Hey good folks and happy Thursday! Sorry the late newsletter this week––it’s been a doozy coming back from vacation and jumping back in. But, also, if you haven’t taken a vacation this summer and don’t have one planned, what are you waiting for?! It’s so good for your mental health. Get out there. Get near some water. Disconnect. Touch grass, as they say.
All right, let’s go. |
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May was a great month for AEO. ChatGPT had what Profound is calling their “branded link update,” which did the following: -
OpenAI referral traffic to monitored brand websites nearly doubled overnight (~60-65%) and has stayed there.
- The mechanism: ChatGPT started embedding brand homepage URLs inline in its answers at least ~5x more often. Each link is a clickable, attributable referral.
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The result is a homepage unlock. Homepage share of OpenAI referrals jumped from ~3.5% to ~24% industry-wide. Brand front doors went from a rounding error to roughly 1 in 4 referral clicks in a week.
- For brands: AI mentions are no longer a perception metric. They're a referral channel. And OpenAI can move this number again at any time.
That showed up in our data. And, Google is making some moves to add more visibility into AIO placements in Search Console. All of this means that AEO is getting a bit less zero-click environment, and more directly attributable and reportable. Thank goodness, because selling execs visibility as a metric is tough (even if it is up an incredible amount).
It’s nice to see that things are working, but it is also critical to prepare for the future. I think it is still really important that content teams: -
Build their own AI content production systems, similar to what Alex is talking about here.
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Rethink their editorial ecosystem, what each editorial property is for, how it looks & feels, and how well bots can read it (think markdown, AI overviews, LLM-style search on your site, etc.)
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Not give up on the basics of content marketing, substituting things like blogs or owned editorial properties for Substack in all cases. The pendulum will swing back. Here’s a Zapier example.
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Build guidance and new muscles around what AI does on our content teams and what humans do. Heike has a great graphic from this week on this.
AI is changing how people find information on the internet, and how that information is created and even distributed. This is a big change, and it can be fun! Get creative. Break all of your processes down into their building blocks, and then reassemble.
As attribution gets better, content teams will have more leeway to experiment. Set up the systems, processes and tools now to be ready to do that. Change is tough, but not always bad. |
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You do you!
One content marketer’s best practices aren’t always right for another one, though I do try to distill out the main concepts and core practices I believe everyone can benefit from. That said, you must use good judgment when deciding whether to take advice given from folks on the internet. I am an expert, and this advice comes from my direct experience, but I am not smarter than you, and I have nothing to gain or lose because of what you do.
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THINGS KEEPING ME CONTENT |
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Thank you so much for reading. Let me know what you think by replying to this email. Very excited to be here with y’all. Tracey |
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