AISO and SEO: Differences in Semantic Depth and Relevance

AI SEO (AISO) is the evolution of traditional SEO, merging search intent with AI behavior by answering specific, high-intent queries in clear, concise, and actionable formats (like bullet points and lists). It favors clarity and speed over dense explanations,  so it can confidently summarize the answers for users.

Key Differences and Similarities Between AISO and SEO

AISO and SEO differentiation points in under 30 seconds.

Similarity: 

• • Both aim to satisfy search intent at the highest level and drive visibility.
  • Content structure, keyword targeting, and technical optimization remain essential in AISO and SEO approaches.
  • Both reward businesses that consistently publish around a focused niche to build trust and relevance.

Difference: 

• • AISO content is optimized for AI interpretation—designed to be easily extracted and summarized.
  • AISO is designed to feed AI systems directly, prioritizing answerability over ranking signals like backlinks.
  • Traditional SEO targets SERP rankings and click-throughs, while AISO accepts fewer clicks but aims for placement within AI-generated answers.
  • SEO emphasizes link building and long-form depth; AISO values format clarity, scannability, and how well your content answers fragmented, intent-rich queries across a topic cluster.

Now that you know the key differences between AI and SEO, you might be wondering: Will AISO replace SEO? 

It’s most likely that AI Search Optimization (AISO) won’t replace traditional search engine optimization, but it will reshape how people approach SEO and marketing. AISO complements SEO by helping brands optimize for AI-generated answers and AI-driven tools. This approach leverages machine learning (ML) and NLP to surface content in new discovery channels like ChatGPT, Bard, and Perplexity. The future lies in combining both for a smarter, adaptive strategy.

 It’s time to dive into the steps on how to achieve depth, consistency, and topic ownership.

AISO: 7 Steps to Improve Search Performance

There is a roadmap to improving visibility in AI-driven search results. 

Here, you’ll get specific, practical AISO strategies you can implement today to gain higher rankings and increase conversions.

Make Content More Personalized

To make content more personalized, use a data-driven approach and focus on tailoring content to user intent. Gather feedback from customers about their pain points, preferences, and experiences. Ensure to understand what type of content you need (e.g,. landing pages, case studies, whitepapers) to achieve maximum results.

You can personalize your content by targeting your audience and addressing their specific needs. For example, we created a blog optimized for search terms like “winning SaaS SEO” and “SaaS SEO strategies” to showcase our SEO expertise for SaaS clients. We also tailored the content for AI overviews, making it easier for potential SaaS clients to discover our services through search.

Another great strategy to make your content more personalized is to optimize authors’ pages. Showcase their expertise to create authority. And show search engines that the content was written by humans.

To start  working on authors’  pages, you need to:

1. Define who the content creators are to be listed as authors
2. Create a list of blog posts in a Google sheet and start mapping content pieces for each author
3. Go into the backend and set each blog post to the corresponding author
4. Have a great  designer create all the author’s page elements
5. Have a great developer build the author’s pages in an appropriate CMS

Deliver Direct Answers 

To deliver direct answers to specific queries, you’ll need to put yourself in the reader’s shoes. You’ll need to summarize your knowledge into a one-point paragraph that is easy to understand.

Simply ask yourself: 

• How can I explain the specific concept briefly and deliver an answer in a few seconds? 
• How can I help the reader understand the concept without clicking on 10 different links (i.e.sources)?
• How can I include original examples to support my claim?

No matter what you’re talking about, be direct. Encourage the use of clear headings, answer-first formatting, and structured snippets that mirror how users ask questions.

Take, for example, the “When should an application security architecture assessment be performed” long-tail query.

Here is the right way to make the complex information digestible:

Remember: AI search favors precise, succinct answers. This approach will help you gain rankings in AI overviews.

Here is another example targeting the audience interested in the “seo partner program”.

Make sure to provide quick, value-driven answers that will appear above the traditional search results. This could lead to an increase in brand visibility and potential customers.

Optimize for Google’s AI Overviews

AI Overviews prioritize well-structured, factually sound content. Encourage the use of concise summaries, bullet points, and formats that support featured snippets.

To optimize for AI overviews, focus on:

• In-depth, but short explanation that people can understand in under a few seconds
• Incorporate highly valuable visuals, bullet points, and numbered lists to make content readable
• Be creative and use original examples, especially while comparing solutions/terms

Examples of AI-optimized content:

1. When you search for “seo services for tech startups”

2. When you search for “is seo worth it for small business”

You’ve seen that well-structured answers increase the chances of your content being cited because AI extracts key information quickly.

AI-generated summaries favor content with original key points, fully aligned with search intent.

