Businesses scramble to get noticed by AI search

What’s Happening

Breaking it down: Firms are changing the way they present information on their websites, so they get noticed by AI.

Businesses scramble to get noticed 2 hours ago Save Add as preferred on Google Sean McManus Technology Reporter AI has changed the way many people get information from the the internet For many businesses their site is a vital shopfront, so losing 140 million visits in a single year would be a big problem. Thats what happened to HubSpot, and the cause was AI. (let that sink in)

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

The Details

Like many firms, HubSpot, has been hit by a crucial change in the way we search the 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 worlds intelligence in an instantaneous way.

Why This Matters

How people find information and subsequently take action is lowkey, 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 site to be seen as credible on a core topic.

This is part of the broader shift happening across the tech industry right now.

Key Takeaways

• Users are increasingly switching from search engines to AI tools.
• “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.

The Bottom Line

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).

Is this a W or an L? You decide.