How To Build Consensus Online To Gain Visibility in AI Search
AI search hacks fade fast—lasting visibility comes from strategy, not shortcuts.
How To Build Consensus Online To Gain Visibility in AI Search
Similar to SEO, using clever hacks to optimize for AI search might be alluring.
However, the issue with hacks is that they become ineffective as soon as they are found.
Despite having 98% “lorem ipsum” content on his website, Kyle Roof was able to score highly for the string “Rhinoplasty Plano” in the score Or Go Home Challenge.
Google de-indexed the website within a day of learning about this.
The same is true for AI search, albeit the system is evolving quickly in this case. What is effective now could be in a month.
Understanding GEO
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is an emerging field of optimization for AI search, which includes optimizing to appear in Google’s AI overviews, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, and others.
Some of the examples of how quickly GenAI evolves, as per a key benchmark analysis by Ithy about OpenAI’s o1 to o3 models
- Mathematical reasoning
- Scientific reasoning
- Coding
What is Consensus
Consensus is when a variety of high-quality sources align on a topic. It is an AI search engine for scientific and academic research, searching over 200 million academic papers and using language models to help you in finding, understanding, and synthesizing the literature faster. For every query, Consensus first retrieves the most relevant academic papers, and then our AI analyses the top results, generating a clear, cohesive synthesis of the findings.
A consensus has built a corpus by aggregating data from three major sources: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, and our own crawl of the scholarly web to fill in important coverage gaps. By combining these sources, Consensus covers nearly all of the highest-impact journals and entirely of PubMed. Think of Consensus as an Ai-native alternative to Google Scholar with a more refined corpus.
Consensus uses a classic multi-step approach for information retrieval to narrow in on the best sources:-
Step1: Cost a wide-net
Step2: Refine by Quality
Step3: Produce the final ranking of papers
Consensus Building
Consensus building is a process involving good-faith efforts to meet the interests of all stakeholders and seek a unanimous agreement. The approach enables groups to reach an overwhelming agreement among relevant stakeholders and maximize possible gains to everyone.
There are five essential steps for consensus-building in your group negotiations:
- Including the right people and setting expectations
- Assigning roles and responsibilities
- Engaging in group problem solving
- Reach an agreement
- Holding people to their commitments
The important thing is that consensus cannot be fake.
Building consensus requires convincing people, and for convincing people, you will need to establish your expertise and credibility and get a conversation going to establish consensus on a topic.
In other words, you would need:
- Credible expertise
- High-quality data or insights
- Enough coverage or references across the web to establish your viewpoint acceptance.
Wanting to build consensus around the idea of paying off debts is to prioritize debts with the highest interest rates.
How Experts Build Consensus
For example,
Mark Cuban, a financial expert and a Florida resident. He states, while discussing the topic of the housing crisis in Florida, that on the platform Bluesky, a major issue is the affordability of home insurance. This was then cited by a variety of articles on sites such as GoBanking Rates.
Soon, a consensus forms: Florida’s housing crisis is due at least in part to homeowners’ insurance rates.
A single expert’s opinion can have a major impact on consensus, particularly for smaller, more niche topics.
Collaboration for Building Consensus
By directly collaborating, you can amplify the establishment of a consensus.
Essentially “hijack” your collaborator’s authority and audience:
- Their followers would become aware of your research
- Their peers and fellow experts are more likely to consider your findings
- Media outlets view collaborations as more credible than a single, lesser-known sources, which further boost your reach.
For Instance,
David Grossman’s article The Cost of Poor Communications.
Grossman was able to share his thoughts with a larger audience by being included in an article on Provoke Media’s The Holmes Report. Numerous more articles, including those from websites like Harvard Business School, later cited this material.
These concepts eventually become part of the agreement on corporate communication and show up in AI search results for sites like Perplexity.
Building Consensus Is A Process, even with the Best Methods
These things don’t happen overnight. But that doesn’t mean you should give up; every time you publish a study or collaborate with another expert, your reach and authority grow.
And as you continue the conversation through further studies and guest posts, a new consensus can begin to form.
Long-Term Success Over Short-Term Hacks
Even while new hacks are always being discovered, tried-and-true techniques are always preferable. Building consensus on a topic is a far better use of your time than pursuing an ever-changing target and attempting to outsmart continually emerging generative AI techniques. This implies:
- Developing knowledge via research and guest postings.
- Working together with other professionals to increase your authority and reach.
- Maintaining this authority-building process throughout time.
It is taking efforts to establish an agreement, but the reward is a long-lasting impact, where your content appears in AI search results, and you are seen as a reliable information source.
