Law Six: Know thyself to know thy queries

Welcome back to SEO is Dead’s Ten Law of AI Optimization. Let’s quickly recap where we’ve been.

Law one: AI is your brand’s most important audience.

Law two: Search engines are snobby, but AI is hungry for information, deep information. It’s the greatest opportunity for brands and businesses since the launch of the internet.

Law three: to win, you need to understand how machines read.

Law four: you need to write for robots too. If you want to make it into the Chatbot answers that matter.

Law six: algorithms are moving target, and you must act now to seize the golden moment for AIO.

Now let’s get to law six. You must know yourself to know your queries.

Sounds like pretentious nonsense, doesn’t it? Against the spirit of our laws.

But here’s the rub. To draft the right answers, you need to know the right questions, and the machines won’t tell you. They are black boxes. Google gives you a lot more. Such as the volume of searches for a keyword. ChatGPT doesn’t tell you which questions are asked most frequently.

You have to take a different approach.

If you start with a clear sense of who you are or want to be–easier said than done sometimes–but there’s no way around it to optimize for AI discovery.

Here’s the process:

First, you come up with a query list. At least 40 to 60 questions.

Second, you divide the queries into branded (using your name) and non-branded (broader category questions).

Third, you ask the questions in at least three LLMs. We like Chat, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.

Fourth, you use the best tools available to support you, identifying where you appear and which sources the LLMs cite.

Fifth, you dig in and analyze the results.

You will learn what ChatGPT knows about you and your category, and what it doesn’t know and cannot find. You’ll discover a competitor performs better in Perplexity, and you’ll be surprised to find that Google AI Overviews rely more on your website and ChatGPT favors Wikipedia.

You’ll discover which answers you shape, which answers you don’t, and where the opportunities and challenges are in educating the Chatbots and, ultimately, your consumers or customers.

In the next law, we’ll explain why this approach to Artificial Intelligence Optimization–AIO–is urgent.

If you miss the window to shape the questions, you may not get another.