If Gen AI can't find you, neither can your buyers

This video is a presentation by Josh Blyskal, Head of AI Strategy at Profound, at the Spotlight AR Summit, detailing the shift from traditional search engine optimization (SEO) to a new strategy called Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

His core thesis is: "If Gen AI can't find you, neither can your buyers" [00:00].

AI as a Decision and Creation Engine

Blyskal asserts that search is undergoing a fundamental change, driven by the fact that the Answer Engine (platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews) now acts as the arbitrator of truth, owning the relationship between a brand and its user [02:49].

  • Market Shift: ChatGPT's market share is up 400%, while Google's market share has dipped for the first time in a decade [02:06].

  • Intent Shift: AI search is not for browsing; it is a decision and creation engine [06:25]. The number one most common prompt type is generative intent (37.5%), which includes prompts like "create a marketing plan" or "create an evaluation framework" [06:31].

  • Decision Power: More than half of consumers (46%) leave AI search after already making a decision [06:58]. The deeper AI is involved in the buying process, the higher the conversion rate—reaching 85% when users report AI helped with 80% of the decision [07:50].

The Technical Gap: Why SEO Isn't AEO

The data shows that traditional SEO strategies do not translate effectively to AI search:

  • Low Overlap: An experiment across 1,000 prompts showed that only 19% of results from Google's traditional Search Engine Results Page (SERP) overlapped with ChatGPT's results. This means 81% of traditional strategies may not be successful in AI search [05:25].

  • Weak Correlation: There is only a 5% correlation between a website's traffic and its likelihood of being cited by an AI [09:42].

  • Inverse Backlinks: Sites with fewer backlinks often receive more citations, indicating an inverse relationship between backlinks and AI citability [09:50].

Introducing WebGPT

Optimization must target the AI's internal decision-maker, a tool in ChatGPT called WebGPT. Its sole purpose is to decide what pages to cite and what content will best answer the user's question. Optimizing for AEO means optimizing for WebGPT [04:17].

Profound, AEO, WebGPT, Generative Intent, Semantic Chunks, Recency Bias, Brand CitationFrancesca Tabor