I’ve been thinking about how the evolution of AI and its bursting into our SEO world can be viewed a little bit like the origin story of Frankenstein.

First comes Dr. Frankenstein’s technological creation; he brought it to life in secrecy.

Then, comes his training. Gemini AI summarized the Frankenstein tale this way: “Through stolen books and observations of a nearby cottage family, the creature acquires language, reading, and rudimentary knowledge of history, science, and morality.”

We all know the rest of the story includes the revelation of the creature to the village and the subsequent fear it generated.

Fellow search villagers’ initial responses to AI’s launch in Bing Copilot, Gemini/Bard, Google Search Generative Experience, etc. were similar to Mary Shelly’s work. “SEO is finally dead!” and “Organic search traffic is going to drop by up to 76%!!” are a few of the howls we initially heard.

But rather than reaching for our pitchforks, the villagers at DBE took a different approach where we saw AI as not happening to us, it’s happening for us.

So we explored how AI search bots were working.

We performed our own AI experiments to test different ways we could help AI search bots learn about the topics/brands that are important to us. Some of our main theories and queries research included:

• How did the AI searchbots act differently from the traditional search bots?
• What forms of content did they find authoritative and worth citing?
• Were they influenced by off-website factors like social media posts?
• Did the results vary between the different AI platforms?

Then we saw the results of our experiments as what we fed into the AI ecosystem echoed back in the AI responses to related questions.

This is how we created and breathed life into our Search AI Optimization (SAIO) solutions. This is how we can help you not fear AI but teach it to like and link to you.

Have you heard about Moz’s Brand Authority metric? It was announced last fall at its Mozcon event and it has now been incorporated into its Pro platform as part of its new “Domain Overview” summary section. The section also includes the long-standing Domain Authority and Page Authority metrics that predict the ranking potential of a website or a specific page on a scale of 1-100. Brand Authority is also presented on a 1-100 scale and “shows the value of the brands that Google associates with a domain.”

Wait, what? Let’s try that again.

“Brand Authority™ is a score (1-100) developed by Moz that measures the total strength of a brand.” 

Understand it better now? 

After a deeper review of how Moz explains Brand Authority, DBE has settled on this explanation – Brand Authority is an algorithmic determination of a brand’s salience online in terms of search intent, search volume, and visibility. 

Regardless of how it is defined, it now can be used as a competitive metric where a brand with a higher Brand Authority score is deemed to have more online “authority” than brands with lower scores.

Okay, let’s start connecting some dots.

“Authority” is the A in Google’s EEAT cornerstone for generating the relevant, quality SEO content that influences rankings on traditional search engine results pages.

Search engine rankings results are one of the factors mentioned by both Google SGE and Bing Copilot as influencing what brands they cite with links in response to prompts in their AI platforms. Plus these AI search chatbots also mention LinkedIn as another online “authority” source they value.

So there you have it – the outline of a strategy map from Brand Authority to Search AI Optimization (SAIO). As always, the ability to deliver results success lies in the details of the implementation.

When we launched DBE’s Search Artificial Intelligence Optimization (SAIO) strategy for generating link citations in answers to questions asked of conversational search AI chatbots like Bing Copilot and Google SGE, we showed this iceberg image to help distinguish the similarities and differences between traditional SEO tactics and the new SAIO tactics:

As part of our ongoing “human” learning process on conversational AI searches, we’ve been talking with the chatbots themselves about their “machine learning” processes. Today we’re sharing a recent Q&A session with Google’s Bard that started with this simple question:

Last week, DBE launched our new SAIO (search artificial intelligence optimization) strategy for gaining link citations from conversational chatbots like Bing Chat and Google SGE.  The launch elements we used included:

• A blog post written in a conversational Q&A format
• An infographic depicting how SEO and SAIO work together
• Inclusion of a summary of the blog post and the infographic (with links) in our weekly What’s Hot Wednesday newsletter email
• Posting of the WHW newsletter content and links to LinkedIn

In other words, we practiced what we preached – and now, just a week later, we have proof of performance!

Bing Chat with multiple citations to the DBE blog post:

What is SAIO?

SAIO stands for Search Artificial Intelligence Optimization.

Do you mean using AI for optimizing your website?

No, SAIO is for optimizing your website to be found for conversational searches done on AI chatbots like Bing Chat and Google’s Generative Search Experience (SGE).

How are you pronouncing this acronym?

“Say-o”. Now there’s “see-o” for SEO and “say-o” for SAIO.

So, SAIO is like SEO except you are targeting AI bots instead of the traditional search engines?

Yes and no. DBE’s approach is to leverage both SAIO and SEO best practices to get your website found in both of these types of search environments. It’s not a one or the other deal. In fact, SAIO and SEO best practices share some common strategies for gaining website visibility.

Can you explain how SEO and SAIO work together and how they are different?

First you need to understand how the AI chatbots are trained and where they get their information. Here’s a snippet from a conversation we had with Bing Chat:

DBE: So you would learn new things that are updated in the search index?

Bing Chat: Yes, that’s correct. I can provide you with the most up-to-date information based on the data I have been trained on and the search index.

DBE: So when I ask you for a list of digital marketing agencies in Princeton, NJ you are pulling your answer from the highest ranking websites in the search index.

Bing Chat: Yes, that’s correct. I would provide you with the most relevant and useful results based on the data I have been trained on and the search index.

So, SEO helps train SAIO bots?

Yes, that is why we need to continue to implement SEO best practices following E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust). Google recommends this model for gaining website credibility and rankings from both a content and technical perspective.

DBE covered E-E-A-T in more depth in this vlog: watch here.

That explains how SEO can help SAIO but where’s the difference in SAIO optimization?

SAIO bots look at website content from an informational and conversational perspective. That’s why they already tend to favor content that includes the added detail of Schema-structured content. DBE has seen success in SAIO from adding structured content to already SEO-optimized content pages with our client, celebrity chef Paula Deen:

In a recent DBE vlog, Natalie Lorenzo and I talked about ChatGPT’s AI limitations from a “search” perspective. We discussed two primary caveats to using ChatGPT for searches:

1. ChatGPT’s database stopped receiving inputs in September 2021 so the information is now almost two years old – a lifetime in the internet world.
2. The free version of ChatGPT can not access the internet so it can’t look at websites or perform internet-related research.

Enter Bing Chat that leverages GPT-4 AI (not to be confused with ChatGPT), is built into Microsoft Edge, is integrated with Microsoft’s search engine, and can, therefore, perform web searches. And Bing Chat’s search “results” include detailed responses along with citations and clickable links to learn more.

Clickable links! That means trackable links in analytics, right? Alas, the answer is not exactly. Here’s the result of a Bing Chat search conversation that led me to click on DBE’s link citation to learn more: