Some marketing concepts have a pretty short shelf life (e.g., how to create friend circles in Google+…remember that?) while others are almost timeless. For example, while many SEO best practices have changed over time, tactics like seeking to “be the best answer” to a specific query and writing for humans (while keeping search engines in mind) apply as well today as they did 25 years ago.

There’s widespread concern today over the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on search engine optimization (SEO). Marketers are asking questions like: how do we get our brand to show up in AI search overviews as well as page one of Google? How do we get our website cited as a source in ChatGPT queries or Perplexity content creation?

As noted here previously in How AI Results are Impacting Organic Search Traffic and What You Can Do About It, optimizing for AI requires a combination of traditional SEO and PR practices, stepped up content marketing, branding, and content distribution—in other words, web presence optimization (WPO).

While there’s no way to guarantee your content will appear in AI overviews or AI chatbot queries, the eight techniques detailed below will give your brand its best chance. These approaches have been validated by multiple expert sources including Christopher Penn’s Almost Timely News and the comprehensive Search Engine Journal eBook SEO in the Age of AI.

Create Lots of High-Quality Content

Content matters a lot because content is what trains AI. So, the more content you can produce, and the tighter you can tie that content to your brand, the better in terms of showing up in AI searches.

But not just any content. It has to be:

• High-value (it answers questions astutely and completely);
• Original (it’s not merely derivative of other content, and most definitely is not AI-generated); and
• Authentic (it comes from the personal expertise and experience of your people, or from primary research).

In a recent Search Engine Journal article, Jono Alderson, former head of SEO at Yoast and now at Meta, explains the situation this way:

One of the things that Google is definitely looking for, and one of the things which will be safe to a degree from this AI revolution, is if you can publish, if you can move quickly, if you can produce stuff at a better depth than Google can just synthesize, if you can identify, discover, create new information and new value…

“There’s definitely room to publish good content and publish. 2015-ish everyone started saying become a publisher and the whole industry misinterpreted that to mean write lots of articles. When actually you look at successful publishers, what they do is original research, by experts, they break news, they visit the places, they interact with things…

“What you can do is…audience research, find out what kind of questions people in your sector had six months before they purchased or the kind of frustrations and challenges—what do they wish they’d known when they’d started to engage upon those processes?”

Create Content in Multiple Formats

AI is not only (arguably) the biggest disruption in tech to come along yet, it’s also advancing much faster than the personal computer, the World Wide Web, smart phones, social media, or any other previous new tech.

How much faster? According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve (as shown below), it’s taken less than two years for generative AI to reach the 40% market penetration level. For comparison, it took five years for Internet use to reach that level, seven years for mobile phones, and 12 years for PC use.

A different comparison, from Digital Native, illustrates the speed of AI adoption even more dramatically.

While it took 10 months for Facebook to reach one million users, Twitter two years to reach that level, and Netflix three-and-a-half years, it took ChatGPT just five days.

In almost no time (less than a year?) AI went from understanding only text to being able to ingest knowledge from any type of media format. Consequently, today, to get the most bang for the buck from your content and influence AI search results, it’s imperative to create and repurpose content in multiple formats (text, audio, video, images, diagrams, graphs, etc.).

Optimize for Organic Search

Traditional SEO still matters. A lot.

For everyone concerned about how well their site ranks in organic search results, the good new is that solid off-page and on-page SEO practices also helps with AI search. It’s not sufficient on its own, but it’s an important piece of the puzzle. This include tactics such as:

• Structuring content using H1, H2, etc. tags, along with bulleted and numbered lists;
• Optimizing meta tags;
• Using a clear hierarchical website information structure; and
• Technical SEO (301 redirects for removed content, fixing broken links, etc.).

But while Google and other search engines care about quality of backlinks, AI cares about the quantity of links. That makes a solid, broader web presence optimization (WPO) strategy more vital than ever. See below for an expansion on that point.

Build a Strong Brand

Branding and brand popularity matter. Also a lot.

As noted by Kevin Indig writing for Search Engine Journal:

After matching many metrics with AI chatbot visibility, I found one factor that stands out more than anything else: Brand search volume…the popularity of a brand broadly decides how visible it is in AI chatbots. Popularity is the most significant predictor for ChatGPT, which also sends the most traffic and has the highest usage of all AI chatbots.”

