In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore how Bing Maps differs from Google Maps, look at factors that make Bing the right choice for your business, and explore how you can create and optimize a Bing Maps listing.
AI powered search engines have become a major disruption in marketing in recent years. Some experts even go as far as to claim that they will replace traditional search altogether. We’re far from it yet. For example, in the United States, the number of adults using generative AI as a primary tool for online search is projected to grow from 15M in 2024 to 36M in 2028, which is still only 10% of all adults.
Still, a twofold growth in just 4 years is a great result. Multiple studies show a steady increase in the user database and daily use of the key AI powered tools over the past several years. That’s why, in our opinion, businesses today need to embrace AI search, learn the basics of optimization strategies, and implement them in their digital assets, all to ensure their sweet spot in generated responses.
AI search engines are tools that incorporate features of both search engines and generative AI. These include:
The first two are the core characteristics of search engines, while the remaining three are features of gen AI.
There are at least several dozen different AI powered tools for search. Here are some examples summarized in a table:
The most popular AI search engines are:
First things first, in certain cases, AI tools do not search the web. They would rather use their own internal data sets to answer the user’s questions. An example of such an answer might be an answer to the question about their operation methods.
When they do search the web, AI tools partially operate in a similar way to Google and other search engines. They browse the web in search of a website with information that matches user intent. Next, they use different criteria for analyzing website pages to identify the most relevant sources of information.
Now comes the part that is different from Google. Instead of creating a Search Engine Results Page with links to multiple pages, AI tools generate the response based on the processed information. Basically, they answer the question that the user asks immediately, rather than offering all that there is on the internet.
Check out this example of two replies to the identical query: ChatGPT vs. Google Search Engine Results Page:
As you can see, the AI tool didn’t even give any links to any websites to back up its claims. Another important difference between AI-powered tools and search engines is “sponsored” content, as Google calls it. For now, you can’t pay ChatGPT to get to the top of its results. Will it change in the future?
Here’s what we think. There are several ways for software monetisation. Currently, the most popular for B2C products are these ones:
As you can see for now, artificial intelligence tools use an ad-free monetisation. It might be their forever approach. Alternatively, it might be the way to lure in more users.
In this case, in the future, as their user base will inevitably be growing, the developers of AI tools might take Google’s approach (since the ad placement would bring substantial income). In this case, we’ll see the boom of PPC for AI. Learn more about traditional PPC.
If you want more information, we asked ChatGPT about its process of answering user queries, and here are its answers:
Yes, your business needs to optimize content and website for search driven by AI algorithms. Here are some reasons for it:
This section covers the best practices that will help you get to the AI search results. Some of these practices will be very similar to what most businesses do when they build their digital marketing strategy.
Here’s what ChatGPT says about its criteria for selecting websites for its AI search results:
As mentioned above, many of the working strategies for AI powered search are similar to those used in SEO optimization. That’s because AI tools actively use Google or their own in-built search engine algorithms to find relevant and fresh information and generate responses for their users. That’s why you need to work on the high SEO performance of your website.
A website is the basis of your online presence, but just having one isn’t enough. You need to make sure that it delivers an impeccable user experience and provides all the necessary information about the topics relevant to your business and about your company. Overall, we suggest working on technical SEO, including:
According to ChatGPT, it has its own internal web search engine algorithms, different from Google. Yet, when it searches the web, it utilizes similar principles:
It even forms its own search engine results to choose information from and can offer links to the user along with the answers. The AI Overviews use the results from Google’s own SERP to answer user inquiries:
As you can see in the screenshot above, each section of AI search results has at least one link to a cited source. That’s why getting high search engine rankings is very important for AI SEO.
Apart from Technical SEO that we mentioned in the previous section, the following traditional SEO strategies to ensure high organic traffic are efficient:
Speaking of Local SEO strategies, check out this side-by-side screenshot of ChatGPT and Perplexity AI answering the same query:
Social media presence has a good impact on SEO performance as it gives you the necessary backlinks and regular traffic to your website, provided you have arranged regular content creation pipeline. Apart from this, the presence on social media helps your company establish its credibility and trustworthiness.
Keyword research for AI SEO is pretty different from traditional one. AI-powered tools are known for incorrectly interpreting users to the point where AI prompts have become extremely popular. Check out this article by Harvard University discussing the strategies to write prompts:
Recently, the AI algorithms have become much better at recognizing human speech and guessing user intent. For example, check out this answer to the Google-like query about divorce in Canada:
There are 8 items there that include property division, child-related issues, and even post-divorce period. Right now, few people ask artificial intelligence search engines questions in such a manner.
It has become a cultural thing to treat AI as an interlocutor (not fully, but still) sentient entity rather than a machine that seamlessly works for their benefit, as Google does. Humans tend to anthropomorphise things, and AI driven solutions are made to be human-like.
