From advanced AI search engines (like ChatGPT and Perplexity) to Google’s AI overviews, artificial intelligence (AI) has changed how we use the web. It has transformed how we discover information, engage with content, and make buying decisions.
That said, while initial discoverability and “getting indexed” by AI search engines are crucial first steps for SEO optimizations for AI, they represent only the beginning of a comprehensive AIO strategy. The more significant challenge lies in optimizing your website’s content, structure, and overall performance in a way that signals to AI platforms the superior value and relevance of your site compared to its competitors.
Because AI and LLM-based systems increasingly rely on complex ranking signals, your focus has to shift to good technical SEO practices specifically designed for an AI-driven environment, with a focus on performance, structured data for AI, entity-based or semantic SEO, dynamic rendering, and more. In this article, we’re skipping the basics of indexing, and focusing instead on what you can do beyond AI indexing to optimize your site for generative AI SEO.
Here are some technical SEO tips on how to optimize your site for AI searches, leading to improved AI visibility and healthier AIO/GEO.
1. Schema Markups and Structured Data for Better AI SEO Results
Many SEO managers treat structured data like a helpful add-on, not a necessity. This isn’t the best AI SEO optimization technique since structured data is one of the keys to ensuring your content is seen and understood by AI crawlers and their LLM modeling system. In fact, rather than being just about fancy “rich snippets,” structured data is now the roadmap that shows AI exactly what’s on your page and why it’s worth highlighting.
Let’s break it down a little bit.
You might’ve heard the term “entity-based SEO.” In simple terms, entities are the people, places, and things your website covers. Structured data helps clarify these relationships. Here are some examples:
- For a travel site, you’d apply TouristAttraction or Trip schema to each destination, so AI understands how these places connect.
- Running a recipe blog? Add Recipe schema to display cooking times, nutrition facts, or special dietary labels.
- Marking up a blog post? You can use Article schema to help AI see it as an authoritative piece of editorial content
With this kind of schema markup, AI doesn’t have to guess; it can instantly tell what your content is about and deliver it to the right audience. The end result? Greater authority, clearer context, and a higher chance of showing up in everything from straightforward search listings to AI-curated recommendations.
| Pro tip: if your topic also appears in knowledge graphs (like Wikidata), aligning your structured data to those recognized entities can add even more credibility. Essentially, you’re telling AI, “Here’s my content, and here’s how it matches official data about this person, place, or concept.” That, plus content validation, can make AI more confident when showcasing your pages. |
2. Entity Optimization and Semantic SEO
This is perhaps one of the biggest differences between how traditional and AI-based search engines process content: when AI looks at your website, it’s no longer just hunting for a string of keywords.
AI search platforms care about overall meaning, context, and user intent—an approach known as semantic search. This means if someone asks an AI chatbot, “What’s the best tropical destination in Indonesia?” the system will connect “tropical destination” and “Indonesia” to interpret that Bali might be the perfect fit, even if the content doesn’t explicitly mention that exact phrase.
One of the best ways to show AI that your site is an authority on a topic is by creating content hubs around main ideas or entities. For instance, if your focus is on Bali travel, you might have a thorough “Bali Travel Guide” page that links to in-depth articles on beaches, local foods, festivals, and more.
This helps the generative AI platforms recognize that you’re covering the topic comprehensively. Plus, it makes it easier for human readers to find what they need without bouncing around your site.
| Pro tip: remember to write in a conversational style to increase your chances of being indexed on AI searches. AI is learning how real people talk, ask questions, and seek information. Address common queries directly, break up content into logical sections, etc. Do all you can to help AI understand what your pages are about easily and pass that clarity on to users. |
3. Prerender Content for Improved AI Crawling and Indexing
Now we know that AI platforms process your content and reshape it to best answer users’ search queries. And we all know that JavaScript-based content isn’t AI SEO friendly and often “hidden” from AI crawlers (learn more about JavaScript and AI indexing issues). In that case, how do you ensure AI search engines can easily find and feature your content correctly and credit your site appropriately?
Adopt Prerender.io—a plug-and-play technical SEO and AI SEO tool. Prerender.io generates an indexed version of your content so that AI crawlers can see and understand the information given, complete with all the text, images, and structured data for AI in place.
