When organizations add AI-powered website search or a digital assistant, the benefits are often viewed through the lens of the visitor experience. These experiences help visitors find information, compare options, and take action. For the business, that can mean greater engagement, higher conversions, and stronger customer loyalty.
What’s often overlooked is how the questions visitors submit through website search or a digital assistant can inform an AI visibility strategy. Those questions create a feedback loop: learn what people want to know, improve the content, measure how it performs in AI search, and repeat.
1. Establish a baseline: How visible is your business to AI today?
To start improving how well AI understands your business, you first need to establish a baseline. What content is AI citing? Which priority questions does your content answer well, and where is information missing? When is your organization recommended, and when do competitors appear instead?
Answering these questions helps you understand where you’re already performing well and where to prioritize improvements.
At ai12z, we did this ourselves by using our AI visibility solution. We used our Q&A Analysis report, which assesses how well our content answers users’ questions across five pillars: coverage, authority, clarity, discoverability, and intent match.
Our initial score across those categories was 77 out of 100, indicating a strong performance on core platform topics, but critical gaps in areas like our integrations, CMS connectors, and competitor comparisons.
2. Learn directly from your audience: What are they searching for and asking?
When visitors use website search or a digital assistant, they tell you directly what they want to know. You can see the phrases they enter into search and the questions they ask in conversation. When these experiences are powered by an answer engine, they can understand natural-language questions and provide direct answers.
Those searches and conversations provide ongoing insight into the topics people care about, the language they use, and which questions your content answers well or cannot answer yet. As more visitors interact, patterns begin to emerge. You can identify recurring topics and use those signals to anticipate the kinds of questions your audience may also ask in ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI search tools.
We’ve had both AI-powered search and a digital assistant on our website for several years now, giving us valuable insight into what visitors are looking for and where they’re getting stuck.
After reviewing our Q&A Analysis report, we selected a three-month date range and analyzed the questions submitted through our website search and digital assistant. We saw a clear pattern that reinforced the report’s findings: visitors wanted to understand how ai12z compared with specific competitors and alternative solutions. We could see which competitors they were asking about and which capabilities they wanted to compare.
3. Connect those insights: How can audience questions improve your AI visibility?
You can feed those insights back into your AI visibility strategy to make targeted improvements to your content. That might mean refreshing existing pages, adding missing information, creating new resources, or making content clearer and easier to understand.
Those improvements serve two purposes:
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- They give visitors better information when they engage with your website, whether directly on the page or through your search or digital assistant.
- They give AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini clearer, more complete information to use in answers, citations, and recommendations.
As your AI visibility improves, your business has more opportunities to be discovered through AI platforms and attract visitors to your website. The questions they submit through website search or a digital assistant then generate additional insight into what your audience wants to know and where your content can improve.
That’s the feedback loop organizations may not realize they’re creating when they add AI-powered website search or a digital assistant.
Based on our AI visibility baseline and the clear pattern we identified through interactions with our search and digital assistant, we created more than 30 detailed comparison pages and published them on our website.
Visitors who might previously have received an “I don’t know” response when comparing ai12z with a competitor can now receive direct, detailed answers. When we ran the Q&A Analysis report again, our score increased from 77 to 86. This showed that our website was better equipped to answer those questions. We can now continue monitoring whether that stronger content coverage leads to more citations and recommendations across AI search.
If you want to use questions from your website search or digital assistant to guide your AI visibility strategy, get in touch.