How do I show up in AI generated results / answers / overviews?

Whether you’re a digital marketer, launching a product, or want to be seen as an authoritative voice, let me lay out what I did.

My test… for science

I was periodically checking where my LinkedIn Queens guide stood in search engine rankings, and I found one day that DuckDuckGo had my guide in its AI results.

I wanted to test if I could duplicate this, and I got into Google’s AI results for what to do with expired / AUE Chromeboxes and Chromebooks. Neat.

1. Content still is king

This old adage about search engine marketing holds true for showing up in AI results. You need high quality content. If you came here looking for a shortcut, there isn’t one. I put a lot of effort into my site’s content, making sure it’s accurate, interesting to a select audience, and has good readability. You need to do this as well, and doubly so if your field is crowded.

This also helps with #5 below.

2. Go textual and/or upload to YouTube

The large language models (LLMs) that power AI results (currently) work best with text; And with Google owning YouTube, Google is able to scrape videos on that platform for its AI results as well. Your content should be primarily in those forms.

3. Get organized

• Concise sentences are better than long rambling ones.
• Lists are great for content that can be itemized or ordered.
• Tables are great for information that needs to be in a grid.
• FAQs are great for answering potential search queries.
• Schema markup is great for summarizing your content to bots.

4. Leave the door open

When I first noticed LLMs were scraping my content, I saw CloudFront was slowing / stopping them (non-technical description: I had a bouncer for this site to stop bots). I changed to leaving the door open, and my test resulted in the Chromebox/Chromebook guide being added to AI results much faster than my Queens guide had. This results in higher hosting costs and a slightly higher DDoS risk, but for a static site like I run here, those are more than bearable.

5. Get clicks, links and momentum

Again, no shortcuts. Once my pages started appearing in standard search results, I focused on getting higher rankings. Once I got higher rankings, I got more clicks and links. Once I got more clicks and links, I was considered an authoritative voice. Then finally, once I was considered an authoritative voice, I was included in AI generated results.

6. Keep it up

Maintaining positioning means maintaining E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness both on- and off-site. Backlinko has an excellent guide here, but essentially, this is:

• The extent to which you demonstrate the necessary experience for the topic.
• The extent of your expertise, knowledge or skill for the topic.
• The extent to which you and/or your site is known as a well-established and respected authoritative source for the topic.
• The level of trustworthiness, accuracy, honesty, safety, and reliability of you and/or your site.