Search behaviour is changing: instead of reading ten results, many people read an AI summary from Google's AI Overviews / AI Mode, or ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity directly. The question for site owners: how do you still get mentioned and clicked?

What Google says

In AI features and your website on Google Search Central, Google explains that:

• AI Overviews and AI Mode show links to websites so people can dig deeper.
• These features may run several related searches ("query fan-out"), so they can surface a wider set of pages than classic results.
• Core SEO best practices still apply — there's no special trick beyond helpful content and a crawlable site.

In short: a solid SEO foundation is the foundation for appearing in AI answers.

7 things to do now

1. Answer directly and clearly

Open each service page or article with a direct answer to its main question, then go into detail. Use question-style H2/H3s, comparison tables and step lists — formats that are easy to cite.

2. Real, specific, sourced information

Numbers, price ranges, timelines, processes — specific, sourced content beats generic copy. Show when it was last updated.

3. Show expertise and the people behind it

About page, post authors, real projects, client reviews. For local businesses: consistent name, address and phone everywhere.

4. Structured data

Organization/LocalBusiness, Service, Product, Article, FAQ (only for genuine Q&A) and BreadcrumbList help machines understand exactly what a page is.

5. Fast, machine-readable pages

Main content in the HTML (not entirely JavaScript-dependent), good speed, and no accidental crawler blocks in robots.txt. See the technical SEO checklist.

6. Decide on AI crawlers

Besides Googlebot, many AI companies run their own crawlers. You can allow or block them in robots.txt: blocking makes it harder to appear in that tool's answers; allowing means your content can be cited but also used for summaries. Decide deliberately rather than by default.

7. Consider llms.txt

llms.txt is a proposal (by Jeremy Howard in 2024, spec at llmstxt.org): a Markdown file at your site root that summarises the site and lists key pages for language models. It is not an official standard, and how much major AI tools actually use it is unclear — but it's cheap to add:

# ABC Company
 
> WordPress and WooCommerce websites for businesses in Ho Chi Minh City.
 
## Services
- [Web design](https://example.com/services/web-design/): business sites and stores
- [Maintenance](https://example.com/services/maintenance/): updates, backups, security
 
## Contact
- [Contact](https://example.com/contact/)

How to measure

• Search Console: impressions and clicks from Google (appearances in Google's AI features are included in the Performance report).
• In Analytics, track referrals from AI tools (e.g. chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com).
• Ask AI assistants the questions your customers ask and see whether your site is mentioned.

Wrapping up

AI search doesn't kill SEO — it rewards sites with helpful, specific, trustworthy content and solid technical foundations. That's exactly what my web design and SEO services focus on. Want your site reviewed for the AI era? Get in touch.

Sources

• Google Search Central — AI features and your website
• llmstxt.org — The /llms.txt file