Updated
Voice search optimization was a big SEO trend before ChatGPT. Optimize for natural language queries. Target question-based keywords. Write conversationally. That advice was solid then, and it is relevant now for a different reason.
The rise of conversational AI (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) has taken everything voice search promised and amplified it. People ask voice assistants for directions and weather, and they also have extended conversations with AI tools about complex topics. Your content needs to show up in those conversations.
From Voice to Conversation
Voice search queries tend to be natural language questions. A searcher asks “How do I optimize my Shopify product pages?” in full. Conversational AI takes this further. Users ask follow-up questions. Users refine their queries. They go deeper.
Content that supports this depth performs well. A single blog post that answers the initial question and anticipates follow-ups gives AI systems a rich source to draw from throughout a conversation.
There are many times when I use ChatGPT or Claude to do research that the AI tool gets the answer wrong. So I oftentimes will double check those links that the tool gives me, the citations that the tool gives me. Checking does take extra steps to ensure that whatever research you’re doing is correct.
Writing for Natural Language
Structure your content around the questions people ask. Use those questions as headings. Answer them directly in the first sentence. Then provide the detail and nuance that makes your answer authoritative.
Avoid jargon unless your audience uses it. Write in the language your readers speak. Match the way people search and ask questions.
The biggest thing any business owner can do when creating blog posts with AI is to read what AI is putting into their blog posts. Humans are quickly recognizing AI-written content. And if you don’t edit the content that AI is creating, you are just as flat as every other AI-written blog post out on the internet.
And if you look at the scale of things, there is going to be vastly more AI-written content than human-written content. So your human-written content is going to stand out.
What’s more important than the AI tools you use to cite your data is to make that data into something that is a readable and a memorable piece of content, and the only way you are going to do that is to put a little of you into that content.
As a user, as a writer, you need to think about the narrative that you’re trying to convey to your reader. Some of that story, some of that real human behavior, and more important, your history and whatever you’re trying to convey in your words is the most important.
I put all my previous history into what I write. The fact that I’m answering this question shows that AI has no clue what a human needs to read.
Claude built this post by asking me questions, one at a time, and every answer in it is mine, including the questions any human would have found obvious.
Schema and Structure
Oftentimes, the business owner thinks too hard about the difference between SEO and AEO. SEO and AEO are related. However, AEO benefits from structured data added to your site. Each of your posts should include structured data, and this is very important in this day and age.
Google says no special schema is needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, writing, “There’s also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add” (Google Search Central). Clear structure, question headings with direct answers, is what helps AI tools pull an answer from a page.
Local and Specific
Conversational queries are often specific. A searcher asks for the “best content marketing agency for Shopify stores in the US.” If your business serves a specific market, audience, or geography, make that clear in your content. Specificity helps AI tools match your content to specific queries.
Showing up in those AI answers is something Content Cucumber was late to the game in implementing. So, full transparency, Content Cucumber has only been working on encoding our website for the last year, to be discoverable in AI. One of the important things I think is important in AI is being transparent on how the content is created, and how you are using it.
We can see from all of our recent posts that we are using Claude to do research, but we are disclosing how much of that research is done by Claude and how much of the wording is done by humans. For this example, we are at 90% human wording of the total.
I would encourage business owners to talk to Brent and/or Isaac and learn how we can help them show up in AI answers.
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