The first step to influencing AI is ensuring your website is technically sound for LLMs to crawl and index. This revives the importance of technical audits, log file analysis, and tools like Screaming Frog to identify and remove barriers preventing AI crawlers from accessing your content.
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Websites now have a dual purpose. A significant portion of your content must be created specifically for AI agents—niche, granular, and structured for LLM consumption to improve AEO. The human-facing part must then evolve to offer deeper, more interactive experiences, as visitors will arrive with their basic research already completed by AI.
As users shift from keywords to conversational prompts in AI browsers, SEO strategy must also evolve. The focus should be on creating 'answer-ready' content that directly and comprehensively addresses likely user questions, positioning your brand as a primary source for the AI to cite.
In an era dominated by AI chatbots, a website's relevance increases. These AI systems don't create information; they crawl the web to find it. Your site serves as the foundational data source, making a well-structured, up-to-date digital presence critical for discoverability and accurate representation by AI.
The audience for marketing content is expanding to include AI agents. Websites, for example, will need to be optimized not just for human users but also for AI crawlers that surface information in answer engines. This requires a fundamental shift in how marketers think about content structure and metadata.
Don't overcomplicate technical Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). The most impactful factors are the same as in SEO: strong internal links, proper schema markup, and ensuring LLMs can crawl your page. Hyped tactics like `LLMs.txt` are currently ineffective and not used by major search engines.
With AI-powered search, user behavior has shifted to asking direct questions. Effective SEO now requires structuring content to directly answer the specific questions buyers are asking search engines and AI tools, rather than just ranking for keywords.
The future of search isn't just about Google; it's about being found in AI tools like ChatGPT. This shift to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) requires creating helpful, Q&A-formatted content that AI models can easily parse and present as answers, ensuring your visibility in the new search landscape.
With 80-90% of AI-powered searches resulting in no clicks, traditional SEO is dying. The new key metric is "share of voice"—how often your brand is cited in AI-generated answers. This requires a fundamental strategy shift to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), focusing on becoming an authoritative source for LLMs rather than just driving website traffic.
The first step in a modern visibility audit is to check if your brand, products, or services are cited in Google's AI-generated answers. This is a critical new battleground for visibility that precedes traditional search results and requires dedicated attention.
The rise of AI agents means website traffic will increasingly be non-human. B2B marketers must rethink their playbooks to optimize for how AI models interpret and surface their content, a practice emerging as "AI Engine Optimization" (AEO), as agents become the primary researchers.
