How To Optimize Your Content To Rank In AI Search Results

Don’t want to read? Watch the video instead!

Like the video? Click here to automatically subscribe to the YouTube channel and be the first to get new case studies, tutorials and step-by-step guides!

With that out of the way, let’s get into this article…

Why people prefer AI Search vs Traditional Search Engines

To help understand this, I need to tell you about my weekend.

So a few weeks ago, a new computer game came out that had me pulling out my hair in frustration.

It’s in early access right now for people to test it out, which is great – but it also means the game is sometimes harder than it should be. (The goal of the testers is to see if its playable and that includes testing the difficulty).

Anyways, I played for a few hours and thought I was doing pretty good… that is until I ended up being stuck on the insanely difficult first boss for around 30 minutes.

So I gave in and headed across to Google for tips on how to beat it.

The problem however was that nothing worked. The advice was generic, and the character class I was playing was just too weak to survive with the tips that were suggested.

So I spent another few hours grinding away, out-leveling the boss by 5 levels to see if that worked, but I still couldn’t beat it!

Suddenly it occurred to me that I might find a better answer if I asked ChatGPT – more specifically the AI Search option in GPT 4.0.

So I did just that and I found out exactly what I needed to do for my character class and level.

Not only that but it also shared resources and videos that I hadn’t seen before that helped me to finally beat it.

This is why people are moving to AI search and why ChatGPT has over 300 million users a week right now.

Because not only does AI search allow for a more conversational search query – as if you’re talking to a human being. But it also allows you to be super specific and detailed about your needs, with the tool understanding the context of that question to find the right answer that fits.

When I did the same search in Google – it was all the generic advice. But the AI search didn’t care which ranked top – it cared that I found the most relevant answer first. (And then gave me the best ranking version).

It’s such a better user experience!

Compare that to a traditional approach where you get given a page of results that you have to scan and click through to find the right thing. Most of which are full of false or outdated content.

Is SEO dead now that AI Search is here?

Not at all. Mainly because these AI Search tools work off the backbone of SEO.

In fact, optimizing for AI Search is fairly easy – assuming you’ve been following Googles EEAT guidelines, as well as their ‘good content’ guidelines.

There is one more element though which is a part of technical SEO that you possibly stopped using a while ago. (More on this in a second).

For now though, lets break down how AI Search works, and how it chooses what to share in its so results, so we can see how to optimize for it properly.

How AI Search works

AI Search primarily works off of a 3-tiered logic system so that it can provide the best answer to the user:

Tier 1 results (Most relevant + most trusted option)

Tier 1 is focused on always provide the best answer that is most relevant to the users query that ALSO has backlinks.

This way it knows you’re getting the right thing – but its also trusted by people. More links and higher rankings means its usually the most relevant source.

Tier 2 results (Most relevant when no trusted options are available)

Sometimes though the AI Search engine can’t always find content with a lot of links, so it will still try to give you the best, most relevant answer to your option.

This is why content that is technically on page 3 for the main keyword can be the result that’s picked instead.

This is a great thing for smaller blogs and solopreneurs because it means you can get traffic to pages that don’t rank as high – simply because you know your audience and right content that fits their needs – better than some huge corporation that’s just trying to fit a broad keyword search.

We still want to try and build links to it – but just know you could still get traffic either way which is awesome.

Tier 3 results (Find the best fit it can – similar to traditional search)

So what if there’s no content that fits either of these tiers? There’s nothing relevant and nothing exactly relevant that ranks?

Well then AI Search will follow the more traditional approach which is to try and find semi relevant results or as close as possible to your answer.

It’s not great but it doesn’t want to give you nothing when you search. It always wants to try and provide an answer.

So what does this all mean for us and our content marketing?

Basically the better you know your audience and your topics, and the more niche your content is – the better.

We still need to write high quality content and build backlinks, which is great if you do this for a living. But it does mean that the little guy can also compete a little easier.

We might not get as much traffic per post. But we can get more traffic to posts that might not have ranked in the past.

How to optimize your content for AI Search

In terms of content quality, early indicators show that content that fits EEAT is being given preference.

Basically content that has:

• Unique data points
• Personal experience and expertise
• References and resources
• Etc

Now there could be a few reasons for this. One of most likely is that in a sea of similar content, things like this help it to stand out.

However, its more likely that these elements help build trust but also provide further context to help the tools find the most relevant answer to the users question – vs a generic result.

Again, this is all stuff we should already be doing. We just need to be smart about how we apply this and optimize our content.

How?

Well because AI Search is contextual, it very rarely pulls a single sentence from a search result. Instead it will pull the previous and following sentences around that answer.

It does this so that the reader can understand the context around the answer and have more information, which is a better user experience.

So knowing all this – how do we apply it?

Honestly it’s just good writing habits.

