You need to stop thinking about how to rank in traditional Google search and start focusing on how to get recommended. In AI search. Cause pretty soon all search will be AI search.
I think it's gonna happen by the end of this year. And to be clear, this will still be mostly happening on Google. It's just gonna be an AI giving you the results.
I want to talk about the most fundamental shift, cause it seems like most people are struggling to understand this. In traditional Google search, a human performs a search and then they click on one of the top ranked pages. In that paradigm, the only thing that really matters is how well you rank for those keywords.
In AI search, on the other hand, the human performs a search or a prompt, and then the AI breaks that down into a series of searches. And then instead of considering one or two results where a human would, it will typically consider about a hundred results.
And my guess is as these models get more efficient, they're going to start considering more and more results. In the future, AI might consider thousands of results, and it really doesn't care where you rank in that result set.
And so ranking in AI search is trivial. As long as the page is indexed and somewhat relevant to the term you're trying to rank for, it's going to show up in the result set. The hard part in AI search is getting cited and being trusted.
Even though the AI model is going to consider a hundred or more results, it's only going to cite a handful of them. But of course, being cited isn't the goal. The goal is for the AI to recommend your brand to the user.
But in order to influence that recommendation, you do need your page to be cited.
So let's talk about the most important factors for being cited and ultimately recommended. The first factor is the hardest to influence. It's what's known as primary bias.
This is just what the model already thinks about your brand before performing a search, and it's based on its training data. There's really no easy way to influence this.
But the more content there is online talking about your brand in a positive light, the more likely AI is to site your website. The other badges are much easier to influence.
First of all, you just want to make sure that the information the AI is looking for is clearly displayed on the page. Title of the page should include the most likely term the AI would search for when looking for that information. And then the h, twos or sub headings should include any secondary terms.
And then immediately after the heading you want to directly answer the question.
Maybe the most impactful optimization you can make for being cited in an AI search is having high fact density in your content. What does that mean? It means every time you answer a question or make a claim, you back it up with two or more facts.
These can be statistics, quotes, or other facts backed up by a reputable third party source.
The kinds of pages that get cited most often by A. I. tend to be very long pages with lots of facts.
But of course, being cited is only half the battle. You still need to influence the model to recommend your brand. The best way to do this is just to present your brand as the solution to the user's problem.
You want to explicitly mention your brand by name even though you're on your own website. Don't say we or our. Say your brand's name.
And then immediately after recommending your brand, back it up with two or more facts. Share numbers you're proud of, awards you've won, or testimonials from customers.
Now, you don't want to turn the entire article into a sales letter, but I recommend doing this at least once at the top of the article, right after addressing the main question, and then in one or two other places if it makes sense.
There are a handful of other factors that affect citation rate and recommendations, but in our experience so far, these are the easiest ones to influence.
