What is AI Search Optimization?
AI Search Optimization (AISO) is the practice of making your content easy for AI answer engines like Google AI Overviews, Bing/Copilot, Perplexity, and chat assistants like ChatGPT to find, understand, quote, and link. In plain terms: it’s how you become the source an assistant cites when your next customer asks a question. You may also hear it called Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO), and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
Why is AI Search Optimization important?
Your buyers are already using AI to research and shortlist. Recent data shows that when Google includes an AI summary, people click traditional links far less often, which concentrates attention on the few sources that get quoted. In Pew’s analysis, users clicked a standard search result in 8% of visits with an AI summary, versus 15% without one. That concentrates attention on the few sources the overview cites. ([1])
Google still anchors the top of the funnel, with ~90% global search share, so these AI insertions show up where discovery starts. Your brand either appears in those answers or it doesn’t. ([2])
Meanwhile, AI assistants themselves have become massive discovery channels. OpenAI announced it crossed 300M weekly users by late 2024, 400M by February 2025, and reports now peg usage around ~800M weekly in October 2025. It remains one of the fastest-growing consumer technologies on record. ([3])
Who benefits most? Any category with considered purchases or longer research cycles—B2B software, professional services, healthcare, finance, education, complex consumer buys. AI systems condense pros, cons, and proof points in seconds, so showing up in those summaries influences shortlists early.
Bottom line: customers will discover and vet you inside AI results as often as they do on traditional results pages. Optimizing to be quoted is now part of go-to-market.
Is AI Search Optimization the same as SEO?
Not quite. SEO remains the foundation: helpful content, crawlability, performance, and structured data still matter. AISO adds two priorities that change how you build pages: write so assistants can lift a precise answer with confidence, and mark up your people, products, and facts so machines can attribute correctly and justify a citation.
Uniquely important to AI Search Optimization
Treat the next sections as a checklist of AISO priorities, not a step-by-step how-to.
- Write in answer formats (optimize for quotability).
What to do: Add a concise TL;DR, a Key facts box with dates and units, crisp FAQs (about 80 words each), and step lists where relevant. Use named anchors like #pricing or #methodology.
Why it matters: Models prefer self-contained passages and deep links. You make it easy to extract a clean, attributable answer. - Offer machine-readable facts (reduce guessing).
What to do: Where you cite stats or tables, include a downloadable CSV or JSON, and time-stamp the figures with sources. If you publish lots of research, consider a lightweight public /api/summaries or /api/facts endpoint.
Why it matters: Structured data is easier to ingest and defend, which raises inclusion and citation odds. - Speed up discovery and set clear crawler policy.
What to do: Keep RSS/Atom/JSON feeds fresh; maintain XML sitemaps (news/image/video if relevant). Use robots.txt and X-Robots-Tag headers to explicitly allow reputable AI crawlers and, if desired, exclude others.
Why it matters: Feeds accelerate re-crawls after updates. Clear policy signals reduce ambiguity around reuse. - Show provenance and licensing (earn trust to be quoted).
What to do: Visible bylines and credentials, an Editorial policy, a corrections process, and a one-line changelog on major pages (for example, “Updated with 2025 Q3 data”). State content/data licensing and TDM terms.
Why it matters: Assistants gravitate to sources with transparent ownership and update discipline. - Measure AI-channel referrals (learn what gets cited).
What to do: Add UTMs to feeds, watch server logs for AI user-agents, and track referrals from Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI features, ChatGPT and others.
Why it matters: You’ll see which topics and page structures drive citations and can prioritize the next wave of content. - Make your entities unmistakable (avoid misattribution).
What to do: Give your Organization, Product, and Author pages clear JSON-LD and sameAs links to profiles like Wikidata, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, GitHub; keep names consistent across the site.
Why it matters: Assistants resolve “who said what” before they quote. Clear entities get cited more reliably, which protects brand accuracy. - Accessibility improves extractability.
What to do: Provide captions and transcripts, meaningful alt text, and keep critical content as selectable text rather than embedded in images.
Why it matters: AI systems rely on text. More accessible text means more quotable surface area.
SEO principles that matter even more because of AI
- Deep, consistent structured data (JSON-LD).
What to do: Mark up Article, FAQPage, HowTo, Product, Organization, and Breadcrumb. Keep author fields, dates, and org info consistent.
Why it matters: Schema helps classic search, but AI engines also use it to extract entities, claims, and relationships with fewer mistakes. ([4]) - Freshness with context, not just a date.
What to do: Show both Published and Updated dates and add a quick “what changed” note.
Why it matters: When multiple sources disagree, assistants favor the newest credible passage. This is more critical now that AI summaries can suppress clicks, concentrating attention on the one or two sources that make the cut. ([1]) - Topic hubs and internal linking.
What to do: Organize pillar pages with logical supporting articles and interlink them.
Why it matters: This signals comprehensive coverage and helps assistants choose your best page to cite. - Page experience and reliability.
What to do: Keep pages fast and stable; optimize Core Web Vitals.
Why it matters: Good UX preserves the traffic you do earn and remains a prerequisite for many rich experiences in search. ([2])
Other noteworthy SEO principles (good for SEO and AI alike)
- People-first, intent-satisfying content
- E-E-A-T signals: clear authorship, About/Contact pages, transparent sourcing
- Crawl and index hygiene: internal links, canonicals, unblocked assets; verify Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools ([2])
- Media hygiene: descriptive filenames, captions, alt text
- Internationalization: hreflang, local units and dates
- Duplicate cleanup: consolidate thin or overlapping pages with a clear canonical
- Helpful 404s that guide users to relevant hubs
TL;DR
AISO helps assistants find, understand, and quote you. It’s also known as AEO, LLMO, and GEO. Buyers are already using AI to research, Google still owns the starting point (~90% market share), and AI summaries halve link-click rates when they appear, so being cited matters. ChatGPT alone is now at hundreds of millions weekly users and still climbing. Focus on entity clarity, answer-style sections, structured data, visible freshness notes, feeds and crawler policy, licensing and editorial standards, transcripts/captions, and AI-referral tracking. That’s how you meet customers inside AI. ([2])