This perception and cultural artifact shape how we make queries to AI tools and thus impact the keyword research for AI SEO. We ask questions the way we would ask our friends, colleagues, or family. Many people use words like please, thank you, and even sorry.
Another reason why users ask longer questions is that the “particularness” of the question impacts the quality of the answer. Here’s an example of an inquiry about divorce in Canada, formed in a prompt manner:
This type of prompt looked a lot like a consultation with a lawyer. We strongly suggest reading it as we made it available here. Here’s why you should read it. It represents a buyer journey from initial inquiry about the options during divorce to the request to suggest a lawyer in Toronto:
It can also give you a rough idea, how people talk to AI driven solutions and how to identify high-value keywords you need to optimize content for.
In other words, you need to be prepared for questions; thus, long-tail keywords are paramount for your keyword research. These are relevant keywords that look more like full-fledged sentences rather than 1 word or a short phrase people use in Google.
AI SEO demands high-quality content even more than search engines, and here’s why. Unlike the crawlers that search engine algorithms use to understand what the website is about, AI-driven search tools process the information similarly to humans.
They try to understand the meaning and then retell that meaning (often in other words) based on the previously studied examples. To ensure the high quality of output, they need a high-quality input.
There are several recommendations for content creation to please AI algorithms:
H.E.E.A.T. principle stands for:
In certain contexts, H can stand for human-centered, emphasizing the importance of content readability and value for humans above machines.
Content structure helps bots understand your content better, since structures explain the relations between different parts of content, mostly hierarchical manner. Here are several examples of structural elements that are easy to implement:
If you’ve ever used AI powered tools, you must’ve seen their tendency to structure texts.
Content clusters work similarly to headers and other elements of structured content. They explain AI powered tools show how different articles and pages on the website relate to each other. Usually, a content cluster consists of a pillar page that describes a certain topic in general and supporting articles that describe different aspects of this topic in depth. The relations are shown through interlinking.
Content clusters signal to AI SEO tools that a certain website discusses a certain topic in-depth. Thereby, they help the company to establish its website as an authoritative source of information on the topic related to the cluster.
In simple words, semantic richness means that your content copy meets the user’s intent and provides a relevant, logical, in-depth answer to the user’s query. This content optimization technique benefits not only machines but also user experience with your copy.
To achieve semantic richness, optimize content according to the following practices:
Some SEO tools, like Surfer, can help you in your LSI keyword research:
Overall, to succeed in semantic richness, you need to know your target audience well and monitor SEO trends regularly.
Another thing that AI driven search engines like are interactive elements, images, audio and video. There are several possible reasons why they have such a preference towards these elements.
Despite the fact that AI SEO tools have natural language processing capabilities, they still utilise parsing principles like regular search engines. It increases the speed of information processing and thus impacts your website’s search rankings.
That’s why metadata and schema markup play as important a role as in traditional search engine optimization. Check out metadata on the Google Search Results Page:
Metadata is added in the page code using tags during on-page optimization. Tags are code elements invisible to users. Metadata includes:
Schema Markup helps robots understand what kind of page they are reading and what type of information is stored in it. There are several categories of schema markup:
In one of our studies of how AI-powered SEO tools work, we asked ChatGPT about its criteria for choosing particular firms. It said that it looked at social proof to understand whether the business was a good choice.
Indeed, it’s an important criterion for people when choosing a company to work with. That’s why even when no particular criteria were provided by the user, it still used it in its analysis.
Social proof includes ratings and user-generated content like testimonials or reviews. Ratings are usually provided by users via business directories like Clutch, social media, or Google Business Profile, if your business has one.
We suggest adding your ratings to your schema markup during content optimization to ensure that robots will parse them. Testimonials can also be found on the rating websites. Alternatively, you can ask your clients for testimonials directly.
Video testimonials work well. Because of the advanced natural language processing capabilities, AI powered SEO tools can understand their content and make conclusions about the company’s trustworthiness.
Success of AI SEO strategies (like any digital marketing campaign) can only be achieved if you set goals and KPIs to measure your performance. This section of the article covers this topic.
When setting goals for your next strategy, remember the SMART principle. Goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
In this section, we describe goals in general. When planning your AI SEO efforts, make sure to specify each goal accordingly.
6 goals for AI SEO strategies include:
1. Increasing visibility (increase the number of times you get featured in AI search results )
2. Improve click-through rate (increase the number of clicks that users do upon seeing your business in AI search results).
3. Build topic authority (ensure that you are considered as an authoritative source of information by AI algorithms).
4. Deliver a better user experience (improve your website performance and UX/UI, create relevant content).
5. Adapt to New Channel (gradually master existing AI SEO strategies and learn new tactics)
6. Maintain visibility and user traffic to your website (regularly work on the implementation of your optimization strategies).
