After years of speculation — and years of grifters preying on your very real concerns about how your business appears in ChatGPT — Google released a generative AI search guide.
This guide confirms what we have seen over the past two years while optimizing our clients to appear in LLMs and AI Overviews. Surprise — it’s not a single secret trick or a hidden switch buried somewhere in your website’s code! It’s good old fashioned elbow grease. Focus on the SEO fundamentals, and performance in LLMs will follow.
While we’re glad to see the validation from Google, we want you to understand precisely what’s being spoken about and how it affects your SEO strategy.
Why did Google have to come out with a generative AI search guide in the first place?
In short, bad advice is really bad.
Cannabis businesses are flooded daily with cheesy cold emails and “SEO is dead” LinkedIn hot takes that bravely claim that they, and only they, have uncovered the secret to showing up first in ChatGPT and other LLMs.
SEOs pitching hacks and shortcuts is as old as the discipline itself. Unscrupulous actors come out of the woodwork whenever a major change or development in search comes out. This time around, the evidence against their bad advice piled up quickly. Notably:
- Search engines like Google and LLMs work on fundamentally different systems.
- In most industries, average organic search traffic from LLMs is way less than 1%. Comparatively, Google makes up about 90% of the organic search market.
- LLM use for search is growing, but it is not dethroning Google.
- More evidence is coming out that LLMs like ChatGPT rely heavily on Google, emphasizing that Google cannot and should not be neglected for shiny new toys.
- The generative AI search discipline is so young that there are no universally adapted technical requirements or strategies.
- Tracking is in its infancy and is highly unreliable.
The “Google is dead” doom-and-gloomers are convincing folks to make decisions about their business based on 1% of their organic traffic, with extreme volatility and little data to follow through to boot. So it was time for Google to say something.
What Google explicitly discusses in its generative AI search guide
“Chunking” your content is not a thing
This is one of the most classic misdirections coming from so-called AI search experts. The folks trying to sell you on generative AI tools said rewriting your content was necessary for AI systems to better understand it. They called it “content chunking,” the basic principle behind which is to group content into digestible, clearly broken-down sections. (In reality, they are describing what LLMs do to the content they digest.)
Proper content structure and hierarchy on a website is SEO 101 and has been a foundational principle for years. We are thrilled that Google finally called this out for what it is.
LLMs.txt may not help
SEO specialists like us upload certain file types to your website to help search engines better understand what a particular page is about. There have been rumblings about adding some of this special code to websites to give generative AI systems a file to read.
It has long been assumed that this does not work because:
- LLMs.txt is not a widely adopted standard by any LLM (by contrast, similar file types and standards have been in use for 30 years)
- There's no evidence that generative AI search tools read the file
All the while, audit after audit says that LLMs.txt is a do-or-die for your website.
At CannaContent, we experimented with LLMs.txt ourselves to confirm our suspicion that this markup would not move the needle. Our own trials show little change when LLMs.txt is added. Could this change in the future? Possibly. After all, SEO is in a constant evolutionary state. But you don’t have to do this for your website to see success in LLMs.
AI-specific structured data
People and search engines like Google read the content on your website, just in different ways. Search engine crawlers get an extra boost in the form of unique code, called structured data or schema, to help reinforce the main topics and information on a page.
Similar to LLMs.txt, some have speculated that structured data specifically for LLMs like ChatGPT would move the needle on visibility. But similar to LLMs.txt, we are not seeing any significant movement when adding LLM-specific schema to any website content.
So what should your cannabis business do to show up in LLMs like ChatGPT?
1. Apply SEO best practices
We said it once, we’ll say it again, we’ll say it until the cows come home. What’s good for Google is good for ChatGPT. Google echoes our sentiments.
Sure, Google is going to say the best practices for search are the ones for which it sets the standard. But that doesn’t mean they’re incorrect.
There are literally hundreds of factors that go into quality SEO, but they boil down to:
- A positive customer experience, including a fast website, easy-to-navigate pages, and good content
- Staying on top of search trends and algorithm changes
- Putting in the hard work, because tricks don’t often work for long with Google
2. Publish helpful, informative, and interesting content
It’s been clear for a long time that search engines reward unique points of view and authentic lived experience. We are long past the era of publishing content for the sake of it, whether written by a human or produced by generative AI. Before you hit publish, answer to yourself:
- Will someone learn something new from this content?
- Is this content different from other blogs out there?
- How does this content advance my business’s growth goals and objectives?
The rise of generative AI features in search like AI Overviews means that basic questions and answers are near-fully being covered by generative AI, massively affecting click through rates (CTRs). What does this mean for cannabis businesses specifically? It means your most basic educational and informative content is unlikely to have a significant impact on your bottom line. However, we still believe there’s value to publishing some types of this content because:
- Consumer education is still vitally important in cannabis marketing, and customers want and need this information. While it won’t have the same SEO value as other content, there’s still tremendous marketing value to creating it. Plus, you can use this type of basic content in other ways in your marketing, which is good for your overall visibility.
- Some basic content is still necessary to educate search engines on what you do, who you are, and why they should come to you.
- Basic content may play a role in advancing other SEO strategies on your website.
- It helps signal to search engines that you are an active, authoritative, and trustworthy information source about cannabis.
3. Continue to lean into your authority and expertise
Google wants to recommend the most reliable information it can. Whether it does all the time is a different conversation for a different day, but the aim is still to showcase to search engines (and to people) that you are a trustworthy source.
SEOs have long turned to an acronym called “EEAT,” which stands for Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Search engines want to know that your cannabis business meets these criteria before considering it an accurate source of information. Our Director of Search Strategy, Moeima Dukuly, adds an A to that for “age,” taking note of how search engines reward longevity and consistency.
So, focus on elevating your profile and your brand’s profile. This is important for Google, but it’s one of the main distinguishing factors we are seeing among our clients who appear in LLMs. Clients with a more robust PR, digital publishing, or link-building program appear to come up more in LLMs, as LLMs also take reputation into account when generating answers. Everything from five-star dispensary reviews to deep technical analysis on a software solution is taken into account when generating an answer.
Where reputation management in search used to focus on burying bad links and surfacing good links, this new era of search is less narrowly focused and much more holistic. Everywhere you show up online — articles, social media profiles, you name it — has a role to play in how LLMs, and the internet at large, understand you and your business.
4. Stay away from hacks and tricks
Whenever a major change comes to search engine optimization, it’s pretty much guaranteed that opportunistic snake oil salespeople come along with it. Call it the fool’s gold rush. Simply put, anyone who claims they’ve discovered the secret to AI search dominance is trying to sell you something that doesn’t work.
This leads to our fifth and final point:
5. Take a deep breath and don’t panic
Generative AI search is here to stay. There will certainly be more changes in how these systems work. But it's important to remember that AI search is still a fraction of the traffic coming to your website. Will the numbers increase? Yes. Do we need to take LLMs in search seriously? Yes. Do we need to burn down your entire SEO strategy to accommodate for LLMs? No. And that’s what Google’s guide is all about.
What’s next for AI search and cannabis?
Let’s be clear: We need to take LLMs very, very seriously. What we object to as an organization is when folks use changes in search to scare you into buying their services. Although there’s no need to panic or completely revamp your SEO strategy, now is the time to take your brand, reputation, and how you show up online very seriously.
Search engine optimization is a lot of hard work. There’s no singular hack that’s going to shortcut you to the top when LLMs do become more prominent. By starting now — and keeping your eyes on the prize, undistracted by hollow shortcuts that pop up from suspect sources — you’ll be well positioned to grow, make more sales, and generate more leads in LLMs like ChatGPT in the years to come.