Researchers tested various ways to optimize a website for AI search and found out exactly what needs to be done to increase visibility. They successfully increased the visibility of smaller, lower-ranking websites by 115%, giving them the ability to overtake larger corporate sites that typically dominated the top of search results.
The researchers, from Princeton University, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi, observed that their generative engine optimization technique, called GEO, was able to increase overall visibility by up to 40 %.
The researchers praised GEO’s ability to democratize the top of search results, writing:
“This finding underscores the potential of GEO as a tool to democratize the digital space.
Importantly, many of these lower-ranking websites are typically created by small content creators or independent businesses, who traditionally struggle to compete with the large corporations that dominate the top search engine results rankings.”
Multiple proven classification strategies
The researchers tested nine different methods for optimizing websites, tracking how different approaches performed for different types of searches, including Law and Government, Business, Science, People and Society, Health, History and other topics.
They found that each type of niche topic responded well to different optimization strategies.
The nine tested strategies are:
Authoritative: Change the writing style to be more persuasive in authoritative statements
Keyword Optimization: Add more keywords from the search query
Adding Statistics: Change existing content to include statistics instead of interpretive information.
Citing Sources (citing reliable sources) Adding Citations: Adding citations and citations from high-quality sources Ease of Understanding: Making content easier to understand Optimizing fluency is about making content more articulate Unique words: add words that are used less, rare and unique, but without changing the meaning of the content. Technical terms: This strategy adds unique and technical terms whenever it makes sense to do so and without changing the meaning of the content. Cite sources Addition of statistics Addition.
Which methods worked best? The three main optimization strategies were:
All three strategies scored 30-40% above baseline on one of the metrics used to measure success (Position-Adjusted Word Count) and 15-30% on another metric (metric subjective impression).
The researchers wrote about the success of these strategies:
“These methods, which involve adding relevant statistics (Statistics Addition), incorporating credible quotations (Quotation Addition), and including quotations from reliable sources (Cite Sources) to website content, require minimal changes to the actual content.
However, they significantly improve the visibility of the website in the generative engine responses, improving both the credibility and the richness of the content.”
The Fluency Optimization and Easy to Understand methods were also helpful in improving visibility by 15-30%.
These results were interpreted by the researchers to show how AI searchers rated both content and content presentation.
Which optimization strategies didn’t work
The researchers were surprised to find that using persuasive and authoritative tones in content does not generally improve AI search engine rankings, not as well as other approaches.
Similarly, the method of adding more keywords from the search query to the content also did not work. In fact, keyword optimization performed worse than the baseline by 10%.
Optimizations performed differently across knowledge domains
An interesting finding from the report is that which type of optimization worked best depended on the knowledge domain (legal, government, science, history, etc.).
They found that content related to the historical domain ranked better when “Authorized” optimization was applied, where more persuasive language was used.
Citation optimization, where content was enhanced with citations from authoritative sources, performed much better for actual search queries.
Adding statistics worked well for matters related to law and government. The stats also worked well for the “opinion” question where a searcher asks the AI about their opinion on something.
The researchers observed:
“This suggests that incorporating data-based evidence can improve the visibility of a website in particular contexts, especially these.”
Adding quotes worked well for the knowledge domains People and Society, Explanation, and History. The researchers interpreted these results to mean that perhaps the AI search engine prefers “authenticity” and “depth” for these types of questions.
The researchers concluded that doing domain-specific optimizations was the best approach.
Low ranking websites improved ranking with GEO
The good news from this research is that typically low-ranking websites will benefit from these AI search engine optimization strategies.
They concluded:
“Interestingly, websites that rank lower in SERPs, which typically struggle to gain visibility, benefit significantly more from GEO than those that rank higher.
For example, the Cite Sources method resulted in a substantial 115.1% increase in the visibility of websites ranked fifth in SERPs, while on average the visibility of the top ranked website decreased by 30, 3%
…the application of GEO methods presents an opportunity for these small content creators to significantly improve their visibility in generative engine responses.
By enhancing their content through GEO, they can reach a wider audience, thus leveling the playing field and enabling them to compete more effectively with larger corporations in the digital space.”
Game changer for SEO
This research study shows a new path for SEO when it comes to AI-powered search engines. Those who said AI Search was going to defeat SEO spoke too soon. This research seems to show that SEO will eventually evolve into GEO to compete in the next generation of AI search engines.
Read the research study here:
GEO: Generative engine optimization
Featured image by Shutterstock/ProStockStudio
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