--- title: "How to get AI to teach me about SEO" url: https://howtogetaito.com/teach-me/seo/ published: 2026-09-15 updated: 2026-10-04 author: "Jack Stovell" author_profile: https://i.hilyt.it/jack publisher: "Adapt Progress Evolve" publisher_legal_name: "Adapt Progress Evolve Limited" publisher_company_number: "10047328" publisher_vat_number: "GB362654684" summary: "Use an AI assistant as a patient SEO tutor — explain, quiz, critique your page — while checking every claim against Google's and Bing's own documentation." tools: ["ChatGPT","Claude","Gemini","Copilot","Google Search Console","whatisgeo.app","hilyt"] ours: ["whatisgeo.app","hilyt","visibilitytoai"] disclosure: "whatisgeo.app, hilyt, visibilitytoai are made by the publisher." language: en-GB --- # How to get AI to teach me about SEO > Use an AI assistant as a patient SEO tutor — explain, quiz, critique your page — while checking every claim against Google's and Bing's own documentation. Published 2026-09-15 · Last updated 2026-10-04 · By Jack Stovell (https://i.hilyt.it/jack) · Canonical page: https://howtogetaito.com/teach-me/seo/ Author profiles: X https://x.com/StovBuilds · Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stovbuilds · LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackstovell/ Operated by Adapt Progress Evolve Limited. Registered in England and Wales, company no. 10047328, registered office 5 Brayford Square, London E1 0SG. VAT GB362654684. SEO used to mean stuffing keywords into a page and hoping. Now there's an AI in the mix answering the questions before anyone even clicks a search result, which changes the game but not the basics. You still need to understand how search works. An AI assistant is actually a pretty good tutor for this, if you know how to use it properly, and that's really what this guide is about. ## What you'll be able to do By the end of this you'll understand, in plain terms, how search engines and AI answer engines find content, decide what's relevant, and choose what to show. You'll be able to ask an AI assistant to explain concepts, quiz you on them, and even critique your own page, without just accepting whatever it says as gospel. That last bit matters more than people think. The goal isn't to become an SEO expert overnight. It's to get comfortable enough with the ideas that you can spot nonsense when you hear it, and use the tools you've got (Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, an AI chatbot) with a bit more confidence. ## Before you start Right, a few things worth knowing before you open a chat window. Search engines like Google and Bing crawl the web, index what they find, then rank pages against a query using hundreds of signals. AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot don't do quite the same thing. Some of them can search the live web when you ask a question (Gemini and Copilot are built into search products directly, ChatGPT and Claude can browse when the feature's switched on), but their core skill is generating an answer from patterns in training data, not ranking pages the way Google does. That distinction is the whole point of this guide, honestly. You don't need to memorise anything before you start. What you need is a habit: ask the AI to explain something, then ask where that came from. If it can't point you to a real source, treat it as a guess dressed up as a fact. AI assistants are confident by nature, even when they're wrong, and SEO is absolutely riddled with myths that get repeated as if they're settled science. Keyword density, "LSI keywords", guaranteed rankings if you just do X. None of that holds up against what Google actually publishes about how it works. So the fix, every time, is simple: ask for the source, then go and check it yourself. ## Get set up You don't need anything fancy. Any of the mainstream AI assistants will do for learning the concepts: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot, whichever you've already got access to (some are free, some sit behind a subscription for the more capable versions, check the provider's own pricing page rather than take my word for it). For the hands-on side, a few free things are worth having open in a tab: Google Search Console, if your site's set up in it, gives you real data on what people search for before landing on your pages. Bing Webmaster Tools does something similar for Bing. These are the primary sources, the actual ground truth, and they matter more than any chatbot's opinion. I'd also point you towards a couple of free resources built for exactly this kind of learning. There's whatisgeo.app, a source-linked guide to Generative Engine Optimisation, which is the newer discipline of understanding how AI answers pick their sources in the first place. It walks through the difference between what's a hard requirement, what's still being researched, and what's just advice, plus it's got a 30-day plan if you want structure. There's also hilyt.it/guides, which has plainer guides like "How to get seen in ChatGPT, the mechanics not the myths" and "How to check what AI says about your brand". Both are free and worth ten minutes each before you go further. Once you've got an AI assistant open and, ideally, one of those references in another tab, you're set up. ## Try it yourself Here are three prompts. Each one teaches a different piece of the puzzle. Copy them as they are, or tweak the details. The first is the foundation. It gets the AI to explain, in its own words, how ranking actually works, and you can push back if it's vague. ``` Explain how Google decides which pages to rank for a search query. Break it down into the main factors it considers, and be specific about which of these come from Google's own published documentation versus general SEO folklore. Tell me where I could verify each point. ``` The second turns the AI into a quiz master, which is a genuinely good use of it. Learning by being tested sticks better than reading, at least for me. If you'd rather have the quiz made for you, [turn your notes into a quiz](https://howtogetaito.com/make/a-quiz/) is the place to go. You paste in your notes or a textbook chapter and get the questions back, with the answers and the marking too, whether it's for a class or just for yourself. Then the testing bit is sorted and you can get on with the remembering. ``` Quiz me on the basics of how search engines crawl and index websites. Ask me one question at a time, wait for my answer, then tell me if I'm right and explain anything I got wrong. Keep it beginner level. ``` The third is the practical one. This is where you get the AI to actually look at something of yours and tell you what's working, rather than talking in the abstract. ``` Here is the text