The New SEO Playbook for AI Search (Top GEO Ranking Factors)

Search has finally evolved and now everyone wants to rank in AI search. But

how? Our brilliant team at HRF studied 75,000 brands and 25 million AI overviews and found five key factors that give you the best chance of ranking

in AI search with GEO. And it all starts with branded mentions. Large language

models like chatbt and Google learn by reading the web. And every time your brand name appears on a credible site, that becomes another training example.

And the more often an LLM sees your brand connected to a specific topic, the more confidently it associates your name with that subject when generating answers. It's like when you hear Red

answers. It's like when you hear Red Bull, you think extreme sports. Or when

you hear Tesla, you think electric cars.

Or when you think of Hrefs, you think of Sam O, the charismatic SEO beast.

Branded mentions are so important that they have the strongest correlation with visibility in Google's AI overviews.

higher than back links, referring domains, and domain rating. But how do we know which pages or sites to get mentioned on? According to our research,

mentioned on? According to our research, get mentioned on highly linked to pages if you want to rank in Google AI overviews and high traffic pages if you want more visibility in chat GPT and

perplexity. To find pages and websites

perplexity. To find pages and websites worth getting mentioned on, go to HF's brand radar and enter your brand, competitors, brands, niche, and run the search. Then hit the cited domains

search. Then hit the cited domains report where you'll see the top websites, the number of AI responses, and the exact number of times each brand is getting mentioned and how they're being mentioned. From here, you can join

being mentioned. From here, you can join the Reddit threads AI is pulling from.

Reach out to YouTubers for future reviews or contact publishers for potential PR campaigns. Basically, you

want your brand to appear literally everywhere online, ideally in a positive and topically relevant way. And that's

because of the second key factor for ranking an AI search. Longtail queries.

In traditional SEO, targeting longtail keywords was mostly about coverage. The

more queries you rank for, the more ways there are for searchers to find you. But

in AI search, longtail queries play a different role. AI assistants like Chat

different role. AI assistants like Chat GPT may actually use them to decide who to recommend. And it's because of how AI

to recommend. And it's because of how AI assistants work. When someone enters a

assistants work. When someone enters a prompt like, "Plan me a 5-day trip to Japan in November," the AI assistant fans it out into dozens of smaller longtail subqueries. They then pull

longtail subqueries. They then pull information from multiple sources across the web and combine it into one complete answer. So, if your content ranks for

answer. So, if your content ranks for those niche specific queries, your brand has a much better chance of being included in the AI's final response. And

our data backs that up, showing that Google's AI overviews are way more likely to appear on longer niche queries. So from a practical standpoint,

queries. So from a practical standpoint, you should a create content that answers more complex specific questions and b content clusters that deeply cover the

full depth of a topic. But here's the twist. Even if you've nailed all of

twist. Even if you've nailed all of this, it might not matter. Because if

your content isn't structured the way AI assistants process information, you may not get as many AI search mentions as you should be getting. One way Google AI reads content is by using a tree walking

algorithm, meaning it follows the exact semantic HTML structure of a web page from top to bottom. And this makes well- formatted and structured content easier

for it to process. But it's not just about using heading tags and bulleted lists. It's about how your information

lists. It's about how your information flows. Your content should be clear,

flows. Your content should be clear, organized, and easy to follow. And this

matters because when Google or Chat GPT read your page, they don't process it all at once. They chunk your content into smaller pieces, almost like reading

it paragraph by paragraph, and then they decide which parts are most useful to keep. So, if your juiciest points are

keep. So, if your juiciest points are buried deep down or mixed into long, messy sections, it makes it less efficient for AI to process your content, which may have a role in

rankings. Now, that doesn't mean you

rankings. Now, that doesn't mean you should start writing in short, choppy blurbs like an FAQ or make every paragraph its own idea. Instead, focus

on grouping related thoughts together and keeping each section focused on a single takeaway. Think of it like giving

single takeaway. Think of it like giving AI a clear outline where each part should make sense on its own but still naturally connect to the next. Now, even

