After dropping my Nudie Jeans vs Banana Republic examples of AI rewarding high quality companies vs spammy tactics - I decided to go all in on optimizing with signals that say Seer works in the banking industry. I built a page to reflect our depth of expertise, I interviewed team members who worked on bank projects, I spoke at banking conferences, I did press releases, I updates my speaker byline to include industries I worked in, all to get beat by low quality listicles (here's a video of my research).
Spammy low quality efforts were working over the hard work in AI answers, while I was doing "high quality" efforts like speaking at industry conferences.
We've been analyzing the prompt "tell me about Seer Interactive" for probably almost 2 years. One of our co-workers Nick Haigler an AIO/GEO researcher at Seer recently noticed that a lot of models would reference "remote first" and when he looked into it...
It was the FOOTER over and over again.
We tested this change to our footer to help us change...
36 hours later ChatGPT 5 was all about it, that was quick...
Optimizing for AI - 3 here is what I'm now thinking based on this footer test
#1 Site real estate matters a lot
Take a step back and ask yourself what do I want my business to be known for?
For Seer what's more important to communicate to the marketplace...that we're remote or that 2 years ago we had our best retention rate EVER? Which one will impact how prospects perceive us? We all know the answer.
Then go and find small areas of repetition on your site, I'm not ready to test a massive paragraph, and ask yourself if those are serving you? What is in your navigation, your footer, etc? Be smart about aligning what you put there with what you want to be known for.
Again, I would NOT put a big paragraph!
#2 Determine how much of your vs your competitors citations are owned
We run the prompt... "Tell me about Seer Interactive" but we also run it for 3 other competitors. As you can see we drive more of our own citations than our competitors do.
If more of the answers are owned by us on our domain, then I hypothesize that we can make more changes and get them in the index faster because for competitor 4, ChatGPT gets a lot more of its answers about their brand for that query from OTHER sites. Meaning they gotta wait for those sites to be updated & they don't control those sites.
Controlling your citations is an advantage IMHO.
#3 - Having citations powered by friends is an advantage
When you see the sites that are showing up and consistently influencing answers about your brand, the closer you are to those organizations the better. If it is a site where you can pay to update, you should probably pay and update. If you are "sick" of submitting for awards, but the last time you won that award it is an influential part of answers you might want to keep submitting. Now you can try to align your on site w/ your off site citations.
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