“Broadly, a brand’s visibility seems to be severely impacted by how popular it is…The most visible brands are digital-first and invest heavily in their online presence with content, SEO, reviews, social media, and digital advertising” (i.e., WPO).

>> Takeaway: Popularity is the biggest criterion that decides whether a brand is mentioned in AI chatbots or not.”

Curiously, he writes that “Classic SEO metrics don’t strongly influence AI chatbot citations”—but then seemingly contradicts that contention by noting the importance of content depth, backlinks, and crawlability…which all relate to classic SEO best practices.

While branding matters, Reddit and Quora are (thankfully!) becoming less important. Per the SEJ ebook: “Google AI Overviews is beginning to cite more authoritative review publications to help users shop. The removal of user-generated content (UGC) and reviews from Reddit and Quora dropped to near zero in AI Overviews.”

This image helpfully summarizes the AI optimization recommendations from SEJ.

So, how can you increase your brand awareness and popularity?

• Again, solid WPO practices are vital: create valuable, original content; distribute and promote it; and always be learning from past experience and current research.
• Be active and engaging on social media. Don’t just broadcast—have conversations.
• Use display advertising such as Google Ads display campaigns to get your brand in front of as many relevant eyeballs as possible. Google display ads aren’t great for conversion, but they are a (relatively) low-cost way to significantly increase your brand visibility.

Get to Know Your Customers (Really) Well

Truly and deeply understanding your customers matters.

The emergence of AI searches and search overviews make it more crucial than ever for marketers to understand their customers and write for conversations, not just keyword phrases.

And to be original: don’t ask ChatGPT—ask all your customer-facing experts, from your sales reps, BDRs, and pre-sales engineers, to your customer service reps.

Immerse your team in your customers’ worlds. What are their most impactful problems that you can help solve? What words do they use when describing these issues? What questions—and critically, what follow-up questions—are they likely to ask in AI queries and conversations?

Then answer those questions using your company’s internal expertise and unique point of view. Be very careful with the use of AI for content writing. By its very nature, AI content is derivative, a summary of its training data. It’s not capable of originality.

As highlighted in the SEJ ebook, “AI-generated content is the exact opposite of empathetic content.”

Implement a WPO Strategy

Though the earliest iteration of this model is now 15 years old, WPO (as it has evolved) matters now more than ever.

Here’s what the third-generation WPO model looks like. Note the circular flow of activities:

• Plan and strategize. What topics or questions will you tackle? Who are you writing for (again, this is why knowing your customers and prospects extremely well is vital)? What’s the purpose behind each piece of content, e.g., what do you want the reader to (ideally) do next?
• Develop the content. Be original, authentic, and strive to provide unique value. To maximize ROI, start by producing each piece of content in a long form, then repurpose key parts in a variety of different formats.
• Distribute / promote / amplify. Publish your content then spread it through SEP, social media, influencers and partners, and paid channels.
• Research and analyze. Monitor the performance of your content to better understand what to do more of, less of, and differently. Use external research to stay current on your customers’ concerns. Use these findings as input to the beginning of the process (plan and strategize) again.

Rinse and repeat.

 

Note also the most important elements and activities within this model when optimizing for AI search overviews and conversations: the POSEE approach.

• Paid advertising (Google search/display/remarking ads, LinkedIn sponsored posts, Facebook ads, native advertising, programmatic advertising, etc.)
• Owned content (your brand website and blog)
• Shared (social) media
• Earned media (industry press, analysts, associations, partners, vertical sites, influencers)
• The digital output from event marketing (video, related blog posts, photos from the event, with an emphasis on all socially sharable content pre-, during, and post-event). Here’s more information on how to maximize ROI from your event marketing content.

In short, planning and executing a WPO strategy is crucial to maximizing your chances of being “found” online when your prospective customers are looking for the kinds of solutions you offer—whether that’s in AI overviews, AI search conversations, traditional searches, or their social media feeds.

Finally, there’s an even older framework that’s worth revisiting for AI optimization: The Cluetrain Manifesto from 1999. Note how several of the 95 theses (such as “Markets are conversations”) are even more relevant today with the emergence of AI.

Authors Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger really were ahead of their time. Further ahead than anyone could have imagined at the end of the last century. If you’ve never read it, I can’t recommend it highly enough—it’s a foundational text for digital marketing. If you have, now would be a great time to re-read.