Additionally, Prerender.io can help speed up page load times for bots, minimizing the risk of timeouts or partially indexed content. See for yourself how Haarshop got a page speed score of 99 and a 50% traffic increase after Prerender.io adoption. Read the case study here.
4. Core Web Vitals and Website Performance for Healthier AI SEO
Historically, site speed and performance have always mattered for SEO, but as AI-driven search engines gain more market share, these elements now have a whole new level of importance.
Why? Because you’ve seen how fast ChatGPT gives you answers.
Generative AI platforms process and deliver content in a fraction of a second. Suppose your site runs slowly or your pages are poorly structured. In that case, it’s not just your human users who will be frustrated—AI crawlers will also have trouble understanding your content, potentially lowering your visibility in AI search results.
Core Web Vitals remain a key metric in this new AI era because they directly measure how quickly a page loads, how soon it becomes interactive, and whether it stays visually stable. Even for AI crawlers that don’t physically click buttons, real user data about interaction and stability gets factored into AI models, influencing how your site is perceived and ranked.
Here are some technical SEO techniques to boost your Core Web Vitals scores:
- Use fast hosting or a CDN to keep latency low.
- Convert your site’s images to more efficient formats like WebP or AVIF to trim file sizes.
- Remove or defer blocking scripts so the core content can be rendered promptly.
- Use Prerender.io to ensure everything loads fast—especially for return visits.
These tactics may seem straightforward, but they significantly impact how AI views your site’s performance and, by extension, improve AI visibility. They go far beyond mere page speed, and can help your site handle large influxes of traffic, something that happens more often when AI search engines feature your pages in real-time.
5. Strategic Internal Linking for Comprehensive AI Understanding
It’s easy to think of internal links as just a way for people to get around your website or for search engines to “follow the juice.” Regarding AI SEO optimization, internal links do something more: they show the AI platforms a clear, interconnected map of your site’s content.
AI crawlers (and the traditional search engine crawlers like Google) love it when your pages are logically linked. If you have a main page about “Digital Marketing”, linking to sub-pages about SEO, PPC, and Social Media Marketing—plus a link back to the main page—makes it crystal clear how the topics interrelate. To AI crawlers (and yes, to humans too), this kind of structure paints a neat picture of how your topics and pages fit together.
Rather than scattered bits of information, you’re showing one unified resource, which can help AI recognize that you’re well-rounded in this domain.
When you have a proper internal linking strategy, generative AI tools will gather information from multiple parts of your site to craft a cohesive answer. The result? Your site is more likely to be quoted as an authoritative, comprehensive source—perfect for climbing the ranks in AI-powered search platforms.
| Pro tip: Don’t use anchor text links that say, “Click here”. Instead, opt for something like “Check out our Bali travel guide.” Why? Because when your anchor text clearly spells out what’s on the other side of that link, AI gets a stronger hint about the context and content. This is especially important if you want the AI to see that “Bali” is the actual destination being discussed, boosting your relevance in entity-based SEO, like AI searches. |
Improving AI Visibility Starts with Optimizing Your Technical SEO
Focusing on indexing alone when optimizing SEO for AI search engines is like celebrating the fact that your store’s sign is visible on the street without ensuring the inside is inviting and well-stocked. To truly stand out, your website needs to be fast, structured, and easy for AI search engines to understand.
But even if it meets all these standards, it’s useless if AI crawlers can’t render your site in the first place, and that’s where Prerender.io becomes your best AIO tool in SEO optimizations for AI campaigns.
Prerender.io ensures that AI platforms—both search crawlers and generative engines—see your site exactly as you intend. It makes AI crawlers easy to understand and “index” your content. And when paired with strong technical SEO fundamentals like Core Web Vitals, structured data, and semantic SEO clarity, prerendering gives your site the best shot at being accurately understood, properly credited, and consistently surfaced by AI search platforms.
Keep in mind that if AI searches can’t see your content clearly, it won’t matter how great that content is. It will become invisible to users.
Adopt Prerender.io today and see the significant impact it brings to your AI referral traffic!
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