated because not all AI crawlers are built for the same purpose, and AI companies might deploy multiple crawlers for different purposes. Some crawlers such as OpenAI’s GPTBot collect data to train their models, and others such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT-User fetch specific webpages for real-time answers; there are also crawlers such as OpenAI’s SearchBot that work more like a traditional search engine, pre-indexing your content before someone makes a query. When deciding which crawlers to allow or restrict, you can refer to that directory of known bot user agents.
5. Audit and update content to protect your brand
Every piece of content about your company can now surface in AI search and present a picture to the person searching. If you have been putting off a content audit because it seemed like a low priority, it is high time you moved it to the top of your to-do list. Because your company has evolved over the past five years, hasn’t it? Your products or services have changed, your positioning has matured, statistics or claims you shared a while ago don’t hold true, or worse, may even contradict what you stand for today.
If outdated information appears in an AI-generated answer, what image of your company would it paint? Would the person searching feel confident they can trust you and buy from you?
You can start with a basic content audit:
- What exists on our website? And how much does the existing content overlap with desired core topics?
- What existing content should be improved and what should be archived?
- Which core topics are underrepresented, and where should we create additional content to improve coverage?
- Which are our top-performing 20-30 content assets? And which assets do people mention in discovery calls or other conversations? If the overlap is small, the content that brings your highest traffic doesn’t drive your highest-value conversations.
- What is your process for deciding what gets published?
6. Why you aren’t appearing in AI search results
You can monitor what chatbots generate about you by systematically running the questions your (prospective) customers ask and analyzing the outputs. And what better database for questions than your sales call transcripts, in-person or demo conversations, customer support tickets, and social media comments?
Collect the most frequently asked customer questions and run them through different chatbots. Which companies appear? Which sources are cited?
Another tactic that is underused but surprisingly effective is asking the chatbot why your company didn’t appear in the output: “Why didn’t [add company] appear when I asked for [add prompt]?” You can go a step further and ask what the companies that were mentioned do better, ask additional questions such as, “Which companies are most recommended for [add niche]?” and “What sources are used to answer this prompt?” Ideally, you won’t rely 100% on the LLM but conduct your own research, too, visiting the websites and channels of the companies mentioned, figuring out what they do better than you.
What are the risks of AI search?
At the start of this article, I promised to give you the whole picture, and that involves mentioning the risks AI search brings. Apparently, because chatbots and AI Overviews synthesize information from various sources, including third-party review sites, you have no full picture of what is said about your company or where it comes from.
What is even more problematic is that there are no guarantees the content you have created will appear under your name in AI-generated answers. Chatbots’ responses consistently misattribute sources: that is what systematic tests by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism reveal. The tests included ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Perplexity Pro, DeepSeek Search, Copilot, Grok-2 and Grok-3, and Gemini. Content was most often credited to the wrong source, and even when the chatbots appeared to correctly identify the article, they often failed to link to the original source.
LLMs republishing your original content without proper credit is especially damaging if you have a content-based business model, whether subscriptions or gated content. Chatbots can replicate your content so completely that people have no reason to visit your website or subscribe. These aren’t hypothetical risks: more than 90 lawsuits have now been filed against AI companies for copyright infringement. Perplexity, for example, has reproduced BBC content verbatim without permission and copied the New York Times’ journalism from behind a paywall to deliver real-time responses to its own customers.
Blocking AI crawlers isn’t a reliable solution
You can instruct AI crawlers to stay off your website using your robots.txt file, but this isn’t a fix. A large-scale study found that certain categories of bots, including AI search crawlers, rarely checked the robots.txt file. The effectiveness of robots.txt depends both on the ability of content owners to express their intent to prevent crawling as well as on the willingness of AI companies to respect the prohibitions that content creators have expressed.
As long as AI companies can choose whether or not to follow crawler directives and use original content without permission, you, as a content owner, remain in a position with limited control over how your work is accessed and repurposed. I genuinely hope this will change in the near future and new policies on AI crawling and usage rights will make it possible for all of us to be on top of how our content is used and for what purpose (or at least to have some context on how AI companies will use it).
Blocking AI crawlers doesn’t guarantee your content is inaccessible. For now, you have to accept that you have limited control over how your content is being used by AI companies.
Conclusion
We have all so focused on the bots, that we forget the people we are selling to. But, in the end, your company is the sum of experiences people have with it: that’s why you need to make people the center of your content. And although it is true that SEO has changed, putting all your eggs in the AI search basket isn’t a smart strategy. AI search should be one piece of a holistic content optimization strategy, not the end goal. There is no silver bullet that guarantees you a place in AI search results, at least not for now. What there is, however, is a set of practices that can improve your chances of surfacing there:
- Apply the E-E-A-T principles to create content that shows expertise, experience, credibility;
- Align your content with buyers’ search intent across the buying journey;
- Use structured data, such as Schema.org, to help AI systems interpret information about your business;
- Optimize your robots.txt and understand its limits;
- Conduct a content audit to retire outdated content before it surfaces in chatbots or AI Overviews.
Finally, keep your finger on the pulse of generative AI and AI search, including the risks they bring. Techniques relevant today might be redundant in a month, and you need to understand what is happening to be able to separate fact from fiction.
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I hope you will make the most of these practices. What is your biggest challenge with AI search optimization? Let me know in the comments.
Featured image: Unsplash.
If content is where you are getting stuck, email me: I would love to help you.
