AI is quickly becoming a ubiquitous tool for businesses, used to streamline operations across everything from IT to search engine optimization. When it comes to SEO, the game has changed entirely thanks to AI. Businesses aren’t just looking for clicks anymore. They’re looking for citations and mentions in AI Overviews.
As search engines like Yandex and Google continue to rely on AI to generate more effective search results for their users, it’s up to you as a business owner to understand how AI crawlers and engines select the content that they cite.
Here are 10 things you can do today to start seeing results from your business’s AI search visibility!
1. Structure Content With an “Answers-First” Mindset
The central vehicle of AI search optimization is content. No matter what, online customers are going to engage with your brand through some form of content, and having that content selected for display by AI overviews means you’ll have to change how it is structured.
The AI crawlers used by search engines like Yandex and Google are primarily geared towards finding clear answers for their users, so your content should be created with answers in mind. Use clear heading structures to delineate questions and answers, and include informative bulleted lists, tables, and other data elements to help LLMs more easily digest your content.
2. Create Content Clusters To Guide Users
AI engines are more likely to retrieve content from brands that demonstrate depth of expertise and presence in fields related to their users' queries. It’s no longer enough just to have a single blog post filled with keywords about some service you’re selling or a question you’re answering. Instead, focus on creating content clusters with a central pillar page and several interlinked supporting articles. This will help you hit the more specific long-tail keywords that AI engines gravitate towards and funnel users through your site.
3. Practice Authority-Building
In the age of AI SEO, authority is everything. Famously, Google’s AI engines operate on a strict framework based on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). Other search engines, like Yandex, do the same. Content highlighted in an AI overview won’t just be any old blog on the topic–instead, AI crawlers select the content with the most visible authority on the subject at hand. That authority is driven by signals such as third-party mentions, expert quotes, and directory listings, all of which are crucial for you to accumulate if you want to succeed at increasing AI visibility.
4. Produce Original Research and Thought Leadership
One of the best ways to build additional authority in the eyes of AI engines is by producing your own original research. Personalized experience and insight, which can be communicated via content like case studies, published interviews, and even multimodal content like podcast appearances, help make your content original and real, a key factor in increasing your visibility. AI engines look for thought leaders in their industries. You want to signal through your content that you are deeply involved in industry conversations, as this increases trust and signifies authority.
5. Cultivate High-Quality Backlinks
AI SEO hasn’t done away with the age-old practice of optimizing content through link building. In fact, it’s made linking more important in many ways. In particular, AI engines are primed to mention and cite web content with a large number of backlinks, which are links to your website from other high-quality brands and sites across the Internet. Establishing backlink partnerships further increases your authority by demonstrating your company's reach. Backlinking is also an exponentially scalable process, as backlinks drive referrals that can lead to more backlinks.
6. Create Multimodal Content With Comparisons and FAQs
Businesses that leverage a wide range of content types are well-positioned for success in the age of AI search. AI overviews aren’t restricted solely to text-based content. They’re trying to find their users the best possible resources to answer their questions, including videos, podcasts, and other forms of non-textual content. To capitalize on this, your business needs to create content like YouTube videos, and your key executives and employees need to appear on podcasts and radio shows.
Another important thing to do with your written content is to vary its types. One particular form of content that AI engines frequently retrieve is comparison pages. These pages typically target high-intent traffic by comparing two things, such as products, to help customers make important purchasing decisions. Be sure to include FAQs to address any additional questions your customers may have, as AI engines often cite them.
7. Improve Technical SEO
The technical performance of your website is a crucial element of effective AI SEO. A fast-loading, user-friendly, readable website is perhaps the best way to improve user experience and get AI engines focused on your content. To start, focus on cleaning up glitchy or laggy parts of your website. Eliminate broken links that lead users nowhere and cause frustration. Add any missing tags and add crucial metadata to pages that lack it so AI crawlers can index your site properly.
Additionally, make sure your site is optimized for mobile devices. The vast majority of customers these days do at least some of their browsing on their phones or tablets, if not all of it. If your site isn't optimized for these devices, you’ll be cutting out a large portion of your organic user base.
8. Implement Advanced Schema
Diving even further into technical SEO, you can optimize your site and content even further by implementing advanced schema markup. Schema helps AI engines sift through your content to determine its context and purpose. It signifies what your content is and does through advanced coding, rather than just forcing AI engines to interpret raw text.
Common schema markup codes like FAQPage, QAPage, and HowTo help AI crawlers identify the type of content they are looking at, distinguishing question-and-answer pages from more detailed how-to articles, and funneling your pages into the correct boxes so they can be displayed to users whose queries most closely match the content at hand. This will not only gain you more traffic, but better traffic, because the users you start to accumulate will be high-intent users looking for exactly what your content offers.
9. Accumulate Customer Reviews
Customer reviews are a crucial yet often-overlooked way to increase AI visibility. You might think of them as being the natural result of an AI SEO campaign, but they can actually help you build and scale your campaign going forward as well. Reviews are just another form of authority-building content that AI engines sift through to determine whether your brand can effectively answer user questions or provide them with appropriate products and services. The more good reviews you have, the more likely an AI engine from Yandex, Google, Bing, or another search engine is to retrieve your content, especially if good reviews are recent or frequent.
10. Track AI Search Metrics
In order to ensure that your AI strategy is working, you’ll have to track various metrics, from ASI visibility KPIs to customer and B2B data metrics. Turning to tools like Semrush or the Google Search Console can help you get started here, as these tools offer built-in tracking for several core metrics like clicks, impressions, and queries, which are the fundamentals of AI visibility.
As you dive further into the data, you’ll also want to track AI-specific metrics like citations, mentions, share of voice, sentiment, AI referral, and positioning. Furthermore, B2B metrics such as engagement depth, time on page, and cost per lead can indicate how effectively your business attracts high-quality partners and buyers.
Final Thoughts
The AI revolution is upon us, and businesses cannot afford to stand back and let the landscape change without getting involved. The novelty of AI has led some companies to feel the temptation of letting things settle down and adjust before they dive into working with new technology, but all that will do is cause you to miss the train as it leaves the station. To capitalize on AI’s benefits, you have to be proactive because those who act first will build authority and presence the fastest.
With the strategies we’ve provided above, you can easily start putting AI to work for your advantage. The process of AI optimization is not simple, but with the right tools and a good amount of proactivity, you can reap major benefits faster than you might think. It’s not worth waiting when AI has already changed so much. If you haven’t started optimizing yet, your window is closing! Search engines like Yandex and Google haven’t waited to incorporate AI, so you can’t wait either!
Author Bio:
Mikhail Slivinskiy is Search Ambassador at Yandex with over 15 years of experience in search technology and SEO. At Yandex, he has worked across product development, webmaster tools, and publisher engagement, including leading Yandex Webmaster from 2017 to 2024. He now focuses on how AI-driven search is evolving and how businesses can maintain visibility through authoritative content.
