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Ad groups and tech startups are marking a new era of “search engine optimization” by finding ways to help brands increase the likelihood that they will emerge in the results of artificial intelligence chatbots.
Companies such as Profound and BrandTech have developed software that monitors the frequency of brands’ emergence frequently through AI-driven services such as Openai’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s overview features.
Brands like Fintech Company Ramp, Jobs Search Site Endall and Chivas Brothers, a Scottish whiskey maker owned by Pernod Ricard, have adopted the software. They hope to reach millions of users who regularly use AI products generated as a new way to search for information online. This is a shift that poses a long-term threat to Google’s major businesses.
“This is not just about indexing your website into results, it’s about recognizing large-scale language models as the ultimate influencer,” said Jack Smyth, partner at marketing technology group BrandTech.
These new tools can predict AI models’ sentiment towards companies by providing chatbots with numerous text prompts and analyzing the results. This technology is used to create brand rankings, allowing agencies to advise the best way to ensure that they are mentioned by the model.
This move is because advertisers face pressure from increasing use of AI, creating and targeting marketing. Meta and Google are developing self-service tools to run advertising campaigns directly to brands in the potential threats to the work of institutions and media buyers.
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Some agencies are finding opportunities to offer new services to brands as AI is becoming more common and so-called search engine optimizations are less relevant.
A survey from a consulting firm survey found that 80% of consumers rely on AI writing results for at least 40% of searches, reducing organic web traffic by up to 25%. Approximately 60% of searches now end without users clicking on another website.
However, on Thursday, Google’s parent company Alphabet announced that its core search and advertising business rose by nearly 10% in the first quarter of the year to $50.7 billion.
The powerful results provide relief to investors who are concerned about the rise in popular rival AI chatbots such as Elon Musk’s Grok, and are also wary of evidence that answers from Google’s own Gemini Chatbot and AI summary are cannibalizing the search business by reducing the number of user clicks in ads.
Still, agents are racing to help corporate clients who are about to appear in the results generated by AI services.
BrandTech creates “share models” products that charge brands to confirm similar analyses, and provides guidance on adjusting website text and image assets to better respond to AI searches.
Foround, which raised $3.5 million from Seed Funding in August, led by Khosla Ventures, provides a data analytics platform that allows brands to track common industry-related queries and understand performance in AI searches.
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“Traditional search has been one of the biggest monopolies in the history of the internet,” said James Cadwallader, co-founder of Defound. “And for the first time I feel like the walls of the castle are cracking. This is a CD from the moment it’s streaming.”
This software requires understanding how individual models surface a brand. For example, CHATGPT uses traditional web search and then evaluates a variety of sources for information that is most relevant to users, such as assessing the reliability and permissions of a website.
Adam Fry, Openai’s ChatGpt Search Lead, said he’s more subtle and accurate with questions users are asking, such as “Can you find a quiet restaurant for a family of five in New York?” rather than a “New York restaurant.”
“What’s really new here is that there’s a layer of intelligence above ChatGpt’s model, a layer of intelligence above traditional search,” says Fry.
Meanwhile, Perplexity, an AI-driven search engine, is currently piloting sponsor “questions” as suggested follow-ups after user queries.
“LLM can understand more content and become more subtle. You can find contradictions and find out if the information is misleading. So it’s a much more thorough process than reviewing a link.” “It’s much more difficult to be a target for SEO, because the only kind of true strategy is to provide as relevant and excellent content as possible.”
Data visualization with Janina Conboye
