Around a decade ago, I shared some thoughts on how Google handles duplicate content. In short, while duplicate content generally wasn’t really a good thing, there wasn’t a penalty associated with it or anything. We encouraged people to avoid publishing duplicate content, but it wasn’t a huge deal.
These days things have flipped, and duplicate content can be very helpful.
This video from Rand Fishkin explains what I mean. He shares how he frequently uses the same chunk of text along with the name of his company, and as a result the AI tools are always surfacing his company for that very specific phrase.
In particular, he points out his profile on his website, and how when he speaks at events he always encourages those events to use this profile word-for-word. Included in it is a little blurb about his company, including the words “SparkToro, makers of fine audience research software“. Sure enough, if you go to your AI tool of choice and search for things related to finding “audience research software”, SparkToro usually comes up.
Here’s what I see in ChatGPT:
As Rand points out, though, if you search for phrases around “audience research tools” (which is essentially the same phrase), he doesn’t come up at all. AI tools don’t care as much about synonyms as Google does, and they’re just pattern matching words. This means two things:
- The specific words that you use to describe your company are very important.
- Once you’ve decided on the words, getting that text published far and wide will be of great benefit to you.
The second bullet is much easier said than done. Publish blog posts, repost on other platforms like Substack and Medium, share frequently on social media, appear on podcasts, use a PR firm to help get published in other places, etc. The more you get it out there, the more the AI tools will pick up on it.
Then, when people are using those AI tools to do research about companies like yours, you just might be the result that is shown.
Check out Rand’s full (3 minute) video for more.
