Law 2: Search is Snobby, AI is Hungry
The Artificial Intelligence Optimization revolution–the AIO revolution–starts with search. It’s the fundamental way information is discovered in the digital world and helps drive the global economy.
Search was the game-changer for the internet. It made the web more than a collection of sites you needed to seek out. It unified the information, and it did so with an hierarchy that has evolved over time.
Sites with higher PageRank have greater authority. Put another way, they are more optimized for search and therefore getting discovered.
What is PageRank?
It’s Google’s mysterious mathematical formula to measure the value of links from one page to another. So who the hell actually knows what it is…
In practice, it means that the media wins. Especially the legacy media. The New York Times, the Financial Times and the Associated Press sit on top of the Mount Olympus of Google’s PageRank credibility system.
Not smaller publications or bloggers. Unless it’s a niche subject. Of course, there are plenty of those. But here’s the bottom line.
Search is snobby. It favors publications from the professional journalists and urban creative classes, particularly when it comes to news.
AI is different.
AI needs new information to train.
AI is hungry.
Just what you would expect from the new kid on the block. Here’s what that means.
The potential relevance of the content you create—whether you’re a business, a brand, a non-profit, a freelancer, an artist—has just gone up. This goes to the heart of why AIs are chomping at the bit for more.
Hungry AIs want as much information as they can get to answer questions. Not just provide blue links. Often, Chat, Perplexity or Claude need to answer a series of increasingly specific questions. Journalism generally doesn’t provide such deep knowledge because it doesn’t fit the business model. Journalists need you to click. That demands a headline that hooks and a story structure to keep you reading.
AI doesn’t care about clicks and narratives in the same way that people do.
AI is seeking answers, and that’s the foundation of law number two.
Search is Snobby, AI is Hungry.
It’s also your opportunity.
If you can deliver what LLMs need about your industry, brand, product, service, technological breakthrough or more, It means you can actually…
…Shape LLM answers about your industry, service or product…
…Position yourself as a leader…
…Drive a series of questions to help consumers or customers understand and learn more…
In the past, you needed to get folks to your site to do this. Not now.
The LLMs will take care of it. If you structure your content correctly.
Of course, if you’re not in the answers, the situation is a lot worse than in the past. If you simply failed to optimize in natural search, you could use paid to drive discovery. Now, the AIs are telling people what matters, and there is no way to advertise in the LLMs. At least not yet.
Brass tacks: need to move fast.
In our next video, we’ll show you how to structure content—the stuff of AI answers—that Chat, Perplexity, Gemini and others will want to read and, most importantly, use!
Soon to come… law #3