The Power of Persona In AI Search

Hugh Taylor, CEO of Taylor Communications, outlines the persuasive power that personas have in the evolving world of AI search. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

It’s still early in the lifecycle, but people are increasingly using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT as search engines. The trend is upending the field of search engine optimization (SEO). It’s also affecting my work, as I have spent the last 20 years writing SEO content. The SEO field is pivoting toward the emerging discipline of generative engine optimization (GEO), whose goal is to rank websites in LLM search results. In pursuing this pivot for myself, I discovered a successful methodology that can also help us optimize our use of AI in general.

The Starting Point: A Company that was Flatlining in LLM Search

Comms Factory, which offers public relations services for small businesses, had zero visibility in AI-based search results. The firm’s website did not appear in responses to 25 prompts on LLMs. This situation represented a potentially significant problem for Comms Factory. As prospects turn to GenAI for search, a lack of presence on major platforms threatens to shut Comms Factory out of opportunities to develop new client relationships.

Solution: Adding Persona to the GEO Process

The basic premise of GEO is that the AI platforms regularly crawl the web and ingest content that informs how they respond to prompts. GEO is similar to SEO in this way, but with some notable differences. While SEO focuses on keywords, GEO is more subjective. Success comes from demonstrating authority on the topic the prompt represents.

The first step to establishing authority in GEO is to figure out which prompts you want to rank for on the LLMs. I worked with a GEO tool that analyzed the Comms Factory website and competitors’ websites to suggest prompts. The suggested prompts, such as “Who writes press releases?”, were satisfactory, but I concluded I needed to do more to achieve results.

What was missing, in my view, was the searcher’s persona. As a longtime B2B tech marketer, I’ve worked with the concept of buyer persona many times. It is relevant to GEO, too. The searcher is a person with wants, needs, and fears. If you understand the searcher’s persona and what’s driving their buyer’s journey, you will discover prompts that speak to their search intent.

The nature of LLMs makes the searcher’s persona more important in AI search than it is in conventional search. If you watch people using ChatGPT, you may see them asking questions into their phones, with the software answering them. It’s not search. Using Google is akin to filling out a form. Using ChatGPT amounts to a dialogue between a human and a machine. This human-machine relationship can go even further, with users forming what is essentially a friendly partnership with the software. These factors all affect LLM search.

A person-driven brainstorming session yielded 25 prompts. For example, an entrepreneur who needs web traffic might prompt ChatGPT with “Do press releases get you web traffic?” or “Do press releases help with SEO?” From there, TC grouped the prompts into core categories: Public Relations, Publicist Services, and Press Release Writing.

The prompt groupings became the subject of “hub” pages in a “hub and spoke” content architecture. I wrote five hub pages myself, using a passage-optimization method I’d found effective with other GEO clients. I had the GEO platform’s generative AI (GenAI) tool write 25 “spoke” pages, one for each prompt.

Getting Visibility through the Persona-Driven Approach to GEO

The persona-driven GEO campaign began showing results within days. Within three weeks, starting from zero, Comms Factory had earned 64 mentions on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Forty percent of those mentions ranked #1. The campaign has given Comms Factory brand visibility, putting it in the number three position behind larger, more established competitors. This ranking translates into Comms Factory having a 12 percent “Share of Voice” among the seven competitors measured by the GEO platform. Comms Factory’s brand visibility is growing at the highest rate of the top three. Additionally, seven out of the campaign’s 25 prompts are now visible on AI search, with one prompt now ranking #1, one at #2, and one at #3.

Seeing the Bigger Picture: Persona-Driven GEO Shows the Power of Synergistic Intelligence

The success of persona-driven GEO demonstrates the value of keeping people in mind when working with AI tools. It’s easy to get sucked into the maelstrom of AI and think of it exclusively in technology terms. That’s an error, in my view. The nature of AI and the way people use it make the human factor more important than in any other area of computing.

GEO is also a great venue for what I call synergistic intelligence—the blending of AI with one’s own unique smarts. If you’re using AI tools the same way everyone else does, you will be running in place. If you can inject your distinctive intelligence into your use of AI, which is the fundamental principle of persona-driven GEO, you will synergize with the technology and achieve a positive outcome. At least, that’s the promise. As they say on TV, actual results may vary, but if you don’t try, you won’t get anywhere.