This January, a lot of us in marketing may have a surprising New Year’s Resolution: ranking higher in AI answers.
AI visibility was all the rage in 2025, and for good reason. One study by Ahrefs found that 1.5 billion users were reading Google’s AI overviews every month. These overviews represent a highly valuable space for brands to rank and feature in. Likewise, ChatGPT now reaches over 800 million monthly users, further increasing the importance of being cited in AI answers.
Here’s our guide to maximising your content’s AI visibility, based on over a year of research by the Kooba team.
Remember the basics of SEO
As with traditional SEO, factual, well sourced, and up to date content will perform well in AI overviews. When you produce content that answers your audience’s questions, AI tools will borrow this in their own answers, and will cite you as a source. Unlike with conventional SEO, which relies on basic indicators such as keywords and backlinks, AI rankings will assess language and information in greater context, reducing the need to distort your writing to match exact searches.
In other words, the basis of generative engine optimisation (GEO) should be high-quality and relevant content that speaks to the needs of your target audience. Fortunately, this approach is worth doing anyway, and will benefit your rankings on conventional search engines as well.
The importance of technical development
Just like search engines, AI systems will use the technical setup of your website to help determine the visibility of your content. Clear, logical development will be rewarded, especially if all content is well labelled and contains accurate internal linking. Where relevant, it can be useful to add schema to written content to build context for LLMs to draw from.
One interesting area of opportunity can be seen with Atlas, the ChatGPT browser. This tool uses ARIA tags to help surface content. These are an accessibility feature that ensure assistive technologies can clearly understand dynamic modules within a website. For accessible websites, this dedication to best practices should help expand the reach of their content on AI powered search tools.
Diversify your content sources
As large studies of AI visibility have shown, tools such as ChatGPT often value brand mentions from unconventional channels. For instance, YouTube mentions currently have the greatest impact on positive rankings, despite the platform being an afterthought for many marketing teams. However, this could quickly change. Previously, Reddit was also found to be a key platform for improved rankings, but it's citation share suddenly dropped in September. These key channels will continue to adjust, so the safest bet is to diversify your content across different mediums and platforms, rather than going all in on one channel.
AI models also reward mentions rather than links, so you don’t need to worry about gaining large numbers of backlinks. If your brand is discussed in a positive manner, LLMs will direct users to your website by themselves.
Measure and iterate
Just like with any effective lead-gen campaign, it's crucial to monitor what works best for driving traffic from AI sources to your website. To begin with, review your inbound sessions on Google Analytics, which should give you some clues about which content ChatGPT and other models are using. At a more advanced level, you can begin tracking your visibility across different prompts, and comparing your brand with competitors.
Attracting traffic from AI sources will be important for many businesses in 2026, but this task shouldn’t be overwhelming. By focusing on publishing good content on a good website, and by diversifying the platforms your brand is mentioned on, you stand a great chance of improving your AI visibility.
To learn more about AI visibility, just get in touch with our team. We’d love to help, whether that’s with your UX, content strategy, or web development.
