However, some truths exist.

In this article, Antonis Dimitriou, Organic Growth Strategist at Omniscient Digital shares his tiered list, based on his experience working with SaaS and Enterprise clients. These beliefs are supported by various studies across the web.

The article was edited by Nick Malekos, the founder & editor of Marketing Experts Hub.

The Tiered List

S Tier

Tactics with strong evidence and effectiveness towards ranking of AI Search, and are the most important factors LLMs will use to surface citations and mentions.

• Building brand mentions with co-occurring terms
• Targeting queries plus modifiers
• Consistent brand positioning

A Tier

Tactics which strongly impact AI Search results.

• Link building
• Targeting fan-out queries
• Homepage messaging

B Tier

Often used for citations and influencing the AI Chatbot’s answer to a query, but not always effective.

• Reddit mentions
• YouTube videos

C Tier

Impactful up to a point, for specific cases.

• Schema

D Tier

Possibly impactful, there is evidence crawlers related to LLMs visit the pages, and sometimes mention them, but not as impactful.

• Creating an AI info page

F Tier

Often recommended by agencies, but with little evidence of impacting AI Search.

• llms.txt

S Tier

These tactics teach models what your brand is, in relation to what, for whom. This is what the systems reach for when they decide who to cite and who to show up in responses.

Building brand mentions with co-occurring terms

This is the single highest-leverage thing you can do, and most teams do a diluted version of it.

Models learn associations from the text around your brand name, not from the name in isolation. If your brand keeps appearing beside “SOC analyst training” or “sales engagement platform” across enough independent sources, that association becomes stronger, and LLMs learn to associate it with it.

Pick the three to five terms you need your brand welded to. Then create mentions which carry those terms in the same sentence or paragraph: podcast show notes, roundup contributions, expert quotes, partner pages, community answers, comparison posts on third-party sites.

Targeting queries plus modifiers

Buyers do not ask LLMs one-word questions. They ask long-tail ones. For example “Sales engagement tool with HubSpot integration and SSO for enterprise.”

Build your target list from modifiers, not keywords. Pull them from your own sales calls, your G2 category filters, your competitor comparison pages, and your Search Console long tail. Then create pages that answer the head term plus the modifier explicitly and completely, in the page’s own words, high on the page.

Consistent brand positioning

This a company-wide problem and usually sits under PMMs or Brand. Consistency of how the brand is represented creates stronger associations and assists retrieval for niche cases.

Vague and varied responses create confusion and your brand will get replaced with a competitor who was clearer.

Write one positioning line. Use the same text everywhere: site, review profiles, LinkedIn company page, partner directories, press boilerplate, podcast intros, guest bios.

Enforce consistency on a company-level.

A Tier

These strongly impact AI search results, and the evidence behind them is solid. They sit one step down because they work by improving the conditions for visibility rather than by directly teaching a model what you are.

Link building (Digital PR)

Links got rebranded to Digital PR and citations. Backlinks still matter, even if they are unglamorous by building the authority and connections required for discovery.

The essentially improve the conditions and chances, but do not directly impact HOW you are being mentioned.

Targeting fan-out queries

AI Mode and similar systems decompose a query into sub-queries, run searches based on them, and synthesise the results. Those sub-queries are called fan-out queries.

Fan-out tactics target the use-cases, niches, and different ways people may search, and are informed by the memory of the chat for you. You can’t easily “know” what fan-out queries are, but much research shows the structure they take and can be replicated when doing SEO research.

Homepage messaging

Your homepage is the highest-authority page telling models what you are. Treat it as a primary source document, not a conversion asset with a hero image and three adjectives.

If your H1 is a slogan and your subhead is a benefit statement, there is nothing concrete to extract. If it names the category, the buyer, the core capability and the differentiator in plain text, then LLMs understand what you actually do.

LLMs prefer usability over brand statements.

B Tier

Both of these show up in citations regularly and both may decide what content is being used in the decision-making process.

Reddit mentions

Reddit is heavily cited by several AI search systems.

Active participation is the best way to get Reddit mentions, while many SEOs tend to try manipulative and automated tactics.

Use it with caution.

YouTube videos

Very good for Google’s AI search surfaces.

Video assets get surfaced in AI Overviews and adjacent Google experiences, so if Google is your primary target, then it’s own video platform is the right source to train.

C Tier

Impactful up to a point, but may not work for all kinds of businesses and niches. Use when needed.

Schema

Structured data helps Google understand entities and can support your presence in Google’s AI surfaces. Product, Organization and FAQ markup are the best ones to use overall, and they help to get various rich results on Google, they may as well help with AI Overviews.

