Jim

M Posted 12 months ago

t 9 min read

We are all navigating a constantly changing search and AI landscape. As the ground shifts beneath our feet, marketers have never had a more critical time to evolve and stay ahead.

Today, together with our customers, we are making a monumental step forward as we launch BrightEdge AI Catalyst.

For The First Time Ever: Get the Complete View of Your Brand Across Traditional and AI Search

As AI and Search accelerates how brands are perceived and perform, I am proud to announce that our customers now have access to the first comprehensive solution that enables brands to influence their presence across multiple generative AI search engines.

Customers can track their digital footprint and track, understand, and optimize their presence across all aspects of search, from core and traditional search through to multiple Generative AI search engines.

And It Is All in One Enterprise-Grade Platform!

Building on our history and foundations in AI and data-driven insights, BrightEdge AI Catalyst allows brands to instantly amplify impact, outperform competitors, and confidently navigate AI search engines, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews.

At the heart of our customer success approach are three core principles: Inspiration, Innovation, and Impact.

• Inspiration: Inspire New Ways of Thinking
  • We inspire marketers to better understand their audiences using data insights to help customers connect with them in more meaningful ways.
• Innovation: Innovate With Cadence
  • We innovate to keep customers ahead of digital market changes through a regular cadence of market-leading technology product launches.
• Impact: Impact Multiple Business Outcomes
  • We help marketers deliver real, tangible results and business outcomes that genuinely transform their business.

These principles guide our commitment to empowering marketers with the tools and insights they need to succeed in today's dynamic landscape.

Let me share some more context on how we got to today!

The Transformation Is Here as Billions of People Turn To AI

• ChatGPT just surpassed 500 million weekly active users in late March.
• Gemini's web traffic grew to 10.9 million average daily visits worldwide.
• Bing's Copilot increased to 2.4 million.
• Anthropic's Claude reached 3.3 million daily visits.
• DeepSeek's chatbot eclipsed 16.5 million visits.

I find it super interesting that people are increasingly trusting in AI technology.

Research from Attest reveals that 68% of consumers trust information from Generative AI, with 41% having more confidence in AI search results than paid search listings. As these AI engines are growing fast monthly, each has its own interface and logic, and each shapes perceptions of brands in different ways.

BrightEdge Generative Parser ™ data shows that March referral traffic from these AI-first search engines continues to grow significantly.

• ChatGPT +19%
• Perplexity +12%
• Gemini +19%
• Claude +166%

However, while Google still dominates the industry with a 92% market share and optimizing for AI Overviews is always your first step, it shows that more and more brands are being discovered and interpreted across multiple AI platforms, each with their own:

• Interface
• Logic
• Way of shaping brand perceptions

Furthermore, some platforms will position your brand negatively; many leave you out entirely.

The Era of AI Inevitability

AI is actively shaping what customers know, trust, and believe. People are not just searching anymore; they are asking AI and AI is giving an opinion.

This represents a fundamental shift from focusing on just search rankings to understanding how AI presents brands.

Introducing BrightEdge AI Catalyst

I am thrilled to announce BrightEdge AI Catalyst, enabling brands to see where and how they are perceived everywhere it matters by AI engines.

BrightEdge AI Catalyst Completes Search Picture for Brands to Win in AI Era

Building on our two-decade history of pioneering innovation in search and AI markets, we are providing our customers with a unified overview of where they are winning and losing in key conversational moments across critical AI platforms.

But it is not just visibility that matters.

It is the proven performance results delivered with action from AI.

By leveraging billions of historical and real-time data points, customers can act around crucial revenue-generating touchpoints across both traditional search and AI search.

The AI Catalyst Advantage

Cross-Platform Visibility

Monitoring brand performance across multiple AI platforms has become increasingly complex. That is why we developed Catalyst to provide unified cross-platform visibility:

• Customers can now track their brand presence and sentiment simultaneously across Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.
• Our dashboards allow brands to monitor performance across the entire AI search ecosystem.
• It is all in one place, providing the complete picture needed to make strategic marketing decisions.

