Redefine discoverability and understand your consumers

Andrew says: “There is a growing need to understand an awful lot more about consumer activity in terms of where they're actually searching.

People used to go on about voice search, which is obviously important, but now you should really be trying to own the answer layer. By that, I'm referring to AI citations and references.

When I type something into Google, I generally go to two places. I might go to Google to ask a question and get an answer, or to help me on my fact-finding or information-gathering journey. Otherwise, I'll go to ChatGPT, Claude, or any of the other AI engines, and I'll ask them for their recommendation.

I'll ask them, ‘If I were to do this, how would I do it? What would be the best place to find information about this particular topic?’ or ‘If I were trying to identify a suitable company to work with, who could you recommend?’ – and ChatGPT is obviously very verbal and vocalised on handsets and mobile phones.

The ability to structure content in a way that can be identified by AI engines and get citations and references in AI recommendations is a massive growth curve for the industry. As consumers, we’re getting lazier and lazier with our approach to things. People don't walk to work anymore; they get on a scooter. It reminds me of the film Wall-E, where everyone's on a spaceship and they're getting bigger and bigger, sitting there and not doing anything, floating around on magnetic chairs.

People are getting lazier in the depth with which they search. You can see this in the lack of engagement with URLs that are in positions 4, 5, 6, and 7. There used to be a much higher level of engagement, and now that's dropping off as the search results are gradually getting shifted down the page with AI placements, more PPC listings, etc.”

What's your personal search decision-making process, in terms of where you choose to go and why?

“I don't put an awful lot of logic behind it because it comes instinctively now.

We need to look at the concept of redefining discoverability and align with consumer intent, which, for me, comes down to owning the answer. That’s what we do at LKOA. We've got a series of really advanced suites that monitor AI citations, references, links, and questions that have been asked about a particular brand. We have something very smart which does that across all of the AI engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, and DeepSeek – all those engines are considered.

We use it for competitive intelligence, so we compare how often competitors are mentioned versus clients. Then, we restructure the content on those pages to bait the AI engines in and get them to provide those citations and comments. Then we can assess whether they're positive or negative in sentiment, good or bad, and challenge them – which falls into the reputation management sphere. That's just one of the many tools that we have.

Consumers are becoming a little bit lazier, and I'm getting lazier myself. If we were to ask 100 people to choose a method to search for a solution, an ever-increasing number of people would reference the AI solution that comes up in Google. Some people may go straight to ChatGPT; maybe those who are more educated, because they use that to support some of their work or studies, and it accesses what is viewed as an impartial data set.

Whereas, Google is being manipulated by us SEOs, with content baited for the search engines. Backlinks, internal linking, tags, and all the high-level optimization activities that are done to achieve those top positions are effectively SEO/SERP manipulation, whereas AI comes across as more trustworthy.”

How do you select the data that is most pertinent for your target audience, and how do you structure that to appear in AI search engines?

“It's about having questions within the content of the website, and it's about having very well-marked-up schema and structured data. AIM (Ask with Purpose, Include Details, Modify & Refine) is a concept where you focus on using very specialised techniques to get the AI engines to recognise you.

Publishing news articles is really good as well because it's new information for the AI engines to pick up. They like recent information, and new information attracts them. If you don't mark them up as news, and you don't have them all scoped out correctly with the right schema, you'll lose opportunities.

There are many techniques, and they're openly available for people to research on the web. What I'm not going to do is give away the crown jewels, because that's how I earn my money. However, I would encourage anybody to look very deeply into how to structure your content to bait the AI engines – and it's quite simple to do. You could literally go into ChatGPT and ask that question right now, and it will tell you.

ChatGPT is working off an assimilation of data from an index of the web, and it's constantly being updated. That information is openly available. You could go into ChatGPT right now and ask it, ‘How do I structure the content on my website to get more citations in AI search results?’ and it will give you a list of accurate recommendations. It's not going to lie to you.”

Can you also use AI to review your website and figure out how to improve your existing content?

“You can definitely use AI to do that.

We have something called a ‘readability analyser’, where we use all of the AI engines to assess the readability scores of the individual pages within a site. We would be looking at the Flesch Reading Ease score, the Flesch-Kincaid grade, the Gunning Fog Index, the SMOG Index, the Coleman–Liau Index, and the Automated Readability Index (ARI). Then, we accumulate an overall score.

You’re trying to structure the content for an eighth-grade individual. That sounds silly, but for the mass audience, most people left school a long time ago. Not everybody went to university, and their reading skills and vocabulary are not necessarily being advanced through further education and constant reading all the time. Individuals reading at an eighth-grade level are probably the most popular demographic to target your content to.

