Notes
Short takeaways from the work: things worth knowing about AI search and answer engine optimization.
- 01
Register in Bing Webmaster Tools, not just Google Search Console
ChatGPT’s search leans heavily on Bing’s index. If Bing hasn’t crawled your site, you’re invisible in a large share of AI answers, however good your Google rankings are. Verify the site in both tools and submit your sitemap on day one.
- 02
Measure AI visibility with a fixed set of questions
AI answers don’t come with rankings. Write down a fixed set of real buyer questions, run them through a handful of different AI engines, and count how often you’re named. Rerun the same set to see what changed.
- 03
Put the answer in the first two sentences
AI models lift passages out of your page; they don’t read it top to bottom. Open every page with a short, self-contained answer to the question it targets, then add the nuance below it.
- 04
Say every fact the same way, everywhere
When a model finds two versions of the same number or claim, it trusts neither and may cite someone else. Treat your key facts like a style guide: one phrasing, on every page, in every interview.
- 05
Generate structured data from what's on the page
Never type schema markup separately from the content. Generate it from the visible text, so the page and its machine-readable label can’t drift apart.