@tjrobertson52

Yesterday I read the best overview I've ever seen on AI search.

It was from Kevin Indigo's newsletter Growth Memo, and he went over everything it takes to be recommended by large language models like ChatGPT or Google's AI mode.

He broke it down to 11 factors to determine which brands AI Search recommends.

And it was so good that I thought I'd do a video on each factor.

He starts by explaining how AI search works.

When you ask a question to a large language model, it will usually perform a search on the web.

This starts with a retrieval of relevant web pages.

It will then site or look at some of those web pages, and finally it'll decide which of those pages can be trusted.

So for now, we're just focused on retrieval, and we're gonna start with the first factor, which Kevin calls selection rate and primary bias.

Primary bias refers to the bias that large language models have before they perform a search.

As you probably know, large language models are all pre trained on data from across the internet.

So assuming there's a significant amount of information about a specific brand or website on the internet, the large language model already has an opinion of that source, or a bias.

That bias has huge implications for which webpages are retrieved in that initial search.

Websites that are seen as a trusted authority in the space are much more likely to be retrieved.

For example, You ask a question about real estate, there's a good chance the large language model is immediately gonna search for Zillow.

The more competitive the search is, the more this primary bias is gonna factor in.

This is why for smaller brands, I recommend focusing on hyper specific terms.

They tend to be much less competitive.

If you want to be recommended for competitive terms as a smaller brand, you're going to have to get recommendations placed on those websites that are already seen as an authority in your space.

So what can you do to improve your primary bias and therefore improve your selection rate?

You need more information about your brand across the internet.

This isn't something you can fix overnight.

Make sure you're consistently using the same brand name and the same words to describe your brand, words that people might use when searching for the products or services you offer.

Join as many conversations as possible, create as much content around your brand as possible, and get people talking about you online.

Tomorrow, get into Kevin's second factor and by the end of this, you'll know everything it takes to rank an AI search.