Findability is a big challenge for businesses in the AI era
Make sure people are talking about you online
For 20 years, Google was the key to online findability. Any business or tradesperson that wanted people to find them online optimised their website to ‘catch the eye’ of Google’s crawler. And ‘search engine optimisation’, or SEO, became a discipline in its own right. A properly optimised website meant a flow of visitors pointed your way by Google, and the opportunity to convert them into customers. Now we’ve entered the AI era, however, things are very different. Nevertheless, having your own website remains important.
AI has changed the game
The rise of AI has brought rapid and far-reaching change to the digital world. Instead of listed search results reflecting content found online, AI systems provide answers compiled using information from multiple sources. And it provides those answers immediately. Consequently, as we previously reported, people who use AI tools visit fewer websites. That raises the question: how does a business get found in this new landscape? The displacement of traditional search engines as the main source of visitor traffic means that an attractive, search engine-optimised site is no longer sufficient.
Make sure people are talking about you online
Because AI systems compile answers by referring to multiple sources, someone else’s website is as likely to contribute as yours, and often more likely. Of course, your site was always competing with others, but the chances of being overlooked in the material presented to an internet user in response to a query is much greater when AI is compiling the response with the aid of a ‘large language model’ or LLM. Guest blogs, interviews, social media posts and reviews now carry more weight than ever. For some valuable insights into how to maintain your profile in the world of AI-enabled searching, see the blog by SEO expert Chantal Smink.
Focus on context rather than keywords
It’s important to think beyond keywords. The questions that people put to AI systems are often much more specific than the short phrases they enter into a search engine. For example:
A Google user might search on “Carbon racing bike €3000”.
Whereas the same person might ask ChatGPT, “What’s the best racing bike I can get for riding in the Alps on a budget of €3000?”
The first query will return a list of websites that score well on keywords such as “racing bike” and “carbon”. The second will come back with an answer reflecting content geared to the user’s particular interests: bikes within the budget that are suitable for mountainous terrain. So, for example, it’ll reflect the experiences of a popular blogger who went up Mont Ventoux on a bike in the relevant price bracket.
In other words, in the AI era, keywords matter less than context. A spin-off benefit of that is that you can now concentrate on writing interesting, informative material, rather than levering keywords into as many sentences as you possibly can. And that hopefully means a more readable site.
Technology is still developing
Although AI technology is still developing, clear trends are already apparent. At the moment, many tools are strongly text-oriented, while users are increasingly consuming video content. What’s more, a lot of AI tools still get input from background search engines. So it remains important to be visible to those engines.
Stay in control with your own domain
Ultimately, the rise of AI and ChatGPT exposes a deeper problem: dependency on dominant platforms such as Google and Meta. No matter how powerful a platform is today, in the long term it’s never a good idea to have all your eggs in one basket. It’s still vital to have your own website, your own hosting, your own content and — ideally — your own community. That way, you remain in control of your reach, and you’ve got alternatives to fall back on when search engines update their algorithms or social media platforms change their policies.
