Gone are the days of traditional Google Search.
Not only has Google Search forever changed with the integration of AI Overviews and AI Mode into its interface, but also incredibly powerful search alternatives have emerged: AI platforms like Grok, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and more.
The rapid advancement of AI search has been staggering. According to Semrush, traffic from AI search could surpass that from traditional Google search by “early 2028.”
As AI search continues to grow in popularity and ability, more companies are prioritizing optimizing web content to boost their brand’s visibility in AI search. This process is called Generative Engine Optimization (or AI SEO depending on who you talk to).
While highly similar to SEO, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) doesn’t focus on improving content rankings in search engine results pages. Instead, it prioritizes maximizing a brand’s influence and discoverability in AI search.
As we wrote about previously, nearly all ambitious businesses should be optimizing for AI-powered search. For this article, we want to focus on a very specific tactic companies should consider to boost visibility in AI search: incorporating strong FAQ content to a website.
What is an FAQ?
A Frequently Asked Questions or FAQ section on your website is a highly effective way to answer important questions relative to your business, products, services, industry, and more. It typically consists of a list of questions that then have short, 1-3 sentence answers.
Here’s an example of an FAQ on our website’s homepage:
Not only does a great FAQ section improve user experience by making it easier to understand your offerings, it also boosts AI visibility.
How?
Here are three reasons why FAQs are useful for improving AI visibility:
- FAQs are easy for AI tools to understand because they provide clear and concise answers that are ideal for AI-generated snippets and summaries
- FAQs are in a machine-readable format
- FAQs directly address long tail queries people may not use in traditional search
Let’s discuss each of these reasons in more detail.
FAQs Provide Clear and Concise Answers
AI tools like ChatGPT and Grok love to provide easily understandable responses to user prompts. FAQs are perfect for this. They are typically formatted with a relevant question and then followed up with a concise, 1-3 sentence answer.
Not only is this super effective for a user, but it’s gold for an AI tool to use for its responses.
FAQs Are in a Machine-Readable Format
As previously discussed, FAQs are in an extremely simple format: question followed by answer. This format mirrors natural language queries (the ones we typically use when using AI), which allows AI models to easily map user prompts to relevant answers.
Also, many websites use FAQ schema to embed FAQs in HTML. This enhances the machine-readability for AI models, making it near trivial for AI models to ingest the information.
FAQs Answer Long Tail Queries
Another key reason why FAQs are great for boosting AI visibility is because they typically answer long tail queries that a traditional search engine might not.
AI models use Natural Language Processing to both understand user prompts and to generate strong answers. When someone uses AI, they typically have a conversation with it (chatbot). This is not the case with a traditional search.
As a result, queries in AI search are often conversational by nature, frequently including long tail queries like “why would a company choose Demand Thrive to boost AI visibility?”.
For example, here’s an FAQ we created that addresses long tail queries. We embedded this one into our guide on AI Overviews.
FAQs aid AI platforms in answering long tail queries (like the ones above) because they address them head on.
Conclusion
FAQs are a great way to boost your brand’s visibility in AI search. On top of that, they’re great for improving user experience and informing potential customers about your business. If your company needs help maximizing AI visibility, contact us.