This week on Local Search Tuesdays, I’m breaking down why customer reviews should be front and center in your AI search strategy. Reviews have always been huge for Local SEO, but with AI systems analyzing sentiment and looking for diverse content, they’re more important than ever. And it’s not just about Google or Yelp anymore—review diversity across multiple sites could be the secret to staying visible in AI-driven results.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’m going to be talking about how customer reviews should be a key part of your future AI search strategy.
Reviews have always been a key element of any Local SEO strategy. If you look at the most recent few years of the Local Search Ranking Factors study from Whitespark, reviews have gained weight in the algorithm every year for the last three years - and likely will be even more weighted when we get the results back from this year’s LSRF study.
Now we have AI search systems, and even though they’re in their infancy, everyone is trying to figure out how they work and which factors influence visibility in search results.
AI systems excel at identifying patterns, and sentiment analysis is a key step in returning results to many of the queries people enter. According to recent research, consistent positive sentiment across forums, social media sites, and review sites seems to be a key indicator of better visibility in AI search results.
Query fan-out is an important aspect here too. The AI systems will look for diverse content types to answer the multiple queries that are spun out from the original query. Review sites are a key source of both sentiment and user-generated information about a company or product.
It’s not just about the review stars - the text that accompanies the score are where the gold is buried.
Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide had a great quote in a recent blog post: “If AI is a super-smart, ever-learning student, your reviews are AI’s Spark Notes for your business”
Reviews provide real-world, human-generated content. They offer diversity of opinion, which AI systems love. Reviews also offer current, up-to-date sentiment. The AI systems don’t have to crawl through hundreds or thousands of reviews and do real-time calculations to figure out sentiment - the sentiment score already exists.
Most importantly, reviews offer insight into firsthand customer experiences - information that the AI systems can’t really get anywhere else.
Historically, most everyone has really only cared about Google reviews. Businesses that were more aggressive with their Local SEO strategies might also have focused on Yelp, since the reviews displayed on Apple Maps were sourced from Yelp instead of Google.
And you should continue to care about those two, but as we move into the future, review diversity will be important. The AI systems will seek out unique and helpful information from multiple sources in order to provide a better answer to the initial query.
The AI might look at Facebook reviews. It may check out forums like Reddit. Depending on the query, it could check vertical-specific review sites like Healthgrades, Angie’s List, or DealerRater. You won’t know which sites are the most important, since the queries will be so diverse, and the query fan-out means multiple queries to multiple sources.
So as you look to the future, make sure review diversity is a key element in your digital strategy. And remember, while lots of “gurus” online claim to know the secret sauce to showing up in AI search results, the truth is that no one really knows, and we’re all just trying to figure it out. I’ll keep sharing insights in future episodes, ‘cause we’re all on this road together.
That’s all the time we have left for this week’s episode, so you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here: We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
