How To Do Topic Research for AI Platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, etc)

In this video, I'm going to show you how to uncover thousands of topics that you could be covering on your website to improve your visibility in AI search tools like ChatGpt, Google's AI mode, and AI overviews. Because right now, these platforms are shaping your buyers decisions before they even get to your website. Now, at Exposure Ninja, we've analyzed thousands of AI generated responses across loads of industries, and we've [music] identified that some sites are doing really well, getting loads of visibility in regular search, but they're nowhere in AI search. Whereas, some websites actually don't have great visibility in traditional search, but are doing super well in AI search. Now, if you're leading the marketing of a large business, then your content budget is not just there to drive page views and impressions. Really, your content budget should be driving traffic and conversions. And if these AI platforms aren't citing your brand in the sort of decision-making queries where [music] your prospects are choosing what to buy, you're losing visibility at the most strategic part of the buyer journey. And that's what we're going to solve today. Okay. Okay. So, why do we need to identify which topics to cover in order to appear in AI search? Well, this is why. This study looked at the overlap between brands that had good visibility in traditional search and brands that had good visibility in chat GBT. Now, if AI search optimization was just SEO, you would expect the crossover to be very close to 100%. I.e., if you ranked well in traditional search, you'd be getting featured a lot in chat GPT. But that actually wasn't the case. This study found that the overlap was between 61 and 62%. So what does this mean? Well, just because you're doing well in the old world doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to be doing well in the new world. But there's also an opportunity here. If you're not doing so well in the old world, well, that doesn't necessarily stop you from doing well in this new world of AI search. Now, there are plenty of examples of brands that are doing really well across both. Let's take a look at one. Um, so I've just searched Google for email marketing and we can see the top ranking website in the organic section is this Mailchimp article, email marketing, everything that you need to know. It's a good what we call a pillar piece of content, a really comprehensive guide. And the good news for Mailchimp is it's also being picked up as the first link in the AI overview and it's being cited at the start of the AI overview as well. So this piece of content is really dominated and it's been really well structured for AI search. And if you search on Perplexity, another AI tool, what is email marketing? You'll see again this Mailchimp article being cited as a source. But then there are other times where websites that are ranking nicely in traditional search, don't show up so much. Here's one. What are the best business accounts in the UK? Now, money supermarket, which is a comparison site, so makes its money sending referral traffics to different banks, is doing super well in traditional search, top of Google for this term, which would have been generating it vast amounts of money every month. But in AI overviews, it's nowhere to be seen. And again, going over to Plexity, Money Supermarket just isn't here. So, what's going on in these cases? Well, sometimes it's because the AI tools don't actually recommend a certain type of website for that query. We're going to look at an example of that in just a minute. But a lot of the time it's because the content that has been written, whilst it might be structured well for traditional search, actually it doesn't really answer all of the subqueries that the AI search tools really want answered. If you have a look at what's going on under the hood with these AI tools, they're often doing something like this. What are the best bank accounts in the UK is the question I answered. But look at how Perplexity is running lots of different background searches. It's then piecing together answers from all of these and combining them to give me a really comprehensive response. So, if your content isn't ticking all of those boxes and being shown for what we call those query fan out searches, i.e., imagine there's a single search and then it fans out into lots of sub searches. If you're not answering all of those topics and you don't have visibility for those, you might be missing out on this crucial AI search visibility. So, here's what you need to do about it. And what we're going to do is use a live example. We're going to pretend that we are a brand that does skinincare. And in particular, we've been tasked with increasing sales of our skin cleanser products. And what we're going to do now is figure out what content topics we need to be covering in our website's content and the subtopics that we need to be ticking off in our articles. Now, there's two ways of doing this. There's the manual way and there's the fast way. We're going to go through the manual way first because there's some important distinctions here and it allows us to just observe the landscape and then I'm going to show you the fast way. So the manual way is to just start throwing different prompts into Google. Now when I say throwing different prompts, what you really want to do is start from the product or service that you want to sell. In our case, skin cleansers. We're then going to work out what the questions are that people would ask. We don't just want to answer every single question that someone's going to ask like what is skin? What we want to do is think about the topics and the questions that are reasonably close to generating a purchase. So, for example, good skin cleanser might be one of them. If someone's looking for good skin cleanser, they're probably not just browsing cuz they're bored. Oh, they might be bored, but they're probably browsing because they're looking for a good skin cleanser to buy. So, we just put this into Google as an example and observe what sort of sites are showing up. Now, remember, we're a skincare brand. So, in particular, I'm interested to see if any other skincare brands are showing up in this AI overview section. Now in this case I've got Amazon, I've got YouTube, I've got media sites, British Vogue, Marary Cla, CNN, then we've got more YouTube, then we've got Spar Index, then we've got a beauty content site. So actually none of my competitors are showing up in