Getting your photography business found in Generative Search

Generative Search: The New Frontier of SEO

There’s no question about it – Chat GPT and Gemini are beginning to take over the search landscape and more and more queries are being answered in the generative search box at the top of the search engine (whether that’s google, Bing) without Google directing visitors to your website. So how, as a photographer, do you go about getting your website ready for the AI revolution?

How does Generative AI answer a query?

I actually asked Chat GPT to show me a basic overview of its workings. So on a really basic level, a search will go something like this:

I then asked it what it would look at to Recommend an Editorial Wedding Photographer in Derby, and this was it’s more in depth answer.

How to get your website found on Generative Search

The first steps to getting found in generative search as a photographer are going to be pretty similar to getting found in SEO.

1. Showcase E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

• • • Make sure your site clearly shows who you are: include an “About” page with your credentials, awards, client testimonials, and any press mentions.
  • • Add an author bio to your blog posts or guides to reinforce expertise.
  • Use genuine reviews and encourage clients to describe their experience (preferably on Google Business Profile for local relevance).

2. Use Structured Data and Schema Markup

• • • Add schema to your main pages—especially:
      • • • “ImageObject” schema for portfolios/photos
        • • “Product” or “Service” schema for your packages
        • • “FAQPage” or “HowTo” for guides or informative posts
        • “Review” schema for testimonials

  • Structured data makes your site easier for AI models to interpret and may help surface your content in AI-generated search summaries.

3. Emphasize High-Quality Visuals and Optimization

• • • Use original, professional-quality images and videos—these are more likely to be included in AI answers.
  • • Give every image a descriptive file name and relevant alt text that includes your keywords and describes the photo clearly (e.g., “central-park-engagement-photography.jpg”).
  • Regularly update your gallery and remove outdated images; AIs favor fresh, relevant content.

4. Focus on Conversational, In-Depth Content

• • • Write guides or blog posts that answer common questions your clients have (e.g., “How to prepare for a headshot session in New York”).
  • • Target longer, conversational queries (“what should I wear for a fall engagement shoot”)—AI search engines love detailed, helpful answers.
  • Structure your posts with strong headings, sub-headings, bullet points, and FAQs for easy parsing.

5. Master Technical SEO for AI Readiness

• • • Ensure fast load times—compress your images, use lazy loading, and leverage a CDN.
  • • Make your site 100% mobile-friendly with responsive design.
  • • Use HTTPS for security—AI engines prioritize secure sites.
  • • Maintain a clean site structure and internal linking for easier crawling by bots and AI.
  • Fix broken links and keep your sitemap up to date in the Google Search Console, including an image sitemap.

6. Strengthen Your Local and Visual Search Signals

• • • Claim and optimize your Google Business Profile: add current photos, update your hours, location, and description, and respond to reviews.
  • Participate in local directories and encourage backlinks from reputable photography blogs or press to boost authority.

7. Continually Update and Experiment

• • • AI search is evolving. Use Google Analytics and Search Console to test new content, keywords, and schema tweaks—and see what’s surfacing in generative search summaries.
  • Keep your site fresh with occasional new portfolio shots, case studies, or updated service pages.

Check Your rankings

The first step is to see how you rank for different queries? Are you showing up for the sort of questions your clients are asking? More importantly, who is? Can you reverse-engineer why generative Search is prioritising those sites?

Focus on the Big Two

People know to head to Chat GPT, and Google are trying to steal their market with Gemini. Meta, Claude, Perplexity and Bing are also well regarded generative search engines, but I don’t think they are as widely used by the public (certainly in the UK.) – so I would just focus efforts on the big two for the time being.

Top Tip: Ask Chat GPT

If you ask Chat GPT to ‘recommend a family photographer in the Sheffield area’ and then ‘what information did you look at to make this recommendation’, it will tell you.

This is a huge step forward from trying to guess what search algorithms want. If the machine is willing to be honest about how it achieved its results it’s a great tool to leverage.

External Authority / Digital PR

Generative AI places far more weight on what other sites (especially ones with high authority) are saying about you than what

This is a call to get featured on blogs, and to collaborate more with other suppliers wherever possible. We’re used to citations and backlinks being an SEO factor. What we see now happening is that Generative AI is placing those citations in context of the original site / post that they’re coming from.

One thing I have noticed about ChatGPT is it loves Award Winning Photographers and Best of Lists from authoritative sources like This is Reportage, Nine Dots, Inspiration Photographers, etc. And will often list photographers with a long list of accolades first.

Personally I hate entering awards, but it looks like it may be a necessity moving forwards.

Visual Intelligence

Advances in deep learning models, such as Vision Transformers (ViTs) and convolutional neural networks, allow AI systems to perceive complex patterns and interpret the content of images in ways that closely mimic human perception. These models enable generative AI not only to create and enhance images but also to understand what objects, scenes, and contexts are depicted in them.

What this means for photographers is that when gathering recommendations, Chat GPT and Gemini can ‘read’ your images and recognise whether they are the style / subject matter that the user is searching for.

Tip: Try to match what you’re showing with what you’re saying. For example, If you’re marketing as a documentary wedding photographer, don’t show lots of posed couple portraits to back it up.

Answering Queries

This is a landscape where tools such as Answer the Public become invaluable. As essentially, we’re going to be looking to get featured in answers to questions that couples have when planning their wedding. It is worth focusing on long-tail-keywords and in depth articles – especially on subjects that haven’t been covered before by your competition. Even if they have, just trying to write a better article can sometimes win the day.

So I might be trying to optimise for analog film photography or street style wedding photography., but you can ask Chat GPT to create a list of articles / questions for your speciality.

Schema Markup

I’ve been using Rankmath for my SEO and Schema markup this year to help prepare for the Generative AI revolution. I don’t know if this is strictly necessary, but I figured that every little helps, and if it helps the search bots discover the tougher to find content on my site

An ever evolving challenge

As Generative AI moves forward I think we’ll see both it getting smarter, but also getting monetised. I can’t see a world in which Chat GPT and Google aren’t both charging businesses for mentioning them. I think the way round this in the short term is being the only authority on a handful of things (see the answering queries section above) and in that way, sometimes winning the battle. SEO has always been a lot like fishing – laying out lots of rods and hoping to get a bite on one – and I can see this becoming ever more the case.

Did that help?

I may not be an expert in Generative Ai, but I’ve spent a lot of time toying with it, and these are the things I’ve found to be helpful so far. I’m sure it will evolve, and some of this information may quickly go out of date as machine learning speeds up at an exponential rate. If you have any comments or feed back please drop me a line.