The Marketer’s Guide to Answer Engine Optimization

Answer engines such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini increasingly create and retain commercial intent, traffic, and some sales. Answer engines make shopping more convenient, especially for those who are comfortable using answer engines rather than other media—and ultimately, shoppers are loyal to convenience. Here are three ways answer engines deliver convenience:

• Supplying information symmetry. Answer engines offer rich, immersive details about how merchants and other shoppers perceive the quality of products. According to Forrester Research data, 29 percent of U.S. online adults struggle to buy apparel online because they “can’t tell the material and quality of what [they are] buying based on the product page.” When consumers ask ChatGPT questions about a product, the engine queries merchants’ product feeds, brands’ owned and operated properties, crowd-sourced forums like Reddit, and more, offering consumers nearly complete information to learn more about, compare, and purchase products.
• Minimizing shoppers’ time to value. Answer engines empower shoppers to complete deeper, faster research than they can on traditional search engines. ChatGPT gets, on average, about eight prompts per user per day, compared to three queries per user per day on classic Google search. And prompts on answer engines are, on average, six times longer than queries on search engines. Yet sessions on answer engines typically don’t last as long as those on search engines, and answer engines also accelerate business buyers’ journeys. According to Forrester data, answer engines help 28 percent of B2B buyers spend less time doing research. Despite faster journeys, 57 percent of B2B buyers consider more or different vendors, which highlights the efficiency and efficacy of answer engines.
• Making shopping as natural as speaking. Answer engines enhance the capabilities of virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, which introduced millions of consumers to voice-based shopping. Most consumers still use virtual assistants for informational, rather than commercial, queries, but answer engines are changing the game. ChatGPT’s paid subscribers can access “agent mode,” which integrates Shopify for voice-based transactions. Per Forrester data, about one in five U.S. online adults use voice commands with a virtual assistant to research products/services at least weekly. That number will rise as virtual assistants make it easier to discover products, add items to shopping lists, track packages, and provide ratings and reviews.

Enhance Content to Prepare for Commerce Across Answer Engines

Having resonant, technically sound, and fresh content improves a brand’s ability to persuade shoppers throughout their journeys that begin and end on answer engines’ results pages. Here’s how marketers can capitalize on commerce across answer engines:

• Map authoritative content to questions. Anticipate and satisfy commercial intent across answer engines by modeling the questions that shoppers ask in different phases of their journeys. Then create credible content that specifically answers FAQs. Listen to conversations on Reddit and Quora to glean FAQs. Develop distinctive yet simple content that associates your brand with the topics that are important to shoppers. Distribute content authored by in-house and third-party subject matter experts on and off your site to grow your share of voice. The more effective you are, the higher answer engines’ opinions will be of your products.
• Make content indexable. Answer engine crawlers are more active and less forgiving than search engine crawlers. They’re still in training, so they ignore protocols such as robots.txt, visit the same page repeatedly every few hours, and hit websites with hundreds of requests per second. Regularly update site maps, establish a clear and logical internal linking structure, implement schema, and pre-render pages so crawlers can easily index content for shoppers as they discover, evaluate, and commit to products and services.
• Amp up content velocity. As answer engines become more visually persuasive, they demand not just more content but more compelling content. Heighten content velocity across text, image, and video by using generative AI to brainstorm and draft assets and variations. The more variations engines are fed, the quicker they detect winning and losing variables, reducing companies’ time to optimization. Spread winning variables on and off owned properties to augment visibility, which lifts consideration and sales.
• Amplify authority offsite. While search engines over-index on owned and operated content, answer engines increasingly rely on content not on a company’s site. Participate in forums like Reddit and manage your reputation on review aggregators to augment authority. Work with PR to manage how influential voices in your market mention your brand. For example, a pet food brand can hire veterinarians to amplify their brand’s unique value propositions in glossaries, infographics, and videos that get sourced and cited on answer engines’ results pages. 

Nikhil Lai is a principal analyst at Forrester Research.