A recent podcast by Ahrefs raised two issues about optimizing for AI search that can cause organizations to underperform and miss out on opportunities to improve sales. The conversation illustrates a gap between realistic expectations for AI-based trends and what can be achieved through overlooked opportunities elsewhere.
YouTube Is Second Largest Search Engine
The first thing noted in the podcast is that YouTube is the second-largest search engine by queries entered in the search bar. More people type search queries into YouTube’s search bar than any other search engine except Google itself. So it absolutely makes sense for companies to seriously consider how a video strategy can work to increase traffic and brand awareness.
It should be a no-brainer that businesses figure out YouTube, and yet many businesses are rushing to spend time and money optimizing for answer engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT, which have a fraction of the traffic of YouTube.
Patrick Stox explained:
“YouTube is the second largest search engine. There’s a lot of focus on all these AI assistants. They’re in total driving less than 1% of your traffic. YouTube might be a lot more. I don’t know how much it’s going to drive traffic to the website, but there’s a lot of eyes on it. I know for us, like we see it in our signups, …they sign up for Ahrefs.
It’s an incredible channel that I think as people need to diversify, to kind of hedge their bets on where their traffic is coming from, this would be my first choice. Like go and do more video. There’s your action item. If you’re not doing it, go do more video right now.”
Tim Soulo, Ahrefs CMO, expressed curiosity that so many people are looking two or three years ahead for opportunities that may or may not materialize on AI assistants, while overlooking the real benefits available today on YouTube.
He commented:
“I feel that a lot of people get fixated on AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity and optimizing for AI search because they are kind of looking three, five years ahead and they are kind of projecting that in three, five years, that might be the dominant thing, how people search.
…But again, if we focus on today, YouTube is much more popular than ChatGPT and YouTube has a lot more business potential than ChatGPT. So yeah, definitely you have to invest in AI search. You have to do the groundwork that would help you rank in Google, rank in ChatGPT and everything. …I don’t see YouTube losing its relevance five years from now. I can only see it getting bigger and bigger because the new generation of people that is growing up right now, they are very video oriented. Short form video, long form video. So yeah, definitely. If you’re putting all your eggs in the basket of ChatGPT, but not putting anything in YouTube, that’s a big mistake.”
Patrick Stox agreed with Tim, noting that Instagram and TikTok are big for short-form videos that are wildly popular today, and encouraged viewers and listeners to see how video can fit into their marketing.
Some of the disconnect regarding SEO and YouTube is that SEOs may feel that SEO is about Google, and YouTube is therefore not their domain of responsibility. I would counter that YouTube should be a part of SEOs’ concern because people use it for reviews, how-to information, and product research, and the searches on YouTube are second only to Google.
SEO/AEO/GEO Can’t Solve All AI Search Issues
The second topic they touched on was the expectations placed on SEO to solve all of a business’s traffic and visibility problems. Patrick Stox and Tim Soulo suggested that high rankings and a satisfactory marketing outcome begin and end with a high-quality product, service, and content. Problems at the product or service end cause friction and result in negative sentiment on social media. This isn’t something that you can SEO yourself out of.
Patrick Stox explained:
“We only have a certain amount of control, though. We can go and create a bunch of pages, a bunch of content. But if you have real issues, like if everyone suddenly is like Nvidia’s graphics cards suck and they’re saying that on social media and Reddit and everything, YouTube, there’s only so much you can do to combat that.
…And there might be tens of thousands of them and there’s one of me. So what am I gonna do? I’m gonna be a drop in the bucket. It’s gonna be noise in the void. The internet is still the one controlling the narrative. So there’s only so much that SEOs are gonna be able to do in a situation like that.
…So this is going to get contentious in a lot of organizations where you’re going to have to do something that the execs are going to be yelling, can’t you just change that, make it go away?”
Tim and Patrick went on to use the example of their experience with a pricing change they made a few years ago, where customers balked at the changes. Ahrefs made the change because they thought it would make their service more affordable, but despite their best efforts to answer user questions and get control of the conversation, the controversy wouldn’t go away, so they ultimately decided to give users what they wanted.
The point is that positive word of mouth isn’t necessarily an SEO issue, even though SEO/GEO/AEO is now expected to get out there and build positive brand associations so that they’re recommended by AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.
Takeaways
- Find balance between AI search and immediate business opportunities:
Some organizations may focus too heavily on optimizing for AI assistants at the expense of video and multimodal search opportunities. - YouTube’s marketing power:
YouTube is the second-largest search engine and a major opportunity for traffic and brand visibility. - Realistic expectations for SEO:
SEO/GEO/AEO cannot fix problems rooted in poor products, services, or customer sentiment. Long-term visibility in AI search depends not just on optimization, but on maintaining positive brand sentiment.
Watch the video at about the 36 minute mark:
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Collagery