Brand Visibility Everywhere: Getting Indexed in Both Traditional & AI Search

AI search platforms are becoming more popular every day, with ChatGPT alone hitting a milestone of 400 million weekly users. While many businesses still focus on optimizing for Google, those who plan for brand visibility in AI search will have a competitive edge as these platforms gain market share.

These shifts in technology and consumer behavior have major implications for businesses and marketers that rely on search engine visibility for traffic and conversions. If you're not thinking beyond page one of Google, you’re missing out on growth opportunities. 

Your content needs to be found everywhere consumers are searching if you want to maximize your visibility across all types of search. Today, we’re going to cover where all brand visibility begins, the source of every organic conversion for both AI and traditional search: indexation. 

Brand visibility depends on getting indexed in both traditional and AI search

For the first time in a decade, Google’s global market share has trended below 90%. That’s still a large majority, but the rising popularity of alternative search platforms means that search is no longer a one-horse race. Primarily focusing on optimizing for Google was a safe strategy for many years, but new AI-powered search platforms are changing the game; now, to get brand mentions and linked citations everywhere your consumers search, you have to think (and optimize) outside the Google box.

There’s good news: you don’t have to change your search strategy wholesale. Visibility across AI search relies on a similar process as traditional search:

• Inform search and AI engines that your site needs to be crawled
• Ensure bots can easily find, crawl, and render your most important site content
• Get your content indexed by Google, Bing, and the new search indexes some AI platforms (like OpenAI and Meta) are building
• Employ a content strategy that supports every step of the customer journey
• Strengthen your SEO fundamentals to give traditional and AI search engines the ranking and authority signals needed to prioritize your site in mentions and linked citations

Appearing in AI search begins in the same place as traditional search: getting indexed. If your website can’t be found by search bots and AI bots, it will never be surfaced in conversations with AI assistants or in top search engines like Google and Bing.

Pushing vs. pulling: How search & AI engines find & prioritize your content

There are two key concepts when it comes to getting your content indexed: the idea of pushing your content to the platforms that need to index it, and the idea of making it easy for them to find and pull content from your website. Both are important, but pushing your content directly to traditional and AI search is a proactive step you can take that gives you more control over what is found and prioritized on your site.

The Pull: Passively getting content found and indexed

The “pull” covers the traditional strategies you can use to get your content found, prioritized, and indexed in search:

• Defining rules for bot behavior and content access across your site via robots.txt
• Using rel=”nofollow” to tell crawlers to ignore an internal link they find
• Using rel=”noindex” to tell crawlers when a page they find shouldn’t be indexed
• Using canonicals to tell crawlers which version of a page is the most important
• Providing optimized sitemaps that can help crawlers find your most important site content (consider sitemaps a halfway point between push and pull; they’re passively found by crawlers, but proactively provide a clear “map” of which content is important to crawl on your site.)

All of these methods force you to wait for a platform to decide it’s time to crawl your site. Once that time comes, you have hints and rules in place to guide how their bots find and explore your content, but there’s an innate lack of control. You can’t tell them exactly what to crawl or when to crawl it; instead, you hope it happens often enough that your freshest content is found, indexed, and either ranked in traditional search or summarized in AI search.

If you only rely on “pull” methods of indexation, you’re leaking opportunity. There’s no way to ensure your content is found, that important content is prioritized first, and that old or inaccurate content isn’t finding its way into the search results.

The Push: Proactively getting content found and indexed

The “push” is a newer, more proactive strategy for ensuring your most valuable content is found, prioritized, and indexed across traditional and AI search. This includes actions like:

• Generating and implementing optimized XML sitemaps (make this step more proactive by automating this task frequently to ensure your freshest content is included)
• Using protocols like IndexNow, which pings top partnered search platforms and informs them it’s time to recrawl a website
• Using the Google Indexing API, which only applies to very specific types of content updates (like job postings and livestreamed video content)
• Submitting URLs directly to Bing via the URL and Content Submission APIs, which provide content directly to the Bing index without requiring their bots to crawl it

These “push” methods give you far more control over when and how your site content is crawled. The ability to push content directly into the Bing search index is especially important:

1. Many traditional search alternatives use the Bing search index to power their results; 
2. Many AI search platforms do as well. 

That means that if your freshest content appears in the Bing index quickly, you have the best chance of it appearing in AI search mentions and linked citations, too.

AI search platforms rely on LLMs that have been pre-trained on vast amounts of static content, meaning they don't automatically have up-to-date or fresh information.