Level Up Your AI SEO Keyword Research

Keyword research has evolved with generative AI and conversational search. AI-powered search uncovers deeper insights into search intent, identifying user pain points, and suggesting alternative keyword phrases. These AI-enhanced platforms analyze user behavior patterns and generate highly relevant keywords, enabling businesses to create more targeted, search-optimized, and conversion-driven content.

But you also need to feed AI with relevant information and optimize prompts for the best results.

Let’s pretend we’re doing AI SEO keyword research for “harnessing solar energy”. The first step is to ask AI: “Give me 10 longtail keywords related to the seed keyword”.

Here are the results:

Now expand your research by asking what problems solar power solves. You get keyword ideas from pain points.

Now, discover alternative phases. Ask AI what are alternative ways to say “harnessing solar energy”.

In our example, AI went a step further and created categories:

Next, label each keyword by search intent. High intent (i.e., ready to convert), medium (i.e., comparing solutions), and low (i.e., still want to learn about solar power).

This is only a fraction of the AI results.

You’ve seen that AI chatbots are great for understanding keyword relations and meanings. What you need to do is learn how to guide them.

It’s also recommended to take advantage of AISO services that provide intent-focused, semantic keyword groupings. 

Uncover the “Zero Volume” Strategy

The zero volume strategy targets low-search, high-intent queries that aren’t tracked in traditional keyword tools. However, these “invisible” queries have a high conversion potential since they come right from the customer’s preferences. Targeting real user questions can lead to higher-quality traffic and boost conversion.

Give AI this prompt to start with your zero volume strategy: You’re a [what company]. You are best at [what kind of solutions does the company provide]. What specific problems would you single out as the most frequent among clients?

There you have hyper-specific queries that combine problem + impact. 

Next, expand your search by looking at Reddit discussions.

Take a look again at the AI results, and search for a specific problem. Let’s pick this one:

Hiring Challenges Without Smart Tools

• Problem: Recruitment systems don’t offer applicant tracking, automation, or data visibility.
• Impact: Slower hiring cycles, missed candidates, and poor coordination across hiring managers.

So, search for “recruitment systems don’t offer applicant tracking”. 

Open the Reddit link. 

Scroll down, look for question patterns, and pick a topic that has the potential to position your HR solution company as the best candidate.

Next, expand your PPA search:

This way, you’ll get guaranteed searches that can lead to conversions.

Let AI Search Platforms Find Your Brand

To let AI search platforms pull highly valuable responses from your branded website, encourage structuring content to be crawlable, factually rich, and brand-consistent. 

For example, if there is a positive change in an organic ranking for a given keyword, you can optimize further for the AI overview. Or even offer a personalized discount and create a social media post boosting a specific service that targets a given keyword.

Here is an increase in our client Corodata’s paper shredding services page rankings and traffic.

If you want to optimize for branded searches, you first need to check the current AI overview result. So, search for “document destruction services”. 

Look at an AI overview result.

Evaluate and optimize service pages to surpass the current AI overviews. Make sure to mention the biggest strength of your service and how it can help potential customers.

Optimize for Voice Search

To include strategies for voice search optimization, you need to implement voice tactics so that digital assistants (e.g., Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri) can help people find your content through voice queries. Voice search transforms the user’s spoken input into text, which then search engines interpret and show in search results. When voice assistants recognize your content as relevant, you’re increasing your chances of brand awareness and authority. 

Here is a more detailed breakdown:

• Write as you talk: Optimize your content for voice searches in a way that feels natural. Imagine as if you are having a conversation with a friend while answering a specific search query.
• Add schema markup: Implement schema markup to help search engines understand the deeper meaning of your content. This can lead to increased user experience and visibility.
• Add relevant FAQ: Incorporate FAQs in the traditional way (e.g., by analyzing high-performing pages and extracting common questions around topics like PPAs), and use AI to identify weak areas in your content and suggest original FAQs targeting long-tail keywords.
• Regularly update content: Maintain relevance and topical authority by regularly updating your content for voice search. Double-check facts, statistics, and relevant information. Add the ”last updated date” to show search engines your content is current.
• Cover technical SEO: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, loads quickly, and is free of potential technical issues (check them on Semrush) to optimize for voice searches.
•  

For example, optimizing for voice search works great when targeting local keywords. People use these keywords when trying to find a specific service/product near their area.

Let’s start with “seo services for tech startups near me Los Angeles”. 

Some common SERP features provide users with quick answers from voice search.

