How To Improve Visibility in AI Results: Proven GEO Strategies From the Pros

TL;DR: How can you improve visibility in AI results?

To improve visibility in AI results, use generative engine optimization (GEO) — a strategy that blends traditional SEO with AI-aligned tactics. These include structured data, long-tail keywords, natural language formatting, and E-E-A-T signals that help your content rank in AI search results like Google AI Overviews and Bing’s AI-powered summaries, as well as AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

You followed SEO best practices. Your content ranks. But your traffic? It’s slipping. What gives? The issue isn’t your content — it’s how generative artificial intelligence (AI) is rewriting the rules. AI-powered experiences like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, and Bing’s AI-powered summaries are replacing traditional blue links with instant answers, and if your content isn’t optimized for them, your brand won’t get seen.

That’s why brands are turning to generative engine optimization (GEO) — a future-proof AI SEO strategy designed to improve your content’s performance in AI search results. Let us show you exactly how to improve visibility in AI results and keep your brand in front of high-intent users, no matter how search evolves.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?
• The AI visibility ladder: Your GEO framework
• How AI search results work (and why visibility has changed)
• How to rank in AI results on search engines
• How to appear in AI answer engines & chatbots
• FAQs on improving visibility in AI results

What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is a modern approach to search engine optimization (SEO) that helps your content appear in AI responses. Those responses come from AI-powered search features like Google AI Overviews and Bing’s AI-powered summaries, as well as from AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on ranking in organic results, GEO adapts your content for how generative AI discovers, interprets, and delivers information. It combines key elements like structured data, long-tail keywords, natural language formatting, and E-E-A-T signals to optimize content for AI and boost your chances of being cited, summarized, or recommended by an AI system.

The AI visibility ladder: Your GEO framework

Traditional SEO gets you on the map. GEO gets you into the answer box. The AI visibility ladder is your framework for scaling that climb, from being indexed to becoming the go-to source AI platforms cite and recommend.

Each step helps AI platforms process and surface your content in response to user queries. Over time, this compound effort increases your visibility in AI search results and solidifies your AI SEO strategy.

Step 1: Foundation (traditional SEO)

More than 50% of Google AI Overview citations come from pages already ranking in the top 10, making strong traditional SEO still essential. Thus, if your content isn’t optimized for organic search, AI likely won’t find it either.

What to do:

• Lay solid groundwork by following SEO best practices
• Improve site speed, UX, and mobile responsiveness
• Ensure crawlability for bots like ChatGPT-User and Googlebot-Extended
• Use clear, keyword-rich H1s, structured headers, and internal links
• Submit and maintain your sitemap

Goal: Make your site easily discoverable, indexable, and rank in organic search.

Step 2: Relevance (align with AI search context)

AI tools don’t just match keywords — they look for context, clarity, and content that answers questions directly.

What to do:

• Use long-tail keywords that reflect how users ask questions in chat-style queries
• Structure content using BLUF format (Bottom Line Up Front)
• Add FAQ sections with schema to match AI Overviews
• Ensure semantic relevance with natural language and topic clusters

Goal: Match your content to the way large language models (LLMs) parse and respond to user prompts.

Step 3: Trust (strengthen E-E-A-T signals)

AI engines prefer citing sources they can trust — those with demonstrated E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness).

What to do:

• Add author bios with credentials and experience
• Link to high-authority third-party sources
• Highlight testimonials, awards, and case studies
• Keep your site content updated with fresh, accurate info
• Include trust elements like HTTPS, contact info, and transparent policies

Goal: Become a credible, quotable brand that AI platforms are confident in referencing.

Step 4: Influence (earn mentions and external signals)

AI pulls from far beyond your website. If your brand is consistently mentioned across platforms (forums, reviews, media), it’s more likely to show up in AI answers.

What to do:

• Encourage reviews on G2, Trustpilot, Crunchbase, etc.
• Submit to product directories and marketplaces
• Earn PR placements and backlinks from authoritative sources
• Engage in relevant Reddit threads and online communities
• Monitor and grow your branded presence across third-party sites

Goal: Build an external footprint that LLMs recognize and value when generating answers.

