@tjrobertson52

The internet is moving away from search engines and towards discovery engines.

So I want to talk about what I mean by that and what this means for any brand or business who's looking to get found online.

So this is a trend that's been going on for about a decade now, but it's starting to accelerate recently.

It really started back with social media as well as video platforms like YouTube.

It used to be that you went to YouTube and you searched for what you wanted to watch.

Now you open YouTube and you discover what you're gonna watch.

And of course, all the platforms work this way, but even Google and large language models are starting to move in this direction.

Google's been making a big push for Google Discover and Chat. G b t recently introduced pulse. Both of these products surface content that you might find in a traditional search engine.

However, it's often showing people things that they would never think to search for but are nonetheless interested in.

And as these platforms store more and more information about you and the algorithms get more sophisticated, you're gonna get better and better at finding content and brands and businesses that are appealing to you that you might never have thought to search for.

Now, search engines aren't going away.

In fact, I think they're gonna be even more important than they are today.

It's just that more and more often it's gonna be an Algorithm that's doing these searches on your behalf, searching for things that you would never even think to search for.

So what does this mean if you're a brand or business looking to get found online?

Well, historically, the best strategy has been to create content focused on the things that people are actually searching for.

And that will continue to be a good strategy.

However, the shift towards discovery engines opens up entirely new areas of opportunity for content.

I think these opportunities could be split into two categories.

The first one is information specifically about your business or brand.

You wanna make sure it's easy for people to find the answers to any questions they might have about you.

This is typically gonna be done on your website.

Instead of just having a few bullet points on why people should choose you, you should go in depth with FAQ pages and about pages, case studies, client success stories, testimonials.

You want to arm the algorithm with all the content they could possibly want when selling you to a prospective customer.

In the second category is content that addresses what your customers didn't know.

They didn't know.

This is typically going to be best done on social media sites.

I highly recommend doing it through video. Focus on the type of content that your target audience would find both interesting and helpful.