For years, SEO followed a fairly predictable path. You’d target the right keywords, publish content around them, build up some backlinks and watch your rankings climb. It was a simple model and for a long time, it was the whole picture.
That picture has changed.
These days, someone researching your business might never land on a traditional results page at all. They could be asking ChatGPT to compare their options, getting a summary pulled together by Gemini or Perplexity, or reading an AI Overview sitting above the search results before they’ve clicked on anything. Zero-click searches are becoming far more common and AI platforms have become a genuine part of how people discover businesses, alongside traditional search, brand mentions and the content sitting on your website.
For SEO professionals like myself, this doesn’t mean the old rules stop applying. It means there’s now more to keep on top of. Here are the best practices we’d recommend businesses focus on right now.
1. Keep Your SEO Foundations Strong
It’s easy to get distracted by AI search and forget that the basics still matter just as much as they always have. If anything, they matter more, because AI platforms lean on the same signals search engines have always used to work out what your business does and whether it’s worth trusting.
That means:
- Clean, well-structured pages that are easy to crawl
- Relevant keywords that reflect how your customers actually search
- Quality backlinks from credible, relevant sites
- Fast load times and a solid mobile experience
Without these in place, AI tools simply have less to work with when deciding whether to reference your business at all. Strong technical and on-page SEO is still the foundation everything else sits on.
2. Build Content With AI Search in Mind
Traditional SEO has largely been about ranking for a search term. AI search is more about being the answer itself, so it’s worth reviewing your content with that in mind.
A few things make a real difference here:
- Answer questions directly. Lead with a clear, direct answer to the question your customer is likely asking, then add the supporting detail underneath. AI tools tend to favour content that gets to the point.
- Build out FAQs. They map naturally onto how people phrase questions to AI assistants, and they give you several specific, citable answers on one page.
- Use schema markup. Structured data helps both AI platforms and search engines understand exactly what’s on a page, rather than having to interpret it.
- Show genuine expertise. Well-evidenced, specific content holds up far better than anything generic or thin. Real experience and detail continue to count for a lot.
The aim is to write content that works for the people reading it and the systems referencing it, rather than treating those as two separate jobs.
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3. Start Tracking Your AI Visibility
Most businesses currently have very little visibility into how often, or how accurately, they’re being mentioned inside tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Claude. That’s understandable, but it’s worth changing.
A few questions are worth checking regularly:
- Does your business come up when someone asks an AI assistant a question your product or service is relevant to?
- Is the information being shared about you accurate and up to date?
- How does your visibility compare to competitors appearing in the same conversations?
Brand mentions and authority are becoming a genuinely measurable part of your overall search presence, and reviewing this alongside your usual rankings and traffic data is quickly becoming standard practice.
SEO Isn’t Disappearing, It’s Changing Shape
None of this means abandoning what you already know about SEO. It means widening the scope of what “search” covers and making sure your strategy accounts for all of it: solid foundations, content built with AI platforms in mind, and a regular check on how you’re actually showing up.
Search is happening in more places than it used to, and being visible wherever your customers are looking is what good SEO has always been about. The channels have just multiplied.
If you’d like help reviewing where your business currently stands in AI search, or building this into your wider SEO strategy, get in touch with the team today.
