In this episode, Glynis Tao discusses how AI is changing the way SEO works, especially for fashion brands. She breaks down the differences between traditional SEO and AI-driven search, focusing on why authority and content structure matter more than ever. Glynis shares a case study featuring Nomi Designs to show how consistent, strategic blogging led to a feature in an AI Overview. She wraps up with straightforward tips to help you keep your SEO strategy effective as search continues to evolve.
About
Glynis Tao is the founder & CEO of Chase Your Dreams Consulting, which is an apparel business consulting & online marketing agency that specializes in SEO & AI search optimization for e-commerce companies. She helps fashion, beauty and lifestyle e-commerce brands create optimized content and attract potential customers through organic search results.
Takeaways
- AI is changing how people discover your brand and products.
- Traditional SEO focuses on optimizing for blue links.
- AI SEO is about optimizing for visibility and AI-generated answers.
- Content must be original, structured, and helpful to be cited.
- Blogs are essential for training AI to see your brand as an authority.
- Topic clusters help build topical authority for search engines and AI.
- Use schema to make content easier for machines to understand.
- Helpful content is prioritized by Google's helpful content system.
- Brands need to create content that aligns with natural language queries.
- Helpfulness beats fluff in content creation.
What is AI SEO and how is it different from traditional SEO?
AI SEO isn’t about ranking in the top 10 search results anymore. Tools like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT are now summarizing answers and linking to trusted sources. If your brand isn’t seen as authoritative or helpful, it might get skipped—regardless of where you rank. SEO today is about being cited, not just clicked.
Why is your traffic dropping even if your rankings look fine?
If you’re still ranking well but seeing fewer clicks, AI could be the reason. Google’s SGE now shows AI-generated summaries at the top of results pages, pushing traditional listings further down. In March 2025, 13% of all queries triggered an AI Overview, double what it was two months earlier. You haven’t done anything wrong—search behavior is shifting.
What kind of content shows up in AI search results?
AI tools prioritize content that’s clear, structured, and helpful. Blog posts with specific answers, strong headings, schema markup, and a clear brand voice have a better chance of being cited. TLDR summaries, FAQs, and expert insights all help AI recognize your content as trustworthy and worth referencing.
Real example: How Nomi Designs got featured in AI Overviews
Nomi Designs, a sustainable linen clothing brand, saw major results from a focused blog strategy. Posts like “Can You Wear Linen in Winter?” and “How to Pack Linen Clothes for Travel” earned top placements in Google’s AI Overviews and brought in tens of thousands of impressions and clicks. The key? Clear structure, useful content, and strong internal linking.
What SEO fundamentals still matter (and matter more)?
Some SEO basics are more important than ever:
- Topic clusters build topical authority
- Schema markup (FAQs, How-tos) helps AI understand your content
- Helpful, expert-led writing builds trust with both users and machines
EEAT—Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust—has become essential if you want AI tools to recognize your brand as a credible source.
How can you future-proof your SEO strategy?
Start by auditing your content for quality and authority. Remove fluff, add schema, and repurpose your strongest content across platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube. Most importantly, stay consistent and update older posts. AI search rewards helpfulness, not size—so even small brands can compete if their content genuinely serves their audience.
Chapters
00:00 The Impact of AI on SEO Strategies
01:15 Understanding AI SEO vs Traditional SEO
04:27 Building Authority in AI Search Engines
07:42 Creating Effective Content for AI Visibility
11:42 Future-Proofing Your SEO Strategy for AI
Transcript
Glynis Tao
AI is changing how people discover your brand and products and where you can make yourself visible. By learning how to adapt your SEO strategy while your competitors are away at their summer cottage, you are taking the important steps to future-proof your website's search strategy. In this episode, you'll learn how to adapt your SEO strategy and stay visible in AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Bing Copilot. Let's do this.
Welcome to Chase Your Dreams, a podcast for fashion entrepreneurs who want to build a purposeful and profitable clothing business so they can make a living doing what they love. I'm your host, Glynis Tao, an apparel business consultant and SEO specialist with 20 years apparel industry experience. I'm also a mom to a wonderfully energetic little boy named Chase.
Hi and welcome back to the Chase Your Dreams podcast, the show for fashion entrepreneurs who want to build a purposeful and profitable business so they can make a living doing what they love. I'm your host, Glynis Tao, an apparel business consultant, SEO specialist, and founder of Chase Your Dreams Consulting. I help fashion, beauty, and lifestyle brands grow their online presence through SEO and AI search optimization.
