The core theme is that while traditional SEO is evolving, AI Search Optimization (AEO) presents a significant new revenue opportunity for businesses. The content outlines a practical, four-step strategy for businesses to adapt their content and technical SEO to be discoverable and cited by AI search platforms, emphasizing the importance of conversational content, EAT principles, semantic richness, and building authority through external sources.
Mind Map
Clique para expandir
Clique para explorar o mapa mental interativo completo
Is SEO dead? And why did 90% of founders
and marketeers say that AEO was the
biggest revenue opportunity in 2026?
I've identified four steps that will
take you from a complete beginner to
being able to drive revenue from AI.
I'll explain exactly what AI search is,
why it works differently to Google, and
more importantly, the practical steps
that you can take right now to get your
business showing up. My name's Chris
Donley, and I spent 20 years in SEO. I
bootstrapped a 100 person agency, Verb
Brands, running SEO for companies like
Bugatti and Aston Martin. And I have
never seen a shift move this fast. And
today I run Searchable, which is a SAS
business that provides analytics and
aentic workflows to help companies
improve their AI SEO.
So, let's start with a reality check.
Most self-titled SEO gurus are screaming
that Google is dead and that you need to
abandon everything and focus only on AI
search. And although chat GBT is the
fastest consumer adoption of technology
ever, if you look at this data from
Spark Toro, Google is handling 13 to 14
billion searches every single day. If
you look at OpenAI's own data, the
majority of their queries are things
like reformat this email. How do I
respond to this? And the truth is right
now people are sticking with what they
know, Google. So Google isn't dead, but
the tides are beginning to shift. And
the point that most marketeteers or
founders are overlooking is that Google
itself has now pivoted. More than 50% of
searches end with AI overviews. And this
behavioral change is going quietly
unnoticed as more and more people want
their answers to be served
conversationally, [music]
not just in keywords. So when 7 billion
of Google searches end with AI
overviews, you want to create highly
citable pieces of content. The good news
is is that AEO and GEO are just an
additional layer that you need to add to
your existing SEO strategy. And that all
the tactics that I'm about to cover
apply across Chat, GBT, Gemini, Claude,
and Google's own AI overviews. All of
these are technically now powered by
large language models. And so, [music]
how do you get your business to be
recommended at a specific time that your
customer is looking for your product?
Number one is writing content that AI
search platforms will use. In short, AI
search platforms pull the top ranking
search results and trusted sources on
the web already. They compose answers
made up of several different sources.
So, if you take a look at this graph
here, you can see that it varies across
LLMs. Chat GBT uses different sources
compared to Gemini when it generates its
answers. So, when we used to optimize
for SEO, you would structure everything
around a specific keyword, CRM software
for example, and that simply won't work
with LLM. So instead, you need to build
it far more conversationally. Structure
it around many queries. For example,
what is the best CRM software to help
SMMES generate leads? You're answering
an exact question. And then you want to
focus on your headers, H1, H2, H3, and
so on, and build the entire piece of
content on natural humanlike sentence
questions. Then your role is to answer
that in a very conversational way. So,
in this instance, try and give an expert
answer regarding why a certain CRM is
better for a small business that wants
simplicity and a fast setup. So, one tip
I'd give here is to download a tool like
Whisper Flow or even record a Loom and
then talk to your laptop as if you're
describing the answer to a friend. And
this can form the basis of your article
and I guarantee it will be written far
more naturally than if you didn't do
that. So the second thing I want to
focus on to make your content work in AI
is EAT and Google has focused on EAT for
years. Experience, expertise,
authoritiveness, and trustworthiness. AI
focuses here very deeply with answers
being increased by up to 30% for chat
GBT and perplexity when brands are
including clear sections, expert
commentary, and clear FAQs. So how do
you create content that aderes to the
EAT principles? It's actually very
straightforward and it goes back to my
point that AI platforms weigh content
with real expert commentary. So EAT
means sharing real life experiences
including expert advice, commentary,
showcasing case studies and testimonials
in the content that you are writing. So
ensure that you're including quotes and
statistics from high authority sources
or individuals and aim to try and give
multiple perspectives on complex topics.
