All you need to know about AI SEO: How UK companies can appear in AI Search

It’s something of a buzzword at the moment, a topic of hot conversation if you like- that is, how can a business appear in AI search.

After all, every man and his dog is now using, for example, ChatGPT, so businesses will naturally want to appear there to flog more goods.

 

But how do you do that?

Well, organic SEO is still important. Therefore, ranking for that list of blue links is still important.

However, as you will know, more businesses are appearing as citations in Google AI Overviews in ChatGPT in Perplexity.

Therefore, if you don’t appear there, well, you could be missing out on a lot of sales. So don’t get left behind, let’s jump on the bandwagon, and let’s make your business more visible on AI search.

LLMs can extract your knowledge.

So, perhaps the most important concept to grasp is that the LLMs, which stand for large language models, are trained on text.

This text is a test that appears on company websites.

But what is AI SEO?

Well, with organic SEO, let’s say you’ve just written a brilliant article and you want to close your MacBook and have a glass of wine.

But before you do, remember to send the article to Google for manual indexing.

Well, things are different with the LLMs; there’s not normally a tool where you can send your brand-new blog post for indexing.

Therefore, this basically means you still have to ensure it can be read and indexed, but often you can’t instruct, for example, an LLM to index the work.

However, you can help the LLMs

The LLMs basically want to extract a sentence or some facts from your website to answer a question.

Therefore, the leading and best SEO companies in the world are among the best, because one of the best ways of getting your business cited in the LLMs is to, for example, have a good page structure.

This means doing the following:

  • Good on-page SEO
  • Write in clear sentences
  • Write in a way that the information could be mentioned in a citation
  • Make sure that all the information is accurate

 

Authoritative

Now, this is where there are massive cross-overs and similarities with organic SEO. Now, talk to any of the best of the best marketing agencies, and they will tell you that to improve a business’s organic SEO, you must understand Google EEAT.

Now, a key part of Google EEAT is “authorativeness”

Which boils down to two main factors: how often your business gets cited by quality websites.

The other is the number of quality backlinks the business has.

Now cited means that the brand name is mentioned in a newspaper article.

Because of the semantic web, Google has a really good understanding of who is an expert in their business niche.

Now, how LLMs such as ChatGPT decide who to cite may vary from LLM to LLM.

However, it’s widely thought that if you can prove that your business is an authority, that you truly are an expert in your business sector, this is the work that gets cited by the LLMS.

Therefore, leading SEO consultants believe the following is important when improving a business’s authority:

That is:

  • More backlinks
  • More mentions
  • A higher ranking on Google may mean that your work is cited more often by the LLM.
    Social media may have some influence.
  • How often does your name appear on other websites, such as if you’re an SEO expert, how often does your name come up on other leading SEO websites?

 

Must be structured right and offer clear answers

At this agency, we have always written in a conversational tone.

Which means our content marketing has always been structured with headings and an FAQ-style format.

Now we believe that this is the best way forward when optimising for the LLMs/

It just stands to reason that Googlebot often wants to crawl and index a page and read the on-page SEO clues, to decipher what that page is selling or offering advice on.

Therefore, there’s no reason whatsoever why the LLMS would not do the same.

 

Therefore, SEO best practices are important, such as:

  • Adding H1 -H6 titles
  • Writing alt text
  • Using bold text on some titles that are not header tags
  • Adding internal links
  • Adding anchor text that’s descriptive and describes the link
    Etc etc

Just be as clear as possible.

This is one of the problems that sometimes occurs, and I most definitely do this from time to time.

That is to waffle a bit; now this means that content marketing can go off-topic.

However, many leading agencies, including ourselves, now believe it’s better to stay on topic and also to improve the authority of the website and the pages.

The reason is that if the work is high quality, you’re making it abundantly clear what your business is selling, what you’re good at, and that you know that area.

So, for example, if you retail fine-quality watches, make sure the website offers the best possible advice.

If you’re answering key questions that your customers are asking you, such as “How to spot a fake Rolex Watch” – then if the advice is really good, you’re optimising for the LLMs and organic SEO all at the same time.

Therefore, you’re basically killing two birds with one stone.

However, you then have to show that you are an authority, that other businesses and blogs respect your knowledge and like the advice.

Therefore, again, a good social media following, a lot of backlinks, and a lot of mentions improve the semantic SEO.

 

Topical authority

Here’s another strong prediction our business has: businesses that are going to get cited more in LLMs, such as ChatGPT, will be those that are more focused on selling a few product lines rather than many.

The reason is that, for example, let’s return to our example of a retailer of luxury watches: if they offer advice and repeatedly publish work on, say, used Rolex watches, then they are an expert in that area.

However, we believe that e-commerce retailers that sell a huge selection of items will struggle in AI search.

For example, a retailer might sell men’s suits, footwear, watches, and aftershave. Now, this is more of a broad brush; the advice is going to be more general, so we don’t think these businesses are going to surface as answers as regularly as a laser-focused business that’s only selling one product line.

Structured data

Time and time again, various SEO agencies are stating that it’s important to add schema markup to your work.

This could be an article schema, an FAQ schema, or a schema to mark up your company’s NAP information.

However, it just makes perfect sense to add more schema, because this helps your organic SEO and the LLMS understand what the page is about.

Show that you are an expert in your business sector

This is another really important point; again, this has strong overlaps with organic SEO.

Google EEAT says that in your business’s content marketing, you should show that you have experience and expertise in the products and services that you are selling.

Therefore, if you publish just one blog post or an occasional article, this is usually not enough to demonstrate to the LLMS and Google’s algorithm that you are an expert in your business sector.

Normally, you have to blog and add advice over a long period; it’s only then that the LLMS start to crawl and read more and more of your work. Then, like Google’s algorithm, they can start to see that due to the number of articles, you are an expert in your business sector.

However, again, blogging and adding articles are only one part of the equation; you still have to show that other businesses and customers like this work. Therefore, this often means gaining backlinks with high DA scores, as well as, for example, having a lot of mentions and likes on social media for the work you have published.

Again, just like backlinks, it’s important to get brand mentions to improve your business’s semantic SEO.