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Same base, new surfaces

AI search vs SEO: what changes, and what doesn’t

Most of SEO still applies to AI search, because the AI answers you care about pull pages from a search index before they write anything. What changes is around the edges: there are more indexes and crawlers to think about, new controls, new reports, and an answer that paraphrases you instead of showing your title.

Why the base stays the same

Every major AI answer product that cites the web documents some kind of search step first.

  • Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode use its core ranking systems to retrieve pages from the Search index, then the model writes from them. Its optimization guide calls this retrieval-augmented generation, or grounding.
  • Microsoft says Copilot turns the prompt into a short query, sends it to Bing, and writes the response from what Bing returns. That is in its Copilot web search documentation.
  • OpenAI says ChatGPT search rewrites a question into one or more queries and sometimes sends them to other search providers. That is in its search help article.

If the search step cannot find, crawl, or index your page, the model never sees it. That is why Google’s guide says optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO.

What does not change

These come straight from Google’s AI features page and optimization guide. Most of them also apply to the other engines, because they are about being crawlable at all.

  • Indexing and snippets. To be a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. Google says there are no additional requirements.
  • Crawl access. Allow crawling in robots.txt and at your CDN or host.
  • Internal links. Link to important pages so they are easy to find.
  • Text and page experience. Keep important content in text. Make the page decent to use.
  • Structured data that matches the page. Useful for rich results. Not required for AI features, and Google says there is no special schema for them.
  • Quality and spam rules. Google’s spam policies still apply. Creating many pages mainly to manipulate rankings breaks its scaled content abuse policy, whether the target is a results page or an AI answer.
  • No guarantee. Meeting the requirements does not mean Google will index or show the page.

Google also lists things you can skip: llms.txt and other AI text files, special markup for AI, breaking pages into tiny chunks, and rewriting copy in a special style for models. Its systems handle synonyms, so you do not need every long-tail variant of a phrase.

What changes, part 1: more than one index

Classic SEO for most sites means Google, with Bing a distant second. AI answers spread that out. Each product reaches the web through its own crawler or its own search partner.

The search crawler each product documents. Allowing these is a separate decision from allowing training crawlers.
Product What it documents
Google AI Overviews and AI Mode Googlebot and the Google Search index. Same crawl as ordinary Search.
ChatGPT search OAI-SearchBot. Sites that block it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though a navigational link can still appear.
Perplexity PerplexityBot for search results. Perplexity-User fetches pages when a person asks, and generally ignores robots.txt.
Claude Claude-SearchBot. Anthropic says blocking it may reduce visibility and accuracy in search responses.
Microsoft Copilot The Bing search service. If Bing has not indexed a page, Copilot’s search step has nothing to return for it.

The practical change is a robots.txt review that names more agents than it used to, and a check that your firewall does not challenge them. The crawler guide covers each token and the training crawlers that sit next to them.

What changes, part 2: new controls

There are now controls that affect AI features without affecting the rest of search.

  • Google’s Search generative AI setting. Search Console has an include or exclude setting for AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative AI features in Discover. The help page says include is the default, and that the setting is not a ranking signal for the rest of Search. The AI Overviews guide walks through it.
  • Google-Extended. A robots.txt token for Gemini training and for grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI. Google’s crawler reference says it does not affect inclusion in Google Search and is not a ranking signal there.
  • Bing’s NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE. In a 2023 post, Bing said NOARCHIVE keeps content out of its chat answers and out of training, and NOCACHE limits chat answers to the URL, title, and snippet. Pages with either tag can still appear in Bing search results. The post was written when the product was called Bing Chat.

Check that none of these is set by accident. A theme or plugin that adds NOARCHIVE to every page has an effect that is easy to miss.

What changes, part 3: measurement

Rank tracking does not translate. A generated answer has no position 1 to 10. The reports that exist count different things:

  • Google Search Console. The Generative AI performance report counts impressions, meaning times a link to your site was shown in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Google also says that traffic is included in the regular Performance report under the Web search type.
  • Bing Webmaster Tools. The AI Performance report counts citations across Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and some partner integrations. It also shows a sample of grounding queries: the phrases the AI used when it retrieved your page.
  • Google Analytics 4. The default channel group now has an AI Assistant channel for visits from sources like ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Copilot, and Grok. Google says it excludes AI Overviews and AI Mode. OpenAI says ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it sends.

None of these shows the sentence an answer used about you. For that you still have to run the question and read it.

What changes, part 4: the answer paraphrases you

A results page shows your title and a snippet you can mostly control. A generated answer rewrites what it found. It can get your price wrong, describe last year’s plan, or say you serve a market you left. OpenAI’s help article says search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect.

The fix is ordinary: make the facts plain and consistent on your own pages. Say what the product is, who it is for, and what it costs, in text, near the top. Keep the pricing page current. Microsoft’s Bing team makes a similar point in its AI Performance post, recommending clear headings, tables, and FAQ sections, and keeping text, images, and video consistent about the same things.

Google also says its AI features may use query fan-out, running several related searches for one question. One consequence, and this is inference rather than something Google states: a page can be pulled in for a sub-question you never targeted, so a clear page on a narrow topic can be more useful than one broad page.

What changes, part 5: other people’s pages

Google’s optimization guide says its AI features can show what is said about products across the web, including blogs, videos, and forum discussions. In plain SEO, a review page that outranks you costs you a click. In an AI answer, it may decide what the answer says about you. The same guide warns that chasing inauthentic mentions is less useful than it looks, because ranking and spam systems still apply.

This is where a lot of AI visibility work actually goes: finding the pages that get cited for your category, and making sure what they say is accurate. The competitor guide covers how to read them.

A week split between the two

Classic SEO tasks that also serve AI answers:

  1. Check indexing and snippet eligibility for your key pages in Search Console.
  2. Fix internal links to your pricing and product pages.
  3. Make sure the first paragraph of each key page says what it is in plain words.

Tasks that are new:

  1. Review robots.txt and your firewall for OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Googlebot, and Bing.
  2. Check the Search generative AI setting in Search Console, and look for stray NOARCHIVE tags.
  3. Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools if you have not, and look at the AI Performance report.
  4. Run five buyer questions by hand with the manual check, and read what each answer says about you.

Related: what AEO means, and what GEO means.

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