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How Should You Think About Website SEO for AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 448)

Screenshot of Google search results showing AI Overview for the history of football to illustrate the idea of website SEO for AI

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Google’s AI Overviews show up regularly for lots of search queries. Plenty of people also use ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and others for “search” (albeit, with different behaviors than we’ve long seen on Google). This reality has plenty of people asking how to ensure their website and their content shows up in search results. What can you do to drive website SEO for AI?

It’s a great question. It’s one that’s worth paying attention to. It’s also not necessarily the first question I would ask.

What is the first question? Where should your focus be when it comes to AI and search? In short, how should you think about website SEO for AI? That’s what this episode of the Thinks Out Loud podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

How Should You Think About Website SEO for AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 448) — Headlines and Show Notes

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You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

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Transcript: How Should You Think About Website SEO for AI?

In last week’s episode, titled What’s the Point of Your Website in an Age of AI, I talked about the reality of AI agents. And at one point I stated, “let’s start with the idea that at the moment AI agents technically don’t exist. I mean, they’re a cool idea and they could turn up at scale 10 minutes after I record this, but they don’t exist right now.”

Literally the same day that the episode dropped, OpenAI, the folks behind ChatGPT, launched a research preview of Operator. And this is what they called it, “a web automation tool that uses a new AI model called Computer Using Agent to control a web browser through a visual interface. The system performs tasks by viewing and interacting with on-screen elements like buttons and text fields similar to how a human would.” That’s from Ars Technica.

So yeah, that happened.

It might not have been 10 minutes after the episode, but it was damned close. I’d love to think I can manifest all sorts of things that easily. Like right now, I hope you hit the Powerball this week… OK, let me know how that works out for you.

In any case, I stand by the overarching point of the episode and why I think you still need a website and why that will likely be true for some time to come, if not forever. I’m not going to rehash the whole episode here. I encourage you to check it out at the link in the show notes when you get a chance.

At any rate, as a consequence of that episode, I got a couple of questions from folks wondering how they make their websites work better for AI. In short, how do you make your website show up in answers like Google’s AI Overviews or ChatGPT?

It’s a fair question. New research shows that Google AI Overviews appear on roughly 30% of searches. I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 448 of the Thinks Out Loud podcast. Let’s dive in and give it a think.

The idea of website SEO for artificial intelligence is a good one, generally. I am in support of this and I’m going to tell you as we go forward in this episode some things you can do to make sure you show up in those cases. What’s also true is that you don’t want to lose sight of the big picture.

For instance, why do I keep saying website SEO, not just SEO, regardless of where the traffic goes? Because as I noted last week, “the point of your website in the age of AI is to create a deeper, richer brand experience and engage with human customers directly. A place where you can keep your content assets free from the dictates of big tech.” In other words, if you’re trying to do SEO for someplace other than your website, you’re building your brand on rented land.

Sure, if you’ve got a YouTube channel or LinkedIn page, you undoubtedly want to follow best practices to ensure you show up there. But you also want to direct those folks to your own channels, your website and your CRM as often as possible. That’s where you ultimately have the most control with your customers.

Second, if you’re only working on your website for SEO reasons, well, you’re doing it wrong.

As Rand Fishkin once said, SEO is the reward for building your brand. In other words, the best way to beat Google at its game is to have customers search for you by name. Your marketing activities should be about building a brand that customers intentionally search for, not just showing up for every possible result in the search engine. You’re missing the bigger picture if you chase every new trend. And chasing every new trend, even ones as big as AI may prove to be, can be a massive waste of time.

Questions like these pose a perfect case for focusing on “what won’t change.” You know the story, I’ve talked about this before. Jeff Bezos, when asked about what might happen in the future, famously said it’s more important to focus on what won’t change. He knew, for instance, that consumers would always want lots of selection, they’d always want fast shipping, and they’d always want low prices. In fact, he couldn’t imagine a world where they’d want the opposite. And then he built Amazon to meet those wants.

Jumping to chase every single AI and SEO trend as they appear is chasing your tail. You’re spending too much time thinking about what will change and not enough time thinking about what won’t change.

If you’re like most folks, I imagine that you have too much to do every day to waste time. And frankly, given that time is always our most finite resource, you never want to waste it.

To get the bigger point out of the way, first, AI search is fairly limited today. I know, I know, you’re probably thinking, bull crap, lots of people search on AI. I even started by quoting a study that shows AI overview shows up for 30% of searches. Yep, guilty, lots of people do.

OpenAI gets a bit over half a billion visits every month. To remind you of the numbers though, according to Comscore, almost 40% of Americans aged 18 to 64 have used generative AI. And the Census Department found that more than 24% of American Yorkers used it, quote, least once in the week prior to being surveyed. Another number is that roughly one in nine folks, or about 11%, use generative AI nearly every workday. So that’s a healthy number of folks who are using these tools.

That also means that 60% of folks have never used it. 76% aren’t using it at least once a week. And 89% aren’t using it every day. Again, keep this front of mind. What won’t change? …or at least what isn’t changing too much yet.

As for the research around AI Overviews, well, AI Overviews appeared for 29.9% of the 10,000 keywords studied, but those keywords made up only 11.5 % of total search volume. According to Search Engine Journal, “high volume keywords are less likely to have an AI overview than mid-range search terms with monthly search volumes between 501 and 2,400.”

Here’s the thing, lots of the search queries that customers ask, whether in a traditional search or in AI tools, really aren’t worth anything to Google. In fact, they’re not really worth all that much to your business either. I’m recording this on Wednesday, January 29th and trending topics over the last seven days include:

  • Nvidia stock
  • Lunar New Year
  • Medicaid
  • Caroline Kennedy, and
  • RFK Jr.

