AEO Competitor Research for AI Visibility (Vaibhav Sharda ft. James Dooley & Paul David Truscott) (James Dooley Interviews Vaibhav Sharda)

James Dooley: AEO competitor research. Trying to find all the attributes your competitors have and then trying to beat them out to increase AI visibility. Today I'm joined with Paul and Vaibhav Sharda. So, first of all, I'll let you start off. Why is it important to do the competitor research to find all the different attributes that a competitor might be doing well for, to then be able to try to compare and not just compare, but beat them out for all the main attributes that someone might be looking for?

Vaibhav Sharda: Okay, so because the nature of search has changed when people are using AI. No matter the model, it doesn't really make much difference, although they function a little bit differently. The main difference between normal search and, and using these types of AI systems is the people enter into conversations. And so it's almost like a filtering system. So they're asking a sequence of questions which will force the LLM, the AI search system, to go and look for these particular attributes that align with what you're looking for. And so bit by bit it's kind of filtering out all of the, the ones that don't measure up against what the person's looking for. And so if you haven't done a good job of covering all of your attributes and describing all of your attributes both on your site and off, it's going to be much, much easier for your competition to beat you out if they have done a good job. So that's really the key. It's very, very important now. I think before people were more focused on the benefit to the customer, which makes sense. But now the only way that the systems can figure that out is by the attributes that you include in your information online.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. But all of that is the benefits. All these benefits... You, the benefits for me, I might be looking for a luxury hotel. You might be wanting a cheap hotel. Um, and it's still, still both looking for a hotel. One might be looking for, um, a sea view or on the beachfront, and one might not want to be around city centre and stuff. So, people have got different reasons of what they might want and still looking for a hotel with different attributes put into place. Vaibhav, can you share your screen if possible and show some real-life examples, maybe of, like, Autoblogging, let's say, which is, um, a kind of article generation tool and software. Can you share some examples of how this works?

Vaibhav Sharda: Sure, sure. So... Okay. So, inside Autoblogging, so there is a feature called competitor research. So, once you run it for your brand, simply add your brand and paste in your website URL and it will automatically go in your site. It will figure out what you do, um, what your business is, who all your competitors are. And for each competitor, it will go in and find all these attributes which Google AI Overviews mentions those brands for. So, for example, Agility Writer is a competitor for Autoblogging.ai, which has... Which is known for deep long-form SEO articles, rich research, detailed fact-check, long, long-form SEO articles, and so on. So, all these attributes are important if you want to be mentioned for, you know, one of the best AI writing tools out there. So, if you can cover all these attributes in your content, in your web pages, if you have landing for everything, and even external, uh, content based on these particular attributes which AI is actually looking for, or what people basically search for, like when you... When they try to look for a better AI article writer out there. So, it's, it's a good way to target all these specific attributes. And, like, you can even give it a go. Like, which are the best long-form SEO article generators? And if you search it on Google, AI Overviews will mention a couple of more attributes that you can target. So, you can go deeper into this stuff. And we also have this option of, you know, planning titles based on this. So, if you simply generate, like, uh, plan your... Just, just hold it there for one second. So, when you're doing the competitor research, obviously it can pull back your competitors. Are you able inside of Autoblogging.ai to, if it, like, say it brought one back and you was like, "No, no, no, they're not competitors," can you untick the... Like, or add an additional competitor in, as opposed to... Just at present, it's just Autoblogging is deciding who the competitors are and you can't untick them?

James Dooley: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely. So, the research is very much like, uh, it's, it's very deep. So, for example, like, these are all broadly related competitors which you can exclude or add or mark them as direct. And these are all direct competitors which the AI obviously thinks they are. But if you, if you think they are not a competitor, you can simply click on exclude. And while running the research, you can actually mention some of the competitors which might not have, like, good SEO. So, it might not be found by the system. But if you think they're very direct competitors of yours, while running the research, you can simply mention those names as well. And then I know as well. So, so you can exclude the competitors, but what about the attributes? What say there was certain attributes? So, let's say... So, I'm looking for a luxury hotel and obviously they... They both offer... You want a cheap one, right? So, you, you come along. But if, if you was looking at a specific attribute, can you, if you, if it didn't fit Autoblogging, could you untick the attribute as well and say exclude this attribute? Because you don't... You might not want to cover that as well.

Vaibhav Sharda: Yeah, yeah. That's a good... I'll add that option, yeah. Like, if, if we have a list of attributes, like unique attributes, we should be able to click on it and, you know, exclude them or add more attributes. I'll, I'll, I'll definitely add that. That's a... I think that needs added in only because if... When you start looking at your ideal customer persona, not everyone is your ideal customer persona. So, there's certain attributes that you might say this doesn't fit our brand very well. So, I think, yeah, adding that in would be a great little feature. Anyway, carry on. Sorry, I just wanted to make sure that you can pick or exclude.