AI suggests the following additional goals:
Assign several KPIs for each goal to measure your AI SEO performance. Here are some examples of such KPIs:
Branded Mentions Frequency shows how many times AI solutions mention your brand. Additionally, you need to analyze how your brand is mentioned.
AI Visibility Index measures the number of times an AI provides a link to your website in search results (for example, AI Overviews by Google, ChatGPT, etc.).
Click-through rate from AI Responses demonstrates how often people click on the link provided by AI search algorithms.
Engagement Metrics calculates the average time on page spent by users that came through AI search algorithms, their bounce rate, the scroll depth, and other related user behavior data.
Conversion Rate of AI-Referred Visitors calculates the percentage of users who came from AI and converted (made the desired action, like booking a consultation, making a call, etc.).
Rich Snippet and Summary Position analyses if your website is featured in summaries (e.g. AI Overview by Google).
Content Understanding Score assesses how easy it is for AI-powered tools to read and understand your content.
Share of AI-Driven Searches measures the share of AI traffic in the overall incoming traffic for a website.
In this section, we discuss in detail how to build effective SEO strategies for AI powered search.
If you’ve been doing traditional Search Engine Optimization and digital marketing, you’re already ahead of the competition in optimization for AI search engines. Still, you need to prepare for the full-fledged operations.
Purpose: Create a comprehensive plan, acquire necessary SEO tools, and study the current search trends.
Duration: 2 weeks
Study the search landscape, current AI SEO trends, and your target audience (how they use AI driven search). This will help you uncover valuable insights you will be able to use in building your strategy.
Plan your next steps, quarter by quarter, month by month, and week by week.
SEO tools are essential to measure your campaign’s performance and take timely action.
A budget will help you use your resources wisely and save on many activities.
Purpose: Create a launchpad for your next phases.
Duration: 1.5 months
Start with an SEO Audit to understand the level of performance of your website. Introduce necessary changes and plan the ones you can’t make immediately for the upcoming months.
Make sure your website is registered at various platforms like Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, Facebook, Clutch, local and industry-specific directories, etc. Remember to provide backlinks on those platforms to your website.
Map content clusters and create a comprehensive content plan. Remember that the best SEO practice is to create the majority of the content over a short period of time, one by one, rather than writing content pieces for different clusters simultaneously. Make sure that you add target keywords for each of your content pieces.
Check your website against the chosen KPIS.
Purpose: Create content for 1-2 clusters and signal AI engines
Duration: 3 months
Create long-read blog posts on a regular basis. Remember to apply content optimization principles for AI:
Begin creating content for your SMM channel to get backlinks and social proof.
Plan content pieces that are optimized for the location where your business operates. It will help your visibility in local AI searches.
Check your website against the chosen KPIS.
Duration: 3 months
Purpose: Strengthen your AI success or make necessary changes if something doesn’t work as planned.
It’s been approximately 5 months, and a lot could’ve changed since your first audit. Study the current search trends, revisit your target audience, and check what your competitors are doing to make sure you’re on the right track.
Tweak it if necessary. Start a new cluster if possible.
Partner with reputable websites and journals in your industry to publish your article and your vision on the matter. Remember to add backlinks to your website.
Check your website performance against the chosen KPIS.
At this stage, you have already mastered the basics of optimization strategies and can go for more advanced tactics.
Duration: 3 months
Purpose: Increase your presence in AI engines for search.
Add FAQs to answer very specific questions (for your local area, for your industry, etc.) Use a conversational tone of voice.
Apart from the regular posts in your blogs and partner websites, begin creating downloadable content of high value. It can be a whitepaper or an ebook dedicated to your insights on a particular topic within your industry. It will lure both potential clients and AI powered tools.
Check your website performance against the chosen KPIS.
Study search trends and begin planning your next year.
Remember, this is a completely new SEO practice. You need to change your mindset to adapt. Often, the only way to learn is by doing something (and making mistakes).
The following monthly activities will help you implement your AI SEO practices and keep track of them.
Optimization for AI driven search is a relatively new and quite nuanced activity. Many companies don’t have the necessary resources to conduct AI SEO in-house. To ensure AI search visibility, we suggest outsourcing generative engine optimization to digital marketing agency like dNOVO Group.
We have the necessary expertise in building AI SEO strategies. We have profound understanding of how AI algorithms work. We can also build a complex digital marketing strategy that encompasses SEO efforts, AI optimization, content creation, PPC and email campaings to achieve maximal effect for your business.
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This guide is to help you get the competitive edge in AI Search Optimization. Learn how AI algorithms work, what best practices to use, and how to measure success. Get a 12-month strategy for AI Driven SEO.
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