SEO in the AI Era: What to Do for Google and ChatGPT

Table of contents

• What the Primary Sources Say (and Don’t Say)
• Step 1: Set Your Access Policy Before You Touch the Content
• Step 2: Confirm Google Can Show You With a Snippet
• Step 3: Use Preview Controls Deliberately, Not Out of Fear
• Step 4: Content That Survives a Summary
• Step 5: Structure, Structured Data and Page Experience
• What You Don’t Need to Do (and Often Get Sold)
• How to Measure Without Fooling Yourself
• A Ten-Point Checklist
• Next Step

Most companies asking “how do I do SEO for AI?” expect a list of new tactics. The official documentation says nearly the opposite: Google states that there are no additional requirements or special optimizations to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that long-standing SEO best practices remain relevant. OpenAI, for its part, does not describe content tactics at all. It describes crawlers and how to control them in robots.txt.

That is the thesis of this article. The real work is not inventing a new discipline. It is five specific decisions: which crawlers you allow, whether your pages are eligible, which preview controls you apply, whether your content offers something a summary can’t replace, and how you measure without fooling yourself. None of them guarantees a place in a generative answer. All of them raise the odds that your content is eligible and remove the mistakes that quietly exclude you.

This is an operating plan. If you first need to understand what SEO, AEO and GEO mean and how they relate, start with SEO, AEO, and GEO: The Visibility System. We assume that foundation here. One scope note: “SEO with AI” can mean using AI tools to do SEO work, or preparing your site to be visible in Google’s AI search and in ChatGPT. This article covers only the second.

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What the Primary Sources Say (and Don’t Say)

It helps to separate what is documented from what the market repeats. This is what the primary sources establish, as of the date we consulted them (October 9, 2026):

Two caveats in the interest of honesty. First, these sources describe eligibility conditions, not selection mechanisms. None of them explains why a particular link appears in a particular answer, and anyone who explains it in detail is interpreting, not quoting. Second, Google states that meeting every requirement does not guarantee it will crawl, index or serve your content.

With that boundary clear, here is the plan.

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Step 1: Set Your Access Policy Before You Touch the Content

The first decision isn’t editorial. It’s a business decision: what do you want AI systems to do with your content? There are three distinct uses, and the documentation separates them:

1. Appearing in answers with a link (search). This benefits anyone who wants to be discovered.
2. Training models. You may want to allow it, or not.
3. User-initiated actions (for example, someone asking ChatGPT to read your page). OpenAI notes that because these actions are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply.

The table summarizes the relevant crawlers and tokens, and what each controls according to official documentation:

Here is one example of a possible policy, not a universal recommendation. A services firm that wants to be discovered in ChatGPT but prefers not to hand its content library over for training could allow OAI-SearchBot and disallow GPTBot and Google-Extended.

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

Three operational notes that prevent common mistakes:

• Check the CDN and firewall too. Google’s best practices include making sure crawling is allowed “in robots.txt, and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure.” A correct robots.txt does nothing if a security rule returns errors to crawlers.
• Wait before concluding anything. OpenAI says robots.txt changes can take about 24 hours to be reflected in its systems.
• Blocking is not always absolute. OpenAI’s publisher FAQ says that if it obtains the URL of a disallowed page from a third-party search provider or by crawling other pages, and sees signals the page is relevant, it may show just the link and page title in ChatGPT Atlas. Its stated way to prevent that is a noindex meta tag, which a crawler can only read if the page is allowed to be crawled.
• Verify crawlers; don’t trust the user agent string alone. OpenAI publishes its crawler IP ranges as JSON files. Your technical team can use them to validate real traffic in server logs.

Make this call with someone who answers for the business, not only the dev team. It is an intellectual property decision and a visibility decision at the same time.

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Step 2: Confirm Google Can Show You With a Snippet

Google’s condition is literal: indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet. That changes the order of your audit. Before talking about content for AI, answer these questions with Search Console data:

• Are the pages that matter indexed? (the page indexing report)
• Do they return a 200 status code and indexable content? Google lists both explicitly among the requirements for being considered.
• Are noindex, nosnippet or max-snippet directives applied by a template, plugin or legacy setting? This can happen on sites that have been through several migrations or theme changes.
• Is the important content in text, not only inside images or elements that don’t render?

The tool for checking what Google actually sees is Search Console’s URL Inspection, which shows the HTML Googlebot received. It’s the same tool Google recommends for debugging preview controls.

The outcome of this step is usually unglamorous and valuable: a short list of important pages that aren’t eligible because of a configuration error. Fixing that has a better expected return than any “AI rewrite.”

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Step 3: Use Preview Controls Deliberately, Not Out of Fear

The controls exist and they work for AI features: Google confirms that nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex apply, and that more restrictive permissions limit how your content is featured in its AI experiences.

The useful question is what you are protecting and at what price. Three scenarios:

• Commercial content you want discovered (services, guides, comparisons): there is usually no reason to restrict it. Limiting it also shrinks your storefront in classic results.
• Paid or high-value proprietary content (reports, data, client material): it may make sense to limit snippets or gate access, accepting that you’ll lose some visibility.
• Specific fragments within a page (a pricing table, a sensitive figure): data-nosnippet lets you protect one block without removing the whole page.

One practical detail Google flags: a change isn’t instant. Google says crawling can take anywhere from several days to several months depending on how often its systems decide a page needs refreshing, and that you can request a recrawl.

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Step 4: Content That Survives a Summary

This is the only truly editorial work. Google puts it this way in its guidance for site owners: create unique, non-commodity content that visitors find helpful and satisfying, in an environment where users ask longer, more specific questions and follow-up questions.

