SEO for Coaches: How to Get Found in the Age of AI

SEO for Coaches has Changed

I’ve been working in SEO for nearly 20 years and over that time had a good number of coaches and consultants hire me to help with their search engine optimisation. More recently, I’ve become much more focused on coaching myself, which has given me an unusually uncomfortable ringside seat as AI has started changing the way people search and find information.

Over the last two or three years, one problem has become increasingly obvious to me.

A huge amount of traditional coaching SEO was built around answering questions.

• How can I become a better leader?
• How do I grow my business?
• How can I become more confident?
• How do I manage a difficult employee?
• What does a business coach do?
• Is executive coaching worth it?

Answering questions like that on your website made perfect sense, usually in the form of blog posts and landing pages. Someone searched Google, found your article, clicked through, read what you had to say and hopefully decided you were exactly the person they needed.

Now Google itself is generating that answer.

As is ChatGPT. As is Gemini. And as is Perplexity.

As you’ve probably noticed, Google’s generative search systems now use its existing search index, ranking systems, retrieval and related-query techniques to assemble AI answers which are then shown above the traditional ten blue links.

First thing to say. That doesn’t mean SEO has stopped working. It simply means the job has changed.

The Short Version

Generic coaching advice is becoming easier for AI systems to generate without sending anybody to your website. It’s also much easier for searchers to find, for exactly the same reason.Why wade through your 2000 word blog post, when I can get a definitive 3-sentence answer?

So there’s literally no point any human being – experienced coach or not – trying to beat AI by publishing even more generic advice.

As coaches, I think we need to work towards becoming the person Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or whatever, as well as prospective clients have good reasons to recognise, trust, cite and recommend.

For coaches, that means building evidence around:

• who you are
• who you specialise in helping
• what experience you have
• what you believe
• how you work
• what results you’ve achieved
• what other people say about you
• where else your expertise appears online

In other words:

Don’t just provide the answer. Become part of the answer.

What Does SEO for Coaches Mean Now?

For me, SEO for coaches now means making the online part of your business easy to discover, understand and trust across traditional Google Search, local search. social media and of course, AI-powered discovery.

The foundations haven’t disappeared.

• Technical SEO still matters.
• Service pages still matter.
• Content still matters.
• Links and mentions still matter.

Google itself says the fundamentals of SEO continue to underpin visibility within its own generative AI experiences. And where do you think the likes of ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity or Claude start their own searches when looking for an answer? It has to be the historical algorithms already in existence.

What has really changed is exactly what sort of content now gets attention.

Google’s own current guidance specifically encourages unique, expert-led and non-commodity content based on genuine experience rather than material that merely repeats information already available elsewhere or could easily be created by a generative AI system. That’s enough for me.

And for coaches, that distinction matters enormously.

I Know This Problem Because It Happened to Me

I didn’t arrive at this conclusion by reading a few articles about AI SEO.

It’s happened to my own website and my own business.

I’ve been publishing SEO content for years.

• Useful articles
• Guides.
• Advice pieces
• Answers to questions people were searching for

And for a long time it worked.

Then, around 2 years ago, traffic to a lot of that informational content simply started to dry up. My pages hadn’t suddenly become rubbish. And people definitely hadn’t stopped asking the questions I was answering.

What had changed was how those questions were being answered.

Google was increasingly inserting AI-generated answers directly into Search results.

People were using ChatGPT or Claude. Gemini was becoming part of the search journey. Perplexity was giving researched answers complete with sources.

And the old equation:

Question → Google search → blog article → website visit

was no longer as dependable as it had once been.

Fortunately, my own site began performing surprisingly well in AI searches from around late 2024.

I can’t honestly tell you exactly why. I’ve occasionally wondered whether some of my older website content may have appeared in datasets used in earlier AI development or training, but I have no evidence for that and I certainly wouldn’t present it as an SEO strategy here, although I have blogged about my observations here.

What I did have was a website containing years of material consistently associating me with:

• SEO.
• SEO coaching.
• SEO consultancy.
• Local SEO.
• Website strategy.
• Small business SEO.

And practical answers to some very specific search questions.

So when one of my coaching clients arrived earlier this year, with almost exactly the same problem I’d been experiencing myself, I had a pretty good idea where to start.

The Business Coach Whose Leads Suddenly Disappeared

One of the most useful examples I can give comes from my work with a UK-based business coach. This is someone who has worked with some seriously impressive organisations and business names over the years, including Rolls-Royce, Boeing, Lloyds and Dell.

He had never really needed to chase clients. His reputation, thought leadership, LinkedIn activity, case studies and website content had consistently generated opportunities.

Then it all ground to a halt.

