The search landscape is undergoing a seismic shift, with the first major AI Search challengers to Google — Perplexity, Bing Generative Search, and OpenAI's SearchGPT — all announced within weeks of each other.
SEOs are concerned — how will they adapt to a more competitive, diversified search world that doesn't play by the old-school SEO rules?
Enter seoClarity, the only end-to-end solution for this brand-new challenge.
Below, we’ll go over an effective AI search framework to help tackle the complexities of this new era using seoClarity.
Table of Contents:
Framework for Winnning in AI SEO
AI Search is growing fast with referral traffic to many of our clients’ sites rising sharply as more and more people turn to these new ways of searching. This presents a brand new set of challenges for SEOs to overcome as these AI search engines operate very differently than traditional search.
To help SEOs adapt, we've built the only complete end-to-end solution to research, track, report, and optimize for AI search engines.
Here’s our recommended framework for how to win at SEO in the age of AI search using seoClarity.
- Identify Opportunity
- Cover Your Topic From All Angles
- Optimize Content
- Ensure Discoverability
- Track Performance
1. Identify Opportunities with Rank Intelligence
In order to be ready for how AI search engines will continue to change search, you need to know where AIOs show up in the first place. Are they appearing for your target keywords?
seoClarity data shows that `4% of keywords trigger AIOs, although this depends on the industry.
Knowing where the AIOs appear helps to identify opportunities and outline a strategy.
How To: Use a Platform That Tracks All AIOs
To form a strategy for how your brand will approach AIOs, you need to know where they appear.
Rank Intelligence in the seoClarity platform tracks AIOs and shows you which of your keywords trigger one. You can also see whether or not you’re included in the linked resources.
2. Cover Your Topic From All Angles With Topic Authority
AI-driven search engines prioritize content that provides deep, authoritative answers to user queries.
By addressing a topic thoroughly—exploring subtopics, answering potential questions, and presenting nuanced perspectives—you signal to AI that your content is a valuable, all-encompassing resource.
This not only boosts visibility in search results but also enhances user engagement, as readers are more likely to trust and spend time on content that meets their needs without requiring further searches.
How To: Leverage AI-Powered SEO Topic Research
seoClarity simplifies and scales thorough topic research, even if you're new to the subject.
Instantly uncover how your audience searches for your product or service using the largest keyword dataset available. Plus, harness the power of natural language processing (NLP) and deep-learning algorithms to identify user intent, discover fresh content ideas, and pinpoint the exact questions your audience is asking.
This empowers you to create engaging, in-depth content that not only satisfies user needs but also aligns with AI search engines' focus on relevance, depth, and contextual understanding.
3. Optimize Content With Content Fusion
Language models draw their information solely from the page’s content.
AI models value content that is:
- Authoritative — it aligns with existing knowledge of the topic
- Unique — the content builds on existing content to offer new information (check out our blog on the skyscraper technique in SEO)
- Rankable — For example, seoClarity research shows that 99% of AI Overviews have at least one source that ranks in the top 10 organic listings
Recommended Reading: How to Rank in AI Overviews: Content Optimization Tips
How To: Leverage an AI Content Analyzer
Optimize your content at scale with seoClarity's AI content analyzer, Content Fusion. Analyze existing content for topic coverage, identify gaps in your content, and provide step-by-step assistance in writing authoritative and unique content that extends past what has already been written.
Working with Content Fusion, you can follow our content optimization framework to create content, increase its ranking keywords, and optimize old content. What can we say, we like frameworks! They work.
TIP: Continue to structure your page accordingly with proper headings in a hierarchical way.
4. Ensure Discoverability With seoClarity's Site Health Analyzer
If you want to rank organically in Google, your pages have to be crawlable and indexable. The same applies for AI search engines and AI Overviews.
To ensure that your content is being found, track bot activity using seoClarity:
Finding crawlability problems or indexing issues helps you be eligible to appear in the AI Overviews.
Run a site audit (here’s an SEO audit checklist to follow) to locate and rectify these technical issues.
How To: Use an End-to-End Site Health Analyzer
Your technical solution should allow you to monitor crawl activity by search bots. This can help you establish a timeline between last bot crawl and the time to appear in the AIO.
The site health analyzer should also be able to pinpoint bottlenecks on your site. As a rule, make sure your most important content is crawled and indexed.
seoClarity’s full suite of site health capabilities has you covered with all of this.
Tip: Build and deploy schema to help language models understand more of what the page is about. The content is important. So is the way it’s structured.
5. Track Performance with seoClarity's Complete Tracking Abilities
Referral traffic from ChatGPT has grown 145x from July to September. And, in the past two months alone, the number has tripled based on what we’ve seen across seoClarity's diverse set of client sites.
While this rapid increase is based on a small starting traffic number, the signs are there that this could become something significant.
Considering that traffic to ChatGPT has overtaken Bing since around the time of SearchGPTs introduction in August, it’s safe to say ChatGPT has emerged as a real player in the traffic-driving game.
As such, it’s important to determine if ChatGPT and other AI search engines are growing as a traffic source in your analytics.
After all, did an SEO win really happen if there isn’t reporting to back it up?
Once you start winning references in AI search engines or having links inside the AI Overviews on Google, you need to know if that inclusion is earning you more organic traffic.
How to: Use a Platform With Complete Tracking Abilities
With seoClarity, you can track the performance of your AIO keywords over time.
See how often your target keywords trigger the AI Overview SERP feature and where your (or your competitor's) domain ranks among the referenced sources.
seoClarity even tracks the user intent against the queries that AI Overviews is triggered for. This chart shows that transactional keywords have dropped a bit in their frequency over the past 2 months.
See your CTR trended over time and drill down to the keyword or URL level to see how the AIOs are impacting traffic.
To see what the AIO responsible for influencing your traffic looks like, we store a snapshot of all the SERPs that show an AIO feature.
When it comes to tracking referral traffic from ChatGPT you can do so in GA4 by following these steps to create a report that you can view repeatedly:
- Go to “Library”on the “Reports” tab and under “Reports” click create new report > create detail report > Traffic Acquisition
- Click the + next to the “Session Primary” column head
- Search for and add “Session source / medium” as a column
- If the customize report sidebar isn’t open, click the pencil icon in the upper right.
- In customize report, drag “session source / medium” to the top and click three dots to set it as a default.
- Hit the back arrow in “customize report” and click “add filter.”
- Under dimension, search for and add “session source / medium”
- Set match type as “matches partial regex”
- In value, enter the unique identifiers for each AI engine you want to track, separated by the | symbol. E.g. “chatgpt|perplexity|claude|gemini”
- Click “apply,” then save and name the report
You should now see the referral traffic for the AI engine sources you added. You’ll be able to find this report under reports > library in the future.
Conclusion
Change is inevitable in SEO.
The way we’ve built the seoClarity platform and advised our clients is rooted in frameworks that help you build a solid foundation on which to build your SEO program.
Like a tree holding its ground in a storm, staying true to what we know works with our clients has prepared us for this change, among many others. If you’ve prioritized the user experience in all aspects of your SEO program, you're on the right course!
<<Editor's Note: This blog was originally published in November 2024 and has since been updated.>>
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