Elements of Optimization Associated with AI Search Engines

Summary

Podcast Title: Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Host/Author: I Hear Everything
Episode: Elements of Optimization Associated with AI Search Engines
Release Date: March 22, 2025

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Introduction

In the episode titled "Elements of Optimization Associated with AI Search Engines," host Jordan Cooney from Free Visible engages in an insightful conversation with Cassidy Clement, Senior Manager of SEO and Content at Interactive Brokers. Building on their previous discussion about retaining SEO value, this episode delves into the evolving landscape of AI-driven search engines and the strategic optimizations required to thrive within it.

Continuation of SEO Value Discussion

Jordan Cooney begins by referencing the previous episode where they explored the concept of SEO value, including its processes, future directions, KPIs, and the importance of cross-functional partnerships within businesses. He emphasizes the significance of reshaping narratives around SEO investments and managing SEO value across websites.

Jordan Cooney [02:38]: "If you missed that episode, please go back to yesterday, give that a listen. Great insights and direction on how to approach this in the ever-changing landscape that we're facing today."

AI Search Landscape and Current Trends

The discussion shifts to the current state of AI search engines. Jordan shares findings from a recent AI study conducted by Free Visible, which analyzed 30 websites across various categories. The study revealed that a substantial 77% of AI-driven traffic is directed towards informative, blog-like content. Additionally, finance emerges as the fastest-growing vertical in AI search traffic, largely due to collaborations between AI companies and financial institutions.

Jordan Cooney [04:38]: "One of the fastest growing verticals in AI search traffic is finance, largely driven due to partnerships and relationships that many of these LLMs and AI companies have forged over the past few years with financial institutions and organizations."

Foundational SEO vs. AI Optimization

Cassidy Clement elaborates on how AI is reshaping SEO rather than replacing it. She uses a cake metaphor to illustrate the relationship between traditional SEO and new AI-focused optimizations.

Cassidy Clement [02:38]: "We still have to have the cake. So that's kind of the way that this goes in my opinion, while you're still utilizing, and what I mean by that is you still have to have SEO foundational concepts integrated into your website..."

Cassidy underscores the importance of maintaining SEO fundamentals such as meta tags, accessibility, and structured data, even as search results increasingly feature concise and clear content optimized for AI interpretation.

Cassidy Clement [07:19]: "With SEO you were optimizing for user intent and a search engine which is a little different... So someone writing a blog saying 'which pair of shoes I liked the best' is very similar to someone searching 'what pair of shoes are the best'..."

The Role of Brand in AI Search

Jordan introduces the critical role of brand perception in AI search optimization. He posits that brand connotations significantly influence AI-generated responses, especially when users query specific brands.

Jordan Cooney [08:30]: "Is brand critical to this entire journey of AI search optimization? What's your perspective there?"

Cassidy responds by categorizing optimization into three parts: informative and educational content (30%), brand-related content (30%), and supportive content (30%). She highlights the necessity of a robust backlink acquisition strategy and the challenges posed by AI crawlers that can scrape and integrate content more efficiently.

Cassidy Clement [08:52]: "The core elements of GEO really are bringing things together to be clear and concise, citing them or supporting them with other types of opinions..."

Future of Discovery and Tipping Points

As the conversation progresses, Jordan probes into the future trajectory of AI search and the impending tipping points that could lead to major shifts in content discovery and SEO practices.

Jordan Cooney [17:27]: "I want to know where you see the future going... When are the major milestones of change in this arena going to occur?"

Cassidy outlines several factors influencing the future of AI search engines, including market uncertainty, integration with other tools, sustainability models via advertising and freemium structures, and the ecological impact of handling vast query volumes. She emphasizes the ongoing need for foundational SEO practices and the adaptation of content strategies to remain relevant in an AI-dominated search environment.

Cassidy Clement [18:39]: "If your content naturally has high engagement, optimized page incorporates directly to or very close to the actual search intent and keywords, odds are it will show..."

Skills for the Future SEO Professional

Looking ahead, the conversation touches upon the skills and competencies that SEO professionals must develop to excel in an AI-enhanced search landscape. Cassidy suggests that future SEO strategies will require integration with advanced tools, an understanding of AI-driven metrics, and the ability to adapt to rapidly evolving algorithms.

