Ranking & Authority That’s AI-Ready: 4 Modern Visibility Strategies & How You Can Maximize Them For AI Recognition As Well As Search Ranking
Did you hear about the new technology that uses bacteria to power laptops?
They do say mitochondria are the powerhouse of the Dell…
You don’t need to look that up, I was only kidding, but it almost seems like it could be real, doesn’t it?
Technology is moving fast, and every day the speed at which it improves also accelerates, and I want to talk about a problem that it causes.
At some point, what we’re doing to get ahead online could suddenly become obsolete, like horses when the automobile became popular. If you ask some folks, it’s already happened.
If you ask me, though, we’re not even close. While some techniques are no longer working as well as they used to, typically the bigger problem is that our existing techniques simply don’t work well with AI.
At least, not without a few minor changes. That’s what I really want to talk about, before some folks get bamboozled into spending ridiculous amounts of money on some new strategy that isn’t proven yet and may not work at all.
With the ultra-fast rise of AI and how it’s suddenly everywhere, it’s worth being cautious, because not every new technique is going to work the way it’s described.
Now I’m not one of those folks stuck in the past, “This advertising was good enough for my grandpa, so it’s good enough for me!”
However, I do think it’s silly to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to swap metaphors a little — because we have a whole range of super effective strategies already, and some of them can be optimized for AI without becoming any less effective.
Why would we start over with new and unproven marketing strategies when we have proven, long-term, and simple strategies that we already know and love?
Today I want to focus on 4 of the best strategies we’ve been using for several years already, and how they can be optimized to work even better with AI. It only takes a few minor changes to have a massive effect.
1. Backlink Networks
Let’s start with the basics, because they’re still just as effective today, or maybe even more so with AI.
If you want the search engines (or AI) to trust your brand, you need to show that you’re trustworthy, and the best way to do that is to show that others trust you.
It’s trust and authority all the way down, and the best way to show that is by having positive content about your brand hosted by multiple popular services.
This means not relying on a single host, but a network of hosts, and making sure they’re all top-tier on the trusted list.
Getting your content hosted on unknown or untrusted sites may be quicker and easier, but it could hurt your rankings more than it helps them.
AI uses the same authority signals as the search engines in this area, so in this way, nothing has changed, and this technique works for both options.
2. Structured Data
While the last strategy changes very little, if at all, the way your data is organized online could need a full revamp to optimize it for AI.
Get Christina Martin’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
This can be a little tricky and is best done with expert help, but in short, what it means is making your content readable to the AI.
The problem is that AI crawlers don’t see the world, or websites, the way we do.
What’s obvious to us may be invisible to them — and we want the AI to have all the info at its fingertips.
An expert can help you to rework your websites so that everything is accessible to the AI, and I also recommend re-wording some content to be more precise.
For example, try stating the questions you’re answering exactly as customers are likely to ask them.
When the AI searches for an answer and finds a question that matches exactly, that means you’re much more likely to be used for the response.
3. Hub & Spoke Information
As tempting as it is to have a single website with every piece of information on it about your brand… this isn’t very effective for anywhere other than your main website.
It just leads to information overload and kind of turns into a mess.
On the other hand, you can provide all the same information using several websites to make it easier to understand, for both humans and AI.
One popular approach is the “Hub & Spoke” design, where your main hub has an overview and contains links branching out to other sites with more detailed info in specific areas.
You get to share all the same info, but the algorithms will credit you for several trustworthy pages instead of one, and they’re easier to understand.
4. Consistent Content
Finally, we need to talk about content, because using blogs, videos, podcasts, and other multimedia formats has been a super effective strategy for a while already, and it can continue to be with AI.
The goal here is the same as it ever was: create high-ranking, trustworthy, and informative content about your brand, and then create some more.
Each new piece hits all the sweet spots, showing the algorithms that your brand is helpful, interesting, authoritative, and has all the answers.
However, you do need to remember to optimize for AI by using readable formats, clearly stating the questions before answering them, and using only trusted hosting networks.
The long and short of it is simple: while AI is changing the way consumers use search engines and find new products or services, the way we climb the rankings is still largely the same.
Of course, ads are now less effective than ever, since the AI simply ignores them, but ads were never a good long-term solution anyway.
The same techniques we’ve been using for years will continue to carry us through for another decade, I estimate, and if we’re lucky, maybe they’ll even help to reduce the number of ads we see every day too.
