SEO & AI Search: Why You Should Build for Humans First

I’m currently working on something I’d recommend to any new business: building my online presence the right way, from the ground up. 

As I’ve been updating my website, adding accreditations, and refining how I talk about what I do, I started thinking about something that’s becoming increasingly important in SEO:

How do you grow your online presence in the age of AI while ensuring you’re building trust with your actual human audience?

This got me thinking about SEO & GEO/AEO (have we decided what we're calling this yet?!) and tactics like E-E-A-T (signals that help demonstrate trust and credibility) and how they can be used for human-first optimisation.

As I'm building my own business, I'm having to make these decisions myself: What information should I put on my website? How do I demonstrate credibility? How much should I optimise for AI search & SEO? And how do I make sure I'm not creating a website that's technically optimised but actually unpleasant or unhelpful to use?

What is E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for:

E - Experience

E - Expertise

A - Authoritativeness

T - Trustworthiness

E-E-A-T is a way to give users and search systems evidence that you have genuine experience and expertise, that your information is credible, and that your website is trustworthy and secure.

Demonstrating trust and credibility on your website is especially important in the age of AI and information overload. But it's important to do this in a way that's genuinely beneficial to the people landing on your site, not just the robots.

Ways to effectively demonstrate E-E-A-T to your audience

Let's look at some practical ways you can demonstrate your credibility to your audience while also making it easier for search engines and AI systems to understand who you are and why your content is trustworthy.

Experience

To show that you have first-hand experience with the subject you're discussing, consider including original photos, personal experiences, examples from your work, case studies, or insights that come from actually doing the thing you're talking about. 

For example, on my website for R Weber Digital, I’ve referenced the previous work I’ve done with agencies in the “About” section.

Expertise

To demonstrate your expertise, focus on providing genuinely useful information and supporting your claims with reputable sources where appropriate.

You can also make your expertise clearer through things like author bios, professional qualifications, accreditations, or content that's been reviewed by someone with appropriate expertise.

On my website, I've included my accreditations to demonstrate my knowledge and experience in the areas I specialise in.

Authoritativeness 

Authority is largely about how others recognise your expertise. One way this can happen is through backlinks from relevant, reputable websites linking to your content. Backlinks can help demonstrate that other credible sources consider your website a useful or trustworthy resource.

But not all backlinks are created equal. Relevance and quality matter more than simply accumulating links.

There are third-party tools, such as Semrush's Authority Score, that can help you assess the relative strength of a website's backlink profile. These can be useful for research, but they're third-party metrics rather than Google rankings or direct measures of E-E-A-T.

To start demonstrating credibility to potential clients, I’ve included testimonials on my website, while I work on building out my blog and earning relevant backlinks.

Trustworthiness 

Trustworthiness brings all of the above together.

Make it clear who is behind your website, how people can contact you, what your business does, and where your information comes from. Be transparent about your products, services and claims, and make sure your website provides a secure experience.

Things like clear business information, accurate content, appropriate citations, transparent policies, and HTTPS can all contribute to creating a website that users feel comfortable trusting.

Ultimately, the goal isn't to add a checklist of “trust signals” because you think Google or an AI tool is looking for them. It's to give real people enough information to make an informed judgement about whether they trust you and your expertise.

I’ve included clear contact details, an “About” section, privacy information, and followed basic security best practices.

Three shortcuts I'd avoid when optimising for AI search and SEO

Just as there are good ways to demonstrate E-E-A-T, there are also plenty of shortcuts that can do more harm than good. 

1. Keyword Stuffing

It’s 2026, so we’re hopefully long past the days of flooding a page with the same keyword in hopes that it lands you a first page search result on Google. 

However, it’s still common for people to focus too much on fitting their primary and secondary keywords into the text, rather than creating genuinely helpful content. It’s not worth creating content for algorithms if it’s at the expense of the person reading it. 

Sure, AI can write an article for you, include your target keywords, structure the headings correctly, and optimise it for search. But if the result is generic, boring, or doesn't actually answer the user's question, have you even achieved anything?

Before asking “How can I get this to rank?”, ask “Is this actually useful?”

2. Trying to manufacture mentions on Reddit and forums

Online communities can be valuable sources of first-hand experiences and discussions that are surfaced in search and, increasingly, AI-generated answers. But that doesn't mean you should flood Reddit and other forums with mentions of your business.

Online communities are generally pretty good at spotting self-promotion. If every contribution is really an advertisement disguised as advice, you're unlikely to build the credibility you're looking for.

The goal isn't to manufacture mentions. It's to genuinely contribute something useful.

3. Abandoning traditional SEO

While AI search is growing quickly, traditional search remains an important part of how people discover information online. You can consider AI visibility without ignoring the SEO foundations that make your website accessible, useful and discoverable.

Technical SEO, useful content, clear site structure, and user experience still matter in the age of AI, if anything, now more than ever. Rather than throwing your SEO playbook out the window, consider how established SEO practices can work alongside strategies that help your content appear in AI-generated results.

Build for humans first

E-E-A-T isn’t just an SEO checklist. It’s useful because it helps you think beyond rankings and focus on what users actually need. Rather than just putting keywords in the right places or adding information for crawlers, it's about adding valuable information to your website that real people can use to assess whether they trust you.

If you’re using trick tactics to get your site to appear in AI results, but users are arriving on your site and it’s not what they expected, or not helpful to them, then you’ve wasted your time, and your user’s time. 

My rule of thumb when working on search and AI visibility is simple: make your website easier for humans to understand, and you'll often make it easier for machines to understand too.

Make your expertise clear, structure information logically, answer the questions your users actually have, and demonstrate why they should trust you.

Don't get so caught up in optimising for AI that you forget about your actual users. 

Design your online presence for humans first & let the machines catch up.