1. General AI Visibility (Optimizing for AI Search)
For your website to be used as a source by major AI models like those integrated into Google Search (Gemini), Perplexity, or Claude, you primarily need to focus on what’s now being called Generative Search Optimization (GEO).
Key Strategies to Get Noticed by AI:
- Focus on High-Quality, Answer-Oriented Content: AI prioritizes content that is informative, comprehensive, and directly answers specific user questions. FAQs, detailed guides, and clear problem-solving content are very effective.
- Implement Structured Data (Schema Markup): This is one of the most critical steps. Schema markup (like for
FAQPage,Article, orProduct) is code that helps AI models explicitly understand the context, type, and relationships of the information on your page. - Ensure Excellent Crawlability & Traditional SEO: Most AI systems rely on the existing indexes of traditional search engines (like Google and Bing) and their crawlers.
- Make sure your
robots.txtfile is not blocking any crawlers (including special ones like PerplexityBot). - Submit a clear, up-to-date XML Sitemap to search engines (e.g., via Google Search Console).
- Ensure fast loading speeds and a mobile-friendly design.
- Make sure your
- Establish Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T): AI models are trained to prioritize content from credible and authoritative sources to prevent hallucination and provide reliable answers.
- Use Clear and Logical Structure: AI uses your headings (H1, H2, H3) as a roadmap to understand the content. Make sure they are clear, descriptive, and follow a logical flow.
2. Dedicated AI Indexing Services (Custom Solutions)
You can also use specialized platforms to create a dedicated, AI-optimized index for your website’s content. This is typically for integrating search into your own products or for use by developers building agentic AI applications.
| Platform/Service | Purpose | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud-based AI Search Services | To build a custom, AI-powered search experience for your own website or application. | Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search (Advanced Indexing option), Azure AI Search (Creating a Search Index) |
| Emerging “AI Index” Services | To directly feed your content to AI platforms in a structured, real-time, and often monetized way. | Cloudflare’s AI Index (Offers APIs, LLMs.txt files, and a pub/sub model for direct content connections to AI builders). |
In short, while you don’t typically “submit a URL” to ChatGPT or Gemini directly like you would to an old directory, you optimize your website for the AI-first indexing that these systems rely on.