If you are thinking, ‘Oh no, not more AI-related content’, think again, because there is no burying your head in the sand on this one.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about how search behaviour is moving away from SEO to online reputation.
A McKinsey AI Discovery Survey (n = 1,927) reports that 50% of consumers (of all ages) are using AI-powered search, and 20-50% of traditional search is at risk. This is partly because people buy shortcuts and AI is the ultimate shortcut.
I recommend you ask yourself whether your online reputation is geared to meet how people are already searching and making buying decisions.
AI recommends service providers, suppliers and products based on different parameters to traditional search. Editorial content, articles and blogs are AI’s most trusted source of information, followed by live commerce (selling through a live video screen) like Live Instagram, social media, review sites and also the search engines themselves.
The point being that reputation is increasingly important because AI does not rank only your website. It also reads the wider evidence across your entire digital footprint. What you publish, what others say, how often you appear, and whether those signals are credible enough to recommend you.