If AI is now the gatekeeper to discovering content, trust is what opens the latch.
Just like the people who designed them, large language models (LLMs) gravitate to content that’s authoritative, research-backed, well-structured, and that answers common questions.
While your brand may get cited in AI answer engine summaries and overviews, links back to your site are no longer a given.
This shifts marketing goals from getting your URLs ranked to having your content scraped and surfaced.
According to research from WordPress VIP and Human Made, 31% of brands cite greater reach and visibility as a key AI-readiness benefit.
Here’s how to get there:
1. Balance SEO with studying answer engine optimization (AEO)
The keyword-rich, longform content you’ve been creating is still important for people using search engines, but search bots are looking for concise, content-rich snippets.
Embracing AEO doesn’t mean ditching SEO. It’s just another tool in the kit, but it makes choosing the right CMS architecture more important than ever:
2. Accelerate AEO with new processes and workflows
It’s time to channel your inner prompt engineer.
The better you can imagine what your audience is asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Google, the more you can change the way you develop and publish scrape-worthy content.
This guide walks you through the best practices we’ve spotted so far, and any enterprise marketing team could adopt them:
3. Think like a top publisher
USA Today Co. was like many brands, seeing traffic drop as AI’s role in content discovery rises.
Instead of hand-wringing, the company got hands-on in getting ahead of the challenge.
Watch our webinar and learn how its newsrooms are now winning in search again.
4. Update your metrics
Don’t just stand witness to what LLMs are doing to your traffic. Quantify it.
Beyond tracking referral traffic, you need to start thinking about citation rates and quality, topic level/cluster demand, and more.
If you’re ready to get granular, we have the primer you need:
5. Don’t follow the trends. Lead the change
Even if they’re being disintermediated in search, WordPress VIP product innovation leader Christoph Khouri argues brands still matter in an AI-first world.
His recommendation? Help define the standards rather than waiting for them to be fine-tuned. This could define which brands not only survive AI but thrive.