In today's episode, AI SEO is here, how to future-proof your fashion brand online, we're talking about the rise of AI in search engines and what that means for your brand's visibility. If you've noticed that your website traffic is down, even though your rankings seem stable, it might not be you, it might be Google. We'll explore how AI is changing how people search, how content is surfaced, and what you can do to adapt your strategy to stay competitive.
So let's just start with the basics. What is AI SEO and how does it differ from traditional SEO?
Traditional SEO focuses on optimizing for Google's 10 blue links, ranking on page one by using keywords, backlinks, and on-page content. But AI SEO is about optimizing for visibility and AI-generated answers like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews. These tools don't just list your page, they summarize answers and cite authoritative sources. So if your brand isn't seen as an expert, it may be left out of those answers entirely. It's not about rankings anymore. It's about authority and being referenced. In other words, it's no longer just about getting clicks. It's about being cited as the source.
So Google's Search Generative Experience or SGE and Microsoft's Bing Copilot are two of the biggest disruptors. In fact, according to SEMrush, over 13% of Google queries triggered an AI overview in March 2025. That's double what it was just two months prior. SGE generates summaries at the top of the search engines results, reducing clicks to traditional organic listings.
So if you just think about the traditional Google search engine results page prior, previously we used to type in a keyword into the question box and then it would come up with an answer, the list of websites that you can click on. SGE generates summaries at the top of the search results, reducing clicks to traditional listings and Bing Copilot is integrating chat GPT directly into search experiences. So even if you're still ranking number one, you may be seeing fewer clicks.
Something that I talk about in detail in episode 45, Why Your Website Traffic is Dropping and What to Do About It, if you haven't listened to that yet I break down how to diagnose traffic drops using Google Search Console and how to spot issues that are caused by AI search. So have a listen to episode number 45. So the overall impact would be that there is less real estate for organic results, but more emphasis on authority and structured data so what kind of content gets cited in AI answers.
Blogs are still a powerful tool, especially when they're original, well structured, and helpful. So the way that LLMs work, their large language models, they look for original, structured, and helpful content. And so that's why it's really important now more than ever that your blogs and your content have FAQs, schema, and are written in an expert voice. These are things that will help your blogs become more likely to be cited. So AI tools are trained on written content and they favor blog posts that include several things such as specific answers to user questions, clear headings and subheadings, FAQs and schema markup.
And you can also have a TLDR summary or key takeaways, key takeaways at the top of your blog. And this is also something that I emphasized in a previous episode. That was episode 43 on How Blogging Builds Brand Trust and Boosts Sales. In that episode, I basically emphasized the point that blogging isn't dead. In fact, it's essential to train AI to see your brand as an authority. So make sure you have a listen to that episode.
In essence, that episode emphasizes the point that your blog posts can be your ticket to being mentioned in AI summaries, but only if they're structured well and actually solve a real problem for your audience.
Other tools you could try using are Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube as offsite content that influences AI visibility as well. Those are other areas and places that AI engines pull other information and data from.
Let's talk about the SEO building blocks that still matter and now matter even more. First of all, I talk about this a lot and also I have several blog articles written about it. It's about topic clusters and that's our practice of creating multiple related pieces of content around a central theme that helps build topical authority. That's a key signal for both search engines and AI. So I use this strategy for myself, my own blogs, and also for my client blogs.
Also, another thing you want to keep in mind is to use schema markup. So this is structured data like FAQs, how-to, and product schema that make it easier for machines to understand and site your content.
And also, the other thing you want to keep in mind is helpfulness. How helpful is your content? Because Google's helpful content system and AI Overviews prioritizes content that is people-first, expert-led, and designed to actually help. So AI doesn't just want keywords now, it wants clear, credible content from brands that it can trust. So that's where EEAT comes from, otherwise known as EAT, and that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Your site needs to show real authorship, updated posts, and a clear brand voice to earn that trust. I have several articles I talk about this, I will link to in the show notes.
AI power search engines like AI overviews and search GPT are changing how consumers are discovering your products. So these platforms are prioritizing more conversational intent-based search results. In order to stay visible, brands need to create content that aligns with natural language queries and prioritizes user intent. This means adapting your product descriptions, blogs, and FAQs to answer customer questions directly.
