As we continue to delve more deeply into GenAI I’m drawn to a post we did some 10 years ago about the transition from traditional marketing to digital marketing. The plan of course was that companies should shift their budgets and practices from the old way to the new way because to us, we could see the writing on the wall. The thing is that am reminded thought, is that many of these traditional marketing techniques are actually still valid. Sure, the Yellow Pages might have gone by the wayside but we still see mailers hitting our letterboxes as well as catalogues, trade shows still happen. The takeaway was largely that perhaps our thinking (and a little of our budgets) needed to shift to better embrace this new way. This was mostly true but more accurately, consideration of course needed to be where your users are.

Still, we’re in a similar situation with SEO and GenAI. SEO is still incredibly powerful and valuable but we know there’s a shift on its way. We’ve been exploring and experimenting and seeing some interesting change but we’re still cautious. Search continues to be an extremely valuable channel.

How Do We Prepare for this Shift?

For this we look to the trusted authorities who have decided to spend a lot of their waking hours looking into this stuff. Important to note that I’m not talking about people who sound like a trusted authority. This is a critical and actually quite difficult aspect of your preparation but these are the ones actually checking patents, and reading documentation like OpenAI GPTBot Docs. Others (like us) prefer to experiment to see what works and what doesn’t, opting to test and refine and break and push limits because that’s how our brains work.

Naturally there is some specific information that we can lean on.

• Over 80% of ChatGPT’s citations come from .com domains with .org next at 11%
• Google AI cites a mixture of sources with Reddit at 21%, YouTube 19% and LinkedIn 13%
• Perplexity seems to predominately favor Reddit at 47%
• ChatGPT is heavily influenced by Wikipedia, with around 48% of their citations
• Lists, bullet point and quote formats work better
• Page formatting in clumps under heading tags is preferred
• Fresh content performs better
• AI crawlers don’t like javascript
• Brand mentions without links seem to work better

Of course this is all very interesting but does it influence our approach to digital marketing? Well perhaps a little but as with SEO, these tactics could change often. More importantly, for SEO you should’ve already been doing a lot of these anyway. I used to refer to SEO standing for “Search Everything Optimization” but I recently learned about “Search Everywhere Optimization” which I think I prefer.

What Can We Do Today?

So a couple of things to note I think. We’ve always promoted a user-first strategy, even in the early days of SEO it’s always really been about users. If an article is stuffed with target keywords that impact the quality of its content, that may have been an effective tactic for search engines at some point in time but search engines are pretty smart and it’s most likely caught up to you. That’s because it’s bad for users.

Technical elements like site speed, url’s, page structure all remain essential. These are things that again have always influenced a positive user experience.

So user experience matters. How about rankings? Well, rankings should never have been a critical metric. Sure, good to get that sense for what’s going on in the SERPS but you definitely should not have been going all in on rankings. Optimally, SEO has always been about what really matters…revenue or leads or conversions or what we’ve always referred to as bottom line shit (BLS) so any focus on impressions or rankings or engagement or whatever other vanity metrics should always be viewed with a grain. The patterns are there and they can be useful but we shouldn’t be fully banking on them.

What Can We Really Be Doing?

OK so a few tangibles:

1. Clear Content – Cut the content fluff. Get to the point, making it clear for LLM’s to interpret. Keep the tone conversational, this is how people are searching now.
2. Page Structure – you want to keep things clearly organized. Best way to do this is through use of headings (one h1, multiple h2’s and h3’s as necessary), lists and “chunked” content. Don’t go too long without a break.
3. Summaries – Consider a preview summary at the beginning of the piece of content
4. Brand Signals – Keep pushing key elements that promote your brand and builds trust. Social website like TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Yelp, Reddit, Google My Business and more are always (and you guessed it, have always) good avenues for promotion and communication.
5. Reviews – anywhere that has reviews should be nurtured and promoted, even on your own website.
6. FAQ’s – make sure to make them useful (i.e not just for the sake of visibility) but also add them throughout your website. Add some juicy nuggets that some might not be aware of.

It’s time again for us to explore and experiment but as usual, it’s about making sure you’re accomodating your users and meeting your audience where they are. Google sure. Bing, perhaps. TikTok, maybe. Amazon, possibly. Reddit, could be. Point is, your SEO has most likely already been doing many of these activities, maybe a few technique shifts will help but certainly don’t go jumping the gun at this point on your usual activities.