When a company’s content already ranks well on Google, but AI tools keep citing competitors instead, the instinct is to rewrite everything. Cristiano Winckler, Somebody Digital’s Director of Digital Operations, says that’s usually the wrong fix.
“If you have great content, it is already ranking well organically, but you’re not seeing AI utilizing that content, we usually look at the technicals,” he says. “AI requires something slightly different to be able to interpret your pages.”
Schemas are the first thing the Somebody Digital team checks. Beyond that, small changes to how existing content is structured, not the content itself, often do more work than a rewrite. “Sometimes, by restructuring a little bit the exact same piece of content, without making changes in your content, just restructuring it a little bit, also helps,” he says. Comparisons between a product and competing solutions do better in tables or bullet points than in paragraphs.
A short summary near the top of the page, roughly 250 to 500 characters, also matters more than most content briefs account for. Winckler ties this back to how differently AI tools and Google actually behave once they land on a page.
“Google will try and insist on crawling in and understanding what your website is about,” he says. “AI is going to try, and if something is wrong, doesn’t have the schemas, the technicals are not fantastic, it’s going to give up, because it requires a lot of resources, financial resources, to re-crawl websites constantly.”
That’s a different kind of risk than falling in Google’s rankings. Google tolerates a messy site and keeps trying. AI tools move on instead, often to a competitor’s page with weaker content but a cleaner technical foundation underneath it.
For content that already performs well organically, Winckler’s advice is to treat this as a technical audit before a content rewrite: check the schemas, look at whether comparison content is genuinely easy for AI to parse, and add a short, clear summary near the top of key pages. For content that hasn’t ranked well at all, the fix runs deeper. But for pages already doing the hard work of ranking, these are the practical, unglamorous fixes that decide whether AI ever picks them up.
Google and AI tools “read” pages differently. While Google is patient and will crawl messy sites, AI tools are resource-constrained; if a page’s technical foundation (schemas, structure) makes it hard to parse, AI tools often give up and move to a competitor’s page instead.
Not necessarily. If your content is already ranking well organically, rewriting the text is often the wrong fix. Instead, you should perform a technical audit of the page to ensure it is structured in a way that is easy for AI to interpret.
The Somebody Digital team recommends checking your schema markup first. Beyond that, restructuring comparison content into tables or bullet points and ensuring there is a clear 250–500 character summary at the top of the page can significantly improve how AI interprets your content.
Yes. Traditional SEO prioritizes ranking, and Google will often forgive messy site architecture. AI optimization requires a cleaner technical foundation because it lacks the financial resources to constantly re-crawl complex, unstructured websites.
A short summary (roughly 250–500 characters) near the top of the page acts as an essential signpost for AI tools. It helps AI quickly understand what the page is about without requiring the intensive resources needed to crawl and interpret the entire document.
