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What’s The Difference Between Keyword Research and Prompt Research?

Over the years, we’ve talked a lot about both keywords and keyword research in our digital marketing agency’s blog (you can view a list of those keyword-related blog posts at https://allintheresults.com/category/keywords/), so we won’t repeat all of the valuable information about the keyword-research benefits shared there. Such research is just one piece, but an important piece, of an overall SEO/GEO/AEO strategy, and often is the foundation of all other SEO/GEO/AEO (search engine optimization/being found online) tactics, particularly when it comes to being found in traditional search engines.

Keyword research and prompt research differ on a number of fronts, including the factors outlined below.

How Keyword Research and Prompt Research Differ

  • Nature of What Is Entered In Search Tool By Searcher/Prompter: Traditional keyword research is/was all about discovering what topics (in the form of one word or several words (a phrase or statement)) individuals, in geographies your organization serves) are/were entering into traditional search engines on an average monthly basis. Eventually, keyword research expanded to “light” question research, using tools like Answer The Public. Prompt research is about discovering the various questions vs. statements or phrases that individuals are putting into an AI search/answer engine, like Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, or ChatGPT, to get an answer to a specific question.
  • Geographic Focus: as discussed above, keyword research is/was focused on understanding what terms/phrases/words target audiences in an organization’s geography were entering into traditional search vs. AI search tools to determine which phrases the target audiences were using most. With prompt research, there is far less geographic/physical-location focus, and it is far more difficult to obtain what questions individuals specifically in your geography are putting into an AI search tool, like ChatGPT, to get their question answered.
  • Ultimate Search Engine Optimization (SEO/GEO/AEO) Goal/Objective: Keyword research is all about helping an organization “rank well” in relevant search results fo relevant searches. Prompt research is about identifying the types of questions anyone anywhere is entering in an AI/answer engine that are either directly, tangentially, or very indirectly related to the products or services your organization offers.
  • How Research Is Used: Keyword research is used to inform the content that one includes on their website — whether it be post or page content — but particularly, the words used in/the phrasing of headers and subheaders, and behind-the-scenes meta/SEO tags. Prompt research is about identifying which content on your own website or a competitor’s website is being cited (linked to) by AI search engines, and therefore, being served up to “prompters” in the answer they spit back. This research can help inform the format and content nature of future blog posts or Q &A (housed in an FAQ website page). In addition, a different set of prompt research should be conducted to learn the exact phrasing/the nature of prompts that your target audiences are regularly putting into AI search/answer engines.
  • Tools Used To Conduct Research: Free and paid tools exist to conduct keyword research, and our team uses the free keyword planner tool in Google Ads to conduct such research. Prompt research involves the two types/branches described above and can be conducted by 1) adding the “first user source” dimension to your Google Analytics “pages and screens” report (see image below) and entering the names of various AI search engines, such as Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini, into the search query bar so you can see to which pages/posts on your site AI search engines are referring visitors. If you have a visitor coming to a specific post/page on your website, then the AI engine in-question must have cited (provided a link to) the website page or post in-question; and 2) using a paid tool like SEMRush which has a distinct “prompt research” tool within it to gather broader/more general target-audience prompt behavior, and therefore, behavior that goes on beyond your particular website.
This image is a print screen from a Google Analytics report where the page report has an added dimension of the first user source name so the user can see what AI search engine is referring traffic to which pages and posts of their website.

Need Help Conducting Prompt Research Or Keyword Research?

Reach out today for a complimentary discussion regarding keyword research and prompt research to support an overall SEO/AEO/GEO strategy!

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Your Best Chance Of Appearing In AI Overviews? Being The Best

After reading this Linked post by Eli Schwartz, a very well-respected and well-known SEO expert, about how to appear in Google AI Overviews, the above slogan came to me. I wanted to give credit where credit is due and share how I was inspired. It all makes great sense and is in keeping with what we, as a fellow SEO expert, has been sharing in recent months, i.e., if you want a search engine to declare you as the best, or indicate less directly that your organization is the best or one of the best in its field and geography by mentioning your organization’s name or sharing a link back to your site (known as a citation), then your organization has to earn that “best” title.

