AI-Ready SEO: Why Preparing Your Website for the Future Starts Now

AI is changing how people search, and how your organisation gets discovered. In this article, we explore what it means to be AI-ready for SEO, and how you can prepare your website for the future of search.

What it means and why it matters 

Search is changing. With generative AI becoming a core part of how people discover content, answer questions, and make decisions, organisations need to think beyond traditional SEO. 

That’s where AI-ready SEO comes in - a future-focused approach that helps ensure your digital presence is not only search-friendly, but optimised for how AI engines interpret and surface content. 

Let’s break it down: 

• SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): Still essential. This is about making sure your content is optimised for traditional search engines like Google and Bing. It includes keywords, metadata, site structure and page speed. 
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation): A newer concept, this focuses on how content is surfaced by AI tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, or Perplexity. These tools pull from multiple sources and reward trustworthy, structured, and well-contextualised information. 
• AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation): This is about structuring your content in ways that help AI-driven tools provide direct answers - think featured snippets, FAQs, and well-structured data. 

Why preparing now is an opportunity 

Many charities and ethical organisations are still unsure how AI will impact their digital presence. But rather than seeing this as a threat, we believe it’s an opportunity to: 

• Improve content clarity and relevance 
• Increase visibility across a wider range of tools and platforms 
• Future-proof your website for how people actually search today 
• Create a stronger connection between mission, content and discovery 

The good news? You don’t need to reinvent your website to be AI-ready, but you do need to build and structure it with the right foundations. 

Giant Digital’s approach: AI-ready by default  

At Giant Digital, we use Django, a powerful open-source framework that allows for total flexibility when delivering web page templates. This enables our engineers to build websites that are “AI-ready” out of the box. That means: 

• Clean, semantic code for better machine readability 
• Structured data and schema markup as standard 
• Lightning-fast performance and accessibility baked in 
• Content models that support future optimisation and automation 

We apply these AI readiness principles across every site we deliver, ensuring our clients don’t just meet today’s search standards, but are set up for the next wave of AI-driven discovery.