How To Dominate AI Search Results in 2026 (Complete Strategy)

Picture this. You open up Chat GPT and you ask it who are the best companies in my space. Chat goes off, does its thing, comes back with some fantastic recommendations explaining exactly why customers think each one is great and it makes a suggestion. Trouble is, none of them are your business. For many marketers watching this, this hypothetical situation isn't so hypothetical. It's happening right now. Your potential customers are using AI tools like chat GBT to find what to buy. But most marketers have no idea how to get their brand in this conversation, let alone be the one that comes out on top. That changes today. At Exposure Ninja, we've helped brands around the world get tools like AI overviews, chat GBT, Clawude Perplexity to recommend their brands, products, and services. Our clients see real traffic and sales from this. So, in this video, we're going to build your AI search optimization strategy together. There are five steps. So, let's go. Okay, step one, an audit. We need to begin by finding out what AI is currently saying about your brand and how often you're being recommended. Well, there's a rookie way of doing this, which is to just head over to chat GBT, AI overviews, AI mode, perplexity, claude, and just start putting in some prompts and seeing how often your brand and your website is being recommended and cited in the responses. Thankfully, there's also a better way of doing this, which is to use a tool like profound, which helps aggregate all of this information and measure it over time. For example, we're looking at Virgin Active here, and we can see their visibility score against competitors. Eek. We can see which topics they're being recommended for a lot. Eek. Eek. And even what the different AI tools think about them. Eek. But tools like Profound give you much more information and a much bigger picture view about how these AI tools are actually recommending you. You can even see how often each different AI tool is recommending you versus recommending competitors. So, it's a much more accurate way of auditing your overall visibility and getting a really clear idea of, okay, this is where we're starting from. All right, so once you've done this, you're probably feeling pretty bad about your overall visibility. So, let's talk about how to actually improve this. Well, step two is SEO foundations. Now, there is a bit of a rumor out there that AI search optimization is just SEO. All you need to do is just do good SEO, hope for the best, and chat is going to recommend you to everyone. We strongly disagree with this, but having good SEO in place is a really good foundation for good AI search visibility. You might not be using a regular search engine as much these days, but do you know who is AI tools like ChatgBT? They're often running numerous web searches in parallel in the background, and they can scan through dozens or even sometimes hundreds of websites to come up with an answer. And if you want your brand to be recommended in that response, it helps if you're one of the cited websites that were found during the research. Of course, AI can't site what it can't crawl. So, you still need solid technical SEO, schema, structured data, fast load times, internal links. Of course, these tools are crucial for traditional SEO, but they now help AI tools to find which products and brands to recommend, not just Google. And of course, because web ranking still matters, even if it's the AI tools using those web search engines, links are still important because links often define how visible you are in traditional search. We've got some recent videos all about SEO, so I'm not going to go into loads of detail about the nitty-gritty of traditional search engine optimization. We also have this book, which is one of the UK's bestselling titles on SEO. You can get it from Amazon if you like. 942 reviews. Come on. And by the way, if you want some help with your digital marketing, the team here at Exposure Ninja can give you a hand. We specialize in AI search optimization and we help our clients get visibility across the internet, including through AI tools like ChatGBT. You can request a free digital marketing review from the team. Just go to exposurinja.com/re. They'll take a look at your existing visibility and they'll map you out a prioritized action plan that you can follow over the next 6 to 12 months to generate more leads and sales online, including from tools like chat GBT. This service is completely free, but not everybody is eligible. So, you do need to apply for it at exposurinja.com/re. Okay, so far you've audited your visibility and you've got a plan for traditional SEO. So, what do you need to do now to make sure you're as visible as possible in these AI tools? Well, that leads us on to step three, which is optimizing your content for AI. AI tools love content that is well ststructured, expert-led, and complete. Anytime you can demonstrate the experience that's inside your business, [music] that's going to help you with AI. If you're just providing generic information, AI doesn't need you for that because it can produce that stuff itself. But when you're talking about personal firsthand experience, particular case studies or examples or stories that you've worked on, that's where the AI really leans on your expertise and wants to site you as a source. When we're designing content strategies for clients, we reverse engineer what's known as a query fanout approach. What does that mean? Well, when an AI tool goes and runs some background web search to provide a response for a user, it will often ask lots of variation queries. So, it's running all of these different background searches and it's compiling all of this information into an answer. So, what we need to do when we're structuring our content is look at the types of background searches that it's running and make sure we've got content that targets each of these. That gives us a better opportunity having our content featured in multiple answers. Meaning when the AI tool is working out which information to amalgamate into its response, we've got multiple horses in that race. Now, the challenge is that different AI tools like to site different types of content. Both content from different types of websites, but also different formats of content as well. Again, this is where a tool like Profound can be really useful because it allows you to see which types of content are being cited across a wide range of queries for each different AI tool and that allows you to observe what types of content are most successful. Let's do an example. So, here we are on Profound. We're looking at Black Rockck, which is an asset management business. If we head over to citations and we scroll down, we will see the top websites that are being cited in responses which are relevant to this business. For example, we can see Nerd Wallet, Bankrate, Investopedia, and Fool.com are the most popular websites to be cited in AI responses. That means if we want to get our brand recommended, we need to be seen on those websites. But we can also see the types of content that these AI tools like to site because we can then produce that content ourselves. Let's scroll down a bit and we'll see the top citation pages. Now, this