Thank you for inviting me to be a contributor to the Kill Zone! I am thrilled (pun intended) to be here.
I’m Lindsey Hughes, a former Hollywood development executive turned story coach for novelists and screenwriters and a non-fiction author.
How to make sure AI can find and recommend you and your novel
In the last few months, you may have noticed that internet search has changed. Now when you Google something, Gemini, Google’s AI, answers your question in a paragraph, giving you links if you want to read further. Many people have stopped Googling altogether, starting their search with their favorite AI tool.
This shift is why writers need a new internet visibility strategy – GSO.
What is GSO?
Generative Search Optimization (GSO) makes your work easy for AI tools to understand, trust, and surface inside their answers. AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, and Perplexity, are summarizing, recommending, and quoting the internet for people searching. Your job is to make your work easy for the AI to understand and recommend.
Think about it like this:
- Traditional SEO was a treasure map. You sprinkled keywords around your site and hoped Google sent explorers to your link.
- GSO is different. It’s about showing up inside the answer.
AI-powered conversational search is fundamentally changing internet search by moving away from basic keyword results toward nuanced, back-and-forth dialogues between readers and AI tools.
Traditional search engines struggle with long, specific phrases, forcing readers to think in basic keywords like “novels about birdwatching”. In contrast, AI can process language nuances to handle highly specific requests. For example, a reader or producer can ask for “a good thriller set in a small town with a female protagonist who’s a journalist investigating a cold case” and receive a recommendation that matches those exact criteria.
Search becomes a conversation where every response uncovers deeper aspects of what the user is looking for. People can modify their requests as they go, guided on a journey of discovery rather than just asking for directions.
Through conversation, AI tools get to know users’ behavior, search history, and preferences, enabling them to tailor results to an individual’s specific interests. They can remember a user’s preferences over months or years, making increasingly accurate recommendations.
AIs can read and analyze pictures too. A reader can take a photo of their physical bookshelf. Then the AI then analyzes the titles and recommends what they should read next based on their established tastes.
Why GSO Matters for Writers
AI is becoming the new librarian, bookseller, and research assistant. If the model doesn’t know your work, it can’t recommend it. As a writer, you want AI to have read your books.
AI is the new librarian.
When someone asks, “What are great cozy mysteries set in Maine with innkeeper sleuths?” they will not scroll ten results anymore. They’ll read one AI summary and click one recommendation. If the model can’t confidently describe your book or script, you’re invisible.
This is good news for readers, authors, and screenwriters. It will be easier for people to find stories they like and easier for creators to build a fanbase.
GSO levels the playing field.
Generative engines don’t only reward big brands. They reward clear, consistent, well-structured information that’s easy to verify and cite. That’s good news for indie and traditional authors.
GSO fluidly links discovery and purchase for books.
The line between discovering a book and buying it is disappearing through agentic commerce. Soon readers will be able to find a book through a conversation and complete the purchase without ever leaving the chat interface.
What does AI know about you?
Search for yourself and your projects with a few of the AI tools.
Try these prompts:
- What do you know about [Your Name] as an author?
- Summarize [Book Title] and list themes, tropes, and comparable titles.
- Where can I learn more about [Book Title]?
- What genre is [Title] and who is it for?
Notice:
- Is the info accurate?
- Is it thin, only one vague paragraph?
- Does it point to the wrong page or another person with your name?
Optimizing Your Website for GSO
Let’s get visible!
SEO helped Google know who you are. AI visibility is about what the internet thinks you mean. Now you must write your website for people and AI bots.
Make your writer identity clear with a dedicated About page
- Who you are (author)
- What you write (genres + audience)
- What you’re known for (awards, credits, specialties)
- Where to start (your best entry title)
- Your writer logline. “I am a novelist and I write [genre] + [kind of stories] with [tropes].”
- Your short bio.
- Your agent contact information and how to reach you directly.
- Links to social media. Don’t forget: Linked In, YouTube, Goodreads, and Amazon Author Central, your podcast, podcast appearances, legacy media mentions. (AIs read social media. It’s another place you are mentioned. The more data points on you and your book the better.)
Give every book its own page on your website
Instead of lumping all your books together on one page, give each one a dedicated, content rich page. The more information about the story, the better the AI can know and recommend it.