of my webpage: [paste your page content] Act as an SEO reviewer. Tell me what's clear about what this page is for, what might confuse a search engine or a reader, and suggest two or three specific improvements. Avoid generic advice like "add more keywords" unless you can explain exactly why it would help. ``` That third prompt is the one that tends to reveal the most, because you'll see fairly quickly whether the AI gives you thoughtful, specific feedback or just falls back on old SEO clichés. ## Check the result Right, so the AI's given you answers. Now what. Test one: pick a specific claim the AI made, something like "Google uses page speed as a ranking factor," and go find it in Google's own Search Central documentation at developers.google.com/search. If it's there, great, the AI was right and you've now got the actual source. If you can't find it, or the documentation says something more nuanced, that's your signal the AI simplified or invented something. Test two: ask the same question in two different AI assistants and compare the answers. If ChatGPT and Gemini disagree on something concrete, like whether a particular meta tag still matters, that disagreement is useful. It tells you the answer isn't settled, or one of them is out of date. Test three: check the AI's advice against your own Search Console or Webmaster Tools data. If it tells you your site probably has an indexing issue, go and look at the actual Pages (indexing) report. Real data beats a guess every time, even a confident-sounding guess. A quick tell for spotting an answer that isn't backed by evidence: watch for absolute language. "This will guarantee higher rankings." "You must include X." Google has been fairly consistent that there's no single trick that guarantees anything, so any answer that promises certainty is worth double-checking rather than trusting outright. ## If it doesn't work Sometimes the AI just gets it wrong, gives you outdated advice, or repeats a myth as if it's fact. That's not a failure on your part, it's just how these tools work; treat it as a normal part of the process rather than something to fix by trying harder. If an answer feels off, ask the AI directly to justify it: "what's your source for that" or "is this still true as of Google's current guidelines." Sometimes it'll correct itself, sometimes it'll admit uncertainty, which is honestly the most useful response you can get. If it just repeats the same claim more confidently, that's a red flag, not reassurance. On privacy: be careful what you paste into a chat window. Your own webpage content is generally fine to share, since it's public anyway. But don't paste things like your Search Console login details, API keys, customer data, internal analytics exports, or anything containing other people's personal information. If you want the AI's opinion on your traffic patterns, describe the numbers yourself rather than uploading raw exports full of user data. Most AI providers have their own policies on what happens to data you submit, worth a glance at whichever provider's terms before you get into the habit of pasting anything and everything. If you've had a genuinely bad experience, wrong advice that sent you down a rabbit hole, the recovery is simple: go back to primary sources. Google Search Central, Bing Webmaster guidelines, your own Search Console data. These don't change their story depending on how the question was phrased, which is more than can be said for a chatbot on an off day. ## Questions people ask ### Which AI assistant should I use to learn SEO? Any of the mainstream AI assistants will do for learning the concepts: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot, whichever you've already got access to. Some are free, some sit behind a subscription for the more capable versions, so check the provider's own pricing page. ### How do I check whether the AI's SEO advice is actually true? Pick a specific claim and go find it in Google's own Search Central documentation at developers.google.com/search. You can also ask the same question in two different assistants and compare, and check the advice against your own Search Console or Webmaster Tools data. ### What should I not paste into an AI chat when learning SEO? Your own webpage content is generally fine to share, since it's public anyway. Don't paste Search Console login details, API keys, customer data, internal analytics exports, or anything containing other people's personal information. ### Why does AI repeat SEO myths like keyword density? AI assistants are confident by nature, even when they're wrong, and SEO is riddled with myths repeated as if they're settled science. Keyword density, "LSI keywords" and guaranteed rankings don't hold up against what Google actually publishes. ### How can I spot an AI answer that isn't backed by evidence? Watch for absolute language like "this will guarantee higher rankings" or "you must include X". Google has been fairly consistent that no single trick guarantees anything, so any answer promising certainty is worth double-checking. ## Keep exploring Once the basics feel solid, there's more worth reading. "[How to get AI to cite me](https://howtogetaito.com/cite-me/)" digs into a related but different problem: getting AI answer engines to actually reference your content rather than just Google ranking it. "[How to get AI to recommend my business](https://howtogetaito.com/recommend/my-business/)" goes a step further into how AI assistants form opinions about businesses at all, which touches on trust signals that traditional SEO doesn't really cover. Between the two, you'll start to see how classic search and AI-driven answers overlap and where they properly diverge, which is where things get genuinely interesting. If you want a more hands-on next step, visibilitytoai.com has a free AI readiness check and a free AI-crawler robots.txt check, both useful for seeing where your own site currently stands, rather than staying purely theoretical. ## Sources and review notes - Google Search Central — SEO starter guide: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide · Search Essentials: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials · Creating helpful content: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content - Google Search Console: https://search.google.com/search-console/about · Bing Webmaster Tools and guidelines: https://www.bing.com/webmasters/about · https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a - What is GEO: https://whatisgeo.app/ · hilyt guides: https://hilyt.it/guides · visibilitytoai free tools: https://visibilitytoai.com/tools/ Review date: 15 September 2026 — every source above was opened and checked against the text on that date.