The Basics of AIO SEO Techniques

According to Gary Illyes, Analyst at Google, the road to the AI Overview section and AI Search does not differ at all from the standard SEO practices. He claims that the same principles apply to show in these categories, and the same fundamentals of Google search are used to display these results.  But what if, despite all your efforts, extensive blogging, and covering trending topics, you still don’t find yourself in the AIO block?

What are the SEO core guidelines in 2025 and how do they apply to AIO?

It’s time to take a deeper look at the basic principles of what type of strategies can help you rank in the AI Overview.

Keeping your site healthy

This may seem simple, but this refers to the site speed, core vitals and metrics, HTTPS protocols, but also logical navigation setup, overall UX that produce signals like visitor engagement and retention. Keep your CMS, plugins and content up to date to avoid any vulnerabilities.  There is nothing new here but the basics play an important role.

Schema

The days of excessive schema are over.  Keep it simple, limit markup as multiple schema cause bloat and won’t improve the ranking process but are still a viable signal.  It helps Google understand context and relationships, and it is a signal for LLM features. Including it is still recommended but bringing simplicity to the setup is now a requirement, as something that used to be a part of the SEO strategy is a lot less impactful.

Content

One of the few core indexing signals for Google are the following: country, language, secure site, core web vitals, dofollow, spam policy violations, and content recency and freshness.

If your content is not indexed, it should most likely be refreshed and the quality should be improved.

Google specifically does not claim that AI-generated content cannot rank in AI Overviews, but it does mention that the content has to be original, written in a logical way, and include additional elements that can help the user beyond the content that already exists on other websites.  This brings us to the fact that adding personal expertise and creating user-centric content that goes beyond copying what has already been written and bringing additional knowledge and experiences to expand on the topic is crucial to ranking.  This highlights that since AI content generators are training on the existing data, they are not able to expand on it beyond what has already been presented and extend it to incorporate additional points or experiences.  Finding niche topics where you can highlight your knowledge and expertise will be the key to placing your website in the AIO section. Creating new content and considering that freshness plays an important part in the indexing process, building out your website consistently can help with the discovery and placement.

Google is looking for steady expansion and existing page improvements that result in better communication with the audience not simple changes to manipulate signals and results.  Stay away from publishing low-quality blogs each month, as they will not be indexed, and these techniques can cause an overall demotion of your website.

Images

Google recognized that it does not discriminate against AI-generated images as long as they support the described content and are a true representation of the topic presented. The image has to be relevant and accurate, even if some minor elements have errors. As long as they are conceptually aligned, there will be no penalty from Google, even if, on a closer inspection, the image may display some classic AI issues.  Keeping high standards when it comes to imagery is more of a good brand practice, so a thorough inspection before posting is always recommended.

LLMs.txt not a standard or a requirement

Adding LLMs.txt to the website has been compared to the old keyword meta tag and is redundant to the main content of the website. Some compare them to the robobots.txt, but that’s a complete misconception. They don’t carry much value with SERPS and currently, AI systems don’t use them.  This may change in the future and become a standard to AI website content crawling, but as of today, this has not been confirmed. There are proposals to standardize the llms.txt files to highlight LLM-friendly content going forward.

Soft 404s

Soft 404s are redirects of non-existent pages that return a 200 OK status, although the content has been abandoned or no longer exists on the page.   These low-value pages consume a crawl budget and can lead to an overall reduced visibility. The best practice for content that is no longer present is to return a 404 or 410.  For content that has been moved, use 301 redirects. Showing these pages as a 200 OK can indicate low quality and misleading content.

It might be time to do a deep audit of your website and re-evaluate its basic setup and content. Ranking in AI results may not give you the CTRs that the traditional search used to deliver, but it gives your brand the exposure it will need to compete in the AI-centric future.