this AI overviews, which could be an indication that Google actually doesn't want to site beauty brands own websites here. Instead, wants to look at third-party sites. Now, if that's the case, it might not matter how good my content is. I just might not be the type of content that Google wants to show in this response. Here's another example of exactly that thing at play. Let's say that I want to target acne prone skin for my skin cleansers. What are the best skin cleansers for acne? Again, it's mostly content sites. It's third party websites. It's the Guardian. There is a pharmacy. There is Boots. So, those are e-commerce stores, but they're not the brands themselves. We've got media site, media site, media site, media site, media site, medical media site, medical media site. Those are the types of websites that Google is citing. Now, it might be that if we produce some really good content on this topic, we can get it cited here. But it might just be actually that if we want our product to be recommended here, what we need to do instead is do some amazing digital PR to get featured in these articles. And we've covered how to do this in other videos, so I'm not going to cover that in loads of detail now. But contrast this search results with this one here, best skincare routines for sensitive skin. Now, in this search, Google actually doesn't seem to have any opposition to showing skincare brands own websites. We've got Caravee here, which is a skincare brand and might be one of our competitors. We've got Caravee um ranked top in the AI overviews and again here and again here. So, this would be a topic that we would want to cover on our website because we can see that Google is happy to site brands content. Now, if we're doing things the manual way, the next step is to go and have a look at this content and see what its structure is like. Remember that we're looking for the subtopics that these articles are answering. So, we've just searched for skin, and this is the article that has shown up. Interestingly, that is not the headline for this article. So, what's most likely happened is Google has broken that query down into sub queries and run those in the background. Okay, that's why we're getting different results in the AI mode to what we're getting in organic search. So, this is an article on how to manage sensitive skin in different skin types. Then, we've got a bunch of subtopics here. What is sensitive skin? What causes sensitive skin? How to manage sensitive skin? Dry sensitive skin. This is the paragraph that has been cited in Google's AI mode. Oily sensitive skin, etc., etc. So, you can see how they've broken this topic down into chunks and given the detailed answers in this page. If you're doing this the manual way, you will want to do this across loads of different searches for each of your core products and services. Now, because the AI responses aren't the same every time, you'll also want to do this multiple times. And you'll want to keep track of the sites that are ranking well and being cited consistently. Now, if that sounds a bit of a faf, it is. There's no way around it. Luckily, there are two faster ways of doing this. The absolute fastest way is to have the team at Exposure Ninja do this for you. This is something that we do for our clients as part of an AI search visibility audit. During this audit, we'll analyze your visibility compared to your competitors across all of the important topics that are strategically relevant to the products and services that you're selling. We're focused on what can we do to get you more visibility when somebody is about to buy. What are the queries that they're asking these AI tools just before they buy? and how can we make sure that those AI tools are recommending your brand. This is one of the fastest growing areas of digital marketing as more and more businesses are realizing that AI overviews and chat GBT can drive the sort of quality of traffic that we've never seen before because those people are so well informed. They're so ready to purchase [music] because they've been recommended your brand over and over and over during those conversations. This is something that we do for our clients. If you're interested in us doing this for you, then you can request this AI search visibility audit. Just contact us through the website at exposurinja.com. The next fastest way of doing this is to do it yourself and track your results, but use a tool like Semrush. And Semrush has kindly given us access to their AI visibility toolkit for this video. So, let's take a look at how the process works in there. Now, we're going to stick with our beauty brand example. We're going to need a website to analyze. So today we're going to be analyzing dove.com. So when you stick dove.com into Samrush's AI visibility overview, you get this screen. This shows us Dove's overall visibility in AI search. And it looks pretty good. It's 76 out of 100. And you can see their relative visibility in each of these different AI tools. Notice that the AI overview visibility has improved significantly. That's the orange line here because AI overviews are being used a lot more in Google. Now, whilst this result might look pretty good, 76 out of 100 is not too bad. One of the main reasons for that is because Dove has such good brand visibility that there are so many people searching for Dove products that they're of course visible for those. But what we're really most interested in this is how we do this topic research, how we identify the topics that we need to be covering in our website's content in [music] order to stand out and get recommended. So, that's down here in this section. Now, we've got a few different tabs along here. The ones that we're going to be focusing on today are these first two. Your performing topics is the topics and individual prompts that your website is already being cited in. Let's look at some examples. So we can see all of these Dove branded topics. So if we expand these, we can see the individual prompts. So somebody has searched Google here for Dove cherry body wash. And we can see the full response and you can see that Dove is being linked to in the answer. So all of the topics in this section are the ones that we are already being cited for. We're already having our website linked in the results. And the visibility score is the percentage [music] that we are being seen in those answers. We can see the number of mentions across the prompts in this section. And the AI volume, this is how many times this phrase is being searched per month. So some of these Dove