By the time he came to me, his website hadn’t generated a serious enquiry for months. His initial conclusion was that the reason he wasn’t getting clicks was because he needed a new website.

He was partially right. The existing site did need a refresh. But I didn’t believe that simply making it prettier was going to solve his underlying problem.

Changing the colour of a button rarely results in more phone calls.

The bigger problem was that the way people were discovering his expertise had changed. And, rather inconveniently, I’d just witnessed the self same thing happening to my own online business.

What I Changed on His Website

I rebuilt the website in the way my client wanted, but underneath that new WordPress website I’d approached the content rather differently.

The objective wasn’t simply: Make this site rank.

It was: Make this website extremely easy for search engines, AI systems and humans to understand who this person is, what he knows, who he helps and why his experience matters.

That involved several core changes.

Clearer Service Landing Pages

Each core service was given a much clearer purpose.

Rather than relying on vague coaching language, pages explained very precisely:

• who the service was for
• what problem it solved
• what happened during the process
• what made his approach different
• what experience supported the claims
• what somebody should do next

That gave both visitors and search systems clearer context.

Stronger Case Studies

Case studies became much more important.

Not just:

“I helped Company X improve leadership.”

But:

• What was happening?
• What was the business challenge?
• Who was involved?
• What did he do?
• Why did he choose that approach?
• What changed afterwards?

That creates information which is specific to the person who actually did the work.

AI can manufacture another article called 7 Ways to Improve Leadership before breakfast. But it cannot genuinely recreate your experience of helping a real board of directors solve a real leadership problem. That takes a combination of smart AI prompting and engaged human intervention.

More Specific Questions and Answers

I expanded questions where doing so genuinely helped the reader.

Not because Google has announced that “having 25 FAQs makes you rank in Gemini”.

It hasn’t.

But useful, specific answers make a page clearer and can help visitors quickly find the information they actually need. Google explicitly says there is no requirement to divide pages into artificially small “AI chunks”. Pages should be structured naturally for people.

As a rule, I use FAQs when they improve the page, not because I’m feeding some mysterious machine a sacrificial offering in return for clicks.

Short Summaries and TL;DR Sections

The same applies to summaries. A concise summary near the top of a long article can be genuinely useful.

It tells a human being whether the page is worth reading. It also gives the page a very clear statement of its central argument.

But again, I wouldn’t claim that AI tools or  Google rewards a page simply because somebody has typed TL;DR above a paragraph. And even if it did, there’s every chance they’ll stop recognising them in a week, a month or a year.

The real value is clarity.

Better Headings and Page Structure

I made the subject of each section obvious. That meant descriptive headings, proper page hierarchy and sections focused on genuine questions people might ask. After all, Google recommends organising content clearly with useful paragraphs, sections and headings for readers.

Stronger Internal Linking

Blogs linked naturally to relevant service pages. Case studies linked to related services. Service pages linked to supporting examples and useful resources.

That helped turn what were once isolated pieces of content into a connected body of expertise.

Stronger Author and Entity Signals

It should be immediately obvious who wrote something and why their opinion matters. That translates into clear author information, a strong About page, consistent professional information and structured data that accurately reflects what visitors can actually see on the page.

Structured data remains useful for normal SEO and rich search features, although Google specifically says there is no special AI schema required for generative search.

More First-Hand Experience

Wherever possible, within the content, generic explanation was supplemented with:

• things he had seen
• situations he had encountered
• lessons from clients
• views he had developed
• examples from his career
• mistakes businesses repeatedly make
• advice he would give differently now

That was one of the most important changes.

Because Google’s current AI-search guidance is remarkably clear on this point: unique viewpoints, first-hand experience and genuinely useful non-commodity material are exactly the sort of things site owners should be producing.

Why Generic Coaching Content Is Becoming Less Valuable

This is the central problem.

Imagine somebody searches:

How can I motivate my team?

A coach can write 1,500 words answering that question.

But so can ChatGPT.

So can Gemini.

So can Perplexity.

And the answer will probably be perfectly respectable.

Set clear expectations.

Communicate.

Recognise achievements.

Give people autonomy.

Understand individual motivation.

Lovely.

And utterly replaceable.

Now compare that with:

The Three Employee Motivation Problems I Keep Seeing in Owner-Managed Businesses

That article can contain:

What happened.

What the manager thought the problem was.

What you thought the problem actually was.

What you changed.

What worked.

What didn’t.

What surprised you.

That’s much harder to commoditise.

Does Blogging Still Work for Coaches?

Yes.

I still recommend blogging.

But I no longer recommend publishing content simply because a keyword research tool says 1,300 people search for something every month.

Before writing an informational article I’d now ask:

What can I add that AI cannot simply reproduce from common knowledge?

