Succeed in AI SEO with SEO fundamentals

Olga says: “AI SEO still runs on SEO.

Although SEO has practically turned into AI SEO, and no one thinks about SEO without thinking about AI these days, AI SEO is still based on good SEO.”

Does existing best practice SEO assist with AI SEO?

“Yes, generally speaking.

I have analysed exactly what you can do to dominate in AI SEO and rank in AI chatbots. All of the things you should do map directly to the things you need to do in SEO in order to rank, be indexed, and be crawled.

I was able to map it around four main areas, which you always have to take care of in SEO: technical SEO, content strategy/creation/structure, user experience, and authority. All of them ideally map out to AI SEO, to ranking in chatbots, and all of that.”

Is search engine usage still primarily focussed on more traditional search?

“That is one of the fundamental things that we should consider when we start to panic about SEO.

Now, I have so many clients asking me whether I do AI SEO and whether old SEO still applies, or they should pivot to GEO, LLMEO, AIO, etc. What I try to tell them is that SEO fundamentals still apply.

If you look at the data, the market share of search engines is almost the same. Google lost maybe 1% of its traffic to chatbots. All the traffic from chatbots combined is around 3% of the traffic that search engines generate. For example, Google is used something like 370 times as much as ChatGPT. We are comparing millions to billions.

Google is also winning this entire game because they have created AI overviews, which are now in at least 60% of search results. Google has baked AI into their search results.

You still want to rank in those overviews or those chatbots. Clients like to ask about it, even when they know that the percentage is small. They hear about it all the time, so they want to rank there. What I'm saying is, if you rank well on Google or on Bing, you will rank well in those chatbots.

The basics of SEO are the same. Now, though, you should look into Bing, because Bing feeds ChatGPT. If you want to take care of the entire system, you still need to apply the fundamentals of SEO, take care of Bing, and take care of Google, because these two essentially power most of the chatbots we are using.

Basically, things are the same. You should never forget about those SEO fundamentals, because without them, you won't be able to even enter the game of Google and Bing or ChatGPT, Perplexity, and all of the rest.”

What are the key differences between optimizing for Bing versus optimizing for Google?

“To be honest, the same things you do for Google usually work for Bing. The biggest difference is that in Bing, it is usually much easier to rank. If you rank well in Bing, your rankings in Google will often follow as well.

Traffic from Bing can be a kind of validation for Google. The way that Google's search system works, it can know which URL is getting traffic, and this may help you rank better, so you should definitely take care of both.

One of the differences with Bing is that you need to set up Bing Webmaster Tools for your website, because Bing is not as aggressive with crawling as Google. Google crawls almost everything. With Bing, you have to explicitly ask it to crawl specific pages and specific URLs. That is probably the biggest difference. In terms of how easy it is to rank, it is much easier with Bing.”

If you do want to succeed in AI-driven search, are citations more important than rankings?

“Yes. With ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or other chatbots, we are not really talking about rankings; we are talking about citations, and whether that mention of your brand is just a mention or whether it’s a linked mention.

This is the difference between rankings in traditional search and chatbots because they are citing you, as opposed to giving you a specific rank or a specific position. In ChatGPT and all of those LLMs, we are talking about citations.”

Why do you believe that chunks beat pages when it comes to being featured in AI search?

“They use a chunk retrieval mechanism, which basically means that AI scans the entire article and divides it into different chunks. If your article is structured so that each specific paragraph answers a specific question or explains a specific concept, and it is done in such a way that by reading each paragraph, you can learn something without reading the entire article, then you will stand a higher chance of being shown in an AI response.

In AI overviews, for example, Google has seen a huge increase in very long long tail queries, usually questions, where people are asking ‘What is X? How do I do that? Why?’ If your article is structured in this way, then you will have a higher chance of being shown there.

Plus, this will also help you appear in the People Also Ask section, if we are strictly talking about Google search results.”

How do you measure the value of an unlinked mention, and how does that value compare to that of a linked mention?

“In AI overviews and in chatbots, you can have either a normal link to your website or just a mention. With those mentions, just the fact that your brand is present acts like a no-follow link.

In the past, we only had follow links, then no-follow links came into being. A lot of studies show that no-follow links also count and help, and there are even studies showing that just having your URL somewhere, unlinked, is a small authority factor for Google and other search engines.

The same thing is happening here. If you are mentioned, that is a good authority signal. The currency of authority has transformed a bit because we are talking about citations and being cited rather than talking about how many backlinks you have. It is similar, but the language is different.

Quotes from people like your brand experts are also valuable, even if they are unlinked. It is great to get those kinds of mentions. Unlike 10 years ago, you don’t have to obsess over whether or not a link was included. It’s no longer as necessary to go out there and ask for those links.

I can’t stress enough how important technical SEO is in this new AISEO/GEO/LLMEO arena.”

What does a well-structured website look like nowadays, and has that changed?

“Things are similar. The most important thing is whether or not search engine crawlers and AI bot crawlers can access and crawl your website. If they cannot do that, you won't be able to be shown there, cited there, or linked there.

Another thing is, can they see the content without JavaScript rendering? Google is good at rendering JavaScript, but it's always safer to have the entire content visible without the need for rendering. The same is true for chatbots. Most of them do not really render JavaScript, so if you don't have your content in the source, then chatbots won't be able to see what you have to say.

Structured data is also still important. You can convey a lot of information in structured data about who you are, what you do, what you talk about, what you are an expert at, etc. Structured data is a great language you can use to communicate with machines, including both search engine crawlers and chatbots.

In terms of technical SEO, there are a few other elements to consider as well. When it comes to the website structure, you want to have your topics clustered in a specific way. You want to have the main topic, which talks about subtopics, and you want to have them linked to each other so that, wherever the bot comes from, it can really understand the relationships between all of that content.

You want to build the structure in this logical way and create silos. You don't have to be super strict about it, but you have to stick to a specific topic within a specific part of the website. Ideally, the entire website should be about just one topic. You don't want to talk about everything (unless you are a news website, but that's a different thing).

The better the structure, the easier it is for bots to understand your content. Then, you can strengthen the content internally through internal links as well. That is more for search engines, but the same things apply both here and there.”

Olga, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Remember that AI SEO still runs on SEO.

The AI SEO craze is a little bit overblown because search engines still rule, especially Google, and you have to play by their rules.

If you want to rank in those chatbots, 90% of what you have to do is remember the SEO fundamentals. If you do that, you will take care of basically everything you need.”

Olga Zarr is an SEO Consultant and Founder of SEOSLY. Find out more over at SEOSLY.com.