During keyword research for this article, we found that less than 100 people search for these terms monthly.
But AI keeps advancing. And it’s always looking for new data — often urgently.
Today we’re going to talk about the mechanics behind AI—what it considers valid when constructing its response—and how you can make your content interesting to it.
Let’s learn more about indexing for AI? Let’s first understand the current situation.
AI is Hungry for Data — and It’s Getting Scarcer
The main engine of a Generative Artificial Intelligence system — especially NLP ( Natural Language Processing ) models — needs data to be able to create its results.
This isn’t news. But the point is, we’ve always country email list thought this data was practically infinite—while AI learns from a dataset , barred list technology will be an advanced more data is being created and made available daily.
The point is that AI is starting to find problems in its data sources.
Recently, several datasets — entities that collect high-quality links and data and make them available or sell them — are creating restrictions on the capture of their content.
In a recent article in The New York Times we see several of these valuable content aggregators closing their doors completely to AI.
For SEOs reading this, here’s an important piece of information: these datasets are preventing your content from being read directly from robots.txt. The AI is completely prevented from even knowing what these datasets contain.
Some data sources go even further, even suing OpenAI—as was the case with the New York Times and several other content creators.
AI needs quality data. But we’re going a bit beyond what we need here.
When it comes to SEO, SEM, and search in general , AI doesn’t need in- depth data on certain topics. But it still needs it.
A quick aside to talk about this for a moment. And then we’ll talk more about how to actually do SEO for AI:
The Nature of Generative AI Data for Search
It turns out that this lack of data that AI caseno data faces and will continue to face is not directly related to our work in organic traffic and content marketing.
We are constantly producing content, and we won’t stop any time soon.
What we understand about the current scenario is quite simple: AI is here, and it’s fueled by the content brands produce.
Now, what’s happening is that new search engines are emerging with AI — notably SearchGPT and Google Gemini, already included in Google searches around the world.
These systems have a ranking system similar to Google’s own, and cite the sources that helped compose their answers.
This is one of the points that illustrates the need to do SEO for AI — to be one of those authoritative source links.
But there is also another reason: to control the narrative about your segment and your brand.
If you’re in a very specific niche, you need AI to be able to deliver accurate answers to simple questions. It’s a business matter.
For example, you’re working on large-scale HDPE piping installation. The AI needs to be able to inform the user about the characteristics of HDPE and why it’s better than other materials in this context.
This is the need for AI-enabled SEO. And this is the time—when capabilities are still in their infancy, and we don’t live in a landscape as competitive as SEO was a few years ago.
How to do SEO for AI?
Technically, there are still no practical methodologies focused on SEO for AI.
For example: conventional SEO, focused on search engines, came with some rules that are still used today.
The hierarchy of headings , for example, or the presence of backlinks that make your site more attractive to search engines.
AI also has its own rules, which are quite similar. Subtitle placement, clean code, and even some EEAT points are shared between conventional Google and the AIs that catalog your content.
This is for a very simple reason: most of the on-page SEO work is related to the user experience when reading that specific result.
The same goes for AI SEO. The tweaks to appear in AI are not very complex or completely new, most of the time.
Generally, you’ll need to follow some precepts more closely related to your editorial and research needs, and a few technical adjustments related to structured data, in the case of Gemini.
Let’s understand each point better now. Let’s go together:
Continue to Rank Well on Google
The first step is simple: to have your content scanned and indexed by any AI, the best way is to continue placing content on the first page of search engines, especially Google.
It’s no secret that ChatGPT’s very first source of information was Google.
Long before it started having problems with reliable data sources, Google had already been scanned and indexed almost entirely by most NLPs.
And GPT-4 has direct access to Google, including being able to list the first 10 results for a given keyword:
So, it’s best to continue investing in creating SEO-optimized content to appear in AI.
They say that Google will end because of AI, but it is not over yet, and it is the main source of information that AI uses in the vast majority of results.
In fact, when we talked earlier about the lack of data that AI faces, much of this blackout was due to the indexing block requested by Reddit.
Reddit is an old acquaintance for those who use Google regularly. As it is a constantly evolving database, it has started to dominate the top of searches made in English.
It didn’t take long for the AI to use Reddit as a source:
In fact, Google had to make a $60 million deal with Reddit to be able to use these posts.
So, continuing to work on classic SEO with the goal of appearing at the top of Google is, at least for now, the dominant factor in AI SEO.
This even has a name: Search Everywhere Optimization. More on that in the next topic.
The New SEO — Search Everywhere Optimization
What we need to understand now is that SEO, then, is no longer an effort to simply appear on Google.
It’s an effort to make your content appear everywhere — on Google, AIs, and wherever else search exists.
That last sentence is important. The arrival of AI has put the internet’s largest institution in check—the famous “Google it.”
Everyone now understands that Google is no longer the only way to get answers to your questions. It’s a medium . One primarily geared toward those who want human-written answers in text format.
What the new SEO proposes is that each piece of content exists within a search ecosystem, which encompasses much more than good old Google.