We’ve already discussed ways your organization can send signals to AI engines that you are trustworthy in a number of recent blog posts, and that includes getting rave reviews from happy customers. But, ultimately, the way to get those reviews is becoming a company whose products, services, and customer service is unmatched by competitors, by demonstrating your commitment to the community/communities you serve, and by making sure you’re an “employer of choice.”

Why I’ve Got The Experience and Knowledge To Speak To What Makes An Organization An Outstanding One

Having worked since I was a teenager and until my mid-50’s for employers (and served in a number of manager and director roles), and now, for the past 12 years run a marketing agency that has successfully served more than 150 clients and received public-facing accolades (reviews), compliments and appreciation from clients, I believe I’ve got the background and experience to speak to what makes an organization stand out from competitors, and therefore, be considered “the best.” You can learn more about my corporate marketing and marketing agency background on my Our Principal and History website page.

As a life-long marketer I feel so strongly about how many of the attributes below influence an organization’s success that I’ve written about many of the below in past blog posts!

What Does It Take For Your Organization To Be The “Best” In Your Industry and Geography?

  • Treat your employees well.
    • Offer them opportunities to learn and take on new and larger roles.
    • Take the time to listen to and consider employee’s ideas to improve work productivity or process, or the products and services you offer.
    • Offer tangible and intangible benefits that they value and/or need.
    • Celebrate personal and organizational milestones and successes.
    • Offer financial incentives where, if the company does well, the employee does well.
  • Deliver exceptional, world-class service each and every day at every point of contact (EPOC) with customers. As a marketing professional with more than 35 years of experience I know first-hand how important good customer service is to success. Not only when it comes to assisting customers/clients of your organizations, but handling inquiries and leads that come into your organization respectfully, effectively, and on a timely basis!
  • Offer solid, reliable products and services that meet client expectations and needs at a reasonable, fair price.
  • Give back to your community/communities.
  • Always keep an eye on business and daily life changes and how they impact your clients — whether they be businesses or consumers — and how you can make their lives easier or respond to a challenge they are facing.
  • Always be evolving and considering what new innovative product or service you can offer.
  • Educate. Educate. Educate — make sure staff and leaders have time to stay in the know on industry changes and national, regional, and local happenings and anything else that could negatively or positively impact how they and your business does their work or the products and services you offer. Ensure they can learn from both internal and external experts. To support all of this, designate times of the week as meeting-free and learning time!
  • Encourage out-of-the box thinking by all staff and leaders!
  • Treat your clients and customers like family.
  • Take the time to walk in your clients’ and customers’ shoes. Check out this blog post about the importance of walking in your customers’ shoes.
  • Show both your clients and customers appreciation regularly. A small “thank you” goes a long way!

I’ll likely add new features and characteristics to the above list as they strike me, but I think any organization that achieves the aforementioned will succeed at being top in their field, in their particular geography!

Acceptance of Circumstances, AEO, AI Search, Being Found on Google, ChatGPT, GEO, keeping up with trends, local search, organic SEO, partnerships, Search Engine Optimization, staying current, website

Why One Or More Business Directory Listings Could Be Your Ticket To AEO Success, i.e., Being Mentioned or Cited In AI Search Engines

While the focus of this blog post is on getting a Better Business Bureau (BBB) listing, because it’s an organization that most consumers and business owners, and AI search engines, like ChatGPT trust as far as being a neutral/objective party that has vetted the organization in-question before posting information about it, other business directory listings can also support your organization being cited or mentioned in AI search results as well. Read why business directory listings send signals to search engines that your organization is trustworthy!

How You’ll Benefit From A Better Business Bureau Listing

I have spoken with or e-mailed many of my clients about the value of getting accredited by the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and having a paid vs. free listing to get the backlink from their website to the client’s website which is very valuable related to SEO and being found on AI search engines these days. That’s because AI search engines are looking for signs of your organization’s credibility/trustworthiness before they feel comfortable mentioning your name or serving up your website in “prompts” entered by relevant searchers into their tool. A listing on the Better Business Bureau will serve you well from a-being-found-in-AI-search-engines standpoint if you have a paid listing vs. free one. 

