Listen




NEW! Listen to article

Sign in or sign up to access this audio feature! No worries … it’s FREE!

Just last week, I again watched as my neighbor spent two hours washing, detailing, and meticulously waxing his vintage Chevy Corvette. That routine got me thinking: I don’t believe I’ve ever seen him pop the hood and work on its engine.
Then it struck me. Isn’t that how so many businesses and B2B marketers approach SEO?
You’ll spend countless dollars and hours to make a website absolutely perfect for traditional search engines. Heck, much of my own time over the past 10 years has revolved around things like keyword density, alt tags, internal linking, meta tags, and schema.
Unfortunately, all of those focus on cosmetic changes, not substance. Not authority, not trustworthiness—the very things AI-powered search tools, like ChatGPT, now look at.
Luckily, you can make the shift from traditional SEO tactics to something more useful: artificial intelligence search optimization.
I’ll walk you through what you need to know.
Sorry, But Today’s Internet Requires More Than Traditional SEO
When I think of traditional SEO, here’s what it mainly focuses on optimizing:

Sourcing and targeting the “right” keywords
Strategic placement of those keywords
Metadata
Alt tags
Relevant internal and external links
Relevant and authoritative backlinks
Page performance

These are all still important, but AI has shifted the dynamic. No longer can you only focus on those cosmetic details to gain an advantage.
To help you understand the differences, I’ve put their core focuses side by side:

B2B marketers must adapt optimization strategies and embrace a culture of building true domain authority with trust. I don’t think you should totally abandon the more “cosmetic” focus of traditional SEO, but you should simply spend less time optimizing for only visibility.
Think Digital Credit Score: AI Search Is About Trust
The best way to view AI search optimization is to think of it as a digital credit score. In the financial sector, banking institutions evaluate the “creditworthiness” of a person interested in a loan based on various elements, such as account age, payment history, credit utilization, and so on.
I’ve found that AI search engines focus on similar areas; but, instead of seeing whether a person can afford a car, they’re figuring out whether a website’s content should be shown in its AI responses.
I’ve discovered that—much like with credit—authority and trust are the factors that mean the most for AI search engines. Below, I’ve outlined how to build that authority and trust to boost your “digital credit score.”
1. Let AI crawlers into your home

The first step of establishing a solid relationship with AI search engines is to let them search your websites. Similar to making your website indexable, you want to give AI crawlers access to your content.
Follow these steps to do so:

Update XML sitemaps to allow AI crawlers.
Change your robots.txt file to allow crawlers, too.

Here’s what you can add to your robots.txt file to allow specific AI crawlers:
User-agent: BingbotAllow: /
Or…
User-agent: GPTBotAllow: /
It’s like letting credit bureaus view your past financial habits. It’s possible to block access, but then you’re never building authority.
2. Write your history on expert content
Here’s the word to focus on: history. You’re writing a history for every website you optimize for AI search. I like to build that history with expertise, essentially showing AI search engines that I’ve put in the work to maintain a content schedule of quality over quantity.
Here’s how I recommend building that history of expertise:

Avoid giving theoretical advice; instead, provide actionable examples that people can implement.
Focus on issues faced by your audience; don’t try too hard to stretch into other niches.
Publish consistently; doing so builds reliability and trust.
Spend time developing in-depth resources discussing common industry issues.
Incorporate real-world case studies, relevant research, and credible data to strengthen arguments.

AI search engines are becoming increasingly skilled at detecting genuine expertise. So, it’s risky to pump out eight shallow articles that don’t add much value to the Internet. You’re better off spending time on three or four expertly crafted pieces with credible citations.
3. Grow your network of authority
What’s the point of a credit score? In my eyes, it’s usually a way for financial institutions to vouch for you as a loan applicant. It puts some authority on your side. Similarly, reputable sources linking to your content build authority with AI engines. As does the act of citing reputable sources within your content.
Take these steps to build a network of authority:

Guest-post on related, respected industry publications.
Create partnerships with related businesses.
Collaborate and engage with industry leaders in your content (think interviews and case studies).
Seek citations in research papers, academic texts, and trade magazines.
Say “yes” to research collaborations within your industry.

It’s about participation. It’s a lot less transactional than just trading backlinks. You’re finding genuine partnerships and building on each other’s expertise so you both become trusted voices.
4. Make factual claims and verify them with citations
Inaccurate financial records can lead to lower credit scores; accuracy and verification also matter greatly to AI search engines.
Here’s how to strengthen accuracy and verification efforts for AI search engines:

Provide accurate and credible citations for stats, research, and claims.
Give several perspectives when talking about complex issues.
Tell readers when you lack knowledge about a particular area.
Avoid linking to secondary sources; go for original sources.
If new evidence comes to light, update your content.

