Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: Well, hello there. Welcome
to AI Search one oh one. We're going to see
how quickly we can get through this crash course. If you're a business owner,
if you're an artist, if you are somebody
who has something that you want to show up when somebody types into ChatGPT or Perplexity or Google Gemini, this is absolutely
the course for you, whether you're an intermediate, whether you're a beginner, I am so excited to have you here and welcome to the class. My name is Ben Hawes. I am the founder of
Ben Hawes HQ and I run a photo booth business
here in New York City that comes up quite
successfully on ChatGPT and other AI
search platforms. And so I'm really excited to share just general
notes with you, general things that
I've learned across my time in 2025 and 2026, learning about how to make your business show
up on ChatGPT. AI Search. This is
so important to me because this is the
shift that is happening. This is the direction
that things are going. And this is what we need
to do as business owners, as people who have
passion projects, and as people who are artists and performers and
whatever we are, we need to be able to
show up on AISearch. Google is no longer
the best way to show up because people are now at least equally using ChatGPT when they want
to find recommendations. So if they're looking
for a restaurant, if they're looking
for a party vendor, if they're looking
for a job even, people are often using
ChatGPT or Perplexity or other AI search platforms really to find what
they want to do. So I'm a business owner. I am a technological wizard, I guess you could say, and I love talking
about AI search. So today's class, we're going to be talking about
three different things. We're going to get into
three different sections, three different chapters, and I'm really excited
for you to be here. So thank you again for joining. Number one, we're going to
talk about the SEO basics. So SEO itself, search engine optimization
is an art. It's a science. It's a skill, and it is something
that is to be mastered. But these ten or 15 minutes
that we spend on this course, I'm really excited to get
you to know the basics. Then we'll talk
about how AI search works and how it's different
from Google Search. And then we'll talk about
making it work for you. That will be the
bulk of this course. That will be really
how ultimately you are setting yourself
apart from your competitors, setting yourselves
up for success when it comes to AI Search. And so without further ado, I would love to just
get into the course. Please click on to the next section and we will
get started. Here we go.
2. SEO Basics: SEO basics. Raise your hand. I
know this is virtual. I know this is something, but we want to be interactive here. So, raise your
hand just for fun. If you know all there
is to know about SEO, you notice I don't have my hand raised because there is so much that you could learn
about SEO over your lifetime. And there's just so much.
There really is just too much to ever learn everything and
to be an absolute expert. Big, huge Fortune
500 companies hire teams and teams of
people to focus on SEO. So if you are a one person
business or if you are a you know, part of a small team. This is the perfect course
for you to learn the basics, to learn what will
have the highest impact for the lowest lift, and to really just
get to a place where you are able to show up on Google on Google AI on
ChatGPT, on other platforms. One thing to note is that these changes are not
going to be instant. So if you change
your website copy or if you compress your images on your website
or whatever it might, it might take two
months, four months, or six months to
actually take effect and for you to see results
when it comes to SEO. So that's something
that's really important to communicate upfront. You're not necessarily
going to come up immediately in Google
with SEO efforts. Some of them will come
up quicker than others, but for the full effect of the work that you're
going to be doing, it's really important to
know that it does take time. So be patient, let
things settle in. Don't change it
every single day and allow some time for these
changes to take place. So one of the first
things to really know about SEO is the page speed. Your page speed, how quickly your page loads or how quickly your website loads is
going to be very important because it tells Google how
quality your website is. So if somebody clicks
into your website and it takes 10 seconds to load, it's going to tell Google
that that's a bad website and that it's not going to send other people to your website. That's just a fact. Page speed, to me, is the thing that you
have the most control over. Things like images can't be too big. You don't
want to have too videos on your website. You don't want to have
too many, you know, just too much content
that people have to scroll through and load and click through
and all of that. Slide shows, you know, things like galleries, you
know, a lot of coding. If you're using something like
square space or if you're using something like WIC
or another, you know, website building platform,
be very mindful of how much density exists
on your website. Um, something that has
the biggest impact, I will say is the
hardest thing to do, but getting backlinks
from reputable websites. Blinks are when another company or another website links to your website because they've
written a story about you or because they are recommending you or
for whatever reason, that will impact your
SEO quite a bit. It will both impact your
Google SEO and your AI SEO. The next thing that is probably the quickest way to show
up the quickest in search, whether that's Google or
whether that's AI is to get listed on platforms such
as Google Business, your Google Business profile. If you don't have a
Google Business profile, I would highly, highly, highly recommend setting that up because that will
definitely get you to a place where
you're showing up on another platform
besides your own website. Same thing with Yelp, same
thing with industry databases. So, for example, if
you're a wedding florist, you want to show up on
things like the not. You want to show up on
things like the Bash, wedding wire, things like that. Getting yourself listed on
websites like that will ultimately help both your AI and your traditional SEO search. And then the last
one here is having a clean website structure so that pages make
sense to crawlers. Crawlers basically, how quickly can the Internet
understand your content? So having, you know, what
they call H one headers, having H two headers, having H three headers, and having text that actually speaks directly to
what is in the header. We'll get into what those
can be in the next section. But I wanted to quickly take a little moment and talk about the basics of SEO so
that you can just understand what will ultimately
help your website the most because when we
get to AI search, it's important that you
have the SEO basics under control, if that
makes sense to you. I think it is really
important to just have the basics there so that once
you get to the AI strategy, you can actually show up and the basics
are taken care of. It's kind of one of
those situations where the foundation is the
most important piece.
