Discover how AI is changing the top-of-funnel SEO playbook. Learn four new strategies to adapt to AI search, build third-party citations, and measure success effectively.

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Happy Friday, Moz fans. Today, I want to talk to you about how I see the typical SEO playbook, what SEOs are actually going to do as part of a typical campaign, changing in this sort of new era of SEO, especially top-of-funnel SEO, which is sort of being most affected by AI at the moment.

So just to quickly sort of set the scene, what has actually changed that I think has led to this sort of big change in what kind of work is going to be effective going forward? 

So this first stat comes from an AirOps study, and I'll link it below, hopefully. This is actually a low-end stat. I'm going to talk about another study in a moment that has a higher version of this number. But they're saying that 85% of citations that they are seeing are from third-party sites. They're not from one of the brands that is actually interested.

That's very similar to what we see in our data. You should look out for some studies from us on this topic in the future. But I just want to sort of corroborate that this is becoming a pretty standard accepted truth in the industry, that you see most of the citations and the prompts that you might choose to track, that you might find interesting are not going to be from your own site, and, therefore, the way that you influence those responses is not by updating your own site. 

And then, there's the traffic situation. So this may change over time. But most of the sites that I've seen sort of saw their AI traffic, by which I mean like Gemini and ChatGPT traffic as opposed to traditional Google search, they saw that sort of peak at less than 2%, and if anything, it's now declining. So if you are looking at AI as a traffic source, for now, you're probably going to be disappointed.

Now, there is a caveat here, which is I'm not talking today about AI ecommerce and agentic ecomm. Maybe this will change how we think about this picture and focusing more on top-of-funnel. But in this case, if you're looking at appearing in responses, you're thinking mainly about sort of awareness and impressions.

You're not, perhaps, imagining that that's going to directly send you traffic in the same way that top-of-funnel SEO might have done five plus years ago. And then, we're looking at grounded prompts as the main opportunity here. So I've done a Whiteboard Friday on this distinction in the past. So I won't talk too much about that now.

But basically, when, for example, a ChatGPT is conducting a Google search in the background, that's sort of your key opportunity to influence what that response is going to say about your brand and your products. 
 

So this is the other study I mentioned. This is from First Page Sage. Again, I'll try to link below. But they've categorized some of the main types of sites that they see in citations, and again, this is pretty similar to what we see in our citation data as well.

But I found this sort of categorization that they've done quite interesting. You'll notice that by far the largest bar, I've combined what they call new media and traditional media, but this is basically journalistic publishing. That's by far the largest source.

And then commercial and brand sites, potentially including you and all your competitors together, would only be 5% in this particular data. And I say, this varies from study to study, but it sort of aligns with what we're seeing, with what the AirOps study showed.

So this is a consensus that really what you put on your own site and your sort of first-party content strategy efforts are relatively narrow in terms of what they're going to affect here.

And that makes sense if you think about it, because if ChatGPT is grounding on not just one whole page of Google search results, but several pages of Google search results, if they look at 10 different SERPs on 10 results each, the chance that you're more than 1 result per SERP is pretty low, unless they're looking at like very, very heavily-branded queries.

So that's sort of setting the scene in terms of why I think some of the strategies I'm about to suggest are going to be the ones that people will gravitate towards. 

Now, the first one and the one that I think a lot of people I've seen picking up on in discussions is digital PR. Except you might have been thinking of digital PR up until now, particularly if you've been in SEO for a while, as sort of being synonymous with maybe white-hat link building.

This isn't about links. You don't necessarily care about the link here. This is about citation building. This is about finding sites that are being cited, a bit of a mouthful, and then trying to appear, and trying to be mentioned, and trying to make sure that the information is correct in those articles. So this is still traditional PR in that you're expecting to be reaching out to journalists, site owners, and bloggers and this kind of thing, except you're not necessarily asking for a link.

Instead, you're asking them to make sure they mention your product and to make sure they mention it correctly, and this kind of thing. But there's an interesting space here for publisher advertorial and partnerships, where these kinds of sponsored articles, you would maybe not have gone towards this as a link building strategy because you would have had to mark this up as sponsored content in your link attributes, and maybe you would think that wouldn't have the same effect as a followed link.

But perhaps you would care about this if you think that some of these LLMs are going to ingest this either way. So there's a potential opportunity here for publishers and a slightly different approach. And the last thing I'd mention here is that the way you're going to identify these sites that you might reach out to is probably prompt tracking. That's where you're going to find who is being cited when your brand or your competitors' brands are being mentioned, or maybe not being mentioned, and you would like them to be. 

Number two, on a similar vein, is what I'm calling barnacle SEO.

So you might have heard this phrase in the past, when talking about heavily-branded SERPs. So, for example, if you Google search "Moz," you would expect to see, yes, moz.com, but you would also expect to see our social profiles. You would expect to see our YouTube channel. You might expect to see perhaps a Crunchbase profile or something.

These kinds of other sites, where you can control what appears and you can control that result, are an opportunity here. And it's not just for very branded SERPs.

It's also for sort of what I'm calling "soft-branded" SERPs.

So my colleague, Dr. Pete, wrote about this distinction a bit recently. That can be yet another link below. But the idea here is that a lot of prompts are not explicitly branded, but do kind of beg a brand in their response. If I say, "What is the best phone for filming video?" okay, that isn't a branded prompt, but clearly the response is going to mention a brand.

When you have prompts mentioning a brand or especially a specific product, some of these barnacle sites can be important again.

I think YouTube and Wikipedia are two pretty universal examples. Yes, I know Wikipedia can be difficult to influence in a way that is sort of within the ethical guidelines, and I'm not suggesting you go outside those ethical guidelines. But I am suggesting it would be useful for there to be a Wikipedia page about your brand and your products.

Here, I'm talking about sort of your own branded, controlled YouTube channel. I think it's more important than ever that there is something there and that you sort of control that presence. But there will also be specific examples in your industry. 

Kind of staying on the same theme, number three, user-generated and community.

So the equivalence of that, that you can't directly control yourself. This is obviously much more difficult. But how you show up on Reddit, how you show up on review sites, how you show up on third-party video, for example, other YouTube channels talking about your products.

This is harder to influence, but it is something that you're going to have to care about. And this is probably the thing that goes most outside of the comfort zone for SEOs right now. 

Then lastly, at number four, I'm calling this information, which is maybe a bit lazy on my part, a bit of a catchall. But here I'm talking about essentially making sure that across all the different places where your products or your services or your brand might be mentioned, the information is consistent, it's present, and it has all of the key stats there.

So again, this is making sure that your different profiles and listings and the different places that things show up on your own site don't contradict each other, and the same on third-party sites potentially, so you have a very consistent message here, and there's no ambiguity.

Bonus points here if you can fill an information gap. If you have some novel data that only you can appear in, that's more percentage of citations that might be able to come from your own site. This is probably the biggest opportunity to increase that number. 

And then, as a bonus, obviously, I do think you should measure this as well. It isn't necessarily part of the playbook. But if you are doing all this work, hopefully you're going to want to see some results.

I have two tips here. One is that I think your KPI for this kind of top-of-funnel playbook should be mentions or impressions and not traffic. As I mentioned before, I think traffic for this kind of optimization can be a bit of a red herring. I know that's a tough pill to swallow.

Your citation data, so what we might traditionally have looked for as SEOs is like: Oh, where are links to my site appearing? Or where are the links to other sites appearing? That is not a KPI anymore. That is your tactical input. That's how you decide where to focus on all of this other stuff.

I hope that was all useful. Let me know in the comments, on YouTube, on LinkedIn, or anywhere else you can find me. Thank you very much.