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There’s been no shortage of bold claims about how AI will revolutionize (or ruin) marketing. I’ve spent the last six months experimenting with AI tools to understand how they could help my team. In this article series, I’ll walk you through the use cases that I’ve found most promising.
Connecting with buyers through web search is by now a decades-old practice for marketers. Most marketing teams do some level of search engine optimization (SEO). But AI has brought some big changes to search. Learning how to navigate these changes can open up new opportunities.
Search Has Changed Forever
The biggest change in search is Google’s AI Overview. You probably see at least one every day. AI Overview appears at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) and provides an answer to the searcher’s query. In doing so, it takes traffic away from all of the pages listed below it. The result is a drop in organic traffic to sites that have been getting thousands or tens of thousands of visits per month from these searches.
AI chatbots, like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, are also increasingly being used for web searches. The numbers are smaller – less than three percent of all searches – but this number will likely rise. Even at three percent, AI chatbots collectively perform billions of searches. When prompted, they perform web searches in the background and then add information from their LLMs. In many cases, citations of sources are added. Below is the beginning of ChatGPT’s answer to my ‘What are the five most valuable soccer teams?’ prompt.
Figure 1: The start of ChatGPT’s answer to ‘What are the five most valuable soccer teams?’ prompt. Note the citations below the summary.
While an AI Overview on a Google SERP and a ChatGPT answer work pretty much the same way, the web indexes they use are different. Google uses the Google web index, of course. ChatGPT and Perplexity use Bing. Claude uses Brave Search. Optimizing your content to ensure your site shows up in AI search is now more complicated. You have to optimize for Google, Bing, and potentially other web indexes.
Which brings us back to SEO. Many have proclaimed that SEO is dead in the wake of GenAI. Far from it. Now you have a whole new crop of AI tools using content from and citing top-ranked web pages. If you want your content and brand to feature prominently, you need to keep investing in SEO, but change up your tactics. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
SEO’s New Cousins: SGO and GEO
SEO has two new offshoots: SGO and GEO. Both build on conventional SEO practices, but are aimed specifically at AI search results.
Search Generative Optimization (SGO) is a new approach to SEO that focuses on how content is used by AI-powered search engines, Google and Bing. The term SGO was derived from Search Generative Experience (SGE), which is Google’s name for the tech behind AI Overview.
SGO aims to make content easy for Bing and Google to understand, summarize, and cite in Bing AI Summary and Google AI Overview. As a marketer, you want your ideas, products, and viewpoints to be included in these AI-generated overviews, and your page link and logo (on Google) to be included as a citation.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is a strategy for having your content appear in searches done using AI chatbots. The aim is the same as SGO, but you will need to monitor how your content appears in the AI chatbot results you care about. Some people include SGO under the GEO umbrella.
How to Optimize for SGO and GEO
A solid SEO program is the best way to do well in AI search. You can’t simply skip over SEO and expect to appear AI-generated searches.
There are some additional things you can do to give your content a good chance of appearing in AI search. First, experts believe that AI engines prefer clearly-written, semantically-rich content. Content that has a lot of semantic connections to other topics and concepts is more likely to be favored in search rankings. Make sure your product pages, blog posts, or glossary entries are written in an easy-to-understand, conversational tone. Include statistics and examples to make the content richer. Also, make it easy to parse by including lists, tables, and FAQs. If you are unsure where to start in optimizing your content, take a look at the citations listed and compare them to the answer given by the AI engine. This should give you some insights on how to optimize your content.
Second, there are some technical tricks that will help. Many of these will sound familiar to anyone who has done technical SEO optimization. Make sure your site is fast. Include AI crawling bots – GPTbot, ClaudeBot, et al. – in your robots.txt file. If you have been ignoring Bing for years (as many of us have), submit your site for indexing so that Bingbot can give an up-to-date view to ChatGPT.* Google has also said publicly that using schema markup helps its AI crawler bots. The bottom line is to make your site easy and efficient to crawl.
For product-related searches, AI will often look to review sites and best-of articles. You need to make sure your product is well represented. You may notice that many of these sites are either vendor-written – the AI is not smart enough to know that, only that it ranks well in SEO {more here}
What Should Your Strategy Be?
Don’t stop investing in your SEO program. If you don’t have a strong one, consider adding resources. Worst case, you may gain some organic traffic to your site via conventional web search. Done well, a comprehensive SEO strategy that takes into account SGO and GEO will result in citations in AI Overviews.
Going all in on optimizing for AI search via chatbots is not the right nove at the moment. Despite the amazing growth of AI chatbot use, Google is still dominant in search. I recommend looking at a tool like Profound to monitor AI search. If you notice a significant amount of queries from a particular chatbot, consider optimizing for it.
If you want to learn more about AI and search, I recommend the videos from Exposure Ninja and Surfer Academy. You should also get with your SEO team or agency and strategize. There are also some cool new tools for tracking how you appear in AI searches.
I encourage all marketers to dig in and understand how AI is changing search and how customers find your product or service. It’s an exciting time with lots of opportunities and competitive advantages to be gained.
*You might be confused, as I was, about all of these bots, what they do, and how they are related. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot. GPTbot is an AI crawler bot that collects data for AI training. Bingbot is a web-crawling bot used to index the web. ChatGPT uses information from both GPTbot and Bingbot.
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