You need to have:

• Clear headings and subheads
• A logical progression of these headlines in terms of topic flow
• And to always make sure you cover the relevant information for a section inside that section

A really easy way to do this is to use the what, why, how, and show approach. This gives that clarity and context that AI Search is looking for.

• What are we covering?
• Why does it matter? Both in terms of the topic and to the reader?
• How does this work? How do you do it?
• Show them how and provide additional context with images, videos, stats and data points

If you make sure to include this, not only will your content improve but you’ll also be a great contender for showing up in AI Search results because you’ll be wrapping answers in contextual and relevant information.

Better still – you’re audience will enjoy reading it more also!

There is however one more thing you need to do to help optimize for AI search. You might have even done this in the past and then stopped. Well, knows the time to start again…

Why Schema Markup matters once more

Schema Markup is basically additional code that you can add to a page, to help search engines understand what that page is about.

How to create Schema Markup code for your blog posts

Option #1. You could do it manually using this Schema Markup Generator

Basically you can select the type of schema you want, fill out the details, and it builds the code for you:

It’s the most customizable option and its completely free.

Option #2. WordPress plugins

Assuming your on WordPress, you can also use plugins like RankMath or Yoast that offers Schema Markup options for your posts that it does for you automatically.

Super handy right? However, these plugins have some slight issues.

This is because most articles that you write, require 3 types of Schema Markup:

• Article Schema. This covers the site, the authors name, the article topic and more
• BreadCrumb Schema. This  shows how the Page URL fits into the sites structure. So an article might be yoursite.com/blog/articlename
• FAQ Schema. This is where you share all the questions in your article that you’ve answered. these are usually things people search for so being able to show up for these adds value and gets you traffic

So whats the issue?

The problem is that if you leave it up to these tools, they often cut large sections of the post out of the schema. Meaning you lose a lot of the context that you’re trying to help AI Search understand what you’re about.

This is why I prefer to manually use the tool so I can fill this all out and rank.

However, that can be a little time intensive, so to make it even easier, I use ChatGPT to help me with this.

Basically I wrote a prompt (which you can grab here) that tells the tool how to scan my article, and create each type of Schema – so I can then copy and paste it into the backend of my article.

Its not fully automated like with the plugin tools, but its still faster than doing it myself.

Here’s how it works:

The prompt is going to create the 3 schemas for you one after the next.

However, because Schema code can be quite long and memory intensive, ChatGPT can struggle. (This is a common issue when it comes to large memory and writing content. However there are ways to get around this).

The first thing we do is enter the core prompt.

It not only tells the tool what we’re going to do, but it also tells it how we want to stagger this process so we can get around the memory issues.

Smart eh?

Then it will ask you for the URL of the page you want to add Schema for, so that it can go read the page. (You could also just paste the finished draft in if you want to do that instead. Just make sure to tell it the final URL so it knows how to fit this into your breadcrumbs.)

And just like that, it will smash out the first schema for you.

I recommend then opening up notepad on your computer and copy and pasting this across.

Then tell the tool you’ve done that and it will start the 2nd schema for you which is the article Schema.

It will ask you for a few details such as the Image URL, your brand logo and others.

Tell it what it wants, and then it’ll give you this new schema also.  (If you’ve given the live URL, the tool will try and grab these for you).

Then copy and paste that across into notepad also.

However, you’ll notice in this particular schema it will say “Copy article body here”.

This is to make sure we don’t miss any of the article content if we were to rely on the tool on its own to do this.

So head across to your article (or draft) and then simply copy and paste the body section from your article, and then paste it into the schema in the spot instead – making sure that its still between the “”.

Once you’ve done that, head back to ChatGPT and ask it to continue and it will now create the FAQ schema for you. It will scan your article for common questions and your answers and then write them out for you, so that you can check they are correct like so.

You can edit them or simply let it know they are correct and then it will write the FAQ schema for you to copy and paste just like before.

Easy right?

And just like that, you now have the 3 main Schema that you need to help optimize your article. the last steps are to check if the code has any issues by running it through a quick tool – and then adding it to our article.

Here’s how to do these.

How to check if your Schema code works

Google has a free tool that you can copy and paste your code into and it will examine to see if there are any issues – as well as let you know whats working and included in the code.

Delete the placeholder code and copy your own, and then hit test.

It will then run and show you it works, and what its found – like so:

(Sidenote: I cover how to fix any errors in the video).

Once you have your code approved and working, head across to your CMS to add it.

How to manually add your Schema code in WordPress

All platforms are different. Usually what you’ll find is a section to add header or footer code for each specific page 9so that its unique to that page).

All you have to do then is copy it in and hit save and you’re good to go!

Now it’s your turn

So as you can see, it’s fairly easy to rank in AI Search. All you need is good content that matches EEAT + Schema to win.

Simple!

You just need to do it, so make sure to optimize your own articles today.

P.S.

And don’t forget – you can grab my custom ChatGPT prompts to help you do this schema here. (Simply click across and enter your email, and I’ll send it to you ASAP).