And lastly, use your own content to
address known limitations and objections
to your product or service that exists
today. And this will allow you to
control the narrative in the answers
that LLM provide and give you a positive
sentiment when LLM talk about you. The
third thing I want to talk about is how
AI chatbots prefer semantic richness and
[music] context. So unlike in SEO where
we used to repeat the same keyword again
and again and again to try and get it
ranked, you want to be using many
[music] natural variations explaining
the same thing or explaining related
concepts around the same topic. So if
[music] you're talking about your CRM,
you want to have multiple different
descriptions and multiple different
questions about the CRM rather than just
plugging the CRM term. So, ensure that
you're using clear structures and
headings to separate your text and your
content into really clear, logical
sections. Focus on trying to separate
your content into bite-sized question
answer content. [music] Try and use
bullet points more and lists. And tables
are even shown to improve your ability
to be answered. And it makes sense. If
an AI is asked a very specific question
and you have the answer as a header and
that specific answer in a bullet [music]
point, it's much more likely to mention
and site you and drive traffic towards
you because it's easy to retrieve the
answer. Another way that you can think
about using tables is for comparisons of
features [music] and for comparisons of
pricing. And using a table in this
regard is an excellent way of passing
the information straight [music] through
to AI machines. Which takes us nicely on
to the fourth part, which is FAQs. [music]
[music]
This is quite literally gold right now.
If an AI is asked a very specific
question and you have that exact
question as a header with a clear answer
underneath, it will probably site you.
So those are the four points to focus on
to really get your content cited by AI.
But the problem that most marketers have
faced for years is there hasn't been a
reliable way to track traffic from LLMs.
There is no Google search console. So
how do you know if it's working? So
tracking clicks also isn't as helpful as
it used to be as most people will get
the answer to their question
conversationally right there in the
chat. And right now the best way to
track your success in AI search
therefore is how often your brand is
mentioned in the answers and how often
the LLM will link to your website as the
source in their answers. So how do you
do that? How do you get mentioned? How
do you get cited? And that question was
the fundamental reason that I launched
searchable earlier this year. It lets
you automatically pull data from your
business and your website and create
relevant prompts so you can immediately
start tracking how you are performing
versus your competitors and see which
LLMs are actually citing you and
mentioning you [music] every single day.
Honestly, try it. I've dropped a link
below in the description for you to give
it a go. So, the next part of your AI
optimization is schema. So, what is
schema and how can you use it? Schema
markup is a specialized form of
structured data that is used to tell a
search engine or AI exactly what content
you are showing. It's literally code
that machines read that humans don't
see. And there are two core types of
schema that you need to focus on to
really win in SEO. One is foundational
[music] and is known as your
organizational schema. This tells the AI
about your brand, your business, and
directs them towards your social
channels. In the eyes of AI, this is
fundamentally what it sees you as. It's
what it knows you as. And that is why I
think it's so important to work hard on
ensuring these elements are very clear
that your social profiles are set up and
posting consistently as this forms your
social fortress around your entity. So
AI really understands what your business
is. The second type is article schema.
This is the machine code that is used to
communicate the author, the date of
publication, the meaning of the article.
It's the core element [music] and
therefore it's how you're going to be
understood by AI. Think of it as
labeling your content. It helps AI
quickly search through to spot any
relevant articles before citing. So,
three quick wins for article schema.
First, attach it to a real expert, not
like an admin as part of the company.
Use a proper author with credentials and
a bio. AI trusts people, not anonymous
[music] brands. Second, don't just mark
up the page. Mark up the details. You
need a headline, publish date, last
[music] updated, and author, and the key
entities that you mention. Third, I want
you to keep it fresh. If you update the
article, update the schema. AI systems
favor content that's maintained and
current. So, that might have sounded
complicated, but here's three quick wins
for article schema. So, the first point
sounds technical, but it's truly not.
You need to ensure that the majority of
your content, which is what you want to
get mentioned and cited for, is in HTML
rather than in something like
JavaScript. AI systems mostly read raw
HTML. So, if it's not in that format,
you simply cannot get read by an AI
machine right now. Similarly, AI bots
aren't yet very good at capturing images
or videos from your website. So, if you
have images or videos, the most
important thing to do is to add clear
alt text to your images and to add
transcriptions to your videos to make
[music] it as easy as possible for the
AI to understand what those pieces of
content actually are. The second
technical point is you need to ensure
that your website's site map and site
structure are very clear. A few years
ago, there was a trend to push all of
your content onto one single page. But
these design styles make it extremely
confusing for an AI to understand what
your site is, what's more important than
anything else. So instead, you want to
lay it out in a very logical human
hierarchy that helps a crawler to
understand your business and what the
key of your website actually is. And
then make sure that your highly valuable
content that you actually want to be
read is not hidden away. And I thought
I'd end the technical section on a very
quick one, but just make sure that
you're not disallowing Google crawlers
or Microsoft Bing or Chat GBT's bot from
actually being allowed to crawl and
scrape your website. So to do this, you
just need to submit site maps in two
places. Number one, Google because
[music] Google is still the dominant
engine and as we covered earlier,
receives 7 billion AI summaries a day,
but also Bing because Bing, if you
didn't know, is what powers chat GBC.
You can update your robot.ext text file
easily in your website control settings.
