How do I Optimize my Website for AI Overviews?

Google’s AI Overview is a new feature within search results that provides summarized answers to queries, often drawing information from multiple sources on the web, including large language models (LLMs) and the Search Generative Experience (SGE). It significantly impacts your website by potentially replacing traditional search snippets with AI-generated summaries, making it crucial for your site’s content and technical structure to be machine-readable and highly credible to be referenced.

Structured data is critically important for AI Overviews and SGE because it provides explicit, machine-readable information about your content. By using schema.org markup, you tell search engines and LLMs exactly what your page is about, its importance, and who it comes from, which helps AI Overviews synthesize accurate and relevant answers and improves your chances of appearing in rich snippets.

Yes, optimizing image file names and formats can significantly improve your AI search visibility. Using descriptive file names instead of generic ones (e.g., “IMG_115”) provides valuable context to search engines and AI. Additionally, using modern, compressed formats like WEBP and AVIF can improve page load speed, which is a ranking factor and contributes to a better user experience, indirectly aiding AI comprehension.

Your website’s URL structure is crucial for AI understanding because it creates a logical hierarchy for your content, similar to a well-organized folder system. A clear, hierarchical URL structure helps AI models understand content clusters and the relationships between different topics on your site, making your information easier to discover and process for AI Overviews.

To ensure your website demonstrates E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) for AI-driven search, focus on a robust technical foundation, high-quality content, and clear structured data. This includes addressing security, maintaining consistent and accurate metadata (page titles, H1s, slugs), and organizing content with a logical heading hierarchy (H1, H2, H3). These signals help AI Overviews identify your site as a credible and expert source.

Content clusters are groups of interlinked web pages that revolve around a central, broader topic. They benefit AI SEO by providing a comprehensive and logically organized body of information that AI Overviews and LLMs can easily understand and synthesize. This systematic organization helps establish your site as an authoritative source on specific subjects, making it more likely to be referenced in AI-generated answers.

WordPress is often recommended for advanced technical SEO for AI because it is an open-source platform that allows for deep core-level customization. Unlike closed-source systems (e.g., Wix, Squarespace), WordPress provides the flexibility to implement intricate structured data, optimize image handling systems, and develop advanced internal linking strategies that are vital for AI comprehension and visibility.

Recovering from a sudden drop in keyword rankings or organic traffic often requires a deep technical SEO audit. This involves identifying and correcting issues like poor technical foundations, missing or incorrect structured data, sub-optimal content organization, and inefficient indexation. Addressing these core technical problems helps Google and AI understand your site better, leading to improved rankings and traffic recovery.

Internal links play a crucial role in preparing your site for AI search by creating a strong internal network that helps search engines and AI understand the relationships between your content pieces. A well-developed internal linking system guides crawlers through your site, ensuring all relevant content is discovered and indexed, and it signals to AI Overviews the depth and breadth of your expertise on specific topics.

Descriptive and consistent page titles, H1s, and URL slugs are fundamental for AI Overviews because they are the primary signals that tell search engines and AI what a page is about. When these elements align perfectly with the page’s content, it establishes credibility and clarity. This consistency helps AI Overviews quickly identify and summarize the core topic of your page, increasing the likelihood of your content being featured in AI-generated answers.

