The relentless buzz surrounding AI search suggests a revolutionary shift in the digital landscape, heralding a new era for SEO. While the technology is undeniably game-changing, the strategies required to achieve visibility in AI-driven search engines are not too dissimilar to the things that SEOs have been doing for years. Below, we’ll look at the AI search engine landscape and what brands need to do to measure and optimise for AI search.
Which AI-search platforms should you focus on?
Firstly, if you’re interested in investing in building AI search visibility, who are the key players, and which platforms should you focus on? Back in 2023, there was a lot of talk about whether Google might some day be usurped by new rivals offering better, AI-driven search engines.
Some of the key developments in this time included:
- 30 November 2022: ChatGPT launched, leading to Google CEO Sundar Pichai declaring a “Code Red” over the threat to Google’s search business in January 2023
- 7 December 2022: Perplexity launched its AI-driven search engine
- 7 February 2023: Microsoft announces a new version Bing powered by ChatGPT AI providing a chat widget within the traditional search interface
- 21 March 2023: Google launched Bard, its own AI chatbot, in response to ChatGPTG
- 10 May 2023: Google launches Search Generative Experience (SGE) for users signed up to Search Labs, an experimental AI search feature similar to the new Bing interface
- 14 May 2024: Google launched AI Overviews to all users in the US, based on SGE. AI Overviews rolled out globally by October 2024.
- 5 March 2025: Google launches AI Mode within Search Labs, an experimental mode designed for more complex, multi-part search questions
So far, this has led to Google maintaining a dominant position in the market. To put this into perspective, here’s SimilarWeb’s total visits data on the four platforms mentioned above:
Note: While these results are for global searches, they skew heavily towards the US, especially as Google’s merger of its various country versions has not yet been completed.
With this in mind, Google should still be at the forefront of your brand’s search strategy, while keeping tabs on other players in the market. In practice, this means that marketers should focus on three key things in 2025:
- Start tracking traffic & visibility in AI search
- Focus on understanding ranking factors behind AI overviews
- Monitor how Google’s AI Mode develops and how that may affect strategy
Let’s now dig into these points and identify how to optimise for AI driven search:
How to measure AI search performance & visibility
A good first step to investing into AI search visibility is to understand how much of your traffic already comes from AI sources. Rather than a standing start, you may find that you already have content driving traffic from AI search and chatbots.
You can track traffic from AI searches & chatbots via Google Analytics 4 (GA4) by isolating those sources in your data, for example:
ChatGPT
- Navigate to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic
- Add a filter with the “+ Add filter” button
- Choose “Session source/medium” and set the filter to “exactly matches” or “matches regex” and enter “chatgpt.com”
Perplexity
- Navigate to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic
- Add a filter with the “+ Add filter” button
- Choose “Session source/medium” and set the filter to “exactly matches” or “matches regex” and enter “perplexity.ai”
Filtering AI traffic in GA4
To consolidate all traffic from AI chatbots into one channel, you can also create a new channel group in your GA4 instance that includes traffic from any AI platform you desire. Kyle Rushton McGregor has a great walkthrough on how to do this here.
Can you measure traffic from AI Overviews?
Unfortunately, Google does not offer a way to track clicks directly from AI overviews, for example with no way to filter clicks from these snippets in Google Search Console.
Right now, the best solution for tracking clicks from AI Overviews is to leverage a keyword ranking tool such as SEMrush or SE Ranking, or other platforms designed specifically for measuring visibility in AI search such as Waikay.io.
Fundamentals of Optimising for AI Search Engines
With tracking out of the way, let’s look at the three main areas of focus for optimising your content and brand visibility.
Understand your user’s search intent and provide a clear answer
AI Overviews and AI search in general is no different to traditional search in that it’s crucial to consider what users are actually looking to achieve off the back of their search. Below are some examples of the main search intents, query examples and typical landing pages that can serve these queries:
| Type of search intent | Example query | Typical landing page experience |
| Informational | “What are AI Overviews”“How to lubricate a treadmill”“How long is flight from London to Berlin” | Article or blog post |
| Commercial | “Best business bank account”“Treadmill”“Best carry on luggage” | Product category page, comparison tool or product review roundup |
| Transactional | “Car insurance quotes” “London to Berlin flights”“Buy treadmill” | Quote tool or eCommerce product page |
| Navigational | “Spotify web player”“NatWest contact number”“British Airways app” | Homepage, contact page or app store product page |
AI Overviews typically show up for informational queries, longer search terms (“longtail” queries), queries with high search volumes, and typically non-monetised queries, according to Ahrefs.
This means for visibility in AI overviews, it’s crucial to create clear and concise answers for who, where, what, why, when style queries, ensuring content can easily be cited in AI answers.
