Optimize for AI Search: You Still Need SEO in 2026
AI isn’t replacing SEO, it’s built on top of it. In this episode, I’m explaining why optimizing for AI search isn’t about chasing trends or rewriting your entire website. Instead, it’s about strengthening the same SEO foundations that have always mattered: clear messaging, specific niche language, structured page titles, strong meta descriptions, optimized images, and proper heading hierarchy. AI tools pull information from your website, Google Business Profile, directories, and reviews to summarize and recommend providers. If your messaging is vague or inconsistent, AI won’t understand you (and neither will potential clients). This episode walks through the four core SEO elements you need to strengthen so your practice shows up clearly in both traditional search and AI-driven results.
Key Takeaways
AI search tools pull their information from your website and online listings — they don’t magically “know” what you do.
Vague messaging hurts both human visitors and AI visibility; clarity about who you help, what you treat, and where you’re located is essential.
A simple “I help ___ with ___ in ___” framework can dramatically strengthen both your homepage messaging and your AI visibility.
Page titles and meta descriptions should clearly include your specialty and location to help you show up for people who don’t already know your practice name.
Image file names and alt text are overlooked SEO tools that help search engines and AI understand your site.
Proper heading structure — especially having only one H1 per page — makes your content easier for AI and search engines to categorize and recommend.
Resources
Transcript
[00:00:00] Samantha Mabe: I am Samantha Mabe, website designer and founder of Lemon and the Sea, and this is Elevate your practice. If you're a holistic health practitioner ready to grow your practice without wasting time on things that don't work, you're in the right place. Each week I share a website, SEO, and marketing advice along with guest experts so you can bring in the right clients and feel confident about how you are showing up and serving the people that you help. Let's get started.
Why AI Optimization Is Really About SEO Foundations
[00:00:38] Last week I had you run through three ChatGPT and Claude prompts to see whether your business is showing up in AI searches. And some of you probably loved what you saw and others maybe just wanted to quietly close your laptop. Today I wanna talk about why this is not about chasing AI trends. It's about strengthening the same foundation your website has always needed. AI is not replacing SEO. It's actually built on top of SEO. And if your SEO Foundation is weak, AI isn't going to understand you either.
Where AI Gets Information About Your Business
[00:01:16] It's important to start by understanding where AI gets its information from. Because we're using this for search and not creating content, AI is going to pull that information from other places on the web that are also talking about your business and your industry. That means it's pulling the information that it gives to people from your website, from your Google Business Profile, from reviews that you have, directories that you're listed on, and your social media profiles. And when it looks at all of that, it's seeing what is the most important content, what is repeated most often, and how can I best match the person who is searching with somebody who's going to be able to help?
[00:02:09] AI doesn't magically know what you do, and you certainly don't want it making up things about you, it's getting its information from the content that you are publishing on your own site, on social media, or in other places that people are talking about you. Which is good news because you don't need to optimize for AI in a new or complicated way. You just need to make sure your website is clear, it's structured well, it's specific, and it's consistent with every place else you are showing up.
Why Clear Messaging Matters for AI Search Visibility
[00:02:49] The real problem that I see people having when they either aren't showing up in AI searches or the information that AI has is inaccurate is that they have vague messaging. This is the same problem that copywriters and designers have been talking about for ever, because if AI doesn't know what you do, no one else is going to either.
[00:03:19] If your homepage says something like, I support whole person healing, or live your most vital life, that doesn't mean anything to anyone. And it doesn't mean anything to the robots. It might be able to categorize you into a wellness provider bucket, but it's not going to be able to match you with somebody that you actually want to work with and can help.
[00:03:48] But if you are clear on your homepage and say something like, I help women struggling with hormonal acne and irregular cycles, naturopathic medicine in Richmond, Virginia, that is super specific on who you work with, what they might be struggling with, and where you're located.
[00:04:10] Now, please do not use that as the headline of your homepage. That's also not going to help you because we want to be connecting with humans even more than we want to show up in search results. But what you can take away is that you need to be clear on your audience, your location, the conditions that you specifically work with, and the modality that you work in all in language that somebody is actually going to be looking for.
How to Write a Clear Headline for SEO and AI
[00:04:43] If you're not sure what to say in a homepage headline, the easiest place to start is with an I help statement. So I help blank with blank in blank. This might mean you write something like, I help children with sensory processing challenges in North Chesterfield. I help women navigating perimenopause in Santa Barbara. I help couples in Virginia to rebuild trust after infidelity. There are lots of ways that you can play around with this, and that's going to give you the basic foundation of what you want AI to know about you and what you want other people to know about you.
