With the release of Google’s AI Overviews, life hasn’t gotten easier for affiliates: your content now needs to satisfy not just search engine algorithms, but also artificial intelligence models. The good news? All models think structurally. If you can hack their logic, you can earn consistent top visibility. In the new episode of Expert Talks, we explored how to adapt your content strategy to new realities and establish your brand as a trusted source of knowledge for AI models with Daria Bondarenko, SEO Team Lead at Already Media.
Where is SEO headed
Imagine your site ranks #1 organically but doesn’t bring the expected traffic. For SEO specialists, this isn’t hypothetical. Today, they don’t fight for top links on search engine results pages, but for a single mention in an AI-generated answer block. Here are the key challenges we faced in 2025:
- The rise of zero-click traffic – users get answers instantly, without visiting a site;
- Shrinking visibility – only 2–3 brands appear in AI-generated answers, the rest go unnoticed;
- The need for verified trust – without clear signals of experience, authorship, and expertise (E-E-A-T), your content won’t be selected by AI;
- Zero transparency – it’s impossible to know exactly how or where AI uses your content.
Being relevant is no longer enough. Your content must become a trustworthy source that LLMs can use as ready-made answers.
“In my view, SEO is changing not because of algorithms, but because of people. More users are turning to ChatGPT instead of Google, and AI only picks sources it can trust. That’s why brand trust is becoming the key SEO asset.”
— Daria Bondarenko, SEO Team Lead, Already Media
What to do with SERPs: An AI-First guide for SEO specialists
The first thing to grasp: AI doesn’t search for pages. It searches for knowledge. Your goal should be to be included not only in SERPs but also in the vector-based knowledge base that it uses to generate responses. To achieve this, you must become a trusted source for both users and algorithms. We’ll provide practical steps to help you build a knowledge graph, structure your expertise, and start speaking AI’s language.
Step 1: Register your brand as a recognizable entity.
To be included in AI knowledge bases, your brand must exist as a structured entity on authoritative platforms.
- Create brand profiles in open databases. For example, publish a short article on Wikipedia or Crunchbase. Fill out your company information, website URL, and niche on LinkedIn and in Wikidata.
- Maintain consistency across all platforms. Your brand name, slogan, and descriptions should be identical everywhere to avoid confusion and earn the trust of AI.
- Add semantic markup to your site. Use schemas such as Organization, Person, Product, FAQ, and HowTo to help AI recognize different content types.
- Include sameAs links in your markup that point to third-party sources, such as Wikipedia, Crunchbase, and LinkedIn.
SEO Tip: If your LinkedIn profile differs from your website or Wikipedia entry, AI may treat them as separate entities. The more consistent your data is, the higher the chance that AI will recognize your brand as a trustworthy source.
Step 2: Build Your E-E-A-T Profile
To create valuable content for AI and its users, your articles must establish your credibility. Models look for:
- Experience – share case studies, test results, stats, or original research, even small-scale;
- Expertise – list real authors, bios, certificates, and their industry roles;
- Authoritativeness – earn mentions in trusted iGaming media outlets;
- Trustworthiness – use HTTPS and publish “About Us,” “Team,” “Contact,” and “Privacy Policy” pages with accurate, consistent information.
SEO Tip: AI prefers original content written in the first person (“We ran this test,” “In our case, this worked”). It also easily reads structured data, such as charts, graphs, and API outputs. Always include the date of the last update — freshness matters to both users and models.
Step 3: Optimize Your Brand’s Vector Footprint
Unlike Google, AI doesn’t follow links. It builds semantic associations: how your company connects to topics and trusted sources in your niche. This is known as semantic proximity.
To help models associate your brand with specific topics:
- Publish content directly tied to your niche. The more iGaming terms that appear, the stronger your brand’s domain relevance becomes;
- Stick to thematic consistency. AI prefers websites with a clear focus.
- Earn mentions in contexts with relevant terms, such as “Brand X — trusted affiliate site for live casino bonuses”;
- Get featured on high-value, semantic platforms like Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn. Mentions on these platforms establish stable vectors.
You can also incorporate this semantic network building into your PR strategy by co-researching with operators/providers, writing guest posts for trusted platforms like PokerListings and Live Casino Comparer, doing collaborative reviews, and creating podcasts.