I’m going to bet that most of these have no value to your business at all. know, lots of companies can probably do something with Lunar New Year, offering specific products, services, or specials to customers celebrating the holiday. That could be a great idea. And creative marketers may find some opportunities in other trending terms. But let’s be honest, monetizing many of these, given their connection to politics, for instance, is difficult and probably potentially risky for most folks.

Second, the shelf life of many of these types of questions is incredibly short. Even when I narrow the view in Google Trends, to say the “travel and transportation” category, which is an industry I frequently work in, I get the following list:

  • Spain Tourist Band
  • Hotels
  • Panda Cam
  • Hotel News, and
  • Indigo.

Obviously, if we ignore how much competition you’re going to face there, some of these, like hotels or hotel news, for instance, might be worth exploring. But another feature in Google Trends shows how long the boost in search volume above their traditional levels lasted. On the long side, “Panda Cam” lasted for, say it with me now, one day and two hours. That’s the only term that lasted longer than a day. Four of the top 10 terms saw a boost that lasted for less than six hours.

Again, you may be able to creatively find ways to use these terms. My point isn’t to discourage you to think outside the box. My point instead is to keep you focused on areas that have the most likely meaningful return. Short-term pops can help you from time to time. I’m not saying to ignore them. But usually, as the saying goes, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

What tends to happen is that your customers hear about something trending, some topic, some area of interest. They do a search to find out what it’s all about, get their answer, and then move on with life. Trying to rank for those in search or in AI is not a winning strategy most of the time. Ask anyone, anyone, whose business somehow managed to rank for “what time is the Super Bowl,” how much business they gained from it. I’ll bet you the answer is not much. Sure there are exceptions.

And if you’ve got a big enough team of incredibly skilled folks, you can probably make some hay there. But that’s not going to be the case for most businesses.

What’s also true is that there’s a deeper lesson in that query, the query, “what time is the Super Bowl,” than I think we tend to realize. That query is a brand query. Customers are searching for a brand, “the Super Bowl.” Yes, it’s arguably one of the most famous brands in the world, so you’d think they wouldn’t need it. But it shows that the search happened because people care about that brand. They care about the Super Bowl. And because of that, it’s the Super Bowl — and its partners — whose business benefits.

In an ideal state, that’s what you want your customers to do with your brand all the time, whether they’re searching in AI or whether they’re searching in traditional search. The data backs this up.

Returning to the Search Engine Journal, the study that Search Engine Journal cited, “…navigational queries like searching for a specific website rarely resulted in AI Overviews. This shows that,” the article says, “that AI Overviews focus on general information rather than direct navigation… and that non-brand terms are more likely to produce AI Overviews.”

The article continues to say that, “…about 33.3% of non-brand searches show an AI overview, while only 19.6% of brand searches do.” I mean that makes a ton of sense. This is about brand. This is about what do your customers really want to know. You want your customers to search for you by name. You want them to search for your brand.

When you get to how people show up in AI, how you show up in those AI searches, well, if we’re being honest, nobody knows. And I want to be fair, that’s not true. I take that statement back. There are plenty of good tips and techniques out there for how you show up at the moment.

For instance, we’ve consistently seen that sites showing up in Google’s Featured Snippets also tend to appear in AI Overviews, as well as in other AI-related search experiences. Again, I don’t want to discourage you from finding new ways and new creative ways to find new customers.

If you’re doing this during your 20% explore activities as part of a core and explore approach, where 80% of your time is dedicated to your core marketing activities and 20% is dedicated to exploring new ideas? Well, then go off, friend. That’s exactly what you should do.

At the same time, the big challenge at the moment is that AI itself, let alone search for AI, is changing incredibly fast. Again, note my point in the intro about agents showing up 10 minutes after the episode drops and then OpenAI releasing their agent about 10 minutes after the episode dropped. You’ve also undoubtedly seen the buzz around DeepSeek, a Chinese open source AI that gives near-frontier model performance, but allegedly cost only $6 million to develop. That’s opposed to the billions that others are investing to make AI the new standard for computing.

The point is that most advice on the topic of website SEO for AI right now has the shelf life of unpasteurized milk. In Phoenix. In July. We just don’t know how long some of this advice is going to last or how much long-term benefit you can derive from this.

And if we keep the focus on what won’t change, the one thing that appears to consistently be true is that brands win. As the Search Engine Journal article states, “websites with reliable voices, verified information and trustworthy content will likely be cited in AI Overviews.”

Which makes sense. If you ask any AI about a brand, it’s going to tell you about the brand. Funny how that’s what customers want too. They want to know when the Super Bowl is. They want to know the answer to their question. And AIs want to give them those answers.

So your focus should be on how do you become a great answer for the things your brand can deliver on. How do you create a great experience that your customers want again and again and again. The truth is we want our customers searching for us by name. We want our content and our websites and our experiences and our social media efforts to help customers to answer their questions, to build a relationship, to drive awareness and interest and desire and action. In short, we want to build our brand.

And we want to do that whether our customers are using search or social or AI or search on AI or anything else. That won’t change. It shouldn’t change. That’s how I think you should think about website SEO for AI. Otherwise, you risk a lot more than not showing up in the answers.

You risk that your customers simply won’t care about you.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 448.

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Show Outro

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep sending me things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

Tim Peter is the founder and president of Tim Peter & Associates. You can learn more about our company's strategy and digital marketing consulting services here or about Tim here.

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