James Dooley: Yeah, yeah. So, like, like coming to that, like based on all these attributes, in one click you can generate this entire title planner. And all these titles are basically, like, it covers four different type of articles: feature listicles, alternatives, comparisons, and direct brand info. So, I'll just start with direct brand info. This is, like, it mentions why your brand is best for this particular attribute which it found, uh, on every other direct competitor. So, you can target each and every attribute. And you can put out these articles or these pages on your own landing pages, like on your own site, so that an LLM finds some direct verifiable reference. Like, okay, your tool or your business has this particular feature. It is not just hallucinating stuff from based on outside content. So, if you all... If you add these, so AI can actually, like, search for Autoblogging.ai SEO-optimised articles and it might find a page out there so that it will give... Boost its confidence, right? Okay, this particular tool is good for it. The next one is comparisons. This is, like, direct competitor comparisons. So, Emplibot versus Autoblogging.ai, which nails hands-on autoblog or WordPress autoblogging. So, this is one of the attributes which Emplibot is known for and you can directly now compete with it based on all these attributes. So, you can put out all these articles on guest posts, on external sites, even do videos for it. Like, just, just push content out there. Like, uh, these are all for external references or external sources, uh, for AI LLMs to pick up. These are all fan-out queries in a way, right? And just mentioning this on your own site, like, for example, Autoblogging.ai mentions it is better than Emplibot for this particular attribute. It is like, obviously you will mention your own name for sure. Like, on your own site it is the better one. But if you have external articles out there which says or verifies, okay, you are actually good, then it should... It will work much better. And these are listicles which are, like, alternatives. So, six top Koala AI alternatives for direct WordPress publishing. So, competitor alternatives along with a specific attribute that they are known for. So, just put out all those content. Like, it covers almost everything, like alternatives and so on, like direct competitors. And this is the main stuff, like five AI autoblogging tools that run your WordPress on autopilot. So, this is again like a listicle type of articles, but these are like... Like, they cover the attributes entirely, like broadly in a way. It doesn't mention any competitor in the title. But it will list down competitors here which are like... They will, they will help you form the listicle in a proper way. For example, Emplibot is known for WordPress on autopilot. Even this BabyLoveGrowth and so on. All these direct competitors, right? They are known for WordPress on autopilot. And in this, like, if you simply generate this article, the article will have Autoblogging as the best one. Like, that does WordPress on autopilot. And it will mention all these competitors on position two, three, four, five and so on. So, all this is done for you, like bulk, bulk article... Article generation. Autoblogging is the best one. SEOWriting, Koala AI, Content at Scale and so on. So, yeah, in this way you can actually figure out all the attributes that you want to go for and generate the article, publish it on guest posts and, you know, do some press releases if you want to and so on. You can even generate some videos as well, like from within Autoblogging. Yeah. Vaibhav, can you stop sharing your screen now? I want to ask you a few questions on it. So, Vaibhav, with regards to that there, what makes this a genius move is the amount of people that are looking to do... Get as many different prompts as possible. Look at all the different query fan-out terms. Maybe look at competition and do the comparison articles or the alternative articles from one of your brands. But a lot of them say, I want to build consensus. And I've already done, like, one or two articles of it. Well, no. To build the consensus, you can start to do a comparison article for, like, say, IndexMeNow versus Indexceptional as being two indexing tools. Once I've done that once or twice, I'm like, oh, I can't think of any more to do. No, you can start covering every different attribute. Yeah. Against the competitor. So, IndexMeNow versus Indexceptional for Google indexing. IndexMeNow versus Indexceptional for guest post, um, indexing and stuff like that. So, you can have all the different types there. That it just gives someone a, a almost an external topical map that they're able to go after multiple times, covering every single attribute. What's your thoughts on it anyway, Paul?

Paul: 100% agree with that concept. And this is really dealing with, like, the contextual layers that sit under the contextual domain that you're dealing with. So, whatever that contextual domain happens to be, you'll have all these layers which are the... You talked about this actually in, not in the context of LLMs, but well over a year ago when you were talking about EAV triples. So, this kind of really fits together in general semantics as well. So, we're talking about all these contextual layers that allow you to cover these entity-attribute pairs with their values, with the attribute values, uh, in a comparison form so that you can massively increase without having any fear of, of having, um, any duplicate, uh, titles out there. Because what one of the problems with having the duplicates, as you guys know, that not that there's a penalty for it when you put this on third-party sources, but the problem is that Google will often not index them or not show them because they're too similar. So, if you put articles up that are attacking it from a completely different context or covering a different attribute and values of that attribute, it's a completely distinct and unique article. And so that is a way, yeah, you can, you can get so much more mileage. And by doing that, you're covering, um, one of the things I've noticed with a lot of these tracking tools that, that are out there is that they're obsessed with the fan-out on the prompts that, that, that people have used up to date. But the problem with the prompts that people have used, A, that they're so wide, they're so, so broad. Um, and also that's history. That doesn't mean they're going to be the prompts next month. They almost definitely won't be. But if you cover all of the attributes and their values, you're kind of... And you cover them from different context, you're kind of already covering... It doesn't matter what the prompt is then. It doesn't matter how a person, whatever language they use to get to the, the... Or to try and extract the answer from the engine, you've got it covered.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. Vaibhav, one last question. So, we're looking... We're, we're looking at AEO competitor research. We're trying to look at all different attributes that a competitor has. Let's say they come into Autoblogging.ai and they go and find 550 different articles or topics to go after. They've got the article titles now. Can you give me just a few examples, apart from the guest posting or PBNs or putting it on your own website, with Rankera, you're doing quite a lot with other platforms and different types of content. Can you just list a few different ways how people could be externally kind of showing, like, covering these to cover the attributes to say why your brand is better?

