How to Refresh Content for More Traffic and AI Visibility w/ Louise Linehan

and we are live. Okay, welcome welcome everyone who are joining in today's webinar live. Hello. Yes. Awesome. You're saying hi in the chat. You can share with us where you guys are dialing in from because we have quite a number of people in today's webinar. It's really cool that people are logging in from all around the world. Hi. Hi, everyone. Uh yeah, it looks like people can hear me. So, don't worry, Louise will be on in just a bit. You guys are quite excited for today's webinar on a very important topic too because uh refreshing content is something that um anyone that has some amount of content on their website, they should be paying attention to. It's a potential for even more traffic and more AI visibility that you probably have not considered. Yeah, we'll just uh hang in there for a couple minutes while everyone comes in. people already raising hands. Uh Tamzid, we will be if you can if you have a question to ask, could you please um use the Q&A function in your Zoom? It should be in your toolbar, the Zoom toolbar. It looks like a question mark. U please use that function to ask your question because we'll be using that today to handle Q&A. Okay. Uh same goes for Jazz. Thank you. Okay. Uh without further ado, I will begin today's webinar. So welcome everyone. I am your host Constance product marketer here at HRES and today our webinar is about how you can refresh your content for more traffic in AI visibility. So content freshness is one of the key features AI seems to prioritize when choosing pages to site in its generated answers. So that refers to both new as well as like recently updated pages. They tend to on on average get cited more than others. So it's a like like genuine strategy for improving your traffic and your uh visibility in AI generated responses. So while you're refreshing your content, which pages should you prioritize and how should you go about making these updates so that your pages turn out to perform better and not worse, which can happen? Well, Louise is here with us today to show us about the different tactics you can use to refresh content effectively. Louise has been working in the SEO marketing space for um over 10 years. I've been pushing out some of our best blogs and AI search in the last year. You may have seen some of her content recently on the blog and if you have not, please go check it out. It's really worth the read. Uh and you guys are in a treat for today. So Louise will be sharing her main presentation in the first half and we will be opening our floor for uh 10 minutes Q&A afterwards. So if you have a question to ask as we present as we go about um our our presentation here, please use the Q&A function and uh for anyone that have see the questions Q&A and you see a question that you really want to get answered, please upvote the question. Um and we will prioritize those to get answered first. Any questions that do not get answered in the 10-minute Q&A, we will answer them in like as a slide in the deck that we will share from today's presentation. Okay, they'll be afterwards. So, we'll keep the Q&A within 10 minutes today um so that we can uh get a smooth going on with our webinar and so that everyone can watch everything within the hour. Okay, this webinar if you ask us, we get this question every time. Is this webinar recorded? It is currently being live streamed on YouTube and you can watch a replay of this webinar later on after this live stream is done. Okay. So, so you'll get a recording as well. You can watch it anytime afterwards if you like to rewatch certain parts that you find interesting. Uh that's where you can do it. So, without further ado, I will hand over to Mike to Louise. Um whenever you're ready. Hi. I could just go ahead and share my screen. Hi everyone. Thanks so much for joining. It's so great seeing so many people from different parts of the world. Um I'm just going to share my screen and hopefully you should now be able to see my slides. Um so as Constant said, I'm going to be talking about how you can refresh your content for more traffic and AI visibility. Uh the slides will be available after and I'll try to uh try my best to answer some questions at the end. Um and this is just a quick overview of what I'm going to be covering today. I'll tell you why updating your content is massively important. I'll show you ideas for how you can do that. And then I'll give you some best practice advice. So, it's quite a scary time to work in marketing at the moment. We're all losing tons of clicks to AI AI overviews. Um, and it kind of makes you wonder whether it's worth even updating your content anymore. But I do think updating your content is still crucial. We know that it's crucial for search visibility, but it's also crucial for AI visibility. Uh, and that's because AI assistants basically they call on search indexes to get the freshest information. Um, and they top up their static training data with retrieval augmented generation. So AI is drawn to fresh content. Uh, and we've seen that in our own research. So we published this study on the right here um, back in July. We analyzed 17 million citations across seven different AI assistants and we found that the URLs cited in AI are 26% fresher on average than URLs in the search results. And also it's not just about citations. Updating your content also gets your brand mentioned more accurately. So even if you don't get a link from an AI assistant, your ma your brand may get pulled into those AI responses. So you need to make sure your content is accurate um and up to date uh so that your brand is being recognized accurately. And then there's been some other research by other SEO experts showing the impact of content updates on AI visibility. So Chris Long on the left here found that chat GPT fan art queries regularly retrieve content with 2025 in the title. And then on the right, this is Metahan. He publishes some really great research. I recommend checking him out. And he found that chat GPT actually has a URL freshness score that prioritizes recent content. Um he also stumbled on an interesting university study where researchers added artificial dates to content and thereafter watched that content jumping up 95 places in the rankings of seven different AI models. So basically freshness