One of the most hotly-discussed topics in digital media & marketing these days is the degree to which AI is upending things. And one disrupted segment with high stakes and wide reach is search. Search is also the function for which AI has the closest value proposition and thus substitution effect.
Though Google is still dominant, as we often forget in the AI hype cycle, AI engines like ChatGPT are quickly gaining market share. Google – having learned the rules of disruption in a former life when it was the disruptor – is quickly cannibalizing itself by transforming the way it answers questions & queries.
Altogether, the way we find things online and get answers is quickly evolving, which is a good thing. But according to Sterling Sky’s Elizabeth Rule in her recent L26 talk, this comes a daunting side-effect: different models and methodologies mean new rules for optimizing one’s online presence.
The art of doing so has always been the domain of SEO… and that’s still the case. But with the rise of AI engines comes the need to learn the still-opaque and quickly-developing art of AI optimization (AIO), also known as generative engine optimization (GEO). Just when you mastered SEO, this comes along.
Class Credits
The frustration sparked by that last part has inspired the question: Does all the work I’ve done in SEO carry over to best practices in AIO? Do my class credits transfer? Though AIO is still a black box, just like SEO was to a degree, the consensus so far to answer that question is an unsatisfying “yes and no.”
Specifically, some aspects of SEO prime the pump for AIO and offer a head start for adept practitioners. Other parts of the SEO playbook don’t translate to AIO visibility. But here’s the key part: the latter half of that SEO playbook shouldn’t be thrown out. Because Google is still a force, you have to do both.
That’s the inevitable outcome of any discussion around the interplay of SEO and AIO. For many digital marketers – including time-starved SMBs that wear a marketing hat – their workdload just doubled. They have to now appease the SEO gods and the AIO gods, with only some overlap between the two.
Practically speaking, Rule outlines a growing list of things that digital marketers should keep in mind when learning how to live in an AIO world. For example, AI engines are all about content, but don’t care as much about technical SEO like core web vitals, schema markup, and other formatting.
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Golden Goose
Given this emphasis on content, it also means that citations are back. Once a core element in traditional SEO, citations have lost potency as Google’s algorithm evolved. But with AIO, it’s all about getting cited wherever possible. And bonus points for authoritative citations like trade press or winning an award.
Rule recommends, for example, issuing press releases about various business achievements or events. She noted that she never thought she’d be recommending that in the past, but here we are. Similarly, go back to the old practice of PR-driven editorial coverage. Make sure the trade press knows about you.
As we’ve written, reviews are also very influential in AIO. Due to the granularity of AI-engine queries – compared with search’s caveman speak – there’s a need for nuance (e.g., “I’m looking for a place to host a 10-year-old’s birthday party for 50 people, that’s pet friendly and accommodates nut allergies.”)
What that means practically is that AI engines have to reach farther and deeper to find answers to such detailed questions. Reviews in Yelp and other places is often where they find it. For similar reasons of long-tail depth, Rule says that Reddit is the new golden goose for AIO. So businesses need to be there.
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Consistency is King
Beyond all the above, business info needs to be consistent across these various places where AI engines source content. This emphasis on consistency makes sense given the propensity towards hallucinations. There’s a high rate at which AI engines invent businesses or provide the wrong details.
Given that reality, businesses can boost the probability of accurate answers by applying consistent structured data in several places. That means having accurate and updated listings data in several places – a ranking factor in SEO that’s now higher stakes, given that AI engines emphasize it as well.
So altogether, AIO rests on a combination of structured and unstructured data. Once again, the same could be said for SEO, so they do indeed have similarities. But things differ once you go one level deeper, as they each rely on different information, and they each emphasize different points of online presence.
Put a different way, when it comes to online visibility for businesses and digital marketers, the game hasn’t necessarily changed… but it’s being scored differently.
Header image credit: Alex Padurariu on Unsplash
