How to rank in AI search results: Expert best practices
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Marketing Hub Marketing automation software Free and premium plans Service Hub Customer service software Free and premium plans Content Hub Content marketing software Free and premium plans Revenue Hub CPQ, billing, and payments software Free and premium plans Agent Hub Your central home for building and managing AI agents across the platform Learn more AEO (Beta) Answer engine optimization tools that track and improve your brand's visibility in AI results Learn more Home Marketing How to rank in AI search results: Expert best practices How to rank in AI search results: Expert best practices Written by: Ramona Sukhraj HUBSPOT AEO TOOL See exactly where your brand shows up in answer engines and take action to close AI visibility gaps. Knowing how to rank in search engines and how to rank in AI search results are two different games now. As of early 2026, BrightEdge found AI Overviews appear in roughly 48% of tracked Google searches, and prevalence climbs as high as 100% for healthcare and treatment queries. ChatGPT handles over a billion queries per week, while Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini are routing millions of searches every day without a single click. But here’s the silver lining: You can be invisible in blue-link results and still win AI visibility if you know how to optimize for it. I’ve spent a lot of time inside the data, working with content marketers who are trying to figure out exactly this. What follows is everything that actually works, backed by research — no fluff, no guessing. See exactly where your brand shows up in answer engines and take action to close AI visibility gaps. AI-referred visitors aren’t just traffic — they’re pre-qualified buyers. Ahrefs analyzed their own traffic data and found that AI search visitors accounted for just 0.5% of total visitors, but drove 12.1% of all signups. That’s 23x the conversion rate of visitors from traditional organic search. Semrush confirmed the pattern, finding that AI search visitors on average convert at 4.4x the rate of standard organic visitors. These visitors are inherently more qualified than visitors forced to click onto your website. In most instances, they’ve already received the answer they needed from AI and actually chosen to click through for more. That self-selection shows high intent and interest. The volume of AI search traffic is still small compared to Google, but it’s growing fast. The teams investing in AEO (or GEO) now are building citation authority while competition is still low. If SEO trends continue, that tide won’t stay low for long. Cloudflare reported that AI crawlers now account for 4.2% of all HTML requests across their network. OpenAI’s GPTBot alone grew 305% from May 2024 to May 2025. However, if your robots.txt or server configuration blocks AI crawlers, even the greatest content will go unnoticed by AI knowledge bases. Seasoned digital marketers know that before search engines can even rank you, they need to be able to crawl your pages, and it’s the same for AI search results. Every major AI platform has its own crawler. Now, if you have some sort of intellectual property (IP), private, or proprietary content on your website, you don’t want AI using without compensation, having AI crawlers blocked isn’t a bad thing — but make sure you’re not blocking crawlers you want to let in. OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, for example, are retrieval crawlers. They don’t use content for training, but they power real-time AI answers. Block them, and you disappear from ChatGPT and Perplexity search results. Pro Tip: Even if you’re protective about your content, don’t block all AI crawlers. Research from Rutgers Business School and Wharton found that publishers blocking AI crawlers via robots.txt lost roughly 7% of weekly traffic within six weeks. AI crawlers aside, there are several other things you can do to make your website technically accessible to AI. An llms.txt file is a document added to your website that serves as a map and resource guide for AI models, search agents, and autonomous web bots. This newer standard, officially supported by Anthropic, helps AI systems understand which content is safe to summarize and cite. What we like: The llms.txt file is a quick win. It takes under an hour to create and tells AI crawlers clearly which parts of your site you want them to use. Think of it as a welcome mat for AI systems.
Source: HubSpot
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