Optimising your website for AI‑driven search
Tuesday 26th May 2026
AI-powered search platforms are becoming increasingly used, which means that traditional SEO strategies focused solely on Google search are becoming outdated. Optimising your website for platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI search engines is critical in 2026.
Understanding AI‑Driven search
AI-powered search uses natural language processing and machine learning to understand the user’s intent. AI has the ability to merge multiple sources together and therefore provide direct answers to users’ questions, rather than the user needing to look through a few different sources.
Key strategies to optimise for AI search
Similarly to SEO, AI has various elements to it. This means that to get your service pages to show up on AI searches, strategy and planning needs to go into the site itself.
Maintain an authoritative online presence
AI engines prioritise trustworthy and authoritative sources. To strengthen your authority, it is important to keep your LinkedIn profile and legal directory listings up to date. Publishing thought leadership articles on relevant legal topics can further enhance your reputation.
Ensuring that your website content is current and factually accurate helps maintain trust with both clients and AI platforms.
Focus on clear, authoritative content
Elements like your domain authority, user experience and types of content you have on your site all need to be considered when planning out your strategy. A good service page of content will have lots of details on the type of service you offer, structured headings and lots of related content like case studies and testimonials.
This improves the likelihood that AI platforms will reference your website when answering queries.
Use schema markup
Schema markup is a type of structured data that you can add to your website’s HTML to help search engines and AI systems understand the context of your pages.
Schema markup can help to support AI-driven searches as platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Bing AI use the structured data to summarise or cite your website.
Optimise for conversational queries
Users interact with AI differently than they do with traditional search engines. They often ask very specific questions, such as; “Which employment law firm in London specialises in tribunal cases?” To ensure your website captures these types of queries, it is important to write content in a clear, natural and conversational tone.
A good way to add the answers to conversational queries to your website is by including frequently asked questions (FAQs) as they can use long-tail keywords.
Enhance multimedia content
Adding a variety of media content to the pages on your site can help to increase your appearance in AI searches as AI platforms are increasingly using media in responses.
Media content like videos, infographics, PDF downloads and images can help to improve engagement and increase the chance your website is cited by AI systems.
Monitor performance
AI-driven search may reduce direct website traffic while still generating valuable leads.
It is important to track mentions or citations of your firm on AI platforms; monitor direct enquiries or consultations that can be attributed to AI referrals and measure engagement with your multimedia content.
This approach ensures that you accurately assess the real-world impact of your AI search optimisation efforts.
Conclusion
Optimising your website for AI-driven search is essential. By focusing on authoritative content, structured data, conversational queries, multimedia and online credibility, your site can remain visible and relevant in an evolving digital landscape.