With the advent of Ai research, SEO is now more than optimising a site such that the machines can collect all the words and pictures.
Most readers who’ve had fun with the “Deep Research” tools that I mentioned last week will, I’m guessing, have been initially impressed with the results, but may well have found errors and omissions. That’s all part of trying to make sense of the information available on the web, and machines are as likely to be misled as any of us.
One specific enquiry I made resulted in a very interesting observation that we might learn from.
I’m in the market for some home improvement products, and I’m interested in those from a specific manufacturer. Normally, to find suppliers, the best way is probably to go to the manufacturer’s website and look for a list of stockists. But there’s another approach (which many people use) and that’s to go to Google and type in something like ‘[Blue Widget Company] stockists near me’. In this case, tried both.
As expected, the manufacturer’s website gave me the full official list of stockists. However, the Google approach omitted some stockists (and included some who don’t stock the brand concerned!). It’s not entirely Google’s fault – there are still stockists who don’t even have a website to speak of, and others who are vague about whose products they sell.
However, with my query, the inferior (Google) approach seems to be the one that the Ai search engines are using. Their results were incomplete and even incorrect. So why did the Ai tools not simply use the manufacturer’s website, with the official list?
The answer was that they couldn’t. The stockist list on the manufacturer’s website was actually inaccessible to a machine. To get the list, the visitor had to enter their postcode. A map was then produced, with the stockists highlighted. Very nice …but useless to a machine unable to enter that postcode. In this case, a full list of stockists and their locations was what the machines needed, and that simply wasn’t available.
The moral of the story is that SEO is now more than optimising a site such that the machines can collect all the words and pictures. It’s about creating a site where the machines can get all the information as easily as humans.