How Will AI Search Impact SEO? Chris Penn Provides the Best Answers Yet

There have been lots of questions swirling in marketing circles about how artificial intelligence (AI) will impact search engine optimization (SEO), and how SEO and content marketing practices will need to change to take advantage of AI. In a recent newsletter, Christopher S. Penn provided some of the best answers to date.

His entire article is well worth a read, but it’s close to 2,200 words. Until you have time to get to that, here’s a quick summary of his main points.

AI-Based Search Will Take Off — Here’s Why

Penn believes the popularity and use of AI-based search will ramp up quickly for two main reasons:

First, it gives you the bottom-line answer without scrolling through intrusive ads and pointless graphics. Ever click on a click-bait headline and then have to scroll endlessly through ads and crap to get to the one nugget of information you really wanted? Yeah, AI search just gives you that nugget.

Second, it summarizes information from multiple sources, saving users the time of doing that manually. Want to know about current best practices in content marketing or SEO, for example? You could do a standard search and then grab the best ideas from several of the results, or…you could let AI do that for you.

AI Search Uses Three Types of Data

It’s vital for marketers to understand these types and how to develop strategic content marketing, public relations (PR), branding, and SEO plans to take advantage of the emerging popularity of AI-based search.

Training Data

This is all of the historical data, scraped mostly from the web, used to train each particular large language model (LLM). It’s what the LLM “knows” to begin with. In order to make their brand content part of that training data (and therefore part of the results AI search will display), marketers need to do two things.

First, create more content. The more topics you can address, subject-matter expertise you can demonstrate, questions you can answer, and thought leadership you can communicate, the better.

Second, get published in lots of places. Use content syndication, PR, partner marketing, and other tactics to get your content exposed in as many places as possible.

Note that, for now at least, AI doesn’t really care where your content gets published. Traditional PR would say it’s far more valuable to get your brand mentioned in Forbes, The New York Times, or The Wall Street Journal than in the Peoria Evening News or Billy Bob’s blog. AI doesn’t care.

Plus, it’s a lot easier to get published on Billy Bob’s blog than in WSJ, and there’s no risk your content will end up behind a paywall, inaccessible to LLMs.

User Prompts

AI is constantly learning new things from the prompts users enter. That makes branding even more important in this world. The more mindshare your brand has with customers and prospects, and the more often they search for information about you using your brand and product names in AI, the better.

Retrieved Data from Search

This is why traditional SEO remains vital. The better you do at on-page SEO, link building, and all of your other standard SEO practices, the more likely some of your brand content is to end up in AI search results.

Content Marketing is Even More Crucial in an AI Search World

Penn makes three main points about the importance and impact of solid and active content marketing as AI search gains popularity.

You need quantity AND quality. Among the problems in early AI models were tendencies to display bias and even provide wrong answers. To combat this, LLM builders are now curating content more carefully, avoiding garbage-in to prevent garbage-out.

Curated AI models will ignore junk, so don’t produce more content just for the sake of producing more content. Make sure everything you create provides value and quality.

Create content in multiple formats. Get your CEO and SMEs booked on podcasts, and make sure those podcasts include transcripts. Write more (of course). And produce more video; according to Penn, LLMs “scrape YouTube like crazy.”

Always mention the brand as well as any trademarked names or servicemarks your company owns. Tie your brand name and terms to the content produced. Human readers may be able intuitively to make the connection between your brand and content, but LLMs need to have that connection made blatantly obvious.

The bottom line is that success with AI search is less about doing things differently than it is about doing more of and a better job with much of what you’re doing already in content marketing, PR, branding, and SEO.

Wait, Who is Christopher Penn?

He was a co-founder (along with social media guru Chris Brogan) of the PodCamp Unconference series; VP of marketing technology at SHIFT Communications for five years; and has worked as co-founder and chief data scientist at Trust Insights for the past 6+ years. These days, he does a LOT of keynote speaking. He also writes an excellent marketing newsletter.

Content Authenticity Statement

Probably should have opened with this, but — 100% of this blog post was human generated. No use of AI. 🙂