Google just launched AI Mode and it's like the biggest changes in the SEO history we have ever seen in years, and this is just phase one. And personally, I believe Google will eventually integrate it into the standard search. In simple terms, Google AI Mode works just like perplexity, ChatGPT Search. It's a dedicated AI search experience where you can ask question and get immediate response. To be honest, I like the AI Mode experience more than AI overviews. It's less clutter and is much more focused, and this change is huge because even AI tools are catching up. Google is still dominating the search market. Initial data from SimilarWeb also shows that the user adoption rate of AI Mode is increasing, although it's still early. But imagine more of your customers are using AI Mode since they're already being trained to get familiar with these ChatGPT or Perplexity-Like search experience. There is a real impact for your site traffic, but same time, this can also be a growth opportunity for your brand. Before I share the strategy first, we all need to have the right mindset. That is to stop thinking to optimize for Google search, but start optimizing for trust. I know this sounds weird. This is a video about Google AI Mode, but SEO is no longer just a Google thing or the old Google search result page optimization, fighting for rankings. We have to let go of this thinking. These day, people want immediate answers, and the best interest of Google is no longer the best interest of you as a brand. You want traffic, but Google wants to give answers and continue to feed ads and stay profitable. A user behavior study from Kevin Indig shows that searchers now prioritize trust before relevance. They will first evaluate if this is the brand that is familiar or trustable before they assess how well it address the answer. And I'm so resonate with this finding. Ultimately in the AI age, we are optimizing for trust. Because trust make your audience convert, trust create more brand searches, trust create positive signals, even though your audience is not clicking, and this is your biggest opportunity, can continue winning in Google AI Mode. And here is a strategy using what I call the "Trust-First SEO framework". Pillar number one, digital platform expansion. We're redefining where your audience finds you because relying on your And pillar number two is context driven content strategy. We are creating content that builds trust, authority, and matches how Google AI actually process information. And pillar number three is AI authority signals. We are optimizing how AI search engines perceive and prioritize your brand. And each pillar is interconnected together. The WHERE, The WHAT and the HOW, and let me go through this one by one. Our first pillar, where is to redefine our playing field. Search optimization is no longer just happen on the Google search. Result page. It is much bigger than that. Especially for YouTube, Pinterest, the searches per user grow significantly, and that is the fundamental shift in how people discover information. And so you must invest in at least one social media and stay active. Social media will become part of your organic search growth strategy, and these channels will become more interconnected. When it comes to Google AI Overviews, YouTube and LinkedIn are among the top two social platform that get cited often and not just AI generated results. The latest research also shows that YouTube is the number one search destination overtaking Reddit Now. So start a YouTube channel or reactive your YouTube immediately if you want to stay visible in the Google search ecosystem. And also do a simple channel audit for your brand. If you are over relying on search, like over 50% of traffic is driven from search. How does the over channel mix looks like? Do you have a good traffic from direct channel which signals you have a strong branding? You might have already missed out lots of top of funnel awareness opportunity. If you don't have a multi-channel strategy. Your audience, Google AI LLMs are actively looking for evidence to evaluate if your brand is trustable. So having an active, strong multichannel presence will boost their confidence level because it signals your brand has a real world authority other than just an SEO optimized website. And eventually you should build a 360 degree trust ecosystem for your brand. Each platform like Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, X nowadays leverage powerful AI algo to feed relevant content for you. Imagine if your customer search for personal finance tips and then YouTube or other social media will start feeding related videos or content about investment plan for them. If your brand are not active on these platforms, these are all missed opportunities. You can check out this video for more about what this 360 trust ecosystem mean. So the next is to focus on maximizing conversions on your website. Website will become more like a lead generation or conversion machine in the AI Age. People are now exploring possible options from social media, forums, reviews, somewhere outside websites. They visit your website is to get proof and to make sure they are in the right place and have the right research information to make these final conversion decisions. So install heatmaps, user behavior trackings to understand deeply how users behave on your website, what kind of sections they click the most, how they're navigating or build an exploration report on Google Analytics to visualize the most optimal navigation path for your users. You can even start from your desired destination and trace backwards how your users were navigating before that so you have a more clear picture. Google AI is now getting more advanced at reading user signals. The leaked Google search API documents also confirm that they're tracking a lot of engagement signals to judge the page quality. It also recently launched tools like SynthID detectors, scanning for AI generated content. So your website user experience will become a crucial ranking factor. ******** And here comes the second pillar. WHAT.What content to create to capitalize this opportunity? Your audience does not lack information. AI can now generate content with just a few clicks, blog posts, social posts, videos, images, even websites. So eventually people will only look for brands or peoples that they can trust for information. Ask yourself, if this piece of content really build more trust or actually hurts it. Every content piece should build authority and trust with uniqueness and originality and not just fill keyword gaps. And so do extensive research around your target audience and evolve from just keyword research to audience research. Keyword research is still useful to judge a topic popularity, but it's definitely not enough to succeed anymore. In traditional SEO search, a typical query is like this best stroller brand for travel. Now with AI mode, the query might become this. The search query length will only become longer with more context, details about the user's need. And so your job is to craft content that has this persona in mind and really addressing their needs. And so grab reviews on Google Business profile in your niche. YouTube videos, comments, Reddit, Quora forums discussion, Amazon reviews. These are all valuable data to understand deeply