As ChatGPT, Bard and AI-enhanced Bing have rolled out to the public, the question on every marketer’s mind has been, “When can we advertise in these results?”
OpenAI, Google and Microsoft have been tight-lipped about when these capabilities will be available, but they’ve certainly alluded to their future. Google has already provided examples of shopping results within its conversational AI-based chat feature, and OpenAI just launched ChatGPT Enterprise, so we know they’re coming.
All of us who perform any level of search engine marketing (SEM)—bloggers, solopreneurs, ecommerce sellers and, yes, SEO professionals—will need to adapt our strategy or risk becoming obsolete. So how can we prepare for something we know relatively little about?
Quality over quantity
With Google’s nascent search generative experience in Search Labs, the goal is to make your business or brand eligible to show up in the results. A person asking one question doesn’t need 14 pages of results; they need one or two excellent answers from the most qualified sources. Looking back at the classic Quality Score measure, we can assume the higher the quality of content, the more likely it is to be chosen for the results.
Google recommends investing in high-quality creative assets for your website, which will likely also help your chances of being used as a source by other LLMs. The new technology is meant to support a helpful and reliable search experience, not detract from it.
Context clues
That handy checklist released at Google Marketing Live in May contains clues about how to adapt SEM strategy—not just to Bard but potentially to Bing and ChatGPT as well—such as: Whatever LLM you’re using will need sufficient contextual information about your product or expertise to know when it might be relevant to a searcher.
For example, it’s not enough to know that Premier Protein makes protein shakes—the LLM needs to know that protein shakes can be a healthy breakfast or snack, that protein intake is imperative for building and maintaining muscle mass, that it’s effective after a workout, that it appeals to fitness-conscious consumers on a budget, and so on. It’s not so different from regular SEM in this way.