Just E-E-A-T It

Carolyn Shelby recently wrote in SEJ that:

For over a decade, E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) has played a role in search rankings…But with the rise of AI-generated content and AI-synthesized answers, E-E-A-T (now including experience) is no longer just a good idea. It has become the defining factor in determining which sources AI-driven search results consider authoritative enough to cite and include…AI Overviews and other AI-generated search features don’t just favor sites that ‘align with E-E-A-T principles’ – they favor recognized experts.”

She provides an excellent overview of why E-E-A-T principles (which have been important in SEO for the past decade) are essential for success in optimizing for AI overviews, searches, and citations.

She concludes with helpful recommendations for applying these principles, which reinforce the other guidance above:

• Be the expert, and source of expertise and thought leadership in your industry: “Publish original research, case studies, and expert insights. Engage in media interviews, guest contributions, and speaking engagements. Create data-backed reports, surveys, and authoritative content that others cite.” And build high-quality backlinks; in other words, offsite SEO.
• “Leverage thought leadership beyond your website. Be featured on authoritative platforms, podcasts, and news outlets. Participate in peer-reviewed research and industry collaborations.” In other words, implement a WPO strategy.
• And finally, monitor the results of your efforts: “Actively track how AI-generated answers represent your brand. Engage with AI search models via feedback loops and corrections.” This is the “analyze and react” phase of the content marketing cycle.

Prepare for What Comes Next

While all of the strategies described above are solid marketing practices that should stand the test of time, again, AI is evolving very rapidly. As changes are made to how the large language models (LLMs) underpinning AI work, and particularly as agentic AI (wherein AI agents independently complete tasks instead of just providing answers) advances, new best practices will inevitably emerge.

For example, Shelly Palmer recently mused about a future in which AI bots will be marketing to other AI bots, a future in which:

Consumers no longer browse. Their AI agent does it for them. It knows their budget, their brand preferences, their sustainability values. It doesn’t need to be convinced with a 30-second spot – it needs structured data, trust signals and relevance in the moment.”

Best practices in this brave new world include optimizing for machines, not just humans (technical SEO, structured text) and designing “for real experiences” (branding, event marketing, authenticity).

He may be too optimistic, however, in suggesting that “Agentic AI is already here.” Given the (unavoidable?) tendency of AI tools to make up facts, their difficulty at times in following direct instructions, and their frequency in making mistakes, consumers (and on a larger scale, business buyers) aren’t quite ready to hand over their credit credit card number and turn their AI agent loose to do the shopping quite yet.

As if all of that isn’t enough to be skeptical of any near-term widespread use of AI agents, as Carolyn Shelby noted in her SEJ article:

Premium AI models were even more prone to confidently incorrect responses than their free counterparts, contradicting the assumption that paid AI services are more reliable.

ChatGPT, in particular, only indicated uncertainty in its wrong answers 7.5% of the time. Which means that 92.5% of the times it was wrong, it was confident it was correct.

If ChatGPT’s success rate at indicating uncertainty were a batting average, it would be .075.”

Final Thoughts on Optimizing for AI Overviews and Searches

In conclusion, to maximize your brand presence and “findability” as AI eats into traditional search activity: be authentic, be empathetic, and be everywhere (WPO).

Develop original, expert content. AI has many use cases in marketing, from research and image/video generation to workflow automation and competitive analysis. But creating final content is definitely not one of them.

Keep working on traditional SEO. The best practices and techniques for getting ranked highly on Google and other search engines are necessary, though not fully sufficient, requirements for appearing in AI overviews and searches.

Get to really know your customers and prospects. Create detailed buyer personas, then test and refine them with your customer-facing coworkers. Understand their frustrations, and address those using using the words your buyers use, not your internal marketing terms. Be their expert source.

Invest in building a strong brand. Brand popularity is a key factor in AI citations and mentions.

Stay current on advances in AI tools and technology, and how marketing practices will need to evolve.

Finally, as the tagline at the top of the Webbiquity blog says, “Be everywhere online.” Implement a WPO strategy to maximize your chances of being found where your buyers are looking, whether that’s in AI tools, traditional search, social media, or anywhere else on the web.

The post Optimizing for AI Overviews and AI Searches Make WPO Matter More Than Ever appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog | Webbiquity.