What Is AI SEO? And How Is It Different From Traditional SEO?

What is AI SEO?

AI SEO is the practice of optimising your website and brand so AI-powered search tools can find, trust, cite and recommend you. That covers Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, and AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, which now answer questions directly instead of just listing links.

That’s the definition we use, and it’s the one that matters for most businesses. But if you search for “what is AI SEO”, you’ll find the term used in quite different ways. Before going further, it’s worth clearing that up.

AI SEO has two meanings

We checked the top nine results for “what is AI SEO” and found no agreement on what the term means.

• 2 of 9 define it as using AI tools to do SEO: writing content, researching keywords or building links with software such as ChatGPT. Salesforce and Shopify take this view.
• 3 of 9 define it as optimising for AI-powered search, so your content appears in AI-generated answers. Search Engine Land takes this view, and Wikipedia’s “AI SEO” entry redirects straight to generative engine optimisation.
• 4 of 9 mix both meanings together.

The difference matters when you hire help. An agency selling “AI SEO” may mean it uses AI to produce content faster, which is a way of working, not a result. Or it may mean it will improve how AI search tools represent your business. Always ask which they mean.

In this guide, AI SEO means the second: being visible in AI-powered search. We cover the first meaning briefly at the end.

Why AI SEO matters now

AI answers are changing how people use search results, and fewer of them click through to websites. Pew Research Center tracked 68,879 real Google searches by 900 US adults in March 2025 and found:

• when an AI summary appeared, people clicked a traditional result 8% of the time, compared with 15% when there was no summary
• only 1% of visits involved clicking a link inside the AI summary itself
• people ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with an AI summary, against 16% without

The same shift is happening in the UK. Ofcom estimates that around 30% of UK searches now show an AI Overview. If people get their answer without clicking, the brands named and cited in that answer are the ones that benefit.

How AI SEO differs from traditional SEO

Ranking well in Google doesn’t guarantee you’ll appear in AI answers, especially outside Google. In a study of 15,000 queries, Ahrefs found that:

• only 12% of the pages cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity ranked in Google’s top 10 for the same query
• for ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, the figure was around 8%; Perplexity was highest at 28.6%
• 80% of AI assistant citations didn’t rank in Google for that query at all

Google’s own AI Overviews behave differently. Ahrefs found 76% of their citations come from pages in Google’s top 10. Traditional SEO strength carries over well to AI Overviews, but much less to standalone AI assistants.

What earns visibility is different too. In a study of 75,000 brands, Ahrefs found that how often a brand is mentioned across the web correlated far more strongly with appearing in AI Overviews (0.664) than the number of backlinks it had (0.218).

In short:

• Goal. Traditional SEO: rank a page in a list of links. AI SEO: be cited, named or recommended in an AI-written answer.
• Where you appear. Traditional SEO: Google and Bing results pages. AI SEO: AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude.
• What counts most. Traditional SEO: relevance, links and technical health. AI SEO: all of those, plus clear answers, a well-defined brand and mentions on trusted sites.
• How it’s measured. Traditional SEO: rankings, clicks and traffic. AI SEO: mentions and citations across AI prompts, AI share of voice and AI referral traffic.

What stays the same

AI SEO builds on traditional SEO. It doesn’t replace it. AI search tools still need to reach, read and trust your pages. Google’s AI Overviews draw on its search index, and AI assistants retrieve pages from the web when they search.

The fundamentals still apply:

• a site that search engines and AI crawlers can access and index
• fast, well-structured pages with the content in the HTML
• genuinely helpful content written with real expertise
• a trustworthy reputation built over time

If these are weak, AI SEO tactics won’t make up for it.

The five core parts of AI SEO

Most AI SEO work falls into five areas:

1. Technical access. Check that robots.txt, your CDN and your firewall aren’t blocking AI search crawlers. (A file called llms.txt is often recommended here, but the evidence shows it has little effect.)
2. Answer-first content. Write clear, self-contained answers that AI tools can quote accurately. See AI content optimisation.
3. Entity clarity. Make sure search engines and AI models understand exactly who you are and what you do. See entity SEO.
4. Brand mentions and corroboration. Earn mentions, reviews and coverage on the sites AI answers draw from. This is the heart of generative engine optimisation, explained in our guide to GEO vs AEO.
5. Tracking. Test a fixed set of customer questions across AI tools over time. See AI visibility tracking.

Using AI tools for SEO: the other meaning

AI tools can make SEO work faster, but they don’t replace judgement. They’re genuinely useful for keyword clustering, content outlines, summarising data, drafting schema markup and spotting patterns in large datasets.

The risk comes with publishing AI-written content at scale without care. Google’s guidance focuses on whether content is helpful, not how it was made. But its “scaled content abuse” spam policy, introduced in March 2024, targets content produced in bulk mainly to manipulate rankings, whether by people or by AI.

The sensible approach: use AI to research and draft, and have a person check the facts, add real expertise and edit before anything goes live.

Want to see how AI search represents your business today? Our AI visibility audit tests the questions your customers ask across AI tools, compares you with competitors, and gives you a prioritised plan. As an AI SEO agency, it’s where we start every engagement.