how do I optimize my website for Google’s AI overviews hi my name is Brant Soler i’m a technical SEO expert and I’ve taken a deep dive into large language models and information retrieval how search has been evolving through answer engine optimization and voice search optimization the whole bag and so I’ve decided to make a movie right here where AI can’t really go somewhere with wind and trees and plants birds flowers etc etc so the things I want to touch on are how your website is the source of all LLM information that’s easy right everyone understands that in order to be featured or understood you have to have credibility you have to be seen as an expert etc etc not and when I say the difference between credibility and being an expert is that your website has to demonstrate in a multitude of ways that you have credibility and that you are an expert and so when you’re thinking about how to position yourself the first thing you need to look at is the technical foundation of your website because with Google going bananas for credibility markers the best place to look is the foundation of your site so if you’ve gone the distance to make sure that you’ve closed the security loopholes your structured data is complete and clear that your architecture is built in a way that provides content clusters and that your metadata is rational and logical then you’re going to be 10 steps ahead when you start putting content into your website or when you continue putting content into your website and so I’d like to break these down bit by bit i’d like to start with your URL architecture when I say that it basically means how your addresses are set up so no matter what kind of website you have you should treat it like a folder on your desktop folder A contains this contains that and this is the value that you’re creating is that here’s a cluster of information that is within this cluster that is in with it this folder and now you’ve created a value statement through a URL it’s the same thing for the internet you should be starting at your homepage going into a section going into a subsection and continuing your journey etc that’s how the internet works in order to create content clusters that Google or any large language model will be able to understand and so once you figure out how to structure the pieces of your website say services and case studies and blog whatever the case may be then you really think about how people are going to navigate through it so let’s say you have one service you provide um beehives you have one long form page about beehives and then you can link out into a use case section of beehives in this kind of stack how many beehives you need in an area things that could be in your blog things that could be in a you know which type of beehive do you want to order do you want to start with a home kit do you want to start with a whole commercial field of beehives just in case the first part of this is being able to link between the sections of your website to be able to say this is connected here and to be able to create a link between those sections the value flows between them from a machine perspective from a user perspective it makes it super easy to say “Oh okay i’m looking for beehives and then this is the kind of beehive I want and then you can process your user journey as you needed so what underpins this structured data structured data is always the underpinning of your website structured data is a piece of code that will tell any search engine large language model etc exactly what is on the page why it is important who it comes from and the steps backward to get to the homepage when your breadcrumbs are set up correctly and breadcrumbs are very important it’s not just a how do I get out of this cave uh the key to having complete structured data is using a system like Yoast creating custom structured data making sure that you have checked as many of the boxes at schema.org or and through Google’s rich snippet tester as possible because you don’t just want to say “Hi I’m a business here’s what I have.” You want to provide as detailed as rich information because there are so many credibility factors now that will either make you show up in searches or make you invisible in searches and of course no one wants to be invisible and so once you figure out your structured data then you need to look at what kind of files you’re putting into your site PDF files images etc etc now the two most recent file formats are AVIF and WEBP i believe WEBP is Google’s file format so they probably want you to use WEBP but the compression model is what’s important because a webp image that is the same size as a JPEG the WEBP will load faster because of the compression model used so the first step in optimizing all of the files on your website is making sure that they’re in the right format and then the second part is how you name the images because

img_115 doesn’t have any value isn’t going to help you and in fact may hinder you because it doesn’t describe what is actually in the image so if you’ve used Google image search for literally anything you’re not going to see very many IMG_16115 represented in their search because it is lacking the credibility factor of an excellent file name so this is where you put the name of your business maybe if you’re going to launch it on the web it goes web in the middle and then the end of the file name is what exactly is in the image and so using a format for all of the images all of the files you create becomes second nature you start optimizing every single file that goes across your desk it’s surprising but at the same time it makes it super easy to find any file you want at any time you want without opening and playing the guess and check game so now we’ve talked about the compression side and the naming side you probably have a really good understanding of gosh I probably need to go and rename these images sorry I know that no one really likes rework but it’s important because every single element of your site that you can optimize for your brand for your business for your purpose is going to be a leg up against people who just slap together a website so the other component to this third side if you will is when you have the actual listing of what is in the image you can take that and translate it into the alt and title tags for the image that way you have the keywords for your business in the file name in the alt in the title and so that does triple duty for you

