How to Get Found by Google's Bard + Open Call for Volunteers!

A few days ago, I got this message on Linkedin:

Well, as much as I liked the sweet old Bard recommending me to others, this started a thought process that I’d like to share with you.

Looks like generative AI in search is here to stay. It will unlikely look the same as now, but it will be part of our information and product discovery moving on.

Thanks for reading Ann Smarty's Search & Social Digest! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

So how do we increase our chances to be included in generative AI search answers?

Being part of Google’s Knowledge Graph would certainly help. Yes, I have another screenshot to share here:

But from what we have seen so far, Google’s Knowledge Graph is very slow to update. It takes months to include new entities.

Generative AI must be using the knowledge graph as some part of the foundation but it would hardly have any useful answers if that were the limit of their knowledge.

From what it looks like generative AI uses more recent information as sources for its answers, and those sources don’t necessarily coincide with top-ranking results:

So online context influences Bard which influences our brand or product findability.

I am actually thinking of launching a new service / project / audit for this.

If you’d like me to look at your product or site, and then gather some insights, you could help me put something together.

Please reach out! seosmarty AT gmail (or through Linkedin)

We could help each other, or we could just waste time chatting about AI, etc. I am ok with it going either way!

Tools of the week:

• There is a free backlink checker I didn’t know existed. You may have fun playing with it! It offers loads of free data! What a find!
• Krea.ai is a fun free AI tool to play with! It creates all kinds of pictures based on your prompt and you can animate any of those creations. I uploaded the result on TikTok (yeah, feel free to follow me there as well) and it generated more views and engagements than my regular personal video does without taking hours to create.

I cannot say I was happy with the result because I had been spending so much time creating useful and authentic videos for TikTok to see a video that took a minute to create perform just as well or even better. But I was impressed by the result nonetheless.

Must-reads for this week:

• AI-Generated Content is the New Floor: With ChatGPT and others taking seconds to write pretty ok content, how soon will the majority of digital content is going to be written by AI? We have months and years to figure that out, but I am sure Google will find ways to surface content that’s useful and helpful, whether it’s human or AI-written. What Rand is talking about is how human content will ultimately stand out: It needs to be unique in experience, expertise and/or perspectives.
• Google-Extended does not stop Google Search Generative Experience from using your site’s content: In my previous digest, I shared a new tool from Google that allows you to opt out of training Bard with your content. Well, the clarification came a few days later: Even if you use the tool, Bard will still use your content unless you block Google bot entirely. Oh, Google.

Again, reach out if you’d like us to figure out your Bard findability! Or comment here if you are up to it!