TMAI #470: 🏆 AI Age: Bye SEO, Hello AEO! -P3

[1]

TMAI #470: BYE SEO, HELLO AEO! -P3

[More Content. More Places. More Often.]

[ Web Version [2] ]

The essential paradigm behind this series on Answer Engine

Optimization (AEO):

*

How humans seek is changing in foundational ways.

We typed keywords. We type_ resolution queries_ now.

We did the searching and clicking and reading and backing and forthing

and questioning and deciding. AI does that for us now - and it is

pretty good at it.

While this change is beyond fantastic for humans, it is anti-fantastic

for businesses.

You stand to lose approx. 30% Organic traffic in the next 12 months

(many have already lost 65%) and 15% Paid traffic (if I'm being

insanely optimistic).

In TMAI #468 [3], I’d shared the four problems we need to focus on:

1. PRE-SEARCH. 2. SEARCH EXPERIENCE. 3. PAN-SEARCH. 4. NEW

ANALYTICS.

Premium #469 [4], shared 11 actions you should consider across

Pre-Search (Research, Owned Experiences), and Search Experience

(Winning Paid Answer Advertising).

Today, the newsletter is dedicated to the most important problem.

2b. Search Experience: Winning Organic Relevance in AEs.

As you rush your transition from an SEO-focus with blinders, to an

AEO-focus and the long slog… Your salvation will be… CONTENT.

Your mantra to win AEO: _More content, in more places, more often!_

Let’s look at actions you should already be activating for each.

MORE CONTENT.

1. FOCUS ON CREATING “AI RESISTANT” CONTENT.

Answer engines are good at summarizing existing, duplicative content

from 50,000 places, and offer just one or two real choices to their

Users. To be one of those two choices, you now have a difficult

challenge: Create content OF GENUINE NOVELTY AND DEPTH.

Ideas: Original research. Proprietary data. Unique insights.

First-party created. Deeply business relevant. Sourced from your

specific micro-slice of customers/users. More complex “how to”

and, especially, “why” content.

In the short-term you do need some level of 3P quantity – because AI

is learning about your business mostly from others. Longer-term

success will come from 1P quality. Making it clear to the AE: You are

an authoritative, irreplaceable source for it.

Let’s say your CMO has exceptional taste. Product. Styling.

Creative. Zeitgeist. Taking those bits, converting them into

multi-modal content at scale on your digital presence, equals

value-rich “AI resistant”. Why? Your CMO’s unique. Her stories

told via text, video, audio will be “AI resistant.” Your

challenge: Overcome large company inertia, to deliver quality at

scale.

Keep leveraging existing SEO skills: Follow the old technical

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T)

recommendations. Google PDF, Page 26 [5]. [5] They work broadly,

additionally earn you “citation impressions” within AE replies –

a very good thing.

WARNING: Last year, we thought this was a good idea: Buy an expensive

“AI Tool,” it’ll automagically “build content” for our site,

product pages, blog posts, emails! OMG! It’s the best. We have to do

nothing, buy “AI Content Tool”!! Fly in the ointment: Everyone’s

doing the same thing. AND, automagically spewed text is NOT genuinely

novel and depth, which means it is not “AI resistant." 😬

2. SPEAK HUMAN.

You remember how you did SEO in the early days? _Keyword stuffing._

That is all it took to trick a search engine into ranking you.

Humans are asking layered, nuanced, paragraph-long, resolution

questions. As AEs they try to understand your Brand – from your site

and 75 others places you don’t know of – you’ll gain an

advantage if the Answer Engine understands you via your HUMAN SPEAK.

Go to Pantene.com [6], Michaelkors.com [7], United.com

[8], Pfizer.com [9], your favs, if there is text content, all of it

is in BRAND SPEAK (“editorial voice content”) or technical-speak

or both.

Two problems: The AE has to do a lot more work understanding you.

Increases the odds it will understand you incompletely or

erroneously.

Speak human.

Don’t “dumb” things down. Audio, video, text. Be smart. Be

clever. Be funny. Be direct. Be layered. Be nuanced. Be expressive. Do

all that while speaking like a human. If you can’t do that, speak

(audio, video, text) as your customers would.

If you are a fashion website and you speak like Anna Wintour… You

might only get one visitor to your site: Anna Wintour.

3. OPTIMIZE EXISTING CONTENT FOR CONVERSATIONAL MODES.

You remember FAQs?

They were the conversational queries at the dawn of the internet. They

are sexy now! ChatGPT, Claude, others are designed specifically to

answer complex multi-part questions. Hence, it is incredibly impactful

if the Product Descriptions, Reviews Summary, Competitive Strengths,

Key Selling Points, Customer Value, etc. are structured to directly

answer questions using clear, concise, and natural language that

mimics human conversations. I.E. FAQs.