That might be:

• Experience.
• Data.
• An opinion.
• A case study.
• A framework.
• A strong example.
• A comparison based on years of working with clients.
• A mistake you repeatedly see.
• Something you’ve changed your mind about.

If you can add those things, publish it.

If you’re planning to write 10 Tips for Better Time Management, you might want to reconsider how much value you’re genuinely adding to civilisation.

Stop Trying to Beat AI. Start Becoming the Answer.

This is the idea I come back to most often. For years the SEO goal of coaches and any website owner was commonly expressed as:

I want to rank number one.

• Still useful.
• Still worth pursuing.
• But increasingly incomplete.

The question I’m more interested in nowadays is:

What would need to be true about this coach for Google, ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity to consider them relevant when someone asks for a recommendation?

And that concept applies as much to me – a working coach teaching small business owners ‘how to do SEO’, as it probably does to you. Imagine somebody asks:

Can you recommend an SEO coach in the UK?

Or:

Can you recommend a leadership coach who works with first-time directors?

Or:

Who can help a family-run engineering company improve its management team?

Those are not requests for generic information.

They’re requests for selection. And selection requires evidence.

What Makes a Coach Worth Recommending?

There is no published checklist that guarantees an AI platform will recommend you above any other coach working in the same space. Remember, this is no longer SEO as it once was. Anyone claiming otherwise probably has a downloadable PDF they’d also like to sell you.

What we can do is make the signals around our expertise much clearer.

A Clear Specialism

Business coach is broad.

Business coach for independent financial advisers is specific.

Leadership coach is broad.

Leadership coach for first-time tech directors gives both humans and machines much more context.

Specificity helps answer:

Who is this person relevant to?

Evidence of Experience

Don’t simply claim expertise. Demonstrate it.

• Case studies.
• Projects.
• Examples.
• Years doing the work.
• Situations encountered.
• Results.
• Lessons learned.

An Identifiable Point of View

If every coach says broadly the same thing, nobody stands out.

Why not try to clearly explain:

• What do you believe?
• What do you disagree with?
• What advice is commonly given that you think is wrong?
• What do inexperienced coaches misunderstand?
• What have your clients taught you?

Independent Reputation

Your own site will always say you’re marvellous.

The interesting bit is when other people do.

That can include:

• Reviews.
• Podcast appearances.
• Interviews.
• Professional organisations.
• Industry commentary.
• Speaking engagements.
• Features.
• Useful mentions.
• Collaborative work.

Google’s own guidance notes that its generative systems can consider information and discussion from across the web, while warning against manufacturing fake or inauthentic mentions simply to influence AI visibility.

Original Intellectual Property

If you have a process, framework or method, document it.

• Give it a name if appropriate.
• Explain how it works.
• Show where you use it.

This creates concepts that can become associated with you, rather than simply with the wider coaching industry. For me, what’s working really well as I write this, is a free tool I built that checks how likely it is that your website is being cited by AI. You can check it out for yourself here.

Your Website Should Become an Evidence Library

I no longer think a serious coaching website should just be:

• Home.
• About.
• Services.
• Blog.
• Contact.

Instead, think of your website as an evidence library. Someone should be able to investigate you and quickly answer:

• Who is this person?
• Who have they worked with?
• What are they known for?
• What problems do they solve?
• What do they think?
• How do they work?
• What have they achieved?
• Who trusts them?
• What evidence supports all of that?

That might include:

• Detailed case studies.
• Strong service pages.
• A substantial About page.
• Testimonials.
• Reviews.
• Original articles.
• Podcasts.
• Videos.
• Speaking appearances.
• Client stories.
• Frameworks.
• Research.
• Useful FAQs.
• Media coverage.

Then connect those assets together intelligently.

Write for Recommendation Searches, Not Just Keywords

Another change I’m making more often is thinking beyond traditional keyword phrases.

People increasingly search conversationally.

Google says its generative search systems can use query fan-out, issuing multiple related searches to gather information needed to answer a broader question. So instead of only thinking about:

• business coach Manchester

also think about questions such as:

• Who is a good business coach for manufacturing companies?
• Who helps SME owners build management teams?
• What should I look for in an executive coach?
• Business coach or consultant: which do I need?
• Who has experience coaching senior teams in engineering businesses?

You don’t need a separate page for every imaginable variation. In fact, it’s widely presumed that creating large numbers of pages purely to capture every possible AI or query variation, is counter-productive and probably won’t result in dominating A! or Google search. (Beware those AI tools promising page 1 rankings and daily SEO/AI Optimised content. I actually lost a client to this late last year. He got back in touch recently…)

Instead, build genuinely comprehensive pages that make your expertise obvious from several useful angles.