To solve this problem, these AI platforms rely on a technique called retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Through this process, AI search platforms are able to use tried and trusted rankings to find the freshest most relevant answers to specific queries. They can also find and re-crawl the URLs found in these search indexes.

How to improve indexation in both traditional and AI search

Being found in the indexes that all search platforms rely on ensures that your content is both discoverable via organic results and used as fresh, accurate input for AI-generated answers. This creates a dual opportunity for businesses and marketers to be found everywhere your consumers search, via both traditional search engines (Google, Bing) and AI-driven assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity. 

Analyze your bot visits via log file analysis

Regardless of how search results are eventually served up, your web content is still found via crawlers like Googlebot and Bingbot. Spend some time analyzing your log data to determine if crawlers are actually finding the content you want them to, and if they’re running into any technical issues. Log file analysis is critical to get the most accurate and reliable information about bot behavior, but it’s difficult to do manually for large websites. You can automate this process at scale with Botify Analytics. 

Invest in your technical site health

Optimize the technical infrastructure of your site to make sure search engines can crawl, render, and index your content without issue. Focus your efforts on improving site speed, optimization for mobile, and removing any obstacles stopping bots from accessing content.

Optimize for AI bots

Many AI bots aren’t yet as sophisticated as Googlebot. They simply don’t have the same resources or crawl budget to access as much content as Google’s robust crawler.

This means that you should carefully consider how you govern AI bot behavior. For example, some AI bots (like OpenAI’s GPTbot) focus on training and refining their AI models. Others (like OpenAI’s ChatGPT-User) are used to find and retrieve fresh content and links from an existing index using RAG. Still others (like OpenAI’s OAI-SearchBot) are used for indexing content, similar to the Google or Bing search indexes. Which bots need access to what content? Develop a strategy and guide them using both push and pull methods of content discovery.

Additionally, most AI bots can’t render JavaScript. Any content that relies on JavaScript may as well be invisible to them; if your valuable content or products can't be "seen" by bots, you may risk their visibility in AI search. Botify Activation’s SpeedWorkers solution solves for this, pre-rendering your site content at scale and delivering it directly to bots to improve the amount of content they can crawl and ensure they don’t miss anything important due to rendering issues.

Automatically inform search and AI engines that content should be found and crawled

Once you know how crawlers are spending time on your site and you’ve removed technical roadblocks, make sure your valuable, revenue-driving content is easily accessible to them. 

If you manage a large website, that can be difficult to do at scale. SmartIndex, a brand-new offering within Botify Activation, automates content discovery and indexing at scale to maximize your visibility across all search platforms while reducing the manual work required:

1. Guide crawlers through your site structure with sitemaps: One of the simplest ways to optimize for crawlers is to maintain a sitemap. Operating on daily crawls, SmartIndex can generate new sitemaps as often as once a day, ensuring bots are following the most up-to-date outline of your website.
2. Alert search engines to updated content: The IndexNow protocol allows website owners to signal page updates to bots, including those operated by major search engines, and request that those pages be crawled. Through Botify’s frequent crawls, SmartIndex knows almost immediately when pages are new or updated, and can send that information efficiently through IndexNow, helping prioritize your brand’s crawl budget.
3. Push your content straight to AI search: Through SmartIndex, you can segment and push your priority content directly into Bing’s index, making it easy and quick to serve your freshest content to both Bing search and the AI-powered engines its index informs.
4. Maximize your visibility everywhere using automation: By automating your indexation strategies, you can achieve more across both search and AI platforms at scale while freeing up your team’s resources for other initiatives.

If you’re already a Botify customer, reach out to your account manager about how SmartIndex can help; if not, we’d love to give you a demo.

Indexation is the heart of your search visibility

Search is no longer just about showing up as a blue link on Google SERPs. With the rise of AI-powered search results and the increasing integration of traditional search engines like Bing into these systems, you need to think about search visibility in a new way. 

Making sure your content is indexed in both Google and Bing gives you the best chance of being found across both traditional and AI search. Crawl budgets are more important than ever, so focus on clearing the way for bots, and your content will find its way to the right indexes.

If you want to learn more and gain actionable strategies for achieving brand visibility everywhere, be sure to join us at our upcoming webinar:

AI search is a tremendous opportunity for brands, but your competitive edge relies on being proactive and ensuring your content is properly indexed and ready to be shared everywhere consumers search.