directly influences uh whether your page gets chosen and cited by AI. And if you've got outdated content, then it's likely that that will get overlooked. And obviously, we you probably already know that um content updates are crucial for search visibility. So um Google has this search ranking system called queries that deserve freshness where it prioritizes content that has been recently published or updated. Usually that's time sensitive topics and like recent events, trending topics, breaking news. Um, and but it does actually extend to things like best product recommendations. So if you update your content, you're basically able to revive slipping rankings and reclaim lost traffic. Um, and according to the Google exploit that was found last year by uh discovered by Mark Williams Cook, Google uses click-through rates when it reanks your content. And they've actually built their own click probability models that can change based on things like how you update your page titles. So, if you have a title with an outdated date in it, then you'll likely get fewer clicks. Um, so content updates also impact user signals, which brings me on to the user. Obviously, you're not just doing updates for um, AI visibility and search visibility. You want to satisfy the end user as well. Um, and even if they're not clicking as often, they'll definitely notice when they do click if you have outdated examples or your data is out of date. And ultimately, that builds a negative brand perception. So updating your content is a matter of reputation management. You need regular uh uh you need pricing sorry you need to update your pricing information regularly your USPs your features and benefits and if you don't have that information and it's stale or out ofd users are going to convert less. So uh yeah it's about reputation management as well as just traffic bumps. So at Hrefs we approach content updates in two ways. Um we focus on either quick updates or rewrites. Um with quick updates I kind of see these as minimum viable content updates. Uh I think like what are the smallest tweaks that we can make that can lead to outsized returns. Um, some updates will generate long-term evergreen traffic, but more often than not, they tend to lead to shortterm or short to medium-term traffic bumps. Um, and that's either because um, intent changes or new SERs enter um, sorry, new competitors enter the SER or your information just basically goes out of date. Um, so if your primary goal is to increase visibility, then I think you have to treat those updates as ongoing maintenance. So that means things like spotting topic gaps, um, providing information topups, uh, and focusing on the things that you can directly control like your on-page SEO, internal linking and so on. Whereas with rewrites um you usually do this or we usually do this when we have a secondary business goal on top of traffic or on top of um search visibility. So for example, say we've released a new product and we have an old blog on the topic of that product. We might want to do a full rewrite of that blog so that we can show off the features. uh we can show off new use cases and in that case it's not just it doesn't just have a goal of search visibility or traffic it has the goal of sales enablement or customer support. Um and with rewrites you basically you might ramp up content distribution or give the article more what I call campaign treatment. Um that's something like sending out a spotlight email or doing PR. Um, and you basically do this because the reward needs to justify the extra effort that you've put into updating that content. So, but for this presentation, I'm just going to be focusing on quick updates. So, when you start off, the aim is obviously to find loweffort, higher reward updates. So, this is one idea of how you can do that. So you can head to the top pages report in HFS in site explorer and you can drop in your site or a subfolder. I've gone with uh the HFS blog here. Then you want to set up a traffic filter and you basically want to put in a monthly traffic number that is towards the top end of what you usually achieve from your most visible pages. And then you want to set that filter to declining. And um then you can select the date range that you want to monitor the decline over. So, for me, I've chosen six months. You could do a year. It's up to you what date range you look at. Another filter that you can add in here, but I've um missed out, but it is really important is a low keyword difficulty filter. So, this basically helps you focus on less competitive SERs. Um where traffic drops are likely because of content issues rather than link issues. Content issues are the things that you can fix and they're directly in your control, but link issues are more of an authority problem and they can take months to fix um through ongoing uh outreach and PR. So really, you want to focus on content issues, which is why a low keyword difficulty filter can help you do that and focus on your quick win updates. And then um after all of that, you want to sort by negative traffic change, and you're basically zeroing in on your top pages that have dropped off recently. Um and then finally, this is the content changes column, and it shows you when each piece of content has been updated. So, if you can see here, this SEO pricing blog had overhaul changes, which signals to me that in this time frame, my team have probably someone else on my team has updated that content. So, what you're looking out for is minor or moderate um content updates. And usually that will be things like maybe a dynamic content block has changed or maybe like one or two sentences has changed, but nothing s significant. So, these are kind of your content update opportunities. And you can also save these filter filters features so you can come back to them afterwards. So I've um saved this as top pages to update and when I have a spare afternoon I'll jump back into this report and see which pieces of content on the blog I can um update. Also it's not just about studying your own content. You can also get inspiration from your competitor's updates as well. So, um this is content explorer in HFS. Um and you can basically drop a domain um or a subfolder in here and then hit the republished filter uh filter and then set the date range. So, in this case, I'm looking at the HubSpot blog