What three things get a video cited by AI search?

State the definitive answer in the first 15 seconds, speak in clear bullet points, and explicitly define your key terms.

Quick Answer

• AI crawlers look for exact facts, not long hooks.
• Three things: answer in the first 15 seconds, speak in clear bullet points for easy extraction, and explicitly define your key terms.
• Start with the business problem, then find out where you stand in AI search, then approve a realistic plan.

This fits inside a bigger picture. If you want the foundation first, here's the full picture.

Exact facts first, then a plan

AI crawlers look for exact facts, not long hooks. To get your video cited by AI, you have to do three things:

1. State the definitive answer in the first 15 seconds.
2. Speak in clear bullet points for easy extraction.
3. Explicitly define your key terms.

Then comes the plan around the video. It starts with goals. What is the business problem you're trying to solve? For most companies right now, that's going to be around visibility and trust. Maybe your website traffic has been dropping. Maybe it's taking too long to sell. Whatever that is, GEO (generative engine optimization) is going to help accelerate and improve those things.

The next step is Intel. Find out where you stand right now. What is your search volume? Where are you showing up in AI search?

Then you can move to what's possible. If you're going to start answering buyer questions, how many of those can you answer? That takes you into the realistic phase: what can you actually accomplish? Weigh the options, come up with a plan, and approve it.

"AI crawlers look for exact facts, not long hooks." Dane Frederiksen

Want the whole list? Download the free GEO Video Checklist.

Still getting your head around this? Start with the foundation. It's the foundation the rest of this sits on.

Frequently Asked Questions

How fast should a video answer the question for AI search?

State the definitive answer in the first 15 seconds. AI crawlers look for exact facts, not long hooks.

Why speak in bullet points on video?

Clear bullet points make your answer easy to extract. That is one of the three things that get a video cited by AI.

What business problem does GEO solve?

For most companies right now it is visibility and trust. Maybe website traffic has been dropping, or it is taking too long to sell. GEO helps accelerate and improve those things.

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Full Clip Transcript

AI crawlers look for exact facts, not long hooks. To get your video cited by AI, you got to do three things. Number one, state the definitive answer in the first 15 seconds. Number two, speaking clear bullet points for easy extraction. And number three, explicitly define your key terms. Let's break down each step. It starts with goals. What is the business problem that you're trying to solve? For most companies, right now, that's going to be around visibility and trust. Maybe your website traffic has been dropping. Maybe it's taking too long to sell. Whatever that is, GEO is going to help accelerate those things and improve them. So we've got to take a, the next step is to go into Intel. We've got to find out where do we stand right now? What is our search volume? Where are we showing up in AI search? And then we can move to what's possible. Like, what can we do about this? If we're going to start answering buyer questions, how many of those can we answer? We kind of have to go into the realistic phase then about what can we actually accomplish. And then we weigh the different options about what's realistic. And then we'll come up with a plan and we'll approve a plan.

Full Transcript

The best practices for optimizing video for generative engines revolve around high information density and front loading your answers. AI crawlers look for exact facts, not long hooks. To get your video cited by AI, you need to do three things. Number one, state the definitive answer in the first 15 seconds. Number two, speak in clear bullet points for easy extraction. Number three, explicitly define your key terms.

I have a free GEO video checklist for you to download the description below. Now let's break down each step. So we're going to start over here with our goals. The reason we do that is because without having a goal in mind, you won't know whether you're successful. Then, since we're answering buyer questions with GEO best practices, we're going to identify in the Intel phase what are the buyer questions that they're asking? Now you're going to find these in your sales transcripts, chats.

You could also find them on places like Quora or Reddit. You may even know 80% of the questions that get asked all the time. So then we're going to do an audit and see, okay, which of these questions do we already have some video content that's answering these questions directly? Are they showing up in AI searches? So you can look on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, any other LLMs you like, and you can see, are you showing up? You can test daily, weekly, but with some frequency, you'll know whether or not you're part of that buyer journey.

Because if you're not showing up in AI search results, that means things are getting summarized or someone else is showing up. And so this is all about you showing up in their buyer journey with your video content. So you can build trust and so you can help educate them, you know, 80% of the way down their buyer funnel through their buyer journey until they're willing to talk to a salesperson. So that's what this is all about. So once we know where we stand, then we can start to look and see, okay, what's possible here? How many of these questions can we answer with videos?

What's our staff availability? Who can we put on camera? What kind of money or budget or, you know, like all the things you're going to need to pull together for this? What can you actually pull off? So that kind of brings us to the realistic phase. So there's the possible and then there's the realistic.