About 40% of voice search answers come from featured snippets.
Voice Search Statistics

If we analyze the search term from the PPA section, such as “Best SEO company in California”, we’ll get these SERP insights: 

• Local pack: A map with  local results displayed at the top of organic search results
• Listicle: Feature snipped  listicle that showcases the best companies
• Sitelinks: A set of links to other pages of SEO agencies that are displayed under the main organic search (e.g., Clutch’s shortlist of leading agencies)
• Reviews: Organic search results enhanced with star ratings and visible review counts.

To get onto Clutch’s shortlist for leading SEO agencies or get verified, first, engage with the Clutch community. Keep focusing on tactics for building a strong online reputation, showcasing case studies that prove your expertise. Next, encourage your clients to participate in Clutch’s review process to narrate your unique strengths and capabilities.

Remember: Client reviews are your best marketing assets.

The number of voice assistant users is expected to increase by 2.5% (153.5 million) by 2025. Considering this fact, it’s important to keep focusing on voice search optimization.

Analyzing SERP features can help you improve your voice search optimization. And if you are a local business, it’s even easier to increase the chances of winning SERP features. There is also a high potential for increasing brand awareness when targeting question keywords for voice search.

SEO: 3 Traditional Tactics that Still Matter

Foundational SEO still plays a key role alongside AISO. 

In this section, you’ll revisit proven SEO tactics that continue to deliver. 

Treat SEO as Your Best Marketing Channel

As the AI landscape has matured, SEO has become far less predictable and significantly more competitive. However, SEO is still precise, compounding, and worthwhile—but slower and more competitive due to the fact that AIOs are eating clicks from informational queries.

SEO is still one of the best marketing channels available, especially when you combine it with AISO. 

Here’s how to treat SEO like your most valuable marketing channel in the AI-driven era:

1. Shift from Informational to Transactional and Bottom-Funnel Queries

AI Overviews mostly dominate top-funnel “how-to” and “what-is” queries. But Google still shows traditional listings for high-intent searches like “best SEO services for tech startups” or “seo services for tech startups.”

2. Build Topical Depth, Not Just Breadth

Combine “topic authority” and “content consistency” approach.

For example, if you’re in an SEO agency, don’t just write about SEO tactics—build an entire content cluster on a specific industry targeting B2B, Financial, SaaS, and more. Be the best source on the entire topic about why SEO matters for SaaS.

3. Structure Content for AI Visibility

Think “structured, scannable, sourced.” Your content should be easy for AI to parse and full of facts, citations, impactful visuals, and tables. It should be written with schema markup, FAQs, and data that can be easily extracted into AI Overviews

For instance, add “Summary Boxes,” bullet points, visual content, internal citations, and TLDR sections—so your content becomes AI-friendly fuel.

4. Invest in Brand and Trust Signals

Google and AI platforms are leaning heavily on authority and reputation, especially with the rise of site reputation abuse and the crackdown on low-quality AI content.

For example, prioritize building high-quality backlinks, increasing mentions from niche authorities, and showcasing expertise (E-E-A-T signals). 

Think about LinkedIn visibility, co-marketing partnerships, and contributing to industry publications.

5. Track LLM and AI Engine Traffic Separately

Treat Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Bing Copilot as new traffic sources—and start optimizing for visibility there.

Be Intentional with Technical SEO

Good SEO begins with a technically sound site and clean navigation. Fixing broken links, improving load speed, and using clear internal linking is crucial. Maintaining a healthy website helps you avoid headaches around top issues such as 4xx errors, low text-to-HTML ratio, and more.

To fix and keep track of these issues, you need to check Semrush’s Site Audit regularly. 

You will find all kinds of issues detected on your website based on their priority level and number.

The best thing about this tool is that you’ll have directions on how to fix a specific issue. For example: 

So, what do you need to know about the crawl process?

During the website crawl process, search engines look to sitemap XML files to help discover content and produce higher-quality ranking results for users. XML sitemaps can be used to help search engine bots discover various types of content and resources, such as images, videos, news, etc.

Here are the best practices to help the crawler access the webpage:

1. Keep it up to date: whenever a page is removed, it should also be delisted from your XML Sitemap, and the same should be done when a page is added. To circumvent this and make it more reliable, use a dynamic sitemap that automatically makes these changes as updates go live.
2. Exclude non-indexable pages: you should leave out all URLs pointing to redirects (e.g. 301 status code) and missing pages (e.g., 404 status code). Moreover, they need to be indexable, meaning that they shouldn’t be blocked on your robots.txt file or be marked for non-indexation through a noindex directive. 

Another important technical SEO strategy is to focus on Schema Markup. To leverage the benefits of schema markup (e.g., increased click-through rate and revenue), you must include it as a part of your content strategy. 

You can run your blog posts through Google’s Rich Results Test to check if there is an article schema included. Double-check on your end, but if you find this missing, it’s important to flag that clearly as a high-impact opportunity and work with your development team to implement. 

