What three things get a video cited by answer engines?

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

Quick Answer

• Answer engines reward high information density and front-loaded answers.
• AI crawlers look for exact facts, not long hooks.
• Three things: answer in the first 15 seconds, speak in clear bullet points, and define your key terms.

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

Exact facts, not long hooks

The best practices for optimizing video for answer engines revolve around high information density and front-loading your answers. AI crawlers look for exact facts, not long hooks.

To get your videos cited by AI, you must 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.

Here is one key term defined. AEO stands for answer engine optimization. It means building your content so AI answer engines can find it and cite it.

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

Want the whole list? Download the free AEO 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 answer engines?

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 does front-loading your answer mean?

It means putting the answer at the start of the video instead of after a long hook. Answer engines reward high information density and front-loaded answers.

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Full Clip Transcript

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

Full Transcript

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

I have a free AEO video checklist for you to download in the description below. Now let's break down each step. We're going to start up here with our goals in the planning section, right? What are we trying to accomplish? For most people interested in AEO, we're trying to do something about visibility and trust. Maybe your website traffic is dropping due to AI Overviews, maybe the sales cycles are too long, whatever the problem is, and you're trying to solve it with AEO, we still need to have goals.

We've got to start somewhere. And we have to know where we're headed. So when we do a little intel on what we actually have now, where are we actually showing up in AI search, what content do we have that actually is helping buyers get educated, this will be our baseline. And then as we head in the direction of our goal, we have to look at what's possible of all the things we could do. Do we have subject matter experts that could go on camera and answer these questions that buyers have? Do we have the capability to do that frequently?

How are we going to actually produce and post this stuff? So once you kind of have a list of what's possible, you can filter this through the what's realistic phase. Like, can we actually pull this off? We have to be realistic here. So once we filter that through, we can improve our plan, and then we're going to go into production and build it over here. So we're going to start up here.

Same thing. Up here, we start with buyer questions. These are going to be the actual buyer questions in their words, pulled from transcripts, sales calls. You probably heard a lot of these. You might know 80% of them off the top of your head. You can also use chat transcripts from the chat bots that you have.

And then once you have those questions, you then go and you make video answers that follow that exact framework I gave you at the start of this, where we're answering their question right away. In the first couple seconds, then we're going to give clear bullet points for easy extraction, and then we're going to define key terms. So if our videos are doing that and they're explaining things up front and they're helping people answer their questions deeply, and the goal is to answer that question sufficiently that we're going far enough into the topic that you sort of answer the question fully. There's really nothing else to say about that. They're going to have other questions over here, but that's going to be a different video. So it's one question, one video, answered fully.

So you'll know you're successful when they're watching about 70% of the way through. That means that you basically got the right people watching and you've given them helpful enough information. If they're not clicking and they're not watching, you'll know that within 24 hours. You just go to YouTube and see what's happening there. You can find out where they're dropping off in YouTube analytics. So before we get to that point, we're going to post it.

And we're going to post it on YouTube. Like I said, we're also going to make sure that we've got descriptions that are optimized to tell everybody what's in that video. We've also got to have the transcripts and chapter markers. We're going to also take these YouTube videos and we're going to embed them on your own URL on your own website. And that's going to also have the transcripts and that's going to also have an article that answers their question well. That gives you more surface area for the AI bots to find your content.

So once our content is out there, we're going to analyze. We're going to go to YouTube studio and look at the analytics and see, hey, are they clicking? That's a click-through rate. You'll know if they're clicking at all, are they watching? And are they dropping off right away or are they sticking around past 30 seconds? And then are they watching at least 70% of the way there?

That's what we're going for is people completing the videos. So if that's not happening, we're going to revise our approach. We're going to make either new videos that answer buyer questions if we are not completely answering them. So here's your buyer. They have a whole bunch of questions on their buyer journey, right? They're headed towards a sale.

We want to start by answering the obvious questions, the sort of main questions that are in the like the 80% of like the most common questions that you get. And so once you answer all these questions, and we basically have videos like down here, we've got videos answering all those questions, you've got most of the way there. And once you get to 80%, that's kind of the normal time when they're ready to take a call with a salesperson for that last 20%, very specific to them. So really what we're doing is it's sort of like a content bingo, right? We have a bunch of squares or questions that are not covered, and we're going to cover them. So that's really what we're trying to do here when we're analyzing over here in this Intel phase.

We are essentially finding out where do we stand, what are the questions they still have, what do we need to still answer, and then we can go about building that. So that's what this is all about is making a good plan that's going to answer their questions and move them to a sale, or at least 80% there where you can do your sales technique. So I got a free checklist for you that's going to cover best practices for AI answer engines, and you can download that for free. And if you need any help with this, just reach out. This is what I do, and I'd love to help.