We have all noticed that now whenever you search on Google, the top result is no longer a featured snippet in a grey box with a short answer to your question, it is an AI answer from Gemini. At the top of the screen, it shows an “AI Overview” that pulls information that it thinks will be relevant to your question from multiple sources. This is a feature that Google has recently added, and many business owners who have invested in improving their organic ranking for years are wondering how this will impact customers finding them.

Google produced a guid about how to best optimize your website for generative AI features on Google Search. The guide talks about the differences and similarities and overall best practices for SEO, which drives every business’ organic ranking. To better understand the AI features, you need to understand how it works. Google Search’s AI pulls information from relevant websites and combines it into a helpful response. That’s why creating clear, useful, and trustworthy content is more important than ever. Google looks at a mix of factors, “experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, or what we call E-E-A-T” (Source). Google says that while this is not a specific ranking factor, the search engine puts results that strongly align with E-E-A-T higher.  With this information, it can generate a helpful response with clickable links to the web pages.

How to Show Up in AI Search

Google has listed a few best practices that you can do for your website to understand what matters most to AI. Let’s look at what those are.

1. Be Unique. To make your website stand out, don’t recycle other’s content. Your website should provide something that others don’t. This also means that your website shouldn’t have content that could easily be created by generative AI. Uniqueness makes your website feel necessary for the searcher.
2. Write Non-Commodity Content. Non commodity content isn’t based in simple, common knowledge; it may require research or an expert who has experiences beyond the everyday person’s knowledge. Commodity content would be “Top 10 Things to Think About When Installing a New Deck”, in comparison Non-Commodity Content would be “How Trex Decks’ Composite Deck Boards are Engineered To Give You a Deck You can Enjoy For Years”. You can see how non-commodity content is specific, includes an expert perspective and is more attractive to read.
3. Organize. Your content should be organized in a way that is easy to understand. This doesn’t mean that you should break your content into smaller paragraphs just for AI to understand. Organized content is what matters, and you should organize it in a way that makes sense for YOUR audience! The use of high-quality images and videos is also important for AI and Google Search overall. The AI Overview at the top may even include images, and it will search for the best quality.
4. Relevance. Google’s newest AI features have increased its ability to determine the relevance of pages. Remember that a higher quantity of pages and creating separate content for every variation that you think people will search violates the spam policy and hurts SEO in the long run.

Visibility that Drives Growth

At the end of the day, Google emphasizes that you should “focus on what your visitors would enjoy, find helpful, and feel satisfied with after visiting your website” (Source). Instead of looking for “hacks”, prioritize strategies that will actually improve your SEO over time. Don’t overthink formatting for AI, create special machine-readable files, or try to force inauthentic mentions to “improve” SEO. Google’s generative AI features are designed to push high-quality, useful content and filter out the unnecessary spam.

As but to become the helpful, credible choice customers find when they are ready to take action. If you want to strengthen your online presence and stay visible where your audience is already looking, MediaBrush Marketing can help you build an SEO strategy that supports long-term growth.