The Search Engine Shift Happening Right Now

We are about to experience one of the biggest shifts in digital marketing that I've seen in the last 2 decades. Now, that might sound a little bit melodramatic, but hear me out. I've got some really important stuff to share with you which affects all businesses. A little backstory. So in 2004, I started up my small local web design agency where we built websites, we hosted those websites, but we also did something called SEO, search engine optimization. And I thought that people used to buy websites from us because it was the website which they wanted to grow their personal brand. Not that personal branding was a thing back then. However, it turns out that the website was actually the gateway drug, and what really those customers wanted was to be found in Google. And if their website got found in Google, people would click on it and then they would go through and hopefully leave an inquiry and become clients. So ultimately what they wanted was leads, new business, and to make some more money. Now it turns out we were actually pretty good at building websites. We very heavily focused on the code which we were building, making sure that it was standards compliant and it had all of the correct formatting and structure in terms of titles and descriptions. And most importantly, that the content that we created on those websites and the way that we built it, that our websites would be found in Google. And not just anywhere in Google, but ideally on the first page, if not further up. Now, back in 2004, very few people had websites compared to today. Today. So it was a bit like the Wild West back then. You could build a website, structure it pretty well, and undoubtedly you could get found in Google, in particular for local search. So if somebody was searching for a business coach in Stroud or a business coach in Gloucestershire, generally our websites would be somewhere up there on the first page, if not number one on the Google search. Now there's been a massive shift over the last 20 years as the advent of fast internet has meant more and more people have got online with their businesses Pretty much every man, woman, and their dog has a website these days. And so Google has got far more competitive. However, something really shifted over the past 12 months, and this is obviously AI. AI has got a large part to play in the direction of where we're going to be going in terms of digital marketing. And like I said, it is one of the biggest shifts that I've seen in the last 20 years. Google back in the day did a great job of managing to compete and push the likes of Yahoo and Bing and other huge giant businesses out of the search game. And Google effectively created this monopoly for itself to the point where people didn't talk about getting found in search. They talked about being found in Google. And it was that one website which dominated online search up until now. So what's happened? AI's come along and all of a sudden now people are turning to things like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and even AI mode in Google's own search to find brands and to find answers to their questions. So what we've seen in the last 12 months alone is pretty much a 30% drop in organic traffic coming directly from Google, and we've seen this wholesale shift across into AI search, which is making a massive difference to people's number of inquiries and website visitors which they're getting. Because like back in the day in 2004, you could have a website, but if it wasn't found on Google, or if it wasn't even found on page 1 of Google, then you wouldn't get any organic traffic from it. So now what we're seeing is If you are not being found in AI search and having your brand cited in AI search, then you're immediately on the back foot. And this means that you're going to really find it difficult to grow your business from an organic standpoint, and you're going to have to rely on things like social media, short and long-form video, paid ads, and various other things like that, which obviously take up a huge amount of time and money and effort in order to be found on those platforms. Whereas if you can get your brand cited and found on AI search, well, technically it's free. And there's some really simple ways if you've got an existing website with, you know, dozens of pages of content on it, ideally if you've got a blog on there, well, there's a few very simple things which you can do in order to update that content to then have it indexed and found within AI search. So I'm going to be going through some of the technicalities of how we go about getting our content found in AI search, things you can do to your website, pretty much today that doesn't cost you anything. And if you really struggle to do that, I've got a couple of tools which I'm going to recommend as well, which can help you just to do the basic fundamentals of getting your content found in AI search. Now, it's a different playing field if you're starting a new website starting from scratch. You need to find a developer to help you with that website who is very much up in the AI search game. If that— make sure that's one of the questions which you ask them. If they're not, then you're probably going to need to find an AI search or AI SEO specialist Somebody who's really clued up in what's going on in AI search, how to get your web pages found in AI search and obviously cited. So that it's one thing being AI search indexing your website. Equally, if your brand's not being surfaced in AI search for specific terms and, and at scale, then that's going to also hold you back as well. Basically how I want you to see this is that Google's monopoly on search is dead and you've got to come up with something different. But here is the greatest opportunity of our time. Google had that monopoly. Now AI search is spread across multiple different AIs. So this means that ultimately you've got multiple opportunities to be found in AI search. Now you're not just playing for that one opportunity on Google search. And the tools which I'm really going to be talking about and focusing on most are the most well-known ChatGPT. Perplexity is a great resource which is getting great traffic at the moment. You also want to look at Claude. Which is built off the Anthropic LLM, which is just really powerful, real, really great natural language model which it's using behind the scenes. The other ones which you want to look at are