AI visibility strategy

Google just moved one step closer to traditional search results being replaced by AI mode. They just rolled out a wider version of a test they ran in October.`n`nWhen you run a search in Google and see the AI overview, they'll be a show more option that expands the answer and below the expanded answer is a chat input where you can start a conversation with AI mode.

This is one of several experiments they've been running to more fully integrate AI mode into the traditional search results. My prediction is that within less than a year, Google search results are gonna look more like AI mode than traditional search results.

This has major implications for SEO and digital marketing in general. Considering that SEO campaigns typically focus on long term growth, I don't think it makes sense anymore to focus on ranking in traditional search engines.

Your SEO or Geo strategy should be entirely focused on how to show up in large language models. Now a lot of SEO's are gonna tell you that it's all the same...

what a lot of SEO's are saying. Right now, the game is no longer about ranking for a handful of super competitive terms.

Instead, visibility is going to be spread across thousands of hyper specific terms, very little competition. The two big implications for your strategy is 1, you need to be tracking what sources these large language models are citing.

And 2, you need to be creating that hyper specific content on as many platforms as possible. So you have as many chances as possible to be one of those sources.

Traditional search engines are going to be dead within a few years. I wanna talk about how we know this and then who the winners and losers are gonna be in this shift.

And then finally, I'll talk about how you can make sure you're one of the winners. Kevin Indig recently reported that Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, says that he sees Google's AI mode replacing traditional search within two to three years.

So that means what we now think of as Google Search would just be a separate tab that people can go to, but the default experience would be AI mode, which is a lot like ChatGPT. However, the shift from traditional search to AI mode has already begun.

Google is already experimenting with bringing more and more AI features into the traditional search results page. So it seems like it could happen much faster.

So what is this going to mean for websites and small businesses when suddenly people are going to AI to get their answers instead of traditional search engines? If you're someone that depends on web traffic like a publisher, then this is just bad news...

ryone kind of accepted that as common wisdom back then. You couldn't trust anything on the internet.

You had to drive to the library, find a book, bring it home, and read through it to find information. Nowadays, if someone says they research something, it's a pretty safe bet that they went to Google, they did a handful of searches, they clicked on some of the links, and they read information from the websites.

For about 10 or 20 years, this has been standard practice before making a big decision. That's all about to change.

iPoll Rank did a study that found that only 4.5% of searches in Google's AI mode result in a single click. I think within a few years when we hear someone say I researched something, we'll be able to safely assume that they went to ChatGPT or Google AI mode and typed in one or two prompts.

And I'm not passing judgment. I think as these large language models get better, that will be the best way to do research.

But what that means is we're effectively outsourcing our decision making to the large language models...

oing a single broad search like dentist near me the way a human might, it'll do up to a dozen very specific searches. And then instead of just looking through the top few results like a human might, it'll look through multiple pages of search results.

What this means is that the large language models are considering hundreds of pages before returning a recommendation. And so it's no longer about ranking in position 1 for the most competitive search term.

It's about showing up in as many places as possible. So the brands that are gonna win from all this are the noisy ones, the ones that are putting out content everywhere they can, that are joining the discussions wherever they're happening.

So that's exactly what we're doing for our clients. We're tracking where all these large language models are looking, and we're making sure our clients are represented on as many of the web pages as possible.

By the way, if you're interested in keeping up with this stuff, Kevin Indig's newsletter, Growth Memo, is one of the best out there.

Semrush have just released two massive studies revealing exactly where ChatGPT, Claude, and Google'sAI overviews are getting all their info from. You'd expect it to be super credible sites, right, like government domains and established publishers.

Nope. AI overviews most commonly site Quora, Reddit, and LinkedIn.

For ChatGPT, it's Reddit, Wikipedia, and YouTube. This is all user generated content, not random blog posts on your site.

So if you wanna show up in AI search, you need to forget about things like meta descriptions and start creating value where AI is actually looking.