Navigating the AI era requires a new approach to search engine optimisation (SEO). In this video, join marketing experts Charlie Norledge and Lauren Henley as they break down how to show up and stay relevant in a world dominated by Google’s AI Overviews and Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT.
What you’ll learn:
- The Great Divide: Understand the shift from clicks to “zero-click” searches, where users get direct answers from AI overviews without visiting a website.
- Optimising for LLMs: Learn to move beyond single-keyword tracking and start measuring performance at a “prompt level”—focusing on conversational queries that users ask LLMs.
- The Power of Brand: Discover why investing in your brand’s reputation and authority is more critical than ever. Google’s AI looks for citations from reputable sources and earned media, making these new key performance indicators.
- Practical Strategies: Find out how to use AI for better competitive analysis and how to adapt your digital PR campaigns to secure mentions in high-level publications that AI models trust.
Transcript
Charlie Norledge: As an industry, we’ve been Google-first for many years. One of the changes over the last 12 months is that we’ve seen a big rise in people starting to use LLMs, so that’s things like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. I think the way we’re going to have to start changing our strategy is by looking at how we can rank within those spaces now. It’s not just a case of thinking, “okay, we’re fine in Google, these are our rankings.” It’s multi-touch now, and it’s really about understanding where our performance is across those different spaces.
Lauren Henley: That does tie into PR as well because for years lots of campaigns have been made for Google. They’ve been made for links and link targets. So, moving away from that, unlinked mentions are going to be so much more important, and sort of tracking things across not just Google, but across social and different platforms.
Charlie Norledge: I think from our client perspective, the biggest impact we’re seeing is when it comes to traffic. We’re seeing something called the ‘The Great Divide’ over the past few months, where people are getting their questions answered directly in search without having to click on a website. We’re seeing zero-click search happen, and the great divide is where impressions go up. So, a lot more people are searching, but because their answers are directly in the search results, they’re not clicking. Whilst it is quite scary, it’s something that we have to accept is going to happen, and I think what we need to do is try to make sure that when there’s a potential for our client to be featured in AI, we’re optimising to be in that space.
Lauren Henley: If people have been doing good E-E-A-T signals for the past few years anyway, that hard work will continue to pay off. Google looks for citations through the expertise on someone’s website, but it also looks to earned media and reputable sources to recommend products too, so that work is still really important to do.
Charlie Norledge: Yeah, I can see that when we look at the citations that come through from those different LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity, a lot of it comes from places like Reddit and The Times, which are really high-level news publications. In digital PR, we’ve been building links in those publications for a long time, so hopefully, digital PR is going to get even more important in our strategies.
Lauren Henley: Yeah, exactly, and it gives us some opportunities because through these tracking tools and where you mentioned the different citations that we find, we can add those sources to our media list and make sure we target them specifically.
Charlie Norledge: On the keyword tracking side, I think we’re going to see a pretty significant change there as well. For the longest time, we’ve just tried to track maybe 100 keywords for each client, and they’ve been the goal. I think as search becomes more conversational, it’s not just about tracking a keyword like ‘contact lens’. Someone won’t go into an LLM and just search for ‘contact lenses’. They will go in and say, “what is the best contact lens provider in the UK?” So, I think rather than just tracking a single keyword within LLMs, what we’re going to do is start to track it at a prompt level. You would have ‘contact lens’ as a topic, and you would track maybe 30 prompts, best guesses of what you think users search for, and then you can get a score of how visible you are across those prompts, how often your brand is mentioned, how often you’re linked, and what the sentiment is. Is it positive or negative? And then we can really measure how that’s going. So, if you’re going to take anything away from this, you need to start measuring and optimising for this now. We’ve got technology doing this in-house, but we’d strongly recommend for any brand that they start to look at understanding how they’re performing in LLM search across all the different spaces
Lauren Henley: From a PR point of view, it’s just sticking with that relevance. It doesn’t mean that links aren’t important; they’re still really important. It just gives them a different layer of importance. And it means that you need to focus on those brand mentions and not kind of discard them because they’re not passing link equity.
Charlie Norledge: I think with all of this, it does show how important brand is going to be. I think people have to be prepared to be able to invest in that level to improve your brand. It’s not just about optimising a single page anymore; it’s about looking at your brand as a whole and trying to make it as relevant as possible.
