Best Practices for an AI-Driven Search Content Strategy

It’s impossible to talk about SEO in the new year without considering the increasing presence of AI in search from Google’s AI Overviews to generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. However, content strategies in 2026 do not need to reinvent the wheel to be included in these AI-infused arenas. Follow these best practices to remain relevant in the ever-evolving search landscape.

Traditional SEO Still Applies

While AI-powered search experiences are changing how content is discovered, they are still built on the same technical foundations that have governed traditional search engines for years.

Indexability

AI Overviews and LLM-based answers cannot reference or surface content that search engines cannot reliably crawl, understand, and index. Ensuring that pages are fully indexable—free from blocked resources, rendering issues, or unnecessary reliance on client-side scripts—remains vital for visibility in both traditional search results and AI-generated responses.

Titles

Page titles and H1 tags continue to play a critical role in signaling topical relevance and intent. Clear, descriptive titles help traditional search engines and AI systems quickly understand what a page is about, while well-aligned H1s reinforce that focus for both users and machines. This clarity becomes even more important when AI systems are selecting concise excerpts or summaries to include in generated answers.

Headers

Logical use of H2 and H3 headers further supports content comprehension. Structured headings create a clear information hierarchy, making it easier for AI systems to identify discrete sections that answer specific questions. In practice, this increases the likelihood that portions of your content can be extracted, summarized, or cited in AI Overviews and LLM responses.

Schema Markup

Schema markup remains another critical component of an AI-ready SEO strategy. Structured data helps search engines, and some LLMs, disambiguate entities, relationships, and intent, which is foundational to how AI models interpret and recombine information. Whether it’s FAQ, HowTo, Event, Product, or Article schema, providing explicit context improves machine understanding and increases the chances your content is used accurately in AI-generated answers rather than misinterpreted or ignored. Rich results remain beneficial in traditional search results too.

Write for People First

As AI chatbots, and AI systems in general become more capable of summarizing and synthesizing information, the value of genuinely useful, people-first content only increases.

Value-Added Content is Key

AI models are trained to prioritize information that adds something new or meaningful to the conversation, not content that simply restates what already exists. Value-added content—original insights, practical guidance, proprietary data, or nuanced perspectives—stands out both to human readers and to AI systems deciding what to reference.

Remember E-E-A-T?

Authenticity and authority are also increasingly intertwined. Content that reflects real-world experience, expert knowledge, or firsthand insights signals credibility, which aligns closely with how Google evaluates quality and trustworthiness. Clear author attribution, well-supported claims, and consistent topical focus all help reinforce authority in an environment where AI systems are pulling from multiple sources.

Bonus Points for Brevity

Clarity and conciseness matter more than ever. AI-generated answers favor content that communicates ideas efficiently, without unnecessary jargon or filler. Well-written content that gets to the point quickly is easier for AI systems to parse and easier for users to consume—whether they encounter it directly on your site or indirectly through an AI-generated summary.

From Awareness to Conversion

Finally, it’s important to recognize that AI Overviews and AI chatbots often operate at the top of the funnel. They are frequently used for exploratory, informational queries rather than high-intent transactional searches. For this reason, content strategies should still cover all stages of the buyer’s journey—from early education and problem awareness to consideration and decision-making. Comprehensive coverage allows your brand to appear consistently as users move from AI-assisted discovery to deeper onsite engagement.

Format for LLMs

In an AI-driven search environment, which also applies to Google, how content is formatted can be just as important as what it says. Large language models favor information that can be easily extracted and recomposed, which makes “snippable” content especially valuable. Structuring answers in clear, self-contained sections increases the likelihood that your content will be quoted, summarized, or referenced accurately. Think featured snippets, but on steroids.

Do FAQs Help AI Visibility?

Yes, FAQs are particularly effective in AI-powered search because they align closely with how users phrase long-tailed queries and questions and with how LLM systems retrieve answers. Direct question-and-answer formats reduce ambiguity and allow models to pull precise responses without excessive interpretation.

Tables

Similarly, tables provide structured comparisons and datasets that AI systems and people can readily interpret. They are especially effective for displaying numbers—such as how Google continues to dominate, even as AI chatbots have started to siphon away some of that search traffic for themselves:

Platform	% of Search Traffic
Google	91.8%
LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, CoPilot)	8.2%

Source: Wix.com’s “AI search vs. Google” August 2025 research report

Lists

Bulleted lists also help break down complex ideas into digestible, scannable points. For example, here’s a list of resources to learn more about AI in search including how the most popular AI chatbots are impacting how people seek and find information:

Videos are Content Too

It’s also important to recognize that videos are content—not just supplements. Google increasingly uses video titles, descriptions, transcripts, and on-page context to rank and cite videos in the AI Overviews, especially YouTube videos, but also videos from social media platforms such as TikTok. Well-optimized videos can appear directly within AI-generated results, extending your reach beyond traditional blue links. Ensuring that videos are properly embedded, supported by descriptive text, and paired with accurate metadata helps AI systems understand and surface them appropriately.

Taken together, formatting content with LLMs in mind does not mean writing for machines at the expense of users. Rather, it means presenting high-quality, people-first content in a way that is easy for both humans and AI systems to understand and have confidence in.

How to Show up in Google AI Overviews and Other LLMs

The increasing infusion of AI in search can be both exciting and daunting, but it doesn’t require an overhaul of your existing content strategy—it requires refinement. The same fundamentals that have always driven strong SEO still matter, but they must now support how AI systems interpret, extract, and present information.

Focus on keeping content technically accessible, clearly structured, and easy to understand at a glance. Invest in authentic, authoritative content across multiple mediums that demonstrates real expertise, and structure key insights so AI can accurately summarize and reference them without losing meaning.

Ultimately, the brands and websites that succeed in Google AI Overviews and other LLM-driven experiences will be those that make high-quality content easy for both people and machines to trust and elevate.