A lot of our clients have been reporting more leads from LLMs — ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Google AI mode, and other AI search engines.
Consumers use these for search, and if your brand is trustworthy enough, it gets included in the training data, and the AI tool mentions it when answering relevant questions.
You can reserve a place in AI search results just like you could on Google.
The best way to start is by tweaking your content strategy.
Here are three major content planning rules for brands that want to get into AI search:
Rule 1: Analyze your audience; go deep.
As you prepare your content plan, don’t just load keywords from tools.
Check your Google Search Console impressions and other analytics. Browse your customer support requests.
You’re looking for real, specific, and unique pain points of your target market. Things they will be asking their AI assistants about.
Look for non-conventional information that third-party tools won’t give you. Talk to salespeople at your company. Read niche forums and Reddit threads (LLMs get trained on Reddit data among other things).
These specific, narrow, unique pains of your target market will make the best content titles that get attention of AI tools and help them match you with users’ requests.
Do: source content topics from real human needs.
Rule 2: Prioritize intent and audience match over search volume
Seriously, ignore search volume in keywords. So many valuable B2B longtails sit at 0 or 10, yet imply a lot of revenue.
With AI search optimization, it’s all even more serious.
BOFU sells the best, so focus on covering as many BOFU queries as possible.
(BOFU = “bottom of the funnel”, the clearest buying intent queries, e.g., discounts, competitor comparisons, and so on)
Do: dedicate most of your content plan to BOFU longtails
Rule 3: Build topical authority to get noticed
Topical authority consists of two major things — the depth of your topic coverage, and the amount of external recognition your brand gets.
Make sure your content covers all aspects on one single topic before moving to something else. Start with something related to the best-selling part of your product or service.
Always start thinking at the bottom of the funnel, not at the top.
Re-think the way you produce content too. Here’s a list of practical tips for AI-friendly content production:
Layer smart branding and promo activities on top of your content production. Go after mentions, not just links. The more often AI tools come across your brand mentions for a certain topic, the better.
Do: be a world-class authority on at least one big topic; get mentions.
Generative search optimization has even fewer guarantees than SEO, but the ranking factors are already clear — check this list of ranking factors for AI tools
There are things you can do right to maximize your chances of getting AI search traffic.
💡We’ve just opened our AI search audit service to the public — check it out if you want to future-proof your online brand presence.
originally published on Medium