I highly recommend making claims to get noticed by AI search engines. You must, however, back up those claims with multiple, credible sources. That’s because AI systems corroborate evidence before delivering responses to users.
Moving Forward With Your Plan for AI Search Authority
The introduction of AI search engines demands more. It’s a long-term process of building your digital reputation. I suggest starting with an audit of your current SEO strategies and the ways you can connect with AI crawlers for visibility.
After that:

Find your true expertise areas and start building expert resources for those.
Have a consistent publishing calendar.
Mingle with other industry experts and make content with them.
Maintain rigorous habits of fact-checking and citation.

Remember, this is your website’s digital credit score. It may take time for ChatGPT and other AI search modules to take notice, but the rewards of being a trustworthy voice in your industry will pay out big time.

I attended the full-day event in London, and here is my summary of some of what I learned.

Firefly

Firefly is Adobe’s AI-based creation tool that has seen incredible innovation in the past 2 years, with Mood Boards as the latest addition. Adobe Firefly Boards is an infinite collaborative canvas, and it is no surprise that you can invite collaborators to contribute or comment on any board you create. Mood boards are often used in fashion and editorial shoots to share concepts for hair styling, makeup, and the overall look of a shoot. Images can be uploaded from your computer or imported from Adobe Stock. Remix is a new addition that allows you to combine 2 images into a new one that represents your creative vision. Imagine if you have one photo showing a woman in a blue fur coat and a second image showing a metal flower sculpture. Remix could combine these shots so that the final result was an image of a woman wearing a metallic-looking fur coat.

Text to image is the normal workflow for AI-generated images in Firefly. Remix offers an image-to-text workflow. When images are combined into a new image, Firefly provides the prompt used to create the new image. This prompt can be modified to create an image with a look that aligns with your preferences. You can also specify an image Firefly will use as a style, structure, or composition reference. Suppose you wanted the mood board to show a woman with red hair sitting at a desk, but all of the images you found featured a woman with red hair standing near a desk. You could import a photo of a person sitting at a desk for the program to use as a composition reference, and this image would be remixed with the first image to produce the shot of a woman with red hair sitting at a desk.

You can use Adobe’s new Firefly Image Model 4 and Firefly Image Model 4 Ultra or non-Adobe engines such as Google’s Imagen 3, Veo 2, and Flux 1.1 Pro. Each AI model has its unique style, and for that reason, Adobe has incorporated these outside engines into its software. You don’t have to create an account to use the non-Adobe models, which makes the creative process smoother. Adobe’s AI generators are licensed for commercial use, and images imported into Firefly are never used for AI training. If you are unsure about how a particular asset was created, you can hover the cursor over the image to see which engine was used in its creation.

Photoshop

Photoshop offers improved background removal. In one demonstration, Photoshop accurately separated an image of a woman wearing a black sweater from a black background. A layer mask is automatically created, which gives you the ability to refine the color, texture, vibrancy, and other aspects of the selection. There is also an Adjust Colors feature that lets you see the range of colors in your image. If your image had pastel tones, for example, you could stay within the broad range of pastel hues as you adjust the colors.

Adobe makes it easy to jump between its various software platforms. You can take the image from Photoshop and open it in Firefly to animate the image into a short video clip. The video clip can be re-opened in Photoshop, which can now show a timeline for video clips. The newly created video can be imported into Photoshop and used as a background to create a final image that is mostly static but has some moving elements. Using Express, you can automatically generate a caption for this moving image and then schedule posting to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, or LinkedIn. Express can create the caption, and you can schedule the time that the post will go live.

Premiere Pro and Firefly for Video

By its very nature, video editing is more time-consuming than photo editing. Premiere uses AI to reduce the time spent on tedious parts of the workflow. In a normal video workflow, you would import clips into the program and then scroll through the clips to find specific scenes. A new feature, Media Intelligence Analysis, can scrub clips to find scenes like “dogs walking” or “people wearing blue.” You can even search for words or phrases spoken by people.

Firefly can even extend your clips to create additional B-roll. One interesting use case is correcting minor filmmaking mistakes. If you regretted zooming out on a particular scene, you can cut the clip before the zoom motion and then have Firefly create a few additional seconds to replace that footage featuring the bad camerawork. Another way to generate video is to open two photographs taken a few minutes apart and use Firefly to create a video that begins with one photograph and ends with the second.