3. How AI Search Works: Into how AI search works. This is something that
I think about often. It's something that
I'm really passionate about because I want
to make sure that you understand there are
differences between the way that people
Google search and the way that people AI search. When they're Google, they're
typing in things like, you know, concerts NYC. That's an example. They're
typing in concerts, San Francisco, whatever it is. Whereas when they're going into AI Search, they're
typing in, like, What kind of concert can I see tonight in this neighborhood
in San Francisco? It's a little bit different than how they are Google things. So it's really
important that you optimize your own website. You optimize your own blog, you optimize your own content, your social media content,
things like that, in order to show up when people
ask questions like that. Because basically
what's going to happen is if you
have something on your website that
directly matches what people are asking on ChatGPT, for example, you will
ultimately show up faster and first when people ask
the questions that match what you have
on your content. And so it's really
important to just understand that
difference and to have keywords on your
website that will allow for you to show
up in traditional SEO, like on Google and in AI search. The next thing is that AI relies on different
inputs and sources. So one thing that's really
interesting is that with Google, you know, it's really more like your
website that you're trying to have show up
more immediately, maybe something
like your LinkedIn or your YouTube page or
something like that, but very rarely,
is someone Google, you know, florist in Tampa, and an Instagram is
going to show up first or a YouTube page, you
know, things like that. Usually, a Yelp page
will show up or a Google Business profile will show up or
something like that. But with AI AI is searching
the entire Internet to find out what is the most relevant to the question that
is being asked. It's not looking necessarily at, you know, the same things
that Google is looking at. And so it's really important to understand what
those sources are, and those sources really
are social media, blogs, press, things like that. And so that's really
important to understand. And AI is also truly
making recommendations. It's not just listing the most popular things
that have been clicked on. It's actually making
recommendations for people based on what they asked and based on what
AI knows about that person. So for example, if somebody has talked about how they just really never liked
anchovies on pizza, and there's a restaurant
called AnchovPizza and someone types in pizza
pizza Philadelphia. Like anchovies are not going to show up in that
person's AI search. Do you know what I mean? So it's really
important that you're descriptive about what you do offer for your
service or your product. That's how AI is different
than regular search. And so let's move on to
talking about really quickly how you can make
AI work for you.
4. Make It Work For You : You're trying to make
AI work for you. It's really important to
think about your intentions. Why do you want to show up
when someone searches in AI? Is it because ultimately, obviously you want to
get more business, but what are the reasons
that you would show up over your competitors and be
descriptive over that? That's the main takeaway that I want you
to take away from this class is whenever you're writing content
for your business, whenever you're writing
website copy for your website, whatever it is, be
descriptive as heck. That's the big takeaway is you're no longer
looking for keywords. Keywords would be if you were
a dodgeball team company, you know, a league
is what I meant. A Dodgeball league. Like, you would have used Dodgeball League over and over and over again
in your website. But now, you want to talk
about who you're serving. You want to talk about
the city that you're in, you want to talk about
programs that you're running, things like that
in your content. So, number one, with SEO for AI, which a lot of people call AIO or a lot of people
call, you know, AEO, it's kind of
influx right now, but it's something that is
going to continue to grow. But you want to make sure you
have those basics covered. Having those basics covered with you know, the page speed, the backlinks, things
like that will ultimately help you more
than you even can imagine. But then, number two, you want to write social
media content with really descriptive
information about your business. So this is the big shift. I feel like the big thing
that's different is that when Google was the main search platform
that people were using, it wasn't necessarily searching people's individual
Instagram posts or Tik Tok posts or whatever. But now with AI, the social media
matters even more, and it matters for
search even more. And so it's really important that if you're going
to post a picture of a smoothie from
your smoothie shop that you describe the smoothie, almost like say what's
in the smoothie, say who came in and
got the smoothie, say where your
smoothie shop is and how much the pricing is
and things like that. Times adding specific
details about pricing or adding specific
details about location or, you know, planning out,
you know, say, Oh, we are a smoothie shop, and we planned your perfect Saturday. You know, that kind
of thing can show up in search way more because
somebody could say, Hey, I'm in New York
for a Saturday. Like, what should I do?
