Get the press talking because AI will be listening

James says: “You need to be earning press mentions if you want your brand to be recommended by AI-powered search.”

Why do you suggest press mentions over other content online?

“When I talk about AI-powered search, I'm talking about Google's AI overviews and AI Mode, but also the AI chatbots like ChatGPT and those sorts of platforms.

They disproportionately pull their sources from trusted and authoritative sources: third-party mentions on the web. It just so happens that a large percentage of those are what we would class as press publications.

It's all rooted in the idea that you can't be recommended as the best if you're the only person who's saying it. When AI-powered platforms are making summaries and recommendations, they're pulling from a multitude of sources, almost for validation that you should be recommended. One of the most effective ways to do that is to get mentioned in the right way in press publications.”

How do you know which publications are the best ones to try and get your brand mentioned in?

“There are a few ways to think about this.

The first is that, whether we're looking at AI overviews, AI Mode, or ChatGPT, they reference the sources that they're pulling from. At least, they reference a number of the sources that they're pulling from.

Therefore, you can put a prompt through these chat platforms and see the types of sources that they are using, which gives us an indication of things like the types of features you should be looking at.

If you are a D2C brand selling products, you ultimately want to get your products and brand featured in product roundups: ‘Best X’, ‘The Best X for Y’, ‘Top 10 products for X, Y, Z’, etc. These are disproportionately leveraged by the AI search platforms to make recommendations on products. We know this by analysing the sources.

The sources are there for you to understand at least the types of content and types of sources that are being referenced. Then, you can build that into a strategy that clearly lays out, as a brand, which types of content you need to be featured in, and on which types of publications.

Unlike Google search (where we've spent so many years reverse-engineering and making educated guesses as to what the ranking factors are, what we should be doing, and what we should be prioritising), AI platforms give us this fresh look at where they're pulling their sources from and where they're summarising from. It's almost giving you a blueprint to say, ‘Here's where you need to be featured.’”

Do you need to search AI for your competitors and then see what publications are being used for them?

“100%. I think there are three main AI services you need to pay attention to right now: AI overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT. You can expand this to Claude, Perplexity, Grok, etc. – the number of AI-powered platforms is growing rapidly – but the majority of traffic and activity is centred across the two Google AI services and ChatGPT right now.

Run prompts and ask questions. For example, you can ask, ‘Give me a recommendation for the best bean-to-cup coffee machine,’ and add ‘under £1,000,’ ‘with a milk frother,’ etc. You can start to play around with the prompts and the questions that you ask in each of those services, and then you can see the sources.

If it's Google, make sure that you are not logged into an account that you use heavily, because it will be biased towards personalisation. With ChatGPT, especially, make sure you're running a search with memory turned off. There’s a little button in the top right of the window that allows you to do that. It’s like using Incognito Mode in Chrome to make sure that you are getting that vanilla response.

If I ask ChatGPT what the best digital SEO agency is, it will say, ‘Digitaloft’ every single time, because it knows who I am and what I do. I have almost trained it. If you run that prompt on anybody else's account, that is not the result that comes up on top.

These platforms have a bias to memory, and you need to remove that to get a true understanding of what sources are being pulled from and what that AI knows.”

Do you think that, by optimizing for ChatGPT and Google, you will also be optimizing for other AI engines in the future?

“To a certain extent, yes.

It’s probably a good time to mention that I believe Google will, hands down, win the AI search battle. As of right now, the two players in that battle are OpenAI and Google. To me, there is no question that Google will come out the winner here.

Google has the infrastructure, and it has the audience. I was at the cinema over the summer with my children, and Google were advertising before a film, saying that you can now search in new ways thanks to AI Mode and AI overviews. Google are running primetime TV ads to educate an audience who is very familiar with who they are and what they do in the new ways to search.

Google have their web index, they have their knowledge graph, and they have now layered in Gemini (their LLM) on top of that. I fail to see a scenario where Google doesn't come out as the winners in the end.

On the way, we've got ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, etc. Claude is favoured by programmers who are using it to code, for example. We will see LLMs become tailored to specialist use cases, but when it comes to AI search, I don't see a world where Google doesn't win.”

How do you go about earning these types of mentions once you’ve determined where you would like to be mentioned?

