Digital marketing and AI · 3 min read

Built for Google, Rebuilt for Answers

A site built to rank in a list of links is not automatically a site an AI answer can use. Sometimes the only fix is to build differently from the start.

By Jeev Trika

For most of my career, building a website meant building it for Google’s list of ten links. In 2025 that list started to move, and I found out how much of what I had built was tied to it.

Built for the list

In August 2011 I sent our developer a full review of the topseos categories. Most of it was written for Google. For every category I listed the phrases buyers searched:

Local Search: local seo company, local seo service.

Then came the page titles, rewritten to match, the URLs changed to match with 301 redirects from the old ones, and a note to resubmit everything:

Produce all new URLs / maybe even all - and resubmit into Google Webmaster Tools

That was the craft: find the words people type, put them in the title and the address, and make the page the best answer in a list of ten. It worked for a long time, across a portfolio of about 250 comparison platforms.

The list gets pushed down

By 2025 the results page itself had changed. Above the links there was often an AI-written answer. A partner agency that wanted to work with topseos asked whether the site had been optimised for AI Overviews and ChatGPT.

My answers that summer were cautious. On the plan we were running, my first point was that Google controls the organic results, which is the argument of Rented Land. And on why paid search, rather than organic, was the way to get in front of buyers quickly:

bypassing organic results (which keep getting pushed down), fast.

On AI Overviews specifically:

I agree there’s some value in organic, especially with the new AI Overviews, but it’s still early and there’s no guarantee since it’s in its infancy.

An old site cannot just be retrofitted

In October 2025 the same partner suggested changing a key page so it would be more likely to be picked up in AI results. Our answer, after discussing it internally:

we can’t change the organic SEO page as that would change all the programming/coding for the whole site.

That sentence is the whole lesson. A site built for one kind of search has its assumptions in its code: how pages are generated, what is on them, how they are linked. Changing what an answer engine can read is not a content edit. It can mean rebuilding the site.

So this site was built differently

When I rebuilt jeevtrika.com in 2026, the requirement was to be readable by an answer engine from the first line of code, not optimised for one afterwards:

every page is pre-rendered, so the content is in the HTML a crawler receives, with nothing waiting on JavaScript;
each page carries structured data describing who I am, what I have built, where I studied and what each article is, linked into one graph;
the site publishes an llms.txt file, a plain-text summary of who I am and what is here, written for language models rather than for people.

None of that guarantees an AI answer will cite this site. Nobody can promise that, any more than anyone could promise a first-page ranking. What it does is remove the reasons it could not.

What I would tell someone with an older site

Check what a crawler actually receives, not what the browser shows after the scripts run. Find out whether your pages say plainly, in structured form, who you are and what you do. And be honest about the codebase. If the answer to “can we change this page?” is that it would change the whole site, the question is not how to optimise the old site. It is when to build the new one.

Deciding which of those two a business is facing, when it depends on being found, is where a digital marketing and AI engagement starts.