Cassidy Clement [24:17]: "We have to try to remember that all of these search engines... are all still deriving from metadata and original search results. So you still have to do it."

Conclusion

Jordan and Cassidy wrap up the episode by reiterating the indispensable role of foundational SEO amidst the transformative influence of AI on search engines. They advocate for a balanced approach that amalgamates traditional SEO techniques with innovative AI optimization strategies to ensure sustained organic growth and visibility.

Jordan Cooney [17:02]: "It is critical to think that foundational SEO isn't going to add value. And we're missing out on the opportunity to leverage this new technology to help us do it better and faster and more effectively."

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For more insights and detailed discussions from the Voices of Search podcast, visit voicesofsearch.com.

Transcript

[Ben Shab]

The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney hello SEOs and marketers.

[Jordan Cooney]

My name is Jordan Cooney from Free Visible. Joining me today is Cassidy Clement, who is the Senior Manager of SEO and Content at Interactive Brokers.

[Ben Shab]

This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most link to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster [e-mail] AWT that's a h r e f s.com.

[Jordan Cooney]

AWT yesterday, Cassy and I talked about key items to retain SEO value. Today we're going to continue the conversation by discussing elements of optimization associated with AI search engines. Okay, here's my conversation with Cassidy Clement, the Senior Manager of SEO and Content at Interactive Brokers. Cassidy, welcome back to the show.

[Cassidy Clement]

Thanks again. Glad to be back.

[Jordan Cooney]

Yeah. So day two Yesterday we kind of really unraveled this concept of SEO value. What is the process behind this? How we look at the future of where this is going in terms of the KPIs, but even more importantly, the partnerships, the relationships across the business, the communication with teams and stakeholders like UX and design, ultimately really helping us reshape the narrative around how we invest, control and manage the SEO value in any of our websites. So if you missed that episode, please go back to yesterday, give that a listen. Great insights and direction on how to approach this in the ever changing landscape that we're facing today. But for our conversation today, we're going to go into the specifics around optimization and AI search engines. And I think that this is something that is super exciting because this is the breaking the door in the new frontier. Where are we going? Recently here at Pre Visible, we did an AI study and we analyzed 30 websites. And in those 30 websites we looked at the categories that those websites are part of, or at least their content is associated with. We looked at the AI traffic that they're receiving and we came to some interesting conclusions. One of them notably is that 80%, 77% of traffic is going to informative blog post like content. The other really interesting piece of data is that one of the fastest growing verticals in AI search traffic is finance, largely driven due to partnerships and relationships that many of these LLMs and AI companies have forged over the past few years with financial institutions and organizations. So with that backdrop, Cassie, I'd love to get your perspective on where we are today. I know that by the time this gets released, the entire landscape will have changed and maybe you and I will both be replaced by AI bots, but whatever. On a serious note, where are we today? How are we looking at the AI search landscape and what's your view on what, what, what this is for businesses and SEOs alike?

[Cassidy Clement]

Well, all I can say is last time I was on here, I remember you asked me a question about is AI going to change or negate SEO? Something along those lines. And I remember saying, no, it's just going to change the way you have to think about it, the way you have to go about it. And thankfully that held true. So the way that it tends to be now is you have your standard issue SEO. We'll talk about this again in a nice little metaphor of a beautiful little cake. Oh yay, chocolate cake. We love it. And then on top of that is going to be your geo, which is all of the fancy stuff, maybe some fruit, all of these other elements, eye catching, easy to understand what it is and everybody likes it. But in order to have a cake, you still have to have the cake. So that's kind of the way that this goes in my opinion, while you're still utilizing, and what I mean by that is you still have to have SEO foundational concepts integrated into your website, while the search results may still be utilizing blog like content, easy to read content, you still need your SEO fundamentals. And really there's certain success metrics that you can use for both regular optimization success, seeing how you're doing as well as the geo, the generative optimization and generative engine optimization. But really the key difference is geo, you're optimizing for the AI engines. So it's for a summary output where with SEO you were optimizing for user intent and a search engine which is a little different. So I mainly think about it like the AI side you're going to be mainly being like, okay, we're not scrolling through all of this. What are the main points? Are we clear? Are we concise? Do we have good supplemental sourcing with it? That's why so many of those blog like posts work that way because it's also, it's similar to the way that the language is used to search. So someone writing a blog saying which pair of shoes I liked the best is very similar to someone searching what pair of shoes are the best versus old school search engine best shoes in 2025. And someone wrote on their webpage that marketed their product, these are the best shoes in 2025. Very different.