SEO Tip: Use logical phrasing checks to test brand recognition.
Step 4. Strengthen sentiment & co-occurrence
GPT models have built-in emotional-semantic maps of brands. That’s why they pay attention not only to facts but also to the tone of how people talk about your company. The more positive reviews your brand receives on trusted platforms, the higher the chance it will be chosen as a source of knowledge.
How to earn AI trust and boost your brand’s reputation embedding:
- Add a “What users say” section to your website – a good signal for AI crawlers;
- Publish case studies and reviews where users explain why they like your product or service;
- Avoid aggressive advertising – it creates a toxic context.
SEO tip: It’s not just about collecting positive reviews on Reddit, ProductHunt, G2, and LinkedIn — it’s equally important to address negative reviews. Be transparent on forums and social media. Respond to criticism, answer questions, and publish clear rebuttals when needed. AI values honesty more than silence.
Step 5. Maintain consistency and content evolution
Updating your site is essential, but it needs to be done carefully to preserve the structure, history, and relationships of the content. Here are a few principles to guide content updates:
- Edit pages without changing their URLs. If that’s unavoidable, use a 301 redirect;
- Don’t delete older content without reason – archive or update it instead;
- Include both publication and update dates to show AI that your content evolves rather than disappears;
- When changing the tone of voice, style, or visuals, archive old versions in the sitemap.xml;
- Establish consistent mention patterns. Two mentions per month over a year are better than 20 mentions in a week followed by silence;
- Don’t frequently change your brand name, logo, or slogan – AI might not recognize them as the same entity.
SEO Tip: A common mistake is to purge a lot of content when a brand pivots its strategy. While that might be acceptable in classical SEO, it signals instability to AI models and vector-based indexes. We recommend marking updated pages with “Updated” tags or specifying canonical links for revised articles. This shows AI that you’re building on knowledge, not deleting it.
Step 6. Build Your Brand’s Ontology Map
For AI models to better understand your business, brand mentions alone aren’t enough. They need to be connected to other entities. Create an ontology map that places your brand at the center with key surrounding categories, such as partners, products, audiences, and citations.
The key ontology elements are:
| Relationship Type | Purpose | Importance for AI |
| isATypeOf | Brand category | Helps determine context for citation |
| usedFor | Product or content purpose | Boosts response relevance |
| partnersWith | Brand partnerships & collabs | Builds trust via network connections |
| competesWith | Competitors | Adds your brand to comparative lists |
| foundedBy | C-level team | Mentions of experts increase credibility |
| servesAudience | Target audience | Clarifies who benefits from your content |
| mentionedIn | Brand mentions | Boosts knowledge trust level |
| offers | Products, pricing, APIs | Shows commercial value |
| integratesWith | Connected services | Links you to technical ecosystems |
SEO Tip: Cement relationships through content, metadata, and external mentions. Use structured data (schema.org) to encode them on your site. Strengthen the context with Wikipedia pages, interviews, guides, integrations, and product comparisons.
Step 7. Ensure Visibility for AI Crawlers
You’ve worked on building your expertise and visibility, earned reviews on trusted platforms, and structured your content, yet AI still seems to ignore your site. It’s possible that your content isn’t visible to bots from OpenAI, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and others. These bots only index open, accessible content, so your website must be crawl-ready.
To avoid blocking AI bots:
- Check that your robots.txt doesn’t block page scanning;
- Disable Cloudflare challenges and CAPTCHAs for known AI crawlers;
- Set proper metadata: og:title, og:description, canonical, organization – all fields must be accurate and consistent.
SEO Tip:The easiest way to see if AI bots are visiting your site is to check your access logs or use AI Crawl Control in Cloudflare.
Key takeaways
Today’s AI-friendly strategy rests on six core principles:
- Your brand must be recognizable;
- Expertise must be real and verifiable;
- Website content must align with niche-specific queries;
- Reputation must be solid and trusted;
- Your site must be technically visible to AI bots and models;
- Changes must be planned and consistent.
We may not be able to buy our way into generative results just yet. However, we can make our brand content useful, understandable, and stable enough for AI to naturally choose it as a reliable source. To achieve this, SEO efforts must be supported by marketing and other business units.
See you in the AI Overviews!
