YouTube SEO for AI Search: How to Rank your YouTube Videos | 3.3. AEO Course by Ahrefs

Hey, it's Ammo and welcome to lesson three, which is on YouTube optimization for AI visibility. Now, in the last two lessons, we covered how to create content that gets cited and how to earn mentions on other people's pages. But, there's one platform that deserves its own conversation, and that's YouTube. Why? Because YouTube is the most cited domain in Google's AI overviews. And get this, according to our data, YouTube mentions have a 0.737 correlation with ChatGPT visibility. That's the strongest correlation of any factor we studied. And there's a reason for that. GPT-4 was trained on over a million hours of YouTube transcripts. So, YouTube isn't just a platform AI sites, it's a platform AI learns from. So, in this lesson, I'm going to walk you through a three-step process to get your YouTube videos in front of AI. Let's get started. So, the first step is to find what's already working on YouTube in your niche. And the key idea here is that you want to target what I call search hits, rather than viral hits. A viral hit can get you a spike of views, and it can keep spreading based on a YouTube user's interests. But, once the YouTube algorithm has exhausted the interested people, it dies. A search hit, it gets you consistent traffic from both Google and YouTube search month after month because people are actively searching for that topic. And search hits are exactly the kind of videos AI is likely to pull from. And that's because if Google is already ranking a YouTube video for a keyword, there's a good chance AI overviews will cite it, too. On top of that, titles for search videos tend to be very clear about what the video is about, whereas viral hits, not so much. So, here's how to find these topics. Go to Site Explorer and enter www.youtube.com/watch. Then, open the organic keywords report. This shows you every keyword that YouTube videos are ranking for in Google. Now, filter for keyword rankings in the top three and add your niche terms to the include filter. What you'll get is a list of topics where YouTube videos are already ranking at the top of Google and are related to your space. Now, let's move on to the second step, which is to actually create videos that rank. Once you found your topics, you need to make sure your video is set up to rank in Google. And there's a checklist I follow for this. First, your title needs to contain the keyword people are searching for. This isn't the place for clever or click-baity titles. If the keyword is how to use Google Docs, that should be right in your title. Save the creativity for the thumbnail. The title handles the keyword, the thumbnail sells the click. Second, your description needs to be a real summary of the video. Just write a summary of what your video covers and add your target keyword in the first couple of lines. Google reads this, AI reads this, and viewers read it, so make it count. Third, add timestamps. Timestamps turn into YouTube chapters, and those chapters can show up in Google for specific queries. So, if your video covers five tips and someone searches for tip number three, Google can link directly to that chapter. It's basically free extra visibility for like two minutes of work. Fourth, say the keyword in your video. And this one's important. Google understands audio. Liz Reid, who's VP of search at Google, has said that Google can understand audio content and video content. So, if your video is about the best protein powder for repair, actually say those words in the video. Don't put it in the title and hope for the best. And fifth, match the format to what's already ranking. If tutorials are dominating the search results for your keyword, make a tutorial. If listicles rank, make a listicle. Don't fight the format. Look at what's working and match it because you're matching the intent of the searcher. Now, none of this is complicated, but it's the difference between a video that gets buried and a video that shows up every time someone searches for that topic. And that brings us to the third step, which is to layer in AI visibility. So, at this point, you've got a video that's optimized for Google search, but here's where you take it a step further for AEO. Go to Brand Radar and enter a popular brand or YouTube channel and go to the topics report. Then set a filter where the domain mentioned is youtube.com. Now, you can see exactly which queries AI is pulling YouTube videos into, so go and create content around those topics. And as for how to actually rank there, it comes back to what we already covered. Pick the right keyword, make a thorough, well-optimized video, and be comprehensive without wasting people's time. And here's one more thing to keep in mind. Remember, every video you publish on YouTube is potentially training data for AI models. So, even if a video doesn't get cited right away, the content is being absorbed. The more helpful, specific, and well-structured your videos are, the more likely AI is to learn from them and eventually recommend them. So, that covers content, mentions, and YouTube, but there's a technical side to AEO that most people skip entirely. Things like structured data, robots.txt, and making sure AI can actually access your site in the first place. And that's what we'll cover in the next lesson. I'll see you there.