What it does not do is affect visibility in non-Google LLMs like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity etc.

D Tier

Possibly impactful, there is evidence crawlers related to LLMs visit the pages, and sometimes mention them, but not as impactful.

Creating an AI info page

There is something here, but pretty uncertain. The problem is that it’s probably not needed, but crawlers still visit the page with little evidence it works.

Editor’s note: I strongly believe that a well written Home, About, and Contact pages are more than enough for the purpose, an AI info page may not be a complete waste of time but it probably does little more than a blog post or a product page.

F Tier

Often recommended by agencies, but with little evidence of impacting AI Search.

llms.txt

Many SEOs, consultants, and agencies implement llms.txt, but as proven by cats.txt, a fun experiment by Mark Williams-Cook, even an irrelevant page will be crawled and cited.

No major AI search system has committed to consuming it as a ranking or retrieval input. It has not been adopted the way robots.txt or sitemaps were, and publishing one has no demonstrated effect on whether you appear in AI answers. It is a proposal with strong marketing behind it, and it survives mostly because it is easy to sell and easy to tick off.

How to sequence this

Tiers S to A are actions which must be in everyone’s to-do list, while actions B and C depend per case and resources.

The rest are pretty much optional.

But, each tactic can support a wholistic SEO / GEO / AEO strategy to rank for search and various AIs.

The post The Top AI Search Optimization Tactics Ranked in a Tier List appeared first on Marketing Experts Hub.

This article expands on Antonis’ view of “the unified web” or “the unified web ecosystem”, and the role of multichannel SEO in the unified web and provide actionable tips and practices that we, as SEOs or digital marketers can leverage to navigate the unified web and help brands grow organically.

Disclaimer: Opinions and tactics mentioned in this article, are purely personal observations based expertience.

What is multichannel SEO

Multichannel SEO refers to the practice of leveraging mutiple channels or platforms to increase clicks and conversions to a website or increase overall visibility for a specific brand, service or product. Multichannel SEO goes beyond Google and the standard way of publishing pages to capture blue link positions.

Examples* of multichannel SEO might include strategies and/or content on:

• Reddit
• YouTube
• Quora
• LinkedIn
• Big publications like Forbes
• Social media like X (ex-Twitter)

*Examples have been added to the article by the editor to support the definition provided.

What is the unified web

The Unified Web, is the the user-centric (people and agents) web, regarding how platforms and mediums are connected with each other.

Antonis strongly believes that embracing the unified web, is a must for brands, in order to keep on growing organically. Channels are not working in silos anymore, but, they feed each other, creating feedback loops between them.

Editor’s Note: This has always been the case, where brand fuels SEO, and SEO improves brand positioning in concert with the overall strategy. The fact is that now it becomes more obvious and in a mature web, brand and a stronger overall strategy plays a bigger role than simple, fast, growth-hacks.

Non-linear user journeys

To explain the concept of the unified web, let’s take an example of a web searcher/user:

The user journey might look as follows:

• A user might start with a Google search or a prompt / LLM query.
• Then visit a sub-Reddit (or other forum) to expand or research more.
• The user might then also do some navigational searches to reach brands that the user found directly.

Alternative journey:

• The user might find content on social media,
• Google the brand to learn more,
• Ask an LLM about the brand.

The combinations are infinite and thus, the different user patterns are infinite as well. This is why people who say a channel will die are wrong. Channels don’t work in silos, they complement each other to the full searcher cycle.

Site Quality Score Patent in the Unified Web

Now, to give some more context about the concept of the unified web, I would like to mention a specific Google Patent, a Patent called: Site quality score.

In a big picture view:

The Patent’s system tracks site-specific queries and queries that users click on associated with that site.

It then calculates a site quality by taking the ratio of site-specific queries to associated queries.

The Patent specifically mentions:”A site quality score for a particular site can be determined by computing a ratio of a numerator that represents user interest in the site as reflected in user queries directed to the site and a denominator that represents user interest in the resources found in the site”

Thus, users going directly to a website can enhance this website’s performance.

And guess what can feed this system: Non-Google channels like social, LLMs etc

Non-Google channels like social, LLMs can feed the Site Quality Score System.

Apart from direct queries and branded searches, mentions on other media are also good for gaining “visibility” in LLM outputs.

And, apart from that, in-platform search functionalities, like Reddit answers, will also surface brands that are present in the platform.

Imagine this:

Your brand appears on Reddit, which feed its AI search, which also feed branded searches, which also feed trust to Google, which can enhance your rankings and all these co-occurances can also make LLMs associate your brand with specific token sequences.

This is exactly what I call the unified web.

