George Kao explains how to get AI assistants to recommend your content. AI still crawls websites as primary sources, but also weighs social signals from Reddit and Twitter heavily. Unique perspectives and human-made videos with collaborators stand out against mass-produced AI content.
A great question about what's happening with Google searches sending people to our websites, or not anymore, since Google search, as you know, when you do it, the default is now the AI overviews. The AI answers the questions based on, you know, the first page of search results. So people often don't need to go to websites anymore. They just are happy with whatever Google said, and they're continuing on with their day. And the questioner said, well, so therefore something like YouTube is really what is worth our effort now, because when people Google, they oftentimes do see YouTube results come up, you know, besides— and the YouTube results are a bit more visual, so they might click on a YouTube video to go watch it, and then If it's, you know, it's because it's multimedia, it's more likely to interest them in who you are and therefore, you know, want more information about you, et cetera. Of course, we also have to take into account that many people are, you know, they shifted away from using Google to using ChatGPT or using Meta Muse or any of the number of Grok, whatever, whatever AIs that they're used to using to find information. And it's just gonna be more and more the case, right? Like, it's, this is welcome to the new world. Like, it's, people are gonna become more and more used to using their AI assistants instead of Googling and having to look for websites and clicking on website. Oh, that's not the right site. And say, okay, so we have to be understand that, okay, We want, we want to— sorry, I got interrupted by something. We want AI assistance to refer people to us. And many people have already begun discovering when they ask their new clients, how did you find me? It's not unusual now to say ChatGPT or Google Gemini or, you know, Claude or whatever. Okay? And I've been getting AI leads since 2023. Yeah. As early as, you know, the first year that ChatGPT was here. Anyway, so then, so really the question is, it's a 2-part question. One, right? How do you get AI to recommend you? Right? And secondly, Is it worth building a website anymore? And should you just use something like YouTube? Okay. Right. So let me answer the first question. How do you get AI to recommend you? You have to first understand where does AI get its information? It gets its information mostly, it respects most the information from a couple of sources. One is public webpages. public web pages. In other words, your website. So by going through the effort of putting content on your website, you are almost certainly getting that information into the data training so that when someone uses ChatGPT, you know, in 6 months, it'll say, oh yeah, go check out the site because that's where I got the information, or this is— and but the— but then the question is, And I'm going to be teaching an entire course on search engine optimization in the AI age. So I feel like I'm— I don't want to go too in-depth here because it's— there's so much involved and I'm still continuing to research because I'm preparing for the course itself. So I don't want to say too much, too many things that might be wrong. But number 1, your website still matters because that's where AI is getting the information. Number 2, AI also really respects information from places like Reddit and X, you know, Twitter. In other words, what other people are saying about you. So this is the tricky part is that ideally you want people, you wanna be producing things, content and ideas and your presence, et cetera, products and services webinars so that people actually want to talk about you and they end up talking about you online. And by the way, this is nothing new, right? Because the old SEO before AI was just, was like this too. You were trying to produce things so that people talked about you online. And then that's what Google respected the most is other people talking about you. Because if you just talk about yourself, then everyone can do that. And now of course, AI, it makes it easy for everybody in the whole world. to build websites and talk about themselves. So, so like AI has to be even more careful. Like, well, if it's just you talking about yourself, and even if you put YouTube videos up now, AI's— I'm getting you, you, I'm getting AI to create videos for me and uploading them. So it's like, in other words, in the new world, content is no longer valuable. Wow. I mean, sure. Some content is so valuable if you have interesting information that other people aren't putting out there. Yes, that's interesting. And people go, oh, that's not something I get through ChatGPT. And that's not something that I get through most content, you know, the most content I scroll. Your perspective is really interesting. So interesting perspectives are still talked about by other people and taken by AI to say, well, this is another perspective. Okay? Number 2, It's so much about connections and collaborations now. I mean, even more so because AI makes content so cheap and free and easy to create, everyone's gonna be doing it. So what's— so content's gonna be flooding us, so it's no longer valuable, right? And so what's still valuable is humans connecting with other humans and creating something together. So even more so, Yes, YouTube is helpful if you post content there. But again, any AI person can post content there, AI thousands. So it's better for you to post content there with other people, right? With other people. So I hope this is helpful. I think I'm gonna just kind of end the segment here, and I hope this gives you some ideas too. And, and so, so sorry to wrap up. I realized that one thing I wanna wrap up to say is that Therefore, in the AI world, it's even more valuable to do 2 things: to live, have an interesting life, and therefore have interesting things to say. Okay? And 2, to connect more with other humans and do things with other humans and upload what you do with other humans so that people go, wow, those are humans doing things together. You know, so conversations that humans are having together, projects humans are doing together. That's interesting. That's more, that's more interesting than everybody doing their own thing with AI now, right? So I hope this is helpful.