and what they've been republishing or updating over the last year. Um you can put your own domain in if you want to check your own content updates, but in this instance, I'm conducting a sort of competitor analysis on a HubSpot. They're not technically a competitor of ours, but we do create a lot of overlapping content. So my aim here is essentially to recreate their most successful updates. Um, and I think personally I think the content explorer is really good um for looking at it gives you like a top level view of multiple trend lines at once. So you can basically scroll through um the whole list and see the t the traffic spikes. Um oh, sorry I've gone off there. and you can understand which updates have actually been a success. Um, obviously if you're auditing your own content, you can see which updates have worked and which haven't and then you can try again if they haven't worked. But um, what I will say is that obviously not all of these spikes here are um, as a result of content updates. They might be also due to algorithm updates. But generally speaking, this report is quite a good springboard for deeper analysis of um traffic trends. And this blog in particular by HubSpot caught my eye because I know that we actually have um a blog on the exact same topic um in Href. So I'm interested in what learnings we can take from HubSpot's update that we can apply to our own blog. So once you've found your su uh an an a successful example of an update, you can take the URL over to site explorer for more like deeper dive analysis. Um so basically just start off by looking at the trend line and you're kind of looking out for these green circles. Um this is our content changes tool. And so if you see a green circle preceding a traffic spike, then it's usually a telltale sign that the traffic has improved as a result of an update. So obviously this is HubSpot. Um they've updated their content here and they've seen quite a sizable traffic bump as a result. Um so the size of the circle actually indicates the amount of content that was changed and obviously its position on the x-axis shows when that change happened. So in this example, HubSpot made overhaul changes to their article in September. And um if you actually click on that circle, you can see a sidebyside comparison of the updates that actually happened. So uh in red here, this is before the update and then in green, this is after. So they've added quite a lot of content. Um and yeah, this is the result. uh they've managed to claw back 10,000 monthly organic visits which in this landscape is quite impressive. So um it's an example of a successful update. On the other hand, this is a view of our own blog on the same topic of top search engines. Um as you can see, it's kind of not doing very well right now. It's flatlined. We saw this cursory spike in March when we updated it, but since then it's kind of fallen off. So, our aim is to learn what Husbot got right with their update so we can revive our own content. And now on to something everyone wants more of, um, which is AI visibility. And here's how you can have a look at your competitors updates and see if they're winning new AI citations. So, here's an example. Um, this is the cited pages report in Bran Radar, which is our new AI visibility tool. Um, so I've gone in here and I've dro d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d dropped in the HubSpot blog as a URL filter and um their most cited article in over AI overviews is one on the topic of competitor analysis. Um, and I saw this and it kind of piqued my interest because I know we have an article on our own blog on this topic and it's also lost quite a bit of traffic lately. So, as you can see here, HubSpot's article has started gaining m momentum around April time. And this kind of made me wonder whether they'd done any content updates in that time to this article. So, I basically clicked this tiny arrow to the side of the URL and then hit inspect and that brought up the content changes tool again that I mentioned earlier. And I could see exactly when um content dates had happened in this calendar view. and I could look at what had been changed. Um, and lo and behold, on April 11th, HubSpot has updated this content on Yeah, on April 11th, uh, around the same time that their article started gaining even more traction in AI overviews. So on April 11th, HubSpot was cited HubSpot's blog was cited 151 times and now it's cited roughly 476 times. So its AI visibility has multiplied by three times since the update. And even if the update wasn't the only reason for this growth, it seems like it definitely has helped. Um, so once you've got an idea of the content you can update, you kind of need to start thinking about whether it's actually worth updating that content. So the first thing we always think about is does it have business potential? And business potential is a matrix that we actually created at HFS to make sure that we're always writing about the most relevant topics um that our audience are interested in. Um, so by relevant topics I mean topics that are related to our product or our business. And our goal is essentially to get to number three on the business potential scale, which is basically creating content where our audience can't mention the topic without discussing us. So when you're updating your content, you need to reconsider whether the content is still relevant enough to your business or products to even warrant updating it in the first place. Um, obviously as we're all acutely aware, top of the funnel content isn't getting the same attention and traffic it used to in search. We used to be able to create blogs that were quite loosely related to our business. Uh, we could earn lots of links from them as well historically, but it doesn't really work so much anymore and Google is penalizing sites that publish a ton of non-relevant content. So, you really need to think about, have I lost traffic for this topic because it's not actually that relevant to my brand anymore? And if the answer is yes, then it's probably not a great contender for a content Um, please interrupt you for a second. I think people want to see more of your slides, so you might need to reshare and remove your webcam for the moment. Okay, that's okay. All right. So, it's all right, guys. Uh, so could you only see me just then? No, no, no. It's