if your content is perfectly written and structured, there's another key factor that can put you in or completely knock you out of AI results. And our data shows that this key factor is all about

freshness. Our study of 17 million

freshness. Our study of 17 million citations across seven AI search platforms found that AI assistants strongly prefer newer information. In

fact, content cited by AI is 25.7% fresher than the content that shows up in regular Google results. And Chat GPT and Perplexity go even further. They

tend to list citations from newest to oldest. That happens because most

oldest. That happens because most assistants use something called rag. RAG

stands for retrieval, augment, and generation, which is the part of an AI system that goes out and looks things up. If a model already knows the answer

up. If a model already knows the answer from its training data, it doesn't need to search again. Just like you and I don't need to search for directions to places we visit all the time. But if the

topic is new or evolving, Rag steps in and fetches the latest information from the web to fill in the gaps. That's why

freshness isn't just a ranking signal anymore. It's a retrieval signal in this

anymore. It's a retrieval signal in this AI era. And here's proof that freshness

AI era. And here's proof that freshness can boost your AI rankings. In April

this year, HubSpot updated their small business ideas article and soon saw a massive spike to their organic traffic.

No surprises there, but their AI mentions to that page also spiked at the exact same time, generating over,00 new mentions according to HR brand radar. So

something you can do is to take note of pages that could benefit from regular updates and add them to your regular refresh cycle. Update facts, new quotes

refresh cycle. Update facts, new quotes or stats, remove things that have become irrelevant, and redate the post when it's meaningful. And that one small

it's meaningful. And that one small update could be the difference in getting mentioned across AI platforms. By the way, I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but before you do anything, make sure your site can

actually be crawled by AI bots. Kind of

sounds silly, but in our study of 140 million websites, about 5.9% were blocking OpenAI's GPT bot alone. So,

take two seconds to go to yourdommain.com/roots.txt

yourdommain.com/roots.txt and make sure you're not accidentally blocking the very systems you're trying to rank in. And that brings us to our final, easiest, and perhaps most

important key factor, and it's all about diversifying your strategies. Normally,

when I talk about diversifying your traffic or marketing strategy, it's because over reliance on a single channel can wipe a business out overnight, which we've seen happen time and time again. But that's not the

reason you should diversify in the context of AI. In our data set, we compared the top 50 most mentioned domains in Google AI overviews, chat

GBT, and Perplexity. And get this, only seven of those domains appeared on all three lists. That means that 86% of

three lists. That means that 86% of sources are unique to each assistant.

Google AI overviews leans heavily on YouTube, Reddit, and Quora. Chat GPT

prefers publishers and news outlets like Reuters and the Associated Press. And

Perplexity tends to site niche or regional sites like health, finance, and localized blogs. So, even if you

localized blogs. So, even if you dominate one of these ecosystems, that doesn't mean that you're guaranteed to appear in the others. Hence,

diversification is a must. To find the pages you need to optimize for each AI platform, go to HF's brand radar and add your brand, a few of your competitors, a niche, and run the search. Hover over

your brand under the AI platform you want to investigate, and hit others only. Finally, go to the cited pages

only. Finally, go to the cited pages report to see all of the web pages that are being recommended in your AI platform of choice where your competitors are mentioned, but you're not. Then, go and reach out to these

not. Then, go and reach out to these websites to try and get your brand mentioned alongside your competitors.

And when you're done with that AI platform, hit the drop down, choose the next AI platform you want to be mentioned on, and rinse and repeat. Now,

a lot of this advice might sound familiar because doing GEO or AEO or LMO is still just SEO. The difference is that you got to think broader. It's not

just about content and links anymore.

It's about building a brand and showing up everywhere your audience already is.

But here's the truth. No one's really saying out loud. No one actually knows how to definitively optimize for AI search yet. It's still too early. For

search yet. It's still too early. For

now, all we have is the data we've analyzed. And now we need more

analyzed. And now we need more practitioners to go out there, test, and share the results. And one of those practitioners

is already testing so we can build that step-by-step playbook for you to follow.

So, make sure to subscribe for updates, and I'll see you in the next video.