Artificial Intelligence is everywhere. ChatGPT. Google AI. Google AI Overviews. Google AI Mode. Claude. Perplexity. Your customers are beginning to use it – a lot. If you own a business or work in marketing, chances are your boss has already burst into your office asking:
“Do we show up in ChatGPT?” “Google AI Overviews?” “Claude?”
Many marketers are not even aware of if their customers are using AI, if they “rank” or “appear” in AI answers… and then, of course how to optimize for AI answers, which is called AEO – Answer Engine Optimization.
In this video, we’ll go all “empirical,” channeling English philosopher Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of empirical science. Bacon believed that instead of arguing about how the world should work, we should observe how it actually works. You know – formulate hypotheses, do experiments, get actual facts and data, examine the results… and refine our theories. (Side note: the word “empirical” comes from the Greek Root (Empeiria): The word comes from the ancient Greek word empeiria (ἐμπειρία), which translates directly to “experience,” “practice,” or “knowledge gained by experience.”)
MARKETING PHILOSOPHY
I’m Jason McDonald, and welcome to Marketing Philosophy, where we use philosophy to understand marketing—and marketing to better understand human behavior. Today’s philosophy is empiricism. Here, rather than philosophizing in the cloud… we are going to look at the facts, and use facts to formulate our understanding of “reality.” (In this case, whether your company appears in AI answers, and a methodology to figure out how…)
One important caveat: this is not about whether your customers use AI. It is about whether your business appears when they do. As my Mom – a great philosopher in her own right – used to say, we are breaking the problem down into manageable parts. Part “A” – do your customers use AI answer agents like ChatGPT? Part “B” – does your company “rank” or get “recommended” in them? And Part “C” – how to influence whether you appear on not. Let’s get started!
KEYWORDS BECOME CONVERSATIONS
Traditional SEO begins with keywords. Imagine a chiropractor in Fremont, California.
- Early Stage – back pain – lower back pain – sciatica
- Middle Stage – What is chiropractic? – Does chiropractic help
sciatica? – Chiropractic vs. physical therapy - Late Stage – Best chiropractor in Fremont – Chiropractor near me – Reviews for chiropractors in Fremont
- Reputational – Dr. Singh chiropractor Fremont reviews – Reviews for Dr. Ritu “Ria” Singh.
Notice how keywords evolve as the customer moves from education to purchase. From “learning about an issue” to hiring someone (or buying something). Keywords and keyword theory have influenced SEO for decades.
AI works much the same way, except AI understands conversations. An AI answer agent like ChatGPT or Google Gemini isn’t that different from a search engine like Google. People ask it stuff. It answers. The AI is just a) more sophisticated than Google, and b) more conversational. There are more back and forth conversation-like interactions.
Instead of typing “chiropractor Fremont,” a customer might ask:
“My back has been hurting for several months. What could be causing it?”
Later:
“Is chiropractic a good treatment for sciatica?”
Finally:
“Can you recommend a few chiropractors in Fremont, California?”
And then, tell me about “Farnoush Yassini chiropractor Fremont.
As you think about AEO, you want to map your keywords / customer journey to the types of questions a potential customer is doing. You can (and should) build this out on a document or spreadsheet. Whereas SEO has keywords and rank on Google, AEO has buyer personas, scenarios, and conversational prompts. Similar but different!
STEP ONE: DEFINE BUYER PERSONAS
Every audit starts with the customer. These are often called “Buyer Personas”
Examples:
- A 32-year-old man with recurring back pain.
- A 27-year-old woman diagnosed with sciatica.
- A 63 three year old man creating YouTube videos with neck pain, who is open to chiropractic and is looking for the best chiropractor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and discovering Snyder Chiropractic. Oops!
Or, let’s pretend you are an estate planning law firm in San Francisco, California. Your services are estate planning, trusts and wills, and possibly complex probate litigation. Your buyer personas / scenarios might be:
- A married couple in their fifties looking for an estate planning attorney. They have substantial assets and need a living will, plus planning on how to give their estate to their kids.
