SEO for large websites: Improving visibility in Google and AI search

SEO is no longer linear. Alongside traditional search engines, AI-powered answer engines now deliver not ten links but a complete answer. To stay visible, you need to establish your brand as a trusted source, for Google and for every AI that generates answers.

For companies with large websites that have grown over time, this is a particular challenge: many pages, many stakeholders and many systems. In this article, we cover five developments shaping SEO for large websites today and what you should take away from them.

Search becomes a conversation across many platforms

Search used to be simple: a problem, a few keywords in Google, ten blue links. Linear and predictable.

Today, things look different. Someone planning a complex software migration, for example, talks it through with ChatGPT, asks Perplexity for sources and has Gemini or Google's AI Mode draft a plan. Google is still the most important search engine, but the way people search has fundamentally changed. The goal is now Search Everywhere Optimization: being rated as trustworthy and recommended by AI systems.

Clean technical SEO determines whether AI systems understand your content

Without a solid technical foundation, any optimization for AI answers and AI agents falls flat. Technical SEO is the translation layer between your content and the machine. If a system can't crawl your page or parse its structure, the page won't appear in its answers.

In its July 2026 guide to AI search, Google lists the prerequisites: a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. For large websites, Google explicitly points to crawl budget. Here's what matters:

• Crawlability: AI crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot often don't execute JavaScript. Content needs to be in the HTML, load fast and be easy to parse. Learn more in our article on AI crawlers and the JavaScript problem.
• Information architecture: Clear hierarchies, descriptive headings and topic clusters help people and machines alike.
• Structured data: It's still useful for rich results. According to Google, though, it's not a prerequisite for AI features in Google Search, and there's no special markup for AI.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the work of getting generative AI systems to use your content as a source and cite it in their answers. Google is clear on where it belongs: optimizing for AI search is still SEO. We explain our approach in our article on Generative Engine Optimization.

We prepare your website for AI agents

Websites are no longer visited by people alone. AI agents act on users' behalf: they compare products, make reservations and prepare purchases.

For example: a user asks their assistant to find the right CRM software for a 50-person company and compare prices. The agent visits your site, extracts the data and presents the result. The user never set foot on your website, but your data shaped the decision.

How to make your website agent-ready:

• Lean content: Agents often don't render complex JavaScript. Key information belongs in the HTML as text.
• Clean page structure: According to Google, browser agents analyze screenshots, the DOM structure and a page's accessibility tree. Semantic HTML and accessibility therefore help agents as well.
• Machine-readable facts: Prices, availability and technical data must be unambiguous and consistent across all pages.
• Watch emerging protocols: In retail, standards like the Universal Commerce Protocol are emerging, allowing agents to complete purchases. Google Search, by contrast, doesn't use llms.txt files, according to its own guide.

First-hand experience and original data make your content citable

When AI can produce any text in seconds, generic content is worthless. AI systems don't cite content they could have written themselves. In its guide, Google explicitly recommends content with a distinct perspective and first-hand experience.

What AI systems and people look for:

• Original insights: data only you have.
• Real experience: real-world cases, not theory.
• Easy to absorb: content that gets straight to the point.

For how you write and structure content, that means:

• Lead with the key point: Every section opens with its main takeaway.
• Clear answers: Headings reflect the reader's question, and the first sentence answers it directly.
• Beyond text: AI answers increasingly include images and videos. Optimize them as carefully as your copy.

We track how AI systems talk about your brand

We used to measure rankings; today, influence is what counts. It's not enough for your brand name to appear in an answer. What matters is how it appears: as the recommended solution or as one option among many.

These metrics are becoming more important:

• Citations: How often is your website linked as a source?
• Share of AI answers: How often is your brand mentioned compared to the competition?
• Sentiment: Does the AI talk about you positively, neutrally or critically?
• Performance in Google Search: Search Console has a dedicated report showing how your content performs in Google's generative AI features.

The goal is for AI systems to see your brand as the natural authority on your topic. You get there through digital PR, coverage in trade media and quotes from real experts at your company. Artificially generated mentions don't help; Google's spam systems detect them.

Automation keeps large websites manageable

Complexity has grown considerably. You're optimizing for Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and the AI features of search engines. With thousands of pages, the only way to manage that is automation.

Here's where we use it:

• Monitoring: Your visibility across all AI platforms is tracked continuously and automatically.
• Automated checks flag problems with structured data or load times. We then prioritize and fix the causes.
• Content planning: AI helps identify gaps and review structures. The content itself remains the work of subject-matter experts, because Google explicitly warns against mass-produced pages with no original value.

Conclusion: Your roadmap for SEO in AI search

SEO for large websites has become a discipline of optimizing for influence. Your next steps:

• Align your teams: SEO, PR and content work together. PR builds the authority your content needs to be recommended in AI answers.
• Build for machines, write for people: Clean technical foundations make sure AI systems can read your content. Real cases and experience make sure readers stay.
• Become the source: Structure your data so that no AI can ignore you when it generates an answer in your industry.

Learn how we set up SEO for large websites on our SEO and technical SEO pages.