AI Visibility

How to optimize your website for AI search

The Orchestra Team · September 23, 2026 · 6 min read

There's an emerging industry of AI-search hacks: special files, special formatting, special keyword formulas, secret schemas.

Most businesses should start somewhere much less exciting — building a website that is technically accessible, unambiguous and genuinely useful. Google's guidance is unusually direct about this: "From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO."

Here's a practical framework.

1. Make your content crawlable

Check robots.txt, noindex directives, canonicalization, JavaScript rendering, broken pages, internal links and sitemap health.

For Google, pages need to be indexed and eligible for normal Search to participate in generative AI experiences. For ChatGPT search, ensure OAI-SearchBot isn't blocked — in robots.txt or by a WAF rule that quietly denies its IP ranges.

2. State clearly what you do

Your homepage should communicate business + category + audience + problem + differentiation.

Weak: "unlock your potential." Better: "AI marketing software for small businesses that creates campaigns, social content, advertising concepts and SEO recommendations."

Specific positioning creates clearer context.

3. Create topic clusters

Don't think only in keywords — think in areas of expertise. A GEO platform might build AI visibility as a hub, linked to GEO, SEO vs GEO, ChatGPT visibility, AI citations, competitor visibility and measurement.

That creates depth without hundreds of near-duplicate pages.

4. Answer real questions

Ask sales, support and customers what prospects repeatedly ask before buying. Those questions are content opportunities.

Create answers complete enough to be genuinely useful without forcing every reader into a sales funnel.

5. Publish information others cannot easily reproduce

This is the biggest opportunity. AI summarizes generic information extremely well, so generic content becomes less differentiated. Your advantage is what the model doesn't automatically know: your data, experience, methodology, research, experiments, customer patterns and expert judgment.

Google recommends firsthand experience and unique perspectives rather than reproducing existing web knowledge.

6. Support claims

Don't write "customers love our software." Write "in our 2026 customer survey, X% named Y as the feature they used most" — and expose the methodology where you can.

Microsoft's guidance for AI answers makes the same point: "examples, data, and cited sources help build trust when content is reused."

7. Keep information current

Review pages periodically and update pricing, product features, company descriptions, statistics, locations, dates, screenshots and team information. Stale information creates conflicting signals and poor user experiences.

8. Use structured data correctly — but don't obsess over it

Structured data remains useful SEO infrastructure where appropriate. But there is no special "GEO schema": Google says there's "no special schema.org structured data that you need to add" for its AI features.

Use relevant schema because it accurately describes your content, not because someone promises it guarantees AI citations.

9. Ignore the llms.txt hype for Google

Google states you don't need to create machine-readable AI text files to appear in Search, and that doing so "will neither harm nor help your site's visibility or rankings in Google Search."

Other systems may develop different conventions. Don't mistake a proposed web standard for a universal GEO requirement.

10. Don't chunk your content for robots

A related myth says content must be split into small blocks for LLMs to parse. Google's optimization guide answers it directly: "There's no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it."

Clear headings, tables and FAQs help — because they help readers. Fragmenting an article into 50 disconnected snippets does not.

11. Measure what changes

Optimization without measurement becomes guesswork. Track AI mentions, citations, prompt coverage, competitor visibility, Search Console AI impressions where available, AI referral traffic and downstream conversions. Then repeat the audit.

The AI-search optimization loop

1. Measure — where are you visible now?
2. Diagnose — what is missing?
3. Improve — content, positioning, technical SEO or authority?
4. Publish.
5. Measure again.

That's far more sustainable than chasing every new GEO trick posted on social media.

Good GEO looks surprisingly like good marketing

Know your audience. Explain what you do. Publish useful information. Build credibility. Make it accessible. Measure whether you're being discovered.

The technology has changed. The fundamentals remain remarkably rational.

More to come

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