How To: Optimize Your Content in the Era of AI 

Let’s start with a quick exercise. Think of a product or service. Any one will do. Got something in mind? Whatever you picked, there’s a good chance that its creators are currently figuring out a way to imbue it with AI functionality in some way or another. That’s if they haven’t already done so…

However you feel about artificial intelligence, and we’re well aware that there’s a range of opinions there, these changes are significant because they require marketers to adapt. In fact, it’s not an overstatement to say that content creators who fail to react to this changing landscape risk being left behind.

Below we’ll cover a few ways in which you should be adjusting the content you produce—and your strategy for optimizing and promoting that content—in the age of AI content marketing, so you’re not one of them.

Appeal to the algorithms (which means appealing to humans)

Once upon a time, we’d try to optimize different pages for very specific keywords. In some cases that meant trying to get creative, shoehorning terms like “best ramen restaurant Philadelphia” into blocks of content using stopwords and punctuation. Fortunately, those days are over.

Keyword stuffing hasn’t been a viable SEO strategy for years, and experts now prioritize the use of synonyms and semantically related keywords. Returning to the example above, you’ll notice the top results (after the Places section) for that term don’t even contain those exact words:

Using natural language that imparts information, rather than forcing in keywords, remains the way to go. And this transition has only been intensified with the rising importance of AI in SEO. When we ask ChatGPT to help us find the best ramen in the city, for example, it highlights four top picks for us. 

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, the first of these is the same restaurant that Tripadvisor crowns as its best:

Despite having an extremely minimal website—its homepage barely has more than 100 words—that doesn’t appear heavily optimized beyond having “ramen restaurant Philadelphia” in its meta description, Terakawa is dominating Philly’s ramen scene when it comes to AI SEO outcomes.

In this case, that’s due to positive review scores and features in blogs and other publications. In other words, backlinks from trusted sources. So, how can you apply that to your own business? 

Try searching for what you’d like to be recognized as (for instance, “best project management app” or “top ski resort in Aspen”) using AI tools, and look at the citations in their responses. ChatGPT lists this directly via the Sources button, but you can ask Gemini what it’s basing its responses on.

Armed with this info, you can figure out ways in which you might optimize for comparable AI searches—that might mean, for example, emphasizing your location or working to improve your Trustpilot score.

Prioritize thought leadership and humanity

We’ve previously written about how we stopped panicking and started embracing AI as a content agency. Because, when deployed appropriately, it’s a valuable tool for content generation, brainstorming, and more.

Gen AI is great for generating (the clue is in the name!) responses based on the training data that has been fed into it. It’s not yet, however, capable of the same independent perspectives or unique observations that a real person can offer. In other words, gen AI tools aren’t good at offering hot takes!

Although AI is more than capable of churning out content, it will likely feel generic or derivative unless you add a little extra flavor. That could mean including life lessons—like this nice Sifted piece from Josh Lachkovic covering his learnings from his failed startup—and referencing current events and memes, or tailoring your content to a very specific audience (where my elder millennials at…?).

The human touch is a vital ingredient when using AI for quality content creation, without which it’ll feel flat and lifeless. Injecting character is what enables you to cut through the noise of competitors producing similar work. When you’re crafting marketing content, think about what makes your perspective unique or interesting and aim to apply that viewpoint throughout everything you produce.

Build intrigue without compromising on clarity

Plenty of marketers have already (prematurely) decided that tools like Google’s AI Overview are the enemy. And we understand that view, since it appears to siphon traffic from external sites by answering common search queries without the user needing to navigate away from Google. Consider this example:

The highlighted text shows an AI-generated summary that Google has pulled from the top link, via Harvard Business School’s website. But it’s very unlikely that the person searching will read it and say “ok great, that’s all I need.” They’ll probably want to check out more resources about how to secure funding, and the title of HBR’s page is constructed in a way that invites searchers to click through and learn more.

While there’s no way to brute force being featured in an AI Overview, it’s absolutely worth framing your titles and content in a way that encourages users to click through when you are. Focus on answering user queries early and succinctly, but create content that builds on them and invites further engagement.

Thoughts on the future of AI-powered search

Although we’ve covered a few ways to tailor your AI content marketing efforts to the brave new world we’re now living in, we’re really just scratching the surface of the rapidly evolving discipline of AI SEO. 

We already know that AI is capable of analyzing the content of images, for example, which will enhance the ability of search engines to check that websites are using alt tags appropriately and determine whether the visual content featured on a page is actually doing anything that reinforces its value to end users.

The good news is that nothing we’ve covered in this piece is reinventing the wheel. The majority of existing best practices* around content production and marketing strategy continue, for the most part, to be relevant today; optimizing content in the age of AI is more about tweaking and refining than reinvention.

*FYI: We’ve compiled some practical tips for marketing executives looking to use AI for quality content.

And there’s more good news. Remember the example above, in which an authentic Philly ramen shop is outpacing large competitors with hefty SEO budgets? It appears that AI could be valuable when it comes to democratizing search traffic opportunities, with authenticity winning out over advertising and SEO spend.

So keep being you and, in the flood of gen AI content marketing output, let your personality be a liferaft.

For more thoughts on AI, and its relationship to content marketing, check out The AI Resource. That’s our AI newsletter for marketing and content leaders, designed to keep you up to speed on the space.