GAIO: How to Increase Your Brand’s Visibility for AI Chatbots

AI chatbots are changing the way people look for information, products and services online. The large language model (LLM) ChatGPT alone boasts an estimated 1.4 billion users. That’s an increase of one billion (!) in comparison to the tool’s launch in January 2023.

Consequently, models like ChatGPT, Google Bard and Google Search Generative Experience are increasingly influencing your customers’ purchasing decisions.

You should rethink how you provide information as a company. Because this will decide whether your content meets the new requirements of chatbots. Generative AI optimisation (GAIO) is the magic word and the digital marketing discipline of the moment.

An Update for Your Digital Marketing Strategy

GAIO is already known as THE new online marketing discipline in the realm of search engine optimisation (SEO). It’s such a novel concept that the term can’t be clearly distinguished from other subject areas yet. This article therefore takes a broad look at GAIO, discussing everything from the machine readability of website content to the quality control of AI-generated content distributed via social media.

The first step would be to adapt your website and provide AI models with information on your company, for example in the form of structured data. The next step would be to assess your brand mentions, i.e. how your company or products are talked about in other media such as magazines or blogs. Since LLMs consider context, they try to provide accurate responses to requests by consulting a multitude of sources.

This means it is all the more important for your company to understand how LLMs work and which factors determine their output. And there’s only one way to obtain a clear understanding of these factors: training, just like for AI models. Companies that implement intelligent systems at an early stage can gain a decisive competitive advantage.

Tackling the AI Revolution with GAIO

GAIO is currently still in its early stages and poses several challenges for marketing teams. Just like when it comes to SEO, it is difficult to monitor the content published about the company on channels other than the official website.

If the LLM doesn’t have access to enough data, it may interpret information in the wrong way. GAIO can help prevent your target group from receiving incomplete, false or even damaging information about your company or your products.

3 Tips for Successful GAIO

An LLM can only process the content of your website if you make it available to bots in the »correct« way. But how can you make your content AI ready?

Tip 1: Remember the Basics

First things first: you will need well-structured and, above all, current data. If your company doesn’t have a SEO-conforming content strategy yet, it’s high time.

This includes:

• clear headings
• a new paragraph for every train of thought
• a short and precise URL

You should also be sure to maintain metadata and image descriptions, so that they remain in line with the context. Like almost all digital business disciplines, GAIO is a continuous process.

Tip 2: Establish a Rule Book

If you want to make GAIO an integral part of your content and marketing strategy, it would be beneficial to establish an internal set of rules. This allows your content creators to produce AI optimised content faster and ensures consistency on your web pages.

Prompt optimisation allows you to align your content’s tone or your service chat’s responses with your corporate identity. Additionally, rules for ethical use, quality control mechanisms and data protection regulations could help both internal and external AI tools work efficiently.

Tip 3: Ask the Right Questions to Increase Customer Focus

When defining concrete requirements for your company, you should always focus on your target group. After all, AI isn’t the one buying your products and services. Rather, you need to use the technology as a tool for authentic customer communication.

Use the following questions to analyse your target group’s search behaviour:

• How are our customers searching for products and services?
• What exactly are they searching for?
• Why are they searching for these things?

The Right Information

An LLM needs a sufficient amount of information to be able to work with and for you. However, you also need to consciously decide which content should and shouldn’t be processed by AI. It is important to find a good balance here. Above all, you should be careful with specific and sensitive data. Even if the content is very specific – for example, if it’s based on the experience of your experts – you should carefully consider to what extent it should be freely accessible. If you aren’t cautious, your company’s unique informational advantages and innovative approaches could be made available worldwide.

On your own website, you can determine which content is accessible to AI and which isn’t. »Robots.txt« can help you with that. It tells crawlers – programs that comb through the internet for information – which of your website’s URLs can be analysed and which can’t.

But you must look out! Crawlers should but aren’t obligated to adhere to Robots.txt’s rules. OpenAI claims to respect these. However, if you want your content to be completely safe, you’ll have to protect it from unauthorised access in other ways.

GAIO versus SEO – What’s the Difference?

As you may have noticed, there are many parallels between GAIO and SEO. This is not surprising because both disciplines involve bots automatically searching through websites. The bot indexes the content, collects relevant data and makes it available to its users.

Search engines use this data to determine how relevant a website is for a particular search query. Backlinks from other reputable sources also play a decisive role.

The more high-quality links a website has, the better it is usually rated as and the higher it ranks in for example Google searches.

For GAIO, backlinks are not as important. Besides your own content, it’s less about where your company is linked, and more about where and how your company is talked about online. At the moment, however, there is still a lack of transparency as to how strongly brand mentions are weighted.

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