As a decision criterion, a piece of content earns its place if it passes this test: if a good three-line summary can replace it without loss, there is no reason for anyone to click, and no reason for a system to prefer it over ten equivalent sources. What tends to survive a summary:

• Original data or analysis, with the methodology explained and dated.
• First-hand experience and judgment: which decision we recommend, under what conditions and with what exceptions.
• Tools, templates and processes the reader uses, not just reads.
• Verifiable information about who wrote it and how. Google’s helpful content guidance proposes the “Who, How and Why” questions: clear authorship, transparency about automation, and a purpose of helping people rather than manipulating rankings. We go deeper on building that credibility in E-E-A-T for Mid-Sized Companies.

And a warning about the other side. Google says using generative AI to produce many pages without adding value for users may violate its policy on scaled content abuse. AI can help structure and research; judgment, fact-checking and a point of view remain human. We lay out the boundary in Generative AI in Content Production.

One point for anyone worried that long questions will break their keyword strategy. Google explains that AI Overviews and AI Mode may use a “query fan-out” technique, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics to build a response. The practical consequence is not to write hundreds of long-tail pages. It’s that covering a topic in depth with a coherent structure, a site whose pages reinforce each other, makes more sense than spreading thin. That is the argument behind content architecture for visibility and topical authority.

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Step 5: Structure, Structured Data and Page Experience

The three technical elements Google names explicitly are modest:

• Important content in text. If the key answer exists only in an image or a PDF without text, it isn’t accessible to either logic.
• Structured data that matches what’s visible. Google asks that everything in your markup also be visible on the page and that you validate it. There is no special schema for AI. Useful markup is still whatever fits the page type (organization, article, product, FAQ where appropriate).
• A good page experience, for people arriving from classic or AI results alike: it displays well across devices, loads quickly, and lets visitors tell the main content from everything else. The link between technical performance and conversion is covered in Technical SEO and User Experience.

Google adds two recommendations that rarely show up in “SEO for AI” guides: support text with high-quality images and video where relevant, and keep Merchant Center and Business Profile information up to date. For local businesses and retail, those listings are part of the storefront.

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What You Don’t Need to Do (and Often Get Sold)

Based on what the documentation says and doesn’t say, these practices are often presented as mandatory without official backing for Google’s features:

• Creating an “AI” text file or special schema to enter AI Overviews. Google says it isn’t necessary. If you decide to publish a file like that for other reasons, treat it as a low-cost bet, not a proven lever.
• Rewriting the whole site in “answer format.” Structuring content well is good SEO. Chopping it up until it loses its argument turns it into the commodity Google advises against.
• Changing dates to look fresh. Google’s helpful content guidance lists changing page dates without changing the content among the signs of content made for search engines rather than people.
• Paying for guaranteed “ChatGPT ranking.” No official documentation allows anyone to promise it. For this specific topic, what works and what is hype when appearing in ChatGPT details what evidence exists.
• Blocking everything as a precaution. Walking away from OAI-SearchBot or Googlebot out of fear of AI means giving up visibility to avoid a risk you can manage with finer controls.

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How to Measure Without Fooling Yourself

Two documented facts set the frame. First, Google includes AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic in the Search Console Performance report, under the Web search type; a click on an external link in an AI response counts as a click. Second, Google launched a dedicated generative AI performance report (announced June 3, 2026 and rolled out to all sites on August 31, 2026) showing impressions, pages, countries, devices and dates. The report’s documentation lists no clicks or queries, and those impressions are already counted in the main report.

That means Search Console tells you how often you appear, not how much influence that appearance has. For ChatGPT, OpenAI documents that publishers can track referral traffic with analytics tools. The details and limits of that measurement, along with Bing and GA4, are covered in how to measure brand visibility in AI answers.

One last point of judgment. Google maintains that clicks from pages with AI Overviews are higher quality (users spend more time on the site) and recommends looking at the overall value of visits, using conversion indicators like sales, sign-ups or inquiries, not just clicks. That is Google’s claim about its own data. Treat it as a hypothesis you can test with your analytics, not as a fact about your business. For the other side of the equation, the effect of direct answers on click volume, see zero-click search: how to build visibility.

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A Ten-Point Checklist

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Next Step

If your team isn’t sure whether the pages that carry the business are actually eligible, which crawlers to allow, or how to measure the effect without claiming credit that can’t be proven, the starting point is a scoped technical and editorial review. It’s part of our strategic SEO service and builds on Maccam Network’s SEO methodology. If you’d rather talk it through first, get in touch.

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Sources

• Google Search Central. (last updated December 10, 2025). AI features and your website. developers.google.com/…/ai-features
• Google Search Central. (2025, May 21). Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google’s AI experiences on Search. developers.google.com/…/succeeding-in-ai-search
• Google Search Central. Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. developers.google.com/…/creating-helpful-content
• Google Search Central. Google Search’s guidance on using generative AI content on your website. developers.google.com/…/using-gen-ai-content
• Google Search Central. Google’s common crawlers (includes Google-Extended). developers.google.com/…/google-common-crawlers
• Google Search Central. (2026, June 3). Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console. developers.google.com/…/gen-ai-performance-reports
• Google Search Console Help. Generative AI performance report (Search). support.google.com/…/16984139
• Google Search Console Help. What are impressions, position, and clicks? (sections on AI Mode and AI Overviews). support.google.com/…/7042828
• OpenAI. Overview of OpenAI crawlers. developers.openai.com/…/bots
• OpenAI Help Center. Publishers and Developers FAQ. help.openai.com/…/12627856-publishers-and-deve…

Sources verified as of October 9, 2026.