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Todd E Jones's avatar

Someone said on LI today, "how long till we just call it 'digital optimization'?" good question.

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Paul Chaney's avatar

Ann, you are a staunch defender of traditional SEO despite outcries against it, and I appreciate that. It's daunting enough to use good old SEO strategies and tactics as they are, much less add an entirely new set geared to AI.

I especially appreciate your reference to brand knowledge content. I'm going to study that in-depth.

One question, though: Does getting favorable mentions in genAI mean that the machines will scrape our content? If so, does it work like the Google spider? That's something I'm confused about that I hope you can help me with.

Thanks for sharing your expertise!

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Ann Smarty's avatar

Hi Paul, thanks for the kind words!

> Does getting favorable mentions in genAI mean that the machines will scrape our content?

Not necessarily. They can find out about your band from other sources, but letting them scrape your content increases those chances.

> does it work like the Google spider?

Not quite. LLMs also rely on their training data they refer to. The training data can be updated through crawls (their own or using other crawls, for example, some of them may use Google index without physically crawling the web).

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