AI search engines: how to show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude
A growing share of search traffic now happens in AI chatbots. Here is what they actually look for.
By 2026, a meaningful share of "search" queries happen inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and the AI overviews at the top of Google. Optimising for these is similar to traditional SEO but with a few specific differences.
How AI engines find information
Most AI engines either crawl the web themselves or use a search engine as a retrieval layer. When a user asks "best Webflow studios in London", the AI does a search, reads the top results, synthesises an answer, and cites sources.
To show up: be in the top traditional search results AND have content that's easy for the AI to extract.
What makes content AI-friendly
Clear, declarative writing. No ambiguous phrases. Sentences that state facts unambiguously.
Structured information. Lists, tables, definitions. AI loves well-formatted information because it's easier to extract.
Topical authority. Don't write one thin article about a topic. Write a cluster — multiple articles on related sub-topics. AI engines prefer sources that demonstrate depth.
Cite your sources. AI engines learn to trust sites that themselves cite real sources. Linking out is not the SEO sin it once was.
Schema markup. Especially FAQ, HowTo, and Article schemas. These help the AI understand what kind of content you have.
What kills AI visibility
AI-generated content. The engines can detect their own output, and they deprioritise it. Use AI for drafting but rewrite for voice.
Thin pages. A 200-word page with no real information gets ignored. AI engines summarise; they need something substantive to summarise.
Walled gardens. If your content lives behind a paywall or login, AI engines can't read it. Either gate it (and accept the visibility hit) or open it.
Excessive ads and popups. Content that's hard to read gets deprioritised by both humans and AI.
Specific tactics
Write FAQ-style content for common questions in your niche. "What does a Webflow site cost in London?" gets surfaced if you have the answer in plain language with FAQPage schema.
Get cited by trusted sources. When Wikipedia, major publications, or established industry sites cite your work, AI engines weight that heavily.
Maintain a topic cluster. A core "pillar" article on a topic, plus 5-10 related sub-articles, signals depth that AI prefers over isolated posts.
Realistic expectations
Showing up in AI overviews is similar to ranking on page one of Google: hard, valuable, requires real content. The studios doing this well in 2026 are the ones who started writing substantively in 2024.
There is no shortcut. The same fundamentals apply, with a slight bias toward clarity and structure.