AI Search Behavior Insights

Understanding how audiences use AI search platforms often leads to ineffective content strategies. Marketers can now bridge the gap between understanding AI search behaviors and prompt research:

• Together with BrightEdge Copilot, customers can eliminate guesswork with precise AI prompt suggestions based on actual audience behavior.
• It taps into our deep knowledge and data repository to analyze your website, existing search patterns, and billions of historical queries.
• This delivers accurate, targeted insights that align with actual AI search usage.

Multi-Platform Optimization

Creating separate content strategies for each AI platform is inefficient and costly. As marketers face resource constraints—especially when trying to optimize for multiple AI platforms simultaneously—we have placed efficiency at the core of this innovation:

• Customers can optimize once and rank everywhere with efficient content strategies that work across multiple AI-driven search environments.
• This saves valuable time and resources while maintaining consistent messaging.

Real-Time Intelligence

The AI search landscape evolves weekly, if not daily, and keeping pace with change is hard:

• BrightEdge AI Catalyst provides real-time intelligence and targeted, actionable recommendations for improving AI-driven visibility.
• We process billions of data points in real-time, allowing our customers to make quick strategy adjustments when they matter most.

AI-Influenced Journey Mapping

Understanding the customer journey has always been crucial, but AI has fundamentally transformed how customers discover and engage with brands:

• With BrightEdge AI Catalyst, we have pioneered new approaches to mapping these AI-influenced journeys.
• This includes advanced features for persona development, intent mapping, and journey analysis.
• It reveals how your audience interacts with AI systems throughout their decision-making process.
• It identifies key AI touchpoints that impact engagement and conversion, helping our customers create more effective targeting strategies.

The Full Picture: AI-Driven Brand Perception and Driving Performance

AI Catalyst gives brands the complete picture of how AI highlights their brand—where they appear, where they do not, and how they are presented.

But it also does much more by connecting the data dots:

• Built on 20 years of working with top brands, using billions of searches to give marketers the clarity they need now.
• It connects this information directly to business plans, goals, and results—all inside the BrightEdge platform.
• It shows the complete picture and helps brands act (with confidence and trust in data) whenever and wherever AI affects presence, perception, and performance.

Learn more about BrightEdge AI Catalyst here: https://www.brightedge.com/ai-catalyst

This is Your AI Moment – Let Us Guide You

AI is rewriting the rules of search. We are not just keeping up—we are leading the way. And we are here to make sure you do not get left behind.

And there is more.

With GSC Reporting, we are helping you answer the question every leader is asking: How is AI impacting my existing Search business? Now, you can finally measure that directly. And with the new BrightEdge Chrome Extension, we are putting real-time optimization into your workflow so that every page, update, and decision happens with AI insights behind it. This empowers you to act at the speed that AI demands.

This Is What Enterprise AI Is: Connected, Actionable, And Built for Impact.

Together with our customers, we are not just adapting to AI—we are building the capabilities to win. Let us keep pushing forward to shape the future of search and AI.

Want to learn more about how BrightEdge can help your business navigate the AI search revolution? Contact us today for a personalized demo.

lpark

M Posted 1 year ago

t 9 min read

Longtail keywords are becoming critical as search becomes more conversational with the advent of AI chat. Learn what longtail keywords are and how to win them here

Why are Long Tail Keywords Important?

A long tail keyword is a phrase that is generally made from three to five words. Since these keywords are more specific than generic terms, they allow you to target niche demographics. These keywords are also less competitive than generic keywords because they are designed to better reflect how people make queries. With long tail keywords, you are able to attract more high-quality traffic to your website which is more likely to lead to conversions.

During the customer journey, long tail keywords become more important as their journey evolves. Typically, users begin with a simple search and as the search engines guide them to solving their pain point, their searches become more detailed. This is where long tail keywords will become important to separate your brand from your competition. 

BrightEdge Generative Parser reveals that as of January 2025, 35% of AI Overview results now handle multiple search intents simultaneously, with projections showing this could reach 65% by Q1 2025. This means users increasingly combine multiple aspects of their journey into single, detailed searches - making long tail keywords that address specific combinations of needs more valuable than ever.

