How to Optimise Your Website for AI Search — A Practical Guide for Business Owners
You’ve heard about AI Search. You may have read that ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s own AI Overviews are changing the way people find information online. You may even have started to notice that your website traffic is softer than it used to be, without any obvious explanation.
The next question — the one most business owners arrive at fairly quickly — is a practical one: what do I actually do about it?
This page answers that question directly. It’s written for business owners, not developers. No jargon, no technical rabbit holes, no vague advice about “creating great content.” Just a clear, honest guide to the practical steps that make a real difference to how AI systems find, understand, and recommend your business.
First, Understand What AI Systems Are Looking For
Before diving into tactics, it helps to understand the basic principle behind all of them. AI systems — whether that’s ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity — are not matching keywords the way Google’s older algorithms did. They are making judgements about credibility, clarity, and relevance in a way that is much closer to how a knowledgeable human reader would evaluate a website.
When an AI is asked a question and reaches for sources to inform its answer, it is asking, implicitly: is this content clear enough to understand? Is it specific enough to be useful? Is this source trustworthy enough to cite?
Everything that follows flows from those three questions. The practical steps below are all, in one way or another, ways of answering “yes” to each of them.
Step One: Write for Humans, Structure for AI
The single most impactful thing most business owners can do to improve their AI visibility is to rewrite their website content with genuine clarity as the goal — not keyword density, not word count targets, not vague aspirational language, but actual clear, specific, useful information about what their business does and who it does it for.
AI systems are remarkably good at identifying content that was written to impress a search engine rather than to inform a reader. Pages that are padded with synonyms, stuffed with repetitive phrases, or written in the kind of corporate non-language that says a lot without actually communicating anything tend to be passed over in favour of content that is direct, well-organised, and genuinely informative.
Practically, this means using clear headings that describe what each section actually covers. It means writing in short, readable paragraphs rather than dense walls of text. It means using bullet points and numbered lists for information that is naturally list-like — AI systems find structured content significantly easier to parse and quote than unstructured prose. And it means getting to the point quickly rather than burying the useful information under paragraphs of preamble.
Step Two: Answer the Questions Your Customers Are Actually Asking
One of the clearest patterns in how AI systems select content is their preference for pages that directly answer specific questions. This is not a coincidence — AI search is largely driven by conversational, question-based queries, and the systems are naturally drawn to content that mirrors that structure.
The practical implication is that every website should have content that explicitly answers the questions a potential customer would ask. Not the questions a marketing manager would want them to ask — the questions they actually type into ChatGPT or Google at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday evening when they’re trying to solve a problem.
For a hotel, those questions might include: “what is the difference between a sea view room and an ocean front suite?”, “is the restaurant at X hotel suitable for a vegetarian?”, or “can non-residents use the pool?” For a solicitor, they might be: “how long does conveyancing take in Ireland?”, “what does a solicitor charge for probate?”, or “do I need a solicitor to make a will?” For a plumber: “why does my boiler keep losing pressure?”, “what is a power flush?”, or “how much does a new boiler cost to install?”
An FAQ section is the most obvious place to put this content, and it is one of the most consistently effective things you can add to a website for AI visibility. But the principle extends beyond FAQs — any page that is structured around answering a specific, real-world question is doing the right thing.
Step Three: Be Specific — Names, Places, Facts and Figures
This is one of the most underappreciated differences between traditional SEO and AI optimisation, and it’s one of the easiest to act on once you understand it.
AI systems have a strong preference for content that contains named, verifiable, specific information over content that communicates in generalities. “A beautiful hotel on Spain’s stunning Costa del Sol” tells an AI system very little. “A 55-room beachfront hotel on Mijas Costa, between La Cala de Mijas and Marbella, with a heated outdoor Polynesian Pool and an award-winning à la carte restaurant” gives it a great deal — specific names, specific features, a specific location, specific credentials.
The same principle applies in every sector. A solicitor’s website should name the areas of law it covers, the courts it practises in, and the specific types of client it serves. A restaurant should name its head chef, its cuisine style, its location relative to local landmarks, and its opening hours. A web developer should name the platforms they work with, the types of business they typically help, and the specific services they offer.
Go through your website with fresh eyes and ask: if an AI were reading this to answer a customer’s question, what specific, useful, verifiable information would it actually find? If the answer is “not much,” that’s the work to do.
Step Four: Add or Improve Your Schema Markup
Schema markup is a piece of technical code that you add to your website — invisible to visitors, but highly legible to AI systems and search engines — that explicitly tells them what your content is about. It’s the difference between an AI having to infer that your business is a hotel from reading your prose, and an AI being told directly: this is a hotel, here is its name, here is its address, here is its phone number, here are its facilities, here are its opening hours.
For most small business websites, the most valuable schema types to implement are LocalBusiness (or a specific subtype like Hotel, Restaurant, LegalService, MedicalClinic etc.), FAQPage, and Review or AggregateRating. These are the schema types that AI systems most frequently use to understand and surface local and service businesses.
You don’t need to be a developer to implement basic schema. Most WordPress websites can handle it through a plugin — Rank Math and Yoast both include schema functionality, and there are dedicated schema plugins for more specific needs. If you’re unsure what schema your site currently has (or doesn’t have), a web developer or an AIO specialist can audit it quickly and tell you exactly what needs adding.
Step Five: Build Your Off-Site Presence Consistently
AI systems don’t only look at your website when assessing whether your business is credible and worth recommending. They look at the broader digital footprint — the pattern of mentions, references, reviews, and citations that exist across the web.
A business that appears consistently across Google Business Profile, TripAdvisor, Yelp, industry directories, local press, and social media platforms presents a coherent, well-evidenced identity that AI systems can trust. A business that exists only on its own website, with no external corroboration, is much harder for an AI to assess with confidence.
Practically, this means making sure your Google Business Profile is complete, accurate, and regularly updated. It means actively encouraging reviews on Google and on the relevant platform for your sector — TripAdvisor for hospitality, Trustpilot for e-commerce, Houzz for home services, and so on. It means keeping your details consistent across every directory and listing that mentions your business — the same name, the same address format, the same phone number. And it means having some presence on at least the social media platforms where your customers are most active, even if that presence is modest.
Step Six: Keep Your Content Fresh
AI systems are being updated constantly with new indexed content, and sites that are regularly adding new, relevant material are consistently better represented in those updates than sites that have been static for months or years.
This doesn’t mean you need to publish a blog post every day. It means having a realistic content schedule — even one new piece per month — and sticking to it. Blog posts that answer specific questions, seasonal updates, case studies, news about your business, or guides relevant to your sector all serve the purpose. The goal is to signal to AI systems that this is a live, active, maintained website that continues to generate useful, current information.
Where to Start
If all of this feels like a lot, start with steps one and two. Rewrite your most important pages with genuine clarity and specific information, and add an FAQ section that answers the questions your customers actually ask. Those two changes alone will make a measurable difference to how AI systems perceive and recommend your business.
If you’d like a clearer picture of where your website currently stands — what it’s doing well, where the gaps are, and what the priority actions would be — a straightforward AI Search audit is the fastest way to get there.
At FreeAssortment.net, that’s exactly what we offer: practical, specific, honest guidance for business owners who want to be visible and competitive in the new world of AI Search. Get in touch at office@freeassortment.net or call (+353) 89 488 5089, and let’s take a look at what your website needs.
FreeAssortment.net | Web Development & Digital Marketing | Kenmare, Kerry & Mijas Costa, Spain
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