The answer engines need to learn about your brand from somewhere, but it’s not always your website, so updating FAQs alone won’t move the needle in AI search.
The advice about adding to your FAQ section or creating FAQs is everywhere.
- Hubspot tells its followers to create FAQs to perform better in AEO.
- Microsoft’s Bing Blog tells users to add FAQs as part of their content recommendations.
- Tools like Writesonic and AirOps will add an FAQ to every page if you let them.
But a study of over 158,000 AI-generated answers and 468,000 citations found no correlation between earning a citation and a recommendation in the AI answer and an FAQ on the first-party website.
FAQs might make it easier for the AI to formulate its answer, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to use the FAQ you created when generating its response to a given question.
So, what is the disconnect?
AI engines often don’t use just your website to find out information about your company. This is especially true if the question has to do with comparison, product features, use cases and ideal customers.
Instead of just running through your feature list on your website, they are scanning all sorts of places on the web to make sure your brand belongs in the answer at all.
The parametric layer
The AI engines keep a repository of information about your brand and your place in the market. This is essentially their knowledge of what you offer, your pricing, your reputation, how strong of a brand they perceive you to be. This parametric layer is tested against live search for the answer engines to determine if anyone needs to be added to or taken out of their recommendation set.
FAQs come into play in the parametric layer because they give the answer engine more insight into your brand and the story they should tell about it.
However, they don’t do much in terms of telling the AI engines if you are a strong enough brand to recommend.
For that to occur, your brand needs to be talked about all over the web, particularly next to your competitors.
The importance of third-party mentions
Having a fully fleshed out website is like having a great pamphlet about your product. If you can get someone to read it, then they learn all about you.
But how do they hear about you in the first place?
Someone recommended you, or they saw something about your brand somewhere. Something led them to you. Think about brand mentions in this way. They are like people talking about your brand, what you do and what you offer all over the internet.
This internet context and popularity is crucial for the answer engines. Of course, they can and do read websites to find out about what you offer. But to ensure they are truly answering the question, they cross-reference this information with other sources all over the web.
The sources they use to do this are called citations. The citations then inform the answer, leading to your brand getting recommended to consumers.
So how do you become the source? You get more brand mentions all over the web, and for this to make an impact, there can’t just be one or two. You’ll need to do this at scale to be competitive in your category.
What’s next
You should certainly answer the frequently asked questions about your company, product or service on your website.
What I am saying is you don’t need to put them in neat little FAQ sections. Create in-depth product pages and technical guides, make comparison charts, feature lists with explanations of various features, make sure your pricing is accurate and create content for your site that clearly answers the questions you think your customers are asking.
Also, make sure you integrate a third-party brand mention strategy, where you are gaining enough mentions of your products and services and how they work all over the web, so the AI engines have enough information about you to recommend you to customers.
Written by Sarah GilbertBrand placements. AI visibility. A clearer way to see the whole picture.