Are long tail keywords important for SEO?

Over 70% of search queries are made using long tail keywords. This has become particularly prevalent with people using voice search more often. People now generally enter queries into Google using the same types of phrasing as they do when they are speaking with a friend. This is called natural language. Using long tail keywords, therefore, makes your content more likely to draw these users into your website and begin the process of the buyer’s journey. In addition, generative AI such as that found in Google’s AI Overviews are expanding the ways long tail keywords can be used to pinpoint conversational search patterns. As AI enables users to combine multiple intents, the way they use long tail keywords becomes vital in earning citations from these engines. You can learn more about Google SGE in our Ultimate Guide to AI Overviews!

Long tail keywords being comprised of a few words makes them much more specific. This means that both users and site owners generally receive better results. Brands receive traffic that is more closely aligned with their content, which will improve their ability to effectively bring new customers into the sales cycle. Customers also receive content that is more closely aligned with their objective, making them happier.

The specificity of long tail keywords also means that there is less competition for each keyword phrase. Brands can better customize their specific keywords for what they provide users.

Long Tail Keywords: Strategic Importance in AI Search

The rise of AI-powered search has fundamentally shifted how users interact with search engines, making long tail keywords more valuable than ever for SEO practitioners. According to BrightEdge Generative Parser data, search queries that trigger AI Overviews have become increasingly conversational, growing from an average of 3.1 words in June 2024 to 4.2 words by year's end. This shift reflects a growing user comfort with more natural, detailed search patterns that align perfectly with long tail keyword strategies.

For SEO practitioners, this evolution presents a unique opportunity. Rather than competing directly with major brands for broad keywords, long tail optimization allows websites to earn citations in AI search results by providing complementary, specific information. BrightEdge Generative Parser data shows that AI Overviews are now pulling from a significantly broader range of sources - up to 151% more unique websites for complex B2B queries and 108% more for detailed product searches. This means that websites optimizing for specific, detailed long tail phrases have an increased chance of being cited in comprehensive AI-generated responses.

This democratization of citations in AI search results means that digital marketers and SEO’s can focus on developing deep, specific content that answers particular aspects of user queries, rather than trying to compete for broad, highly competitive terms. By targeting the natural language patterns that users increasingly employ in their searches, websites can position themselves as valuable sources of specific information that AI systems will reference when building comprehensive responses to user queries.

Long tail keyword example

Depending on the topics your site creates content around and how many pages you have, you will want to collect a pretty large relevant list of long tail keywords that you can use throughout your site. It's not realistic, or SEO-healthy, for you to optimize your site for the same keywords on every page, therefore you'll need a running list of great keywords.

If you're a local brand looking for local foot traffic, adding "near me" to your long tail keywords is a good practice. For example, long tail keywords including "organic coffee shops near me" or "buy Guiana chestnut plant near me" are both good examples of when a user is at the final stages of their buyer journey searching via long tail queries. Using specific keywords like "organic coffee shop" and "Guiana chestnut plant" will help you to rank better as they're further from common keywords bigger brands are trying to rank for.

Researching long tail keywords

1. Build your buyer personas and map them to customer journeys.
2. Use this information to help you identify topics that your personas will want to see at each stage of their journey.
3. Leverage your own query research via search engines by typing a simple search into the search bar and see what keywords autofill into long tail keywords. These keywords are what users are searching for and you should optimize for them. You can see to the right that we typed "best seo" into Google. Long tail keywords autofilled to show us what users are most often looking for when it comes to "best seo."
4. Use keyword technology, like the BrightEdge Data Cube X, to identify the relevant keywords that you can best rank for that also have high traffic rates.
5. Monitor your success with your keywords, looking closely at your traffic and engagement rates. This will tell you how many people you are attracting and how well your content is answering the need of their query.

Long-tail keywords are valuable tools for those looking to optimize their content and attract more relevant visitors. The better you are able to better understand your users, the better you will be able to meet their needs and bring in new customers for your organization.