Your website has been doing well for SEO and getting great results from Google. However, you seem to be dead in the water when it comes to ChatGPT.
You are seeing a little bit of inbound traffic from AI engines, but not a lot of citations for your website. It might be because ChatGPT sources information from three sources including standard execution of Google and Bing searches. If the AI bots can’t get through your content, you will find that all of your brand mentions are coming from external sources.
While a good ecosystem of authoritative sites are great for your brand in AI Search, your website needs to be included in the mix and serve as a source of truth for information.
Determining How AI Sees You
The first thing you need to do is assess what is being seen. There are a lot of tools, but I have been using the Semrush AI Search Health tool. It is part of their existing site audit tool. It makes a lot of sense, because having a technically healthy site is still a priority in search and for GEO responses.
One of the things that makes this report easy is that you can quickly see a status of your site from a technology standpoint.
The second thing is that it tells you if you are having any issues with pages being crawled. There are a lot of articles about creating content for your site that AI engines will use. However, if the AI engines can get to it or it is blocked from their bots, none of that matters.
For this particular client, the payment portal is blocked. They don’t sell products online, but they do have online payment for events and conferences. Maybe in the future when they are comfortable with Agentic AI signing registrants up that will change. For now, the brand has made a reasonable decision to maintain control through other online processes.
Good Technical SEO is still Good Technical AI Search
Although there are elements for AI Search that you need to be aware of (javascript issue, crawl rate, page load preventing AI bots from waiting around to get content), the elements of technical SEO still apply to AI Search. These are clearly integrated in the reporting results.
The report does give you the ability to see Markup and Structure Data Items for the page. That is a super fast way to make sure all of your code is working and you are leveraging the right schema on a site.
That’s right. You can delight an AI bot by feeding it content like it is data. Not only do AI engines use content chunking, but that approach creates a good user experience.
It also helps to create hierarchy and clarity. Clarity over cleverness. That is something that is not only good for humans, but has shown to benefit AI results.
Time and Speed
Quite often, this is one of those things that people don’t want to acknowledge. Winning at traditional SEO and AI Search is really a game of completeness. Completeness of approach, completeness of conversation and completeness of technical development.
People are using AI for a shortcut. Granted, there are a lot of things that AI can speed up. However, taking a shortcut on the technical aspects of your site or relying on sloppy ‘vibe coded’ content might poison the water.
In a throwback moment, I still remember clients wondering why it took months to stand up a website. We would get comments like “I can create a Facebook page in a couple of hours.” That is right, but what that argument never took into account was the millions of dollars and countless hours it took to arrive at that place.
Don’t Let the Panic Kill Your Chances
AI has generated a FRENZIED (and I use capital letters on purpose) conversation over the last few years. I was caught up in the whirlwind for awhile. I could get more content created, I could get more things done. I could create more junk.
Panic was spurring an instinct to do more . . . just to do more.
What stopped me? I got a good kick in the pants from a trusted peer. It made me stop and reset. Yes, I still use AI for many tasks and for idea creation. I just decided to use the computer sitting on my neck to generate the completeness.
One of my clients was on a panel about AI in Cannes with Leigh McKenzie from Semrush. They were talking about the challenges of creating trustworthy, localized content. Elisa Lesieur from Yucatan said something that shined through to me – “We are such in a crazy world where everyone speaks, but no one is being heard.”
She goes on to point out that “we don’t bring credibility with volume, but we bring credibility with alignment.”
Alignment takes time. It takes completeness of thinking and completeness of execution. That doesn’t mean you can’s use AI to execute efficiently. However, that doesn’t mean eyeballing it.
That means taking out the level to make sure things are square and plumb. It means applying schema, filling in all the data on your images, your links and your content down to the last meta tag. It means clearing out every last item on the AI audit.