As nearly all your initial traffic losses are coming from

“non-branded” keywords, it is especially critical to include

long-tail, question-based words and structures that reflect how users

verbally articulate their queries.

Keep leveraging existing SEO skills. Follow the old structured data

(schema markup [10]) recommendations to provide explicit signals to

LLMs/Answer engines. Digestible chunks, clear headings, lists, tables,

all still work great – your challenge is to be unique and

value-rich. Also, a good old “entity database,” with products,

collections, materials, celebrities, care instructions, etc. etc.,

will ensure LLMs learn consistent facts about your business.

4. MULTI-MODAL, FTW!

I’m sure you’ve noted that Answer Engines like ChatGPT, Claude,

others suck so much less than Siri and “OK Google” – both roll

over and die at the tiniest complexity in the question.

In large part it is because AEs corpus is multi-modal: Massively more

text, and images and audio and video – along with the superior

ability to understand all that.

I asked an AI Agent to go watch a video for me and create a mind map.

It was almost perfect!

[AI made Mind Map from YouTube video.]

If you are normal, it is likely your content strategy is primarily

text.

As you elevate text awesomeness with recommendations 1, 2, and 3,

above, turbocharge your AI Resistance with relevant custom images,

videos, and audio.

Ex: The Loewe Puzzle Bag [11] is a fav of mine. Visit the page and

ask this question: Do we have custom images related to the product? Do

we have videos beyond a model walking about with the bag? Do we have

audio that summarizes the product reviews (or top product reviews as

product), how about the designer speaking about the signature design

in an audio clip or podcast, how about the models describing why they

prefer the brand?

The answers: No, no, no.

Prioritize a comprehensive multi-modal audit for your digital

presence. Immediately. Then, build a business case for your CFO Matt

to help fund this critical work to reduce traffic/revenue losses (and,

God willing, even upside).

Keep leveraging existing SEO skills: Follow the old technical SEO

recommendations of alt-text, transcripts, and metadata. It also helps

with discoverability re Answer engines.

5. EXPLORE NEW TOOLS FOR CONTENT IDEAS.

Webmaster tools does not cut it. 1P Analytics tools like GA and AA

don’t cut it anymore.

Researching and optimizing for how people ask AEs questions requires

new tools. Conversational query mapping is where it’s at!

Trakkr.ai [12] has a free forever version. I’ve been playing with

it for our Kate Spade business (buy our awesome handbags! [13]).

Great place for you to start to do prompt tracking, monitor your

brand’s visibility, and activate sentiment tracking.

Evertune [14] is enterprise grade. It provides an expansive and

sophisticated set of options: Brand Monitoring, Site Audit, and

Content Strategy. I particularly like the Consumer Preferences report,

your CMO will like the AI Brand Index. (Disclosure: I have a tiny,

tiny, tiny, tiny angel investment in Evertune.)

These tools will focus you on the content you need to prioritize,

based on resolution questions people are actually typing into AEs, and

how AEs understand (and mis-understand) your brand, purpose, values,

products, and relevance.

[Note: We will come back to Evertune and Trakkr next week in the new

analytics section.]

6. BUILD YOUR CUSTOM CONTENT PORTFOLIO STRATEGY.

Once you’ve actioned the advice above, translate it into a

“content portfolio strategy” for your brand. You’ll identify the

type of content to create, guidance on what it’ll cover, and the

frequency of publication.

Here's the one I made for our brand, Coach (for the US entity):

[Coach AEO content portfolio strategy.]

Now, your brand has focus and actionability – no running around like

chickens.

MORE CONTENT.

7. CONTENT DISTRIBUTION: FAAAAAAR AND WIDE.

This is one of the most profound changes you’ll have to deal with re

content.

In my assessment, in AEs the influence of your 1P site/app (owned

existence) has dropped considerably. Your influence via 3P existence

(earned, rented) has increased exponentially.

Try this: Go to Claude, type in any resolution question, and look at

the citations and footnotes. You’ll see more variety/diversity in

sites listed as sources. Now do the same on Google, far fewer.

Remember the much-discredited “big deal” BACKLINKING?

Another cheap trick you could play on Google (which became more and

more ineffective over time). Backlinking was all about “anchor

text” from links in many places.

Backlinking is ineffective, but the essence of it is: We have to have

content about us in many, many, many, many more websites. It does not

have to link to us necessarily. It has to be as multi-modal as

possible.

