Everyone wants their business to be found in AI search.
But, beyond the golden rule, SEO agencies are using – optimise for traditional search (to the maximum extent), paying close attention to the factors we know AI models use to assess which content it serves to users – how can you improve your visibility in AI search?
One thing that is working well is posting to Reddit and LinkedIn. The AI engines use content from these sites regularly to answer AI queries and are often cited within the answers.
So why LinkedIn?
Let’s be honest, most businesses aren’t posting on Reddit. It’s just too spicy for most companies. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is the perfect place to share your industry insight. And millions do every day.
Creating LinkedIn content that increases your visibility in AI search
These guidelines are liable to change and develop over time. But, just as we expected, and alluded to in the introduction, they follow the rules of SEO, and the same practices we’ve been mastering for clients for many years.
- Write content that adds value and answers questions
- Make your content as original as you can
- Format the content well, keep the main answer at the top of the post and use plenty of paragraphs to make your content easy to read.
- Articles on LinkedIn work particularly well, as they enable you to add H1 and H2 titles in the same way your website and blog does.
- For posts, write between 50 to 300 words
- For articles, write 500 to 2000 words
Why LinkedIn and Reddit help you be found in AI Searches
I can see why collective knowledge websites like Reddit and LinkedIn are favoured sources for AI search. The website content you wrote, and diligently optimised to rank at the top of Google search, is going to be centred around your organisation and its clients. You’re hardly going to be linking to your competitors and recommending where they may be better placed to supply a service, are you?
Whereas Reddit and LinkedIn are, to some degree, open forums, where you can post clear ideas and thoughts on your particular industry. These sites are also a massive content farm for AI search to reference; they are always up to date, there’s a vast amount of data covering a mad range of topics, and it’s all in one place. Why bother scouring the whole internet when you can just look in a few places?
To help me add credibility, the lovely people at SEMRush did all the hard work analysing 89,000 LinkedIn posts to show why AI Search loves citing them, so I didn’t have to.
Finally, evidence that you should be posting on your LinkedIn Business Page!
Ask most marketers, and they’ll say that they can’t see the point of posting on their businesses’ LinkedIn page, because it gets a lot less engagement than personal profiles. There are lots of reasons I disagree with that point of view, which I won’t cover here. But the research carried out by SEMRush shows that content on LinkedIn in business pages is getting indexed in AI searches, particularly on Perplexity.
You don’t need to be a LinkedIn influencer to make this work
The research shows that you don’t need 100,000 followers or a post with hundreds of comments and reactions; to increase your AI search visibility using LinkedIn. Chance would be a fine thing, for most of us.
The most cited LinkedIn posts in Ai Searches are from people with around 2,000 followers on posts with 15 to 20 reactions from people who post roughly once a week.
Should you abandon your website SEO efforts?
Easy answer: NO.
As I explained above, ranking your website for AI search is quite tricky, though not impossible. By looking at alternative sources for your business to be found (using LinkedIn as a place for your optimised content) you are ensuring that you will be found in other places other than just Google search.
Around 93% of all searches are still done on Google.
And while the number of searches on AI isn’t insignificant, they are still way behind Google
- Google: ~14 billion searches per day
- ChatGPT (search-like queries): ~37.5 million per day
We can help you with traditional Search, AI Search & LinkedIn marketing
We’re in a pretty unique position in that we have a long and successful history helping clients rank on Google search, and we have the same social media skills that help content do well on LinkedIn and appear in AI Searches. Meaning that you can compete using three digital marketing tactics at the same time.
If you’d like a chat about how we can help you. Fill in the form below, and we’ll be in touch.
