Ever since late 2022, AI has been the biggest question in digital marketing. It seems like every day there’s a new AI tool or bot that you “can’t miss,” but the use cases are never quite clear. The big problem is that Large Language Models aren’t a single-use-case situation; there are as many different ways to use them in digital marketing as there are digital marketers.
But not all AI uses are created equal. Some of them are completely necessary, and ignoring them can cost your company in the long term—but some of them do far more damage to your brand than any benefit they could bring.
AIO, GEO, AEO
There are a lot of names for optimizing your website for AI: Artificial Intelligence Optimization, Generative Engine Optimization, or Answer Engine Optimization have all been bandied about as names for the practice. However, one thing is clear: no matter what you call it, if you’re not taking advantage of AI search, you’re falling behind.
Last month, Eight Oh Two posted a study that revealed that 37% of consumers start their search on AI tools instead of Google. There are a number of reasons why it’s happening, and many people have written a great deal about the potential consequences, but—for now at least—the genie is out of the bottle. If you aren’t meeting the customers where they live, you’re going to lose potential customers, as sure as if you were on the second page of a Google search.
What Do I Need to Know for AIO
The first thing to know about AI Optimization is that you cannot set aside SEO; in fact, many of the improvements you’d make for SEO matter to AI as well. Here are a few of the most important:
Site Speed: AI crawlers time out at between 1-5 seconds. If your content isn’t loaded by then, it’s not going to show up in AI search.
HTML over Javascript: AI can’t handle Javascript very well. If you want the replies to be coherent, you need your content to be in plain text with HTML formatting. CSS can get you the fancy stuff.
Do not block crawlers: if your bot protection is too strong, you might be stopping AI crawlers from reading your page.
Metadata and H-tags are MORE important, not less: the first thing any crawler looks at, whether AI or Google, is the metadata and headers of your content.
If AI Search is So Good, Can I Use AI-Generated Content?
Absolutely not.
This is the basic paradox of modern AI marketing: consumers are using AI to find you, but if you try to use AI to reach them, you’re going to hamstring yourself at the starting line. The most basic element of SEO is that you have to create content that people are going to want to engage with; if you’re just putting up the same AI-generated posts that everyone else is, why should viewers choose you?
If people are going to your website or blog post, they want to hear your perspective, your knowledge, your unique voice. LLMs don’t, technically speaking, create: they predict what the most statistically-likely sentence is.
That means that what comes out of it isn’t going to be unique, interesting, or any knowledge or perspective that hasn’t been regurgitated a hundred times before. It won’t connect with your audience at all; they won’t find it helpful; and, because you can’t check the sources, you can’t be sure if what it’s saying is even accurate. You’re just going to get unreliable beige mush.
But it goes beyond that. Knowing that it’s unpopular with readers and is frequently not helpful, Google has been screening for AI-generated content and quietly filtering it out of search results. So you won’t actually get any benefit from LLM-generated articles.
Optimize for AI with Opmasis
If the list of ways to optimize for AIO looked daunting, or confusing, don’t worry! Opmasis Digital Marketing has the skills and expertise necessary to help your site appear on more AI searches. Contact us today to get started with optimizing your web presence!
