Help Articles – Page 6
SEO optimises a page for a position. AI search optimization optimises data for retrieval. The overlap is real, since both reward being crawlable, explicit and authoritative, but the objective has moved.
Three things change in practice. The unit drops from the page to the passage, and for commerce from the product page to the product data. The outcome changes from a visit to an answer, which means a correct citation with no click counts as success rather than failure. And freshness matters more, because an assistant quoting a stale price does you more damage than not appearing at all.
Usually because the facts are visible to a person but not reachable by a machine. The failure sits at one point along a path, and identifying which point is the whole diagnosis.
The stages run in order. Human-visible, where a customer can find it by using the interface. Crawlable, where a retrieval system can fetch it. Structured, where it exists as explicit data rather than prose. Channel-ingested, where it is supplied through a feed the destination supports. And integrated for retrieval, where a live service is connected to the system answering the question.
AI Overviews are assembled from passages, not whole pages, so the unit that matters is the section rather than the document. A page can be cited for one heading and ignored for everything else on it.
The structure that works is direct. Put the question as the heading, answer it plainly in the first two sentences, and keep the section true when it is read on its own with no surrounding context. Supporting detail goes after the answer, never before it.
Run a fixed set of prompts on a schedule and record what changed between runs. The before-and-after comparison is the measurement. A single result on a single day tells you very little, because answers vary between sessions.
Track three things: whether you appear at all, whether the facts in the answer are correct, and which source was cited. Tools such as PromptWatch and Profound monitor citation share across prompts over time, and Search Console still records impressions where AI surfaces are involved.
By being the cleanest authoritative source for a specific fact, not by publishing more. Assistants cite what they can extract without ambiguity and attribute with confidence.
In practice that means three things. State the fact explicitly rather than implying it. Keep each section true on its own, so it survives being lifted out of the page around it. And make the claim traceable to you as the merchant or manufacturer, because a system choosing between your page and a reseller's will favour the source it can attribute.
You do not rank in ChatGPT the way you rank in Google. There is no position to climb and no results page to move up. When someone asks for a product, the system assembles an answer from whatever it can find, understand and trust at that moment.
Three things decide whether you appear. It has to find the product in answer to a question that never mentions your brand. It has to understand the facts, which means typed attributes rather than adjectives buried in prose. And it has to trust the source, which means the price it quotes is the price you are charging today and the stock it promises is stock you actually have.