How AI search results work (and why visibility has changed)

To know how to get your content chosen by AI and improve visibility in AI results, you first need to understand how these AI search features actually work and why they’ve changed the game for SEO.

Today’s search isn’t just about ranking on page one. Tools like Google AI Overviews and Bing’s AI-powered summaries use large language models (LLMs) to pull quick answers from multiple sources, often without the user having to click anything. If your content doesn’t check the right boxes, it gets skipped.

Here’s how each system delivers results:

Google AI Overviews

Google AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear above or alongside traditional search results. They aim to answer user queries instantly, citing a few select sources for further reading.

What affects visibility in Google AI Overviews?

• LLMs like PaLM2, Gemini, and MUM
• Google’s core ranking systems (PageRank, Helpful Content, Spam detection, etc.)
• Search intent matching
• Structured data (schema markup)
• E-E-A-T signals (experience, expertise, authority, trust)
• Databases like Google’s Shopping Graph & Knowledge Graph
• Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics, like finance, health, and government-related searches
• Multimedia content (images, videos) that supports clarity and engagement

Bing’s AI-powered summaries

Bing’s AI-powered summaries, part of the broader Bing Generative Search experience (which also includes responses from Copilot in Bing), function similarly to Google’s AI Overviews. They generate conversational, multi-source answers at the top of Bing’s results, referencing web content directly to address user intent.

What factors influence Bing’s AI-powered summaries?

• LLMs such as GPT-4 via Microsoft’s Prometheus model
• Traditional Bing ranking factors (content quality, backlinks, CTR)
• Structured data and semantic relevance
• Site authority and user experience
• Page formatting that supports summarization

Quick comparison table: Google’s AI Overviews vs. Bing’s AI-powered summaries

Both Google AI Overviews and Bing’s AI-powered summaries are reshaping search behavior. Users now get full answers (and brand recommendations) without ever visiting a website. If your content doesn’t meet the criteria above, you won’t just miss clicks — you’ll miss being seen at all.

How to rank in AI results on search engines

Now that we understand how AI results on search engines work, let’s talk about getting them to notice you. Here are four tips for how to improve visibility in Google and Bing AI search results:

1. Clearly answer search intent
2. Optimize for E-E-A-T signals
3. Target long-tail keywords
4. Follow SEO best practices

1. Clearly answer search intent

AI-generated summaries in search results are designed to help users find the answers they need instantly. That said, one of the best ways to improve visibility in AI search results is to answer search intent quickly, clearly, and succinctly.

Doing so helps for two key reasons. First, you’re making it easier for AI models to crawl your page and find the information they need to generate a summary. It also increases your chances of being directly quoted in an AI Overview or summary, which can increase your visibility in AI summaries.

2. Optimize for E-E-A-T signals

When pages are trustworthy and helpful, search engines reward them with higher visibility and citations in AI-generated snippets. To make your content more trustworthy, you need to boost your E-E-A-T signals. 

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust. You can boost your E-E-A-T with page optimizations like:

• Including certifications, awards, years of experience, case studies, etc., to demonstrate trust and experience to audiences
• Using an authoritative tone in content
• Supporting claims and statements with quotes from trusted sources like thought leaders, studies, or timely statistics

Recent studies on generative AI and LLMs in search engines have found that enhancing E-E-A-T signals can significantly improve visibility in AI results and overall SEO rankings.

3. Target long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords are an underrated tool in SEO that helps you rank for more detailed search queries. Long-tail keywords resemble conversational language, and, more importantly, they reflect how people pose in-depth queries to search engines.

AI-powered overviews are meant to help break down those detailed queries, so by targeting long-tail keywords in your content, you can increase your visibility in AI results because you’re better matching the verbiage and cadence of queries that generate AI summaries.

4. Follow SEO best practices

Finally, your best chance at improving your visibility in AI search results is to ensure you’re following SEO best practices. After all, both Google and Bing use search engine ranking factors when generating AI summaries.

