SEO Is Dead: How AI Really Recommends Your Book (and What to Do About It)

Authors. You may not realize it yet, but traditional SEO search engine optimization is fading. Keywords are no longer the golden ticket to getting your book discovered. In today's AI driven world, context is king. So if you don't want to get left behind, this video is for you. Hi, I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers and creator of the ultimate book marketing tool, Author Launch Kit. Now at Book Launchers, we've been seeing the trend for a little while now. Google search traffic is going down while ChatGPT traffic is going up. And Amazon has also been shifting their algorithm and recommendations to be more based on generative AI. What does all this mean? Well, let's break it down first. Let's start with traditional SEO. People have focused on this for a long time and this is all about exact match keywords and keyword phrases, also called long tail phrases. What you would need to do is find the highest performing, lowest competition keywords and then optimize your content for this. For authors, this meant book titles, subtitles, book descriptions, author bios, and even the content you put on your website needed to be keyword driven so that you would get found by the search engine. Without strategy around the keywords, you probably weren't showing up in search. Now that's not dead, nor is it irrelevant. Understanding what your audience is searching for is still helpful and keywords still matter. On Amazon, the keywords still play a role and it's likely going to be the case for a little while while the generative AI programs improve. But it's important to understand this is changing and AI powered discovery emphasizes content, user intent and semantic relevance. So instead of searching how to write a book, a user might ask, well, I'm writing a book but I'm stuck with a bad first draft. What do I do now? And AI interprets the intent and provides contextual relevant recommendations. Or instead of searching book coaches, a person might ask, AI, please give me a list of the best nonfiction book coaches who have experience with memoir writing. Or if it's mid conversation in ChatGPT or Claude or one of these other platforms working on the book project. The potential reader might just say, I am stuck and I think I need someone to help me. Who do you recommend to get my book from here to being ready for the next step? This might sound daunting, but it's great news for authors who have been producing great content for their readers for a while because they're likely already featured on sites with authority, and that will come up when AI is powering an answer if you've been spending all your time optimizing for keywords and enjoying search traffic for specific keywords, it's time to dig deep into content creation and create some really rich content on a variety of topics that are going to be related to what your ideal reader is working on. Now, when it comes to Amazon, I still recommend you do your keyword research, but also knowing your ideal reader and what kind of questions they are going to be asking as they look for your book is going to be very important. It also means you don't need a book summary when you write your description. And by the way, you shouldn't have been doing that anyways. But you need to speak directly to the reader, help them know that the book is exactly what they're looking for and talk about what matters to them so that when AI searches and synthesizes answers, they have that exact context to pull from. So in your description, for example, rather than describing your book, describe your reader who it's for and the problem it solves or the need it fills. Remember, your book description should be sales copy, so that means it needs to sell. It is not a book summary. It also shouldn't be opening with the first sentence about you, the author. The first sentence is all about who it's for and why they're going to care. Keywords still matter, but understanding what the reader is looking for and why is going to be even more valuable than it ever has before. Do do do do. This is a commercial break Just waiting for the noise to end. Just waiting for the noise to end. In fact, generative AI enhancements on Amazon will significantly reshape how authors can set up their books to be found, and this will offer new opportunities as well as new challenges. Generative AI can analyze the full text of a book, not just metadata categories or keywords provided by the authorization. This means that books with nuanced themes or they crush cross genre or unique stylistic elements might be surfaced to readers more effectively. Even if the author is new or the book is hard to categorize, the categories won't limit the reach, which is fantastic. Regardless, selling well will matter because being found on best selling and trending lists is going to help you. When our client Ben Weiner sent us a screenshot, chatgpt was recommending his book Fever Pitch. I did a similar search and got the same recommendation and then I dug into where it was coming from and sure enough it was the top selling new release book in the startup category on Amazon and that is why it was being recommended. So topping lists and getting reviewed on popular review and editorial book review sites will matter. Creating a Goodreads profile and adding content there matters. Being present on a site like Wikipedia, Reddit or other sites where you're not behind a paywall or a membership and that site has high authority. Those are good steps to take to help your book be discovered. Ultimately, I think this is exciting because good content is