about what problems your audience are facing and waiting for your original take and give them answers. Then use AI to map all these persona details, their goals, motivations, psychological triggers. You can even set up AI automation to fast track this process. SEO in the AI Age should work like a UX strategist. Content is still king, but context is queen. And now to know exactly what to create, we have to go beyond the main query with an intent expansion strategy. Google is using what it call a Query Fan-out technique in AI mode to break down the main search queries into multiple related and alternate queries before the Gemini model generate the final response. The official patents also outline a similar process. You can use the People Also Asked sections, SEO tools to research for a list of relevant question about this topic. Google AI will also make the searches more personalized, so you can leverage the related to recent searches to get more sub-queries ideas. Another way I suggest is to use NotebookLM, and I always think NotebookLM is a secret SEO tool because it's powered by the Gemini model. It is the closed system that you can evaluate different relevant signals that might be useful for your Google AI search optimization. So in this example, I have this main query about what is the best skincare routine before wedding day. We can use Discover Source to first gather top 10 results. Google return these results because they are relevant to your query, high quality or high authority. Once you import them, you can use this prompt to reverse engineer the most possible sub-queries. Then immediately you'll have those highly relevant content ideas that AI Mode might be actually using in its underlying process. This is not the perfect solution, but I have tried this method and I'm able to reverse engineer most of the subqueries from the official demo. I'll put the prompt below if you want to try it yourself. I also have another NotebookLM for SEO video for you. Another big tip is about your format. Different content ideas have different favorable formats by AI and Google AI will only get smarter in understanding multimodal content. It also made it official to recommend brands to create content beyond text. So look through the search results on both AI search or search result page. Is it video format dominated or text content dominated so you can adjust your content strategy better. Another things that I always tell brands to do is to focus on high quality mid funnel content. These are content that will help influence your audience purchase decision as they're heavily researching options, they are more likely to trigger high intent searches and so are more profitable for your brands. Some content format I found working really well and so favored by AI models are those highly related to decision making. They often comes with listable format that are easy to scan for AI models. And I encourage you to try them for your brand, so to increase the chance to get seen for this higher intent searches on AI. Okay. The next pillar is HOW. That is how AI sees you. AI doesn't sees your website or content the way humans do. They're scanning for entities, relationships and trust signals in a completely different way. And there are two key optimization strategies here. First knowledge graph optimization. To make it really simple, a knowledge graph is like a big digital map that helps these AI models, AI agents, understand information the way we do. Instead of just looking for exact words, it connects things like people, places, or ideas and show how they're related to each other. And this helps AI models to quickly return the results for users. So that's why you want to make sure AI grabs the correct relationship as you want it to. Majority of your brand knowledge graph consists of two things, the schema markup and named entities. So make sure you install the relevant schema markups on your website for any important information you want to present for AI models. For example, organization schema, local business schema, product schema, review schema, etc. These are the minimal requirements to build your brand knowledge graph for AI model understanding. You can also check if your page has already installed any schema markup using the Google Rich result tool. I'll put all the resource below, and that is not enough. We also need to have named entities. So the simplest way to think of it is these are words or phrases that give more context for AI to understand your brand from those unstructured data and to match any similarities. There are different free tools to extract these named entities or words used. I'll put the links below, just type the text for those top AI search results and you can extract some top used phrases for your content inspiration. Another simple way is actually ask ChatGPT to extract all the named entities and study what are entities these top AI search results use, so you can compare any gaps in between and further optimize your content. Now. Second is to do target outreach and focus on the top three position brand citation optimization. Because for now the citation panel on Google AI Mode still works pretty much the same as in AI overviews. Again from Kevin's study, most searchers only skim the top three citations of the panel and seldom scroll past 75%. Of course there are different factors contributing to these rankings, and these positions are not always easy to get. But again, we can reverse engineer the process and especially for those brand driven search caries. For example, what is the best yoga map brand for beginners is a super valuable, high intent search query, and you can see most of the responses are pulled from these media or publishers and seldom you will find responses from the original brand site Then you can try to outreach the editorial team. Usually it will provide a contact email on the site, and I also highly suggest you to directly connect the present on LinkedIn or other platform and outreach them with a pitch. Now, the trickiest part is do not start with a generic pitch. Always lead with value. Like this example. Your pitch can mention any proprietary research or survey or any valuable information that would enhance this piece of content or like sending any free samples and see if they're interested to try it out, and always include how these testing data help to fill any gaps in their existing articles. I must say that direct product mention like in this case is very difficult to get, so you might want to try something more easier, like expert roundup articles, industry trends, educational how to content, try to see which publishers are getting the most visibility because for these type of content, publishers are usually more welcome to mention you if you offer something valuable in return. You don't need to create more content with AI, but need to be more thoughtful and always have this trust building piece in mind. Join my community so you can get more inspiration on how to use AI for your SEO strategy. Get access to all my tested prompts I share on my channel and other featured content. You can find the link in the description to join. And before you go, also watch this video about how to use NotebookLM for SEO content research. And you'll be surprised NotebookLM is such a powerful tool for SEO. I will see you next time.