Among the changes mortgage businesses are trying to adjust to in the age of artificial intelligence, marketing strategy could turn out to be the trickiest to understand and implement.

AI has ushered in a new landscape for digital marketing across all types of businesses, and where search-engine optimization once governed how companies made their way into the public consciousness via Google and similar platforms, the popularity of artificial intelligence is upending old practices.

Instead of typing a search in Google, consumers today are increasingly turning to the likes of ChatGPT, Anthropic and Google's own generative AI tool, Gemini, with queries.

For mortgage lenders and originators of all sizes, the change means not only adoption of new techniques but also ways of thinking about marketing that seem contradictory to what might be considered established norms.      

"Definitely within the last year, we've all from a marketing perspective have had to look at things a little bit differently and focus on being the best answer and not just the loudest bidder," said Sarah DeCiantis, chief marketing officer at United Wholesale Mortgage.  

"It's challenging all of us to think about things a little bit differently and from more of a consumer-first, consumer-why or consumer-intent perspective, than just focusing on the paid side of things."

With AI technology still rapidly developing and changing, there is no one-size-fits-all guideline that can be studied or mastered, mortgage leaders say. Companies understand, though, that AI's surging popularity demands a strategy pivot that shifts from putting their best side forward to understanding what the rest of the world associates with them. 

"AI optimization, as opposed to search engine optimization — it's a much broader context. Large language models work differently, and they look for different things. Not only do we have to change our own content, but we also have to ensure that we understand how we're viewed in the broader ecosystem," said Tela Mathias, managing partner and chief technology officer at mortgage consultancy firm Phoenixteam. 

"It is much more important what others are saying about you and how the ecosystem views you," she said.

How online marketing recentered from "us" to "them"

As search engines developed in the internet age, turning Google into today's dominant platform, SEO marketing practices relied on a straightforward formula for marketing teams, according to Steven Cooley, CEO of AI intelligence platform Prlmnt and founder of Mortgage Advisor Tools. 

Common methods, such as online backlinking to websites and keyword stuffing could assure companies would end up high in a Google search.

"Essentially, whoever had the most backlinks was deemed relevant and therefore ranked on the first page of Google," Cooley said. There are some similarities to earning placement on AI platforms, but the same strategy won't bring equivalent results, he continued. 

"It is not as complex as we originally thought it was, but it is significantly different than search-engine optimization," he said. 

With AI engines increasingly becoming a preferred source for answers and advice, companies are discovering that they need to take into account where they sit in artificial intelligence's search hierarchy and leverage those findings to gain authority.  

"AI has introduced a different level of needing to get in the weeds and understand how it's going to impact us because there really is no textbook for it," DeCiantis said. 

Through a common method called retrieval-augmented generation, AI consultants can examine websites to help companies discover how large-language models might be able to draw in users. But RAG, as it is referred to, only offers only a partial solution, Cooley said. While it may lead visitors to click on a webpage, it won't necessarily present the image a company may be seeking, at least without human assistance.

"We have found that there is a technical aspect, a content-structure method, that we have to help people with," Cooley said. 

AI advisors today also have tools to comb through ChatGPT and similar platforms to determine when and how companies show up in response to questions, and then subsequently apply the results to help create customized AI strategies. Such firms can study business competitors' placements as well to glean how to increase their chances at appearing in AI searches. 

What will AI say about you?

As AI reshapes optimization and experimentation replaces rulebooks, marketing professionals are coming to terms with a tougher reality: they are no longer in the driver's seat when it comes to which content platforms choose to deliver.  

Artificial intelligence can only produce answers based on information it possesses in its own data repository or that can be readily accessed and read. As a high-powered data tool, it has no ability to verify facts, meaning higher AI authority does not necessarily correspond to reliability or accuracy.

With search accessibility in mind, FAQ pages and websites like Reddit have become the type of "reliable" sources generative AI turns to for the information that leads it to form logical answers. 

"A large language model, for example, is going to see FAQ documentation as more reliable in its format and its structure, because it's able to ingest and digest that information more effectively," Mathias said. 

An LLM is essentially a "very powerful auto-completion platform," which takes all the context it has to predict the next word or sentence or paragraph or page.

"The reality is when you're in this auto-completion world, where I'm just predicting the next most likely string in a sequence, then I'm looking for statistical probabilities, among other things," Mathias explained.

Is SEO already obsolete?

With AI and LLMs changing the marketing game, a question arises about the future of Google and SEO. While it is unlikely that search engines will turn into dinosaurs, "AI is eating into the dominance of search," highlighting the need for changes that maintain SEO's value in an AI-focused world, according to Josh Glantz, CEO of customer-relationship management platform Lendware.

"When I think of SEO, Google is still the dominant player, and I believe will continue to be so for the foreseeable future," Glantz said. 

"That said, when you go to Google, you have the ability to use regular Google search or AI search. Google will continue to migrate more of its users to its GenAI search, and in that way, is going to continue reducing the importance of being on the first or second page of Google search results."

Examination of SEO metrics can also help companies enhance their AI marketing efforts if they take the time to understand what's driving search traffic to their sites.

"If I was heading up marketing for a company, I would want to pay a lot of attention to my organic traffic and all the variables and the outcomes of it a little bit more than ever before to understand how I might need to supplement that," Cooley said.

"People obviously are still using the internet, and you need to be positioned well in search," he continued. "But there is a new consideration that is moving extremely fast, and consumers are turning to it more and more for their decision-making."