Gemini, which is one of Google's own tools. And then also Google has recently switched on AI mode in its own search, which means that it's going to be using existing databases. So if you can plug into Google's own AI mode, then you're already a step ahead. Now Google AI mode is probably one of the easiest ones to be found in if your website's already being surfaced on Google organic search. You can make sure that your site is set up with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, and those tools will give you clues as to how you should be updating your website to then be found in AI mode on Google. I'm not necessarily going to focus on AI mode on Google specifically because I think the biggest opportunity is actually with all of the other AI tools which are still innovating and growing. And if you can get indexed and found now and get decent levels of traffic out of those tools, those are the ones you want to focus on. So I'm going to give you 5 tips, essentially 5 things which you need to be thinking about including in your content when you are structuring it to be found in AI search. Now there's the obvious stuff, and these aren't one of the 5, but there's the obvious stuff which you need to do in terms of researching the titles of the articles and content which you're publishing, the heading structure of those articles, things like the meta description. Are you also including rich content within that? So So embedding videos from YouTube and Vimeo and other tools like that, also including podcast interviews and maybe even snippets from social media platforms, which produces this rich media. Now, all of these things pay into not just organic search on Google, but all of the AI search as well. Because what happens is when you include these tools embedded on a page of content and they are linked to your brand, it sends signals to all of the AI search tools that these social medias and other platforms are also linked to your brand. So what we're looking for, and this is the first thing which I'll talk about, is brand mentions. So back in the day on Google, one of the things which you would try and optimize around would be keywords. So having your pages of content found for multiple different keywords or key phrases alongside also backlinks. So backlinks used to determine how much trust a page had. Now what we're seeing in AI search is that rather than having hundreds of backlinks going back to a specific page of content, if your brand is mentioned multiple times across multiple different websites, that brand mentions have the same amount of juice that backlinks used to get. It seems that LLMs are very smart at recognizing where a brand is mentioned on a website and joining up all of the dots. So what you want to be doing is making sure that wherever you put out a piece of content, or if you get featured on another website, that your brand name is being mentioned in the snippet of content that then ties back to your brand. Let the LLM do the rest of it. Backlinks used to be very technical but very easy because you can just add a backlink in. Brand mentions are a little bit more complicated, but we've just got to trust in the process that these large language models know what they're doing, these AI tools know what they're doing, and they will just do the do provided we get our brand mentioned in as many different places as possible. Now that could be other people's blogs or websites, it could be on social media, it could be on video platforms. It could be on a multitude of different places, but you want to make sure that you're kind of dropping your brand name into that. One really simple way to do that is to make sure that whenever you upload a piece of media to the internet, be it a video, be it a podcast, be it an article or a file, that you make sure you rename the image file to include your brand name as well. Because that's just one really simple signal that we're giving to all of these AI tools out there and LLMs that this piece of media is attached and linked to our brand. If you upload a photo and it's just like img_1739a, that gives no information to the LLMs. But if you rename that image to say Robin Waite Fearless Business Coaching, all of a sudden that's a brand mention and that ties back in with what we're, what we're talking about here. So brand mentions is the first one. The second thing which you want to include, which used to— well, still is also relevant to Google's organic search, but it's frequently asked questions. So one of the things which we're seeing, uh, a huge change or shift in traffic from Google into AI search is for question-based queries. Things like, what are the benefits of hiring a business coach? How much does business coaching cost? So it's any of those sort of questions starting with what, where, when, why. So what you need to do is include frequently asked questions not just at the bottom which has been the traditional way of doing it, of your page of content, but dropping in those frequently asked questions throughout your content. Because again, this sends signals that you're asking and answering questions within your content, and therefore it's going to be useful, hopefully, to a human being who is using the AI search tool to find out more information. So the third thing, which is linked to frequently asked questions then, is something called schema markup. Now this is the first bit of deeply technical, I suppose, code which you're going to have to look to introduce use and include on your website. It's really hard to include— to describe schema markup. Schema markup basically is almost like a summary in code form of structured data on a website. So where you have frequently asked questions, you also need to create a short piece of schema markup code which essentially summarizes the FAQs in code form. And it's just an easy way for AI, rather than having to parse all of your content and figure it out, it can go straight to the structured schema markup which you've added onto your website and pull that into its LLM. Because it's structured and it's code, it understands it and it can index it and pop it into its database in a really efficient manner. If you don't include schema markup, well, it's kind of got to figure it out from all of the, the dump of content which you've got on that page, on that, that web page, and it might make mistakes. So if you add in schema markup, then what it's going to do is it's just going to send these signals to LLMs AI tools to