Head of Editing at Eleven

Alana Chase

With over 10 years’ experience in editing and editorial team management, Alana serves as Eleven's Head of Editing, aiding editors in creating top-quality content and overseeing recruitment to ensure only the best of the best join Eleven’s ranks. A seasoned digital journalist and writer, Alana holds an MA in Creative Writing and is accomplished in spearheading content strategy at high-growth media startups.

Why Subject Expertise Matters More Than Ever in AI Search

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If you’re not already building a strategy for Google AI Overviews (AIOs), ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI-powered search engines, you may find yourself left behind—maybe even sooner than you think.

Users today are searching for, accessing, and acting on information in whole new ways, which means visibility in answer engines isn’t just nice to have. Soon, it will be essential for long-term brand authority and commercial success.

The key to making this happen is topic expertise—whether it comes from your internal team, expert contributors, or both.

In this article, we explain how AI is used in search engines, why subject matter expertise is vital for visibility, and what it all means for you.

How AI Is Used in Search Engines

AI, especially large language models (LLMs), is being incorporated into search engines to improve how users find and interact with information. These engines use AI in various ways:

To more deeply analyse content. LLMs can go beyond keyword skimming to analyse the context and structure of source material. This makes it easier for AI search engines to “understand” what makes content truly relevant, helpful, and reliable—and surface that content in results.

To better understand user intent. Through semantic search, AI can interpret the meaning behind a query, even if it’s vague. This helps surface content that aligns with what users actually need, particularly when it’s backed by expertise.

To interpret user behaviour. The LLMs that power answer engines can also monitor and learn from how users search, click, and engage with results. Many then use this understanding to personalise results based on users’ search history, behaviour, or preferences.

To deliver more direct answers. Through generative search (like we see in Google’s AIOs), search engines can produce original responses to queries, often by summarising information from multiple sources. Content that fully and clearly explains a topic (especially from an expert’s point of view) is more likely to be included in these answers.

To speed up search and discovery. AI in search engines can help reduce the number of queries needed to obtain a complete and useful answer.

Traditional Search vs. AI-Powered Search

Here’s how the two search types compare:

Stage	Traditional search	AI-driven search
Crawling	Uses bots ("spiders" or “crawlers”) to find web pages, PDFs, forums, and structured data across the internet. Typically crawls on a set schedule	Uses AI crawlers to find content, but can also discover info from SERPs (including AIOs and snippets), fragmented or unstructured data. Can crawl more frequently or according to certain user queries
Indexing	Stores content in a massive database, organised by keywords and metadata. Indexes full pages to show in search results May be slower to index content	Uses natural language processing (NLP) to interpret and organise content on the fly based on meaning, context, and relationships. May index only parts of content Generally faster at indexing than traditional search engines
Ranking/inclusion	Identifies and displays links to pages based on what a user searches for	Generates detailed, direct answers (typically with a list of sources) to queries
Potential ranking/inclusion factors	Keyword relevance Domain authority Publication date and freshness Trust signals (clicks and high-authority backlinks) Page experience (speed, ads, etc.) E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust/trustworthiness)*	Intent alignment Context awareness Content clarity, tone, structure, and helpfulness Source credibility Publication date and freshness High-authority backlinks E-E-A-T

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As marketing, content, and AI strategist Fleur Willemijn van Beinum puts it, AI search is “intent-focused and context-driven,” while traditional search is largely keyword-based. “AI looks beyond words,” van Beinum says. “It tries to understand the user’s intention, and even if not directly stated, it picks up the underlying purpose behind a search.”

Christian Rigg, Eleven’s Head of Operations, agrees with van Beinum. “Historically, search engines have used keywords as proxies for user intent—a kind of ‘best-guess’ for what the user’s actually after,” he says. “LLMs are helping search engines get closer and closer to that intent, in a way that’s not so completely alien from how humans understand one another.”

* “There’s been recent discussion about E-E-A-T not being algorithmic but rather just something Google’s Search Quality Raters are instructed to look for,” Eleven’s Head of SEO & Organic Growth, Simon McMahon, explains.

“But when detailing how Search works, Google heavily emphasises E-E-A-T. This guidance is also reflected in search results (in competitive niches especially), where pages with poor E-E-A-T struggle to rank well.”

Why Subject Matter Expertise Is More Important Than Ever

It’s the key to visibility

Answer engines—specifically the LLMs that power them—generate responses based on two datasets:

Training data from across the web. Think of this as an LLM’s “long-term memory.” It encompasses massive amounts of publicly accessible content and teaches the LLM how language works, what topics mean and how they’re usually explained, and the way information is typically structured. With this knowledge, an LLM can “understand” search queries and generate responses.\
Traditional SERPs. Consider this an LLM’s “short-term memory.” The model looks at results for queries on traditional search engines to help provide more complete and precise answers.

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Expertise plays a significant role in both.

Although LLMs don’t evaluate content in the way traditional search algorithms might, they do “learn” from content they’ve been trained on. Trusted sources dominate the data on which LLMs are trained—because that’s the content most often published, cited, linked to, and engaged with. As a result, the models “learn” what trusted content looks and sounds like: expert-led, well-structured, clear, and concise.

Over time, LLMs increasingly generate answers that emulate the tone, structure, and content of accurate, authoritative material. This means that brands that consistently publish expert-driven content (or are mentioned by other trusted sources) more strongly influence the responses LLMs generate.

When AI search engines draw from SERPs, the impact of expertise is just as strong. They typically surface factual, reliable content that directly serves the user’s needs… because that’s what Google favours.

In fact, Google has made it clear that the only thing content must do to be considered for AIO inclusion is follow the Google Search Essentials guidelines. At the heart of these guidelines is “people-first content”—content designed to genuinely benefit users. And at the heart of people-first content? Expertise.

