WHAT DOES AI SEO ACTUALLY MEAN?
AI SEO is the practice of improving how clearly a website, business or person can be discovered, understood and referenced across search experiences increasingly influenced by artificial intelligence.
It is not a separate discipline bolted onto the side of SEO. It is SEO, viewed through a lens that has widened. For a long time, the question was: can a search engine find this page, and is it worth ranking? Now there is a second question: when an AI system summarises, synthesises or answers a question, can it understand what this business is, what it is authoritative about, and where it fits?
Those two questions share a lot of the same answers — which is the point. The work that has always mattered still matters. What has changed is that the surface where discovery happens is bigger, and the machines doing the understanding are less forgiving of ambiguity.
IS AI SEO DIFFERENT FROM NORMAL SEO?
No — not in the way most people mean when they ask.
Traditional SEO remains the foundation. Crawlability matters. Indexability matters. Content matters. Authority matters. Links matter. Technical SEO matters. If a search engine cannot read your site, understand its structure, or trust its content, no amount of "AI optimisation" will rescue it.
What AI SEO adds is a greater emphasis on a set of ideas that were always present but not always urgent:
- Clarity — who and what the business is, stated plainly and consistently.
- Entities — the identifiable things (people, organisations, products, places, concepts) the site is about.
- Context — the relationships between those things, and the broader topics they sit within.
- Extractability — whether the useful information can be pulled out and quoted cleanly.
- Attribution — whether the source of the information is clear.
- Topical authority — whether the site demonstrates genuine expertise on the subjects it wants to be known for.
If that sounds like good SEO, it is. The shift is one of emphasis, not invention. See SEO vs GEO: what's the difference? for how this sits beside the newer term GEO.
HOW DO AI SEARCH SYSTEMS FIND INFORMATION?
This is where it helps to be precise, because not every "AI search" works the same way.
At a high level, AI search experiences tend to draw on some combination of:
- Web indexes — crawled pages, like a traditional search engine's index.
- Search results — the ranked listings a traditional engine returns, sometimes used as a retrieval layer.
- Retrieval systems — the mechanism that selects which information is relevant to a query.
- Knowledge graphs — structured representations of entities and their relationships.
- Structured data — machine-readable signals (such as Schema.org) that describe content and entities explicitly.
- Authoritative websites — sources that demonstrate expertise, consistency and corroboration.
- Third-party references — mentions, citations and profiles elsewhere on the web.
- Platform-specific datasets — the particular sources a given platform has access to or chooses to use.
Here is the important caveat: I am deliberately not claiming that ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity all retrieve information identically. They don't. Different platforms use different mixes of live web access, curated corpora, knowledge bases and model training data. A claim that "ChatGPT ranks websites using X" is usually an oversimplification.
What you can say with more confidence is this: the clearer, more consistent and more corroborated your business's information is across the web, the more likely it is that whatever system is reading it will understand it correctly.
THE FIVE FOUNDATIONS OF AI SEO
This is the framework I use when I look at a site. It is not a trademarked methodology, and the order isn't sacred — but it reflects the order in which things tend to break down.
01 — CRAWLABILITY
Can search engines and AI systems actually reach, read and understand your site's structure, services and important pages? If the foundation is cracked, everything above it is compromised. Crawlability, indexation, site architecture, performance and clean technical fundamentals come first.
02 — ENTITY CLARITY
Is it obvious who the business is, what it does, and how its important entities connect? A search system should not have to guess whether "Ricky Whiting" is a person, a brand, or a product. (See what is entity SEO? for the deeper version of this.)
03 — CONTENT AUTHORITY
Does the site demonstrate meaningful expertise around the subjects it wants to be known for? Not keyword repetition — actual, useful coverage of the topics that matter to the business and its customers.
04 — CONTEXT + CONNECTIONS
Are the relationships between the business, its people, its products and its wider context made clear — on the site and corroborated across the web? Entities become powerful when they are connected.
05 — ATTRIBUTABLE INFORMATION
Is the useful information stated in a way that can be extracted, quoted and attributed? If the answer to a question is buried in a paragraph of marketing copy, it is harder to surface than if it is stated plainly.
DOES SCHEMA MARKUP HELP AI SEO?
Yes — with an important "but."
Schema markup (structured data) is a way of making explicit statements about entities and their relationships. A Person schema says this is a person, and here is their name, job, and the organisation they work for. That is genuinely useful. It reduces the amount of guesswork a machine has to do.
But schema is not a magic AI-ranking switch. Adding schema does not cause an AI system to cite you. It does not guarantee inclusion in an AI Overview. It does one thing well: it describes. If the description is accurate, consistent and corroborated by the rest of the site and the wider web, it helps. If the schema claims things the content doesn't support, it doesn't.
This is the principle: schema doesn't create authority, it helps describe it. Read the entity SEO article for how this fits together.
CAN YOU RANK IN CHATGPT?
This is one of the most asked questions, and the honest answer is that "ranking in ChatGPT" is usually an oversimplification.
AI responses are not a fixed league table. What appears in an answer can vary based on:
- The query — how it is phrased, and what it implies the person wants.
- Context — the conversation or session around the question.
- Retrieval — which sources the system pulls from for that particular answer.
- The model — which version, and how it is tuned.
- Location — where the person is, where relevant.
- Freshness — how recent the information is expected to be.
- Personalisation — where the platform applies it.
- Source availability — what is actually accessible and authoritative at that moment.
What a business can do is improve the quality, clarity and authority of its public information — so that whichever system reads it, and whatever the query, it is more likely to be understood correctly. What it cannot do is control an independent AI's answer. Anyone who promises guaranteed placement in AI responses is overpromising.
HOW I APPROACH AI SEO
My approach comes down to four moves, which I describe as understand, build, connect, grow:
- Understand — what does the site currently communicate, and where is that getting lost?
- Build — what foundations are missing, and what needs fixing?
- Connect — how do search, content, entities and the customer journey work together?
- Grow — where is the most useful opportunity to act on first?
It is deliberately practical. No jargon, no secret framework, no "proprietary AI scoring engine." See the AI SEO consulting page for how this turns into actual work.
HOW DO YOU START?
If you are wondering where your own business sits, here is a genuinely useful checklist:
- [ ] Can a search engine crawl and index your most important pages?
- [ ] Is it clear, on the page and in the code, what the business is and does?
- [ ] Do you have structured data that accurately describes your entities?
- [ ] Does your content genuinely cover the topics you want to be known for?
- [ ] Is your information consistent across your site and the wider web?
- [ ] Is the useful information stated plainly enough to be extracted and quoted?
- [ ] Is the next step for a visitor obvious once they arrive?
If you can't tick all of those, you now have a list of things to work on. That is more useful than a score out of 100.
Want to know how AI sees your business?
Enter your website and I'll review it across search, entity, content and AI-readiness signals — and highlight the areas I'd look at first.