And if you don't know how to do that,
you can simply work with your existing
developer cuz they will know how to do
that. There is some controversy around
LLM.ext files. However, my view is that
providing additional context to crawlers
cannot hurt the outcome as to whether
you are answered within a chat service.
The next stage that I'm going to talk
about is perhaps the most vital and it's
how you build authority on your own
website. But because this channel is
new, 82% of the people who watch the
videos on this channel haven't
subscribed. [music] So if you've got
this far and you like the videos,
subscribe to the channel and I promise I
will always deliver strategic and
tactical advice on how to grow your
businesses. So thus far we've spoken
about two core areas. We've spoken about
the content that is on your website and
how to optimize that for AI search and
how to technically optimize your website
so it's more easily crawled. But there's
something that most people overlook
entirely with regards to AI search, and
that is that AI models don't just read
your website. They're trained on the
entirety of the internet. The sites that
form the backbone of the training of the
AI models carry enormous weight in how
they think and answer. So, Wikipedia,
Reddit, Quora, Crunchb, Yelp, Google
Maps, these are primary training data
sources. So getting your business
accurately listed and described in these
places doesn't just help humans find
you. It literally shapes how AI models
understand what your company is and what
it does. So there are three core things
to think about here. Number one is user
generated content. Places like Reddit,
Quora, and other forums have millions of
users and conversations happening every
day and are heavily prioritized and used
by LLMs to formulate answers. So, don't
just set up a fake account and spam your
ideal messaging into these forums. Find
threads that really matter and reply
with things like, "I work at X company
and based on your specific understanding
of the problem and the use case, here is
how you fix it. Here is how you change
it and here's how I can help you do
that." And the point is you're trying to
give context to a user who has asked
that specific question because that
informs how an LLM will think about you
and it will inform the sentiment that
the LLM has about your brand. Number two
is large knowledge basis. The LLMs are
very focused on large reputable and
established knowledge sources like
Wikipedia, Yelp, Maps, Crunchb. These
are the primary training data for most
of the models and as such you should
focus on getting your business listed
and described in these knowledge bases
as this will strengthen your entity the
entity [music] that the models are
trying to understand and it will make it
more likely that you are mentioned and
more likely that you are cited. Number
three is publications. And so you as a
business want reputable publications to
write about your brand, to mention your
name and to site you because [music]
when an LLM is considering an answer,
they consider large publications as
authoritative sources on that subject
matter. And if those sources are talking
about you in the context of being an
authority and the context of being an
answer to the question, you are more
likely to show up as an answer. So the
advice is reach out to journalists,
offer comments, form a differentiated
opinion. You want to create highly
citable pieces of content. For example,
at searchable, we have just created the
state of AI SEO, the algorithm report,
analyzing millions of data points and
giving objective data on how the models
are working and creating answers. And
dozens of journalists want to site this
content when they're talking about the
evolution of technology and the
evolution of consumer behavior,
resulting in us getting lots of
different links back, which increases
our knowledge entity in the AI machine
databases, meaning we're more likely to
get mentioned and cited in future for
topics around AEO. So ultimately, this
is what we call digital PR or link
building. So you're trying to get your
comments and your content to be cited by
small and large publications alike. And
the more established and the more
authoritative, the better. So think
niche blogs through to international
newspapers. The more novel and on trend
that your content is, the more likely it
is to get cited. So reach out to
journalists, build relationships, and
give them something to write about. This
is the new era of PR or digital PR. Earn
citations, earn authority, and you will
go on to earn traffic. I remember when
we were first optimizing websites for
Google in 2009 and it was so easy for
sites to gain traffic and now that
opportunity exists again. So any
business can make huge leaps forward if
they take advantage right now. If you
want to use searchable, I've included a
link in the descriptions which will give
you incredible insight and analytics on
your AI search. It will give you the
actions you need to take to improve your
mentions and your citations and your
content. and you will get a customized
agent within your profile that you can
work with as a co-pilot. So once you've
nailed this, make sure that you check
out my next video on creating adverts in
Clique em qualquer texto ou marcação de tempo para ir diretamente àquele momento do vídeo
Compartilhar:
A maioria das transcrições fica pronta em menos de 5 segundos
Cópia com um cliqueMais de 125 idiomasPesquisar no conteúdoIr para marcações de tempo
Cole a URL do YouTube
Insira o link de qualquer vídeo do YouTube para obter a transcrição completa
Formulário de extração de transcrição
A maioria das transcrições fica pronta em menos de 5 segundos
Instale nossa extensão para Chrome
Obtenha transcrições na hora sem sair do YouTube. Instale nossa extensão para Chrome e acesse com um clique a transcrição de qualquer vídeo direto na página de reprodução.
