SEO & AISearch has split into two distinct streams. Classic search engines still drive the lion’s share of B2B traffic, while AI‑powered “answer engines” surface instant summaries that rarely require a click. Smart businesses are optimizing both streams as complementary, not competitive.
- Search: Google holds 89.5 % of global queries; Bing follows at 3.9 %. Organic search supplies roughly one‑third of all website sessions and, in B2B, 44.6 % of revenue.
- AI: ChatGPT claims roughly 800 million weekly users, aiming for one billion by year‑end. Zero‑click behavior trims some organic clicks, but raises top‑of‑funnel awareness by citing authoritative sources.
Google’s AI Overviews haven’t rewritten the ranking algorithm, they reward the exact same signals (authority, structure and site speed/performance) before summarizing them. The underlying theme is to nail technical performance and authoritative content first, then layer AI tactics on top — employing a more/and strategy versus an either/or decision will yield the best results in all cases.
Even the smartest content strategy falls flat if the site itself is slow, insecure or hard for crawlers to index. Treat the five practices below as ongoing must-dos because every ranking signal whether traditional search or answer engine, flows directly through them.
Core Web Vitals is a set of performance metrics that measure real world user experience for loading performance, interactivity and visual stability of the page. You can test your website against the Core Web Vitals by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
- Longest contentful paint (LCP)
- LCP reports the render time of the largest image, text block or video visible in the viewport, relative to when the user first navigated to the page. To provide a good user experience, websites should strive to have a LCP of 2.5 seconds or less. To improve LCP, optimize render-blocking resources, lazy loading and critical CSS on the front-end while optimizing TTFB, CDN usage and caching on the server side.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
- CLS measures visual stability, unexpected layout shifts disrupt the user experience or cause users to lose their place or click the wrong element. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1. or less. To improve CLS, define dimensions for image assets and ensure dynamically loaded assets and UI transitions are handled carefully.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
- INP measures interactivity performance, i.e. latency after clicking on a button or UI element. To provide a good user experience, pages should have an INP of 200 milliseconds or less. To improve INP, employ front-end techniques like event delegation, lazy loading, code splitting and deferral of non-critical JS.
A secure website protects site visitors and signals professionalism to search and AI engines.
- Enforce HTTPS everywhere
- Auto-redirect all HTTP traffic and renew certificates via Let’s Encrypt or Amazon Certificate Manager.
- Enable HSTS
- Add the Strict-Transport-Security header to force encrypted requests and prevent protocol downgrade attacks.
- Set the big four security headers
- Content-Security-Policy
- X-Content-Type-Options
- X-Frame-Options
- Referrer-Policy
You can audit your website with securityheaders.com and you should be aiming for an A grade.
Search engine bots waste crawl budget on duplicate or low-value URLs or even worse, can index pages that should not be public facing. Ensure this doesn’t happen by setting explicit rules for bots to follow and outlining which pages should be crawled.
- XML sitemap
- Auto-generate whenever fresh content is added or refreshed, include indexable pages and submit to Search Console.
- Robots.txt
- Disallow internal paths (/wp-admin, /cgi-bin, /src), staging domains and marketing-tag experiments.
- Canonical tags
- Point parameter, duplicate or paginated URLs back to one authoritative location.
Rich structured data helps both classic search snippets and answer engines understand your content.
What schema markup actually does
It turns plain HTML into machine-readable facts. JSON-LD wrapped in a <script type="application/ld+json"> block labels each page as an Article, FAQPage, Product or ItemList, then spells out author, headline, price, question-answer pairs and so on. That explicit context lets crawlers skip the guesswork. Google openly recommends JSON-LD because it’s easiest to implement and maintain.
How classic search engines utilize schema markup (Google, Bing, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo)
| Schema type | Primary classic-SERP benefit | Example signals surfaced |
|---|---|---|
| Article / BlogPosting | Eligibility for headline-image rich results and Top Stories carousels | headline, image, datePublished, author.name |
| FAQPage | Expandable FAQ rich snippet below the listing (higher pixel height, stronger CTR) | Each Question-acceptedAnswer pair appears as a drop-down in Search |
| Product | Price, rating and availability right in the snippet; feeds Google Shopping Graph | offers.price, availability, aggregateRating |
| ItemList | Turns “best X” or category pages into list carousels or breadcrumb-style previews | Ordered listElement array with position and URL |
How answer engines utilize schema markup (AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot)
| What the AI model needs | How schema markup helps |
|---|---|
| Grounded facts to quote | FAQPage and HowTo blocks give ready-made, sentence-level answers the LLM can lift verbatim, often with a source link. |
| Entity disambiguation | Product markup makes it obvious that “Falcon X400” is a drill, not a SaaS company, so the model returns the right specs. |
| Attribution targets | Clear author, publisher and canonical URLs raise the odds your brand earns a visible citation in AI summaries. |
| Structured lists for comparisons | ItemList lets answer engines compile “top five” or “best of” responses without hallucinating order or missing items. |
Google’s guide to AI Overviews confirms they draw from “signals we already use for ranking,” including structured data, to decide what gets surfaced and cited. Independent AEO studies also show pages with clean JSON-LD earn 20-30% more brand mentions inside ChatGPT and Perplexity answers compared with similar pages lacking markup.
Practical takeaways on schema implementations
- Mark up every core template. Blog post, case study, product detail, category hub — using JSON-LD blocks generated server-side.
- Keep it complete and truthful. Omit fields you can’t populate accurately; incorrect data can suppress both rich results and AI citations.
- Validate before deployment. Use Google’s Rich Results Test and curl your live page to confirm one — and only one — JSON-LD block per entity.
- Update when content changes. Price drops, new authors or revised answers should trigger a schema refresh so bots don’t propagate stale info.
- Monitor both layers. Check Search Console for rich-result impressions, then track mention share in answer engines with tools like Profound or Nozzle to see the schema payoff end-to-end.
Bottom line — comprehensive schema is no longer optional housekeeping — it is the connective tissue that lets both traditional algorithms and emergent answer engines understand, rank and quote your content with confidence.
Googlebot has finite patience — high-value pages must load quickly and return a status code of 200 (indicating no errors). There are a multitude of tools to accomplish this like AHREFS, Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer and SEMRush.
Segment by response code, URL depth and file type. Look for 404s, 301 chains and oversized assets and take steps to mitigate them.
Prioritize fixes. Eliminate redirect hops, compress large media files and no-index thin pages.
Compare bot hits to internal linking. Important pages with low crawl frequency usually need fresher links from high-authority pages.
Sustainable SEO gains come from discipline — publish insight‑driven content and maintain a fast, secure, machine‑readable site. When those basics are repeatable, layering AI‑specific tactics on top lets you capture demand in every discovery channel.
While core fundamentals have not changed, the landscape is getting larger and the level of detail is increasing rapidly.
Need help staying ahead of the curve? Lovely People can help. Let’s talk.