Other platforms like Perplexity and ChatGPT also crawl the web for digestible content as sources for providing answers, meaning your efforts for Google will serve other platforms too – just as Bing can be served with the same content library as Google.
This is where a solid content strategy is crucial, ensuring that your content matches the pain points that your company solves. Learn more in our guide to keyword clustering.
Technical SEO: Ensure your content can be found
The next thing to consider is how easily your content can be found by search engine crawlers. Two key things to consider include:
Don’t use JavaScript to render core content
GPTbot and PerplexityBot are the web crawlers powering ChatGPT and Perplexity respectively. Like Googlebot, they go out and crawl the web for information, However, one crucial difference is that unlike Googlebot, they cannot crawl JavaScript.
This is an important distinction for sites that make heavy use of JavaScript, such as those leveraging client-side rendering. If your site’s main content cannot be loaded without JavaScript, then these bots will be unable to use your content in their answers.
A good way to check is to visit your site with JavaScript turned off, which can be done easily with this Toggle JavaScript Chrome plugin, to avoid needing to dig into your browser settings. Check that all the main content on your site can be seen with JavaScript turned off, and that you can navigate between pages.
If you come across issues, typically the next step is to run a Technical SEO audit, where we can identify the scale of the issue and work with your developers to find an appropriate solution.
Leverage structured data
Structured data is data that’s been organised into a consistent or “structured” way, such as how data in a spreadsheet is organised into rows and columns. On webpages, we can add structure to unstructured data by using schema.org markup. Schema is a standardised vocabulary for describing various data points on a web page, and is already leveraged by Google as a way to pull in specific search features, such as star ratings on product reviews, product pricing, or even ingredients in a recipe.
Schema data has long been used in SEO, and now also helps to signpost AI crawlers towards relevant data. Some of the schema types to consider include:
- HowTo: For how-to guides, which can be relevant for informational queries
- FAQPage: To help reinforce the answers for who, where, what, why, when style questions and answers
- Products and Reviews: Two schema types that can help surface products when asking an AI bot to help with choosing the best products
You can check if schema data on your site is valid by using the Schema validator, Google’s Rich Results test, or by checking the Enhancements section in the left hand sidebar in Google Search Console.
Build brand mentions & coverage on external sites
Possibly the most important change in the rise of AI search is that the user journey is becoming more fractured. In the past, users might discover your products or services on external sites such as news articles or reviews, before heading to your site to research more and then make a purchase or enquiry.
Now, with ever more advanced chatbots that can handle multi-stage queries, more of this journey is likely to take place off-site. While this makes measurement and tracking more difficult, it’s still important to be visible, as the winners in AI search will be those with strong visibility, making them able to capture customers on their site lower down the sales funnel. This may become even more important if and when Google’s AI Mode becomes available to all users, and potentially as the default option for search, replacing traditional search.
Aside from ensuring your own content is optimised using the technical SEO and content points above, it’s important that your brand and products are mentioned in other places online.
In the past, SEOs specifically focused on earning links from external sites, often through a Digital PR process. However, for AI search, links are no longer necessary – brand mentions are impactful even without a link. This is based on an Ahrefs study of approximately 75K brands, revealing that brand web mentions had the strongest correlation with appearances in Google AI Overviews.
Some of the ways you can achieve this include:
- Working with review sites and influences to ensure a steady stream of product reviews on the web
- Publish data studies to gain mentions in global, national or trade press
- Write content on trusted third party platforms that are used as sources of data such as LinkedIn Pulse
Wrapping up – is now the time to shift focus to AI search?
While there is a lot of chatter online about how the search landscape is poised to change dramatically due to AI search, if you’ve made it this far, you’ll have seen that actually optimising for AI is more evolution than revolution.
A key part of this is the fact that Google remains the biggest player, even when you factor in usage of ChatGPT, with 15X more monthly users based on the SimilarWeb data shared in this post. Google’s AI features build upon its existing infrastructure, helping to provide continuity for search marketers.
Some people in the search space are pushing a new term to describe AI search optimisation: GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation. However, based on my view of the evolutionary shift towards AI optimisation, and given we’re still trying to reach potential customers searching for solutions, I feel Search Engine Optimisation is still a valid way to describe this work. Will GEO stick around as a term, will it be considered a sub-topic of SEO, or will SEO be absorbed into a wider discipline of GEO? However it pans out, there will be opportunities for brands that pull the right levers and stay on top of industry developments.
Need help navigating the rise of AI search?
I consult for brands across personal finance, professional services and consumer brands looking to grow their online presence through my consultancy practice, Atkinson Smith Digital. If you need support with navigating the shift to AI-driven search, why not get in touch and see how we can help?