just that like a part of the the screen the slides couldn't see. Yeah. So, it's okay for the rest of the slides will Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Okay. Sorry about that. Go ahead. So, this is the next question. Um, you can think about is moving uh sorry, does demand for the topic still exist? So obviously when it comes to our blog on top search engines, we know um that there's still interest in that topic because we've seen that HubSpot has gained loads of traffic uh from updating their version of that topic. But when you don't have that kind of proof, you need to analyze whether your article's traffic has dropped because overall demand has dropped for the entire topic. Um so this is an example of the keyword fractional SEO consultant. Um and this is our keyword explorer tool. Uh basically it gained popularity in um November 2024 and it was searched roughly 600 times a month. Um some sites might have capitalized on that by creating a blog uh around this topic but now it seems like that term is falling out of fashion. So in this case updating content might not be worthwhile. Uh and then another thing you have to think about is search intent. Um so search intent does change and shift. Um this is an example of the term LLM for um so this is back in 2022. Um LLM actually stands for um something else. It's to do with law. It's Lum Magister which translates to the Master of Law. So in 2022 the SERs were really different. um they kind of had a lot of universities um and law degree information appearing and by 2024 obviously chat GPT came along and kind of changed the whole landscape and now large language model content is really dominating. So when intent shifts you'll tend to see in this this is the SER uh sorry the SER overview tool in keywords explorer you'll tend to see a lot of um movement and drops you'll tend to see lost on the left new on the right and then you'll probably see a low SER similarity score but um so basically when intent shifts you basically have to decide whether the content is still relevant for the user if it has shifted too drastically like in in this example then it's obviously not going to be relevant and um you can also check the identify intents tool within HFS to see what how how much intent has changed. So this is here on the right u when it comes to our blog on top search engines we are basically we want to know whether intent has changed drastically since our last update which was back in March. So at first glance it does look like there's a lot of movement here. So, and that would kind of indicate there has been a drastic intent shift. But if you actually take a look at this identify intent report and then compare it, um you'll realize that might not be the case. So, here's a comparison from March 2025 to September 2025. And as you can see, the topics are exactly the same. The percentages are exactly the same. So, that means it's probably a good contender for us um for an update. Um the other thing you obviously need to think about is the presence of SER and AI features. So obviously AI overviews make um make a huge impact on whether you get clicks or not. We've done our own research and we found that AI overviews impact click-through rates by roughly 35%. So, um, if an AI overview started appearing around the time that your traffic started dropping, it's possible it might not be worth updating that content anymore because you're unlikely to get many more clicks. There's probably a ceiling. Um, but you can check when SER features start showing up using this tool, SER overview. So, um, when it comes to updating our top search engines blog, as you can see, there's a people also ask box here. Um, and people also ask boxes do tend to reduce clicks, but I'm pretty confident that updating this blog is still worthwhile because I basically managed to um track down this blog and the um this box, sorry. And the first time it started appearing was back in 2017 and within that time frame, I know that HubSpot has successfully updated a piece of content on this topic. So, I'm quite confident that um updating could work for for us. Um, another thing you want to validate is uh user engagement signals. So you basically are checking for other signs of life that indicate a piece of content is worthwhile updating. Um, so this is our web analy analytics tool and this is an example of our blog um, our SEO audit blog. Um, so it shows impressive time on page and views per visit still even though organic traffic has dropped over the past year. Um, so we're still seeing strong user engagement signals, which indicates it is still worthy of a refresh. Um, so once you found the content you want to update and you've made sure it's worthwhile updating, then it's time to go ahead and actually do the update. And the easiest starting point is filling your topic gaps. Uh, you can take your article over to AI content helper in HFS um to do this. So the AI content helper basically grades your content against the top ranking pages in the SERs for your chosen keyword. So you're basically spotting and filling gaps in your topic coverage. You just take a keyword and then paste in your URL and then you select the dominant search intent that represents your article and then it scores your article um and individual topics out of 100. So it works in a similar way to search engines and AI systems like Gemini um because it essentially generates a bunch of fanout queries and then measures your article against them based on something called cosign similarity. Um it also give you recommendations for plugging topic gaps and also um suggested keywords and you can also check on your competitor excerpt so you can get inspiration from them whilst you're doing your update. Um, so I analyzed our blog on top search engines versus HubSpots and it was immediately clear that our blog has a lot of room for improvement uh when it comes to topic coverage. HubSpot scores 77 out of 100 and we only score 50. So we definitely have some gaps to fill. Um, and then at this point you can go through the individual topics and see what you're missing out on and start tackling them in your updates. Um, so we definitely need to work on our search on search engine optimization tips here. Um, there's one feature that really helps with this called the highlights feature. You basically can hit a toggle and