The current SEO landscape

Artificial intelligence is significantly reshaping search engine optimization (SEO). Google’s AI overviews and other AI-driven search models now generate direct answers instead of traditional link-based results, reducing organic traffic to websites. Generative AI tools are increasingly replacing traditional search engines. As AI’s role in search grows, website managers must adapt to maintain visibility and engagement.

This article explores how AI is changing SEO, the challenges website managers and marketers face, and actionable strategies to ensure your content remains visible in generative AI-based search results.

How AI is transforming SEO

Loss of traffic for informational queries

AI-powered search models generate direct answers, reducing organic traffic for informational websites. AI-generated answers can sometimes provide users with the information they need without them clicking through to your website, reducing overall traffic. Websites that rely heavily on ranking for question-based searches have seen lower click-through and decreased engagement as users get answers directly from AI results on the search results page.

For CSU’s news website, Source, over 95% of the queries that brought in traffic from AI overviews were informational in nature. Brand queries, events and personalities rarely triggered AI overviews.

Read Ahrefs’ AI Traffic Study for more insights.

AI content overload and indexing challenges

The rapid generation of AI-created content has overwhelmed search engines, leading to stricter crawl budgets. Crawl budget refers to the number of pages that Googlebot (or other search engine crawlers) will crawl and index on your website within a specific timeframe. This budget is determined by two key factors:

1. How much crawling your website’s server can handle without performance issues. Faster, well-optimized servers allow more frequent crawling.
2. How often search engine bots wants to crawl your pages based on their importance, popularity, and how often they’re updated.

While AI-generated web content is not being penalized yet, in the future we might see websites with high volumes of low-authority AI-generated content struggle to get indexed. Google (and other bots) will eventually prioritize high-quality, authoritative content over AI-generated spam.

The shift to intent-based optimization

Intent-based optimization is not new to SEOs. AI-driven search prioritizes content that matches user intent rather than just keyword density on the page. Google’s AI algorithms focus on relevance, expertise, and engagement signals to determine rankings. To succeed, content creators must align their strategies with how AI interprets search queries.

Ethical and environmental considerations

Training and deploying large generative AI models require substantial computational power, consuming electricity, and also water for cooling data centers. This could be another reason why Google and others could get really stingy with their crawl budget allocations.

AI-generated content raises concerns about plagiarism and intellectual property rights. It is very common for AI systems to “hallucinate” when they are not trained on the right dataset or cannot find the right information matching the query.

Generative AI companies are being sued left, right and center for violating copyright laws. Wired has maintained a log of major lawsuits against these companies which serves as a stark reminder of the changing times. Institutions and large content repositories such as the New York Times and Quora have blocked AI bots from crawling their web content.

However, banning AI bots entirely may not be the best strategy, as featuring in AI-generated search results can drive significant traffic. In fact, here is a screenshot of our news website’s traffic from AI sources such as ChatGPT and Perplexity over the last year.

As people’s search preferences change and as generative AI becomes first point of search, these trends will increase and we will scramble to get our websites in AI-generated search results.

How to get your website into AI-generated search results

The key to future-proofing your websites’ visibility is to have basic foundational SEO in place: Fast loading pages, simple navigation structure, contextual internal linking, and long tail keywords used in content.

Optimize for AI-powered search engines

AI-generated answers tend to pull content from authoritative sources, so your website must be:

Well–structured: Having a simple website navigation and using structured data markup could increase the likelihood of appearing in AI-generated answers.

Trustworthy: Citing credible data and references could improve your chances of being featured. Adding author-bios and quotes from researchers and experts could help your website feature in AI overviews.

Improve your crawl budget

As mentioned above, GPT-powered search results lead to a drain of resources. Companies are likely to be mindful of the resources they spend in the near future. It makes sense for website managers and marketers to ensure the most important website pages are being crawled by GPT bots. Following are a few steps you can take to improve your website crawl budget:

• Speed up your website: Faster websites enable better crawling and indexing.
• Fix broken links and redirect chains: Poor site structure wastes crawl budget, reducing visibility for key pages.
• Optimize internal linking: Ensure important pages are accessible to search engine bots. Internal linking is critical in the age of AI. Employ contextual linking to pass SEO value to deeper pages of the website.
• Maintain updated XML sitemaps and Robots.txt file: These files guide search engines in prioritizing key pages for indexing.

Consider these best practices related to content-creation:

• Write for users first, AI second: While structuring content for AI is essential, human engagement remains the priority.
• Leverage FAQs: Targeting core keywords as questions have long been a strategy for ranking on Google. Conversational content is more likely to be included in AI-generated snippets.
• Build content around audience personas: It is likely that by the time someone is searching for a topic on Google and other AI search platforms, they are being provided personalized results based on their search history and behavior. So, it becomes important to truly understand your audience, build personas and write content tailored to those personas. As an example, if your audience segment is in-state prospective students, it’d be better to have pages such as Visit, Scholarships, Tuition etc. catering to this segment.

Strengthen the brand

We talked about the rise of zero-click searches for informational searches. According to study by SparkToro in 2024, only about 40% of queries on Google lead to a click. Attracting new visitors from search alone could get increasingly difficult. Since AI search models (mostly) favor reputable sources, increasing domain authority is crucial.

• Build topical authority: Publish in-depth, expert-driven content on topics relevant to your brand. Create an internal linking mesh connecting pages around one topic.
• Build an omni-channel strategy: Relying heavily on one marketing channel will limit the potential your brand has in the AI era. Building a strong social media presence, leveraging affiliates, content creators and influencers will be crucial for brands to stay top-of-mind. Earlier this month, Google officially rolled out AI Mode, where multimodal search (text, voice, and images) will be a key feature-another reason why brands should focus on an omni-channel strategy.
• Earn high-quality backlinks: Mentions from authoritative sites boost credibility. Original, high quality content tends to draw links from other high quality websites.

Preparing for the future of AI in SEO

AI is revolutionizing search, requiring website owners to rethink their SEO strategies. Instead of relying solely on keyword optimization, focus on structured, authoritative, and engaging content. By optimizing for AI-driven search, improving crawl efficiency, and strengthening brand credibility, websites can remain visible in this new era of search.