As more commercial printers begin optimizing their websites for AI search, many are running into a problem they didn’t anticipate. It’s not the content. It’s the platform.

Small to mid-sized shops often operate on outdated content management systems, rigid templates, or e-commerce-first platforms that were never designed with structured data in mind.

Flat content hierarchies, missing schema markup, and limited code access create real barriers to AI search optimization. These are all barriers that don’t show up when you’re just thinking about traditional SEO.

Matt Hunt, web guru for Great Reach Communications (which launched an AI search optimization program for printers earlier this year) works inside printers’ websites on a daily basis. Let’s take a look at what he’s finding.

WhatTheyThink: From a purely structural standpoint, how ready is the print industry for the transition to AI search?

Matt Hunt: I see a mix of website platforms—from Printer’s Presence to Squarespace and WordPress. Let’s just say that, beyond basic website functionality, there are web hosts that are more AI-search-friendly than others. Not all web hosts support JSON-LD schema, for example, or extra code beyond HTML. Or even if it allows you to add it initially, it ignores it or strips it out for security reasons.

WTT: Is that a JavaScript issue?

MH: It is.Many sites either don’t support it or require you to pay extra for a higher-level account. Sometimes there is a lack of in-depth SEO functionality. They give you some basics, like meta descriptions, meta tags, or keywords, but they don’t support structured data at all. If you are running WordPress or a more flexible system, there are plugins available, but you can’t get too plugin-happy. It’s not unusual for printers to end up with multiple plugins that conflict with one another or cancel each other out.

WTT: Sounds messy in there.

MH: That’s an understatement. There’s one printer we’re working with—when I first got into his site, I couldn’t believe he hadn’t been hacked already. Outdated software, outdated plugins, all of it. It was a mess.

WTT: Saddle up! It’s the Wild West.

MH: You’ve got that right. Even the AEO experts argue over this stuff. This past weekend, I went down a rabbit hole watching specialists go back and forth about specific technical aspects of AI search. One was claiming a given issue is critical, while others were saying it doesn’t matter at all. The only thing they do seem to agree on is that good SEO is the starting point for good AEO. So printers who have been ignoring SEO will have a hard time getting surfaced with AEO until they address that.

WTT: What, good old keyword stuffing won’t do the trick?

MH: Those days are over. In fact, someone did an experiment—using a fake business selling t-shirts or something—but the website itself was blank. It was just a blank page, and behind it was all structured data. The experiment used one address in the JSON schema and another in the website footer to see which AI would pick up. It was the address in the JSON schema—not the data in the web footer—that surfaced.

WTT: Hard to argue with a real-world test.

MH: Exactly. There are people out there who say LD-JSON schema doesn’t matter. There are even AI companies claiming that their bots aren’t reading it. But real-world results are telling a different story.

WTT: It is interesting how little consistency there is.

MH: Not just between AI search optimization platforms, but between those platforms and the AI engines themselves. For example, Semrush will tell me that some sites linking to us are “toxic” and will downrank us in search results. But this is a proprietary ranking that doesn’t impact ChatGPT or Claude at all. So it’s important to take in information from all of the different inputs, but be patient and do your own internal testing.

WTT: Beyond platform limitations, what’s the biggest challenge printers face as they invest in AEO?

MH: Prompt tracking. AI engines are built to answer questions, which means you’re optimizing for the specific questions your potential customers are actually asking. Something like “Where can I get reliable rush postcard printing in Pittsburgh?” Many printers have a general sense of what drives their customers, but figuring out the exact language those customers are using is still a bit of a guessing game.

WTT: How does Great Reach Communications approach that problem?

MH: We do a detailed analysis of what makes a printer truly differentiated in the market, including conducting in-depth interviews to mine out how they win business. It’s time-consuming upfront, but it’s necessary. “Great quality, great service, great prices” describes every printer out there. What AI wants to know is, “What makes this printer different beyond that?”

WTT: Plus, AI search is still evolving rapidly. Once you figure out what it wants, it changes.

MH: Yep. Pack your patience—we’re continually fine-tuning as we go.