You can learn more about the above here: https://www.bbb.org/all/business/business-tips/why-bbb-accreditation-may-help-you-be-more-visible-in-ai-search/?utm_source=chatgpt.com.

BBB Accreditation and Plans:

I recently had a lengthy conversation with one of the accreditation experts at one of the BBB offices serving MA and here’s what getting accredited with BBB, in general, would buy you (but important to check out the various plans that I linked to below to see what each provides):

  • A listing/profile on their site with e-mail, website, and contact information; plus, you could include photos, videos, licensing, logo and more
  • A link from their site back to your site as part of that listing (backlink)
  • Some free legal services
  • Ability to participate in their request-a-quote program where consumers request quotes from BBB-accredited businesses
  • An app that you can use to request customers/clients to write a BBB review for you
  • You can participate in cable advertising program, but would have to pay for that
  • A physical certificate will be mailed to you that you can place at your office/physical location to display you are a BBB member
  • A seal to add to your website indicating you are a BBB member will be provided

There are a variety of plans available, but to really reap extensive, diverse benefits, it would be ideal to pursue the BBB+ plan since you could have a more extensive/larger presence on their website: https://bbb-membership-plans.222-0021.org/, but starter plan would still provide great benefits and far as trust establishment goes. It’s just with the BBB+ plan you get more marketing opportunities — more tools, more resources, more opportunities for your Profile to be shown. 

this show the back of the head of a dark-haired man with a gray dress shirt on pointing to something on his computer tablet which has content open on it.

What Other Business Directories Should You Join?

  • Other Certification Directories (Beyond BBB): think ones that demonstrate what skills your organization is certified in.
  • State or City/Town Business Directories: If there is a business directory for the state(s) in which your business operates, such as the there is for Massachusetts businesses like ours in the form of the Massachusetts Business Network, you should consider joining those. If the city or town where you operate also maintains an online listing of the businesses operating there, you should take the necessary steps to get listed online.
  • Civic or Local Directories: examples include Rotary or Chamber of Commerce directories, or yellowpages.com or Yelp listings where individuals are searching to identify an organization who offers the products and services you do.
  • Industry/Professional Association Directories: examples include CPA Association, Relator Association, and BAR Association directories; for example, our organization belongs to SmarketingConnect – a marketing professionals networking group. Such professional directories could also include industry directories like Angi, Etsy, Fiverr, or Houzz.
  • Vendor/Partner/Supplier/Franchise Directories: these are relevant if your organization is a seller, representative or distributor of another organization’s products or services, or you have some kind of partnership with them, such as you use or support their technology.

And of course, some directories can fall into one of more of the above categories!

Learn about other ways you can support your organization being found in AI search engines.

Acceptance of Circumstances, AEO, AI Search, Being Found on Google, GEO, Google My Business Profile, integrated marketing, keeping up with trends, local search, nextdoor, public relations, Search Engine Optimization, search terms

How To Appear In ChatGPT? Here’s What I’ve Been Telling My Clients

Let’s face it, the world of AI/answer engine search is still rapidly evolving, and fellow marketing and SEO experts and I will still need to keep an extremely close eye on it, and test various tactics related to organizations (we work with or for) appearing on AI engines. But, in the meantime, if I had to suggest four steps/tactics to take now while we continue to monitor how businesses and organizations are impacted by the growing use of AI search/answer engines like ChatGPT (and I do regularly suggest the following to clients), the steps and tactics to support your organization mentioned or being cited in ChatGPT and other AI engines, would include the below. As you’ll see, we’ve already shared and explained these tactics/steps in distinct blog posts dedicated specifically to the step/tactic.