Getting citations is about producing valuable, unique content that answers questions that consumers are searching for. The first thing you need to do is understand what the questions are, and then you need to place content within the architecture of the website to answer those questions. That's how you own the answer layer.”

How do you ensure that the answers that you provide are relatively unique or completely unique?

“In the system we use, we rely on that readability analyser. We have a series of prompts, and in those prompts, we request the AI engine to suggest possible questions that a consumer might be asking. We will then ask it to show us the questions that have been asked around that product and brand. Then, we take those away, investigate the search volumes, and look at the keywords that are being used and how they correlate with the question.

Then we will choose the most suitable series of questions that make sense. You need a level of tact and skill to do that. You need to understand your target audience. From that point, you can start to implement the content in a way where AI engines will actually pick up those citations.”

Would you ever target a keyword phrase that has no apparent search volume?

“If you’re going to do guerrilla marketing and try to create a unique slang word around your brand that no one else uses, and publicise that all over social media, then that’s fine. Even if it hasn't got any search volume at the moment, you're going to generate that search volume.

If you're looking to target something that actually has zero search volume and zero users looking for it, that's not something I would focus on. The sweet spot is understanding what people want to know, aligning the questions and giving answers around that particular topic, then monitoring the arrival and departure of individuals onto that particular page.

You are making sure that, when people arrive, the information they've requested is physically available for them to see. You don't want them to have to traverse the entire page and look for the content. You want to be able to take them to the content and the information.

Once you've achieved that, you need to monitor how long they stay on the page and what other pages they visit. Are they related to the query they came in for? How long were they on each of those pages? Did any of them return to the search results or the AI engine? Where did they exit?

It's data. It's looking at all of that data and understanding it. If you can reduce your bounce rates, increase your page dwell time, increase the number of pages they view, and take them to a particular goal, then you're doing your job. However, if you're attracting what you think are the right people, but the content you're producing or distributing isn't the content they want to read, then you're going to lose that transaction opportunity very quickly.

It's about lining everything up correctly, and getting your ducks in a row.”

How do you ensure that the content that you're providing is completely up to date, and how often do you refresh your content?

“I prefer to create evergreen content, which is content that can evolve and change over time. It doesn't necessarily need to be revised and changed; more than likely, it needs to be added to. For example, content about the Eurovision Song Contest, the FA Cup, the World Cup, the UEFA Champions League, the Billboard Hot 100, or the evolution of a product.

You would have a product page (whether it's about gaming, a sports event, a set of headphones, or whatever), and on that page, you would have the description, the specifications, and all the information that the consumer needs to understand. You don't necessarily need to change that unless any of the specifics are actually changing.

However, you can add reviews and other information to keep that content up to date and keep adding more content that will attract the search engines and AI engines (which are effectively search engines as well, just with a different face) to come back and revisit the pages more often.

If you update the ‘last modified’ tags in the sitemaps and on the page, and do everything correctly, you're informing these machines that there is something else to read, index, and pay attention to. Therefore, reviews are really important as well.

The issue with completely revamping a page is that you're going to be doing it at scale all the time, if you constantly have to revamp every single page.

Let’s take online sports betting as an example. You've got your odds pages that are constantly updating. For every football event, tennis, or any other sports occasion, you would constantly need to be updating the odds and all the information. However, within that page, there are a series of historical activities: winners, league winners, star players, records, scores that have never happened before, different tactics that different teams deploy, etc. You can add all that information to that page, and you can do a review of the year.

When that year's over, you keep that information, and you move on to the next year. However, you make sure that you're structuring the content so that you build up an evergreen historical trail, almost like a Wikipedia page of what's happening. That is how you dominate the space. You have all of the information in one place, and then you link the different terms in there.

For example, if you’re describing the 3-5-2 football formation, you would have a definition tag in there. When you mouse over the particular words, there would be a definition that the AI engines could read and use to define that. That way, when someone says, ‘What is the 3-5-2 formation?’ the engine will know that there's a definition within your website, and they'll reference it.”

Andrew, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Understand the demographic that you're writing for.

Understand what mentions are already in the AI engines for your brand and the sentiment of those, and then look at what's going on for your competitors.

Look at the pages that are working for them and identify what they've done differently from you. Then, do better than them and move forward in the space. Don’t try and reinvent the wheel. If it’s working for someone else, you can do more of it or you can do it better.”

Andrew Stubbs is CEO at LKOA SEO. Find out more over at LKOA-SEO.com.