Personalized GEO: How Content Strategy Should Shift for AI Search

So there's a couple layers to this.

One, we're seeing more and more people go from Google to AI search.

That's coming up in our own data from Grow and Convert, the leads that we've gotten.

We've seen a lot more leads come in from the last, I would say six months from Claude and platforms like that.

And then we're also seeing that shift happen in our clients' data as well.

So we're seeing on a lot of the client accounts that we have, while the rankings are super good, we're also seeing more and more leads come from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and some of those platforms.

So that's one thing.

And then the second thing is then just how people are searching is changing.

So LLMs, you don't really type in short keywords.

You don't go in and you type in best content marketing agencies to go find a content marketing agency, typically in ChatGPT or Clod or any of these platforms.

Usually there's a long running conversation.

And usually the conversation doesn't start around, I'm trying to hire an agency.

It usually starts in some other problem that you're facing in your business.

It could be like, I'm just trying to grow leads and this is my channel mix, what else could I be doing? And then maybe the LLM suggests five different marketing tactics you could do, one of which is content marketing, and then says, okay, if I was trying to create a strategy to go get leads around content, how would I do that? Then you're like, okay, I don't have the in-house resources, what other options do I have? And then it may suggest grow and convert.

So just think about, that and then i also want to bring that over into google as well i think as we're seeing search shift from google to llms how people are searching in the platforms is changing and i've noticed this in myself and there's people on our team that have voiced the same thing where even if i'm going into google and i'm not searching in chat gpt or one of the llms on my phone or on my desktop, I'm typing in longer questions than I used to, or just longer phrases.

I'm not really typing keywords in as much anymore.

And I don't really think that the strategy, like the content strategy has adjusted for how search is changing now.

And what I mean by that is kind of everyone's content strategy still revolves around the thinking from the SEO world where you want to go after these really short keywords.

And that made sense in the Google world.

In the Google world, you basically try to rank for a keyword and then it was up to the user to kind of go through the list of options all the different blog posts and then what was written in those blog posts and then come to a decision on the vendor that they most resonated with the product or service that they wanted to try and that's completely opposite of the way that ai search works in ai search it's actually the ai platform is making the recommendation for you And so you kind of have to flip the thinking on its head here.

So in AI search, again, it knows all this context about you.

You're having a longer conversation.

And then the LLM is kind of deciding based on everything that you've told me, here's the product or service that's best for you.

And I just don't think anyone's content strategy has adjusted for this personalization aspect of search.

And that's kind of what we wanted to talk about today is that we actually think that a lot of AEO and visibility and getting visibility for different companies is actually a strategy change.