How to Get Mentioned in Google’s AI Search Results

To understand how to get mentioned in Google’s AI search results, start with a solid SEO foundation and then tailor your content to fit AI’s new attention span.

AI Overviews focus on answering the searcher’s question, including longer, more complex, and even multimodal questions.

Traditional SEO strategies already have the goal of answering searchers’ questions, so while the system changes, the goals do not. Learn how to enhance what you’re already doing, so you get mentioned in Google’s AI search results.

Where to Start: The Foundation of Good SEO

Before trying to cater to AI algorithms, ensure your SEO fundamentals are locked down.

E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

E-E-A-T is more important than ever with AI Overviews. The algorithm pulls from trusted sources to ensure it shares accurate answers.

So, how do you establish E-E-A-T within content?

• Find high-quality original resources and reference them (government and educational sites, peer-reviewed research, etc.)
• Interview subject matter experts
• Add biographies of yourself or team members, highlighting their expertise (example: check out the bio of our Founder & CEO, Bryan Phelps)
• Carefully select user-generated content; you want to share experiences but not make non-experts appear as experts (think curated reviews vs. a forum)

Learn how Big Leap leveraged Awardco’s $1B valuation to get cited more in AI spaces.

Site Health: An Organized Website Is a Happy Website

Technical SEO is more important than ever. Google Search bots and other AI algorithms need to be able to read your site.

Here’s how to do it:

• Check your robots.txt directives
• Make sure Googlebot isn’t blocked
• Keep access open to AI bots
• Ensure all index-worthy pages are accessible
• Ensure your site offers a strong responsive experience
• Implement structured data to help AI quickly parse information

SEO Ranking

While ranking for the top organic search results does not guarantee citations in the AIO, or visibility in AI mode, there is a strong correlation with ranking on the 1st page of search results and performing well in AI search. AI tends to take information from and cite the top search results. AI chooses those sources because they excel at the technical and content aspects of SEO.

How You Can Restructure Content for AI

Once you have handled the fundamentals, here are some content changes for the new AI age.

Direct Answers and Scannability

Have you ever pulled up an article, seen that it was really long, and then immediately backed out of it? AI is the same, so you need to adjust your content accordingly. Now this doesn’t mean that long, detailed content doesn’t have value—it certainly does.

What it means is that you want to answer immediately (think TL;DR) and then expand within the article—especially in the introduction. AI is more likely to cite your content if you have direct questions and answers.

For example: “What does a first-time cat owner need? Food, toys, a litter box, and a carrier.” After that, you can expand on this answer by discussing different types of food, what toys are good based on a cat’s age, finding a vet, etc.

Another way to improve scannability is to use:

• Bullet points
• Short paragraphs
• Tables
• Lots of subheadings to break up your text

Maybe you’ve noticed that we’ve been doing this within this article.

Query Fan-Out

A query fan-out references related search topics or terms around the subject you’re writing about. Consider “how to lose weight.”

A query fan-out might include:

• “Healthy meals that are easy to make”
• “Exercises that are good for beginners”
• “Medication that helps with weight loss”

By covering multiple related subjects within a piece, your content will be seen as more informative and more likely to be cited in AI overviews.

Fresh Content

Did you know that AI considers how current an article is, on top of its relevance and helpfulness? It’s true!

You can improve established content by updating it with new, relevant information, such as statistics or viewpoints, or by removing outdated information.

You Don’t Need to Rewrite Everything for AI

While it’s good to adapt to the always-changing world of SEO, it’s important to remember that the fundamentals are fundamentals for a reason. So, while you’re altering content to be more AI-friendly, don’t sacrifice SEO foundations to do so.

Instead, balance the two to create content that will be the most helpful for readers.

Need help with this transition? Big Leap can help! Contact us today.