AI search & visibility: An enterprise playbook

AI visibility has become the new competitive battleground for brands, with a growing number of consumers turning to tools like ChatGPT and Gemini for product research.

The good news is that optimizing your site for AI bots and crawlers begins with effective SEO, along with a few modern tactics that can significantly enhance your chances of being mentioned and cited.

If you feel that your brand isn't appearing in AI answers as often as it should, this guide can help. The guide is broken into three sections. In the first section, you’ll find five quick ways Contentstack can help improve your brand’s visibility in AI searches. Next, we detail the eight levels of SEO/AIO we believe are foundational for all enterprise brands. Lastly, you’ll find a helpful checklist to use in charting your progress.

Use this comprehensive guide to understand if you’re doing everything you should be to maximize the AI visibility of your website.

What it is and why it matters

Schema is special, standardized code you add to your website's HTML. Think of it as a set of labels you put on your content to clearly tell search engines and AI exactly what information is contained in your website.

Instead of an AI having to guess that a number is a price or a date is an event time, schema tags it directly: "This is a product review," "This is an FAQ question and answer," etc.

Implementing this structured data is required for your content to get proper visibility in AI Optimization (AIO) and Generative AI Optimization (GAIO) search results. It helps AI platforms understand the meaning, structure, and relationships of your content, making it more likely to be used for accurate citations and answers in services like Generative AI search results.

How Contentstack helps

Contentstack is fundamentally built on structured content. That structure makes it easier for front-end teams (or agents) to generate the right schema markup that AI systems rely on.

What it is and why it matters

Many modern websites use complex code (JavaScript) to load content, which causes AI crawlers to often see a blank or incomplete page instead of the actual information. They send raw data (JSON) to the browser and then rely on the browser to assemble the final page.

Using SSR (Server-Side Rendering), where the complete, finished web page is built on your company's server before it is sent out, guarantees that when an AI bot visits, it immediately sees the full, finalized content.

Using “HTML Fallback”, making sure your content is always available in a standard, easy-to-read Canonical HTML format, rather than just in raw data (JSON), guarantees that the content is universally accessible to all AI systems.

The term "canonical HTML" is about making sure that search engines and AI bots always find the definitive, official version of a web page. In this context, it means a website might have several different links that all show the same content (e.g., a mobile link, a tagged link, or a filtered link). The canonical version is the one you tell crawlers to treat as the one and only master copy. The main purpose is to make sure AI bots can actually see and read all of your high-value content.

How Contentstack helps

The Contentstack API delivers content in a decoupled, structured format, making it ideal for a modern SSR framework to build and serve a high-performance, fully-rendered page efficiently.

And, Launch supports modern frameworks like Next.js and Nuxt.js (which carry out the SSR process).

What it is and why it matters

Core web vitals measure how quickly and effectively a site loads. FCP measures how quickly the first piece of actual content appears on the screen. LCP measures how quickly the single largest and most important piece of content (like a hero image or main block of text) on the page loads. Cumulative layout shift (CLS) measures how much unexpected visual shifting occurs while the page is loading.

It’s essential to establish a continuous, automated process that ensures every time a developer makes a change to the website, performance and accessibility checks run automatically before the change is released, thereby preventing new technical errors from going live.

How Contentstack helps

Contentstack delivers content via a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to ensure high-speed delivery of the data (JSON/API) that the website needs to load. A fast API response time is a prerequisite for hitting the aggressive FCP and LCP targets.

LCP and FCP: Contentstack provides the clean, structured content that makes the SSR process possible. By delivering only the essential content, it allows the front-end to render the largest and first pieces of content (LCP/FCP) extremely quickly, as opposed to waiting for complex code to execute.

Mobile responsiveness: Ensuring Mobile-first indexing compliance and implementing responsive images with srcset. Contentstack facilitates this by storing content in a completely decoupled and device-agnostic manner. You can use its API to deliver the same content to a desktop, a mobile site, or a smart device, allowing the front-end to implement the necessary responsive images and mobile-first code without content constraints.

Optimizing CLS (Layout Stability): CLS measures unexpected visual shifting. While the final fix is in the front-end code (e.g., reserving space for images), Contentstack's structured content can help prevent issues by ensuring content is predictable and complete when loaded.

Launch edge functions: Can be used to block and mitigate AI bot traffic.

What it is and why it matters

An “llm.txt” is a file that SEO/GEO engines can use, which uses a simple Markdown format to give AI models a clean, structured overview of the most important content.

Similar to “robots.txt” files traditionally used for SEO, the file is designed to be concise and easy for an AI to process, bypassing complex website code. It should contain AI Crawler Guidelines, access directives (specify how and where AI platforms can access your company's content), IP and Compliance rules.

Note: this file is not yet supported by major LLMs, but we expect that it will be adopted in the near future, so for future-proofing your site for AIO, we recommend creating one now.

How Contentstack helps

Contentstack data can be easily consumed by an internal application whose sole job is to:

• Read the clean content from the API.
• Convert it into the simple Markdown format required for the llm.txt file.
• Publish that llm.txt file to the website's root directory for AI crawlers to access.

In essence, Contentstack provides the clean, organized input, making the technical task of converting complex pages into simple, AI-friendly Markdown feasible and highly efficient.

What it is and why it matters

Technical SEO resolves issues that prevent AI agents and LLMs from reading your content properly. For example, it’s important to resolve redirects, 404s, soft 404s and canonical conflicts (where two or more URLs show the same content).

Duplicate titles, meta descriptions, and content should be resolved because AI bots and search engines get confused when they see the same title, description, or content on multiple pages. They don't know which version is the best or most important, which can cause them to ignore or lower the ranking of all the duplicate pages. Fixing this ensures that every page has a unique purpose and is fully indexed for AI-driven results.

(Automated) Performance testing ensures that these and other errors do not recur once they have been resolved, so your site remains easy and clear for AI agents to read and understand. We recommend using the Lighthouse tool (a Google standard) to run tests automatically every time the code is changed. It checks for issues like slow loading speeds (FCP/LCP) and gives a score, allowing the team to catch problems immediately. Additionally, use industry-standard tools (WAVE and Axe) to automatically check if the website is usable by people with disabilities (e.g., screen reader compatibility).

Setting up a continuous, automated process so every time a developer makes a change to the website, the performance and accessibility checks run automatically before the change is released, preventing new technical errors from going live.

How Contentstack helps

Contentstack Agent OS can action automations that resolve redirects, 404s, soft 404s, and canonical conflicts.

Contentstack Agent OS can help set up automated checks of Lighthouse CI and accessibility testing with WAVE/Axe to create a CI/CD pipeline for technical QA.

Contentstack is on a mission to deliver the world's best digital experiences with cutting-edge content management, customer data, personalization and AI technology.

Iconic brands such as Air France-KLM, ASICS, Burberry, Mattel, Mitsubishi and Walmart depend on the Contentstack Edge adaptive digital experience platform (DXP) to rise above the noise in today's crowded and competitive markets, constantly adapting to maintain their edge.

Learn more at www.contentstack.com