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This holiday season, rather than searching on Google, more Americans will likely be turning to large language models to find gifts, deals, and sales. Retailers could see up to a 520 percent increase in traffic from chatbots and AI search engines this year compared to 2024, according to a recent shopping report from Adobe. OpenAI is already moving to capitalize on the trend: Last week, the ChatGPT maker announced a major partnership with Walmart that will allow users to buy goods directly within the chat window.<\/p>\n
As people start relying on chatbots to discover new products, retailers are having to rethink their approach to online marketing. For decades, companies tried to game Google\u2019s search results by using strategies known collectively as search engine optimization, or SEO. Now, in order to get noticed by AI bots, more brands are turning to \u201cgenerative engine optimization,\u201d or GEO. The cottage industry is expected to be worth nearly $850 million this year, according to one market research estimate.<\/p>\n
GEO, in many ways, is less a new invention than the next phase of SEO. Many GEO consultants, in fact, came from the world of SEO. At least some of their old strategies likely still apply since the core goal remains the same: anticipate the questions people will ask and make sure your content appears in the answers. But there\u2019s also growing evidence that chatbots are surfacing different kinds of information than search engines.<\/p>\n
Imri Marcus, chief executive of the GEO firm Brandlight, estimates that there used to be about a 70 percent overlap between the top Google links and the sources cited by AI tools. Now, he says, that correlation has fallen below 20 percent.<\/p>\n
Search engines often favor wordiness\u2014think of the long blog posts that appear above recipes on cooking websites. But Marcus says that chatbots tend to favor information presented in simple, structured formats, like bulleted lists and FAQ pages. \u201cAn FAQ can answer a hundred different questions instead of one article that just says how great your entire brand is,\u201d he says. \u201cYou essentially give a hundred different options for the AI engines to choose.\u201d<\/p>\n
The things people ask chatbots are often highly specific, so it\u2019s helpful for companies to publish extremely granular information. \u201cNo one goes to ChatGPT and asks, \u2018Is General Motors a good company?\u2019\u201d says Marcus. Instead, they ask if the Chevy Silverado or the Chevy Blazer has a longer driving range. \u201cWriting more specific content actually will drive much better results because the questions are way more specific.\u201d<\/p>\n
These insights are helping to refine the marketing strategies of Brandlight\u2019s clients, which include LG, Est\u00e9e Lauder, and Aetna. \u201cModels consume things differently,\u201d says Brian Franz, chief technology, data and analytics officer at Est\u00e9e Lauder Companies. \u201cWe want to make sure the product information, the authoritative sources that we use, are all the things that are feeding the model.\u201d Asked whether he would ever consider partnering with OpenAI to let people shop Est\u00e9e Lauder products within the chat window, Franz doesn\u2019t hesitate. \u201cAbsolutely,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
At least for the time being, brands are mostly worried about consumer awareness, rather than directly converting chatbot mentions into sales. It\u2019s about making sure when people ask ChatGPT "What should I put on my skin after a sunburn?" their product pops up, even if it\u2019s unlikely anyone will immediately click and buy it. \u201cRight now, in this really early learning stage where it feels like it\u2019s almost going to explode, I don't think we want to look at the ROI of a particular piece of content we created,\u201d Franz says.<\/p>\n
To create all of this new AI-optimized content, companies are, of course, turning to AI itself. \u201cAt the beginning, people speculated that AI engines will not be training on AI content,\u201d Marcus says. \u201cThat's not really the case.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is an edition of<\/em> the Model Behavior newsletter<\/strong><\/em><\/a>. Read previous newsletters<\/em> here.<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story This holiday season, rather than searching on Google, more Americans will likely be turning to large language models to find gifts, deals, and sales. Retailers could see up to a 520 percent increase in traffic from chatbots and AI search engines this year compared to 2024, according to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36007,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-36006","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}