AI Search Best Practices
Before you dive too deep into AI search, ensure that you have the basics right. These elements are non-negotiable.
Your Website Must Work
Make sure it loads quickly, works on phones, and has a valid SSL certificate.
You Need a Blog
Publish monthly at a minimum. You can use AI to ideate but make sure a human is involved somewhere for clarity and real value.
Claim Your Socials
Claim all social profiles and try to actually use them. Link socials in your footer and in all press releases. Use consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) across all platforms.
Reviews Are More Important Than Ever
Reviews serve as powerful trust signals for AI systems. This is why new brands struggle to rank — they lack the social proof that AI models weight heavily.
Automate review collection: Send emails after transactions asking for feedback. Route 4-5 star ratings to review platforms. Route 3 stars or below to customer service.
Incentivize strategically: Especially when starting, offer discounts, freebies, or gifts to reach 20+ reviews quickly. Follow platform rules but get creative.
Register everywhere:
- For software: G2, Capterra, TrustPilot, Gartner
- For services: Yelp, Google Business Profile, industry-specific platforms
Cycle through platforms to build reviews on more than just one site.
Submit Your Site to Bing
ChatGPT, Copilot, and several other AI systems rely heavily on Bing's search index. Bing is 3-5x easier to rank on than Google.
Submit your website to Bing Webmaster Tools and set up IndexNow. This takes less than 10 minutes and substantially improves your ChatGPT and Copilot rankings.
Track Your Results
AI Citation Frequency: Manually search your target queries monthly in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, or use a tracking tool like Otterly to make it easier and much more predictable.
AI Referral Traffic: Track traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, and bing.com/chat in Google Analytics. Target 10%+ of total traffic from AI sources within 6 months.
AI Conversion Rate: Segment conversions by source. AI traffic should convert 3-7x better than cold search traffic. Target conversion rate above 5%.
Bonus: Implement Structured Data
Use schema.org structured data tags to tell robots what your site is about. Use organization schema on your homepage, article schema on blog posts, product schema where applicable, FAQ schema on key pages, and breadcrumb schema for navigation.