Brands are racing to show up in AI search
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Hey, AI, I'm over here. Will you tell people about me? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.
You've heard of search engine optimization or SEO. That's what you need to do to get your shoe brand or your coffee shop or your public radio show picked up and pushed out by a search engine. Now with more people using AI to search for things, these brands have to work on what's being called AEO. That's short for answer engine optimization. So when someone asks ChatGPT, where do I get good coffee in Baltimore? Your brand shows up. I talked with Erin Griffith, a reporter at The New York Times, about what companies can do to make the AI look their way. Humans need, you know, kind of like something to catch our attention, something novel or surprising, a narrative hook, a story that we want to get pulled into.
Chatbots just want pure information. The key is just a ton of very, very highly detailed information that That could answer any possible question that a human could have. So if you're an automaker, you're uploading your entire user manual. So if someone is wondering if your car has X, Y, and Z feature or can do a certain thing, that the chatbots are going to find that information and correctly spit it back out to whoever's searching for it. Or say if you are a pharma company, a lot of people are, for better or worse, doing a lot of searches about health and medications on these chatbots because they can spit out highly specific results for people. And so pharma companies are uploading very detailed scientific reports.
What is AEO and how does it differ from traditional SEO?
studies and things so the chatbots can absorb them. If you are a luxury brand, perhaps, you are going to start putting out a lot more detailed information about your products. Instead of publishing a few blog posts that might appeal to some of your super fans, you're now going to be just churning out a ton of content that these chatbots can read and then make sure that when somebody asks a specific question, what's the best brand for whatever they're looking for, the chat bot will know to mention your brand. How much are brands spending to do this? You know, it kind of varies because SEO has been around for a long time and that is not the biggest advertising category. But, you know, a lot of these startups now that are offering GEO and trying to help brands, you know, adapt to this new AI world are hoping that it will be even bigger and that they can charge a lot more.
So it's a new and emerging category in, you People are hoping it's going to be enormous. I think it'll be one leg of digital advertising. It's not going to come up and replace some of the biggest categories, including social media. And it's also early days. Brands are just starting to invest in this and figure out, even just knowing what the chatbots are saying about them. So it's hard to measure so far. It's very early. Yeah. And it seems there's actually an emerging industry of companies that you can pay to help your company get noticed by the AIs. Is that right? Exactly. Yeah. There's a lot of startups that are, you know, as startups do, promising this is an enormous opportunity and, you know, the next big thing in digital advertising.
And, you know, people are adopting. The chatbots pretty quickly, like, you know, I think everyone has seen, you know, that, you know, hundreds of millions of people are using them every day and they're definitely using them for shopping. And so it's a huge use case. We'll see how many startups wind up, you know, becoming enormous doing this. I think at this point, it's kind of a nice tool that a lot of brands are experimenting with.
How can brands ensure they are visible to AI search engines?
Because I do need to learn, you know, what are the chatbots saying about us and is it accurate? So I think that will become more widespread, but we'll see how big of a category it becomes. You know, I was recently talking to some colleges that are working to market themselves to AIs. And they told me that one thing that they said didn't work was using artificial intelligence to create content to get noticed by the AIs.
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