map the topic scores to actual precise sentences in your blog so you know which exact areas of your content need updating and enri and enriching. Um, obviously updating content isn't just about plugging topic gaps though. You also need to think about your on-page SEO. So, you want to focus on um your on-page SEO because it's the things that you can control. So, um you could start off by rewriting title tags and metad descriptions to um better prime them for the intent of the SER. Even though these often get rewritten by Google, in testing, Google actually might opt for your version if it drives more clicks. It won't always choose its own version. So, it's still quite important to keep your titles up to date and have some control over them. Um, and you then also can think about alt text or your schema or internal linking or your header tags so you can cleanly structure your article, which is um also especially important when it comes to AI visibility. And then uh once you've filled in topic gaps and done your on page SEO, you need to think about adding in some form of information gain. [clears throat] So my advice would be um focus on filling one or two topic gaps, then add in unique information on top of that. So by unique information I mean things like um firsthand research, templates, tools, left field opinions, and basically anything unique. Um, so in this blog, this is an example of a blog that I updated on H1 tags last year, and I included this piece of research that I found quite interesting. Um, it was a brand new study. No other competitors in the SER were referencing it, and it made the content more current and relevant and just a bit more practical. So, when you update your content, it can be really tempting to just plug gaps with chat GPT content, but that isn't very interesting to read. And chances are most of your competitors will already be doing that. So you'll end up creating conveyor belt about content or run-of-the-mill content that anyone could have written. So if you want to give your readers an actual reason to read your update, um you really want to think about adding in content that differentiates um your blog. So you can start with something like a hook or a quote or a piece of data um that's going to make them want to read it. Otherwise, if you're just um filling all the topic gaps with AI content, you're just going to be entity stuffing and covering a list of topics at a superficial level, which is not really something anyone wants to read. Um when it comes to finding ideas for information gain, it's basically about hanging out where your audience are um and listening out for ideas. So in my case for inspiration I check discussions happening in communities like the SEO community on Slack. Um I will linger in comments and posts on LinkedIn. I subscribe to the newsletters my audience reads. I listen to the podcasts they listen to. And also I do site searches of our own site to see if we've got new uh data or relevant information that I can repurpose to make my content more content update more interesting. Um so there are quite a few ways to find interesting or unseen information. Um so as I've already said it's it's good to think about redistributing your update um once it's live. It's not just about doing it. It's about putting the new updated content out there so you can ring more value out of it. Um, one way you can do that is by involving contributors and subject matter experts from the outset. So you're essentially engineering increased visibility. I used to call this awareness you prepared earlier, but you're basically able to get in front of the contributor's network as well as your own network. So this is an example from Mattesh from our uh blog team doing exactly that. He updated a piece of content um on automotive SEO and then reached out to some experts and collected some quotes and opinions and that especially helped with uh social media distribution. And then of course you need to check whether the updates have actually worked. So I usually use site explorer content changes and web analytics to do that. Um this is a post I updated really recently on onpage SEO. There's been a modest organic traffic bump. Um, it says 23% here. I've since checked on it since creating these slide decks, and it is up to 36%. Um, and on the right here, it's uh 16% in traffic uplift overall, but I haven't checked on this figure since, uh, putting these images in. So, hopefully that's a bit higher now. But basically, there are definitely things I could do to optimize this post further. I could um add some more on page SEO tweaks. I could redistribute it more. And then finally, that brings me on to iterating on content updates. So, I always think you should treat your updates as an ongoing test. Um, and a good way to iterate on your update is going back into the content helper, uh, and then reviewing scores to see if there's any new or emerging topics, if intent has shifted, for example, or if there's anything you can do to boost these scores further. So for example, I added this section in um this is my blog post on SEO audits. Um I added internal sorry a section on internal linking. Originally the score was three and now it's up to 67. And while that is positive, I could go further to better satisfy this user intent. Um I could add in more information about internal linking and bump up the score further. Um, and the great thing about quick updates is they will bring in small visibility bumps that compound over time um, with iterations. Um, so that's basically it from me. Thanks for watching. I'll have a go at answering some of your questions now. I'll just stop sharing my screen. All right. So, we have quite a number of questions. Some have uh are basically asking something very similar but we will ask um we'll go with the first question here which is I think it's trying to ask will chat GBT uh flag the content on my website and basically uh rule it as to be ignored or or you know spammy or something like that. How do we know if something what if if that happens? Sorry. If if Chachi PT flags content as spam, my website as spam. It looks like this question is asking. Yeah. Um, how do we know if your website is flagged as spam by chat GPT? Is that correct? That's the question. Yeah. Um, so my go-to in in I would use our tool Brand Radar to see if the citation shows up. Um, you