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AI visibility work depends on matching the right model, search surface, or answer format to the business outcome being optimized.
Did you know that when people click from the search results to your website, that can either negatively impact or positively impact your rankings on Google and your AI search visibility? Cyrus Shepard just published an awesome article on this. Imagine this is the search results.
If someone clicks and then within one second they're going back to the search results, that's a bad click.
If if they spend 30+ seconds, that's a good click. Whichever one is the longest click from the search results, that's extra good and it'll move those results higher up in Google search results. But you might be wondering how this impacts AI answers.
Well, there's three things going on here.
So first, Google grounds its AI answers with algorithm using the search logs. Second, answers from AI overviews in AI mode are actually driven by the top ranking results. So if you're ranking good in the results via the click data and that'll actually help you appear in the AI results.
And other AI platforms like ChatGPT are using Google search results to generate their responses.
That's how it works. But Cyrus takes it even further and he gives you a very detailed playbook about how you can optimize for the clicks. This article from Cyrus Shepherd is an absolute must read if you want to understand how your click signals will drive your rankings in both Google and AI answers.
AI visibility work depends on matching the right model, search surface, or answer format to the business outcome being optimized.
Map each AI/search surface to a task: answer extraction, public copy, citation mining, checkout readiness, media generation, or customer-intent capture.
This source is connected to AI visibility and answer readiness.
Did you know that when people click from the search results to your website, that can either negatively impact or positively impact your rankings on Google and your AI search visibility?