When I set up my website and social media presence, I didn’t think about how they’d look in AI search summaries. When I finally did search for my business using Google AI, I was alarmed by what came up.
It named people I’d chatted with on Bluesky as points of contact for my business. It said I offered specialist services that I didn’t actually offer. Worst of all, it picked up a few things I’d written on my website and Bluesky and used them to build up inaccurate generalisations.
Finding out the reason for these problems taught me a lot about how to optimise an online presence for AI search.
The main issue was that I hadn’t put enough concrete information online for the AI’s bots to find. This meant it had a very weak picture of me. It filled in the gaps with patterns that are generally true for many people.
Adding clarity to my website for AI search
I dealt with the point-of-contact issue by explicitly stating that business enquiries should go through the contact page on the website. I put this notice in several places and named the website each time.
I also took a similar approach for the specialist services issue. There’s now an extra notice in the footer of this website and at the bottom of each blog post.
Within 24 hours, the changes on my website started to have a positive impact on my AI search results. I’m sure it’ll take time for the old problems to disappear completely, but overall I’m very pleased.
Adding clarity to my Bluesky for AI search
My Bluesky presence caused a lot of problems for my overall profile because AI scrapers didn’t understand that my posts were unrelated to my work. That’s why conversations with other users were treated as business information.
I found this embarrassing because it dragged other people’s names into my AI summary profile, without their consent.
I rewrote the Bluesky profile several times. In the end, what worked was adding two key phrases that directed the bots away from the account. In my website footer, it now says that my social media is where “I share general interests unconnected to my client work.” On my Bluesky profile, it says that I am there for “casual chat. Nothing said here is about my job or my clients.”
[I rewrote this section about Bluesky a week after publishing this blog post.]
My takeaway lesson
This is just my story of what worked for me at this point in time. AI search technology will continue to develop and I’m sure I’ll keep making mistakes.
The big thing I’ve learnt is that it’s a good idea to google your own business from time to time. And look yourself up on ChatGPT, on Bing, and in all the other places.
I’m a UK-based editor and proofreader. I focus on editing and proofreading for documents used in education, training, and workplaces.
TIDE and CANUTE 