How to Choose Topics and Questions to Track in AI Search Visibility Reports (ArcAI)

AI Search engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity have opened up  a whole new way for people to search and gain information. Their challenge from an SEO standpoint is that they are different from traditional search in both the way they process a query and provide results. 

This video and the more detailed step-by-step instructions below it provides both an explanation of why we need to use a topics and brand visibility approach to monitoring AI search and a workflow to help you discover the topics and questions that will be most useful for you to use with these reports.

Scroll down for a step-by-step breakdown of the workflow with more detailed explanations.

Why Use a Topical Approach to AI Search and a Step-by-Step Workflow

1. We know that AI search changes the way people search. They enter a greater diversity of queries, many of them not even information quests but more tasks, and they form much longer, more detailed queries.

2. What has not changed are the fundamental things people search for. People go to Google for ALL types of problems they want to solve.. and increasingly to ChatGPT with the same core problems. Whether it is looking to identify the best hiking shoes for their particular need or the best way to paint a metal fence in their part of the world, what the end user is trying to get to has not changed. 

3. What AI engines are especially good at though, and why a growing number of people turn to them to solve their problem or learn more about something - and ask them more complex questions - is their ability to break down the query to its essential elements, perform multiple searches to research all those elements, and then bring together information from a variety of sources.

But it's important to keep in mind that the goal of the end user has not changed from what they've always done in Google. This matters because it means that knowledge of how people search around your topics in traditional search remains a good first indicator of what they search for in AI engines.

The fact that they might express those needs in more complex ways does not affect how we can track around those needs, as we shall see below.

4. AI search is really a kind of multi-search. When theses engines use search (which they do now to an increasing degree), they have the ability to parse out the individual elements in a complex query and to multiple concurrent searches to gather information on each of those elements.

Then they can bring together all that research from multiple sources and synthesize it into one comprehensive report.

There are two important thing for us as SEOs to understand about this process.

The first is that these engines often use sources at the passage level. That means if your content even has just one brief section that does a great job of addressing just one element of the user's query, you have a chance of showing up as a source in the AI result.

The other is this means even if the query is as complex as the one shown below, if you have a good answer for one part of it (e.g., "What are the best backpacks for someone with a medium frame") and an AI engine uses that, than that simpler question is a valid indicator of your visibility in AI search for the topic of backpacks.

Our sites and brands actually connect with AI search at the level of the sub-queries it uses to gather data for response to a larger query.

5. The best approach to identifying the right questions to track to measure your AI search visibility is to first find a set of the most important topics around your business and then use those to generate a set of the most relevant questions for each topic to track.

Two Frameworks for Finding and Choosing Topics and Questions to Track in ArcAI's AI Search Visibility Reporting

Which framework should I use? Either of the two frameworks below can give you good results for researching topics and questions to track for AI search.

1. Use Framework 1 (ArcAI Explorer) if you want to do quick research entirely focused on what is most valuable in AI search.
   
2. Use Framework 2 (Topic Explorer + ArcAI researcher) if you have access to seoClarity Research Grid and want a more robust topical exploration based in our vast dataset of SEO topics.
   

Framework 1 (recommended!): ArcAI Explorer

ArcAI Explorer, included with all ArcAI subscriptions Core or higher, is a powerful research tool for exploring topics and their related questions with regard to how much demand they have in AI search.

Here's how to use Explorer to find the topics and questions you should be tracking in ArcAI Visibility.

1. Enter any high-level topic topic in ArcAI Explorer to get a complete analysis based completely on AI search.

2. Use our estimated monthly AI search volume and trended demand to decide if this is a priority topic for you.

3. Note the intent breakdown. Use this to guide you in the types of questions you choose to track for this topic. In the example below, we would probably want to be sure we had mostly informational queries, with perhaps a few transactional in intent.

4. Top related topics can show you other topics you might want to track, either as sub-topics to the one you're researching now or as main topics themselves. To do research on any of these, hover the topic and click the funnel icon that appears.

5.  Use the common questions list to find the best questions to track for this topic. To add the current topic and a selection of these questions to ArcAI Visibility for tracking, check the box for each question you want to use and click the Add Prompts button.

Framework 2: Topic Explorer + ArcAI Researcher

This framework makes use of the world's most powerful topical research tool, seoClarity Topic Explorer combined with our exclusive AI question researcher to help you build out the topics and questions to track.

1. Start in Research Grid's Topic Explorer by entering your domain.
   
2. Go to the industries tab and drill down into the sub-industries until you find some relevant topics.
   
3. Choose up to five sub-industries as Topics to use in ArcAI's AI Visibility.
   

As you add those topics to the AI Search Visibility feature for tracking, you have a choice of entering your own questions or letting us generate them.

1. We highly recommend starting with our generated questions as these are drawn from massive data sets of actual searches by real users. This results in the best coverage of users' intents and the things they are interested in.
   
2. Add your topics using the blue Universal Add button and the AI Topics option under Add Elements.
   
3. The "Add additional context" field in AI Topics under Add Elements helps the AI create more accurate and relevant questions for your Topic.
   

Choose about five of the questions use in AI Search Visibility to start with, based on their relevance to your products and services.

1. If you don’t already see it, we’ll soon be including the industry’s first search demand for these questions to also help guide you in your prioritizations.
   

To receive location-specific responses from AI Engines in ArcAI Insights, add "in [location]" to the end of your prompt/question.

For example, you can ask, “What are the best places for leather purses in Houston, Texas?” or “What are the best places for leather purses in the U.S.?”

If you need any assistance, feel free to email support@seoclarity.net. We're happy to help!

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