gives us a list of the pages, not just the websites, which are most frequently cited in AI responses. We can then go to each of these and have a look at the type of content that is already being picked up by these AI tools. In this particular case, what you'll notice is that the articles are really well researched. They're really detailed and they're very specific about who has written them and the source of this information. They also include plenty of information about the methodology used to compile these because in this space which is financial, these AI tools want to site the most trusted and reliable sources. As we said before, each AI tool has a slightly different preference of the type of content it likes to recommend. So if you wanted to improve your visibility in chat GBT for example, you would click only on chat GBT and then that's going to show you the top pages cited just in chat GBT and that'll allow you to get a bit of a feel for ChatGBT's favorite types of content. What you'll notice from this is that ChatGBT is more happy to draw from a brand's own website when it's compiling an answer, whereas a tool like Perplexity is much more likely to only trust third-party websites. So, what do we do in this case? Well, if we were marketing Black Rockck, we'd know [music] that we'd have to put some really detailed guide together if we wanted to get our content cited as a source for these types of queries. We know the sort of format that we're going to have to use because we can see that the same format is basically being repeated across the different sites. We can see the elements that that content is going to have to include. But maybe you find something like this where actually none of the top websites being cited were a brand's own website. All of these are third-party websites. What do you do then? Well, that leads us to step four, which is to become ubiquitous. You need to make sure that your brand is being seen across the internet, but particularly on the types of websites that are being cited in AI responses. Whereas with traditional search, the game was often about getting your website ranked in the search results so that someone clicked on you and then proceeded to do business with you, with AI search optimization, it's increasingly about getting your brand mentioned on the types of websites that are influencing the AI tools to make their recommendations. We do this at Exposure Ninja through digital PR, reaching out to the types of publications that are frequently being cited. In Black Rockck's case, for example, all of these articles are basically the best financial advisor or variations of what we would do is go through each of these, look at the writer or journalist that is responsible for them and then reach out to them because they'll be updating these articles every so often and we can see if we can be included in the next version of that. But it's not just a case of being featured for the sake of being featured. You also need to be really clear about what you want to be known for. How I described this recently on a training session with an international brand was imagine that your brand is known for a few particular concepts. So we worked with skincare brand the ordinary to help them improve their visibility in AI search and drive more traffic and sales through their website. They have a great reputation for being a good value skincare brand that is scientifically backed by relentlessly talking about the ordinary as a great value skincare brand across the internet. everywhere the ordinary is talked about. You can really influence the AI tool so that when they hear good value skincare brand they go ah the ordinary. And that's why when you go on perplexity and you ask what's the best good value skincare brand it says the ordinary. That's why when you go on AI mode and you ask what's the best value skincare brand it says the ordinary and tries to sell you some of their products. To do this of course you have to be really clear about the different concepts that you want your brand to be attached to. For the ordinary, it's good value, skincare brands, scientifically backed. The more you can reestablish that every time the brand is being talked about in reviews, in product features, in press releases, the more you cement those concepts together in the large language models. Now, a lot of brands aren't really clear about the concepts that they want to be associated with. So, one of the things that we do when we start working with a client on a project like this is identify with them what are the concepts that we really want to be known for and how can we communicate that consistently through every piece of content that's produced and every piece of outreach that we do. And I think this is part of the reason why AI is such an amazing opportunity for so many businesses because the products and businesses that AI tools recommend aren't always the biggest. They're the ones that are most clearly tied to defined concepts that match the searcher's query. And by the way, going back to our partners, Profound, they have a sentiment analysis section in their dashboard, which allows you to see what sentiment is like across these different AI tools. Here we're looking at Four Seasons, the hotel chain. We can see that overall they've got a positive sentiment, but we can see the reasons for any negative sentiment online. And typically, it's because maybe a price that has been sold as being all-inclusive actually isn't all-inclusive. Now, if you're four seasons, this is fantastic news because you can tighten up this feature. It's [music] basically the same thing coming up over and over again. Tighten up this feature. Tighten up how this stuff is being talked about on the website. Clear up this ambiguity and you could really remove some of that negative sentiment in your offering. Step number five is paid visibility. At the moment, everything we've spoken about is about getting these tools to organically recommend you. But we are moving into an era where adverts start to appear and influence AI search results. We've already seen Google testing ads inside AI overviews and AI mode and they're blending them with organic recommendations. This means that your Google ad strategy needs to feed AI friendly signals. So, making sure that you're using Pmax and you've got dynamic search ads because the queries that people use in AI tools are generally much longer tail. So, you're going to have to get used to having less control over the queries that you're advertising against. All of this makes the tracking and the data feedback more important than ever. These ad platforms need to see exactly what's happening on your website and what good conversions look like so that they can refine and tune their targeting. So, there you have it. Five steps to your AI search optimization strategy. As you can see, if you're still thinking of search strategy is just ranking on Google. Unfortunately, you may be falling behind. The next generation of search is recommendationbased and AI tools like ChatGBT are the gatekeeper. And if you satisfy the gatekeeper, you've got a great chance of making the sale. Thank you to Profound for sponsoring this video. And you can try Profound's tool out for yourself at tryprofound.com. Until next time, see you