  1. Continue to ask happy customers for Google Reviews so AI search engines view your organization as creditable and a leader among your competitors. Also, ask for reviews or recommendations on Yelp and/or platforms where individuals can post reviews of organizations in your particular industry. And, don’t forget about nextdoor.com if you’re a business with a strong local presence. A recommendation by a “neighbor” is always beneficial from a marketing standpoint.
  2. Pitch stories to reporters/media to support getting PR/publicity/media backlinks to your website.
  3. Join industry and civic organizations, and as part of your membership, ensure you get a backlink to your site to their site and share on your site that you belong to such organizations via a badge and/or mention of the organization and link back to their site. The same goes related to promoting accreditations/certifications you have and any business listing directories you belong to, such as the Better Business Bureau.
  4. Continue to publish blog posts and questions and answers housed under an FAQ page of your site that answer questions that your target audiences have directly and indirectly related to their services, or even something that’s more tangential, but important to your customers.
This is a powder blue rectangular image that runs vertically that says at the top "how to appear in ChatGPT and Other AI Serach Engines" and then contains a numbered list that mentions asking for online reviews and recommendations, seeking publicity,  getting listed in appropriate online directories and answering questions online that your target audiences ask or research.

Ultimately, all of the above, establish your creditability/trustworthiness with AI search engines, and that’s required to succeed at the AI/answer engine search (AEO/GEO) game!

Need Help Being Found In AI Search Prompt Results?

Reach out today to schedule a complimentary discussion with an SEO expert!

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Our Journey With LLM Advertising: How To Optimize and Set Up ChatGPT Ads

We never like to recommend, or try to implement, a new form of online advertising, until we’ve tried/tested it with our own business. That way we can understand the pros and cons of running advertising on a new advertising vehicle, plus all the “inputs” we’ll need to provide to the tool to launch the campaign. That makes it easy to know what questions we need to ask of our clients related to a new ad campaign launch on a vehicle that is new to them, or what we need their approval on.

We waited to try this new vehicle until they offered pay-per-click (PPC) vs. just pay-per-impression (CPM) advertising because, quite frankly, most of clients are small-to-mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and nonprofits and they have far smaller marketing/advertising budgets than large firms and need their ads to really work for them and generate leads and sales vs. just awareness-generation!

This gray image that runs horizontally is a print screen of Results Communications & Research's ad running on ChatGPT and It is truncated but says "Looking For Expert Advice For Bein..Learn How We Help Organizations Appear in AI and Traditional Search..." and contain a small powder blue image that says "SEO."
Results Communications & Research’s ChatGPT Ad

As of the original publish date of this blog post, It’s been about 1.5 weeks since we rolled out ads for our own business, Results Communications & Research, on the ChatGPT LLM-powered (large-language-model-powered) answer engine/AI search platform. We’ve documented below — and will continue to document — our 2026 journey with this new form of online advertising. So, be sure to check back!

