There are 3 things to keep in mind. First, not that long ago Google issued guidelines on what its AI will pay attention to when ranking pages - those are pretty straightforward, and if you have well developed website with good SEO, then getting Google AI to rank your website does not require any major projects. It’s a natural progression from SEO to SEO+AIO (AI Engine Optimization).
Some practitioners make a big deal of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) vs GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) vs AIO (AI Engine Optimization) vs AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) – in our view, it needlessly complicates things. There is plenty of overlap among those, so create a strategy that matches what AI wants with your resources (ok, this may take some finesse – you don’t have an unlimited budget), then just do it!
Second issue: advertising on ChatGPT. If you use Chatty with some regularity, you have likely seen ads that pop up when you enter a prompt. An unscientific poll we did among humans we associate with (as opposed to talking to AI – more about that later), says that currently majority of the ads are ignored – people don’t notice them. However, this may change rapidly as the entire AI field, and how humans use AI keeps evolving rapidly. Will keep you posted.
As for customers finding you on ChatGPT without advertising – it’s happening now. Probability of your shop being found on ChatGPT depends on a combination of factors – primarily the quality of your website, and your overall web presence. If your customers are telling you they found while on ChatGPT, that means you are doing something right. If they don’t, you may want to look into it – the longer you wait, the further behind you will be.
Third – and you have surely gotten phone call about this – “free AI Audit” that tells you how well your website is doing from the AI perspective. Everybody has one, so we built one as well. Here a word of caution – results you get from those audits depend on the parameters that go into the audit – and those will differ company-to-company. The better the company is at SEO and AIO, the more likely they have an audit that’s useful. What also matters is that the company that built the audit understands the industry being audited – as with everything AI, the more you know about a subject, the more you get out of an interaction with an AI. As a research project, we bought a generic AI Audit tool and we will compare results it generates with what our own audit tool says - might be a blog post sometime in the future.
So in a nutshell, yes, AI marketing is real, but you need to separate hype form what’s useful, and it is not easy, even for those of us who do this every day for a living. But AI is not going away, and it’s good to get your website and marketing moving in the right direction, even if you just take baby steps. As for the “AI Audit” that everybody offers – if you really want one, give us a call at 510-209-8049. We will do it for you for free.