- An older man whose parents have died, and he’s looking for a probate dispute or litigation attorney because his family-of-origin is super, dooper difficult and the estate planning was subpar. Queue the litigation!
- A person checking out Blacksburg Law and wondering if they are a good fit.
Different people ask different questions. Hopefully you already have a map of your buyer personas with demographics, psychographics, and situationals mapped out into clear and distinct Buyer Personas.
STEP TWO: DO BASIC KEYWORD RESEARCH
Keywords still matter.
Free tools: – Google Autocomplete – Google Ads Keyword Planner – Twinword Ideas. Try it with some “seed keywords” for either chiropractor or estate planning lawyer.
Paid tools: – Ahrefs – Semrush.
- Keywords tell you what people are interested in.
- Buyer personas tell you who is asking.
- AI conversations combine both.
PRO TIP: USE AI TO OPTIMIZE FOR AI
Copy / paste your homepage (and/or some main product / service pages) into ChatGPT and ask:
- What is my business value proposition?
- Who are my top five buyer personas?
- What are my early-, middle-, and late-stage keywords?
- What questions would those personas ask ChatGPT or Google AI?
- Build conversation flows from education to purchase.
- We’re gonna focus on the question list. And we can be lazy and use ChatGPT to help us generate questions.
Let’s try this for Blacksburg Law.
BUILD YOUR QUESTION LIST
Estate planning example:
(Let’s try these in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews)…
“My husband and I are in our mid-fifties. We own a home in San Francisco, retirement accounts, and have two adult children. What should we be doing for estate planning?”
Then:
“Can you recommend three boutique estate planning attorneys in San Francisco?”
Then:
“Why did you choose those attorneys?”
Chiropractor example:
“I am 27 years old and have sciatica. Can you explain what sciatica is?”
Then:
“Is chiropractic a good treatment?”
Finally:
“Can you recommend chiropractors in San Francisco who specialize in sciatica?”
FOCUS ON LATE-STAGE QUESTIONS!
You probably won’t dominate educational questions. WebMD, Wikipedia, and Mayo Clinic will usually win. Law.com will probably win on lawyer questions.
That’s okay.
The opportunity is late-stage, local questions where customers are ready to act.
MEASURE YOUR VISIBILITY
Track in a Word doc or spreadsheet. (I’ve got an example spreadsheet, here.)
- Date
- Question
– Did your company appear?
– Position / mention
– Clickable link?
– Notes
Repeat monthly. Do this for more than one question.
EXTRA CREDIT
Ask AI:
“Why did you recommend these companies?”
“What sources did you use?”
“Why wasn’t my company included?”
Sometimes the answers are insightful. Sometimes they’re hilariously wrong. Either way, you’ve learned something! And, looking forward to the future, you can start brainstorming the recommendations that boosted a company into an answer engine like ChatGPT. Just like Google, these AIs use content and reputational signals like links, reviews, or directory links to figure out which companies to recommend vs. which questions or conversations.
FINAL THOUGHTS & TAKE AWAYS
Answer Engine Optimization isn’t magic.
It starts with measurement.
Like Francis Bacon taught more than 400 years ago:
Observe. Test. Measure.
Track three to ten realistic customer conversations every month across ChatGPT, Google AI, and other answer engines. The philosophical concept is “empiricism.” This means looking at facts as opposed to just feelings or hunches. It’s also often called “evidence-based.”
Over time you’ll see patterns.
Then optimize.
AEO is a lot like SEO. The difference is that AI answer engines are still evolving, which makes measurement more important than ever!
Take-aways:
At the end of this exercise, you should have:
- An understanding of your Buyer Personas and the “questions” they might type into ChatGPT / Google AI Overviews.
- A list of these questions – generated based on your “seed keywords,” and a focus on “late stage” or “transactional” queries like “I have sciatica pain. Give me a list of the best single-person chiropractors in San Francisco, California, that are well-reviewed and a good fit for my issues.”
- A spreadsheet or document with your “late stage questions” by theme, and a measurement of whether your “Rank” or are “mentioned”
- Cheat sheet – asking ChatGPT or Google Gemini the CRITERIA upon which they selected each company vs. each question.