LLMs seem to learn about you via exponentially numerous sources. High

3P influence.

3P influence is the reason every so called “AI Expert” is telling

you to post lots on Reddit. And, for now, as LLMs scramble for

increasingly “authoritative data” Reddit does play an important

role.

Ex: Here’s a lovely post about the Juliet bag from our brand Coach

[15]. It is not difficult to see why this would be helpful to an LLM

and power 3P influence.

But, Reddit is not enough. Not even close.

For Coach, here’s my customized AEO 3P Influence Priority Matrix

[Coach AEO 3p Influence Priority Matrix.]

And, that’s just a start.

Build your own 3P Influence Priority Matrix. Pay particular attention

to Audience Relevance.

8. MORE PLACES PRINCIPLES.

For AEs, in seeking to prioritize which 3P locations, these are my

initial set of principles (and they will change as AEs are rapidly

evolving):

A: Diversity > Depth: 50 credible domains lightly referencing you

will often beat 5 that go very deep.

B: Go where you find modal variety first: Text + video + audio +

imagery + structured data. AEs are particularly bright because they

fuse all this together.

C: Be where you can control _entity fidelity_: Keep factual

“atoms” (names, SKUs, prices, materials, founders, dates, store

hours) consistent everywhere. Like you and me,😀, AEs dislike

contradictions.

D: Pay more for answer-first packaging: Publish in formats that

answer questions (how to style, sizing, care, comparisons,

provenance), not just promote. Can you believe AI can smell

blatant_ pimping?_ It can!

E: Avoid _thin syndication_ (copy-paste press blurbs). AEs prefer

varied signals and formats, be smart with “PR”.

MORE OFTEN.

9. CONTENT CREATION: NO, SPIKE & SILENCE. YES, SPIKE AND SUSTAIN.

This was essential for old Google. It is existential for Answer

Engines (AEs).

Content creation is often considered a “burst activity,” tied to a

content, campaign, or product launch. There’s an existing long and

complicated multi-team process that follows a content roadmap (which

also took plenty of resources and time to create), to source, write,

check, corporatize content. That gets published. See you next year!

That’s the now a really bad _spike & silence_ content strategy.

My assessment is that in an AE world your influence on 1P site/app has

dropped considerably, 3P influence has increased dramatically - and

that content is published massively frequently. Your multi-modal

content creation has to be _spike & sustain_ to retain relevance (and

organic traffic!).

You’ll have to run 2-week sprints, every 4 weeks, tied to emerging

themes from LLM research, seasonality, category-specific themes,

product launches and refreshes, social winds and whims, etc.

Each company will have its nuance. Scroll back up and see the last

column for the more often specificity for Coach.

Algorithmic updates old Google used to be seismic annual events.

Today, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude have material updates every few weeks,

and transformational updates every few months when a new foundational

model arrives.

_More often_ for your content strategy is life-altering important.

BONUS:

10. TALENT SPARK.

New realities are best embraced by creating new alignments &

incentives.

I recommend merging your SEO and Content teams into a single

“Answers Quality” team.

And, complement the _past experienced_ team members with AI natives.

Both are important. (90% of the replies from my daughter to my text

messages: Memes and Emojis! Incredibly that works with LLMs, they get

her. I struggle!)

NEXT WEEK.

The exciting conclusion of our AEO series.

I’ll unpack the AEO implications as Agentic AI takes over seeking

(robots search, read ads for robots, find the right thing, buy it, get

it delivered to my home).

And, we’ll do _new analytics_ for the AEO age.

BOTTOM LINE.

We are going through a period of rapid change.

The implication is that what works for Organic and Paid will also

evolve more frequently than our organization/team/agency might be

built for.

Agility and speed across _think_, _ink_, and execution will become a

competitive advantage.

If you haven’t started on serious AEO efforts, you are six months

behind. Soon, every month you’ll fall behind two months.

Carpe diem.

Avinash.

Thank you for being a TMAI Premium subscriber - and helping raise

money for charity.

Your Premium subscription covers one person. It's fine to forward

occasionally. Please do not forward or pipe it into Slack for the

whole company. We have group plans, just email me.

[Subscribe [16]]  |  [Web Version [2]]  |  [Unsubscribe [17]]

[18]

[19]

[20]

©2022 ZQ Insights  |  PO Box 10193, San Jose, CA 95157, USA

Links:

------

[1] link

[2] link

[3] link

[4] link

[5] link

[6] link

[7] link

[8] link

[9] link

[10] link

[11] link

[12] link

[13] link

[14] link

[15] link

[16] link

[17] link

[18] link

[19] link

[20] link