Your thing might show up. If the AI knows that the person has a history of loving
smoothies, you might show up. So having a really active
social media page that really describes social media or really describes what your
business is all about, what your products and
services are all about, and what your core values and how you operate
and where you are, really going into
those details on social media will be
very, very helpful. Adding descriptive Q Q and A style content to your
website is crucial. It is so important to
do as you're writing copy for your website
because ultimately, when people are searching and they're asking questions,
like, for example, if you're a bike
shop in San Diego, you sell bikes, you fix
bikes, things like that. On your website,
it needs to have questions that people
might ask about that. So for example, you
can have a page on your website that is just simply Q Q and A, that's totally okay. And it might say,
like, how much does it cost to fix a bike in San Diego? Somebody is going to
Google that or they're going to put that
into ChatGPT and your website is going to come
up more likely if you have those questions and
answers readily available. And even if they don't
land on your website, they might actually get served your content
within ChatGPT, which is very, very cool
and a huge opportunity. Another example would be, I have this orange
on this slide. If you are a fruit
stand somewhere, if you are a fruit store somewhere you're a
smoothie store again, having information
about what it is you sell why you sell it, who the founder is, you
know, where you're located, all of that stuff is very, very important on your website. Whereas before it
mattered more that, yeah, your page was fast and
that you had cool images and it looked cool and that it was a sales page and whatever. Now, the sales page
doesn't matter as much as the
information on the page. So it's really important
to think about that. Then you want to talk
about social proof. This is where it really
gets interesting because you have control
over your social media. You have control
over your website. What you don't have
control over is how people review your products
and services. And so it's really important
to make sure that you're kind of asking for reviews or
generating reviews somehow, and whether that is posted onto your profiles or
onto your social media or whether you're collecting
reviews on something like Trust pilot or Google reviews
or Yelp or whatever it is. Um, it's really important
to start getting more and more reviews
because something that's rated five
stars is just going to come up better in AI search, compared to something
that's one star, or something that
has 100 reviews is going to come up more likely than someone who
has two reviews, if that is starting
to make sense. You want to build social proof. So things like even
social media shares. If somebody shares something
that you posted on Facebook, that's going to be really,
really helpful as well. And so all of that
matters a lot. And then the thing that is
even better is press mentions. So if you can get
listed in a wedding, you know, publication
or if you can get listed in a business
publication or, you know, relevant industry publication, that's going to help
your AI search almost more than anything because it's a backlink and it's
also social proof, and it's also descriptive about what your
business is offering. And so those three things,
like, for example, if you can get listed in Forbes or Business Insider or
something like that, those websites, them recommending
you is very valuable. There's plenty of ways to go about getting
that kind of press. I have a couple, you know, you can take classes on Skillshare. You can do different courses here and there on
how to get Press, but it's really
important to see if you can try to pitch yourself to get on other
people's websites. And with that, we'll go to
the Rapid Fire checklist.
5. Class Checklist: Rapid Fire Checklist,
just to close us out, is really just here
to make sure that you know what you need to do
in order to show up first, second or third on ChatGPT. A lot of times with ChatGPT, they will recommend two or three different
options for people. And so as long as you can be the best option in
that list of three, it doesn't even matter
as much if you're first, second or third because
people do like to peruse which option is best for them. And so the Rapid Fire checklist
here is my site fast? Do I have backlinks? Am I listed on
multiple platforms? Am I posting on social media? Do I have Q Q&A
website Q Q&A sections on my homepage on my
website? Do I have reviews? Do I have active blog posts
based on customer questions? And have I pitched myself to
a press outlet this quarter? If you do all of those things, you are so much more likely
to show up on AI search. And I just want to
really encourage you to take action on that because the time is now
the opportunity is here, and you really want to get into optimizing yourself
for this AI search. One little disclaimer, I'll say, is that we all have different
opinions or we all have different levels of acceptance or denial or rejection of AI, and that's totally okay. What's different here is that you don't need to use AI even to show up on AI for
people who are using AI. And so that's something
that's really important to note is, like, AI search doesn't mean that
you are constantly using AI. It just means that for the
people who are using it, they are able to find you, and that's how you're going
to get more business. That's my point.
6. Next Steps & Thank You: To close us out, I'd love to just thank you
for taking the course. I would love to
connect with you. I would love to share more
information with you. And if you have any
questions, you can DM me over on Instagram
at Ben Hawes HQ. That is where I run
all of my businesses, and I have all of my
communications coming out of. I really hope you
enjoyed this class. I have other classes on small business and
side hustle success, as well as creativity,
podcasting and other tools and
resources as well. I hope you have a great
day and even better week. Thank you so much for
taking this course and go out there and get
found. Thank you so much.
Ben Hawes, Creative Project Consultant & Podcaster