so now that I’ve given you a moment to digest that the next thing you want to look at is your meta information now that’s your page title your H1 and the slug used for the page that you’re on you want to make sure that the page title represents what exactly is on the page your H1 again represents exactly what’s on the page the difference between the two is that your H1 should have exactly what is there your page title should copy it except have a symbol and the name of your business at the end which most websites will use the pipe so it’s whatever page you’re on pipe name of the business it’s a very important combination because each of these three things feed into how your pages are understood by humans by machines literally anything that comes by to look at this page needs to see these three things line up it’s a credibility marker because it shows that you’re telling the truth and that you’re transparent so the last thing to cover here is heading structures i talk a lot about the waterfall method it’s like that Dem Bone song i don’t know how many times I’ve sang that song but the idea is that your H1 begins the page the H2 is connected to the H1 the H3 is connected to the H2 but when you go from an H2 to an H4 reading down through the code you’ve broken the logical structure so think of it like a recursive research report where you have an idea you have subcomponents of that idea sub subcomponents of that idea and then you can finish the topic and start a new main topic with another H2 that’s how you structure your content whatever your content is going to be that needs to be the structure behind the scenes that way you’re have you’re showing Google a technically correct outline for a technically flawless explanation of what is on the page now what you’re using for your content in the headings is up to you typically you’re going to want to frontload your keywords and use questions or have something that is a commonly used phrase to describe what you’re talking about but that’s outside of my wheelhouse in the content zone so speaking of content when you step out of the technical SEO realm it becomes a matter of finding your brand voice using your brand language and harmonizing your words to your clients this isn’t something that I can help with but this is something that you need to think about for yourself how do you want your brand to be represented how can you best speak to your audience what words do they use to describe the utility of working with your business what ways can you connect with them on a deeper level than here’s a cog it’s awesome now maybe you’re selling cogs and maybe they are awesome but it takes a lot more than that to move a product it can take you a while to find that harmony and it can you can use a lot of guess and check you can use customer uh excuse me voice of customer VOC which is where you go back to past customers and say hey why did you use my service why did you buy my product and they are an absolute wealth of information as to how people are thinking about finding and utilizing your product or service so I highly encourage you to talk to people and not only rely on large language models to do this type of research because when you want to harmonize with a human you probably want to talk to a human don’t get me wrong large language models can come close give you great ideas confirm theories u come up with phrasing for you but when you actually want to get human resonance that is not suspect then you need to talk to a human they’re really useful that way i promise now I get asked a lot okay so when I’m working with you what is the deliverable when I get a website hopefully a WordPress website or someone wanting to move their website to WordPress then you have the ability to have your website optimized down to the core because a lot of these builders Squarespace Wix etc etc uh don’t give you the opportunity to get into the core of the website because they’re called a closed source development system it’s closed you can’t modify it you can’t make it faster you can’t take out things you don’t want to use wordpress is completely custom all the way down to the last bits and pieces of the the core so the point is my clients contract with me because they are invisible they are seeing drops in rankings they are losing keywords they are losing traction with their business their leads are drying up and so when I work through a project with a client I leave them with a system that is as technically flawless as possible not the content within but the structure itself so that we can take your brand voice and insert it into the system the biographies of people that are within your business are a great way to start adding credibility to your business and then the about section of who you are what you do and why people should respect you is another great place to go to describe what’s going on with your business and then from there it’s a matter of what do you have to offer your unique value proposition your value that you add to humans and why humans should be excited to work with you because if if humans aren’t excited to work with you they’re probably not going to work with you and that’s one of the reasons that I absolutely love my job is that I get to help people figure out okay these are the things that are wrong with my website here are the steps to fix it and then here’s the plan and outline for how long it’s going to take to get there but here’s what’s the most amazing as a technical SEO expert when I do my job I get to watch my clients completely change who their digital competition is what keywords they are now ranking for how well they’re ranking for them because the technical foundation of your website is the most important launchpad for your content if you don’t have a good technical foundation Google and any other engine crawler spider whatever you want to call it is going to come by and go “All right what am I looking at?” And then have to figure it out and in the information age they don’t want to spend a lot of time figuring out who you are what kind of context you give the world and what kind of value can be derived from showing you to other people that’s the purpose of large language models is that they want to curate the most important information and show that information to the people using their large language model so ensuring that your technical foundation is the first step to being visible straightening up your content and making sure that it adheres to Google’s best practices because they have done an amazing job of giving you an extensive set of best practices for helpful creative content that is universal content for social media content for Bing content for a brochure even you can still find value in their support system or you can hire someone like me and

so the possibilities are literally endless no matter what kind of business you have you might be hurting right now because of what’s going on with the economy you might be booming right now because of what’s going on in the economy you might see your leads drying up and want to fix it anytime is a great time to start with technical SEO so if you found value in this video like subscribe tell everyone you’ve ever met in your entire life drop some comments below and talk to you soon thank you bye