also I I can't speak directly to spam. I can do some more research into that and add in the answer in the deck afterwards. But um if your content isn't showing up in AI assistance, you need to check whether it's being crawled um and whether you you check your robots txt to make sure that it's available to those those AI assistants. But in terms of I' haven't heard about chat GPT flagging content as spam. So um I would check in AI visibility tools first. check that you're um that you're allowing yourself to be cruled by AI assistants and then go from there. But I'll try to research a bit more into that question and um provide a more detailed response in the deck afterwards. Okay. Uh and the next question is what if refreshing content doesn't work presumably the first time and is there a limit of how much and how many times you can change content and update it? I don't think there's a limit, but what I would say is if you're only changing a really small amount of information or just changing the publish date, then um Google has invested a lot of resources into under understanding whether your content has been meaningfully updated each time you update it. And it has uh according to Mark Williams Cook a binary trust signal. So um basically if you abuse your uh the update process by changing a publish date and not changing um your content in any meaningful way then it's likely that those updates aren't going to bring you any more additional traffic or visibility. In fact they might do the opposite. Um, and by meaningful I mean if you've changed content to improve it for EAT or if you've changed content to better align with the intent of the search um, and that kind of thing. Those are meaningful updates. It doesn't mean you have to change a huge amount of the text uh or the images um, but it has to kind of serve one of those things. So, E A T or intent. Um, but yeah, if you're just changing small amounts of content, then um for for no rhyme or reason, then it's likely that won't work long term. Okay. So, I just want to uh mention for the number of people that have started asking questions in chat, that's that's great. We're we're happy that you guys are sharing lots of questions. Um, but if you can help to answer um ask them in the Q&A um that helps to make sure that we get to your question and it helps for other people to see and upvote your question and things like that. Otherwise, it will be very easy to miss in the chat here. So, I hope we can help to do that. Uh I think Ajaz just to quickly um follow up with Ajaz's question, he actually want to say that he has a website to clarify he has a website for example that has a 100 articles on it. Uh, and it has about 10k of monthly traffic. Um, so they're just I'm not sure what he means by radio chat GBT. I think I just Why don't you maybe um just private message me uh and and explain to me your situation because I'm not too sure if we understand your question. We'll get to it later. I hope that's okay. Uh so I'll just keep it as not answered yet for the moment. Um there has been more questions. There's one question that we anticipated it will get asked. oh maybe not. Okay. Well, we we'll get to that later. Um Farid asked, "Is it necessary to show the updated date on the front end from a search engine's perspective?" Um, I think as long as you've got data like if you've updated it in terms of maybe last mod or in your metadata, that should be enough for a search engine to understand that your content has been updated. Obviously, it's helpful to the user if they can see when the um when the page has been updated. So, from a user experience perspective, I do think it is worthwhile including that. But um if you have data like um in your header response like last mod and um or you've got metadata that shows when your content was republished that should be picked up by search engines. Okay. So hope that was helpful for uh there's someone who asked if I only update the date without much changes. I think you kind of answered this already just now and Google. Yeah, I think I um but what about AI crawlers? Do we know anything about that? Um I think it should be the same. And as I said earlier, nearly every sing I'd say probably every single AI assistant now uses retrieval augmented generation to draw on the search results for a number of their responses. So if you're getting things right in search, it's likely that you'll be in the selection pool for AI um responses as well. Like chat, for example, um it officially draws on Bing, but it unofficially draws on Google. So um so yeah, that's the answer. Yeah, it it does matter to get the fundamentals of traditional SEO right for pages if you like them to be uh cited more more often. Uh there is a question about e-commerce websites. It was split into two here. Uh [clears throat] so he's saying that I I run so this is Yogesh. So he said, "I run an uh an e-commerce website and I see rankings declining day on day and I haven't really made changes recently. Um is there as I sort of what are the key things I should keep in mind specifically in the e-commerce context that would be useful when refreshing my content?" Um, I think the approach to um, it like the approach to choosing which pages to update, which e-commerce pages to update can kind of be the same as I just showed in the webinar in terms of like looking at your top pages, finding the biggest declines. You also might want to like introduce like revenue data from your CRM and that if you want to contextualize it. Um, obviously e-commerce pages aren't like blog pages. there's not um a ton of content. But when you're refreshing um e-commerce pages, you're refreshing for trust and user experience um and conversion. So then it becomes a case of like optimizing things like page speed or your your uh conversion paths or um your internal linking is really important um and navigation and things like that. So um you can if you're looking to update kind of on page SEO features at scale we have a tool um called patches in hres which can let you update titles and metad descriptions and internal linking in batch um and you don't have to involve developers. So my advice would be you can test out doing one or two pages and if that kind of works you can try and scale it or batch it um batch those uh updates um using a tool like patches. Yeah. And uh just one quick