SEO and AI: why they go hand in hand and how to show up on Google and ChatGPT

Every time a new artificial intelligence tool appears, the same question comes back: is SEO dead? The official guides from Google and OpenAI say the opposite. SEO and AI go hand in hand because AI search engines don't invent their sources: they read pages they can crawl, understand and cite. If your site isn't built well for Google, it won't be for ChatGPT or Perplexity either.

Without AI summary, click on a result15%

With AI summary, click on a result8%

With AI summary, click on a link in the summary1%

Source: Pew Research Center, March 2025 data

View the data as a table

Without AI summary, click on a result	15%
With AI summary, click on a result	8%
With AI summary, click on a link in the summary	1%

What Google says about SEO and AI

Google is direct in its guide on AI features and your website: there are no additional requirements or special optimizations to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Nor do you need new AI files or a special type of structured data.

What it does ask for is the usual. For a page to appear as a link inside an AI answer, it must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet. Its recommendations are:

• Allow crawling in the robots.txt file and in your hosting or CDN service.
• Make content easy to find with internal links.
• Provide a good page experience.
• Keep important content in text, not only in images.
• Keep structured data consistent with what is visible on the page.

Google also explains that these features may run multiple related searches across subtopics to build an answer. That's why a page that answers a specific question well has a better chance of being cited.

AI robots also need technical SEO

Outside Google, each AI search engine has its own robot. The rule is the same: if you block it, you don't appear.

Robot	Owner	What it's for
Googlebot	Google	Indexes the web for Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode
OAI-SearchBot	OpenAI	Shows sites in ChatGPT search answers
GPTBot	OpenAI	Collects content to train models; blocking it doesn't remove you from ChatGPT search
PerplexityBot	Perplexity	Shows and links sites in Perplexity results

OpenAI states it explicitly in its bots documentation: sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Perplexity, in its bots guide, recommends allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt.

To check whether your page lets these robots in, use our Free AI Checker. And to check the SEO basics that AI also reads, such as title, H1, canonical, indexing and structured data, run it through the SEO Checker.

What changes: fewer clicks, more value in being the source

SEO and AI go together, but that doesn't mean everything stays the same. According to the Pew Research Center, when Google shows an AI summary, users click a traditional result in 8% of visits, compared with 15% when there is no summary. We analyze it in depth in AI Overviews in figures.

The conclusion is not to abandon SEO but to adjust the goal: besides winning the click, it now matters to be the source the AI cites. And that's achieved with what Google has asked for years: original content, verifiable data, clear authorship and a technically clean page. We saw it in our study on which Chilean companies appear in AI search engine answers.

How to prepare your site for SEO and AI at the same time

1. Check the technical basics with the SEO Checker: indexing, canonical, title and structured data.
2. Check AI robot access with the Free AI Checker.
3. Answer specific questions with clear subheadings and a direct answer in the first paragraph of each section.
4. Provide your own or verifiable data and cite your sources: that's what makes a page citable.
5. Measure in Search Console: traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in the Performance report, under the "Web" search type, according to the same Google guide.