Get Known Away From Your Own Website

One of the easiest mistakes in SEO is behaving as if your own website is the entire internet.

It isn’t.

For coaches, I’d actively look for opportunities to appear in relevant places elsewhere.

That might mean:

• Podcasts.
• LinkedIn.
• YouTube.
• Trade publications.
• Local press.
• Industry websites.
• Professional associations.
• Conferences.
• Guest interviews.
• Collaborative articles.
• Useful community discussions.

The point isn’t to scatter mentions everywhere. It’s to create a genuine external footprint around what you actually know.

My business-coach client had already been doing this exceptionally well for years through thought leadership blogs and LinkedIn posting.

My SEO work for him wasn’t about replacing that. It was about making sure his website properly captured, organised and reinforced the reputation he already had.

Local SEO Still Matters for Coaches

If you work face-to-face or want clients from a defined geographical area, don’t ignore local SEO.

People searching:

business coach Leeds
or:
executive coach near me

are not merely asking for advice. They’re looking for somebody. That makes local searches enormously useful commercially.

Google says its AI search experiences can include local business information and recommends maintaining accurate Google Business Profile information where relevant.

Speaking personally, I still prioritise:

• My Google Business Profile.
• Reviews.
• Local service pages.
• Relevant local case studies.
• Local organisations.
• Local media.
• Accurate business information.

You should too 😉

Make Sure AI Search Systems Can Actually Access Your Website

This is the less glamorous part.

It also matters.

For Google’s generative search experiences, your pages still need to be crawlable, indexable and eligible to appear in regular search.

For ChatGPT Search, OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot to surface websites within its search features. If you want pages to be eligible for discovery there, you shouldn’t block that crawler.

Perplexity similarly recommends allowing PerplexityBot if you want your content to be surfaced and linked within Perplexity results.

So alongside the clever content strategy, I still check the boring stuff:

• indexing
• robots.txt
• canonicals
• sitemap
• crawlable internal links
• mobile usability
• page performance
• JavaScript rendering
• structured data where appropriate
• AI search crawler access where desired

Because creating the world’s greatest thought-leadership article and then accidentally telling half the crawlers to go away would be impressively human.

What About llms.txt, FAQ Schema & All Those AI SEO Tricks?

Be careful here.

There’s already an industry growing around supposedly essential “GEO” and “AI SEO” fixes.

Some are useful. Some are speculative. Many are just the online marketing gang desperately searching for a new acronym to use as email titles.

Google’s current guidance on the subject is unusually explicit. You do not need special AI markup to appear in its generative search experiences. It says it does not use llms.txt for Search and does not require pages to be artificially divided into tiny chunks for AI.

That doesn’t mean every experiment is pointless.

It means I wouldn’t confuse experiments with proven ranking factors. I’d prioritise:

• Clear crawlability.
• Useful structure.
• Strong technical SEO.
• Original expertise.
• Accurate structured data.
• Real reputation.
• Quality case studies.
• Original images and video where useful.

Google specifically notes that useful images and video can create additional opportunities for visibility within generative search experiences. Do those things before obsessing over a text file nobody has proved is moving the needle.

SEO for Coaches Is Becoming Reputation Optimisation

I still call it SEO. If it’s any help, Google does too, arguing that optimising for its generative search experiences remains part of SEO rather than requiring a separate discipline.

But the mindset is changing.

Traditional SEO asked:

Which page should rank for this keyword?

I now increasingly ask:

What does the web know about this person?

• What are they associated with?
• Who do they help?
• What have they done?
• What evidence exists?
• What do other people say about them?
• How clearly is that information connected?
• Would a search system have enough information to understand when this person might be a useful recommendation?

That starts looking an awful lot like reputation optimisation to me. And for coaches like you and me, reputation was always what people were really buying anyway.

You Don’t Need More Content. You Need Better Evidence.

SEO for coaches like us isn’t dead. But the old way, the easy version certainly is.

Publishing endless generic answers to generic coaching questions and waiting for search engines to deliver traffic is becoming less dependable.

AI is simply too good at generic information to need us anymore. It already has everything we had to offer on tap.

And that means we need to give search engines, AI systems and hopefully our next client something that’s much harder to replace and store in a data centre somewhere.

• Your experience.
• Your results.
• Your clients.
• Your opinions.
• Your specialist knowledge.
• Your frameworks.
• Your reputation.
• Your evidence.

My whole point here is that you no longer need to spend all your energy trying to write answers every AI mode already knows.

Better to work towards becoming the coach it has a reason to mention when somebody asks who actually knows what they’re talking about. That, for me, is where SEO for coaches in every niche is heading.