For many years, search engine optimization (SEO) was the be-all and end-all for website owners. Anyone who wanted to rank well on Google focused on meaningful headings, high-quality content, fast loading times, and a clean technical structure. These basic rules still apply today and are likely to remain important for a long time to come. At the same time, however, the internet is changing at a pace that would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago. More and more people are no longer asking their questions exclusively through a search engine, but directly to an artificial intelligence system. Whether it’s ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or other AI systems—today, a single question is often enough to get a detailed answer without first having to scroll through a search results page.
This raises a new question for website operators: How do these AI systems actually access the right information? And how do they determine which content on a website is particularly important?