AI search: five things you should be doing to get ahead

Everyone’s talking about AI. From idea generation to copywriting, summarising meetings to planning them, and ChatGPT to Google’s AI Overview, the rapid rise of this technology has changed the way we work in digital. It’s also changed the way brands approach search and think about how they appear online.

And it’s showing no signs of slowing down.

In Q4 last year, 42.5% of all Google results displayed an AI Overview as part of the SERP. We recently ran our own study using Eyequant technology that showed that AI Overviews are the number one result type for grabbing users’ attention.

All this has changed the way brands appear online. A siloed, isolated approach simply won’t cut through and provide the visibility required in today’s channel-agnostic environment.

With that in mind, we spoke to Steve Walker, our Senior Director, Technology & Innovation, to find out what five things brands should be doing to get ahead when it comes to AI search:

 

Understand your audience and their challenges

The first thing to think about when it comes to AI in search is your audience. What are their problems and challenges? What are they trying to achieve or solve? And how can you help them do that through content for AI Overviews?

When Google was very keyword focused, users couldn’t always turn their queries into the right search term and be confident they would get the solution they needed. But now, with search engines responding more naturally, people are going to be asking a lot more questions that they weren’t able to before.

With search engines answering these questions and solving more problems for users, there are more chances for businesses to be involved and visible in this process. For brands, that means understanding what your audience’s challenges are and making sure you create content to solve those problems.

Take to social channels like Reddit and Twitter, interview your customers, and focus-group them to better understand your customers and get to the root of what they’re trying to find out.

 

Answer a wide range of queries in a wide range of formats

As AI Overviews become better at answering questions, users will also go to search engines with a wider variety of queries. And more diverse queries solved by the immediate, streamlined approach of AI search means more opportunities for brands to answer more obscure questions.

It’s important to not just focus on the most popular problems, but to go quite niche and make sure you’ve got in-depth content on your site that solves a broad array of actual problems your customers are facing. Creating content to genuinely help your audience with the challenges they’re facing is more important than ever.

We use Salient, our proprietary technology platform, to identify topic frequency in LLM responses, which is a great starting point for identifying the types of questions people are asking and building out the topics to address your audience’s challenges.

And this can come in a variety of formats. Google’s AI Overviews are increasingly using video content as a source of information, so ensuring you have a range of video, written, and image-based content on your site gives you the best possible chance of appearing in AI Overviews.

 

Double down on digital PR and brand-building

While AI Overviews mean we’ve seen a reduction in click-through rates for some clients, impressions are up because people are still seeing the brands providing the solution. AI provides a brilliant opportunity to get your brand out there, as long as you’re providing genuinely useful content.

AI Overviews can also increase the value of digital PR coverage. When you get your brand coverage on a reputable, high-authority publication, it has a strong chance of appearing in AI Overviews as the source of answers. This gives extra value to news coverage in these powerful publications—there’s less concern about nofollow or affiliate links and passing link authority, because news stories become evergreen examples of content Google will include in its AI Overviews.

This makes the relevance and usefulness of digital PR campaigns more important than ever before. Stories that have practical value and truly speak to your audience will continue to be served to people searching for queries related to topics you’re writing about, long after the initial buzz of a successful campaign has died down.

 

Implement a robust, multi-platform search approach

To appear in AI Overviews regularly, it’s important to consider this brand-building and digital PR as part of an integrated, multi-channel approach to content and search.

The classic SEO considerations still apply because the way AI Overviews operate is based on the way sites rank in the Google index. Sites and pages that rank well are more likely to surface in the AI Overview, so the authority of your domain and the relevance of your content to queries are important. So you’ve still got to get the basics right—it’s not about throwing all the existing SEO practices out of the window.

But it still comes back to expanding your organic approach to make it as audience-focused as possible and thinking multi-platform and multi-channel. Keyword research and search volume are useful, but they don’t necessarily represent the true problems customers are trying to solve. Building out a strategy for multiplatform search is critical.

 

Be a credible source of information

Like any content, copy written to rank for niche or conversational AI Overview queries needs to be an accurate, credible source of information, whether it’s written by humans or AI.

This might seem nothing new, and in line with the E-E-A-T principles, but content trustworthiness is especially important when providing users with a succinct summary that they may not click through to read more about. If it’s related to health or finance, for example, and content isn’t being fact-checked, you’re at risk of spewing out incorrect information with serious moral and legal consequences.

Content produced involving LLMs should be particularly scrutinised. Briefs should be detailed, prompts need to be well-structured, and there should be multiple touchpoints for human review and quality assurance.

 

Following these top five tips will help you get ahead in the multi-channel world of AI search. To find out more about how our integrated approach can help your brand navigate the future of AI Overview-driven search, get in touch with us today.