The #1 MISTAKE You're Making with AI Search and Listicles

Did you know that listicles drive 9 in 10 third-party mentions in AI search?

9 in 10?

Yeah.

So the latest—

90%? So third-party sources drive 85% of brand discovery in AI search. So AirOps did this study, okay? Listicles drive 9 in 10, so 90% of third-party mentions in AI search. Product pages and homepages drive 26% of first-page visibility. 68% of brand mentions are often unique to a single AI model. Okay, you got this over here, right?

I knew the 9 in 10.

Yeah, which is high.

But here's the problem with listicles. I actually did a presentation on this 3 days ago.

Where were you 3 days ago?

I was here. It was a virtual presentation for a private equity firm. The problem with listicles right now, let's actually use ChatGPT for example. Right now, if I want to be the best camera company, right? The best camera for a YouTube video or whatever. If I create tons of listicles, the best camera for YouTube videos, best camera for Instagram videos, the best camera for a podcast, best camera for a video commercial, and I keep breaking them all down. The problem is, is if I put them on junk sites, ChatGPT cites them most of the time and you start ranking really high.

Yep.

It's just a ton of spam.

Yep.

And that's how Google was, right? And I'm giving a hypothetical. I'm not saying I'm actually creating that type of content, but if you look at it, it's just a bunch of spam. I believe ChatGPT, not now, But within the next 12 months, we'll start refining their algorithm, just like how they don't cite Reddit as much because Reddit isn't as high quality. And, you know, if you look at the same example, when Eric Googled NP Digital, it was my company name, LinkedIn name, and then it was someone who wasn't happy after they interviewed with the company. I didn't read it all, but they probably didn't get the job.

Which is not a good result.

It's not a good result. Yeah. But Forget me and my image. That's not what really people are looking for when they search NP Digital. Would you agree with that? Majority of the time, it's not a good experience. Yeah.

That wasn't— that result should have popped up if someone was searching for like employee reviews.

Yes. Not for trying to work with the company. This person was trying to get a job at the company and they weren't happy. They could say they weren't happy or whatnot. Maybe there's some stuff we can improve, but they still did interview with the company and it didn't work out. But the point I'm getting at here is algorithms shift and adjust. Their algorithm on ChatGPT, I believe, will start looking at industry publications and won't look at Joe the plumber talking about the best marketing tools and go off of what Joe the plumber is saying. So I think everyone just creating a ton of spammy guest blog posts and just publishing them all over the web with listicles of here are the top 3 ad agencies and all this, I don't think that's going to be effective.

Yeah. So this is interesting because The old days of SEO, going back to what Neil said, we did an episode on this actually last week, right? It's like Lycos, Excite back in the day, you just did the hidden text spam at the very bottom, right? Or hidden in back of the page. Marketers tend to ruin everything.

Yes.

And so when a new channel comes out, if there's a way to game it, they're going to game it. The other thing is, if you're OpenAI or you're Google, you have to clean things up from a spam perspective. Otherwise, that deteriorates your product quality. And so they're incentivized to fight against spammers, right? And so I'm saying like, those of you that are doing this right now, it might be working right now, But for sure, long-term, it's not going to work out that way. Neil and I have been playing, we've been playing this game for quite a while and we've seen the different movies here. History rhymes.

But when I was doing that presentation, there was other people on my panel. So we each talked for 10 minutes.

It was a panel.

Yeah, but we talked with slides for 10 minutes and then we did Q&A. One of the people, I won't mention the private equity firm or the software, is one of the most well-known softwares for tracking AI visibility. They showed an example of a company that's doing really well in their space and they're talking about their product and how they release on their own blog, that company, like literally they release on their own blog a ranking list of the best products in their space. And they of course mention themselves number 1.

Mm-hmm.

And they showcase how once they did that, they started getting included more in ChatGPT for everything.

Yeah. As if it's a revelation.

Yes.

Yeah.

But that to me is no good. Like if you did that on Google.

Yeah.

Google will be like, this is junk.

Yeah.

We shouldn't end up ranking the site. And eventually ChatGPT will adjust their algorithm for the same reason.

Did you get to disagree on that panel?

I did not get to disagree on that panel.

That would've been great.

It was more so we each had 10 minutes of talk time and then people asked us questions and whoever it was relevant for, we would answer that question.

See, this is the cool thing about panels. At the end of it, it should have been like, hey, did anybody say something you disagree with? And then it would've been more exciting. But the reality is we do disagree with that because the fact that they're saying that means they actually don't understand the SEO game. Like how this has moved.

They don't, but they have good software for AI visibility and they're well known for that, but their background isn't in SEO. So they, I'm not saying they're bad. It's just, they don't have the experience that you and I do for doing this for 20+ years and knowing how algorithms adjust.

Yep. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies, They're a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. I think our takeaway for this one, honestly, guys, is if you focus on doing the black hat things in a white hat way, that always works better. So we're not saying the black hat stuff doesn't work. It works, right? But if you do it in white hat, like back in the day, remember last week I talked about link wheels, which is where you have a bunch of spammy links that point towards these Web2 properties that then link to your site. How about you just have a bunch of good relationships that you build over time from high-quality websites, high-quality publications that link to yours? That's a better signal that lasts for the long term. And that's kind of what you're talking about too. You want to, you want to have high-quality publications. And even Eric Schmidt, like this doesn't change. Eric Schmidt said this, the internet is what? It's a cesspool of poo-poo, right? And the brands will rise to the top.

Yes.

It's because the brands spend more time building their brand, building quality.

Dude, look at Reddit. Reddit cited a lot less on ChatGPT. They're getting less traffic from Google and ChatGPT, I believe, because their stock started taking a tank. Was it just ChatGPT or was it also Google? I think it was both.

I don't know.

But either, I know for sure it was at least ChatGPT because we have a graph on that. The problem with Reddit is marketers started spamming the crap out of Reddit because like, oh, ChatGPT, you want to end up pulling from this? No problem, we'll just spam the crap. And Tim Soulo from Ahrefs, had a funny LinkedIn thread because I think Reddit made some announcements like, hey, marketers have been putting messages, self-promoting, spamming. And I think Tim Soulo said something that was cheeky. To me, it was funny. I loved it. And he's just like, actually, it's just getting started, which is spot on, right? Because if there's one signal that's working—

Yeah.

Eric and I are not in this phase of our career, so we don't believe in Spamming is just too short-sighted. And 20-plus years ago, we tried the spamming approaches. We just know it's not long-term. Marketers will just spam the crap out of something because you can make not just some money, you can make millions and millions of dollars in profit. It may only last 2, 3 years, but A, your cost was very little to nothing.

And that's the lesson. Human nature never changes. That's why you want to study history, right? You want to study human nature because if there's an easy way to make money, people are to go hard on that, right?

Yes.

And like, I don't know if you've seen those memes where it's like the easy way out, that line is like super, the line is very long, but it's like the hard way, the long-term way, there's only like one person there.

Yes.

That's how this is, right? And so look, it's, I would encourage you all, if you're just getting started on this in your career, spam away, because then you'll realize you'll get the repercussions from it and then you get punched in the face a couple of times and then you stop doing it because that's how we learn over time.

Yes.

Yeah.