Visibility Growth in AI Search

“This covers everything I’ve found that actually moves the needle: how to make your own site work harder for AI, where third party reputation is really being built, what to do about Reddit, how to win AI Overviews, and why affiliates matter more than ever. It’s a long read. Worth it.”

Matt Slater

AI Search doesn't reward the 'most optimised' content, it rewards being known.

There are an almost infinite number of ways to approach growing your reputation that are genuine and are rooted in authenticity.

I'm going to share what I've found to move the needle in this embryonic industry.

But first understand that LLMs will utilise two things to make up its mind about you:

• First party content (what you say about yourself)
• Third party content (what others say about you)

And so I split my thinking in two. While there will be overlap, typically affecting each content type requires some different approaches.

Not all these tactics will be relevant for every brand - the idea is to cherry pick and prioritise, then execute.

01 —First party content

As the brand, LLMs want to use you as a core source of the information it surfaces about you.

And the data proves this, PromptWatch shows that cumulatively first party content represents over 40% of responses in ChatGPT across various content types. (And I'll give you tactics to win in each content format).

If LLMs get asked a question about your brand they invariably reference your site during the research phase.

Your website should be ready to answer the calls.

This is the primary focus, but there are also myriad opportunities to be the cited source of non-branded searches in your industry. The potential is infinite.

Tactics to position your brand

Your products and your positioning: Think of your homepage as a business card. A doorway to everything else on your site: core features, key content, tools, templates.

Your pricing should be clear about what is included, the tiers and this information needs to be crawlable. Don't make AI go elsewhere to dig up this information which will likely be out of date.

Your About page should also give maximum context. Your positioning, your ethos, who you are and what you stand for as a business.

There's some noise about llms.txt and AI info pages. Right now, any information you might want in either of these can comfortably sit in an About Page.

There's no right or wrong here. No-one really knows and you'll find thin data when you do go looking. You don't need to die on this hill.

If your business doesn't want a super robust About page, then build an AI info page.

Just make sure this context is available when your site is crawled.

Topical Authority: You need to be seen as an authority in your space. Just like with SEO. You achieve this through producing content built in well-formed clusters about the areas in which you specialise. A simple theory that many get wrong in practice.

I'll add here that within an article, the most notable impact you can have is that your intro paragraph should get to the point (providing the rest of your article is sound too). Give a TLDR and explain the problem + solution in the first paragraph. Then get into the detail. (This is particularly impactful for AI Overviews - more on that later).

Create legitimate answers to customer pain points (part 1): People talk about your business elsewhere on the internet, especially when they are dismayed or can't find an answer to a question they have.

Use this as fuel for content.

Find threads on Reddit where existing or potential users are asking questions or making complaints about your brand, add .json to the end of each thread URL, parse the content with AI, extract the content and the context.

Answer these pain points in the help centre or on a product/feature page. Wherever is relevant.

Create legitimate answers to customer pain points (part 2): Talk to customer service and/or download the chat logs.

There is a goldmine of content here that again can be fed through an AI process to distill the key pain points and produce answers that you can publish as content.

Announce things, but bigger: Use PR for announcements. This doesn't need to be a huge investment and an announcement can be way smaller than you think.

Having a changelog is great, take this a step further by being your own mouthpiece to the media. Write your own press releases, syndicate them on a presswire announcing changes in features, new senior hires, funding rounds - things that are genuinely newsworthy.

Publish data studies and state of industry reports: Be the source of new information backed up by quantitative or qualitative data. LLMs frequently cite the source of industry data and a legitimate piece of industry research can unlock a ton of things for your brand in terms of visibility.

Not only will LLMs cite you, other websites and journalists will too - creating a natural syndication of your brand as the source. There's a reason why this has been a popular backlink strategy for a long time, now it has another layer.

Yes it's a bigger lift if you are starting this from scratch - is it worth it? Most likely in the long run.

Most brands won't do this, that's why you probably should.

Interview your Founder / C-suite: I know a lot of Founders and C-Suite level operators who 1. hoard a ton of useful insights, comment and perspective about the company and the product/service and 2. love to talk.

Harness these two things and get your Founder recorded or their thoughts on paper. From this you can utilise the content in many ways; Youtube long form and shorts, adding quotes to existing pieces of written content across the site, adding your positioning in the About page. The list could go on.

Employee podcast appearances: In the same vein as interviewing your Founder, there are likely others that already have interviewed them. There is media and content produced by third parties that you can surface yourself within your own content because they feature a senior person within your org.

02 —Third Party platforms

Your reputation online mattered way before AI came along. If you have a brand, people have already been talking about you.

Google surfaces "trusted" platforms seeking genuine human opinions and continues to do so.

AI Search is simply one more interface, except it jumped the line in terms of importance due to the crazy numbers of people onboarded. OpenAI alone reports 1 billion active monthly users.

You don't need to be omnipotent, just focus your attention on the third party sites that are being surfaced the most.

From experience, if you can control and dominate Reddit, AI Overviews and 3rd party review sites (in your industry) then you have a handle on the game board.

These are some approaches to do just that.

03 —What to do about Reddit

Let's address Reddit.

They signed a huge deal with Google which altered Google's algorithm heavily in favour of surfacing "human discussions" — they show up in almost 77% of results in regular search queries and 98% of product related searches.