  • Days 1 & 2 (June 11 and June 12) – set up our ad and associated targeting for our campaign at ads.openai.com (ChatGPT is owned by OpenAI) — it was not a large lift at all! Needed to determine and document in OpenAI’s ad tool how much we were initially wanting to spend for a click (we initially put this at $3.50) and our daily budget ($25), plus in what geographies (Providence RI and Boston MA) we wanted the ads to appear. And, also provide context hints (OpenAI instructions explained this exercise this way: “describe the conversations, topics, or keywords where your products or services may be relevant; these hints guide matching, but aren’t exact-match targeting rules.” We also documented the images and content we wanted to use in our ads. We are testing two ads — one with longer and one with shorter headlines — but to keep something consistent, so we’d feel comfortable drawing conclusions about our headlines, we used the same image in both ads. We also had to share with the ad platform what page of our website we wanted ad clickers to land on (we created a brand new page on our WordPress website for such purposes — which is an online advertising best practice).
  • Day 2 (June 12) – launched our campaign by activating it in our OpenAI Ads dashboard.
  • Day 5 or 6 (June 15 or 16) – of course, being the digital marketing and analytics geeks that we are, we checked our advertising dashboard at openai.com countless times to see if the ads were being served up and generating impressions and/or clicks. Seeing zero movement on either the impressions or clicks front, we decided to expand our geography to NYC and our daily budget to $35 and what we were willing to spend for a click to $5.00, in case what we were willing to pay for a click (and the competition to have ads shown by competitors in the same geography for the same types of prompts) was causing the ads to not be shown or we needed a bigger geography to have enough opportunities for our ads to be shown to relevant “prompters” on ChatGPT.
  • Day 7 (June 17) – we saw in our advertising dashboard that our ChatGPT ads were starting to accrue impressions, and therefore, were being served up, but not to any great degree.
  • Day 8 (June 18) – we increased what we were willing to pay for a click to $7.50, and also added in the whole state of New Hampshire to our geographic targeting.
  • Day 9 (June 19) – seeing an alert in the OpenAI ads platform that we were often being outbid by competitors because of what we were willing to pay for a click, we increased our click bid to $10.00 from $7.50 – our first 2 clicks were achieved somewhere between the 18th and 19th, and at that point, our ads had a 0.66% click-thru rate (meaning less than 1% of individuals having our ad served up to them, clicked on it — not surprising for reasons outlined in the next bullet.)
  • Day 12 (June 22) – we just checked this morning and the increase in budget and what we are willing to spend for an ad click, plus the expanded geography seems to be paying off! As of this morning, our ChatGPT ads have generated 2,762 impressions (been served up that number of times), 13 clicks (a 0.47% click-thru rate), and an average cost-per-click of $6.44. We aren’t surprised by any of this. We had seen competitors running ChatGPT ads in our space when we were entering relevant prompts into ChatGPT, so we knew as a business-to-business advertiser we were more likely to have to pay more for a click than a business-to-consumer advertiser might. We also know that ChatGPT is a different animal than Google Search ads — the new form of ads discussed in this post is served up to individuals entering prompts into ChatGPT that might indicate they’d be interested in our services, but it’s not the same as someone entering “keywords” into Google and then Google serving up ads to those individuals because an advertiser provided those keywords as ones they wanted their ads to be served up for. We changed our daily budget to $50.00 today — we should have increased the daily budget a few days back in keeping with our increasing the amount we were willing to pay for a click! We also paused the shorter of our two ads since the longer ad was performing far better. To-date, we have not generated any leads — in the form of phone calls, e-mails, or appointment set-up — from these ads. We’re not discouraged by this at all, since, when it comes to a business engaging a firm for B2B services — or even reaching out to them — there can be a long lead time!
  • Day 17 (June 27) – we paused our ads today. Not because they weren’t generating impressions or clicks, but simply because we are a small marketing agency/SEO company who deliberately keeps our fees/rates very reasonable so that small businesses and nonprofits can afford to work with us. Going into this pilot, we planned to only spend about $300, but ended up letting the ads run until ChatGPT ads had spent $364.12, based on our daily budget and what we were willing to spend per click.

How Successful Was Our ChatGTP Ads Campaign?

Because businesses often take some time before purchasing business services, and therefore, like to research a number of companies before they decide to reach out to the one organization or the few organizations whom they are most interested in, we have yet to receive any inquiries from our ads, but still hope to get some inquiries from those who have clicked on the ads. At least we’ve generated some “awareness” among appropriate parties. We’ve also found in our many years of running online ads for our own business, that often, fellow marketing agencies/competitors click on our ads to see what we are offering and what we are all about. We did ensure our landing page for our ad clickers adhered to best practices, such as demonstrating why we are experts, including “social proof,” therefore, a review or testimonial, and much more!

Ultimately our ChatGPT ads yielded:

  • 11,321 impressions (this number of sets of eyeballs viewed our ads as part of entering an appropriate prompt into ChatGPT)
  • 46 clicks
  • 0.41% CTR (we aren’t concerned or scared off by this low click-thru rate — we’ve seen similar with Reddit and nextdoor.com ads
  • Average cost-per-click (CPC) of $7.92 – not horrible for a B2B (business-to-business) lead

As we recommended at the top of this blog post, keep coming back to learn more about our ChatGPT advertising journey! We’re all in this together when it comes to understanding this particular form of new advertising and how effective it will be in generating leads and sales, not just awareness, and if ROI makes sense for advertisers like our clients who need their ad $$ to work for them pretty quickly.

