AI Content Confidence Analyser

(Published 20 June, 2025. Updated 15 February 2026)

Search and user behaviour began changing in 2025 and that meant we needed to adjust how we approach search engine optimisation to gain visibility for your website.  I’m always considering how to build what I called ‘AI Confidence’ for my client’s digital assets going forward. At face value (currently) AI search engine optimisation for all digital assets has similar requirements to traditional SEO when it comes to understanding the quality and authority of a web page. Featured snippets and AI Overview have a lot in common. However changes in ranking signals have now been felt for some time. Search is evolving and AI search has quite a different process for understanding relevance. I’ve changed search strategies to suit each client based on goals, results and available data analytics.

AI Confidence: Be the truth for citations

I believe that AI Confidence will be a key concept going forward as we look for ways to ‘be the truth’ that garners a citation in an AI Overview (and with the deeper understanding that will come from AI Mode) in Google, and elsewhere in generative search engines.

We are told by Google to write and create for people not search engines but of course we still need to play the Google game to gain the visibility needed to actually be seen (by people).  Talking to chat bots, generative search engines and voice assistants are going to have more prominence as AI engines evolve. Our content needs to deliver clear and direct answers to questions as this is a format easily captured and collated by AI search models. Traditional keyword research might be out the window as these type of queries are currently conversational and difficult to track. This means that first party data is going to be super important (at least in the beginning) and you really need to be thinking about how you collect that across your customer journey. Your data has great value. I have some knowledge around how this works already based on the results I’m seeing with tests carried out for clients. It’s exciting.

So how do we build AI Confidence?

E-E-A-T is still relevant. You can read up on those Google quality rater guidelines if you haven’t already. I will be expanding on this topic but for the moment the advice is to aim for topical authority; find ways to demonstrate first hand experience; create multi-modal content for your web pages and I would also say we need to consider how AI results might factor into our overall digital strategy. Notice I’m not just talking about web pages here I mean ALL digital assets need optimisation. AI relevance might not even be what we decide to chase at the end of the day.

AI and the future of search

Updating this article in February 2026 to say: AI Mode is now live in Australia. Building AI Confidence into your digital assets is now essential, as is AI search optimisation. AI is fast becoming part of ‘life’ as the models improve and answer engines such as ChatGPT and Perplexity become the starting point for question based search and understanding topics. The integration of this technology with apps and platforms is key to digital marketing strategy in future. There really is so much opportunity right now but perhaps not for long.

Search Engine Marketing

Data from Google Analytics

What is search engine marketing?

Search engine marketing (SEM) is the process of promoting your website in search engines so that your website can be found when people are searching for the products or services you provide. Search engine marketing includes organic search marketing and paid advertising such as Google Ads ‘pay-per-click’ advertising (PPC). Search engine marketing is an effective means of attracting new leads to your business because it’s can fulfil both long term and short term goals and capture your market across all stages of the buyer journey. 

The Emergence of AI Search Engine Optimisation

In 2025 Google integrated AI Overviews and AI Mode into the Google search engine results page.  As Google wrote: “The days of consumers carefully choosing their keywords to search are over. Now people can search by talking naturally, with images, or simply circling what they see. With the reasoning power of Google’s Gemini models built into Search, people can ask their most complex and nuanced questions, and Search can understand them and help them discover more of the web. Search is going beyond information to intelligence to help you truly ask anything.”

Search marketing now includes generative engine optimisation (GEO) and answer engine optimisation (AEO). In 2026 we are experiencing improvements in large language models and increasing use of AI chatbots that is fuelling the rise of AI first discovery and significant changes in search behaviour.