How to Get AI Chatbots to Recommend Your Business Over Competitors

"For a long time, the marketing firm Vital Design kept a blog. It was a basic SEO tactic: Write posts about the things your target user searches for, and those people are more likely to discover you in Google searches. Then AI came along, and Vital's organic blog traffic plummeted by 60%. Maybe you've experienced the same problem, just like businesses everywhere."

"While Vital's traffic cratered, its sales-ready leads remained steady or increased. How? Because Vital had started investing in the next SEO-like strategy: It's often called answer engine optimization, or AEO, and it helps boost your company's visibility in AI search queries. In addition, AEO can help search engines more efficiently inform your consumer - which is changing the entire sales cycle."

"Max DesMarais, Vital Design's director of strategy, calls this the "marketing funnel push." Customers' research phase now happens outside your website, through AI tools that synthesize information from multiple sources. So by the time they reach your site, they've already been prequalified by AI. "They are already further down the funnel than they previously were, creating a better environment for them to convert on sales-ready leads," DesMarais says."

"One of the most effective tactics, DesMarais says, is to create content such as new product pages on your website - including features, attributes, and FAQs - that address extremely specific customer needs. The more niche and targeted, the better. For example, let's say you're a marketing agency (like Vital Design) that works with many different WordPress themes and serves multiple industries. You'd want to build pages that address each of those combinations - highlighting specific tools you use, industries you serve, problems you sol"

Vital Design’s blog-based SEO traffic dropped 60% after AI emerged, while sales-ready leads stayed steady or increased. The shift came from investing in answer engine optimization, which improves visibility in AI search queries and helps search engines provide clearer information to consumers. Customer research increasingly happens outside company websites through AI tools that synthesize multiple sources. By the time prospects reach a website, they are often further down the funnel and already prequalified. Getting a business recommended during that research phase can attract more qualified prospects ready to buy. A practical approach is creating hyperspecific service pages with features, attributes, and FAQs targeting niche customer needs.

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