AI SEO = optimizing content to be cited by AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) and to appear in AI-generated answers. Different from traditional Google SEO.
AI SEO (or AEO — Answer Engine Optimization) is a new practice (2024+) of optimizing for LLMs and answer engines. Different from Google SEO: Google ranks pages; AI summarizes information from thousands of pages and composes a single answer. AI SEO focuses on: (1) Good citability (authoritative content with an author byline); (2) Structured data (good schema.org); (3) Originality (vs. generic regurgitation); (4) Verifiability (linked sources); (5) A natural tone (not keyword-stuffed). LLMs are not yet mainstream traffic drivers but are growing: ChatGPT has 100M+ monthly users; Gemini is integrated into Google Search. AI-optimized content = credibility and potential for future "AI answers".
The future: AI answers will become mainstream on Google. Content optimized for AI = direct traffic from a page that is not a featured snippet. It is the new frontier of SEO.
Source: AEO GuideStructured data is HTML code (JSON-LD, microdata) that tells Google information about the content (article, event, recipe, product) for featured snippets and rich results.
A featured snippet is the box that appears above Google's organic results — "Position 0" — showing a direct answer to a question, extracted from one of the indexed pages.
RankBrain is a Google AI algorithm that understands the meaning of search queries and pages, even with new words. It is the 3rd ranking factor after links and content.
Schema.org is a collaborative standard for structured-data markup. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex support it. Used to encode web content in a structured format.
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