Content Optimization for AI Search: Create Content That Performs

For AI search, high-performing content isn’t about ranking, but about building your authority, ensuring consistent messaging, and earning citations.

AI platforms pull from web content that’s well-structured, clear, and relevant to specific questions. They don’t read your article top to bottom, but follow signals to extract what’s useful.

But until now, knowing what “useful” looked like for AI was a combination of existing SEO best practices and guesswork.

Semrush Enterprise AIO’s new Content Optimization capabilities change that. Now content creation can follow a guided process for AI visibility in real-time.

AI search follows similar principles to search engines, looking for content that clearly answers intent-based questions, uses readable structure, and covers connected subtopics in depth.

The challenge? Knowing how to measure these. You can have an informative and well-reasoned article, but if it doesn’t have the right structure, or buries insights in long paragraphs, AI will skip it.

That’s where the new Content Optimization features come in. These give you a clear framework that evaluates your content’s performance for AI search, while providing live recommendations to improve it.

The feature evaluates your content across three dimensions, reflecting how AI models assess copy:

This measures the percentage of essential questions your content covers for a given topic. For example, those that cover the key “who”, “what”, “where”, “when”, “why” information.

If users ask, “How does this work?” or “Why does it matter?” and your article doesn’t address it, you lose relevance.

Covering multiple key questions upfront helps improve your topical completeness and increases your chance of citation in a wider number of AI responses.

AI models understand topics as networks of related ideas, not isolated keywords.

After the key questions, cluster coverage then evaluates whether your article includes relevant subtopics (for example, if you’re writing about “sustainability,” have you discussed carbon impact, renewables, and green policies?).

The clusters AIO identifies are based on actual data from LLM outputs. Sections where a domain is cited in responses are gathered and summarized to form a specific subtopic.

This deepens your content’s authority and ensures you appear across a wider range of search prompts.

Even perfect information won’t perform if it’s difficult to read.

Structure score measures readability, formatting, and clarity. These are the elements that ensure people, and AI models, interpret meaning accurately.

This covers everything from following a consistent heading hierarchy to balanced paragraph lengths and scannable formatting.

While AIO automates the heavy lifting through a more detailed analysis, there are a few foundational rules for structuring content. Here’s an introductory list with why they matter:

Looking to snatch an opportunity and quickly draft some content? Semrush Enterprise AIO allows you to generate optimized content in an instant.

The built-in “Write with AI” feature automatically follows all the best-practice rules, generating a full, structured draft that you can tweak to best match your tone of voice. Plus with the real-time scoring alongside, you can edit with total confidence.

It even helps craft titles and meta descriptions that meet SEO and AI standards, ensuring every piece is optimized from top to bottom.

Creating high-performing content requires clarity, structure, and topical relevance that both AI (and people) instantly understand.

With AIO, marketers gain a clear roadmap to do just that: