How do you prepare for voice search and AI assistants?

Voice search and AI assistant queries differ from typed search in pattern but not in substance. The prompts are conversational (‘where is the company headquartered,’ ‘who is the CEO of [Brand]’), the expected response is a clean spoken answer rather than a list of links, and the selection mechanics favor content that is structured to be lifted. It is worth noting that Google largely deprecated FAQ and HowTo rich results in 2023 (restricting FAQ rich results to authoritative government and health sites and removing HowTo rich results), so these schemas no longer earn rich-result placement for most brands. The underlying structure still helps, though: explicit question-answer pairs make content easier for AI and voice systems to extract. Definitional content (a clear two-sentence ‘what is X’ answer) wins voice selection across most assistant platforms, and well-organized step-by-step content gets selected for procedural queries. Underneath all of it, strong entity signals (Wikidata, Knowledge Panel, consistent attributes) are what let the assistant identify the right answer source in the first place. The discipline is closely related to AEO (answer engine optimization, structuring content so AI answer engines select it) and to the writing-for-the-extract approach we apply across all engines.