Captions can be automatically generated with one click. You have control over the font and color of captions. You can add captions in over 20 languages, retaining the style elements of the original language captions. The translated captions can even be used for voiceover in the voice of the original caption. There is even an option to create a lip-sync for the speaker so that the new language appears to be coming from the speaker.

Photoshop for Mobile and Web

Photoshop for Mobile caters to the generation that prefers editing on mobile devices. A new feature called Tap Select can separate the various elements that make up your photograph. For a busy street scene, the program will locate each car, street sign, person, and pet. You can edit each element separately or remove elements from the scene.

Adobe sees the mobile app as a user-friendly introduction to advanced features like layers and masking that mobile users may not be familiar with. If you begin an edit on the mobile app, it is a simple matter to make final adjustments on the laptop version of Photoshop, where you have access to the full set of Photoshop tools. Since the fundamental quality of all mobile devices is connectivity, it is no surprise that you can collaborate on designs with other mobile users through the app.

Lightroom Mobile

Quick Actions have been added to Lightroom Mobile. If you have a photo showing 5 people, you can make adjustments to each person individually. When you adjust the skin, hair, or any other element on one person, the other people remain untouched.

Lightroom can recognize a landscape photo and make instant selections of the water, vegetation, and sky. Once selected, you can adjust those specific elements without affecting the other elements. If you need to modify the selections, you can use a brush tool to add or subtract from it.

You can also mask a specific range of colors. Generative Remove is available to eliminate distracting elements. These features work on both the mobile and desktop versions.

Storytelling With Brandon Baum

Today, Brandon Baum has 15 million subscribers to his YouTube channel, but he recalls when his first video garnered only 2 views. He spoke about the ever-changing road to storytelling and why he believes today is a great time to be a filmmaker. He views storytelling as a magical endeavor with constant technological advancements, but he believes that the best stories come from real people living in the real world and that new technologies are never a threat.

Whenever a new technology develops, there is a fear that it will kill storytelling. In the silent film era, some people believed that introducing sound would ruin movies. Brandon favors the approach of directors like George Lucas and James Cameron, who embrace new technology to create films that move the industry in new directions.

One challenge faced by Hollywood is the ever-increasing cost of creating films. To reduce costs, the industry favors sequels and prequels rather than banking on new films with new design concepts and new sets. It is harder than ever for emerging storytellers to get a shot because the stakes are so high, but Brandon believes today’s technology has the potential to bring costs down and unleash new voices and new talents. YouTube is a dominant force in entertainment, and anyone is free to tell their story on that platform. Decisions regarding what stories will be told are no longer in the hands of a few Hollywood executives. You need only to create a YouTube channel to have an opportunity to tell your story. The new storytelling paradigm isn’t coming. It is here.

James Barnard

I stopped into a class titled “Turning Likes Into Leads,” presented by graphic designer James Barnard. Today, James has over a million social media followers, but it wasn’t long ago that he struggled to find his voice on social media. He had a website, but it wasn’t bringing in any leads, and the few times that someone did inquire about his work through his website, their main concern was how cheaply he was willing to work.

He had a major win in his industry when 3 of his designs appeared in the Logo Lounge 13 book, which is highly respected by his peers. This accomplishment didn’t lead to any direct leads, however. At one point, he decided to make a TikTok video inspired by the prompt, “What is something that is a flex in your niche, but means nothing to anyone else?” He made a video saying 3 of his designs appeared in the prestigious Logo Lounge book. His presentation was casual, and he was interrupted by his crying child several times. Despite the unprofessional nature of the video and James not showing his designs, the video went viral and led to 70+ inquiries. The video was an authentic representation of James, and it allowed him to connect with people online in a way that he hadn’t been able to before.

James devised a formula for posting videos involving presenting a problem, showing how you dealt with it, and giving a call to action. Show you understand the client’s problems and explain how you handle those problems. Show how your product helps people with their problems. If you do get potential client attention, it is important that your website has all the elements in place necessary for you to show your work and book new clients. Elements that need to be in place include:

Contact form

Quick-loading site

Case studies

Up-to-date content

Landing page that sells

Clear service offerings

Testimonials

If these elements are lacking on your website, you won’t be able to turn social media leads into paying clients. The key to attracting attention is telling an interesting story about your work. Don’t expect your work to speak for itself.

For more about Adobe MAX, check out the keynote address.