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The ABCs & Ds Of Being Found In Answer-Engine-Prompt And Traditional-Search-Engine Results

We will continue to conduct our own informal research — assessing how and when our own website pages and posts appear in both AI/Answer Engine Prompt results and traditional search engine results — but based on what we are seeing as of the date of this blog post, the items outlined in the image and bulleted section below seem to be common features or characteristics of website content that is being served up most frequently in any kind of AI or search engine.

And, it’s also very much in keeping with what we observed and commented on almost two years ago related to commonalties among content that was being served in traditional and AI search engine results.

How To Be Found Online? Do The Following Related To Your Website Content

  • Always keep your target audience in mind — what content/information would be helpful to them vs. content/information you want to share. Don’t be self-serving!
  • Keep your content clean and easily consumable by using bulleted or numbered lists
  • Don’t be afraid to take a different approach to what other experts are saying on a particular topic
  • We’ve talked about this in a number of blog posts, including this post about the types of links every website should have — always include internal links and external links to relevant content
This light gray vertical image says in a dark powder blue "the ABCs & Ds Of Appearing In Answer-Engine-Prompt and Traditional-Search Results and Has Bulleted Sharing the Same Bulleted Content That Is Served In the Post Itself

Need Help Figuring Out How To Write Content For Your Target Audiences Or How To Structure That Content?

Reach out today for a free marketing consultation regarding your organization’s particular challenges related to being found online.

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Medullar: A Safer Way for Professional Services Firms to Collaborate with AI

Guest Blog Post By Heath Anderson, Medullar

Professional services firms run on knowledge: every client engagement, advisory project, investigation, tax matter, or consulting assignment depends on the team’s ability to find the right information, apply judgment, and move quickly.

But for many mid-market firms, that work is harder than it should be. Important context is scattered across email, cloud drives, chat tools, research notes, meeting transcripts, prior deliverables, and personal folders. Teams often spend too much time searching for information they know already exists. Work gets repeated. Collaboration slows down. And when sensitive client data is involved, the pressure to adopt AI safely becomes even more complicated.

Many small-to-mid-sized firms want the productivity benefits of AI and move quickly to adopt AI tools without investigating if and how their proprietary data/intellectual property will be kept private. But, they cannot afford to treat confidentiality as an afterthought.  The crux of this problem is one that Medullar aims to solve.

This image shows a black woman, Caucasian and an Asian woman looking at and working on documents together as they sit on a comfortable-looking brown leather sofa.

Medullar is a privacy-first, secure AI collaboration platform built for professional services firms that work with sensitive information. It gives teams a safer way to bring project knowledge together, collaborate across people and tools, and use AI in workflows where privacy, permissions, and trust matters.

At the core of Medullar are secure, encrypted Spaces. A Space acts like a private project room for a client engagement, matter, deal, investigation, proposal, or internal initiative. Teams can gather relevant documents, emails, notes, research, transcripts, and other materials into one controlled environment. Access is permission-based, so only the right people can see and use the information inside.

This matters because professional services work is rarely done by one person in one tool. A consulting team may have client emails in Outlook, research in browser tabs, deliverables in Google Drive or SharePoint, notes in a meeting transcript, and key context sitting in someone’s inbox. Without a shared, secure environment, valuable knowledge stays fragmented.

Medullar helps firms reduce that fragmentation without forcing a major data migration. Its universal search tool can search across connected apps and sources, helping teams find relevant information where it already lives. That means a team can locate prior work, surface client context, and reuse institutional knowledge faster, while still respecting permissions and access controls.

Just as important, Medullar is designed for private AI interactions. Instead of exposing confidential information to general purpose, publicly trained AI models (such as large language models (LLMs)/answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity), teams can work with AI inside a governed environment. AI can help summarize, compare, draft, validate, and search across approved project context, while keeping the work scoped to the right Space and the right users.

Consider a consulting team preparing for a client engagement. Before the project begins, the team creates a secure Space for the client work. They gather relevant emails, prior deliverables, client notes, web research, meeting transcripts, and internal reference materials. Instead of hunting across multiple systems, team members can search across everything from one place. They collaborate with each other alongside their frontier AI model of choice (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc.) to help summarize the current state, identify gaps, compare findings, and draft sections of a client-ready output, all without exposing sensitive client information.