So let me give you a real example here. One of my clients, Nomi Designs, creates minimalist eco-friendly linen clothing that is sourced ethically and produced locally in Victoria, BC. We helped them develop a blog strategy focused on thoughtful, well-structured content that reflected their values and voice. As a result, several of their blog posts were recently featured in Google's AI Overviews, which is a major win in today's search landscape. So two blogs in particular are ranking right at the top in Google AI Overviews. So there are, Can You Wear Linen Clothing in Winter? is one. And this blog comes up as the number one result and AI overviews with a link directly to their website. And at the time after this blog was posted three months later, the blog had had 22,800 impressions and over 525 clicks. And it's also their second best performing page on their website. Currently, that blog ranks for over 1,000 keywords.
Another blog on their site, called How to Pack Linen Clothes for Travel. In the last six months, just before I hopped on to record this episode, I just went and checked in Google Search Console. In the last six months, this blog had over 47,200 impressions, 1120 clicks, ranks for over 1,000 keywords. Its average position is number seven. It's cited in the AI Overviews with a reference link, and it shows up as a number two position on the Google search engine results page. So this just shows you how powerful blogging can be if you follow a strategy.
So let me just break it down to you exactly what we did. So first of all, we created an SEO blog strategy for them that involves creating contextual content that aligns with their particular brand products categories. Okay, in this case, just linen clothing. We researched relevant blog topic ideas and then created a topic cluster that focused around a main topic with a proposed internal linking system. This helps to strengthen your web page's ability to rank. Another thing that internal linking does is that it helps to build and position you as a trustworthy subject matter expert in your audience. And this is important because Google wants to rank sites that demonstrate experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
The next thing we did is that we developed a blog brief and outline with clear section headings like the H1s and H2s, sections that were all listed. All the client had to do was fill out the brief with their firsthand experience and expertise. The blog then got optimized for SEO, such as title tags, meta descriptions, proper headings, image alt text, and then we also check for spelling and grammar. Then the blog is posted onto the website and submitted for indexing on Google Search Console. So all in all, even with fewer total clicks, we saw higher quality traffic and increased conversions. And that's the proof that with the right SEO strategy, even small fashion brands can compete in the age of AI.
Another point I want to mention is that their organic traffic contributes to half of their revenue and sales from their site. So if you are interested in learning more, you can read the full case study that's posted in my case studies area on my website.
So how can you future-proof your SEO strategy for AI? Well, I've covered a lot in this episode, but there's a few things that you can do to get started. The first thing you can do is to audit your content for authority. This is content that demonstrates your expertise and credibility across all your pages. So take a look through your content and remove anything that may not be as high quality as just maybe more fluff. Just get rid of them altogether because it could be doing more harm than good.
And then another thing you want to do is to use schema, especially in FAQ, how to's for blogs and product pages. You want to post helpful original content, right? Going back to the fluff, you want to avoid fluff. Fluff can be good in some places, but not when it comes to your content. You want to repurpose content on multiple platforms. You want to post full original content. You want to be the go-to source in your niche because you want to be known as the go-to expert in your industry or niche.
Then you want to repurpose content on multiple platforms. So once you've gone through and done all this work, right, you might as well use it and publish it, post it across all the other platforms like on LinkedIn, YouTube, on your social media. You know, you also want to share it, maybe in an e-letter, right? So you want to get it out there as much as you can. And most importantly is to stay consistent, build topic clusters and update older posts regularly to be able to maintain its freshness.
The brands that win an AI search aren't the biggest, but they are the most trustworthy and helpful. So in other words, this sort of levels the playing field because the big brands don't necessarily mean they have the most authority, right? Any business now of any size has the opportunity to stand out and show up in search now just by building your expertise, your trustworthiness and just think of everything that you create as being really helpful.
Helpfulness beats fluff. That's my last thing I would say is the takeaway you want to get out of this is helpfulness beats fluff any day.
So thanks for listening to this episode of Chase Your Dream Podcast. And if you found today's episode helpful, please be sure to subscribe and leave a review. Don't forget to check out the AI SEO case study with Nomi Designs, which I will include a link to in the show notes. And also the previous episodes on blogging and traffic drops.
If you need help building your SEO strategy for the age of AI, please reach out to me. Call or visit my website, glynistao.com, for SEO strategy and services. I have a new page up now dedicated to AI SEO, and I'll have other free resources and more to help support you along your journeys. Until next time, take care.