Vaibhav Sharda: Um, so in Rankera, what we do with... It's a done-for-you service in which we publish or generate all the articles. And based on those articles, we do videos. And those videos goes on YouTube, YouTube long form, YouTube short form, and even Instagram Reels. And we also do Medium posts and GitHub Gists for now. Like, GitHub Gists are working really well right now. Even Medium, if they index well, and videos are actually quite nice too. Like, like Google actually uses a single or multiple videos as AI Overviews in a lot of different niches. It depends on niche to niche, but most of the niches they usually work well for videos. Even Instagram is working really well. So what we do is, this is the base that I showed you. Like, this is the... This is what we use to figure out what content goes out there for every brand that signs up. And based on these titles or these, you know, these attributes and everything, these... This is what we use to start out. And this is working really well because it puts out a good name for your brand out there and puts you against all those competitors along with those attributes. Like, it, it puts you in the Google's eyes, right? Because if you... Even if you have, like, one or two posts out there or videos out there which specifies the competitor along with your name for that attribute, it is... You will find it surprising how easy it is for them to pick those videos out. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Are you doing anything with Reddit anymore or you kind of stopped doing Reddit?

James Dooley: Not right now. It is kind of very hard and annoying because as soon as you mention any brand name in a post or even in comments it gets taken down. So, I'm just saying I'm still experimenting on it. Not there yet. Paul, can you expand a little bit? So obviously Vaibhav's causing it all tied up and he's trying to... Trying to get it on as many third-party corroborative sources as possible. Can you talk a little bit about the genius move of covering those attributes in your case studies? And in, if you can... If you're able to, not in saying incentivise clients or customers, but if they're able to get them in the testimonials, to get the attributes in there as well? Or, if you can win any awards specifically covering that attribute, how that is building the reputation on a, on a novel level as well.

Paul: Okay, so a lot of... Most companies don't even do a good job of doing this on their own site, okay? So, that's the number one. They need to get better at doing that. Cover all of the attributes, the entity's attributes and values across each distinct thing. And I, and I would break that down into company attributes and their values, product attributes and the values, service attributes and the values, and make sure they're covered. Then the next thing is you've got to look at... See it from Google's perspective. And I, I always think of this as a set of weighing scales, right? So, anything that's first and second party... So, for people that don't understand that, first party is, like, your website, anything you have absolute control over what, what content goes on there. Second party is where you have most... Mostly control. So, that there are moderation, there is some... There are rules to what you can and can't post, but essentially you've got control over what you post on them. Then there's third party, where technically you don't have any control. This is where a third-party either company or person is declaring what they think of you. Okay, now unfortunately most of the time, unless it's a professionally written article, most of the time there's not a lot of context. So, you'll see people leave reviews, "Oh, Bob was fantastic. He arrived on time. I'd definitely use you again." For what and where? You know, there's nothing to say what they did. So, the more context that you can add in those testimonial citations and reviews... This is even citations too. People do a poor job. So, whenever you've got any kind of third-party mention of your brand or your product or your service, try and put some context around it so that these large language models understand that they can marry up what the third-party person is saying against what they're saying about what, what service, what product, what element of your business, what attribute of your business are they commenting on.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. Anyone who's listening to this and you're doing AEO competitor research, or you might call it GEO competitor research, or AI visibility competitor research, make certain you are going out there covering all attributes both on your website, on your social media, and on these third-party sources. It is so important to be covering them long term. Like Paul said, you shouldn't just be looking solely at query fan-outs. If you are literally covering every single attribute, that is future-proofing yourself. Doesn't matter what they start doing with the query fan-out terms, it's always going to be entity-attribute patterns and what they're going to be talking about, and you're going to be covered long term. So, make sure you check out the link in the description where we go into detail about brand attributes, product attributes, and service attributes. We have a whole episode going deep on the different styles of attributes and what there is, and how you can cover them in all these different places. But, make sure that you're always doing the research, checking out to see why your competitors could be winning, and why the LLMs like Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Grok, Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT, why are they citing or recommending your competitor? Find out the why, and then try and cover that, so hopefully further down the line, the large language models start to cite your own brand and your own business. Vaibhav and Paul, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.