Google just made a breakout announcement, sharing tips and strategies on how to be featured within their AI search experience on Google. This has been a long time coming. Without hearing directly from Google, the industry has been scrambling to understand what marketers should and shouldn’t be doing to be featured within AI.
Optimizing for AI citations has been top of mind for all search marketers as referring traffic from traditional links on the SERP (search engine results page), is decreasing due to AI experiences.
As website owners are seeing their organic traffic fall, they’re trying to understand how to be featured on AI experiences to close the gap, and potentially get ahead of the competition. Luckily, this announcement gives website owners and marketers clear direction on how to optimize for search.
SEO is Good GEO and AEO
Within this article, Google quickly stated that SEO is still relevant for generative AI search. This is big, and they have been making this claim recently in other publications.
Quoting from Google:
“From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”
Without direction from Google, many specialists were informing marketers that optimizing for AI is different from SEO. This in fact is not true (thankfully), otherwise site owners would have competing strategies to be featured in search.
Now that we know that SEO is great at optimizing for AI search experiences, let’s get into the key strategies shared from Google.
Create Unique, Non-Commodity Content for Your Site Visitors
Google has always valued unique content, this is no different, and I believe that they’re valuing unique content even more so. You see, AI can quickly create a lot of content, but this content isn’t unique nor adds unique value. It’s stating what is already on the internet. What will win is content that has a unique perspective, which Google has coined as non-commodity content.
Commodity content is sharing what is already on the internet, non-commodity content is different as it has a unique perspective, point of view, or information. This is what Google rewards when ranking websites in AI and on search, as users don’t need the same information across the entire search experience.
For any business, this could mean:
Unique Experiences
Share unique experiences that other sources don’t have. For example, say you’re an HVAC company in the Boston area, write about your experiences with specific models and how they perform in the New England weather.
Proprietary Data Sets
If you have any unique data sets that your company has gained over the years, this could be very interesting data to share with your audiences.
Unique Images and Videos
Google has been giving video a lot of love as users enjoy video. Having unique images and videos to share your point of view goes a long way.
Give Users What They Want
Don’t write for the sake of SEO. Write content that will be helpful to the users, nothing beyond that.
Lastly, it’s important that you don’t have duplicate content on your website. This is confusing to Google when it comes to which page to rank, and also not a good experience.
Have a Technically Sound Website for Google to Access, Understand, and Index
You can have the best content, but if Google doesn’t understand it or can’t crawl it, it means nothing. This means:
- Ensuring all important pages are indexed.
- The site is performing well from a speed perspective, across all devices.
- The URL structure is sound and the code is clean.
Pretty much, just making sure that a skilled practitioner is regularly reviewing and maintaining the website and code so that it renders well.
Tools to help with the technical aspects are Google Search Console. Google shares a wealth of information within the Google Search Console, along with PageSpeed Insights.
Optimize Your Google Business Profile
For businesses with local brick and mortar locations, make sure your business profile is optimized. This gives Google and its SEO and AI systems a wealth of information of what your business is, who it services, products and services it sells, and reviews! Reviews are very helpful, especially when users are prompting for the best companies for a specific product.
If you want to learn more, check out our in-depth article on Google Business optimization.
Optimize Your Google Merchant Center
For all e-commerce shops, this is a big one. Optimizing your Google Merchant Center isn’t new, in fact, we have an article on how to optimize your Google Merchant center.
We’ve been promoting this a lot as it helps with your Google Shopping / Performance Max campaigns. Further, it helps rank organically on the Google Shopping experience.
Since Google mentioned this in their article, it sounds like their search and AI systems also rely heavily on Google Merchant Center. So go through our guide and make sure that your product feed is well optimized so Google understands all about the products you sell, who they’re intended for, and their unique value propositions.
Build up Your Online Credibility Across the Web
This has always been a part of SEO and per the quote below, their models review what’s being said about the company from across the web.
- ” Just like the rest of Google Search, our generative AI features can show what’s being said about products and services across the web, including in blogs, videos, and forum discussions.” – Google
Which means, part of your SEO strategy should be to get mentioned from across the web, where your audience is. This could be in the form of:
Getting Featured on News Publications.
This could be in the form of industry publications, news sites (local or national, etc.).
Presenting on Podcasts.
Podcasts are a great strategy as not only do you get the mention, but there is usually around 30 minutes of content for the AI model to learn from.
Directory Listings for Your Industry
Nearly all industries have directories. Identify these and build out your presence, which apart from SEO, will drive real referral traffic.
Collaborate with Industry Blogs
Collaborate with blogs on content to post on their website, covering a unique point of view that would be valuable.
Next Steps for Optimizing for the AI Experience
We’re in a new age of search, and if Google shares that these strategies are valuable, every website should be taking action on all of these steps. If you can’t, for whatever reason, consider hiring a firm like Rise Marketing Group , to handle this for you. We can support website maintenance, content creation, digital PR, and reporting.
