As you can see, the Copilot Answer mimics Google’s AI Overview in many ways, so optimizing your content for GAI is unavoidable at this point. 
This is exacerbated by the fact that these generative AI responses appear at the very top of the search results, meaning you’ll need to engage in GSO if you want to snag prime SERP real estate. 

So, what matters to GAI tools when choosing online sources to include in responses?

The main factors are:

• High-authority content that ranks well.

  When searching the web for sources, AI tools prefer authoritative content that ranks well on search engines and is frequently cited online (i.e., has a lot of trustworthy backlinks).

The more you can include these factors in your content (like building a public API, including author bios, and improving your traditional SEO), the more you’ll appear in GAI responses and summaries.

7 Practical Ways to Optimize for AI Summaries

Okay, now that you know why improving your online visibility in AI tools is paramount, let’s learn how to do just that.  In particular, we’ll explore the 7 most effective ways that we’ve discovered to optimize for GAI search. 

• Using short, scannable answers (especially in the first 1 – 2 lines)

  First, you need to make it as easy as possible for AI tools to find quick answers to common questions in your content.

  How do you do that?

  The best way is to include a short, scannable answer to the titular question raised by the post. This makes it extremely easy for AI tools and search engine crawlers to find. For instance, let’s say you did some keyword research and discovered that the question ‘what is link building’ is popular online.

  From there, you develop an outline for a blog entitled ‘What is Link-Building? How to Build Backlinks in 2025.’  Next, you define link-building within the first two lines of the post, like this: Link-building is the process of getting other websites to link back to your content.

  Boom, now AI tools and crawlers have a clear answer to the titular question (what is link building). As a bonus, it appears at the very top of the post, making it stand out even more.

The Results

Canales Furniture recently celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2023, which is a testament to the business’s strength and staying power.  The brainchild of Silvia Veronica Canales, she started the business in Texas along with nine of her siblings in 2003. 

Traffic Growth::

+X% over Y months

Once we resolve all the technical issues, we go on the hunt for ‘easy win’ keywords, which are keywords a client is already ranking for, just not near the top (positions 4 – 30). 
These keywords are goldmines because with some quick optimizations, we can get them ranking near the top for a quick boost in organic traffic for the client. 
We knew that if Canales Furniture wanted to generate more business, they’d need to rank for crucial ‘money’ keywords for their business, so we targeted both local and product-oriented keywords. 
Mastering the keyword research process was crucial for this client. 
Since they featured a bilingual customer base (English and Spanish), we targeted Spanish keywords as well – such as muebleria (furniture store). 
We also tricked out their product pages with proper optimizations to rank higher (like including keywords in metadata). 
Lastly, link-building is a crucial aspect of any SEO campaign, and furniture SEO is no different. 
Google trusts websites that have backlinks from reputable websites the most, so we got to work building quality link placements on related websites. 

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s

John Doe, Engineer