Every question your visitors type into an AI search tool tells you what your content is missing. Here’s how to treat that upkeep as content planning.
We’ve been buzzing about AI search tools these days. Part of it is that we’ve been playing with an instance of ai12z on Blend’s test site, and part of it is that it feels like an extension of something we’ve been pushing for years: building a practice around analysis and monitoring of site search terms and results. When someone arrives on your site and searches for something, they give you data. They tell you what’s hard to find, or they tell you which pages are the most direct. They give you their thoughts, in a way, and it’s wild to me that more organizations don’t use this to their advantage.
There’s more than just slapping an AI search tool on your site, though. The AI assistant will keep working, day in and day out, whether or not anyone’s paying attention. It’s presenting information from the deepest corners of your site. It’s a great tool, but that tool also comes with some extra work. So let’s talk about what to expect from — and how to get the most out of — your new AI search tool.
Use the information your users give you.
When a site visitor first interacts with an AI search tool, they hand you valuable information. They might hand you a literal question. They might drop a few words. But are those questions and words matching what your site is saying?
For example, your university site might include a page called “Tuition and Fees,” but you see a parent ask “How much does a semester actually cost?”; or, your hospital site might include a page called “Provider Directory,” but you see a patient ask “Do you take my insurance?”
The distance between these phrasings is where your language and theirs have drifted apart. Before you might not have seen these differences, but with most AI chatbot tools you can see both the full question and the full answer, which helps tell you a little about how your audience thinks — and what your search tool can give them.
Everything is fair game.
While LLM services like Claude or ChatGPT tend to weigh freshness — things like when a page was published — your site's AI chatbot has no such instinct, and might keep pulling pages from deep in your organization's history. Which means questions about old products, features, or promotions can lead to over-confident misinformation — after all, if a 2017 page still mentions an expired promotion, there's nothing telling the chatbot to ignore it.
Remember that external LLM-based search engines are scouring the whole of the web for information — your chatbot only knows what’s on your site. There’s no “better answer” if it doesn’t already exist on your site.
In other words, if it’s still in the index, it’s fair game.
An assistant is a mirror of your content — both the good and the bad. When thinking through whether your site would benefit from an AI search tool, remember that implementation and content governance are two separate things. You’ll want to review all of that old content — remove what you don’t want surfaced and adapt what might feel outdated.
Someone has to own it.
Which brings us to the people who maintain it. An AI search assistant with no owner will drift, the same way a redesign goes stale if not maintained.
Owning the AI assistant is not a task as much as it’s an ongoing process. It’s part project management, part content strategy — someone must read the questions, make recommendations for content updates, and tweak the settings; someone must also make sure that audits are happening, that leadership is kept abreast of effectiveness, and that those content updates are being implemented in the first place.
Plan for liability and regulation.
In healthcare or financial services, there’s such a thing as being too eager. There are questions that a chatbot shouldn’t answer, and if they do answer, they should be understood and regulated.
Different chatbot tools handle this in different ways, so if you’re asking this question after the chatbot’s already been selected and installed, you’re asking it too late. When choosing an AI search tool, make sure you ask questions about how it handles regulated content, whether certain pages can be removed from the index, and whether there are any guardrails for answers that your organization might be found liable for.
Content gaps are the new frontier.
The biggest benefit of making a practice out of AI search tooling is that you can begin to embrace failure. This is not as dramatic as it sounds! Every time an answer shows up with too-little information, or when an answer references a 12-year-old blog post, or when the answer is simply completely incorrect, that’s a moment to adjust and tweak your content.
AI search tools show you what is working, and they show you what your content does not yet cover in the exact words your visitors used to look for it. Each search is a content brief, in a way, tested against your live content.
Seen that way, the upkeep of an AI search tool ends up being less “maintenance” and more “content planning,” one of the most effective tools you’ll ever have. Working with these AI search tools isn’t really about the tool at all, when you think really hard about it. As always, it’s all about the content.
