"Artificial Intelligence" is here, and for now it doesn't look like it's going anywhere, despite the countless lawsuits against AI platforms, the clear environmental impact of using them, and the ongoing debate on the ethics of using a tool built off stealing other people's work.
So even if you don't want to use any AI tools at all, other people are using them. And they're using them to SHOP.
So, I'm being asked more and more how to show up in AI and ChatGPT results, so that more people can find your products and buy them.
Luckily, there is a simple answer:
Abide by the same SEO best practices that you would follow in order to show up in any type of search.
That rule is:
Content Is King
What does this mean? It means that the most important thing you can do for your SEO - whether to show up in a Google search, an AI search, or even an Etsy/Faire/Ankorstore search is to create valuable content on your website.
Let's take a step back for a second, and think about how AI works. Tools like Chat GPT are what's called a Large Language Model, which is a tool that has been fed a whole bunch of information for it to reference when asked a question. Much like a search engine, when you ask it something, ChatGPT looks through all of the information it has been fed and attempts finds the answer most likely to be correct.
This raises a question: What information have tools like ChatGPT been fed?
In some cases, the answer to this question is that the developers have created 'bots' that crawl and steal information from all of the websites on the internet. Meaning, anything you've ever written on your website is, by default, ready to be stolen, copied and referenced by the AI.
This is where the copyright problems come from: Anyone who makes a living writing fantastic content on the internet, or writing novels, newspapers, etc - their hard work is being stolen. When someone asks Chat GPT to write them a product description for their product, Chat GPT simply looks at all of the product descriptions for similar products, and steals that information, spitting it back out (often with worse grammar and zero voice).
So this is a bad thing for the people doing the hard work writing content.
However, what it does mean is that it is likely that the AI searches are already being fed your website, and considering it among the references. So if someone asks ChatGPT to recommend them the best [insert product] and you sell [insert product], it is possible for the AI to offer a link to your website as its answer.
But why would it recommend YOUR product over the thousands of other products that it could recommend? Because it is led to believe that your product is the most likely to be the correct answer to the question, and it believes it is the most likely answer to the question because your product is already getting the most traffic for similar search terms. It's circular, see?
Search Scenario
The Glosters website sells handmade ceramic mugs.
The Glosters website ranks number 1 in a Google search for the keyword handmade ceramic mugs.
Someone asks ChatGPT: "where can i buy handmade ceramic mugs"
ChatGPT looks at the inforamtion it has been fed from the internet and sees that your website ranks number 1 in a Google search for the keyword handmade ceramic mugs
ChatGPT responds to the query: you can buy handmade ceramic mugs at Glosters.
This is the simple version of how this query SHOULD work, theoretically. So, by focusing on ranking your website in a Google search, you are already optimising for AI searches.
Of course, the AI tools are often garbage piles of crap that suck major ass in ever answering questions correctly, so it could pull out a different answer every time that you ask it a question. This is one reason why I don't like AI searches - it makes a decision for you, rather than offering you options to choose from.
What more can you do?
One thing that all brands can do to improve their searches in AI is to optimise for questions. When people search for products using google, they will probably simply write "handmade ceramic mugs", however when they search using AI, they will probably write a question, such as 'where can i buy handmade ceramic mugs'.
So, one thing you can do is to optimise for the full question as a keyword. How? The best way, most seamlessly to fit into your website, is to create an FAQ page full of questions likely to be asked to AI. You can write an FAQ page that has the question "Where can I buy hanmdade ceramic mugs" and the answer "you can buy handmade ceramic mugs here at Glosters" with a link to your page of mugs in the keyword. This should be done very carefully to avoid keyword cannibalisation.
FAQ pages are already a part of a good SEO strategy, as there is a lot of value that your content adds to your website by having the answers to frequently asked questions. People look to Google for answers to questions all of the time, and those 'People Often Ask' sections in a google search are often pulling information from website FAQ sections, because of the schema involved in creating an FAQ (the code stuff).
This means that many of my clients are already seeing sales coming through ChatGPT searches, and I haven't changed anything about the SEO strategy that I'm using with a focus on improving their visibility in Google.
If you want to learn SEO and improve your website visibility for both Google and AI searches, I recommend the SEO for Small Business Masterclass. This is an indepth look into how SEO works and why it's crucial for small businesses, then taking you step by step into creating your own SEO strategy and implementing it to you Shopify store. It's a gorgeous set of videos and workbooks giving you everything I know about SEO for small creative businesses and will likely put me out of business as brands no longer need me to do SEO for them, having learned it for themselves.
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