How do I get found in AI search?

Traditional SEO is the foundation, and from here AI picks up information. The number one thing you should be doing is setting up your cornerstones.

Your step should ideally be to define your pillars, what defines what you do. For a marketing agency, that's content marketing, SEO, founder branding. Pillars should be a maximum of five at any given time, three to five.

Clearly define which products and features go under each. AI treats content and SEO in blocks. Let's say my content marketing pillar overlapped a lot with the SEO pillar. AI will constantly fluctuate between the two, not knowing which one to present. That takes away your reputation.

Before you worry about AEO or GEO or whatever, make sure all the SEO fundamentals are in place. They're fundamentally two different things. But it's a linear progression and a handoff.

When all the basics are in place for now, you can hand off and do the AEO things. You can build in parallel, just make sure you're working on your SEO fundamentals.

People are testing copying their pages into MD files and serving them directly to bots. I don't think you should do it, 'cause it creates duplicate content. If you find case studies and real data where people are successful with it, it's potentially something to look into.

The only difference is really how you measure these days, because we're seeing so many zero click searches. It's changing so fast, so who knows what it'll even look like in 3 to 6 months. But as far as we're seeing, the fundamentals matter a lot.

It's making sure any of your content is very structured, so tools can really pick up on it and parse it correctly. Making sure your schema markup is correct on all of your pages is important. For blog posts, that's even as simple as making sure you have an FAQ section and a summary section.

For general SEO, I still say backlinks are the biggest mover. That helps for AI as well.

When you ask ChatGPT and the other models something, they search the Internet, and how they do that is they search Google. One search in ChatGPT might be 10 or 20 searches that relate to that keyword. If you're not there, you're not gonna be in the information they retrieve. How they pick who's in the answer, nobody really knows.

Things like LLMs.txt don't seem to have any effect. Where I work in house, AI platforms send us less traffic than a search engine we never optimise for. I'm sure that's gonna grow.

AEO, GEO, whichever of the alphabet soup you want to use, it's all based on content and authority. I would still want to use years of index data from Google to tell me how to build more AEO authority. These channels are changing, and the distance is becoming less. I would still say that.

In a week, for a couple hundred bucks, you can know what to talk about with your market rather than internally assuming that.

Sit with your team and take inventory. Put down all the keywords exhaustively, even things on the fringes. Put it all into one big broad Google campaign and follow that data.

The main technical foundation for AI readiness is that none of your content is hidden by JavaScript. It's also true for Google, but Google is better at this. It's not the best practice for SEO, but for AI search, it's a blocker.

If you use JavaScript, you need to make sure the text is still on the page before rendering. A crawler, let's say ChatGPT's crawler, should be able to visit the website, take the text from HTML and use it to answer users' questions.

Press View page source. You should be able to see all the text that is visible on the page in the code.

I can't tell you this is 100% going to continue to be the case for AI search. For now, when an agent performs a search, it still retrieves data from an index. That means there is still some ranking, even if it's not transparent to the user.

What I would probably do is a long-term play. The best way is to always have something unique to offer the agent or the readers, something not available elsewhere.

If you collect data from your users, you could present statistics, without disclosing private data. A lot of people like to link to that, because it actually has figures, like any scientific paper.

In AI answers you'll notice a mix of first-party company websites, news sites, and social or forum content. Having a presence across these types of resources, including your own website, will maximize the chance to be cited.

LLMs don't care directly about backlinks. They care about mentions and the overall corpus. Being mentioned on high-authority sites, like major news sites, helps you be shown in LLM outputs.

From what I heard, and this is mostly anecdotal, LLMs prefer content that looks like what they would generate themselves: very nicely structured content. You can enhance that with structured markup, basically JSON-LD where you tell the crawler exactly what is what.

If there's enough information about your domain on your own website and across third-party websites, you definitely get recommended. This point is the most important of all. Do that through digital PR if you can, through link building, or by getting listed on user-generated platforms.

Also design your platform answer first. If someone types a question, you directly answer it, in the first paragraph of your landing page or blog post. Don't write a long story initially and answer towards the end. It does not matter whether they read through or not.

I have sites where I installed LLMs.txt and ones where I did not. There's literally no difference.

You can spam your own listicles, and AI picks it up. But this usually works for smaller industries where there is smaller competition.

If there are only a few listicles in the topic, you can write your own. But if there are thousands of listicles, yours will never get cited, so you need to work harder.

One very basic thing I've done for a coaching business is create a Google business profile. It has nice descriptions, nice pictures, and it continuously gets reviews. Now we can say she's the best rated coach in the city.

Then we wrote a blog post on the five ways to learn public speaking in the city and put her at number one. Sure, it's shameless self promotion, but the LLMs don't understand that yet, at least.

The LLMs use data from community forums, LinkedIn and Q&A sites. Posting and replying to people's questions there makes you visible for leads, but also increases your chances of being picked up by ChatGPT.