Forget SEO: Why AI Engine Optimization Might Be The Future

According to the founder, longtime investor and industry analyst Jeremiah OuyangBill Gates’ vision personal artificial intelligence coming.

He told VentureBeat in an interview that this future would disrupt SEO and e-commerce and require marketers and creators to move beyond traditional SEO to improve on AI. It means planning for disruption and developing new strategies now.

“The advertising model as we know it – getting people to go to your website and see it – is going to break down… I don’t see how that will last,” he said.

Instead, AI agents and foundational models will collect advertising money while advertisers pay to include their messages in the responses that are generated.

“For example, we may see artificial intelligence ‘brawls’, or advertisements, appear next to generated content,” he said. He explained that marketers and innovators need to think about how they will be discovered outside the search engine, within AI itself.

Moving from influencing search engines to agents of artificial intelligence

Last week, OpenAI Launched Its own web crawler to fetch real-time information from the web. But soon, web crawling may not be efficient enough as more and more consumers stay on GPT tools for information — rather than going to marketing or news sites, Ouyang predicts.

“The datagrams are very diverse,” he said.

So how will chatbots get their data — and what does that mean for businesses that want customers to find them online?

With consumers increasingly using automated tools to conduct marketing.”respressionMarketers and innovators need to think about something that many might think is counterintuitive: that you really want to, not NeedLLMs to train on your data.

“If I were a journalist, I would like all MBAs to digest my articles,” he explained, adding that more and more chatbots include citations, including Bing, You.com, and Perplexity. “So when people search for that information, I show first – it’s the same SEO strategy,” he said, warning that this wouldn’t apply to gated content, which uses a different business model.

Marketers have crashed again and again

Sound strange? Well, keep in mind that marketers have been disrupted time and time again over the past two decades, Ouyang said. Since the advent of Google Search, for example, they’ve worked to influence influencers to boost SEO – including journalists, financial analysts, industry analysts, media relations and government. Over the past 10 years, they have added content creators and other influencers to the mix.

Now, Ouyang explained, AI is another influencer marketers who have to meet their needs by feeding them information.

“This means that you may need to create a private API that can be modified by the underlying templates,” he said, adding that he could see companies de-centralizing the nature of their websites and instead offering an API. “We may find that the most effective way to influence an independent agent is to build an independent agent.”

The future of personal AI is Bill Gates’ MO

in Interview with Bill Gates In May during an event organized by Goldman Sachs and SV Angel on AI, Bill Gates said that the first company to develop a personal SEO optimization agent would have an “edge over competitors”.

According to Ouyang, that’s why Gates – along with Nvidia, Microsoft, Reid Hoffman and Eric Schmidt – has invested in Inflection AI as part of an amazing project. A funding round of $1.3 billion in June.

In the company may Launched byewhich stands for “individual intelligence” and was meant to be “sympathetic, helpful, and safe” — that is, act more personal and colloquial than OpenAI’s GPT-4, Microsoft’s Bing, or Google’s Bard, while not veering into the terrifying Extremely.

During a panel discussion at the Bloomberg Technology Summit, Reid Hoffman, CEO of Inflection, said that the Pi chatbot takes a more personal and empathetic approach compared to ChatGPT. “IQ is not the only thing that matters here,” he said. “EQ is also important.”

In June, Inflection also announced that it would release a new large language model (LLM) for powering the Pi, called flexion-1which it said is superior to OpenAI’s GPT-3.5.

Ouyang says he envisions a future where each brand has an independent agent who interacts with buyer-side agents.

“My agents talk to your agent and negotiate the car I want, the clothes I want, the restaurants I eat, and even pick out the cuisine – and maybe the menu with my dietary needs on budget,” he explained. “This is the future.”

How does AI engine optimization differ from SEO?

Of course, a chatbot like Pai is still far from the kind of personal AI agent that Bill Gates – and Ouyang – imagine. And full disclosure: Ouyang says he plans to invest in Inflection AI.

But so far, AI-based chatbots are already making recommendations, and Ouyang said it’s becoming clear that if marketers, publishers, and creators want to succeed (at least those who rely on search engine optimization), they’ll need to start catering to AI’s wants and needs. Agents – that is, by optimizing the AI ​​engine.

Unlike SEO, AI engine optimization is not about waiting for a crawler to come to your website. He explained that marketers now will likely want two things. The first is to create an API that feeds information to the underlying models in real time.

“This standard API protocol hasn’t emerged yet for how to do this, which is why OpenAI’s API just crawls, for example,” he said. But ultimately he predicted that users would ask OpenAI questions before asking them to Google search — “so you need that real-time feed.”

Second, marketers will want to use the same company API with all of its product information and use it to train its AI that will interact with consumers and buyers, whether that be on a website or an app. “It will also interact with the buyer-side agents that are beginning to emerge,” he said.

Brands are already exploring the possibilities

Ouyang said that at the recent AI conference in Las Vegas, there were 2,000 corporate and government leaders in the room. He insisted that they are all moving very quickly to explore the possibilities when it comes to building their own Masters which in the future can interact with clients and their AI agents.

He predicted that the future will surpass BloombergGPT’s Einstein GPT — Soon, Walmart or Macy’s might get their own MBA, or even… The New York Times.

“Many of these companies are preparing,” he said.

To sum up, Ouyang said bluntly recently blog postis as follows: “As we stand on the precipice of this seismic shift, marketers’ call to action is clear: We must equip ourselves not only to influence human decision-making but also to shape AI behaviors.”