Each channel feed each other harmonically.

The question is:

How can we, as SEOs, optimize for the unified web.

Well, there are many things to be told here, but I want to focus on the most important one, which in my opinion is content repurposing.

SEO and Content Repurposing in the Unified Web

Content repurposing is when you recycle a specific content piece into different formats to distribute it through different platforms or, in the context of SEO, capture more SERP real estate or gain more visibility.

As we are talking about SEO, I believe content repurposing will be key, because it will help with the following:

Capture more SERP estate

The SERPs are not only about the top blue links as they used to.

New SERP elements and SERP sections have been surfaced, and thus, to maximize organic growth from Google search, we should take such sections into account.

For example, check the SERP section below:

You can see social media posts ranking in the “What people are saying” section.

Or, check this SERP:

As you see, Youtube videos are ranking on the SERP.

And of course, Reddit posts rank as well:

So, for example, if we repurpose a website page into a Youtube video, we can also rank both with the website page AND the youtube video on that SERP.

Increase brand mentions and co-occurances

Another reason why repurposing is so important, is because it creates more brand mentions and co-occurances all over the web.

These not only help Google associate your brand with specific terms, it also helps LLMs associate your brand with specific token sequences.

Editor’s notes:

Brand mentions are online references to your brand, company, or product, either linked or unlinked mentions contribute to a higher level of brand awareness.

Co-occurencies are the presence and frequency of related keywords or phrases appearing near each other on a web page or within a specific piece of content.

Brand mentions and co-occurencies connect the brand keyword and create local authority for it. For example, “Coca cola” might be found often close to the words “soft drinks” as “soft drinks like Coca Cola”. This means, Google creates a strong correlation between the phrase soft drinks and Coca Cola the brand, showing Coca Cola even if the user only searched “soft drinks”.

Increased branded searches

If people see a brand more often on different channels, they will do more branded searches to learn more about this brand.

This, can feed on branded searches, which, as we said, makes the brand more legit in Google’s eyes.

Editor’s Notes: Branded searches and co-occurencies have strong correlations with better SEO results.

Multichannel SEO & Content Repurposing Tactics

Now, let’s see some tactics, on how you can approach multichannel SEO and content repurposing.

Video into SERPs Examples

Some SERPs are very hard to break into.

A “hack” to break into such SERPs, is to target the query with a video instead of a website page.

Let’s see the heavily branded and competitive SERP for the query “semrush integrations”:

Semrush’s own pages rank super high here.

But, as you can see, videos crack the SERP.

Another example, “stripe api”, a SERP where everything is a Stripe page, except for the Videos section:

These videos may rank low, but, they still cracked a heavily branded and heavily competitive SERP.

Plus, many of that queries are also Youtube queries:

So, you can rank both on Google AND Youtube. Double win!

You can also repurpose a blog post into a Youtube video targeting the same topic, even if it doesn’t have “video intent”.

Youtube users actually search for different things on the platform.

Also, since Youtube is a Google property, having a brand appear on Youtube, gives “legitimacy” signals.

Reddit Strategies

You want to be on Reddit for three reasons:

1) It ranks on Google.

2) You can appear on its “AI search engine”, Reddit answers.

3) You increase brand mentions

So, how can you approach Reddit SEO?

Let’s see some practices and tactics I believe are important:

The first one, is to repurpose “opinionated queries” into Reddit posts.

Based on personal research, Reddit seems to rank super high for queries that their answers are not black or white, but heavily opinionated.

For example:

There’s no such thing as “best dinosaur”. Different people might like different dinos better.

Another example:

Same as above, this is heavily opinionated. Some people like the movie, other don’t.

So, make a list of important opinionated queries (these can be BoFu queries like “best X” or “X review”) and repurpose them into Reddit posts.

You can also mention your brand in the post.

But, be careful!

Reddit posts must not be spammy! Respect the community and actually give value to the audience.

Another tactic, is to create a list of subreddits that match your audience and do Gap Analysis on them, to uncover queries you can target.

Gap Sub-Reddits Examples

Let’s take two sub-Reddits about calisthenic workout:

1) https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/

2) https://www.reddit.com/r/Calisthenic/

So, you can take the first one and do a gap analysis with the second one and then, target queries (with posts) by posting in the first one.

You should always post on thematically relevant sub-Reddits.

Another tactic, is to check for low hanging fruits on a sub-Reddit.

For example, here are some low hanging fruits (I picked positions 12-20) for the /SaaS subreddit:

So, for example, I can target the query “saas examples” on my website and then, repurpose it into a Reddit post in the /SaaS sub-Reddit.