The same pattern applies to advisory, accounting, tax, investigations, and legal-adjacent services firms. A team working on a due diligence review, an RFP response, a case triage, a board briefing, or a client deliverable can use Medullar to organize the work, search across fragmented knowledge, and collaborate more efficiently.

This is especially useful for firms that are large enough to feel the pain of scattered knowledge, but not so large that they can tolerate slow, complex systems. Mid-market firms need tools that improve daily work without adding unnecessary overhead.

A secure AI collaboration platform should do more than answer questions. It should help teams work together around sensitive information, preserve client trust, and turn existing knowledge into better outcomes.

This is the image of Medullar's logo which says "Medulla"r in primarily dark purple letters and has a magnifying glass at the bottom of the m in the word Medullar.

That is where Medullar fits: helping professional services firms use AI safely, find and reuse information faster, and deliver higher-quality work with less friction. Interested in learning more? Reach out today to schedule a complimentary discussion about our secure AI collaboration and productivity tool for your own small-to-mid-sized business and/or for one of your clients; or, ask our friends at Results Communications & Research to make an e-introduction on your behalf.

Acceptance of Circumstances, AEO, AI Search, Being Found on Google, Blog, Blogging, competitive advantage, content marketing, differentiation, GEO, keeping up with trends, online presence, organic SEO, pull marketing, Search Engine Optimization, search terms, staying current, Understanding Your Environment, website

Appearing In AI Prompt Results May Help Your Organization Get Prompt Results

As we’ve shared in recent AI-search related blog posts, a “prompt” is what an individual — related to their own personal needs or business-/work-related needs — enters into an answer engine/AI search engine, like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexi, Google Gemini, or Microsoft Co-pilot to gather information or complete a task related to a particular topic, question, or problem for which they are seeing a solution.

This image is a print screen of a prompt entered into Google's AI Mode search tool and the initial results that Google spit back. The prompt reads "how can I protect my parents' assets from nursing homes" and the results are in the format of content directly below the prompt and citations or links to websites on the right.

How Can Small Organizations Be Found In AI Search/Answer Engines and How Do They Benefit From It?

The AI train is moving fast, and while answer engines may not always serve up your content or a link to your website, known as a “citation,” to a prompter/searcher who is in a relevant geography in response to a prompt related to your organization’s products, services, or solutions, there will still be a number of times when your business or non-profit organization gets a mention or a citation served up to geographically appropriate prompters, i.e., individuals who are located in the geography your organization is able to serve.

So, if you’re a smaller shop, why not take advantage of this opportunity to have your content served up in lieu of a bigger brand’s content. You may not be able to compete with a bigger organization when it comes to ad spend/advertising dollars, and overall marketing budget, but producing easily understood, beneficial content is a low-cost way to help your organization be found online before, or more frequently than, bigger organizations.

Check Out These Resources To Help You Create Online Content That Helps Small Organizations Be Included In AI Prompt Results:

Need Help Determining The Nature Of Content To Produce To Support Being Found In AI Search Engines? Or, Need Help Writing Content For Answer Engines?

To inform your future online content, our team can help you determine what prompts searchers are putting into answer engines, like Google AI tools, related to the products, services, and solutions to problems you offer. We can also help you produce website blog content related to the aforementioned. Reach out today to schedule a complimentary discussion about how your organization can be found online!

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Why Citing Experts Supports Your Own Organization Being Cited

Since we’ve already detailed in a recent blog post the reasons why you want your organization to be cited (when it comes to being found online), we won’t revisit that extensively here. We will say that being cited by a search engine or search tool, i.e., having them serve up a link to your organization’s website vs. just mentioning your name in relevant search results is a very positive thing. But, as we’ve also shared in the past, in order to increase the probability of that happening, your organization needs to demonstrate to search engines (both AI and traditional search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo) that you are credible and trustworthy.

What’s An Easy Way To Show Search Engines You’re Credible?

