Why This AI SEO Survey Matters

Meredith's Husband 0:34

If you're wondering what you can do to help get your website, your brand mentioned more often in AI searches, I have a list of 10 factors that will help you appear more often, according to a survey that was recently done asking professional SEOs what is helping their clients the most in terms of getting mentioned in AI search. Okay, so this was a survey that was done, I believe, of 1,400 professional SEOs. And although the source of this survey, the people doing it, I would say, are not like a high authority company source in the SEO world, that this survey is getting attention from those high authority type companies in the SEO world. So I think it's it's worth talking about. So what I'm going to do is briefly list this, these 10 factors, give a little bit of translation where I think it's needed, provide a summary at the end, both kind of my own opinion and what other people are saying about this survey.

The Top Factors That Drive Mentions

Meredith's Husband 1:32

All right. So according to this survey, the number one most impactful thing that you can do to appear more often in an AI in AI searches is your AI crawl access and snippet eligibility. Now, that's kind of a mouthful. And when I first saw this survey, I was like, well, duh. I mean, that's kind of like saying if you want to get more business through your website, then the first thing that you need to do in order to do that is have a website. Like, yes, it kind of goes without saying. And that's what kind of led me to uh figure out how this survey was done. The survey, they sent they sent uh a list of factors to people and asked those people, the recipients of the survey, the SEO professionals, to rank those factors to give each one a score. So this was not an open-ended question to professional SEOs asking what's most important. And if this question were included in that list, well then yes, duh, of course, it is the most important. If your website is not allowing access to AI, then you're not going to show up in AI searches. That seems like kind of a given. And it's pretty rare, in fact, you would have to put some effort into making your site not accessible to AI in order for that to do. So although it is ranked at number one, I would say 99.9% of us are not going to have to worry about that one. Number two is what they call the query answer match. So, how specifically does the content on your site answer whatever question or questions are being asked in AI? And yes, absolutely, I would agree with this. I've seen this firsthand for my clients doing some keyword research to figure out what people are searching for and what they're asking, and then answering those specific questions on your website almost immediately results in getting more impressions and AI searches. And this is something I talk about in the new AI and SEO crash course on my site, which is now live. If you've been waiting for that, it's live. If you had access to the previous version, you now have access to the new version. But this is one of the things that we talk about, that I talk about in that crash course. Okay, that's number two. Number three is brand entity in LLM memory. So what this means is basically if your brand is big enough so that it was trained or it was used in training an AI model, then yes, you're going to appear more often. Now, most of us don't have your entity, your company needs to be pretty big and I would say have a pretty authoritative reputation in order to be used to train like the new version of Chat GPT or Gemini, et cetera. So this is probably not going to be an option for most of us because we're not managing websites that are used to train those AI models. Okay, so that's number three. Number four is citable and specific facts. This is another one I would agree with. Absolutely. And another thing I talk about in the AI and SEO crash course is including facts, figures, uh, things that AI cannot make up on its own, or at least it's not supposed to make up facts and figures. So when you have those facts, figures, name, dates, any sort of really factual information with actual facts that can be cited, yeah, that does help improve your visibility in AI. Okay, that's number four. Number five, it's called organic fan out coverage rankings. And what this means, this is kind of overlapping in my opinion. Uh, what this means is like, how well does your site already rank for related questions? So this applies to ranking that exists in Google already, not necessarily in AI. You can't really, there are no rankings in AI. So, what this is talking about is how often does your site appear in Google for relate for questions related to the whatever question is being asked in AI. Okay, that to me says you're kind of more of an authority on that topic. This goes hand in hand with several of the others on this list. That was number five, and it goes hand in hand with the next one, number six, organic search ranking. And I've said this many times, like something I cover at length in the crash course. If you want to be in AI search results, if you want your brand, your website to be mentioned when people are using AI, you gotta have good organic rankings. So, and this and Google says this also. So, one of the few things that Google says is if you want to be in AI results, you gotta be in the index. You got to have good SEO first. Okay, that's number six. Number five and six, you can see, I think are pretty closely related. Number seven is called unique first party information. So this is information that you have that nobody else had. So, did you do a survey like this one? If so, something like that, and that's probably honestly why these guys did this survey, something like that is going to help you appear more often in AI, having information that is your own and not just easily duplicated. So think of when you're blogging, if you're creating a blog and it's like how to photograph XYZ, or top 10 tips to photograph XYZ. Uh, yeah, that blogs like that are a dime a dozen. There's probably dozens, if not hundreds, or thousands of those. So you need to have something very unique to your list that will separate it from the others. And this is important. It's incre I see this becoming increasingly important for SEO just in general, including AI. And this also, I think, this is number seven that overlaps with one of the other ones that we saw here. That was number four, the citable and specific facts. Those are are kind of very closely related. I don't even know why they separated those out in this survey, to be honest. But that's number seven. Number eight is called cross-web consensus and corroboration. So that just means your reputation. Are there a bunch of other websites talking about your business and your website? If so, are they saying good things or are they saying bad things? AI can tell that sort of sentiment, especially if you know it's gonna look at places like you know, Google reviews, Yelp reviews, things like that. And if you have a very well-reviewed uh business on those sites, that that's gonna do well for you in AI search results. Number nine, the source and publisher reputation. I think this one is overlaps with at least a couple of the others that we've talked about here. And it's really like what I just discussed, basically. It's what you can do as a business owner. You can't really control your reputation inside AI, but you can control the reputation that's out there on the web. And that's where AI is going to be getting that information. Same is true for Google and SEO. Okay, that's number nine. Number nine, number 10 is extractable content structure. This is a big one. I think this one should have been higher on the list. And this is another thing that I talk about in the AI. I talk about really all of these in the AI crash course, but this one in particular is about how easy is it for AI to look at content on your website and use it in its own answers. Okay. And to do that, you want to basically structure your content similarly to how AI structures their answers. Okay, that's going to make it easier for AI to parse that information, to grab info from your website and use it in its own answers. That's number 10.

What Probably Does Not Move The Needle

Meredith's Husband 8:59

Now, there are some additional factors here, but we're now we're getting into the ones that people are basic SEO professionals are saying, yeah, that's really not important. And specifically, I just want to mention the last two on the list: structured data and the LLMS.txt file. So those are things that initially SEOs were thinking, oh, this is going to be really important for AI search. And we really see, as time goes on, very little evidence for that. That's they don't seem to be very big factors. Yeah, they probably matter a little bit, but like I say in the AI crash course, yeah, if you can do them easily, but do it absolutely. There's no harm in doing it, but they're not going to be that much help either. And they're kind of technical. So they might be difficult to do, and in that case, really not worth it. And in the crash course, I talk about uh when how to how to tell. Specifically, if you're on WordPress, then these things are possible and then how you want to go about it. Okay, so those are the the top 10, actually top 12 uh ranking factors to help you appear more often in AI search.

The Real Takeaways And What Changes

Meredith's Husband 10:06

My thought on this is that taken as a whole, yeah, not bad. I think this is good advice, but don't drill down into the specifics here and take these in exact order and think this must be done because it's ranked above this other factor. I don't think that's the case. It's also, you know, we're kind of early on in this process. Optimizing for AI is relatively new to something like SEO. And these things are probably going to change. And that was sort of echoed. One of my favorite comments here in this survey, they'd asked, you know, these other these 1400 professionals that they surveyed. They said, What are your thoughts on this? And one of my favorite comments was from a guy who works at HubSpot, and he said, Yeah, this is going to age pretty poorly. Meaning whatever we answer here, we're going to look back a year from now or two or six months or two days from now and think, okay, um, yeah, we we really didn't know what we were talking about. And I think there is some element of that here. I also don't think that the questions that were asked are really that great, to be honest. I think they could have been asked in a way that is a little more useful to you as a business owner. Like, what are you actually going to sit down and do to your website? Like the issue about an LL, an AI model, an LLM, already having info and being retrained with information about your business. Yeah, that really helps, but how do you do that? That's very difficult to do, not something you can do quickly. The things that I think you really can take away from this and the comments from other, the other, the SEOs who were surveyed here, uh, most of them agree with this. Number one, there's a big overlap between SEO and AI. If you want to have your website appearing in AI, you got to have good SEO. Like that's the bottom line. And I've seen that with my clients, I've seen that with students. If you're doing well in SEO, it just kind of naturally carries over and you see that you're going to be mentioned more often in AI. Number two, having specific citable information, both in terms of like including facts and figures and structuring your content in a way that is going to make it easier for AI to use your website in its own answers. I've seen that with my clients make a big impact on how often they get mentioned in AI searches or AI search results. All

Practical Next Steps And Closing

Meredith's Husband 12:30

right. I hope this is helpful. If you want some more specific tactical advice on things you actually do on your website, like how do you implement these things? I cover that sort of stuff in that crash course that I mentioned. There's about two and a half hours of video tutorials there, so I can't cover it all here, but this kind of gives you the gist of it. All right. I hope it helps.