related ones are pretty low, but others are reasonably healthy. Dove exfoliating body products. That whole section has around 3,100 searches per month. But we're not really interested in the stuff that we're doing well in. We're interested in the opportunities for growth. And that's over here in the topic opportunities section. In this section, you're comparing your visibility to your competitors. And Semrush is pulling all of the topics and prompts that your competitors are visible, but you are not. So, this is the big growth opportunity. Now, you choose your competitors here. um you just click on them and Samrush will show you some alternative competitors that are showing up for a lot of the searches that you're showing for. Some of these aren't relevant, but in this case, Nivea is. So, we're going to add Nivea, click analyze, and these are the results that we get. This is a massive shortcut because not only is it showing you thousands and thousands of prompts. We've got almost 15,000 prompts here, but rather than having to go through all of them individually to work out which ones are relevant, it's grouping them into topics. Now, we still got almost 3,000 topics here to cover in our content. So, we're going to need to prioritize these a bit, but imagine the manual time that would have taken to get to this stage. It's just unfathomable. So, it's a really powerful tool. Now, remember, we are focused on our cleanser product today. So, we're going to have a look for cleanser topics. And here is a good one. If we expand this, we can see the different cleanser type prompts where they've been searched. So, in this case, all on Google. And we can view the full responses if we want. And by the way, if you're in beauty, we're about to release an AI visibility report for beauty brands. So head over to our website. There'll be a link in the description somewhere if you want to go and sign up for the email list to make sure that you receive that. So you're going to want to spend a bit of time going through these topics and prompts to work out which ones are going to be the top priority for you. If you need to trim them down, I would suggest four filters to apply. The first filter is obviously anything that just really isn't relevant. So you're normally going to notice something that's your competitors are have visibility for which just totally isn't relevant for you at all. An example for Dove would be Caravee skincare products. Dove is a competitor brand. So really having visibility for this isn't important. They could do some comparison content like Caravee versus Dove, but it's not really their style. So we're just going to ignore that stuff completely. And by the way, if you want to take Samrush's AI visibility toolkit for a spin, you can do so at exposure.ninja/ ninja slai-toolkit. That's exposure.ninja/ai-toolkit. The next filter is commercial intent. For example, in this section, we'd seen a prompt along the lines of what does face cleanser mean. That might not be a priority because that doesn't imply that someone's about to buy a product if they don't even know what it means. Whereas something like good face cleanser for dry skin, again, that's the sort of thing that isn't searched by someone who's just having a laugh. they're probably looking to buy a product. Now, remember how previously we saw that Google didn't necessarily want to show branded website results for some of these prompts. Well, with Semrush's AI visibility overview in this competitor section, we don't necessarily have that problem because by definition, these are the prompts that our competitors websites are being linked to. So, we know that Google is happy to show branded websites as the citations in these prompts. But if you want to satisfy yourself, you can always go over to Google and check to make sure that branded sites are showing up as we see they are here. Now, of course, don't forget that if you want to get featured in some of these media type sites, that's a really good idea as well. We covered that in other videos all about digital PR. The final filter is to look at whether you already have existing content which could be tweaked in order to appear for some of these terms. In Dove's case, they've actually got a pretty decentsized content section on their website. The trouble is it's just an absolute mess if I'm going to be honest. I mean, there is sort of a structure to it. We've got skin cleansing topics here. We've got hair care topics here. But watch this. I'm going to click on the skin cleansing articles section and I'm going to end up in a washing and bathing tips and advice section. And there's not really any structure to these. It's just a whole bunch of mishmash topics all slammed together in this category. This isn't the type of thing that these AI tools love to site. So what they much prefer is what we call a pillar content structure based around clusters. So imagine that you want to cover skin care where you might have a cluster over here which is seasonal skincare topics and then coming from this cluster there will be winter skincare and spring skincare tips and autumn and summer skincare tips and each of these will have their own cluster. So, uh, moisturizers for winter skin, how to deal with dry skin in winter, you know, all of those different subtopics. And by taking that approach, you have a much more strategic plan for your content. You're much more aware of any gaps and how to fill them rather than this kind of scatter gun. What should we write about today? So, well, let's write about skin microbiome. You might find that you already have content about some of these target topics, but it just doesn't seem to be doing well. And Dove has exactly this problem. So, if we search the Dove site for skin cleanser topics, we've got this one here. But in Dove's case, they've got this article, which is pretty thin. I mean, it's certainly not the type of high authority stuff that you'd expect to see ranking. It also looks like it's been duplicated across lots of different versions of their website, which I think has led to an absolute decimation of their organic search visibility. So, that's how to find the best topics to write for AI search visibility. If you want help with this, of course, don't forget that you can contact the team at Exposion Ninja through our website at exposurinja.com. And if you're now ready to create your content and you want tips on how to create it in a way that these AI tools love to site, then check out this video which explains exactly how to do that. Don't forget to subscribe. I'll see you next time.