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.
And all while Google fights for its future after being declared an illegal monopoly by the US government.
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.
Table of Contents:
Framework for AI SEO
Think back to the days before the launch of AI Overviews and the new AI search engines. What did you pay attention to in your SEO strategy … Optimized content? Crawlable pages? Reporting on gains and losses?
If you’ve approached SEO in a holistic way then you’re prepared for disruptions like AI Overviews.
This isn’t the first major change we’ve seen in search — and it certainly won’t be the last.
seoClarity offers our clients frameworks that help to structure, simplify and scale SEO programs. A solid, proven strategy will keep you moving forward despite the distractions that will arrive.
Here’s our recommended framework for how to win at SEO in the age of AI search.
- Identify Opportunity
- Optimize Content
- Insure Discoverability
- Track Performance
1. Identify Opportunity
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.
Use an SEO platform that tracks AIOs and shows you which of your keywords trigger one. You can do this with Rank Intelligence. You can also see whether or not you’re included in the linked resources.
2. Optimize Content
Language models draw their information solely from the page’s content. This is another reason to optimize your content (we already know you were doing it anyway!).
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 an AI content analyzer. It should be able to 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.
Content Fusion is a great solution for this.
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.
3. Ensure Discoverability
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.
You need to understand that your content is being found. As such, you’ll need a platform that can track that bot activity like 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 be able to pinpoint bottlenecks on your site, too. 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.
4. Track Performance
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
This is the last step of the framework, and you know seoClarity has a solution for this step, too.
With us, you can track the performance of your AIO keywords over time.
You can see how often your target keywords trigger the AI Overview SERP feature and where your domain ranks among the referenced sources. Or, maybe it’s your competitor’s domain. We’ll show you that too.
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.
You can also see your CTR trended over time and drill down to the keyword or URL level to see how the AIOs are impacting traffic.
If you want 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!
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