As AI tools play a bigger role in how people search, many business owners are left wondering what they should actually be doing differently. According to Dan M. Jones, Founder of On Top Marketing, the answer is less complicated than most people expect.
“There’s a temptation to chase every new feature or tool that comes out,” he says. “But I’d rather businesses focus on getting the fundamentals right. If your site is clear and well structured, both traditional search engines and AI tools have a much easier time understanding it.”
Jones believes one of the biggest mistakes businesses are making is assuming AI search requires a completely different approach from traditional SEO.
“People think there’s some secret AI optimisation strategy that nobody else knows about,” he says. “The reality is that the businesses performing well in AI search are usually the businesses that already have strong foundations. They have clear websites, useful content, consistent branding and a strong reputation online.”
According to Jones, many business owners are focusing on the wrong things entirely.
“A lot of businesses are still looking for shortcuts,” he says. “They’re chasing individual tactics when they should be focusing on making it easy for both people and AI systems to understand who they are, what they do and why customers should trust them.”
Jones outlines several areas businesses should prioritise. The first is content clarity. Pages that directly answer the questions people are actually asking tend to perform far better than pages written around keywords rather than people.
The second is site structure. Search engines and AI tools rely on clean navigation and accurate sitemaps to discover and understand pages. A site that is difficult to crawl is a site that gets missed, no matter how good the content is.
A third area is structured data. Schema markup helps search engines and AI tools understand exactly what a page is about, rather than forcing them to infer meaning from context, something many businesses still overlook.
Jones also highlights content freshness as something that is often ignored. Outdated pages, even accurate ones, are less likely to be referenced by systems that place increasing value on relevance and up-to-date information.
However, he believes the conversation extends far beyond a company’s website.
“The difference today is that people are increasingly delegating research to AI,” he explains. “They’re asking ChatGPT, Gemini and other tools to help them evaluate options. If AI doesn’t understand your business, it’s much harder for it to recommend you when those conversations happen.”
This is why Jones places such a strong emphasis on brand consistency and online visibility.
Reviews, articles, videos, press coverage, social media activity, customer success stories and industry mentions all contribute towards the information AI systems use to build a picture of a business.
“It makes you feel good when a customer tells you how happy they were with your service. But if that information never gets documented anywhere online, AI can’t reference it. It can’t learn from it. And so it can’t use it when somebody asks for a recommendation.”
He believes many businesses are dramatically underestimating the importance of this shift.
“AI can only recommend what it knows,” he says. “If AI doesn’t know why you’re great, it can’t tell anyone else.”
It is the same approach Jones teaches through his free SEO Demystified course, which focuses on helping business owners, marketers and aspiring SEO professionals understand what actually moves the needle, rather than overwhelming them with unnecessary complexity.
After more than a decade working in search engine optimisation, Jones remains convinced that the fundamentals still matter more than most people realise.
“The businesses that win here aren’t necessarily the biggest,” he says. “They’re the businesses that make it easiest for both people and machines to understand exactly what they offer, why they’re different and why customers trust them.”
For Jones, the future of SEO and AI search visibility is not about chasing every trend. It’s about building a business that is easy to understand, easy to trust and impossible to ignore.
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