Tips on getting AI-powered search engines to display your content.

AI-powered search engines, like Google’s AI Overview, Bing’s Copilot, and Perplexity, analyze information from trustworthy sites, then display summarized responses. Google’s AI Overview and Bing’s Copilot often display these results at the top of search engine results pages. These results can also include links to the sources used to generate them, and links to other related and credible sites.

When generating a response, AI-powered search engines look for sites that are well-structured, clearly organized, and concisely written. This is also true for AI-powered chatbots, like ChatGPT and Gemini. Review this guide for tips on improving your content’s reach and visibility in AI-powered search engines and chatbots. This process is also known as generative engine optimization, or answer engine optimization.

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Allow crawlers to access your content

All public pages on the internet are accessible by both humans and machines, also known as web crawlers. These crawlers may index your site for various reasons depending on the company doing the crawling (for example, Google including your site in their AI search results). If you limit crawlers’ access to your content, it’s unlikely that your content will appear in the search results.

To ensure AI crawlers can scan your site:

1. Open the Settings panel.
2. Click Crawlers.
3. If it’s not already, uncheck the box next to Block known artificial intelligence crawlers.

Create high-quality content

Developers typically train AI-powered search engines to prioritize content that shows the following qualities:

• Experience - Create original content with unique insights and fresh perspectives.
• Expertise - Provide accurate and up-to-date information supported with statistics, sources, and expert opinions. Include publish and update dates if possible.
• Authoritativeness - Add author profiles with credentials, expert commentary, case studies, awards and certifications. Link to trustworthy external sources and your own relevant content.
• Trustworthiness - Create clear about, contact, and policy pages to show who you are, what you do, and how to contact you.

Use clear language

To provide quick, digestible information, AI-powered search engines typically prioritize content that’s easy to process and understand. When writing content:

• Give your visitors the information they need concisely and quickly on the page. Short paragraphs and clear language are more likely to appear as a direct answer in search results.
• Clear headings and subheadings can help AI-powered search engines understand the structure and formatting of your content.
• Bullet points, numbered lists, tables, and frequently asked question sections are easy to process. AI-powered search engines often use them verbatim in search results.
• Avoid jargon and overly complex sentences. Instead, use direct, conversational phrasing. AI tools often prioritize content that matches the way people naturally speak.

Tip: If you need help writing site content, learn more about creating site content with the Squarespace AI tool.

Avoid keyword stuffing

Older search engine technology used to match search terms to the same words on sites, making keywords an important SEO strategy. This led to people adding an excessive number of keywords to improve SEO rankings, also known as keyword stuffing.

AI-powered search engines use natural language processing to better understand the meaning and context of searches and site content. This means that keyword stuffing and similar SEO tactics may become less effective. For example, Google released the helpful content update in 2022, which prioritizes useful content over content created primarily for SEO ranking.

Your content should answer what your visitors really want to know, rather than focusing only on targeting the right words.

Build trust in your brand

Search engines prioritize credible brands, and there are several steps you can take to improve brand credibility:

• Increase links from other trusted sites that direct visitors to your site (backlinks), through promotion and contacting potential resources
• Include reviews and testimonials on your site and third-party platforms
• Promote brand or product mentions in places such as forums, Q&A sites, and communities like Reddit, Quora, YouTube, and LinkedIn
• Claim your business on Google Business, Bing Places, and similar tools
• Use consistent branding across platforms

SEO strategies still apply

Many of the strategies we suggest to increase your site's visibility to search engines can also be applied to AI-powered search engines, such as:

• Indexing your site after you first publish, and reindexing after making changes
• Adding relevant metadata like page and site titles, alt text for images, tags and categories, and SEO titles
• Using strategic keywords while avoiding keyword stuffing
• Focusing on site structure
• Speeding up your page load time and ensuring your site is mobile-friendly
• Securing your connection

Test your content

To learn how AI tools summarize or reference your content, experiment with the different models listed below by prompting them to summarize your site or a page of your site:

• Gemini
• Perplexity.ai
• ChatGPT
• Microsoft Copilot

Next steps

As the generative AI (GenAI) landscape evolves, it’s important to stay informed and adapt your content strategy to stay visible in search results:

• Keep up with new features and industry best practices
• Continuously test and measure your visibility in different AI platforms and change your strategies accordingly
• Track how much site traffic comes from AI-powered tools in the Traffic Sources section of your Analytics panel.
• Use various SEO tools to help with this process, like Squarespace’s AI SEO tool
• Register for our Scale your marketing with AI SEO and email automations webinar where we'll focus on making your site easier to find through AI search and building stronger connections with your audience using email marketing.