Businesses Race to Gain Visibility in AI-Powered Search

For many businesses their website is a vital shopfront, so losing 140 million visits in a single year would be a big problem.

That's what happened to HubSpot, and the cause was AI.

The company provides sales, marketing and customer service tools for business-to-business companies.

Like many firms, HubSpot, has been hit by a crucial change in the way we search the internet.

"I remember the days when I would search [the web] and there was no good information," says Kipp Bodnar, chief marketing officer at HubSpot.

"Sometimes there was some stuff, but I had to scroll through 10, 20, 30 links.

"What you have now is access to all the world's intelligence in an instantaneous way. How people find information and subsequently take action is very, very different."

For companies like HubSpot there are several causes for the drop in traffic. Search engines rejigged their algorithms to fight AI slop, which made it more important for a website to be seen as credible on a core topic.

Users are increasingly switching from search engines to AI tools. Meanwhile, search engines themselves are including AI overviews at the top of their results and that often means that users are getting their questions answered, without having to click on to another website.

"The click-through rate for searches that have AI overviews is about 60% to 70% lower," says Bodnar.

So, companies are trying to work out how to be prominent in the answers given by AI.

Answer engine optimisation (AEO), sometimes called generative engine optimisation (GEO), is about helping websites to rank well in AI tools, including AI overviews and tools like ChatGPT.

These are built on an AI technology called large language models (LLMs).

Many companies are using AEO alongside search engine optimisation (SEO), which aims to get websites ranking in search engines.

"We've been able to use answer engine optimisation to increase the conversion rate and quality of the people who are coming to us," says Bodnar.

"I don't know how you are a competitive business in the future without having a strong competency in this."

It requires an understanding of how search behaviour is changing.

"Maybe you enter four to six words in a traditional Google search," Bodnar says. "In an AI search engine, the average length is 40 to 60 words. So, you're talking about an order of magnitude of specificity change."

He gives the example of a company that rents motorhomes in New Zealand. Someone might ask AI for a complete holiday plan for a family of five, including an opportunity to see a favourite animal.

To be cited in the answer, the motorhome company might need to publish an article on the most popular animals in New Zealand for children to see. It needs to be written in natural language that matches the questions people might ask.

HubSpot has been restructuring its own content.

The company used to have long articles about its products and how all their features work together. That's not needed so much now that AI can provide that explanation, Bodnar says.

The new structure uses small chunks of content that the AI can easily extract. If someone asks about the contact management feature, for example, AI tools can easily find that chunk of information.

SOURCE : BBC