Optimize your website for AI search: Here are 6 great tips from Squarespace
The way people navigate the web is changing, thanks to the rise of AI search and chatbots. This affects how visible your website is and what you need to do to attract visitors. Here, we’ve compiled six tips from Squarespace on how to optimize your website for AI search.
Understanding how AI search works, in addition to knowing traditional SEO, will definitely give you and your website a competitive advantage. Based on this article from Squarespace, we show you how AI SEO works, and what you can do to optimize for it.
First; What is AI-SEO or AIO?
AI SEO refers to tactics you can use to optimize your website so that it is understood and displayed in search results or as sources on platforms like Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Where the goal of traditional SEO is to rank higher in search engines, AI optimization (AIO) is about making your website visible in AI answers or AI overviews.
Since this field is still evolving, you may encounter other abbreviations such as GEO (generative engine optimization), AEO (answer engine optimization), and LLMO (large language model optimization), in addition to AIO.
AIO and SEO both rely on factors like trustworthiness and usefulness to promote content, but the way these signals are captured can vary. AI-generated search results can also vary more from search to search than traditional search rankings do.
How does AI search work?
AI, like search engines, “crawls” through web pages on the internet to understand the content and figure out what topics it is relevant to. Instead of matching results to a keyword, as traditional searches do, AI tries to provide a personalized and nuanced answer based on your unique question, taking into account intent and context.
Answers vary from platform to platform, and if you search for the same term multiple times, you will often get different results. This gives your website more opportunities to appear, but also more potential searches to optimize for.
Different types of AI search results
How websites appear in AI searches depends on the platform you use and the type of search you perform. Here's a simplified overview of how your website may appear in AI responses:
Direct answers: This is, for example, what you get in Google's AI Overviews, where AI provides a summary based on multiple sources, and refers to websites as sources.
Featured sources: Websites that AI tools explicitly cite and highlight in the answer or search results.
Conversation-based recommendations: Personalized recommendations provided via AI chatbots, for example recommended businesses or products.
AI visibility vs. traffic
Before you start customizing your website for AIO, you should set clear and measurable goals. For AIO, these will often be about visibility or website traffic . Visibility can help build awareness of your brand, while traffic more often leads to tangible results, such as new customers or followers. By setting goals for both, you can more easily choose which strategies to focus on.
But make sure your goals are realistic. Unlike traditional SEO, AI search can make your website much more visible without necessarily generating more traffic. Since users get their answers directly from a summary or chatbot, they often won’t feel the need to click through to the website itself. Therefore, it may be wise to set a more realistic traffic goal, or define a baseline to compare to before you start your AIO efforts.
6 ways to prepare your website for AIO
The team at Squarespace conducts its own research on AIO and closely monitors industry developments to provide you with the best information possible. However, as AI continues to evolve, it’s important to remember that best practices for AIO also change over time.
1. Make sure AI can "crawl" your website
Just like traditional search engines, AI needs access to "crawl" your website in order for it to appear in search results. A "crawl" is simply a review of your website by a bot, which gathers information through text, page titles, and link structure.
If you use Squarespace, you already allow bots to "crawl" your website (unless you have manually turned this off under settings - crawlers - block crawlers ).
2. Structure your pages clearly
The way you lay out the content on your website helps AI interpret what’s on each page. For example, the title of this article is an H1 heading , “6 Ways to Prepare Your Website for AI” is an H2 , and “Structure Your Pages Clearly” is an H3 . H1 provides a general summary, H2 is a subtopic, and H3 is for the specific point. Make sure you use the right heading level when writing text for your website.
Structure isn't just about headings. If you're sharing information, like in an FAQ or a biography, you should highlight the most important things first.
3. Keep the website updated
Several AIO studies suggest that AI responses often prioritize websites that have been recently updated. The idea is that these contain more current and reliable information. This doesn't mean you have to change your website all the time, but it can be a good idea to check in once a month for updates, such as news, customer portfolios, or minor corrections.
4. Build your brand
Research shows that a strong and frequently mentioned brand increases the chance of being cited in AI answers and summaries. This is similar to how traditional searches favor well-known brands because they are more often perceived as trustworthy.
You can strengthen trust in your brand by, among other things, producing original and good content, creating creative campaigns and getting mentioned in news sources. If you want help working more with your brand, you've come to the right place. At Gasta we know a lot about brand building !
5. Get reviews from others
Similar to branding, endorsements from other people or websites that AI trusts can help strengthen your AIO authority. For example, these could include:
Collaborating with other companies on content, such as suppliers mentioning each other on social media or blogs
Ask followers to share your website on social media or in various forums
Ask for reviews and feedback from customers
Participate in professional discussions online or at events
6. Share useful and unique content
Just like in traditional SEO, relevant, authoritative content is essential to being seen as a trusted source. The goal of AI search is to provide the user with the most useful answer. Such content types can be blog posts, FAQs, summaries and bullet points, or conversational answers that are easy to skim through.
In summary
AIO is evolving along with AI search platforms, so best practices may change over time. But a general rule of thumb is that when evaluating your website for AIO, you can ask yourself “ What is the benefit of visiting my website?” and “Can I make it clearer or easier for people who come in?” Clear, concrete answers will definitely help your website become more visible in AI-generated results.
And it's worth knowing that even though we fear less traffic to the websites, the total visits to all our websites in Gasta (over 500 pcs.) has increased by 11.9% so far this year (as of July 25). So we don't notice that people are not visiting websites anymore ...
Want to know more about AIO or Sqaurespace? Contact me or Vidar.