“This is where it gets really interesting, and there are three core tactics that I can recommend. They are all under the umbrella of PR.

The way I've started talking about what many are now calling GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, is that it's really just great SEO plus great PR. I don't think it is just SEO, but it's not just PR either. Ultimately, it's taking what you say about yourself and what other people say about you, and looking at what comes in that corpus of information that is found from these multiple sources.

When we look at the PR side of it, we have three core tactics that are very influential to AI-powered search visibility. The first of those is product PR. That can be product PR or service PR, with the product being what you offer and getting that featured in press coverage about who you are and what you do. The holy grail for AI search visibility is being featured in the right context.

Links are a difficult one because links still power traditional search visibility, and there is no question about the fact that both the Google services and OpenAI use web search results as one of the foundations when they're running RAG and retrieving sources for grounding.

Traditional search still matters for being visible in AI search, but it's the brand mention – being mentioned across the web in the right context of who you are and what you do, predominantly in third-party publications – that is absolutely key.

In terms of product PR, getting your brand featured in listicles of the ‘Top 10 Best X’ roundups is absolutely essential for e-commerce, retailers, and D2C brands. However, this also extends to ‘Best Insurance Providers’ and Best CRM Software.’ You need to be featured in roundups that recommend you as the best. That is product PR.

The next one is proprietary data studies. Investing in proprietary data studies and data research is the highest ROI activity any brand could be doing right now to be visible in AI search. I'm talking about things like industry reports and expanding white papers to give you a variety of data studies to tell stories from. This is so important because it is something that AI cannot do itself.

We are now working in a world where anybody can go and create content about anything with ChatGPT, whether they know anything about the subject or not, in seconds. If we want to be surfaced by these platforms, what can we bring to the table that isn't already in the corpus of information that exists either in the training models or elsewhere on the web? Proprietary data is one of the fastest and most effective ways to do that because you are bringing in something that AI does not have and cannot do itself.

The third one is expert insights, commentary, and thought leadership, both reactively and proactively. Being cited as an expert, as an individual who is connected to a brand entity, is reputation-building. It's being seen as a cited expert on that topic, and it’s this brand association of who you are and what you do.

Issue comments to the press, either proactively or reactively. Journalists want this too, because journalists and publications are facing the same battles that many of us are with informational content, which is that, if the AI can create it itself, then it will. The one thing that journalists and publications can do to add value is to bring in expertise from genuine experts to add value.

It's a win-win for the publishers, the brands, and the spokespeople.”

Which elements of great SEO need to be maintained for AI SEO?

“If you have been doing SEO the right way, you will have been focussing on relevance and not just creating content for the sake of it – almost adhering to the EEAT principles of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. They are the foundations.

However, we have different challenges with GEO. One of the things that comes to mind is JavaScript. LLM bots are mostly incapable of rendering JavaScript (although Google is the exception there). Therefore, you need to ensure that your content is actually accessible. We know that Google is able to render JavaScript, but ChatGPT cannot. If your pages are client-side rendered with JavaScript, then the OpenAI bot will see your content as a blank page. It cannot be understood or surfaced.

The other one is how content is structured. Many of us have called this semantic SEO for a number of years now. Make sure the content is structured so it's easy to understand, you're using headings correctly, and you're grouping core themes together rather than just writing fluff. To me, this is great SEO.

This matters because AI-powered search platforms pull from and ground their answers in search results, whether that's Google, Bing, or wherever. Therefore, maintaining a strong visibility on traditional search is absolutely paramount to being surfaced.

However, because of the way AI platforms summarise multiple responses, it can't just be what you say about yourself. It has to include what other people say about you as well, which is where being mentioned across the web – PR, ultimately – becomes essential to being visible in AI search.”

James, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“You can't just go and earn more brand mentions to be cited and recommended by AI-powered search. They have to be contextually relevant.

If you want to be visible in AI search, you have to place a focus on being cited and referenced by third-party publications (typically press publications/news publications) in the context of who you are and what you do. If you don't, you run the risk of confusing the AI.

Where Google might ignore irrelevant links, you can end up distorting the AI’s understanding of who you are and what you do. If they don't understand that, you run the risk of not being surfaced at all.”

James Brockbank is Managing Director and Founder at Digitaloft. Find out more over at Digitaloft.co.uk.