So these are kind of part of the same thing. And then you get to the point after you've weighed what's realistic for you, you can make some decisions about, okay, now we know what we're going to do. We've approved a plan and so then we go to the build mode. So the way that we're going to build our video answers to buyer questions is we're going to mine those directly from your buyer questions in those transcripts, right? Using their own words, that's very important because that's going to resonate with them and you don't want to use your language that, you know, the way you talk about that internally. You want to use the language that they're searching for.

So you can have answers that answer those directly according to this formula here. So you're front loading those answers and then you're going deep enough in your answers to move them to the next phase in their journey where they're asking a different question because you've already sufficiently answered this one. That is the goal. So according to that formula, we're going to build the videos so that it's answering their questions and then we're going to post those on YouTube as the main driver because YouTube has a financial incentive to surface those in Google search results and people like to watch videos because they're very helpful for educating people in their buyer journey, right? So because they want to watch them, YouTube wants to show them and we want to be a part of that journey. So we're going to post those in a way that they can be crawled by AI crawlers.

We're going to embed these videos with transcripts. We're going to use chapter markers on YouTube. We're going to also include thumbnails and titles that are going to resonate with the buyer questions so that they're not lost. We're going to embed these YouTube videos on your site with schema and we're going to include the transcript and decent answers that fully answered their question to move them on just like the video does. So after we post that stuff, pretty quick, we're going to start to get some data like within a day or two. You'll know if people are watching.

If there's no clicks, then something doesn't resonate. It's probably the thumbnail or the title if they're not even clicking. Maybe you haven't optimized it correctly with schema or something like that. So it's not even showing up as they're searching. So we got to show up and we got to earn the click and then after they click, we got to earn the viewership. We got to keep them past the first 30 seconds to make sure that we answered their question and then we got to explain deeply.

And if we're doing a good job of this, we want them to stay to like 70% of the way there and then YouTube will then promote that I think three times as much. And it makes sense because if that's the case, they're watching most of it, it's really helpful content. And so from the nature of the content, the transcripts and all that, YouTube knows who this is going to resonate with. And if you're answering, well, they're going to keep sending that out to more and more people. Now, if these things are not happening in your analysis here, they're not clicking, they're not staying, something like that. We need to do some revisions.

We need to go back and say, all right, we have not answered these questions sufficiently. So maybe we want to do another version of that. The answer is better. Or maybe there's a better priority question that we can go after. If we've answered sufficiently and we have kind of checked off those top of funnel questions that get them into our, into our visibility and trust funnel. Then if they're watching those and we'll know that they're completing, we can make the next videos that's going to move them closer to the sale.

And then ideally, we're approaching a in-state where we have what I like to call content bingo. We've basically created enough video content that answers most of their questions, maybe 80% of their questions. And we've moved them all the way down to the funnel to that 80% place where they're like, okay, now I have some very specific questions to my unique situation, my company, my niche, whatever that is. And then that lasts 20%. That's when they're willing to talk to a salesperson or maybe get a sales chat or something like that. So this is the whole process.

And once we get over to the build mode, this really becomes a flywheel and some beautiful things start happening. You're going to get more and more data about who's watching, what questions are answered, and then what you need to do better. And then the video that you put out there, you spend the time making the video one time and then you put it out there. And every time someone watches that, that's time saved for you because let's say you spend one hour making this video. Well, if you get five people watching that one hour, that's one hour you didn't have to spend educating them in the sales process. And because of low trust, they're not going to want to talk to you anyway.

So that means that somebody is out there educating them. It's either AI Overviews or it's someone else's content, some influencer or your competitor, something like that. And we don't want that. We want them to spend a lot of time with us building trust. And the magic number I think you may have heard of this is like the 7-4-11 rule from Google, which means you need to spend seven hours with your content over four different platforms with 11 different touch points. And even if those numbers aren't the right numbers exactly, I think the idea is still very understandable.

This is a long buying cycle. They have a lot of questions that need answering. So they need to spend time answering those questions. And so you want to be the one that's showing up here, not somebody else. And that's why YouTube is going to be your best friend to build a compounding inbound sales machine, which is going to be optimized for GEO best practices. And it's going to function as a flywheel to get better and better at selling for you.

24-7 with the content that's out there compounding. So if you want to get the free GEO best practices checklist, I'll put the link down there in the description that's free, my gift to you. And if you need any help with any part of this, just reach out. I'm happy to answer any questions or give you a hand if that's what you need. Okay. Good luck.