[00:05:29] If someone were to ask you, who do you like to work with? How can I refer them to you? You would be specific in the types of people that you work with, the condition that they might have or the thing they might be struggling with. We also want to be clear about that when somebody comes to our website and reads the copy on that site. This can all still sound like you, but we wanna make sure it's very clear who you work with, where you're located and what you do from the first time somebody encounters you after they have been referred from somewhere or someone else.
5 SEO Foundations That Help You Show Up in AI Search
[00:06:09] How do you actually do that? There are some SEO foundations that you need to make sure are strong on your website before you get into doing any other changes. I'm gonna go through four different places that you can check and see if you need to make updates or if they are ready to go with the keywords you want to show up for.
1. Optimize Your Page Titles for Specialty + Location
[00:06:32] The first is going to be your page titles. This also includes your website title, and it's the blue link that shows up when someone searches. It's also what shows up in the top of your browser tab when your website is loaded. This needs to include your specialty and your location. So it could say something like prenatal chiropractor in Richmond, Virginia and help you show up on search, but if it said home and then your practice name, that's not going to be as helpful.
[00:07:05] Generally if somebody knows the name of your practice and that's what they type into Google, it's gonna find it no problem. What you want to be focusing on is showing up for people who don't know who they wanna work with yet, but they know what they need help with.
[00:07:20] You want to make sure that these are 30 to 60 characters in length, including spaces. And they should be clear and specific. We are not listing out a whole bunch of keywords or every location somebody might type in. We are doing this in a way that it can easily be read by humans and make sense, and so that it signals robots as well.
2. Write Strategic Meta Descriptions
[00:07:43] The second place you want to make sure you are using your keywords and are building your SEO is in your meta descriptions. Again, for your website and all your pages. This should be a sentence or two explaining what the page is about. It's going to include keywords that are specific to that page, and it should be between 135 to 160 characters. Best practice here is to explain what you do and what they are going to learn on this page, and if you have space to then include a call to action like book an appointment, or learn more.
3. Use SEO-Friendly Image File Names
[00:08:28] The third place that you can make sure you are using keywords is in your image file names. When you are optimizing your images to make sure that they load quickly, you also want to rename those files, whether you got them from a stock image library or your camera. Let's actually use keywords that are going to help the robots of the world know what your business is about. So this might look like, naturopathic dash medicine dash Richmond dash for dash women, something like that. There are lots of variations that you can do with these for different locations, different specialties, and they don't necessarily have to reflect what is in the image as much as they need to reflect your business.
4. Add Descriptive Image Alt Text
[00:09:19] The fourth thing you can do is make sure you are also adding image alt text. This should be one sentence and describe what the image is of, but can also include keywords. So instead of having no alt text or letting it pull from your image file name, you might say Occupational therapist working with a child on sensory integration exercises in a Richmond clinic.
[00:09:46] My recommendation here is not to use your business name in all of these, but to focus more on what it is the person is doing in the image or what you're showcasing because the main purpose of alt text is for people who are visually impaired to learn what the image is of if they cannot see it, but we can also make sure that we're including things like our location and our specialty as they make sense for the photo you're sharing.
5. Use Only One H1 Per Page
[00:10:22] A bonus tip here is to make sure you only have one H1 or heading one per page. AI, search engines, everybody reads your page like an outline, and so you want to make sure that your headings are set up correctly. You want one heading one, and it is going to be the top heading on the page. Having those set up correctly is more important than having it look nice. You are going to hurt yourself if you don't have a heading one, and you're gonna hurt yourself if you have more than one. So one heading, one per page, and then you can use headings two through four or five or six, depending on your platform for the rest of the content on that page of your site.
How AI Uses Your SEO Structure to Categorize and Recommend You
[00:11:08] So why does all of this matter for AI specifically? This is the same advice you've probably gotten for improving your website's SEO and while AI does build off of that, it does work slightly differently.
[00:11:23] AI is going to summarize, categorize, and filter. When you can make it really easy for AI to summarize what you do and put you in the correct buckets, then it can recommend you to people who would most benefit from your services based on either what they have asked it or what it already knows about them through other conversations.
[00:11:48] Next week we're gonna be talking about structuring your website, internal links, and why FAQ pages are secretly one of the most powerful things you can add to your site, but if you want to take action right now, my 90 minute refresh is the perfect way to do that. We can make sure that your SEO foundations are set up for success, that you do only have one of those heading ones per page, and that everything is going to start working together to get you in front of people through AI.
[00:12:27] Remember, AI is not replacing SEO. It's just helping people to clarify who they're looking for and make their searches easier. Clarity has always been the strategy. We are just taking it to the next level.
[00:12:43] Thanks for listening to Elevate your Practice. If you enjoyed today's episode, follow the show and leave a review. It helps more practitioners find these tips and start growing their practices with confidence. And don't forget to check out the show notes for links and resources from today's episodes. I'll be back next week with more strategies to help you build a thriving practice.
