Earning a Page 1 ranking is and likely always will be important, but the game has changed at the hands of artificial intelligence. AI can summarize info on the web, enrich it with a set of important TF-IDF-generated terms and send it on its way.
But how do you get your novel ideas into its artificial mind so that it might deliver them to your ideal audience?
We know that it’s fundamentally paraphrasing content that was (mostly) created by humans. Google’s AI Overviews, some might argue, are robots plagiarizing humans (or robots plagiarizing other robots plagiarizing humans, and so on forevermore). And therein lies the aperture in AI’s armor: As long as we are the ones asking the questions, we are AI’s primary source of new information, at least for now.
Creating Content AI Cannot
Humans can create content that AI simply can’t. Does that mean it won’t ever be able to do things we can? Not necessarily. In fact, companies like Google are sprinting to be the first to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), which promises to match or surpass human cognitive capabilities.
Still, every content creator has access to a few unique sources: a true personal story, a powerful new stat created by analyzing proprietary company data or even a novel opinion. Until those stats and stories are documented on the web as content, they are invisible to AI, which means they’re also invisible to everyone using AI — an increasingly large number.
The more dependent people become on AI for content creation, the more important it will be to shine a light on the stats and stories that are invisible to it — AKA, human experiences and new proprietary research.
TL;DR: AI is seemingly the biggest influencer of all right now, but you have the power to influence it. And it may be necessary if we want to ‘save’ the internet.
Influencing AI With Your Real Human Experiences
It may seem counterintuitive. We’ve created Gen AI to help us be more efficient, and now that we have that efficiency, I think many have realized that human ideas and experiences are more important than ever.
Here’s just one example of why I think that’s the case:
I came across a Reddit thread this morning on r/mildlyinfurating, where people share pictures of things that are, well, mildly infuriating — poorly cut pizzas and seemingly silver gift wrap that turned out to be see-through cellophane. You get the idea.
This morning, I saw a screenshot of someone searching Google for “John Wick 5,” looking for information on whether it’s in production or not. Instead, they were met with fake trailers and AI-generated thumbnails, unclear information and other forms of “AI slop” that buried what they were actually looking for.
This experience (and others like it), shows us that a web without new and novel information could easily turn into an abyss of AI-generated content that holds little meaning or is wholly misleading. Could that lead to a vicious cycle of robots plagiarizing robots at a rate fast enough to drown us out completely? It might sound a bit scary, but there are things we can do about it right now.
Human-Led Content Creation
With AI all the more powerful on the world’s largest search engine, if we can get it to serve up real stories and valuable, human-led content, maybe we can influence it in our favor.
I’m not saying to forgo AI, obviously, but be the person in charge when producing content. Be the creative mind behind the bot that can bestow real experiences and original thoughts. Expedite aspects of these processes with AI, absolutely, but don’t sacrifice originality. Here are a few approaches to do just that:
Conduct Original Research
Primary research will always be incredibly worthwhile, and you can do it on a small scale. If you’re a business owner with a customer base, poll them; ask your users questions, send them thoughtful surveys. The results you get will be unique to you and your business, offering insights similar-minded folks might be looking for and asking AI about. If you’ve never shared them, LLMs can’t know about them.
Share Insights Only You or Your Company Has Access To
Whether from the original research, existing knowledge of your industry, products or personal experiences, you know many things that AI doesn’t — and can’t unless you put it out there on the internet. Compile that original research and information into well-crafted blog posts, social media content and more.
Tell Personal Stories
There are few things more inherently human than storytelling. In a world where Gen AI is beginning to feed on itself, so to speak, offer it a little heart with personal stories that users can relate to and identify with. If nothing else at all, at least you’ve added something unique and of real value to the internet instead of just ‘more of the same.’
In a post-generative AI world, these methods are how we can lead the conversation.
Off-Page SEO
To get a little more technical, off- and on-page SEO are still important amid this Gen AI takeover. Their algorithms pull information from around the web. The better it can find and index your content, the higher the chance you have of appearing in those trained results.
Off-page SEO — like completing your Google Business Profile and earning reviews on reputable sites like Gartner and Tripadvisor — can do wonders for helping AI understand your company and value propositions. If you haven’t created business profiles on these platforms, you should. If you have them but haven’t made updates in a while, you should do that, too.
Traditional SEO
If you’re already concocting high-quality content for regular SEO, don’t stop. Those words on your blog and landing pages are what Gen AI algorithms are trained on. Without sufficient and accurate information, they could more easily misunderstand, misrepresent or miss out completely on your business’s important information. So, keep up your traditional SEO efforts, striving for quality and accuracy over quantity.
Share of Model + the Future of Marketing (and the Internet)
How do you know where you stand in Gen AI’s pecking order?
You’re probably familiar with “share of market” and maybe even “share of voice” or “share of search” which represent correlations between things like marketing spend and ROI among others. While these are still relevant to a degree, “share of model” is emerging as the new “share of” measurement for the Gen AI era.
Share of model is defined as the “total mentions of a brand by one or multiple LLMs, as a proportion of total mentions of brands in the same category,” Tom Roach explained, writing for MarketingWeek. It’s essentially a way to measure how visible your business and brand are to AI and its end users.
“No doubt some brands and marketers will use this as a reason to open the floodgates to huge quantities of poor AI content of all kinds to try and ‘game’ the models, as in the early days of search engine marketing. Any new metric is likely to lead to some unintended consequences. Let’s do everything we can to avoid that.”
And we best avoid that by being original, thoughtful and intentional in our content. Some people believe the golden age of the internet has long passed, but we’re arguably in a better position now with all these advanced tools to make it the greatest it’s ever been.
Use AI to your advantage in the many great ways we’ve discussed on this blog (including content creation!) but don’t get caught up in its haste and settle for low-quality articles. Use it as a tool to maintain the internet as a place to teach, learn and discuss unique ideas, with Gen AI acting as a messenger of our brilliance, not the acting architect of it.