focus on, on those specific bits of structured data first, structured content first, pull that into its LLM, and anything else which it gets from the page is a bonus. Now FAQ schema markup is just one of them. There are plenty of others as well. In terms of another one which is going to be popular is something called breadcrumb schema markup. These are 2 which are being featured quite heavily inside Google Search Console at the moment. So So Google Search Console for its AI mode is specifically looking at, I think, 2 or 3 different forms of structured data at the moment. And if you plug in Search Console into your webpage or find some, if you don't know how to do it, ask somebody who is into their websites and tech. They should be able to help you set your website up with Search Console. Then you can start to see the signals that AI tools are looking for when they're looking at your website and trying to garner like what it's about and who this content is for. So what have we got so far? We've got brand mentions, we've got frequently asked questions, and the third thing then is schema markup. If you just do those 3 things alone, the likelihood is that you're already going to start to get found in AI search for a variety of different questions, search terms, and potentially keywords that people are plugging in there. And also remember that in these early days, there's not going to be many people who understand the technical side of getting into AI search. So if you get in there now, you're already way ahead of the curve. And there's this fantastic story which Gary Vaynerchuk talks about when he started to do digital marketing for his dad's wine business. And they used to run a corner store where they sold wine and liquors and all sorts of things like that, that he managed to set up a website for his dad's corner shop and they owned the keyword wine on Google for the best part of 6 months, both in organic search and Google Ads. And that was the difference between taking his dad's business from a million-dollar-a-year business up to $30 million-a-year business. And they started shipping wine across the US. And obviously then that became the early stages of the Gary Vee that we know these days, who is one of the founding fathers, the thought leaders when it comes to digital marketing. So this is why we're in the Wild West of digital marketing right now. If you can get into these AI searches now early and get your brand established, established in them, it strikes me that you're going to be so far ahead of the curve that you'll be capturing and picking off all of the leads that other people are missing just because they're not technically savvy and they haven't taken the time to learn about this. So the 4th thing which you want to include on your website is something called key takeaways. Now, one of the things which I've noticed is that on my blog in particular, we did a hotspot sort of map of where people were dwelling on the website, and we noticed that it's very rare that people down through long pages of websites all the way to the bottom and read the entire article. So what we did is we created this summary section at the top and we called it the key takeaways. And we noticed that immediately when we included this key takeaways section at the top of the page, which was essentially just a summary of the rest of the page, that our dwell time on that web page typically on average increased by about 35 seconds. So imagine, it doesn't sound like a long time, but in web terms that that's a lot. It used to be the common statistic was that if you couldn't capture somebody's attention within 7 seconds on your website, you would lose them and they would move on to the next, you know, person who appeared in the search below you. So getting as much as 5 times that of dwell time on any web page these days is actually pretty incredible. So just by including a key takeaways box at the very top of your page, that is one of the best and fastest ways to get found in AI search because one, it's summarizing the the page. It is structured data which you're plugging into the site, but also you're increasing the dwell time there. So if these tools start to, through analytics, start to notice that people are spending more time on your website, it gives your brand extra credibility, which all sends signals back to AI search that it should push your results, your content further up in terms of what it's, you know, the, the results it's feeding back people when they're using the search tools. So key takeaways are massively important. And again, there's plenty of tools out there. I'll be sharing one which I use a lot, pretty much daily, within the content plan, you know, when we're pushing out and updating content on our websites. I'll go into that in a bit more detail in a second. But a key takeaway section is one of the fastest ways to get into AI search. So you should definitely include that on your website and on your, your blog articles for sure, and anywhere else where you're producing content. The final thing which I want you to think about adding into your content is something called rich snippets. So we've talked about rich content in terms of— or rich media, I should say— in terms of videos, podcasts, and social embeds which you include within your page of content, because that all sends those signals back to AI search. But rich snippets are slightly different. So these are again structured data or structured content which you are adding into your articles onto your page of content. So a really simple example is something like an ordered list or an unordered list. So like a bullet list of content where the first part of that content, almost like the first bullet is the title of it, is in bold, almost like a question. And then after that, it's then got a more detailed response, you know, as a summary of that, whatever that piece is in bold. That rich content again sends the right sorts of signals out to AI search. It's also structured in a way that AI search can can just go and grab it, put it into its large language model, into its, its vector database, and then pull it out quickly and easily when somebody searches for related content. And also, because an ordered list is structured, again, it prioritizes that over unstructured content on your web page. So adding in these rich snippets, lists of content, formatting pieces of it in bold, all of that sends these signals to AI search that your, your content you want to