Or, if you think you might not crack the SERP, just do the Reddit post.

Now, you might ask:

“What factors matter in ranking with a Reddit post?”

First of all:

Don’t think of Reddit posts as a “blog post alternatives”.

As I mentioned earlier, with Reddit answers, AI search will also happen inside the platform. So, you want to build those mentions.

Plus, having a brand co-occur with terms is key for Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO).

Relevant Google Patent: Ranking User Generated Web Content

AGoogle Patent (the most relevant Patent regarding ranking UGC content) that might provide hints on that.

The Patent is called: “Ranking user generated web content“.

On a high level, the Patent does the following:

This patent describes a system that evaluates the credibility of users and their content. It uses social graphs and quality scores to filter out low-quality content and highlight trustworthy information. It also takes the user’s content into account.

For example:

Let’s say a user searches “Best diving spots in Thailand”:

This Patent does not tells us exactly how Reddit ranking works on the SERPs.

Google had a deal with Reddit after all.

And, this Patent can give us hints of what MIGHT be taken into account.

So, now you might think:

“Ok, so I need a Reddit account with good Karma, a helpful post and some answers from users on the post.”

These can be factors, but, there are many occassions that prove this to not be consistent. Based on personal experience:

• Posts from users with not so much Karma ranking high on the SERPs.
• Reddit posts with very few answers and user activity (upvotes) hitting position 1 or 2.
• “User credibility” seems to be applied to the whole Sub-Reddit.
• Often, the Reddit posts that rank are from big sub-Reddits with many users and high activity, which are also VERY relevant to the query.

So, we can suppose all these things matter:

• Profile Karma
• Sub-Reddit
• Query intent
• Post content
• Answers and activity on the post

Personal note from Antonis: I strongly believe, that, as I said before “opinionated queries” are queries you can easily rank high with Reddit posts. Cause this is what Reddit is about, people giving opinions.

And, don’t think of Reddit posts as “blue links”, as, they can take more SERP real estate by appearing on “Discussions and forums” sections:

Some things to consider when leveraging Reddit for multichannel SEO:

1) You can get banned if you seem too “SEO-rish” or “promotional”.

2) Before start leveraging specific sub-Reddits, read their rules and see how their users post.

3) Pick only a few SUPER-relevant sub-Reddits to your queries, and repurpose there without sounding too promotional. You don’t want to get banned, especially if you have a high karma profile.

Social Search and Social Media

Social media are very important for multichannel SEO in the unified web. After all, people search on social platforms.

TikTok for example, acknowledges this, and have included fully functional “organic search” features inside the platform.

What I’d like to say regarding social search, is that content on the post’s (caption/description), subtitles, text on Reels, Stories etc, matter.

After all, you can appear on social feeds without chasing any queries. Query-led marketing can help us identify what social users want to learn though.

For example, here are some queries TikTok users search on the platform:

Thus, we can create content targeting these queries.

Another way to think about “social media and SEO” is taking specific SERP sections into account.

For example, social media posts can appear on the “What people are saying” section.

Let’s see a simple multichannel SEO content repurposing flow based on the image above:

• Find a query
• Blog post
• Repurposing
• Youtube Video
• Youtube short
• Social media post

One query, produced 4 different content types.

Let’s see another SERP (for the query “how to build a gaming pc”) where social media posts appear on it:

As you see, user interests can help us repurpose website content, even if we are not sure if users search for this query inside the social platform.

So, when it comes to social media, you can do the following:

1) Target queries users search on the platform (For example, using search autocomplete on that platform)

2) Repurpose blog content into social media content

3) Find SERPs where social media posts rank and use these queries to repurpose (or create) social media posts.

Moving forward, SEO teams should work with social media teams to ensure a smooth and efficient repurposing or social search-focused process.

Editor’s note: Expanding Antonis’ views on SEO cross-collaboration, SEO teams should be more embedded into marketing and brand, and been able to address quicker opportunities and implement social listening tools the same way that content teams on social and brand utilize. SEO can impact both long-term and short-term opportunities, and support social or content teams. Although, the goals of different teams may vary, a good collaborative environment can greatly impact a company and multiply the results of a single team to impact bigger goals.

Micro-Blogging (“white hat”): LinkedIn Parasite SEO & Medium Parasite SEO

“Micro-blogging” sounds more “white hat” as a method than parasiting on bigger sites.

Editor’s Notes: Parasite SEO is not considered black hat, but wouldn’t even call it white-hat. Probably it’s a hack or grey-hat tactic. You can read more on it from the below sources:

> You can read more on what is Parasite SEO here

> And, a case study in LinkedIn Parasite SEO here.