[Jordan Cooney]

Yeah.

[Cassidy Clement]

So that's kind of the long and short of how this is changing things up. I mean I've gone through keyword research where I am telling people now please give me what you think are more of the normal keywords. And then we're going to start to look for things that you would actually ask a person and then we'll see how we can do our research here.

[Jordan Cooney]

Big question on this because this is one of the areas that fundamentally is I think critical to unlocking GEO or any AI LLM based optimization that anyone wants to take on. And it's understanding your brand. If you have a brand, it's likely part of how any of these AI search engines or LLMs or generating those responses, those natural language responses. You know, you go in and you type in XYZ Business's name, you know, in your shoes example you type in a brand name like Nike. So it's going to use that brand connotation in its, in its formulation of a response.

[Cassidy Clement]

Right.

[Jordan Cooney]

Whether it be on a broad based scale or even on a more refined scale like the best Nike shoes, there's some connotation with brand that will likely influence the response how should we think about brand? Is brand critical to this entire journey of AI search optimization? What's your perspective there?

[Cassidy Clement]

I would actually say for the sake of optimization, is probably 30, 30, 30, 30% being informative and educational, 30% of it being brand, and the other 30% is being supportive to either of those arguments brand or informational. And the reason that I say that is because the core elements of GEO really are bringing things together to be clear and concise, citing them or supporting them with other types of opinions. Which again is why a lot of these personalized blogs get integrated into these rankings, or these editorial columns that get integrated into these rankings. And then finally the brand reputation, whether it's review references, encouraging reviews, or actual statistics associated with why the company has a brand reputation, good or bad, really. But that's why those elements, in my opinion, can be kind of put into three or four buckets depending. It's super crucial though, if you are a brand now, you kind of have to think about your backlink acquisition plan a little bit differently because now those pages can be crawled and implemented. They're scraped as well, which is a little different. So some people don't like that because they don't want that. You know, you used to throw like a no index or no follow on things and just go on your way. Or you thought, oh, this backlink, it's so like weird and obscure. Nobody's going to find this, right? Oh boy, it's getting dicey out there because it's everything. I mean, these crawlers run and run and run and run. Not even scrapers. The other element, which is kind of interesting, it's kind of new. I think ChatGPT may have been the one that released a brief on this, but a lot of people are asking, can you pay to play? Because it used to be that way within. I mean, it is for most traditional search engines. And you could still do, you know, pay for different advertising content partnerships. But people are asking, what about an ad in a sidebar? When people search for certain things, it's very interesting. And most queries are going to be associated with a brand or a specific topic of favoring or not favoring things. So they're really important items to think about. Are you clear and concise? What's your backlink profile like? Do you rely a lot on page search ads and not that much on organic? Because now this is a big organic game. It's going to be a tough one.

[Jordan Cooney]

I'm with you on the entire narrative there about how to think the brand. I think it is complex and it's. But it's critical to kind of wield your narrative in any of these experiences. You brought up something there that's really interesting and that is like there's a lot of players who want to pay to play or want to be more involved in these AI based search experiences. I'm curious to get your perspective on what are the foundational aspects? What are the elements that you have to do? Well, no matter what, right? It doesn't matter. I mean, you could try to pay your way in, but if you don't have like the plumbing right on this, you're paying for nothing. Right. So I think that there's a misconception that like the SEO ways of the past may not be as useful as they are in the future. You brought up link building. We didn't talk about content yet, but there's something here that I like your perspective on with respect to the foundation and elements of what's going to work in the future here.