going to win, not keyword stuffed articles and niche authors can celebrate because AI driven search and recommendation systems will be able to match books to reader interests based on a more granular and accurate understanding of content, sentiment and even style. Getting through the limitations of keyword search is going to be great for niche books. One thing I did recently just playing with this was I uploaded my recent favorite reads to ChatGPT and then asked it what it recommends I should read next. Okay, so you can watch as Chatty, which is what I call ChatGPT. You can watch as Chatty gives me book recommendations the first round was a bit soft and I'd read two out of the three books it recommended. But then when I asked it to go deeper I wasn't familiar with these books and then I asked if they were indie published and two were essentially hybrid. Then I don't show it on this video, but I asked it how it came to these recommendations and the answer is quite illuminating. Basically it explained that books and authors read and recommended by top tier SaaS. Founders from places like First Round Review, Y Combinator, blogs, A16Z and indie hacker circles were part of its recommendations. It also used curated lists from people who think like you, as in think like me. Product led founders, indie Authors and operator CEOs. It also pulled from popular AI and product subreddits, Twitter X, Product Hunt, plus direct content from folks like April Dunford and Marty Kagan. Chatty goes on to explain that it didn't use real time web search, but drew on thousands of trusted reviews and patterns from books that have stood the test. Because as in its words, you're not just chasing what's hot, you're building something that lasts. Which leads me to what I hope you're now thinking. How to get AI to recommend your books. Well, you got to pay attention to the training data sources. AI models like ChatGPT are trained on a diverse range of data, including publicly available texts, books, articles, web pages, licensed content, data sets provided by publishers and institutions, digitized libraries, collections from institutions like Harvard and the Boston Public Library. It also is using recommendation mechanisms. AI provides book recommendations based on user queries, so interpreting the context and intent behind the questions pattern recognition identifying themes and topics within the training data and contextual understanding Matching user needs with relevant content as you think about this, I think the importance of publicly available information is really important. Goodreads and Amazon Lists, book review blogs, Reddit, Wikipedia, they're all places where content is going to be synthesized and used to give answers to queries in LLMs. So if you weren't already making sure your book is being featured on popular review sites, it's a good time to get to work on that. When I asked it which books were self published versus traditionally published to verify what was self published versus traditional, this is what it did. It actually pulled from publisher metadata from the book's official ISBN registry. This was from training data pre2024 so again it was not accessing the web on this search. It also pulled from author interviews, book acknowledgments and case studies and how they published. Example, April Dunford was written publicly about her choice to bypass traditional publishers to maintain control. As AI becomes more integrated into search and recommendation systems, and especially as Amazon's system digests your entire manuscript, the recommendation engine is going to get really pointed and strong. Books with rich contextually relevant content are more likely to be recommended. Books that are getting talked about on a variety of high ranking platforms are also going to be talked about more by the LLMs. Books that are talked about people who are similar to your reader are also going to get recommended as you saw here. Now this is me saying goodbye to over optimization for keywords because that's going to become and already has become less effective. We no longer as a company have to optimize for nonfiction book publishing because when someone is asking Claude or ChatGPT for their next steps for the book, it already knows it's working on a business book or a memoir and it's going to be looking for the next steps for a drafted book. Good thing we have a lot of content out there. And my book Self Publish and Succeed is very well reviewed and talked about online too. So if you weren't already getting your book reviewed and writing informative and engaging content about your subject to be posted on the Internet. Well, today is a great day to start. It's okay if you're feeling stuck or overwhelmed. That's why we created our Author Launch Kit and our Author Business Accelerator. I'll put links in the description below. Author Launch Kit helps you with crafting compelling descriptions, optimizing that metadata, writing some of this rich content for the Internet and the Author business accelerator will be your author support team and system of authors cheering you on. So go ahead, check the links out in the description below and on your way down, make sure that you have subscribe to the channel and this is subscribe. Make sure that you like this video and subscribe to the channel. Ultimately, let's celebrate. Because if you're an author producing a great book for a specific reader and you're out in the world creating content and getting your book talked about, you're going to have even more potential reach to your reader than you ever did before. New videos every Tuesday and Friday. I'll see you on the next one.