For many companies, Google was fundamental in its strategy to reach potential clients. They used optimization strategies for search engines (SEO) to make sure to be one of the few valuable links that appear when looking for something.
Those days are counted, thanks to AI. Search trafficking for companies such as the Kayak travel website and the Chegg Educational Technology company is decreasing, in part because, according to a study, 60% of searches on sites such as Google do not lead users to click on any link; They simply read the summary of AI in the upper part. An executive of a cybersecurity company declared a Forbes That search traffic to its website has decreased 10 % this year. “The industry is totally disrupted because the traditional forms of SEO no longer work,” he said.
Now, instead of creating content to achieve a better classification in traditional search engines, companies are increasingly trying to understand how their brands appear in the responses generated by AI search engines such as AI Overviews of Google, Perplexity and Chatgpt, and create new content designed to be detected by Bots, and a new generation of new companies has emerged to help them.
“We are about to experience a true change of power in the style of Game of Thrones,” said James Cadwaller, co -founder and Executive Director of Profound, which helps more than 100 clients, such as US Bank, Docusign and Indeded, to understand how their brands appear in the AI responses. “We are entering a turning point in which humans no longer need to visit websites on the Internet … These systems are completely kidnapping the relationship with the end user.”
“We are entering a turning point in which humans no longer need to visit websites on the Internet … These systems are completely kidnapping that relationship with the end user.”
James Cadwalader, Executive Director of Profound.
It is a very delicate problem for companies, said Ilya Fushman, a partner of Kleiner Perkins, who led a financing round of 20 million dollars for the startup, which has less than a year of existence. Nvidia and Khosla also participated in La Ronda, which valued Profound in more than 100 million dollars.
To address it, Profound generates thousands of synthetic suggestions such as “cheap soccer shoes” or “the best phone for a teenager” and sends them to search engines with AI to get a general idea of brands that appear more frequently in different answers. The software connects to the brand’s website to observe, in real time, what specific pages are traced more frequently.
Profound tracks the “feeling” to evaluate the reputation of a brand in searches with AI, capturing phrases that could have negative connotations. Based on these metrics, it offers recommendations (as a traditional marketing agency would), such as suggesting keywords, adjusting the style and design, and adding metadata so that search engines with AI can track pages more easily. In some cases, it also uses AI models to generate custom content so that search engines with ia trace it.
It is soon for this new flourishing field, known as optimization of generative motors. For the cybersecurity company that has seen its search traffic fall by 10%, Profound is helping to track the performance of competition in the search results of AI and produce new content to keep up. And a SEO specialist from a large job search company told Forbes that resorted to Profound because the company had a “blind spot” in terms of how the company’s content was presented in the search engines for a few months ago. “We were completely dark,” he said. With Profound, you can find popular indications and learn how blogs and company data appear in the answers generated by AI. Although the traffic of tools such as chatgpt is less than 1% for the site, influencing how AI talks about the brand is where the market is directed, he said.
But influencing the responses of AI search engines is not an easy task. The underlying models constantly change, and with them, the AI responses. The search engines answer the same question differently each time, depending on how and when they are asked and who writes it. “That is why it is so valuable to be debugging, disambiguating and communicating how tools such as Chatgpt reveal information to real people,” said Keith Rabois, a partner of Khosla Ventures, who has backed Profound. “It is impossible to follow up on behalf of the company itself.”
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These startups help companies appear in the search summaries
Profound is not the only option. Bluefish AI, based in New York, which has raised 5 million dollars in initial financing of investors such as Crane Ventures and Laconia, is helping companies from sectors such as tourist, pharmacist and retail to monitor their presence in Gemini, Perplexity and Chatgpt. Large technology companies such as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are becoming AI companies, and the fact that their tools attract hundreds of millions of users has meant a call for attention for the marketing sector, according to executive director Alex Sherman.
While most websites are designed for human readers, they must be optimized to track extensive language models if companies want to appear in AI responses and reach customers directly. In March, Andrej Karpathy, co -founder of Openai, declared in X that “99.9 % of the attention is about to be CLM attention.”
With an overview of AI’s responses, Bluefish can see which data sources influence the perception of brands in these answers. “Some of the best valued third parties that Bluefish detects among its clients are platforms such as Reddit,” he said.
Another outstanding company is Athena, co -founded by Andrew Yan, who previously worked in the Google Deepmind generative team. This company uses its own AI search model, trained with millions of indications and data, to create a panel with different AI metrics, such as sources, mentions and reference fees. Yan said that the search for AI has expanded the scope of marketing, since it feeds on more sources than Google, where the three websites with more links are usually the most visited.
Cadwalader, from Profound, is optimistic that search engines will create a new and improved way for people to discover new products and make informed purchase decisions that best fit their preferences. As IA systems navigate on the Internet on behalf of buyers, they extract data from hundreds of websites and offer them answers generated by AI, companies are realizing that they need to capture the attention of a new type of “VIP client”: the bots.
“In the future, we believe in the future without clicks, in which consumers will only interact with the response engine and agents will be the main visitors of the websites, and that will be something positive,” he said.
This article was originally published by Forbes Us.
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