Designing, building, and maintaining a website goes beyond code and colors.
It’s about clear direction and intention. Does your site reflect your brand? Are your visitors satisfied when engaging with your site content? And as user behavior shifts to increased usage of AI tools, a critical question exists: can they even find you in the first place?
AI isn’t rewriting the rulebook for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it’s raising the stakes. The foundational SEO principles we’ve relied on for years are no longer “best practices” that you can pick and choose from. They are mandatories.
Site architecture, technical health, content relevance, and user experience must be dialed in from the ground up, because search engines are evolving to interpret, contextualize, and serve content through AI systems. The question isn’t whether AI will impact SEO—it already has. The real task is making sure your site is built and maintained with the fundamentals fully embedded, so you’re not just keeping pace with change, but positioning ahead of it.
Things are changing, but these core SEO practices are still important and will work with AI-focused updates to ensure across-the-board success:
- Conduct keyword research and competitor gaps to create topical authority
- Create high-quality content surrounding those keywords and question-based queries
- Optimize on-page elements, including metadata, title tags, alt text, and structured data markup
- Allow for ease of accessibility by creating an easy path to relevant content throughout your site
- Build high-quality backlinks from industry partners, publications, blogs, and more
Gaining Topical Authority With AI
Topical authority shows your site’s expertise in a subject, building trust with both search engines like Google or Bing and AI systems. For example, one of EPIC Creative’s primary industries is the MedTech Industry. We created topical authority in this market by creating blogs related to MedTech marketing and highlighting case studies related to MedTech. Over time, this will be served by AI-powered search engines and results. (Oh yeah, and writing this blog and touching on our MedTech marketing experience helps us continue to do this.)
Using Question-Based Queries For AI
AI-powered search engines and results (such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity) are seeking more than simple keywords. They search for question-based queries and generally more intent behind the keywords. To feed the machine, grow your content around specific keywords, phrases, and question-based queries. Rather than searching for just “MedTech Marketing,” users are searching for “What agencies provide MedTech Marketing near me?”
Schema Markup Is A Must For AI
Schema Markup, which is a form of structured data, is a website best practice that allows for your content to appear in richer and more visual formats of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). The structured data, or schema markup, allows AI to better interpret your content. There are many free tools you can use to create and maintain schemas for your webpages.
How Do We Measure Success With AI-Visability?
Now that we’ve outlined our core principles for boosting SEO and AI-visibility, the next question is: how do we measure success? SEO is only as valuable as the results it drives. At EPIC Creative, our analysts track metrics that reveal how users engage and where content resonates.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for measuring success include:
- Impressions: With AI-driven SEO strategies, we are beginning to see an increase in impressions from our focus keywords or queries, but a slight decrease in overall clicks. This is not a shocker, as users are more often than not getting the information they need from AI-powered results above ads and first position rankings. To measure, you can use tools such as Google Search Console or SEM Rush.
- AI Overview Inclusion Rate: A common metric we track includes the AI Overview Inclusion Rate, which is the percentage of tracked keywords for which your site appears in Google’s AI Overview.
- Brand Mentions in AI Results: This metric reflects the number of times your brand or domain is cited in AI answers—either with or without a link. This benchmark will vary widely depending on brand health, overall search traffic, and industry. It is recommended that you set your own goals. Even without links, brand mentions increase E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness signals from Google) for future rankings.
- SERP Feature Share (AI Overview, People Also Ask, etc.): Another metric that should be tracked closely is the SERP Feature Share—which encompasses the percentage of your keywords where your pages are featured in SERP features like “Things to Know”, “People Also Ask”, or “From Sources Across the Web”—many of which feed into AI Overviews.
The future of AI is at our fingertips. Literally. And it is important that our partners do not fear the future, but rather embrace it. There are a lot more items that we can dive into, and we’ll want to chat more about that in real life.