To get a rich results test, go to the Rich Results Test page. Add the link of the page you want to test and “test URL”.

This kind of markup helps AI search engines understand and display content better, so it’s not something you want to skip. 

Maintaining technical SEO health is tricky, especially when identifying and implementing the right schema markup. Fortunately, our technical SEO services can help.

Managing Your Backlinking Strategy

To bring your backlinking strategy up-to-date in an increasingly AI-driven era, use automation that can help to identify relevant websites, personalize outreach, and predict success rates. Also, keep treating traditional link building strategies as your best asset for building authority.

Still, a popular question arises: Do you think AI-generated backlinks could be a game changer for SEO?

If we ask Google, here is what we get: 

YES: AI Can Be a Game-Changer, But Only Under the Right Circumstances

If we are talking about AI’s ability to nurture quality backlink opportunities at scale, then we should focus on smarter prospecting, personalized outreach, and AI citations:

1. Smarter prospecting: AI tools can analyze thousands of websites to find relevant, high-authority targets faster than any human could
2. Hyper-personalized outreach at scale: With the right prompts and careful, human-guided implementation, AI can craft customized outreach emails that don’t feel templated, saving time and increasing conversion
3. AI citations: To increase your chances of being cited by AI, create original content with unique insights and examples that serve as future-ready snippet-style answers and are easily accessible for AI indexing

NO: AI-Generated Backlinks Can Also Backfire

If we are talking about spammy AI-created websites linking to each other, or mass blog comments/forum posts/auto-generated guest posts, that is a no-go.

Here’s why:

1. Google’s getting smarter: Google’s SpamBrain system uses AI, too. It is trained to detect patterns in synthetic link networks and low-quality content
2. AI can’t fake relevance or trust: Backlinks only move the SEO needle when they come from relevant, trusted domains. AI cannot manufacture that context yet
3. Short-term gains, long-term risk: Tactics like using AI to spin guest posts or create fake link farms are not an effective long-term SEO strategy. They carry increased penalty risk and usually get de-indexed over time
4. Missing content-based link building: AI-generated links often fail to support core long-term link building goals, like building link-worthy content (e.g., case studies, resource pages, and industry reports) that attract high-quality links, earning trust signals, and securing placements on relevant sites. 

If you are ready to build authority the right way, choose our proven link building services that deliver long-term SEO gains. At the end of the day, AI is another tool in the toolbox of SEO professionals and decision-makers. In tandem with a strong SEO strategy and human guidance, AI can help to streamline and bolster your backlinking strategy.

Combine AISO and SEO for Maximum Results

Combine the strategy of smart SEO with the speed and scale of AI. Take advantage of the AISO shift and boost your organic strategy like never before.

Let’s summarize why AISO and SEO strategy works:

• Wider reach: Capture both traditional search traffic and emerging LLM-based discovery.
• Faster insights: Use AI tools to identify trends, topics, and opportunities at scale.
• Stronger authority: Pair human-driven link building with AI-enhanced outreach to build high-value backlinks.
• Adaptive strategy: Stay ahead as SERPs evolve, algorithms change, and new discovery platforms emerge.

To wrap things up, we asked AI about AI shift (plus to include insights from an expert), and you might want to know the answer:

FAQs

What is the difference between SEO and AEO? 

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) focuses on improving visibility in traditional search engines like Google. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) focuses on optimizing content to be featured directly in AI-powered answer engines and voice assistants. With the rise of AI SEO tools and natural language processing (NLP), AEO is becoming a subset of a comprehensive strategy we call AISO (AI Search Optimization), which helps content rank in both traditional and AI-driven platforms.

What are the 4 types of SEO?

The four types of SEO are on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO, and local SEO.  In the AI era, these pillars remain essential, but successful strategies now integrate AI for SEO to enhance technical optimization, content creation, and link building. All types should be evaluated through a thorough SEO audit to keep blending old-school fundamentals with modern automation.

AISEO, ASO, AISO, SEO, GEO, AEO: What is the difference between them?

AISO (AI Search Optimization) combines AI SEO tools, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML) to revolutionize the way businesses optimize content for AI discovery. In contrast, AISEO refers to an automated SEO tool that helps businesses bypass AI detection. 

ASO is App Store Optimization that increases organic app discoverability in the app stores. SEO refers to traditional optimization for search engines. GEO focuses on geographic targeting, and AEO is about surfacing answers in voice and AI assistants. 

With the growing impact of AEO and AISO, businesses need to understand these distinctions and lean into AIO SEO strategies to stay visible across both search engines and AI platforms.