Digital marketing: How do you get your website on AI search results after Google's update?

In part 2 of 4 articles about how AI search will impact your business, Katrina Bell reveals how your website can be one of your strongest assets now that Google's AI update has changed everything.

A recent Cloudflare study revealed that 57.5% of website traffic worldwide comes from bots. Increasingly, the primary visitor to your website isn’t a human at all, but an AI agent. Like it or not, we have to start changing how we present and maintain our websites. 

Google’s recent massive overhaul of search, putting AI at the centre of the experience, has brought the issue of how you get your website on the results screens of all AI searches to the fore.

There are practical behaviours and tweaks that brands and businesses can start using right now.

1 – Is your site easy for AI to understand? All information about your company should exist on your website and be easy to find.

Try this: take your 5 busiest pages and ask Google to give you the top 10 ‘who-what-when-where-why’ questions about those pages in your niche.

Pick 3 that match a ‘want to buy' or 'want to know’ moment and put that content directly on your site. This could genuinely mean the resurgence of the much neglected FAQ page. You are reverse engineering your content to answer the most likely queries such as 'Can porcelain worktops withstand boiling pans?' That’s what humans are searching for.  

2 – Start to track how AI researches and recommends one brand over another. Does yours have a strong presence there? You can use Google’s own Gemini to break down which names appear in popular searches, and where you are currently ranked. No more digging around in separate social apps to spot trends.

3 – Topics are just another way of describing ideas for new content. Ask AI to tell you those topics that have a strong presence. Then make a video or post about what people are asking about. Take that transcript and make it into a blog post, if you still use them. That topic, for instance, 'Winter tile trends', needs to be the headline. Then cross post over all your social channels.

4 – AI loves reviews. They don’t just convince your customers to trust you – they give AI a real-life, up-to-date explanation of what you do and why people recommend you. And in turn why it should trust you. Those reviews, especially from third-party sites, need to be on your site PDQ.

5 – Lead with answers. AI search doesn’t read your page from top to bottom. It scans in chunks looking for one thing – can it grab a complete, self-contained and confident answer to answer a prompt? Get on your site and ask yourself if you are burying that very content three paragraphs in. Then get rid of the hyperbole.  

6 – Your socials are an integral part of your website now and will impact where you rank, if at all.

Historically the traffic you get from Google was the highest quality you could hope for, above social media or referrals, because it was generated by people searching for you or types of you.

Now if your socials are consistently linked to products or services on your site this will benefit your overall score on AI research.

Next month: how AI is changing local search, reviews and Google Business Profiles.