Then add the fact that (according to Ahrefs) Reddit has its own label for retrieval within ChatGPT and it was used 67.8% of the time as the source of all non-cited URLs across 1.4 million prompts (from that same Ahrefs study) and you can see clearly that it has a significant say in what AI and Google says about you.

(Also tons of people still append 'Reddit' to their Google searches because it's apparently the only site they trust for reviews these days).

In short, you need your brand to be talked about in a positive light on Reddit if you want that reflected in AI Overviews and LLMs.

This is not a place where you can talk as yourself from the brand's perspective, it just won't resonate.

Reddit is a special medium because Redditors are one of the most interesting, skeptical and discerning audiences on the internet. And so you need a specific approach.

Gaining a presence on all of the threads and sub-Reddits that are talking about you or should be talking about you is a sizable task.

The thing is, we never learned Reddit in SEO school. At least not at the depth that you need to seriously operate here.

I don't try to be everything - but I can't ignore it for my clients when it's a core component of their reputation online.

And so I found the solution. A couple of years ago in fact:

I partner with (IMO) the single best and most-under-the-radar Reddit expert to manage my clients' brands on the platform. He's someone I now call a friend. He grew up with Reddit, he's been doing this for 15 years before Reddit was shunted into the spotlight and he has consistently grown brands on the platform. His work in this domain is unparalleled.

If you work with me and you want to do Reddit, you'll get to work with him.

04 —AI Overviews are a different beast, slightly

81% of Google searches now produce an AI Overview as the answer. More recently I've been saying that being featured in the AI Overview is the new number 1.

Regardless of whether you get the click or not, you're one of the brands mentioned above the fold.

The interesting part here is that the properties cited in AI Overviews vary from LLMs. You're mainly looking at a combination of authoritative sites, the brand site itself, YouTube and Reddit.

Tactics to appear in AI Overviews

Intent: Just like with regular SEO, you need to hit intent for the keyword you're trying to rank. This means understanding what Google is expecting to see on the page and matching that with your title, your heading structure and your content. Then, build an intro paragraph designed specifically for the AI Overview.

There are some well-documented intro sentences and paragraphs that win certain types of content. Mainly X vs Y (you vs competitor), Alternatives (best X alternative) and Product Review content. Once I've been able to lock in the formula for these formats, I've won the AI Overview time and again.

YouTube: Video content is where you can legitimately stand out in AI Overviews. Not only do they often take a spot on the right hand side of the 3 cited sources, it can also be embedded within the body of the AI Overview itself. Your video content doesn't have to be the highest grade production, it can be a talking head - as long as you're covering the topic in the medium of video and posting to YouTube, you're in the hat to be considered for a spot when the AI Overview comes calling. Follow your content cluster patterns in order of priority.

Reddit: I don't need to rehash what I've already said about Reddit, it's at the core of citations by AI Overviews - you need brand mentions on the platform with your positioning and sentiment embedded, at scale.

05 —Affiliates

Listicles do matter. They are a core component in both LLM and AI Overview visibility.

PromptWatch data shows they are the most cited 3rd party content type.

And, I can confirm, that just like since the dawn of time in SEO - they are pay to play.

It's important that you ignore the noise about brands creating tons of their own self-promoting listicles. You don't need to do this.

Here's how I approach it:

The list: Build a list of the best performing listicles in your space - this is easily done and you're probably familiar with most of them already.

The offer: Build an offer that really gives them something they can't say no to. These affiliates are getting inundated with requests to be on their listicle, you need to stand out. Initially the economics might not make sense, but affiliates are holding an additional card now and listicle influence is going nowhere - don't cheap out.

The relationship: Build a relationship - top publishers and affiliates can and will produce text and video (remember YouTube in AI Overviews?) content that will get cited. Lean into this.

Your positioning: Affiliates control much of how your brand is perceived thanks to their outweighed influence in AI search and AI Overviews. See this as an opportunity to position your brand - the more context and content you can give to affiliates the more control you have over the outcome. You'll never get the whole choir singing in unison but if an LLM takes an aggregate of everything it is seeing, you will likely get the result you want.

The job here is to strategically filter the most valuable listicles to you and do everything you can for inclusion - which can include getting creative on deal structure.

Affiliate and partnerships has a fresh new landscape that is beyond the pre-existing fundamentals of deal making.

Skilled relationship building and deal making has taken on new importance for affiliate teams beyond the previous outlines of their role - they are now too a part of the SEO-GEO-reputation-management team.

06 —Fin

One thing to remember - context is everything.

Not all of these approaches or tactics will suit every brand. Neither will they all necessarily work for every brand either.

Understand where you are first and then build your philosophy on AI search, then build your strategy, then test.

One of the great things about AI Search is when you're pushing things out into the world, you quickly get feedback on the things that work and the things that don't.

Lean into that and double down where you're seeing gains.

Above all, the nature of your reputation is earned not optimised. Maybe SEO and brand building were both the same thing all along.

Ultimately your brand has a reputation online whether you like it or not. There is a significant amount of control that you have available to you to influence both positioning and perception - as I've made clear.

The opportunity cost is your brand's reputation on the internet, what more motivation could you need?

If any of this resonates and you want to talk about what it looks like for your brand, I'd love to hear from you. And if you want to know where your brand stands today before you build your strategy, that's where I'd start.

This is a living document. I update it when I can and when I have new perspectives to share. This place moves so fast and it's an exciting moment to be involved.