Time to read: 9 minutes
Today I want to talk to you about six ways you can beat your competitors in AI search.
Most competitors don’t even know these six things exist, but even if they were aware of them, they can’t pull them off because they’re either too difficult or they don’t have the resources or know-how to do it.
AI search represents a great opening for businesses to pull away from the competition – as long as they focus on the right things.
| # | The Six Ways |
|---|---|
| 1 | Use the expertise only you have |
| 2 | Show up on video and socials |
| 3 | Get mentioned and linked across the web |
| 4 | Map how people actually ask AI |
| 5 | Give AI a map of your business |
| 6 | Fix the fundamentals they skip |
1. Use the Expertise Only You Have
We’re really big on subject matter expertise here at Sixth City, and we love it because competitors can’t copy it and AI search systems reward it.
❌ What most of your competitors are doing
There are a lot of businesses out there that are writing with AI content. Let your competitors do that. They might see an initial spike, but the crash will come, and they’re going to be way behind trying to clean all of that up and then figure out what kind of content they need to create to perform well.
Then you’ve got another type of business that works with an agency, but they leave most of the writing, if not all of the writing, to the agency employees themselves. But those aren’t the experts in your field.
The real edge is to lean into your expertise and your proprietary data. Now, here’s the thing. The best insights – the content that would perform well in search and bring you more business – is most likely locked away in your mind or behind your shop doors. So getting that onto your site, on your socials, that’s the advantage.
Keeping the Lift Low on Your End
✅ How the process works
One of the things that we work really hard to do at Sixth City Marketing is accomplish this while keeping the burden on you as low as possible so you can run your business.
What we typically do is put on a quick 15- to 30-minute once-a-month meeting, and it’s just a Q&A session.
It comes from our deep audience research. We get the information we need from you, and then we go ahead and we use it on your website and on your socials.
It’s a low lift for you, it stays human, and it performs really well.
In fact, I want to hop over to a case study that we have on our website. This was a big subject matter expertise initiative that we did with one client.
- 538% more organic traffic
- 50% increase in leads
Source: Sixth City Marketing dental client case study, year over year
2. Show Up on Video and Socials
The reason I like video so much is that it gets surfaced in AI answers quite a bit. It’s a very powerful asset that can be repurposed in a lot of different ways, so you get a lot of return on your effort here. And it’s prohibitively difficult, which doesn’t sound like a good thing, but it actually is – because that means it can create a gap between you and your competitors, and you can gain a huge advantage if you can crack this code.
Once again, at Sixth City, we’ve cut our teeth on video and socials for a long time, so we’ve got the systems in place to make this really efficient. We help our clients not overthink gear or the script itself. You can take an iPhone or even some Meta glasses and don’t overthink what you’re going to film.
💡 Key takeaway
Just think about the questions your customers ask you, talk to sales, and understand the concerns that they have. You can combine that with the research that we do to come up with some great topics that your target audience is going to want to hear about. And if you’re doing that, they don’t care about fancy cameras and microphones.
One Video, Many Placements
One long-form video can be repurposed into:
- Shorts that can be dispersed on YouTube and other social platforms
- A long-form blog post built from the transcript
- Shorter posts on text-based platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook
The bottom line: that’s how you get the most out of your video efforts, and more places you show up in means more chances to be discovered by both traditional search engines and AI platforms.
3. Get Mentioned and Linked Across the Web
Links are still the backbone of search, but with AI coming into the picture, just getting mentioned actually has a positive impact. That means:
- Discovering opportunities that are high relevance and high authority
- Putting together an outreach program
- Actually doing the outreach to get those third-party signals coming into your website
⚠️ The catch
This has a hugely positive impact, but it’s also an enormous lift – so it’s likely something competitors cannot keep up with. And thus it represents an opportunity if you can partner with an agency that has the know-how.
At Sixth City, we have resources that we’ve developed across well over 10 years that show us the sites that link and the tactics that work, and we’ve even developed longstanding relationships with reporters that help us land high-authority PR placements.
Traditional search and AI systems heavily rely on third-party signals to determine who to rank well or put in their outputs. So you want to partner with an AI search agency that has a really good reputation and response rate.
The next two are a lot more complicated, and I can almost guarantee your competitors are not doing this.
4. Map How People Actually Ask AI
What you first want to do is map your keywords, and each keyword is going to represent an audience driver or something they’re concerned about. What’s interesting is when you start to look at prompts that people type into AI searches, a lot of times those concerns combine in different ways.
In this example, the prompt represents someone asking for something affordable, close to downtown, and open on the weekends.
| What they typed | The concern behind it |
|---|---|
| “Affordable” | Price |
| “Close to downtown” | Location |
| “Open on the weekends” | Availability |
AI search allows people to type more complicated questions, and it’s really important to understand how those concerns intersect in prompts. Then you can engineer your content in a way that helps AI systems understand how you serve those needs.
5. Give AI a Map of Your Business
This is an exercise that we do at Sixth City, and it really feeds nicely into the next initiative: giving AI a map of your business – and more than that, helping it make connections between those concerns and where they intersect. One thing that we are on the leading edge of here at Sixth City is entity maps.
What this does is it maps the entities on your website, and more than that, it shows how those things relate to each other.
✅ What an entity map covers
- Who you are as an organization
- Your people and team members
- Your services
- The topics you cover
- How all of those things interrelate
So that map is a guide for AI search systems to help them when they receive those more complicated prompts that include a combination of audience concerns.
⚠️ Don’t skip this
Without this, your content might not be helping AI make those connections. It’s a really simple thing to create, but you have to know how to do it right.
And to show the proof in the pudding, you can see our entity map linked in the footer of the Sixth City website. It’s got all our entities, like who we are as an organization, who our people are, what our services are, and how all those things interrelate.
It’s a newer thing, but there are case studies coming out that show the benefits of having an entity map and how it’s improving visibility and performance in AI search. It’s a great chance to pull away from the competition because I can promise you this is not even on their radar.
6. Fix the Fundamentals They Skip
AI search has us talking about a lot of complicated concepts and new tactics that are being added to the SEO toolbox, but don’t forget: the core of AI search performance are the SEO fundamentals. And we still see a ton of businesses not even getting the basics right.
💡 Key insight
If you can get these right, you’re going to start to pull away immediately – even without doing anything fancy like building an entity map.
I want to take you over to a case study that I posted on LinkedIn. We achieved a 17x ROI for this roofing client, and look at the tactics. There’s nothing fancy here. It’s the fundamentals.
17x ROI
Roofing client – no advanced tactics, just fundamentals
Source: Sixth City Marketing case study posted on LinkedIn
✅ The fundamentals that drove it
- Money pages: focusing on their high-intent pages
- Content consolidation: consolidating content rather than just publishing new content
- Google Business Profile: which, paired with the website for a local business, is just as important in terms of digital assets
- Link building: so those are your third-party signals
- Conversion focus: helping the content that was already built perform better and get people to that last step
Ready to Find Your Best Opportunities?
So those are six ways you can beat the competition in AI search.
If you want to know what your best opportunities are, reach out to us. We offer a free website assessment. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you in the next video!
