How to sell AI SEO to your clients

AI is slowly creeping up on search market share.

But it’s not a direct replacement.

Various studies have shown people use AI for different things to search. People sometimes use both AI and traditional search in tandem.

But the bottom line is, AI search will be a very important part of a buyer journey for your clients.

Our recent stats show it’s converting 10x higher than traditional search traffic:

This is not to mentional, most visibility in AI will result in no direct referral traffic.

Success from AI search is less about clicks and more about visibility.

First of all, realise that doing great SEO means you’ll already be doing well in the AI overviews, whether it’s Google AI overviews, chatGPT, perplexity etc.

But there are some things to look at for your clients that will increase the chances of inclusion in AI overviews.

Slightly different to link building, in which ‘traditional SEO’ would lead SEO’s to building links with keyword anchors to specific pages. Brand Mentions involves getting mentioned by high tier publications, in listicles or reviews.

Here’s the ahrefs study that confirms:

We are seeing these getting picked up quickly, and used to build the respinses:

The USP part is trying to get mentioned for a particular feature or audience. For example if you’re the best CRM for small business, that would be your USP. Or if you’re the best link building service for agencies try to get that mentioned.

This is because AI doesn’t tend to order choices for the user like best, second best, third best, or whatever. They give the user choices based on the USP, especially if the USP relates to the user.

For example a ChatGPT user who owns a small business searches: whats the best CRM?

As ChatGPT knows a lot about its users (from the history of chats and building up huge context), it will suggest the CRM that is thinks will be best for the user (small business).

It will know this by looking at it’s knowledge base and web search for brands that have a 'salience’ or USP or context that is associated with small business.

This is great for users, and marketers. But the game is now helping AI learn the USPs.

Start by looking at listicles and reviews ranking in your category and ask the publishers to include your brand too. If you have an affiliate program you can incentivise with this, or send free gifts your product.

You can also encourage new listicles and reviews to be written:
We have a new service for this: https://fatjoe.com/brand-mentions/

AI overviews are reading and understanding brand sentiment in ways that traditional search never did. This means more than ever it’s important to influence brand sentiment in forums (reddit & quora) and review platforms.

Again Ahrefs are providing the data on the most cited websites in AI:

The easiest way to tackle this would be, be a great brand, offer a great service, offer amazing support. This will of course influence people to talk good about the brand.

The next things you can do is at every stage of your buying cycle encourage reviews of your brand on TrustPilot and G2.

You could also join in on conversations on Reddit & Quora to influence the conversation.

Build out a huge knowledge base for your customers obviously, but also so AI can learn about every aspect of your product/service.

The more it can learn and understand your brand, the more confident it will feel about recommending you.

Consider using FAQs or help docs to cover everything, and ensure it is indexable by Search and AI tools.

Again, great SEO is usually enough to get visibility in AI. So I think the base of any AI/GEO service must be SEO.

But you could have an ‘addon’ or upsell to build in the things above in your SEO campaign.

Those things would include:

And there you have it, as far I can see these are the big things we should be looking at to rank in AI overviews - if you zoom our far enough, like everything, it looks like marketing - the things we should be doign anyway.

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And that’s a wrap. Hit reply if you have any comments or questions, I read every one.

Thanks

Joe Davies

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