We all know that being found online is a must for every business or organisation.

If that person is looking for a product or a service that you can provide, then this is a lead with serious intent that you want coming to your website. If they see what they like when they get there, hopefully you will have a paying customer!

Our trusted approach here was to optimise your website (Search Engine Optimisation or SEO), using good, solid practices to ensure your website would show up in the relevant searches.

This is a combination of technical best practice (website build, speed, links, protocol) and ensuring that the content throughout the site is rich with relevant copy (in the right places) for the search engine to believe that your website is a great solution for the person doing the searching.

Google changes their search algorithms constantly, which means we are constantly tracking search performance and updating how we optimise our client websites accordingly.

To take “chance” out of the mix we would typically implement a Google Ads campaign to ensure that the relevant traffic will always find the client website, even though it is always better if the client doesn’t have to pay for clicks.

Everything that I have said above still applies, but now we have many people using AI as part of their search routine (there are 900 million Chat GPT users) – it is important that you are aware of how this is different and what you need to do about it.

AI Search

While it is still early days, we do know that AI search is broader than normal Google search but it produces fewer recommendations. 

You need to make sure that you are included in those fewer results.

While Google search will quickly interrogate its database of all of the websites and look for those matching keywords, AI search will look broader and look for other websites (typically online media outlets) that provide more substantial evidence that your website is the best result.

For example: the hotel that appears in an article about the best hotels for business travellers in Dublin is more likely to be the one that Chat GPT recommends if you were to search for best business hotels.      

What can you do to improve your AI Search Results?

We are recommending a few simple things:

1. Your PR game is now extremely important – AI will value all of those positive mentions in online publications (this is great for our industry!!). As well as being great for AI search these articles are brilliant for your business – the 3rd party verification that AI uses is exactly the same as what us “humans” use to assess if a place is good or not!
2. Your web content is more important than ever – this can no longer be just about using the right keywords in the right places for SEO (it is still important), but it must also be closely aligned with the intent of the user. If it is a business hotel then make that extremely clear in all of your content – don’t be all things to everyone (which again is good practice anyhow)    
3. Don’t abandon your SEO good practice as this still applies, it is now just another essential part of your broader digital marketing mix

While we might get the shivers about AI and how it is going to change search, maybe we can take some relief in the fact that they want it to be more human, so maybe we should follow that lead too!

Greg Canty 

Greg Canty is the Managing Partner of Fuzion and he Heads up the Digital department.