[Cassidy Clement]

Absolutely. I mean that is something that people initially who may be brushed against SEO in a meeting before and didn't totally understand. How if we're not paying for some of this, but we're paying for the tools, how does this, how is this advantageous? And we all know there's many ways to quantify and statistics to show why it's doing well. But let's go back a little to what we all were used to good old five years ago. If you were paying for ads, there's quality score formulas. If your site wasn't really great from an SEO perspective, or you're doing black hat stuff, or your site was kind of like left to nothing, or maybe your domain lapsed or anything like that, the value was lost. You could keep trying to bid for stuff, but your multiplier because of the value could be zero and thus the multiplication equals zero. So in this scenario it's kind of similar by incorporating a pay to play action with a AI search engine. No one has released what their algorithm does for ranking, so we don't totally know. But even if they were to consider incorporating it with a bidding system, technically speaking they have to find a way to score quality to consider it. Otherwise it's going to be the highest bidder gets it every time, which doesn't always work. So that's where the foundational concepts come in. If your content naturally has high engagement, optimized page incorporates directly to or very close to the actual search intent and keywords, odds are it will show, but it's incredibly important to remember. And I've said this in so many meetings, I should probably just get a tattoo of it. You need to still do foundational SEO.

[Jordan Cooney]

Yes.

[Cassidy Clement]

It is not going away. You cannot remove accessibility, you cannot remove meta tags, you cannot remove every page on your site and just make one so that you can buy something. It doesn't work that way. These are meant to be supplemental tools to allow people to get the information that they need quicker. So now this is forcing a lot of people to take a good hard look at their site, clear a ton of brush, and make sure that what they are putting out is actually informative and not just marketing jargon that they have up there for the sake of having it. I mean, I could go on for hours, but there's a bit of an SEO existential crisis and I don't want to fuel that fire. But at the same time, it's like everything else in technology. There's a new tool. You have to learn how to do it, you have to learn how to work with it and work for it. Unfortunately, we're kind of missing half the rule book right now because we're in the birth of it. But we have to try to remember that all of these search engines, all of these integrations, all of your products being fed places, your mobile phones, your digital assistants, they're all still deriving from metadata and original search results. So you still have to do it.

[Ben Shab]

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[Jordan Cooney]

That's right, you do. I think that that narrative there was so good, it's like we're missing the mark if we don't think that foundational SEO isn't going to add value. And we're missing out on the opportunity to leverage this new technology to help us do it better and faster and more effective. And it's such a key recipe to the future success that we all are going to have if we can put those two things together.

[Cassidy Clement]

Right?

[Jordan Cooney]

So Cassidy, as we're looking at this AI world and where the future of discovery I've been calling it discovery is going because it's just a way that consumers are going to discover, see content, access information in a much more precise or concise or direct way than what a search engine can provide. A traditional, conventional text based search engine like Google. I want to know where you see the future going. In particular, I want to see your perspective around when the tipping points are going to happen. When are the major milestones of change in this arena going to occur? I feel like they're going to happen much sooner than we all think, but I'd like to get your perspective on that. And then as we're looking down the future, the road of when things change in a dramatic way, because today this traffic is very, very, very, very small. And everyone keeps saying that, but at some point it's not very, very, very small. And that tipping point comes. So when we reach that, what are the skills that we all need to have to be better at our jobs?

[Cassidy Clement]

