Written by Jason Montoya. Posted in Marketing.

What is AI Crawling Optimization (AIO) & How Do Content Marketers Adapt to the Coming Changes?

More and more, people are searching the web by asking AI questions (like they have been doing with search engines), and it's delivering answers based on information it's been given (bypassing search engines altogether). If you're a business like myself, you'll want to be the one showing up in these answers if you don't want to get left in the dust.

And, the key to showing up in LLM (Large Language Model) / AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) systems like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude AI, and Perplexity IS creating rich content.

The good news is that this task of creating rich content has the same requirement for optimizing content for the search engines.

Differences Between SEO & AIO

Going forward, if you create powerful and unique content, you can still thrive in an AI-generated world with a few exceptions and a few differences.

The types of websites and content that are likely to get hammered by AI are generic informational content. Think glossary-type information. Think Wikipedia.

If you've got a lot of this 101-level general content on your blog and website that is getting search engine traffic, that's probably going to get gobbled up by AI systems providing that type of generic information to people.

The opportunity ahead is for specific rich content for specific audiences. Find and solve specific problems. Create content around this concept.

Let me share one example.

Even before the rise of AI-generated content, I've lamented about generic content. The worst perpetrators are these comparison articles that show the pros and cons of different software systems, only to leave you with a conclusion that provides no direction for the user. For example, I am a freelancer who has gotten paid on thousands of invoices on different systems, and the system freelancers should use for invoicing is Harpoon. It's incredible.

I'm approaching the topic of invoice system from a position of experience and expertise. I've got a strong point of view, which is a strong contrast to a generic comparison chart. I may disagree with someone's conviction, but it's at least a strong starting point. Generic and general information are not going to help you when you are facing a problem that requires a specific solution.

Ultimately, vision, stories, and difficult-to-create content are the three pillars of creating differentiated rich content, not just for the search engines, but also for AI.

Structured AI & Structured Data

The future opportunity of AI seems to be grounded in structure. Lex Sisney has a great article about the value of structure in an AI world.

What he correctly assesses is how AI is a prism or an amplifier of what's beneath the surface. Here's what he says.

"AI won’t fix chaos. It will reveal it. If you’re scaling with AI, multi-agent systems are inevitable (point to Anthropic). The real question: Is your structure ready to deploy and manage them? This isn’t just a tech challenge—it’s a human systems challenge. Start there. Upgrade your structure, embed shared context, and refine processes. Without these, AI agents will amplify disorder. With them, you build an execution machine."

So, if your marketing or business is chaotic and wasteful, AI is going to generate more chaos and waste. But if you have clarity and you get things done, AI is going to simplify what you can execute in ways that were out of reach before.

And, for companies that use AI and fail at it, they'll have a scapegoat. Lex explains.

"Most companies will blame AI failure—when structure was the real problem all along."

Title tags have a strong influence on ranking high on Google. I asked ChatGPT if this is the case for AI, and it came back to structure. Here's what it said.

"AI-generated answers draw from:

Main content body

Headings and subheadings

Structured data and metadata

Authority and coherence

Title tag helps orient the AI (like a chapter title), but strong, clear in-body content with relevant context is often more influential in LLM-based summarization and citation."

Structure, which provides context, is a key component. And that's also why your site should be implementing structured data. Feeding AI with a direct interface for your data within this structure plays an important role for the search engines and will likely be the same for AI.

AI Loves Videos & Communities

This year, I've gotten serious about YouTube and producing video content.

I've spent a decade writing blogs and publishing books, and now I'm integrating video as a key component of my content creation strategy.

It turns out, AI likes video. At least for now. In multiple reports, I'm seeing this trend. Growth-memo explains it as follows:

"Community and video matter post-AIO:When users do leave the SERP, many outbound clicks go to Reddit, YouTube, or forum posts — social proof seals decisions."

In a world of uncertainty and reality distortions, people want a demonstration of claims.

Videos and community forums (like Reddit) seem to be types of content that help cement this sought clarity.

A Place For Transcripts?

Outside of some specific instances, I've not found an SEO basis to include a transcript on pages with embedded videos or podcast episodes. It just doesn't seem to matter.

It seems intuitive that including a transcript on a podcast episode page on my site would lead to higher rankings, but for a variety of reasons, that's not usually the case. While there is a benefit to the user, it doesn't translate to Google rankings.

With AI, this seems to have changed. AI requires large volumes of content to operate, and transcripts provide a lot of these words along with the context to make sense of them.

All of my podcast and video content is on YouTube, which provides transcripts for each. But that means the source is YouTube, and AI systems are going to direct people to YouTube as the source. So, by including these transcripts on our websites, I suspect it may help redirect that attention to our websites instead of YouTube.

I don't have any data to ground my hypothesis, but this is what I've got to work with until there is clarity on the matter.

Is There a Name for AI Optimization?

For optimizing on the search engines, SEO (search engine optimization) is the standard acronym for this practice. Social media optimization is SMO. So, what will be the name for AI optimization? Is it AIO? Is it AISEO?

I titled this blog post AI Crawling Optimization (AICO) as that seems to make the most sense for what's being done. I suspect it'll get simplified to AIO.