Originally published on Medium
More and more people claim they’re using AI tools instead of search engines.
As a result, businesses that have been optimizing their content for search engines now need to worry about being found by AI assistants.
“Why bother Googling when you can just Grok?”
ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini — every device and every platform you use has its’ own flavour of AI assistance.
Even Google uses AI-generated summaries and answers in their results pages to keep you from bouncing.
But if you’ve used enough AI tools you know how easy it is to get inaccurate information, outdated sources, and sometimes illegal advice:
All the info you get from AI tools needs to be fact-checked; all writing they produce needs to be edited and trimmed. It’s a matter of basic informational hygiene, safety, and efficiency that most early users already know about.
However, the majority of people going online don’t think about that too deep, and eventually you have to adapt to get mentioned by AI tools.
Adapt and be found by AI assistants
AI tools are OK for coding standard web dev stuff, data operations, fiction writing and ideation, summarization, and abstract meanderings and conversations.
However, they are absolutely awful for meaningful factual research, consulting/coaching, recent event recaps, and a lot more.
This leads to a bunch of challenges that businesses and bloggers need to solve to start being mentioned by AI assistants. The good news is that it’s absolutely possible!
One of our clients has reported getting hypnotherapy leads from AI tools lately. Several people were using AI assistants for mental health-related information and saw the client’s hypnotherapy blog as a further reading suggestion.
Another challenge is — how do you stay relevant, competitive, and still get organic traffic from search engines in the age of AI helpers?
There are several strategies for AI search optimization:
Refine your offer
Make sure you’re in a niche that centers around specific human knowledge.
If you are in the business of re-packaging basic &publicly available information, pivot to something else.
Go deeper, get more specific, sell human expertise and experiences.
If you’re starting an online business, spend extra time about it being AI-proof. If you already have a business online, evaluate it and find new attack angles if necessary.
Thought leadership content > filler text
Focus on producing thought leadership content, things that AI can not plan or produce. This type of content gets shared better, converts better, makes you stand out, and picks up a lot of great unexpected impressions on Google.
And eventually, thought leadership content makes it into the sources that AI tools use.
I’ve written a quick guide on thought leadership content, check it out!
Intent and keywords
People that look for information on AI assistants are using conversational, personalized queries. Add some more of those to your content too, think “how do I”/“what should I do”-type stuff.
Format your content
There are many kinds of formatting methods that help feed your content to bots easily. Text fragments, structured data, and schema are great starting points.
Appeal to authority & use numbers
AI tools are not that smart. They are basically scrapers and they have no way of understanding truth other than using the authority of others.
Use that and link to authority sources in your content and add verifiable stats and numbers anywhere you can.
Stay in the game
Keep producing content long enough so that your content is “noticed” — i.e. used in AI training data.
Keep in mind that most of the technical formatting stuff you find looking for AI search optimization tricks is mostly speculation, since we have no clear guidelines on how all the prorpietary AI tools source their data and learn.
We can expect that with time AI assistants will only improve, which means they will start to actually get better at detecting truly great and relevant content, which is why you have to find a unique human angle to everything you do and keep producing quality content.
The mechanics of AI training changes you you can’t really predict or keep up with it. But if you keep publishing meaningful, well-researched, and justified consistently, you will get into AI assistants suggestions.
We’ve recently launched the AI search audit service, get in touch with us if you want to future-proof your brand!