As a content marketing company that specialises in topic-expert content, we’ve seen this firsthand with our clients. AI search engines surface this content because it’s written by people who (a) truly understand what they’re writing about and (b) go beyond surface-level information.

Our own analysis has found that:

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini more frequently surface thought leadership and original research content in responses. Expertise and authoritativeness are integral to these content types.

Pages demonstrating hands-on experience or real-world know-how are far more likely to appear in AI-generated answers.

Comparison and round-up content authored by experts outperforms non-expert content in both AI search and conversions.

AI search rewards content with strong editorial confidence, which comes naturally from those with subject expertise.

Even off the SERP, AI will find expert content…

In February 2025, a study by analytics platform Profound suggested that there may be less overlap between SERPs and ChatGPT Search results than initially believed: just 8-12%.

In running hundreds of queries for “best men’s running shoes,” Profound discovered that “Google often highlights brand pages and direct purchase links, while ChatGPT cites editorial deep‐dives or ‘Top 10’ reviews from specialised running sites.”

This suggests that LLMs aren’t only echoing what ranks highest. They’re also finding and pulling from lower-ranking content that’s well-written, informative, and expert-led. Ultimately, this shows that when it comes to AI search, expertise—not just SERP position—is what will get you seen.

Expertise builds trust, which is Google’s #1 quality criterion

People-first content has been Google’s North Star for years, but the company emphasised topic expertise even more in its January 2025 Search Quality Rater Guidelines. These guidelines elevated Trust to “the most important member” of the E-E-A-T “family” but affirmed that Trust falls apart without the others, particularly Expertise.

Google’s Search Quality Raters are instructed to score content as “low quality” if it’s clear the author doesn’t have the appropriate expertise in the subject—e.g., someone who’s never run a marathon writing an article on the best marathon training plan.

Source: Search Quality Rater Program Guidelines

In short: lack of subject expertise = lack of trust = “low quality” rating from Google = low visibility.

🤝Expertise alone can get you on Google’s good side: “A very high level of expertise can justify a very high E-E-A-T assessment. Very high E-E-A-T websites and content creators are the most trusted sources on the internet for a particular topic.”

Expert-led content helps you reach people wherever they search

With the rise of AI search, two groups of modern users have begun to take shape:

AI-inclined users, who use ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, AIOs, etc., more than or in place of traditional search engines.

AI-wary users, who rely on traditional SERPs but encounter AI summaries (and aren’t always happy with them).

While each group has good reasons for preferring one or the other, they’re both limited in time and want reliable information they can feel confident acting on. Expert-led content ticks both boxes.

It strengthens E-E-A-T signals, which can both improve traditional rankings and boost your chances of being picked up by AI. That means your brand can meet both audiences at the moment of search intent—whether they’re scrolling the SERPs, checking out an AIO, or reading an answer from an AI tool.

Expert-written content helps counteract misinformation

Misinformation online is rampant, and it affects both traditional SERPs and AI search engines. While both search engines and AI platforms increasingly emphasise expertise, that doesn’t mean either surfaces 100% accurate information 100% of the time.

As Scientific American reports, traditional search engines can inadvertently boost misinformation, especially around topics lacking high-quality content, known as “data voids.” Users can end up reading inaccurate or misleading content simply because that’s what the SERPs show them.

AI search has the same problem. Since AI engines take information from training data and SERPs, they can still incorporate inaccurate content into answers if it performs well in traditional search or comes from a recognisable source. (Through internal research, the BBC found that “when AI assistants cite trusted brands [...] as a source, audiences are more likely to trust the answer—even if it is incorrect.”)

Expert-driven content can help break this cycle and form a new one.

When you publish trustworthy, valuable content, you give traditional and AI search engines better material to pull from. This is doubly true if you write expert content about niche topics. You’ll not only fill the “data voids” but also help ChatGPT answer domain-specific questions more accurately, which research shows it struggles to do.

This better material enhances your brand’s authority and credibility… which encourages backlinks and mentions… which builds visibility and trust… which boosts chances of doing well in traditional and AI search… and on to infinity!

The Future of Expertise in AI-Powered Search

AI has already profoundly changed the way we search for information, and more changes are still to come. Simon McMahon, Head of SEO & Organic Growth at Eleven, predicts that AI search engines will continue evolving to surface subject-matter expertise even more—to the point where SERP performance won’t play as important a factor in AI search as it does now.

“SEOs have always tried to manipulate Google’s algorithm, which ends up hiding or watering down genuinely good content,” says Simon.

“I believe this will actually help AI surface the better answers, and eventually it won’t matter if the page is languishing on the third page of Google because its title tags are under-optimised or it’s a new website with few backlinks. If it’s expert-backed, AI will find it.”

“Right now, there’s a symbiotic relationship between AI and traditional search engines like Google,” he concludes. “But I could see AI search becoming increasingly independent in the future.”

Ready to Prioritise Subject Matter Expertise?

AI search will continue to grow in popularity, and topic expertise will remain key to distinguishing content in terms of visibility, credibility, and impact.

But even if marketing didn’t involve optimising for search engines, we’d still strongly recommend making expertise central to your content creation.

It boosts your brand’s reputation, improves your content quality, helps you reach audiences who care deeply about your topics, and can lead to higher conversion rates. And in a time where competitors can easily “steal your keywords,” your brand’s expertise becomes the one thing they can’t replicate.

At Eleven, we live and breathe expert-led content. We can bring authority to your brand through our extensive roster of subject matter experts or by extracting your internal team’s knowledge to create high-impact content.

‍Contact us today to learn how we can help you lead with expertise.

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