New service, new partnership: Video for AI Search is here!

We’re super excited to announce that we’ve partnered with our friends at Unbranded Digital to launch a brand new service offering: Video for AI Search.

But what’s that?! Never fear, of course the video content is here to explain everything. Let’s dig in.

What is video for AI search?

The way people search online has changed, and as such, your approach to SEO needs to change too. More traditional SEO techniques do and are still working, but with the landscape shifting more towards AI-powered search, there are a few things you need to know moving forward.

AI search is multimodal. It loves to provide answers in a rich context, crawling all kinds of information in order to formulate a response – this includes video.

When you use it correctly, AI powered search can crawl the metadata you add to your videos, much like it crawls your website’s content pages.

How does it work?

AI Search works in a couple of ways. Firstly, it uses the data it has already used to train its model stored as embeddings, and secondly it uses a process called RAG. RAG finds relevant information and up to date information by breaking down a long prompt into separate search queries. All this information is then compiled, and in turn forms its response.

Why is video great for AI Search?

It’s common knowledge that video content can be some of the most engaging out there. Lots of platforms now favour it like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube (which are often cited in AI overviews because AI search crawls these platforms – another reason to produce high quality video content!).

As well as being engaging, video content serves a lot of purposes. It answers questions, it provides context, it creates authority, builds trust and tells stories. AI Search models love to provide answers with a rich context, and all these factors contribute to that. As well as being beneficial for AI Search, these attributes have a multitude of benefits for your brand beyond your SEO activity.

AI Search models crawl video content for their schema, captions and descriptions, so it’s really important to properly position your content.

What’s Brand Drift and why should I care about it?

Now, within the context of AI Search, you might have come across something called ‘Brand Drift’. Let us explain…

AI powered search tools, at present, can be classed as prediction engines, which means that they can sometimes put two and two together (which might seem logical), but end up with seven.

For example, within your industry, there might be three common services, Service A, Service B and Service C. Now you might offer Service A and Service C, whereas your competitors might offer all three services. In an AI powered search, the platform might look at your industry landscape and make the assumption that because the three services are common among your competitors, it makes sense that you’d offer all three too. This happens particularly if you don’t have very much content for the platform to go off. This is called Brand Drift.

It can also happen with your brand messaging, but thankfully, video content is a fantastic way to combat this.

How do I properly position my video content?

Now, this is important.

First and foremost, you need to make sure you’re structuring your content around SEO data. This means using keywords, key questions and structuring your responses as succinctly as possible to accurately answer queries.

Your content also needs to be engaging, front-loaded with the key bits that users are searching for, accurate and genuinely relevant.

Next, it’s all about positioning.

It’s the metadata attached to your video content that AI search can crawl, so it’s really important that you add:

• Captions
• Optimised titles, descriptions, chapters
• Transcripts
• Timestamps

It’s also important to house your content in an appropriately optimised blog post, and to share it across your platforms (YouTube, Instagram Reels, TikTok).

What about the way I’ve always done SEO?

It’s very much worth mentioning here that if your current SEO strategy is working for you, it’s still very much worth doing. But if you want to stay ahead of the AI curve, then incorporating video content into your existing strategy is a really, really good plan.

If you want to make the most of this service, using Unbranded’s excellent SEO knowledge and our professional videography skills, then don’t hesitate to get in touch and start the conversation with us today using the contact at the bottom of this page.

To find out more, check out our Video for AI Search service page.