Managing Director Americas
Back in the early 2000s, when Google was just a promising upstart, search was kind of simple.
Instead of sophisticated algorithms and AI-driven content analysis, search rankings often boiled down to simple keyword stuffing and sneaky link schemes.
A single tweak to a website’s metadata could catapult a page to the top spot overnight, while entire networks of shadowy “link farms” provided pathways to quick digital glory.
For many online entrepreneurs, it felt like striking gold—without any lawmen in sight to enforce the rules. Websites crammed with irrelevant keywords and hidden text soared skyward, capturing precious traffic and fueling the lucrative rise of banner ads.
Emboldened by the lack of regulation, cunning SEO pioneers raced to outsmart each other, pushing boundaries and inventing new ways to trick search engines into compliance. Although these tactics might sound brazen by today’s standards, they paved the way for the advanced, user-focused optimization strategies we rely on now.
To appreciate the cutting-edge SEO techniques of the modern era, it helps to reflect on those early days of experimentation, chaos, and unwavering ambition. It was a pivotal era in digital history.
We are now back in a new frontierland. The world of AIO – or AI Optimization – the battle to get your content noticed by LLMs.
AIO, or Artificial Intelligence Optimization, is about elevating your content so large language models (LLMs) can find, understand, and cite it.
Think of it as the next frontier of digital visibility, going beyond traditional SEO tactics. With LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and others increasingly shaping online searches, purchases and conversations, ensuring your brand is woven into their knowledge base is crucial.
It’s not just about adding fancy keywords; it’s about making your material rich, relevant, and authoritative—exactly the kind of content AI systems love to showcase in their responses.
Why does this matter so much now? LLMs are steadily becoming people’s go-to source for instant information, advice, and recommendations… just like search engines used to be.
And search engines have noticed. Well, especially the one with 90% market share: Google.
Google have launched ‘AI Overviews’ and now the limited-release ‘AI Mode’ to try and make sure people keep going to Google for those questions, product searches and poetry creation requests rather than going to an LLM.
And between Black Friday 2023 and Black Friday 2024, the volume of traffic from ChatGPT to ecommerce sites in the US increased by 36 times.
The growth in the influence of LLMs is rapid and undeniable.
The rise of AIO wouldn’t be that important if search engines and LLMs highlighted the same content.
But increasingly, it’s becoming clear that they don’t.
A recent study by Profound, an LLM content visibility platform, showed that in a comparison of searches and prompts, there was only an 8-12% overlap between sites selected by search and sites selected by LLMs. They are just looking for different things, and different sites. For example, in a test related to financial services, Profound’s study showed that while search engines went for high authority sites like E*TRADE, LLMs opted for more down-to-earth how-to sites like investopedia.com.
LLMs don’t just hunt for keywords. They hunt for contextually relevant content written in natural language. And they can understand synonyms and syntax – they don’t just look for the exact same words in the exact same order.
LLMs are also shown to be more likely to cite newer sites. This is different to SEO, which often cites long-standing sites that have high ‘authority’. This growing demand for content freshness will likely stimulate demand for more frequently updated content – and AI-powered content generation engines that can enable this without enormous human effort. More on those later.
Employing a natural, conversational style is important too. You want to make sure you match the style of the language real humans use in conversations you want to be part of.
This all means that brands and product marketers need to adopt a hybrid approach to content marketing and management. You can’t assume that the same content will stand out to both.
These trends point to the emergence of a need for new types of tools that content marketers can use that augment their content marketing.
We call these tools AI-powered content marketing engines.
Think of this engine as a team of AI agents that are working together. A team of agents that each represent one of your brands. A compliance agent. A sleuthing SEO keyword agent. A channel finder agent. A topic finder agent. Collaborating to find content opportunities, generate and vet content for human review, make updates and assess how the content is faring online.
These engines are starting to take root – we have started to build them at BOI – and we expect them to become the norm over the next few years.
In much the same way that content marketers are having to start to adapt, the emergence of ‘operator’ agents means that many users of your product or website might be LLMs.
This means that the navigation, structure and LLM readability of basically any website is going to undergo significant change in the next few years. Some websites may take off that just target LLMs as users.
Managing Director, BOI (Board of Innovation)
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At the intersection of strategy, emerging technology and innovation Geoff leads our Americas team to craft AI strategy and build innovative AI-powered solutions. With equal amounts of optimism and skepticism, there’s nothing Geoff loves more than a new problem to solve.