For best results, follow Google’s core ranking systems to ensure you’re creating and optimizing your content to perform well on search engines and stand out to LLMs generating AI results. To start, optimize your site for systems like:

• PageRank
• RankBrain
• BERT
• High-quality content

How to appear in AI answer engines & chatbots

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is your all-encompassing solution to increasing your visibility on AI platforms like Meta AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, and more. AEO involves optimizing your site content to appear in AI-generated responses to user queries. Much like SEO, AEO includes a variety of optimization tactics. Here are some of those tactics:

1. Improve your site’s crawlability
2. Build your authority
3. Ensure your content is relevant
4. Generate recommendations and reviews
5. Keep content fresh

1. Improve your site’s crawlability

When you’re trying to rank on ChatGPT, crawlability is key. Crawlability refers to how easily web crawlers, also known as spiders, can comb through your site to understand and index it. In other words, it’s how search engines inventory millions of pages on the Internet.

The more crawlable and indexable your site is, the better your chances of ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). In turn, higher rankings can potentially give you increased visibility in AI platforms and chatbots.

To ensure your site is crawlable for search engines and can show up in AI results, try these optimization tips:

• Break up your content into clear, understandable sections
• Make your website easy to navigate
• Check your meta tags
• Practice good web design tactics
• Provide value to readers with your content

You can learn more about tracking your AI search visibility with our guide on How to Track AI Search Rankings.

2. Build your authority

Authority is crucial when increasing visibility in AI results. Brands and businesses that are recognized as authoritative voices in their industry tend to see higher rankings in AI responses like Copilot because they’re more trustworthy.

Building brand authority means generating awareness around your site, like earning mentions on other authoritative sites.

For example, if your product is mentioned in articles that rank similar products, you’re likely to see increased visibility on Copilot, especially if you’re mentioned by authoritative publications like The New York Times.

3. Ensure your content is relevant

AI answer engines and chatbots are built to help people, and that means offering helpful, relevant information when prompted. Ensuring your content is relevant increases your chances of appearing in answers to prompts people use to find information related to your business.

For instance, if you’re a business that sells travel luggage and you want to increase your visibility in Gemini results, you’re going to create content that’s relevant to travel and luggage topics.

One of Gemini’s top recommendations is a checked trunk set from July. Looking at their product page, it’s easy to see they’ve made themselves highly relevant to the search, targeting keywords related to packing.

4. Generate recommendations and reviews

To improve your AI rankings, you’ll also need to generate reviews and recommendations for your business. For one thing, customer reviews indicate your business is legitimate, making them a key element in people’s decision-making process. AI platforms like Claude see this and, in turn, reward those pages with better visibility in their results.

Reviews, recommendations, and customer testimonials on your site (or third-party sites) boost your credibility and demonstrate your authority in your industry. The higher your satisfaction rates, the more you improve visibility in AI results.

5. Keep content fresh

When shopping for produce, you’re not going to buy the old, almost rotten apples, are you? Of course not! Instead, you go for the freshest ones in the bunch. The same logic applies to ranking in AI results.

When generating answers to user queries, AI answer engines prioritize recently published or updated content that includes current information. Outdated information isn’t helpful for anyone, so regularly re-optimizing content ensures it stays fresh and relevant, and increases your visibility on AI platforms.

FAQs on improving visibility in AI results

Don’t just show up — show out in AI search

AI isn’t a threat to your traffic — it’s your next opportunity. As features and platforms like Google AI Overviews, Bing’s AI-powered summaries, ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini continue shaping how users discover content, the brands that adapt now will lead tomorrow’s search.

Understanding where you stand today is crucial, which is why AI brand visibility audit services have become essential for forward-thinking companies.

Need help getting started? At WebFX, we bring over 25+ years of digital expertise and a future-forward AI SEO strategy to keep your content competitive — no matter how search evolves.

With our high-impact GEO services, you’ll get:

• A tailored roadmap to boost visibility in AI search results
• Expert optimization for both search engines and LLMs
• A dedicated account manager and access to RevenueCloudFX
• Real-time performance tracking and AI search monitoring

AI is redefining the front page of the Internet — let’s make sure it can’t ignore yours. Contact us online or call 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist today about our industry-leading GEO services.