draw the attention for specific bits of content back to the end user. So there we go. If you just do those 5 things every time you upload a piece of content, and not just on your website but whenever you upload something into a LinkedIn post, maybe onto, onto Medium, which is a blogging platform, if you have a Substack or a newsletter which you publish onto a website, anywhere where you have this long-form content, if you structure it in this way, I'm pretty much guaranteed that you will found in AI search in some way, shape, or form. Now you're probably thinking about, well, why? Because I'm getting inquiries and leads from other places at the moment. Why should I get into AI search? This is like tip of the iceberg territory right now of what AI search is going to be capable of. And because we're now not in this monopolistic situation that Google owned for ages, there are multiple AIs, which creates multiple other opportunities. It might be that maybe your content doesn't get found in complexity, but Claude surfaces your content loads. So it's almost like you've got a backup plan. It used to be that if you couldn't be found on Google, well, or even on page 2 of Google, well, you might as well not bother having a website. Now it's just opened up this world of opportunity where we've got, you know, AI tools competing against one another. And if you can get into one, it will be as good as being in Google. If you could get into all 6, even better. And a little case study, because you're wondering what sort of results you expect. Well, 2 case studies in fact. So first and foremost, I recently had a one-to-one client start with me, and I asked him, well, how did he find me? And he said perplexity. He'd searched for the best business coaches in the UK, and 10 had been listed in there. When he then went on and looked at my analytics for my site, he could obviously see that I was into SEO. Turns out that this client runs an SEO Google Ads marketing agency, so naturally, you know, the 2 things came together. That client ultimately ended up spending $10K with me, which is a significant sum of money if you're a coach like I am. The second case study which I wanted to give to you as well, we wanted to test out some of the theories which I've been sharing with you in this video. So I created a directory, a business directory on the back of my fearless.biz website. I'll share a link to it somewhere below. If you want to get listed in the Fearless Business Directory, reach out. We can have a conversation about that. But what we did is I took 20 of my clients who wanted to be listed in the directory initially, and we interviewed them. So we had some organic content directly from the horse's mouth, which we plugged into their profile. We linked up all of their socials and their website. We put a bit of structured data in there. We let that run for a month, and then we ran it through one of our own proprietary tools. So to prepare that content for AI search, a few days later, I got a message from one of my clients who'd listed on there, Paul, who is a hypnotherapist. Therapist based down in Kent, and he said, Robin, you'll never guess what, but somebody has just come on board as a client for me. They bought one of my top packages, which is worth £1,500, which is about $2,000 for our American friends. And I asked them how they found me, and they said they found me on the Fearless Business Directory, clicked on my website link, went to my website, and bought. So we just restructured Paul's interview or page of content in the directory and prepared it for AI search, and lo and behold, he got found. So there's 2 examples there, and I know we're still— we're at the tip of the iceberg. We're right in the very early stages of AI search, but already there's 2 great case studies there where we've just structured the data slightly differently for our search, and it's worked. Money has exchanged hands, we've got some leads, and we've won some business through it. So I just want to emphasize, like, if you're still listening at this point, great because it means you're interested in this stuff and you can then set about updating your website. But what do you do if you're not particularly technical, which I would say accounts for probably 99% of the human population who run businesses? They're great at what they do, but when it comes to AI search, it's an absolute minefield and you don't know where to start. So I've been working quietly behind the scenes on an AI tool. It's called Zero Click Authority. I've been working on it with a business partner, Kiki Choda, and we've started to build an app where you can plug in, you can basically take an existing URL from your website, a web page, copy and paste that into our tool, and then it will start to give you some of that structured content. So the key takeaways, the frequently asked questions, and the schema markup. We are going to evolve that tool further so it can start to fill in what we call content gaps, create rich snippets which you can also cut and paste into your pages of content. We make sure that it's as natural language as we possibly can do, and we're also integrating integrating something called brand analysis into that tool as well, so that you can essentially tell the AI tool all about your brand. And then what it will do is when it creates content, it will do it using your own voice and using various other sources that it found— finds about your brand on the web. The idea behind that is what we want to do is we don't want to create content that could potentially get you into trouble with the AI content police. That is still a thing. So we want to make that content as naturally sounding like your brand as we possibly can do. So if you want to get early access to Zero Click Authority, we'll pop a link to the waitlist somewhere in the description below. Go and jump onto that, and then as soon as we can, we'll get you onto the beta so you can actually test it with some of your pages of content. You'll be absolutely blown away. If your website is already being found on Google and some of the AI search, just updating a few pages of content can make a massive difference to the volume of search which is coming into your website. So jump onto the waitlist below for Zero Click Authority, and we'll link you up with one of our team to give you a demonstration as well and see whether you can get into AI search. I think there's so much opportunity here wasted if you're not doing it.