Using mediums like LinkedIn Pulse and Medium to post content.

There are many benefits here.

First of all, repurposing content on LinkedIn Pulse and Medium, can help you rank easier on specific SERPs.

As you might know already, LinkedIn Pulse is getting a lot of traffic from Google, as Google seems to like LinkedIn’s authority.

For example here’s a SERP where a LinkedIn Pulse article ranks on it:

There are also SERPs where Medium articles rank as well.

But, apart from ranking on a SERP, LinkedIn Pulse and Medium content also appear on specific SERP sections, for example:

Plus, when a user visits a LinkedIn Pulse article from the SERP, this section appears on the article:

Which can send traffic to your LinkedIn Pulse article, even if you don’t rank on the SERP.

Some tips when repurposing content for Medium and LinkedIn Pulse, or when targeting queries with these platforms.

1) SERPs that already have a LinkedIn Pulse article, will probably won’t have a second one. So, avoid going after queries that their SERP already has a Pulse link on it.

2) If you see the “What people are saying” SERP section, but you don’t see a LinkedIn Pulse article on it, don’t get discouraged, as content on these sections seems to be changing.

3) If you repurpose blog content to Pulse or Medium, don’t copy paste your whole article. You don’t want this. LinkedIn ranks because of Authority anyway, so, you can lighten the content a bit, so it won’t be the same as the one on your website.

AI Search and LLMs

AI and LLMs are a very extensive topic, and we will keep this section focused on the topic.

First of all:

LLMs do send traffic to websites.

For example, here’s how much traffic per month ChatGPT sends to one of our clients at Minuttia:

Plus, other platforms, like Perplexity for example, can send additional traffic.

You can get traffic from LLMs in two ways:

1) Get a citation on the LLM output (referral traffic)

2) Get a brand mention on the LLM output (direct traffic if the user later visits your website)

Both are good!

Plus, a brand that appears on LLM outputs can increase its branded search traffic, which as a result, it can overtime help with its search engine rankings as well (See why I call this the unified web?).

How do we appear on LLM outputs?

So, the big question here is:

“How do we appear on LLM outputs?”

There are some awesome article’s on LLMO/GEO, two of my favourite are:

1) Decoding LLMs: How to be visible in generative AI search results

2) LLMO: 10 Ways to Work Your Brand Into AI Answers

Now, based on my own research on LLMO, I believe the following things are the most important:

1) Branded mentions: Getting brand mentions on relevant sites, training data sources is very important.

2) Appearing alongside relevant terms (co-occurances): This will help AI associate a brand with specific token sequences. For example, “{Brand name} is a remote conferencing software….”

3) Fluff-free and NLP-friendly content chunks: Content must have zero fluff and be super focused on what it covers and answers to help crawlers “be sure” about the info they “see”.

4) Matching user needs with relevant information: As users will prompt personalised queries like: “I need a budget friendly X software between X and Y price that will help me do X, Y….etc”. Thus, it’s important to map specific user needs and traits to specific products, services and solutions.

Everything we mentioned before, can feed in data to LLMs and help them create associations between brands, themes and concepts.

For example:

A digital PR campaign, can land mentions to respected publications.

Which in turn can create co-occurances and branded searches. Which in turn can boost SERP rankings, which can also help in AI search ranking as in many cases, AI search engines surface info and citations from the top ranking results.

Everything interconnects in the unified web.

Getting Started with Multichannel SEO

You don’t have to spampurpose (spamming and repurposing) content all over the web to do multichannel SEO.

Content should be good and well-structured based on each platform/channel anyway.

So, pick the most important channels for your brand and connect them with your SEO processes.

For example, I’ve made an AI automation workflow using AirOps, that recommends content formats for repurposing based on the SERP:

Then, it’s up to us in collaboration with our clients to pick the best channels for our “multichannel SEO” approach.

Use the following to guide your multichannel SEO initiatives:

1) SERP features and sections for your important queries: What SERP sections and features are there? Are there forums? Social posts? Videos?

2) Channels your audience is in: Is your audience on TikTok? What about Reddit?

3) Brand resources: Maybe the brand cannot invest on Video, but what about more social posting?

4) Internal teams: Can your team collaborate with other teams to scale your multichannel SEO?

As SEOs, we have much to learn about the unified web and about leveraging other channels for SEO.

But, I’m very positive and I believe SEO will only get more interesting moving forward.

Thank you for reading this article (even if I had some mistakes, cause, proofreading is boring to me and I also felt bored to prompt ChatGPT for editing this lol)

The post Multichannel SEO: Organic Growth in the Unified Web appeared first on Marketing Experts Hub.