How AI is Shaping the Future of SEO

Last updated on June 13, 2025.

The SEO team at Socium Media is always being proactive and engaging with the AI trends that are reshaping the digital marketing industry. Here is how we’re helping our clients stay ahead of the AI curve.

What Has AI and LLMs Shown Us So Far?

• AI citations are coming from deep internal links.
  • Homepage rankings were always a key page to get ranked highly in SERPs. However, only 0.5% of AI citations link to a homepage.
• We’ve found blog posts, products and FAQs tend to be cited the most in the AI SERP Overview and searches within LLMs.
  • Originally mostly blogs and FAQs when the LLMs were more informational.
  • But over the past month, products have been showing more recently with the addition of the buy now buttons in the LLMs.
  • We also have started to see local listings with a map feature in ChatGPT for local businesses and restaurants which does seem to be ranked based on the relevancy of the homepage and the Google Business Directory.
    • Restaurants that have brunch mentioned on the homepage or in their Google Business Profile are ranking for “best mother’s day brunch in XYZ”
• AI results definitely tend to favor pages that directly answer a question or fulfill a specific intent; however, more recently, homepages are seeing the majority of traffic from LLMs due to recent updates.

What AI Considerations Is Our SEO Team Prioritizing?

• Human-written content that answers common questions clearly and directly.
• FAQ sections with concise and useful answers after each question.
• Longer-form blog content targeting long-tail, informational keywords.
• Expanding structured data to help LLMs and search engines understand the content layout.
  • Our team has been implementing more specific schemas to help AI parse the website’s data.
  • We still use the “standard” product, organization, breadcrumbList, blogPosting/article schemas, but we’re finding that additional schema markups are helping with AI results.

What Are We Testing?

• For an outdoor brand we work with, we’ve started building out Travel Guides with travel tips, places to eat, drink, stay, and hike/climb/bike. The idea is to meet informational intent while subtly promoting products and targeting potential buyers in the research phase.
  • Too early to report results, but the structure is built for AI visibility.
  • We’ve found directories like these also work really well in traditional SEO.
• We will also be testing MCPs.
  • This will give us a better understanding of whether this works to increase visibility and allow us to influence results.

What Are We Currently Recommend For Better AI Results?

• Build informational pages that answer questions. 
• Use clear question-based subheadings and answer the question in the first sentence.
• Add FAQ sections to blog and landing pages to further target questions and link to full blog posts answering questions in detail.
• Include tips, quotes or proprietary data to make content more unique.
  • Proprietary data or quotes seem to be a ranking factor in LLMs according to data we saw from Neil Patel.
• Keep pages updated with current info, awards, and seasonal content.
  • Recency of content is also a ranking factor for LLMs.
• Use schema markup across the board for everything applicable.
  • This is not only stated in Google Developer Docs but seems to be what LLMs are currently using to understand content better.
  • We expect MCP (Model Context Protocol) to become a standard which is essentially the 5.0 version of structured data but specifically for LLMs. (See below).
• Make sure pages are crawlable, fast, and easy to parse.

What’s Next For AI and SEO?

• LLMs.txt
  • LLMs.txt is a proposed standard that tells AI models what content they can or can’t use, similar to how robots.txt works for search engines.
  • At this point, most major AI platforms like Google and OpenAI don’t recognize or follow it.
  • From data we’ve seen, there is no real impact on visibility, rankings, or how content is used in AI-generated results.
  • It also requires root-level file access, which many platforms don’t support.
  • Recommendation: We don’t suggest spending time implementing LLMs.txt right now, since it doesn’t provide a measurable benefit.
• Model Context Protocol (MCP)
  • MCP is a way to help AI tools better understand the structure of your website, what types of content you have, and how different pages connect.
  • It allows you to define key areas of the site, like product pages, blog posts, service offerings, and calls to action.
  • This can help AI models display your content more accurately in search experiences that rely on summarization and recommendations.
  • A static MCP file can be added to your site even if your CMS doesn’t support dynamic endpoints.
  • Recommendation: We are still early but we are further exploring this idea. Claude and other LLMs seem to be recognizing MCP and we expect this to become more popular.
  • More Info:
    • https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/mcp
    • https://modelcontextprotocol.io/introduction
• IndexNow
  • Already setup via Shopify Plus or Yoast Premium
  • Notifies Search Engines and LLMs about updates to products/new pages.
  • Recommendation: If this is not enabled, we recommend enabling this!
  • More Info:
    • https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/May-2025/IndexNow-Enables-Faster-and-More-Reliable-Updates-for-Shopping-and-Ads