Fabrice Canel, long time Microsoft employee and the Bing Search Product Manager, said the way you optimize for AI Search is by following SEO guidelines. He echoed Google's statement that doing normal SEO works for AI Search.
Fabrice Cancel and his team wrote up this blog post named Keeping Content Discoverable with Sitemaps in AI Powered Search. In short, it goes over the importance of making sure you do what you can to ensure your content is fresh in Bing's search index.
It recommends using:
(1) XML sitemaps
(2) Lastmod field in that sitemap, which Bing told us is critical previously
(3) IndexNow
I asked Fabrice, does this mean that "normal SEO for AI search," like Google said and he replied, "Absolutely at 💯. Optimize for AI Search by following SEO guidelines."
Here are those posts:
Absolutely at 💯. Optimize for AI Search by following SEO guidelines
— Fabrice Canel (@facan) July 31, 2025
Again, when you ask a search engine - they will tell you that normal SEO works for AI Search because the way AI Search gets your content is through crawling and indexing. Being clicked on from AI Search is a different story, but making sure AI Search is aware of your content requires crawling and indexing.
Forum discussion at X.
