In the Age of AI Search, Great Content is Still King

Quality In = Quality Out.  

Online search, at its simplest, is just inputs and outputs. The outputs of search are what humans see and read and hear from the search engine, and take many forms. Traditional search has pages of direct links based on relevancy, authority, and recency. It also has rich snippets - those added sidebars and sections of Google search results pages that assemble a holistic summary of information. And now there are natural language outputs - most commonly experienced as AI summaries, but also as chatbot conversations and spoken queries with something like Alexa. These newer models create their own output altogether from myriad sources online, including websites, social media, and online forums such as Reddit.  

The inputs, though? They haven’t changed much at all. It’s still the content on websites. Great content is still king.  

If you are the person in charge of the content for your public website, the most important thing you need to worry about first and foremost… is the content on your website. The outputs will continue to evolve and change, but the rules for the content input actually haven’t changed much at all (Google says as much in official guidelines). If anything, AI powered search is rewarding great, structured, thoughtful content more than traditional search ever did. So forget for a moment about all those outputs - you don’t have any control over how they work, or how people use them.  

What you do have control over is your content. And if you’ve been doing things right all along, you may be in better shape than you realize.  

Four Things That Have Not Changed (Much), and One That Has (Maybe). 

1. Structured On-Page Content. 
All search engines look to your markup to understand how information is organized and what its hierarchy is. For years, the best practice for on-page content has been to establish a hierarchy of headings — H1 through H5 — and follow it cleanly through topics and subtopics. That hasn’t changed.
2. Using Active Voice Speaking to Your Audience Directly and Conversationally. 
The most effective website content strategies speak to their audiences as if they were standing right in front of them. They use active rather than passive voice. They frame things in the way their audience understands them, typically in the form of a question to be answered. Conversational search may be new, but conversational content has been around forever. Our work on Columbus College of Art & Design's homepage is a good example—intended to feel like a conversation that directly speaks to prospective students.
3. Utilizing Schema. 
Schema markup flags certain content for search engines as a particular type of information, such as an academic program, event, person, or a physical building. These flags helped to create rich snippets for the last generation of search, and help LLMs as well. New standards for schema tailored to LLMs are emerging. For example, this news article from John Carroll University has the Article, Local Business, and Organization tags, each of which helps with additional context for search results in the Cleveland area and flags for engines that the content is intended as news. If you haven’t been implementing types from schema.org in your work, it’s time to start. And even if you have, you should visit often to keep up with the latest additions, in addition to running tests like this one from Google on your current site.
4. Good Titles, URLs, and Meta Descriptions. 
These three small bits of content are just as important as ever. Outside of the body content on your page, they help traditional and LLM search engines confirm the purpose of each web page. Consistency, not variety, is key here. Rather than jamming as many keywords as possible into these, you should make sure the main title, URL path, and meta description all have the same or very similar terms.
5. One Thing That Has (Maybe) Changed - The FAQ. 
We know AI search naturally takes on a Q+A format, so there’s been lots of speculation that FAQs are a perfect type of content for them. I think that’s too easy of an out. FAQs aren’t inherently terrible if used properly; but they are almost always used improperly as dumping grounds for every question and answer that might be asked. Rather than thinking of grouping all questions and answers together in an FAQ, try including one or two questions and answers relevant to the main topics of each page, on those pages, as part of the structured page content. Make the heading the question, and use the body copy below to answer. Hilbert College does this well with their academic program pages - notice how this Business Management page has both traditional headers as questions as well as a small FAQ component farther down the page.