Well, that's a big question, but I'm going to try my best. So really there's a handful of different things to look at. First and foremost, I think there's definitely, there's a weird vibe in the market right now. And what I mean by that is like search tools and search engines because nobody is really sure about who's gonna, who's gonna win the fight, if you will. It's not really much of a fight. Everybody's playing in their own, you know, sandbox. But really, like if anybody here is familiar with finance, you know, markets tend to be a little nervous before there's an election because they're not really sure who's going to be creating the rules. And it can make people a little hesitant to do anything unless it's you know, a sure win. Now similar to this, a lot of SEO tools or budgeting, a lot of people aren't biting right now because they're not really sure what they should invest in at a contractual basis. And sometimes places can't afford to go in at a year at a clip. They got to do some type of economies of scale for a five year contract where they have five teams in their business business who can utilize this. You know, they got to make a case for it. That's the first thing. There's no real like person in the market right now other than Google. Of course for foundational SEO, there's nobody really saying these are the guidelines that are going to make the most sense for AI Geo Foundation. That's where we're kind of like, we know general stuff, sources, citations, easy to read headings, succinct items, structured data, they all kind of fall in line with foundational SEO too. It's just putting more emphasis on them and making your content a lot more digestible. I think the average reading level for crawlers is like 15, like being a 15 year old maybe. And let me tell you, working in financial services tell you right now, very hard to achieve because legally we have to say a lot of things on page, which makes it tough. But the change part, the ebbs and flows, I mean in my opinion everything's going to go peaks, valleys and probably a plateau as people start to catch up with the skills. But really the first thing is going to be the advertisement aspect. How are these places going to sustain in models where if you want more people to be utilizing this and you get it to a point, which I know Deepseek was one of them, but if you get it to a point that you're able to say that we are working so efficiently that we don't necessarily need a ton of power or processing, that's going to be a big part, which is the ads part, integration of media and both of those ads and media. What I mean with the processing is if you can get it down to something smaller, a little bit of Moore's Law coming in here, if you're able to do that and you're able to have more people start to interact with it, then you can justify incorporating more ads because you don't, you might be on more of a freemium type of business structure which they are on, but if you want more eyeballs on it and utilizing it, there's that. The other thing is integration into other tools and being actually fully integrated.

[Jordan Cooney]

Right?

[Cassidy Clement]

That's what's going to be really weird for a few years because it goes into where are you getting your money from? So are you able to sustain it so you can develop it? Are you able to integrate other forms of media and content so that other sectors can have an advantage or at least a reason to start to fully optimize for you? And then finally, the last piece for that, before you can get into the actual final answer to this, which is success metrics and statistics, is how are you doing this ecologically? Like, is it friendly, is it efficient? Are you hitting processing points where it's unsound to handle all of these queries? Right now it's kind of, it's at a paywall. So you know, it handles a certain point. There's probably a certain amount of user batches that they're familiar with that they know that the processor or the data warehouse or whatever server room I will say in this scenario can withstand. I don't know the exact numbers, but if I were to say the amount of people utilizing Google in a day would utilize ChatGPT, I don't know if they'd survive. That wouldn't necessarily work. Right. So it has to be able to handle the amount of volume because as we all saw from 10 years ago, everybody started using Google, Yahoo, Ask, Jeeves, AOL, all that. Microsoft, Bing even came in the chat for like an hour that it felt like off the face of the earth. They had to start to change into the way that they were utilizing their content structure and their ad structure. That's the main part. And then finally you were asking about skills. So the way that that's going to really start to integrate is if it can get integrated into tools, because that should help. This is just me speaking theoretically. In the future, if you're able to integrate that giving a pipeline of statistics directly into tools that are specific to certain business uses, then you're able to have people get acclimated to your terms, your rules or the way that they structure the rules or the guidelines. And then how exactly success is measured from the way that the engine is constructed. Because right now we have general ideas. We could talk about engagement, we could talk about user acquisition, but we don't have anything else. It's not like anybody right now is selling a heat map for ChatGPT responses. And some people, truly they wouldn't be. Some people aren't comfortable being tracked that way because now there's no click through necessity. So you can track their eyes.

[Jordan Cooney]

That's right.

[Cassidy Clement]

Like these are serious. You want to talk existential. This is the truth. Like, these are things that people are people are considering. And an old school like, okay, back in the day, oh, I dropped this e commerce site. Who's hovering over this backpack? I want to sell, but they're just not converting those heat maps would help. You can kind of utilize it that way, but no one's offering it as a tool. It's a closed system. You can't get in there. So these are truly like, we're in an interesting spot. It's going to be cool to see what happens. A little scary, but you know what isn't?

[Jordan Cooney]

That's right. That's right. And that's a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voices of Search podcast. Thank you to Cassidy Clement from Interactive Brokers for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Cassidy, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or visit our company website interactivebrokers.com.

[Ben Shab]

Okay, thanks to Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's J T K O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. And a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster [e-mail] that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is benjschab B E N J S H A B and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data. It.