Beyond Google: How to Rank on AI Platforms as Well as Search Engines

There's a shift happening in how people find information online — and most businesses haven't caught up yet.

For the past two decades, "being found online" meant one thing: ranking on Google. Get to page one, get the clicks. That playbook still works. But a growing number of your potential customers are no longer typing queries into a search bar and scrolling through links. They're asking questions directly to AI platforms — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, and yes, Claude — and getting synthesised answers back.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: a website can rank on page one of Google and be completely invisible to AI platforms. And the reverse is also becoming true.

So what do you do about it?

First, understand what's actually different

When you search on Google, you get a list of links. You choose which one to click. Your website's job is to be compelling enough to earn that click.

When someone asks an AI platform a question, they get an answer. The AI has already read the relevant pages, synthesised the information, and presented a conclusion. Your website's job is completely different — it needs to be credible enough to be cited as a source in that synthesised answer.

This shift has spawned two new terms you'll start hearing more of:

• AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation: Optimising for platforms that directly answer questions rather than returning links.

• GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation: Optimising for AI systems that generate responses from across the web.

The disciplines overlap significantly, and both overlap heavily with good SEO. But there are meaningful differences worth understanding.

What carries over from traditional SEO

The good news first: if you've been doing SEO properly, you're already in a reasonable position. The fundamentals that Google rewards are the same fundamentals that make content digestible for AI systems.

• Fast, crawlable websites — AI crawlers have the same access requirements as Googlebot

• Clear, well-structured content — headings, paragraphs, logical flow

• Authoritative backlinks — trusted sources linking to you signals credibility to both Google and AI training pipelines

• Mobile-friendly, accessible markup — clean HTML is clean HTML

If your website is a technical mess, fix that first. Everything below is irrelevant if AI crawlers can't read your pages.

The extra steps for AI visibility

1. Write for direct answers, not just for engagement

Traditional content marketing often buries the answer. You set the scene, you tell the story, you build to the conclusion. That's good for engagement metrics but bad for AI retrieval.

AI systems are looking for pages that answer questions clearly, early, and unambiguously. If someone asks "what is the best fashion school in Cape Town?" and your page eventually answers that question after three paragraphs of brand story, the AI may skip you for a page that leads with the answer.

What to do: Add FAQ sections to key pages. Use H2 and H3 headings phrased as questions. Open paragraphs with the direct answer, then support it with detail. Think of it as inverted pyramid writing — conclusion first, context second.

2. Schema markup is no longer optional

Schema markup (structured data in JSON-LD format) has been a best practice for years, but it's often treated as optional. For AI visibility, it becomes critical.

AI retrieval systems use schema to understand what a page is about at a machine-readable level — not just what the text says, but what type of entity the page describes. An EducationalOrganization schema tells AI systems "this is a school" with far more confidence than reading the page copy.

What to do: Add the schema types relevant to your business category. At minimum:

• Organization or LocalBusiness on your homepage

• Service or Product on your service/product pages

• FAQPage on any FAQ sections

• Article or BlogPosting on blog content

• BreadcrumbList on inner pages

If you're on TechBuild.me, this is something we can implement cleanly at the platform level.

3. Become an unambiguous entity

AI systems build what's called a knowledge graph — a structured map of entities (people, organisations, places, products) and the relationships between them. To be cited confidently, your business needs to be a clearly defined entity in that graph.

This means your business name, address, phone number, description, and founding details need to be consistent everywhere — your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, social profiles, industry directories, and any press coverage. Inconsistency lowers AI confidence in who you are.

What to do: Audit your NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistency across all platforms. Make sure your "About" page is factual, specific, and includes founding year, location, credentials, and what makes you different. These aren't just nice-to-haves — they're the raw data AI systems use to identify and describe you.

4. Earn authoritative third-party mentions

AI models are trained on the web's most trusted content. A mention on a reputable news site, an industry publication, or a government directory carries disproportionate weight — not just for your Google domain authority, but for your presence in AI training data.

This is essentially link building, but the goal extends beyond PageRank. You want your business described by others in trusted contexts. When an AI is asked about your category, it's synthesising information from dozens of sources — being described accurately and positively in those sources directly influences what it says about you.

What to do: Invest in digital PR. Get featured in industry publications. Submit to authoritative business directories. If you do something genuinely newsworthy (an award, a major client, a community initiative), write a press release and distribute it. For South African businesses, getting listed on relevant DHET, SARS, or industry body sites adds significant credibility.

5. Consider a Wikipedia or Wikidata entry

Wikipedia is arguably the single most heavily weighted source in AI training data. Most AI systems have absorbed Wikipedia almost entirely. If your organisation has been around long enough and has enough verifiable history, a Wikipedia entry (or at minimum a Wikidata entity) is worth pursuing.

This isn't straightforward — Wikipedia has strict notability guidelines and a large community of editors who will delete entries that read like marketing. But for established businesses with a genuine track record, it's achievable and highly impactful.

What to do: Check if your business or its principals already have Wikipedia mentions. If you qualify for an entry, ensure it's factual, cited from third-party sources, and written in encyclopaedic language. A Wikidata entity is easier to create and still provides structured entity data to AI systems.

6. Add an llms.txt file

This one is early-stage but gaining momentum fast. Inspired by robots.txt, the /llms.txt convention is a plain-text file at the root of your website that gives AI systems a curated, human-readable summary of who you are and what your site contains.

Think of it as a cover letter to AI crawlers — "here's what we do, here are our most important pages, here's how to accurately describe us."

Anthropic, Perplexity, and several other AI companies are beginning to respect this standard. It's low effort and future-proofs your site as AI crawling becomes more sophisticated.

What to do: Create /llms.txt at your domain root. Include your organisation name, a one-paragraph description, your primary products or services, key pages with brief descriptions, and any factual claims you want AI systems to know about you (accreditation, founding year, notable achievements).

The honest perspective on effort vs. impact

The digital marketing industry will inevitably over-complicate this and sell it as a brand new discipline requiring a full strategy engagement. The reality is more practical.

For most businesses, the gap between solid SEO and solid AEO is smaller than the vendors would like you to believe. The same things that make you credible to Google make you credible to AI systems — clear content, structured data, consistent entity information, and authoritative third-party mentions.

If you had to prioritise, here's the order:

1. Fix your technical SEO fundamentals — if Google can't read you, neither can AI

2. Add schema markup — this is the highest-leverage single action for AI visibility

3. Audit and standardise your entity information across all platforms

4. Start earning authoritative third-party coverage

5. Add an /llms.txt file — 30 minutes of effort, long-term benefit

6. Pursue Wikipedia/Wikidata if you qualify

The businesses that move on this now — while most of their competitors are still thinking only in Google terms — will have a meaningful head start as AI-mediated search continues to grow.

What this means for your website build

At TechBuild.me, we build every site with both Google and AI visibility in mind from day one. That means clean semantic HTML, JSON-LD schema by default, consistent entity markup, and blog infrastructure that supports answer-optimised content.

If you want to audit how your current site is positioned for AI visibility — or you're starting a new build and want to get this right from the ground up — get in touch with us.

TechBuild.me builds high-performance websites and web applications for businesses that want to be found — on Google, on AI platforms, and everywhere your customers are looking.