thing to mention is specifically in e-commerce context um it would be useful also to see uh like when you search the keywords that your pages are ranking for maybe not ranking as highly as your competitors. You can see the top ranking competitors and also their competitors that are paying for shopping ads on Google search to see what their pages look like and and then compare to see what they are like doing well that are good for user experience or that are are being you know that that look good basically is like product page and see if you can do the same updates for your own pages. So I hope that was useful Yogesh. So there were a number of people it's not like the most highest uh voted but a number of people asked this question. We knew this question would come up and equal and question mark 100. Um what is uh I believe some questions related to uh when are we going to fix this issue about getting the top 100 uh positions and SERs back for the keywords? Yeah. Um yeah, we're really close to having the solution sorted. Uh essentially because of the scale of HS, it's just taken us um a bit of time, but um we're very close to it. Um when it comes to uh you if you're checking on like the performance of updated content, usually you do that historically and obviously this issue was introduced in September. So hopefully um historically you shouldn't be able it shouldn't affect your the workflows I've taken you through in in this webinar but um it's something that we're almost like im uh very in the very near future we will be having a solution um to that um but we'll obviously keep um keep everyone in the loop about that. Right. Awesome. So I hope that answers questions here. Um we so like we are having quite a number of questions. Uh we're likely not going to finish them all. So I'll look to um feature maybe three or four more questions. Uh and then we will help to answer the rest in the the deck that we share to everyone. So I hope that's okay. Um there's this one question about is it harder uh to win an AI citation once it is citing a page versus traditional SEO like winning the top 10 uh top three positions in Google search? Uh sorry. Is it harder to win a citation versus ranking in the top three? It looks like. Yeah. Um yeah. Um I actually just published a bit of research um and I studied the most cited pages in chat GPT and what I found was 28% of those pages didn't have organic search visibility. So chat GPT whilst it does draw on um search results, there are opportunities for you to as long as your content serves the intent um and matches what people are searching for in AI, um it doesn't necessarily need to rank. Um, as for whether it's easier or not, that's something I can't fully speak to, but um, I just thought it was an interesting takeaway that some of the content that turns up most reg uh, most often in chat TPT doesn't actually have organic So hopefully that in some way answers the question. Yes. So like uh, yeah, it kind of depends. this is the answer you don't want to hear but it really does kind of depends based on the data that we have recently published um it and you can probably look to your own industry and see um if you have the brand radar uh add-on for example you can basically do a sidebyside to see if the pages you can click through to the pages that get cited in your industry or for the keywords that you're trying to uh rank for and and see whether or not they also have organic traffic going towards them and see if that that works or not. Um, this question came up also in other webinars about llms.txt. Should we bother? Does it Yeah, I my manager Ryan wrote a really good um article on this. Our consensus was that it doesn't matter. However, I have seen Crystal Carter from Wix doing a lot of research into llms text.txt and I'd recommend checking her out because she's finding evidence to s to suggest that um it is having an impact and some users of Wix she's actually been testing out um lms.txt on and it has had um a positive impact. Um, I'm still on the fence. I still need to do more research. Um, but maybe maybe the tide is changing and llmx.txt is becoming um yeah, a feasible kind of option. But yeah, I think I think focusing on robots.txt is probably the most important um thing. But yeah, I'd check out Crystal Carter from Wix if um if you can. Okay. So yeah, I mean I think also to keep in uh uh in mind is that currently we don't see any clear signs uh or like definite signs about that spending effort on you know optimizing your LMS.txt txt to really um drive an impact on improving AI visibility. We see other factors have a lot more of an impact and they're probably a lot more worth of your effort and time. This may change it. It depends. You can see how often that a lot of these AI assistant providers like update their algorithms and and they push out new features all the time, new versions all the time. This might change. So um I think um so far the what we see um that drives the most impact in terms of visibility things like content freshness like we covered today but also things like the formats of your pages you know of how well you've answer specific questions uh in your industry and things like that can can make an impact. Those tend to change less and still be impactful. So when thinking about how to prioritize your effort, you may have to consider that as well rather than uh LMS LM llm.txt. [laughter] It's so hard to say. Um this one is related to tracking and monitoring performance of uh LLM's AI visibility basically. So, uh, um, Shreths, sorry if I butcher your name, by saying we're doing somewhat great in terms of ASA patients and while showing up on our dashboards, but we can't try to figure out like why we're doing well. Uh, and and like maybe for some pages it's being cited more and some pages are um not being cited as much. So, how do we sort of figure out what is make like performing doing well and not doing well? um how you measure that success in obviously I can only really speak to Brown Radar but in Brown Radar we have um a report called topics. So um obviously you can see the individual prompts that are behind your citations but we also can see the overarching topics. So I would start looking at that and see if there's any patterns in the types of topics that you're um be you're being pulled into. Um you can also you can also compare trend