Google vs AI Search: your FAQs have a new audience

Your site has a second reader now

It helps to picture who you're actually writing for. Alongside the human browsing your site, you now have an agent reading it too, and it arrives with no memory of you. Every time someone asks it a question, it goes and reads afresh, working out who you are, what you sell, and whether it trusts you enough to put you forward as an answer. It can't ask you to clarify. It only has what's on the page.

That changes what a page is for. It isn't just there to persuade a person any more. It's there to be understood, quickly and accurately, by something non-human that's deciding whether you make the shortlist.

FAQs are back, just not for Google

This is why FAQs matter again, and it's one of the simplest places to start. Clear, genuinely useful FAQs on your most important pages, collection pages especially, give an agent exactly the kind of plain answers it's looking for. The trick is to write them for a real buyer with a real question, not to stuff them with keywords. If the answer reads well to a person, it reads well to the agent. Pair a well-rounded FAQ section with accurate schema markup for agentic searchers, as well as links to reputable sources where appropriate, and you give both people and AI systems clear, trustworthy information they can understand, verify and use.

Give people, and agents, somewhere to go next

An FAQ can only hold so much. When a question needs a fuller answer, use it as a jumping-off point to a blog or a guide that goes deeper. That internal linking does two jobs: it helps an agent understand how your site fits together, and it gives a buyer who isn't ready to purchase yet an off-ramp that isn't just "add to cart."

That matters even more for brands with more complex offerings. For example, a B2B buyer weighing up a serious, considered purchase often doesn't know your brand yet and needs a bit of confidence built up before they'll commit. Expert-led content, the kind that shows you actually know the problem you're solving, is how that confidence gets built.

There’s no shortcut to building trust

Agents don't just read your words, they weigh up whether to believe them, and they lean on the same signals a cautious buyer would. A solid base of reviews, whether on individual products or on you as a brand, carries weight. So do authoritative links pointing to you. If you can't get those from external blogs, they can come from the partners you work with, the brands you supply, or the suppliers who vouch for you. Building that network of trust is more important now than it's ever been, because it's one of the main things that helps an agent find you and feel safe recommending you.

Write for the person, not the robot

It's tempting to treat all of this as a new discipline with its own set of tricks. It isn't. The mandate that's held for years still holds: write for people, show real expertise, be authoritative, be trustworthy. Someone at a conference last year called this “the second wild west of search”, and there's something in that, the ground is moving and the temptation to game it is back. But the brands that come out of it well will be the ones building genuinely useful, trustworthy content, because that's what both a person and an agent are ultimately looking for.

None of it is complicated. It's mostly about being clear about who you are, easy to understand, and worth trusting. Get those right and you're already most of the way there.

If you want a view on whether your site is set up to be found and recommended in all this, we're happy to take a look. Get in touch here.