Traditional search algorithms were designed to deliver the most “relevant” results in response to a search query. Here’s Google’s explanation:
“To return relevant results, we first need to establish what you’re looking for — the intent behind your query. To do this, we build language models to try to decipher how the relatively few words you enter into the search box match up to the most useful content available.”
(Note we added the emphasis on “relatively few words” and will circle back on that in a moment.)
It has been a long-standing SEO best practice to bucket and prioritize target keywords that align with these four search intents:
- Navigational – the searcher is looking for a specific website.
- Informational – the searcher is looking for an answer to a specific question.
- Commercial – the searcher is researching products or services.
- Transactional – the searcher is looking to purchase products or services.
The optimization of content, tags, and link/social signals around the target keyword is designed to make the “relevance” connection for Google algorithms to rank the page based on how well it meets the inferred intent of the keyword usage.
Over time, Google’s algorithms and layouts for its search engine results pages (SERPs) have improved their ability to quickly address the inferred intent of a search query — especially for navigational and informational searches (e.g., with featured snippets, knowledge graph panels, Google Business maps, etc). SEO best practices have evolved to gain visibility in these features in addition to the traditional organic results section.
Now, we have AI engines like Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, etc. that offer users a variety of capabilities from content creation to coding, and of course, to searching. (Check out our coverage on the huge volume of searches that are now being conducted on AI platforms.)
Instead of search queries of “relatively few words,” we now have prompts that can extend from those few words to full sentences or even to paragraphs, depending on the intent of the user/searcher.
So, how do you optimize individual pages for the numerous keyword variations used when a prompt can extend to 30 words or more? The answer is you can’t.
This is why our approach to Search AI Optimization (SAIO) is focused on topic clusters instead of keywords. One element of our SAIO optimization strategy is to provide structured content blocks on a single page that cover a range of related topical keyword variations. AI models can then select the most relevant content block for citation as they parse the intent of searchers’ prompts. Many of these lengthy prompts will most likely fall into the Commercial- and Transactional-research-intent realm, which means those citation links will bring visitors that are more inclined to take action.
If your intent as a marketer is to gain visibility for and conversions from your website, you really need to leverage both SEO and SAIO strategies to address the search intents of your prospective customers, whether they are expressed with short keyword queries or longer prompts.