lines of um different data sets. So um you can look at your branded web mentions for example and see if there's any kind of upward trajectory in that data set because we found um in our own research that branded web mentions correlate with um AI overview visibility. We're actually going to be repeating that study for other AI assistants as well. So, um I would also check that. Um and then once if that is the case, then you can find the sites that um the kinds of sites that are responsible for your mentions and try to build on those relationships and try to um continue that kind of outreach. Um and you can also look at your branded search volume and see if that's having an impact. And basically, um we now have a report within Brand Radar where you can see all of those trend lines in one view. So you can see when one channel um when something on one channel impacts your AI overview growth or visibility um you can actually correlate the trend spikes. Um so that would be how I would do it for brand radar but I can't speak to other AI tools um simply because I haven't used them but yeah. Okay. Uh so we hope that is helpful and unfortunately we will answer one final question here. There were quite a number of other good questions here. So, don't worry, we will get to all the questions um like in the deck that we're sending out to all of you guys. Uh but for now, we will just answer this last one about content formats. Do you have any recommendations? Do certain types of content perform better for AI visibility versus organic visibility? Um like how do I know I should worry about schema markup, images, videos? Should I use them more? So on. How would you go about doing this? Like if you had to refresh your content and like you had to consider this thing about should I add more images and videos and things like that? Um so we it's not exactly the same, but I in the most recent piece of research I did when I studied the most cited um pages on chat GPT, I kind of used Claude to help me analyze what types of pages they were. Um, if you're able to get an export of that data, you can get it out of brand radar. You for you can um you can append your industry or your market and then uh export that data and then use an AI assistant to help you categorize which pages and which page types are most visible. Um, so that could be a way of going about doing it. um we haven't studied the um images um or like multimedia yet but it's something I definitely want to study. One thing we are working on at the moment is studying the structure of content um and seeing like how because everybody says structuring your content um is so important for AI visibility and then there was that whole debate about chunking and everything like that. So, I basically wanted to test that and I wanted to put actual data behind that because I felt like I was hearing everywhere, yeah, just like structure your content better and use small paragraphs. And I was like, yeah, but what where's the evidence? So, we're working on that. Um, so hopefully that should be out soon. Um and as for schema um there's also a lot of kind of people are divided on schema as well um about whether it impacts AI visibility um because one argument says that LLM's um are large language models they they reduce everything to kind of they vectorize everything turn everything into like numerical representations. So whatever you put in like schema um will be like randomized or it kind of will lose that structure and it won't um like when the training data is analyzed um it won't kind of make any impact. But then obviously there's the the fact that um AI assistants draw on search results through retrieval augmented generation and it's proven that schema is impactful for search visibility because it helps improve and enrich the knowledge graph which is what search engines are built on. So so if you're ranking on page one it's more likely that you're going to be visible in AI assistance. So in that respect schema indirectly impacts AI visibility. Um, so yeah, basically what I'm saying is I'm I'm I'm working on it and I'm trying to do more research into that. Um, so hopefully you'll see more of the answers on HFS blog going forward. If your if your question um if if you're still sitting on the fence about like all these different tactics, I I would say that like if it is useful for SEO and we have evidence or like you see evidence that it's useful for SEO like things like schema markup was um relevant to your industry. We know are useful for SEO at least for for most industries. So like you can try to see if that is that can be applied to your website anyway whether or not like you there's a guarantee that it would be improved in like you will improve your AI visibility. So if you think it will help at least for SEO it might be worth the effort anyway to put it in and uh and then you can see how that impacts your AI visibility second. Um yeah uh okay so I know I'm so sorry guys there are so many questions today but we are out of time. Um, thank you. And um, okay, so someone quickly asked, "Where can you find file on the Q&A answers?" We will, me and Louise will help to um, work on these uh, answers to your questions and we'll send them out to you together with the follow-up email to all attendees. Those that have attended today, as well as those that could not make it today, you'll still get a copy of uh, today's deck as well as all the the questions um, that you shared today. Thank you for joining us in today's webinar. Thank you so much for your questions. In fact, they're helpful for us to understand what you guys care about uh as well as inspire us for how we can make uh better content in our webinars. In the future, we will be pushing out a survey which so when you close the Zoom, you'll be prompted with a survey to fill out there. Please share uh suggestions of what you liked or what you'd like to see improved in in today's webinar so that we can improve them for future. Uh so um without further ado, we will go ahead and uh end today's webinar. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm sorry um that we could not get to um everyone's questions, but we're so happy you guys were so active in sharing like what you like to get answers on. Um we hope you guys have a great rest of the week and we'll see you guys in the next one. So, take care and have a great