Include:
- Title, series, genre, tropes,
- Cover art
- Back cover description
- Formats (ebook, paperback, audio), ISBNs
- Retail links + Start here for first book
- Reviews and awards
- Agent’s contact information, if traditionally published
- Your contact info for podcast and media interviews
Strong Bonus Content
Sample chapters or scenes: Provide the first two or three chapters or scenes in text or PDF format. AI bots will read these samples to understand your writing style and story.
List of Tropes: Clearly state the tropes in your story (e.g., “enemies to lovers” or “small-town cold case”). AI models are thirsty for tropes and use them as a primary way to recommend books for specific reader queries.
High-Resolution Visual Assets: Upload high-resolution maps, character art, and book and movie trailers, teasers and pitch decks. Detailed visual descriptions help the AI recommend your book to readers interested in specific settings or aesthetics.
Frequently Asked Questions: AIs love the question-and-answer format.
Book Group Discussion & Classroom Guides for Teachers
Guest Blog Posts or Podcast Interviews: Where you discuss the book. These inbound links help the AI associate your work with other popular authors and themes in your genre.
Secure Mainstream Media Mentions: Many AI models use mainstream media (newspapers, local TV news, and Wikipedia) as a source to determine a book’s cultural relevance. Links from these authoritative sites to your website significantly boost your standing in generative search results.
Optimize Your Goodreads Profile: All major AI models train on Goodreads because its data is highly structured, public, and follows best practices for bots.
Blogging: AI models use associations to categorize authors. Write blog posts like “10 authors similar to [Famous Author]” or “10 best books for fans of [Bestseller],” and include your own work on that list. This trains the AI to cluster you with established names in your genre.
Core Metadata & Identifiers
- Official Identifiers: Explicitly list your ISBN and ASIN (Amazon’s ID). This allows the AI to link your website’s data with information from other platforms like Goodreads. This is the primary key AI uses to connect data from across the web.
- Copyright Details: Include the publication year and publisher name.
- Buying Options: Link to every site that sells the book, this creates more “data points” for the AI to train on.
Techie Stuff
This is the nerdy part that helps the AI behind the scenes. For best results, use WordPress to create your site.
Install and Use Yoast SEO to label the Schema.org: This is the most recommended free plugin for handling technical metadata. Within the plugin, there is a specific tab labeled “Schema”.
- Configure the Schema Tab: Simply click the Schema tab and choose the labels; it is designed to be straightforward and involves turning specific dots green to enable different metadata types.
- Utilize Question/FAQ Schema: You can add “Question schema” to your frequently asked questions pages.
- Why this matters for AI discovery: AI models and search bots “gobble up” this structured data because it provides technical labels that are easier for them to parse than raw text.
Contextual Formatting: Use clear H1, H2, and H3 headings, bullet points, and internal hyperlinks to help the bot find the most important information.
Descriptive Alt Text: Add detailed alt text to images, as current multimodal AI models use this text to understand visual content.
Final Take Away
Re-run your AI audit and see what improved. Congratulations you are visible to the new internet! Now your website is written for humans and for the AI bots that work for humans.
More About GSO
Book Discoverability in the Age of AI: GSO for Authors
How to get ChatGPT to recommend your book
Get ChatGPT to recommend your YouTube videos
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Welcome, and a great post. I’ve been doing some of these things since I started on this journey, but you’ve pointed out a LOT of things I can do to improve. I’ll be checking to see if I even show up on searches.
Thank you for the welcome, Terry! I’m glad you found the post helpful. I need to go through and optimize my own website. I’ve been doing it bit by bit. It’s just one of the never-ending lists we all have as an author.
Welcome to TKZ! Thank you so much for this information. I’ve known I needed to use GSO on my website but I wasn’t sure how or even what it is.
Thank you for the welcome, Patricia! I am excited by GSO because I think it’s going to make it easy for readers to find our books. I hope this article gives a to-do list to get started. I suggest moving forward optimizing for GSO on every new book, and then going bit by bit to optimize the older ones.
Welcome to TKZ, Lindsey! Your post today is packed with useful information, and is timely for me. I’ve needed to overhaul my site for some time. I’m a bit daunted at the prospect, but this will help implement GSO.
Hope you have a great day!
Thank you for the welcome, Dale! I know there is so much to do around GSO! I try to do a little every week, and anything new I add to my site I make sure it’s optimized.