Are you wondering if you should optimize your content for AI Mode? In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Chima digs into this question and encourages us to consider how over-optimization impacts web visibility. Discover why prioritizing best practices, building Brand Authority, and creating original, journalist-quality content are key to long-term search visibility in the age of AI.

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Hi, my name is Chima Mmeje, and I am the Senior Content Marketing Manager at Moz. Today I want to talk about something very dicey. Should we optimize for Google's AI Mode?

Now I know some of you are not going to like what I'm going to say, but think about it this way.

I want us to start expanding our thinking about how we see optimization. Because "optimization” is how we got here in the first place. We would write 10,000 identical articles just so that we would show up on SERPs, and that led to poor user experience that necessitated AI Overviews and now AI Mode. 

Instead of thinking about it as optimizations or hacks, we need to start thinking about it as best practices. Best practices whereby showing up in AI Mode is as a result of a wider search strategy rather than a siloed strategy geared towards just showing up on AI Mode. 

So I want to talk about some of the things that I've been seeing that I do not agree with.

Unnatural summarization

The first one being unnatural summarization. To me, this is a zero-sum game. You are writing your content to be summarized for LLMs and AI Mode so that they can pick up your content to surface in their generative answers. 

The way that I see it, LLMs, including Google's AI Mode, are only going to get more aggressive about keeping users in their ecosystem. It is never going to be enough traffic to justify making it your primary source of organic traffic. So why are you investing time and effort to reward a system that is never going to send you enough traffic? 

Also, I use the word "unnatural" because when you start to write content just for summarization, it looks like what we had before, where we used to just do entity optimization just so that search bots scanning the content will be able to understand how to rank that content, and that led to really, really shitty articles on the internet. 

Chasing LinkedIn Pulse and Reddit Visibility solely for AI Mode

The second one I've been seeing a lot of is people writing content on LinkedIn Pulse and doing Reddit SEO solely to show up on LLMs and AI Mode. To me, that is a short-sighted strategy because you're basically scraping the bottom of the table. 

LinkedIn Pulse is the same as every other platform. They want to keep people on their platform. So a better strategy would be to see LinkedIn Pulse and Reddit as part of your content distribution. But creating entire strategies around this, again, just so you can show up on AI Mode, to me, that is you being reactive instead of being proactive, and that never works. 

Building content moats

The third one is building content moats. For me, this is my least favorite tactic ever. 

We used to do this because it worked. People would write 500 pieces of content, 1,000 pieces of content in a year, because they wanted to show up on Google SERPs. It was their way of covering the full intent space. And that is still important now for AI Mode with query funnel technique, where writing one piece of content is not going to get you seen. You need to cover the full intent space. But we are in danger of making the same mistakes that got us here.If we keep creating content moats and producing mass rubbish content.

The only way to write content is to write content that fulfills a search intent, that is helpful, and I'm going to share more of what content should look like on this side. But really, no more content modes, no more 50 articles a month, no more writing hundreds of pieces of content because you want to cover the full intent space. 

This is the problem that got us here. Let us not make the same mistake again, please. 

Now I am going to come over here and talk about best practices that we should be doing. 

And I use the word "best practices" because AI Mode should be a result of all the other great things you've been doing in your SEO strategy. It shouldn't be the entirety of your strategy. 

Publish like a journalist

The first one is to publish like a journalist, not an SEO to build affinity. And I think this is going to be something that is very hard for us to do because, for a long time, we've been writing content like SEOs that wanted to show up on SERPs. 

So what do I mean when I say publish like a journalist? Think of newsrooms like CNN, New Yorker, and the rest of them. Think about how you form habits of going to this website every day to read content as part of your routine. That bypasses SERPs. 

For me personally, I start my day with reading Yahoo News, and I never ever go to Google to look for any content from Yahoo. I go to Yahoo as the source. That is what we need to start doing. We need to start writing content that comes from an original idea that we had and that is written to attract affinity. Affinity being that people start to seek you out directly instead of going through SERPs to look for information.

Affinity and writing like a journalist really doesn't have anything to do with keywords and more to do with how you respond to the questions and the trends that you are seeing out there right now. And then you share your opinion as a thought leader on what people should be doing. 

Again, best practices, not hacks. 

Invest in digital PR

The second one is to invest in digital PR to support off-page SEO and brand-building efforts. 

Yesterday, my colleague at Moz, Tom Capper was talking about how digital PR and digital PR strategies generally are a great way to improve your visibility, and specifically, we're talking about third-party content here. But this is just one part of digital PR. 

So you publish content on third-party websites because Gaetano also said that yesterday, Gaetano DiNardi said that when LLMs, like Google and ChatGPT, are featuring recommendations or showing that in answer, they are not pulling from your website. They are pulling from third-party sites, like Tom's Guide, CNET, and the rest of them. 

So if you want to get your answers or your content featured, or your brand featured, you need to be going through these third-party websites. And what is the best way to get on third-party websites? Digital PR. That is how you get the reviews. That is how you get the affiliates. That is how you get the influencers. That is how you get featured on news and on all of that. 

You need a digital PR strategy as part of your SEO. Digital PR is no longer just PR. It is now part of any core SEO strategy. 

Build an in-house team of SMEs

Build your own in-house team of SMEs. I think about this as build your own in-house team of Avengers. How do you nurture specialists in-house who are doing the work to start publishing more content, not just on your own websites, but also on third-party sites? 

So, as SEOs, these third-party sites will be places like HubSpot, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land. Any of the publications, or even through companies like Moz, Moz blog, I know we accept guest posts, would be good places to start publishing content. You need to get your authors out there because their affiliation with your brand is going to support your Brand Authority. 

And as your Brand Authority improves, it also rubs off on your internal SMEs. So your brand can't stand alone anymore. There is that entity recognition between who are the people writing this content? Do the LLMs and Google's AI see them as thought leaders? There has to be an entity recognition for the terms that you are trying to rank for, for the solutions that you offer, and that also correlates with the authors who are publishing content around these issues. 

Publish more original content

Now publish more original content that people share and cite. For me, this ties into this. And this is the most important thing that you need to start doing now.

So what does this look like? Run more experiments. Run an experiment and publish the results of that experiment online. When Google releases a new patent, or is it called patent, I don't really know, analyze that patent, and publish that work online. 

John Iwuozor analyzed the Google search - I don't even know what it's called, but I know it's the patent behind Google's AI Mode. He analyzed it, published that content on the Moz blog, and it is doing wonderfully well. Mike King is another person I think of for this. The content that he published around the API leaks, I checked it on Moz Backlink Checker, and it has gotten over 2.3K backlinks.

You need to be the first source of information. You need to be the one who is going to market with that information, not the 3rd, not the 5th, not the 50th. In the words of John Iwuozor, it is difficult to compete when people are using source number one as their reference when they are trying to support their arguments, because they're not going to quote you in that. 

You always want to be the first. So that's more research, more open. It's kind of like what I've been trying to do these days. 

I'll bring this home and say this. We are entering a new era of content where those who innovate win the visibility game. If you're doing the same thing we've been doing, which is waiting for somebody to publish content and then writing your take based on what they've published, you are not going to win with AI Mode.

If you're trying to be reactive by doing things like Reddit SEO, I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, it's great, but if you're making that the sum of your whole strategy, if you're making AI Mode optimization the thing you think is going to save you in the future, then I'm sorry, you've already lost.

You need to start innovating and publishing content that brings people to you rather than waiting for the traffic to come to you because, friends, those days are long gone.