Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it won’t help you overtake your competitors online.
Nor will AI content repackaging or directly copying their content (and sad to say, we do see other agencies in our field offering both). Here’s why – and what you need to know about content going into the AI era.
At First Digital Media, this month’s blog looks at the best ways to produce content that creates customers. For more information, don’t hesitate to call us in Lancaster on 01524 544 346.
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SEO for AI?
No doubt you’ve seen the AI Overview summaries that appear at the top of Google searches for more and more queries these days. If you’re an early adopter when it comes to tech, you may also have moved on to one of the AI-powered search engines, like SearchGPT and Perplexity. There’s no question that AI is going to be part of how search works going forward, possibly not at the level some are currently predicting but it’s going to be a factor.
However, as yet strategies to build your performance in AI search don’t look very different from what’s been proven to work in mainline SEO. There are two things that seem even more important than before; brand mentions and content.
What is a Brand Mention?
At its simplest, a brand mention is any time your brand is referenced next to a key piece of information that’s relevant to searches for your field. For example, if after reading this blog you chose to pass on this information saying “According to the team at First Digital Media, good content is even more important in optimising for AI search”, that’s a brand mention for us (and thank you!)
As you can imagine, this means big name brands have a huge advantage, being named in connection with their products and services constantly all over the internet. You may also recognise that the example above would be a great place for a link to this blog, and from that you might start thinking about backlinks.
Here at First Digital Media, we think that the way backlink best practice has changed over the years is a good indicator for how things will change in AI search. At first all backlinks counted. Then they were monitored for quality.
Then, as quality metrics were identified and people started selling links, they added checks for relevance, and screened out paid backlinks. We predict the same things will happen with brand mentions as AI gets better and dubious agencies take shortcuts. And yes, it’s very possible that the people who already took those shortcuts will get penalised.
Why Does Content Still Matter?
An argument going around at the moment goes like this:
- AI Overviews and the upcoming AI Mode mean lots of basic searches no longer mean clicking through to your site
- The content to capture those searches is therefore useless
- Therefore content has less value
Aside from the first point, none of this is true. Yes, absolutely, a number of basic queries will no longer need someone to click through to your site. We touched on this in last month’s blog, which was about traffic as a metric.
However, if your blog is the one the AI uses to put its answer together, it shows up in citations. That gets your brand in front of potential customers (so long as your content answers the questions potential customers ask).
Good content answers the questions your target market has. If you’re selling scientific instruments, blogs talking about what a gas chromatograph is (for example) are wasted – the market already knows. They want to know what makes yours the one they should use; what can it do for them that others can’t So don’t write about the invention of the gas chromatograph, or you won’t show up.
But here’s where that whole ‘imitation doesn’t help online’ point from the start of the blog really kicks in.
Google Doesn’t Need Another Copy of Something It Already Has
Nor does Bing, or Perplexity, or Claude. So copying content from another website wholesale and changing the brand names and specifics won’t perform better in AI search than the original version. And in the ongoing world of other organic search (which still handles several trillion queries a year), copying someone else’s content for your own site only ever worked if your website was already outperforming the site you took it from.
Your competitor, who summarised the same points (after all, you’re talking about the same tax legislation) but did it in a way that makes it clear for a lay person, will do much better. On top of that, AI is much more likely to draw on their explanation, so they’re more likely to get their brand featured and get into the mind of the potential customer.
Before you publish content on your website, ask yourself whether it’s actually useful to at least one of your ideal customer types. You probably do want to look at what information is out there already and how it’s presented. Where your page has the same information as a competitor, ask yourself if you can add more. Check whether you can lay it out better, or explain it more clearly.
And remember that your page won’t be used just to answer one question – AI breaks down a search into several related searches it thinks might give extra information. The more of these you answer well, the more likely it is that you fill the AI summary and get your brand out there.
Contact UsBeware the Risks of AI Generated Content
Did you know that Google has manual website assessors?
It’s true! They have two roles – first, to make sure that the pages the algorithm pushes to the top are good enough (a cross-check on the main Google system) and second, to identify websites that violate Google’s guidelines but are getting away with it.
If you’ve ever heard of a website receiving a manual penalty, this is the process that causes one. And by the way – that’s why sometimes a site can break those guidelines for years before it drops out of the rankings; it just hasn’t been checked yet.
Historically, the assessors rate webpage quality on a scale that runs from Low to Highest. Earlier this year, Google revised their assessor guidelines, adding a new part of the scale – Lowest quality.
The description for Lowest quality concentrates on AI generated content, and the decision itself is clearly a step being taken to counterbalance the ‘AI content farm’ strategy many sites have switched to since ChatGPT3 launched back in late 2022.
If you think there’s something funny about Google leaning heavily into AI search while simultaneously marking down most AI output as lowest quality, you’re not the only one – but this is the situation we’re in.
It all comes back to the question of content needing to add value. An AI written piece of content draws its information from the AI’s learning database – most of which is web pages that already exist. By definition, then, an AI is at a huge disadvantage in producing content that search engines will want to showcase. Even using it to decide what topics to work on can be risky, as it may ‘hallucinate’ information – always fact check the output of an AI against your experience if you’re going to use it for content.
