Users are relying increasingly on LLM agents and AI engines to gather their information about a business or topic, and are less likely to click through to actual webpages. So what are some ways you can optimise your website for AI results?
Implement Schema
Schema markup is a way of disambiguating search terms that may otherwise have ambiguous or multiple meanings. Traditional keyword-based SEO may not always return the most relevant results (for example, the search term “soft play” could refer to the punk rock band, Soft Play, or it could refer to a children’s creche facility.)
Implementing Schema markup helps to provide relevance and clarity for AI-generated answers. By informing AI engines of the entities on your site through Schema markup, you are avoiding potential “hallucinations” and inaccuracies in AI-generated search results that occur when machines interpret your content with no guidance.
Controlling this data safeguards your organisation’s credibility and demonstrates good E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness), which can also help with your search rankings.
Optimise Client Reviews
ChatGPT and other AI engines don’t pick up on Google Reviews because the reviews use JavaScript, which can’t (currently) be read by AI engines.
So what options do we have?
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Diversify reviews across multiple sites. Reference, quote and summarise your reviews in directories for discoverability like Reddit. Sites like TrustPilot, Facebook, Yelp etc. are crawlable third-party sites. This is helpful for SEO and GEO and avoids an “all eggs in one basket” approach.
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Add testimonials directly to your website. Mark them up with schema so AI tools can read them.
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Repurpose client feedback from emails, texts, or thank-you notes into website testimonials or short case studies.
In order for AI engines to pick up on a reviews page, create a standalone page marked up with review schema. Additionally, linking back to the review itself provides both transparency for the consumer, but also creates a backlink that helps AI engines make connections between your website and the original reviews pages.
Focus on Content
There are ways to further improve AI visibility for businesses. Ai engines are looking for content that is genuinely helpful, and can answer specific queries. Fulfilling niche content requests for your particular industry, like "what makes a garden shed liable for tax?" instead of broad, competitive phrases, like "garden room services" will help get your content noticed. It focuses on what people are asking, and AI engines like ChatGPT are geared towards giving these answers.
The more of this kind of content you have - featured in blog posts, news articles, or FAQs on your site - the better the chances of being featured on AI overviews.
It’s important not to rely on Google rankings alone. With click-through rates and reliance on classic search results declining in the AI-engine era, creating content that directly answers queries from users will help boost visibility.
Accurate schema mark-up for things like FAQ pages, how-to guides, and video content will contribute significantly to GEO, and enable Google rich results (videos are highly prioritised) which can encourage higher click-throughs in traditional search results.
The Importance of Rich Results
While click-through rate is decreasing exponentially due to these AI summaries, the display of rich results on Google can help increase search result visibility. Rich results are enhanced listings that display additional visual or interactive elements, such as carousels, images, ratings, and reviews, beyond the standard page text link in a set of search results.
Users are typically more likely to click on rich results that use additional visual displays, so adding structured data to enable these elements is a useful way to demarcate your site’s information from the rest of the listed results
According to the documentation on Google Search Central:
Google uses the structured data that it finds on the web to understand the content of the page, as well as to gather information about the web and the world in general, such as information about the people, books, or companies that are included in the markup. For example, when a recipe page has JSON-LD structured data (describing the title of the recipe, the author of the recipe, and other details), Google Search can use that information to display a rich result for the recipe.
See: introduction to structured data markup in Google Search
Video Google Results
Videos naturally attract more attention than text alone, particularly video previews and thumbnails which encourage visitors to click through. Adding the relevant structured data markup can ensure these elements are visible within listed Google search results.
Backlinks, which link from other sites to yours, are also a key factor in how Google ranks pages. Videos, especially those you create yourself, are much more likely to be linked to by other websites. For instance, if you make an informative ‘how to’ video related to your industry, other sites may choose to embed it on theirs, driving traffic back to your website.
YouTube or Vimeo?
YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine and is integrated with Google SERPs (video carousels, rich snippets, Knowledge Panels). Videos hosted on YouTube have a much higher chance of appearing in Google’s video results.
Google indexes YouTube content aggressively and tends to rank it above self-hosted or other-platform videos for broad queries. Its ease of optimisation, with its options for description, tags, chapters, transcripts/closed captions and rich thumbnails enables Google to quickly understand content.
Vimeo is a less Google-friendly option, however Vimeo does provide:
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Controlled embedding and page SEO: Vimeo Pro/Business offers privacy/embed controls and a clean player that can reduce distraction on your site, improving on-page SEO if the surrounding page is well optimized
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Brand experience and audience quality: Vimeo’s interface is ad-free and perceived as premium, which can produce better conversion even if raw discoverability is lower
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Avoiding platform redirects: If you want traffic to stay on your domain and prevent external calls-to-action that push users off-site, Vimeo’s hosting options give more control
Regardless of your video host, some important SEO/GEO tips are:
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Provide a full transcript and use it in the page content, as Google reads transcripts
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Implement VideoObject schema with accurate fields
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Optimise surrounding page (title tag, H1, meta description, internal links, fast load time)
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Use descriptive filenames, thumbnails, and chapter timestamps
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Ensure mobile-friendly video delivery and lazy-loading for page speed