There’s a very easy way to show search engines you’re credible and that’s citing other organizations in your website content, i.e., mentioning and sharing links to experts in your field, or on whatever topic you are addressing in a particular section of your website. You can also ask experts to write a “guest blog post” for your site, or partner with a fellow expert on a blog post.

Citing experts on your website demonstrates to search engines:

  • Your organization makes and takes the time to follow and learn from experts
  • Your organization is not too self-serving, i.e., only focused on your needs and self-promotion vs. wanting to provide valuable information to your readers/target audiences, even if it means sharing information about other organizations
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How Do I Know What Experts To Cite?

One of the easiest and best ways to figure out who to cite on your website is to use LinkedIn’s search tool to enter search terms/keywords related to the topic for which you want to identify experts. You’ll likely want to select “posts,” “people,” or “services” by clicking on those buttons to generate lists to review after you’ve entered the keywords in the main search tool on the left top of your LinkedIn homepage.

Review the bios and posts of some of the individuals LinkedIn has served up to you, and begin following those that interest you. Their posts will start appearing in your newsfeed. You’ll soon see/learn which individuals resonate with you and whose websites you want to share on your website in appropriate places. And, keep in mind, you don’t have to share links to their website on your website, you can also share links to their LinkedIn profiles, as we’ve done below.

Here’s Some Of The SEO/AEO/GEO Experts We Like To Follow On LinkedIn

Kristine Schachinger

John McAlpin

Mike Friedman

Erik Marsh

Neil Patel

Eli Schwartz

The above individuals are just a handful of those we follow on LinkedIn because there’s so many experts, like us, who regularly create and share content about search engine optimization (SEO), answer engine/AI engine optimization (AEO), and generative engine optimization (GEO).

Need Help Identifying Which Experts You Should Follow On LinkedIn?

Reach out today to our Greater-Boston digital marketing agency for a complimentary discussion about your marketing challenges and opportunities.

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Do I Need To Keep Adding New Content To My Website To Continue To Be Found Online?

The answer to the above question is pretty straightforward, and in most cases, “yes.” Given that we are in the day and age where individuals are using what’s known as answer engines — think ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude — more and more for both business and personal purposes, if an organization wants to continue to be found online, it DOES need to regularly produce and publish new content. Unless your site is one that is only meant to provide very static information and credibility to people who already know or have found your organization, your organization will need to do the following to support your organization’s name being mentioned or a link to your organization being served up by answer engines in response to relevant prompts.

This image is a print screen of what it looks like when you go into a WordPress website to add a new post and says "Add new Post" at the top and "enter title here."

What Types Of Content Do I Need To Create If I Want To Be Found In Answer Engine Results?

  • Blog posts or questions that reside within a website FAQ (frequently asked questions) page that answer questions that your organization regularly gets asked by prospective clients and existing clients
  • Blog posts or questions that reside within a website FAQ page that answer questions that keyword research and answer research indicates your target audiences are asking answer engines/searching on
  • Blog posts that speak to topics that are “tangential” to the particular products and services you offer, but that are important ones for your target audiences. For example, you might offer seniors in-home care, but write and publish some blog posts about senior fraud, aging in place/aging at home, and exercises for seniors. You get the picture!

Even if you’ve already published such content, target audiences’ questions and needs change/evolve, and both from a marketing standpoint and a search-engine standpoint, you need to demonstrate that you are staying current/relevant/up-to-date. It’s not good to have clients or prospective clients visit your site and see that you haven’t put up any new content in many months and/or content is outdated — it looks like you’re not minding your shop, and if you aren’t, what else might you neglect? And, search engines are more likely to serve up new, fresh content than content that is old and dated.

In sum, a static site will NOT help your organization be found online by target audiences, given how individuals gather information these days. Sure, it’s time-consuming, but regularly producing and posting new content answering questions and providing information that benefit your target audiences needs to be an ongoing marketing activity. As we’ve always said, “SEO (search engine optimization) is NOT a one-and-done exercise.

Need Help Figuring Out What To Blog About And How Frequently?

Reach out today to schedule a complimentary discussion with our digital marketing agency about your blog strategy!