Meta is developing background tech that suggests Facebook Search is planning a major overhaul.
Why Facebook Search Is Becoming a Real Discovery Engine
During its early stages, many of the internal Facebook search features were focused on helping users connect with friends or messages. However, Meta has almost completed the infrastructure needed to shift away from that. One of the first hints thatMeta is serious, is that its crawler is scraping the open web.
Meta crawlers log data as “meta-externalagent,” have been observed to crawl much more of the web than usual. The degree of crawling done by an organization varies greatly depending on what they’re trying to accomplish, but most likely, Meta is developing a retrieval system and training machine learning models to be used with it.
Facebook Search and the Broader AI Race
Meta and the major AI companies are all building search andopenly seeing the immense potential that comes with the changing landscape of search. OpenAI recently built a search index in which it actively serves smaller and mid-sized websites as it does larger publishers. Facebook has over three billion active users. A slight change in the way users discover content will likely result in a significant change in search activity and a surprise to a lot of brands that rely on Facebook as a paid advertising channel.
Now things start to become more complicated. If Meta builds a search tool using web crawling, then the content published on your site will likely impact what exists within Facebook. This may include search results, content from AI that generates summaries, and other content that appears in users’ feeds based on the relevance of the content, and not the social relevance.
What Facebook Search Could Mean for Organic Visibility
This phenomenon is seen with other AI-centric platforms already. Brands that once optimized their site for Google are now seeing organic traffic stagnate. This has been replaced by an AI discovery layer that surrounds them. What matters is not “did they click?” but “did the platform know that we existed when that relevant query was made?”
Facebook search is one of many issues relating to AI. Other companies are working on similar things to what Google is doing with their AI Overviews, and what Meta seems to be building. ChatGPT is pulling from the same open web as the other large platforms. This means that how you structure your site, as well as your entity authority and your brand’s identity on the web, will all affect the way information is processed for this search tool.
How Facebook Search Fits Into an AI Visibility Strategy
It’s crucial to work with a team that has knowledge of Facebook Search and AI visibility services because the optimization levers for these are not the same as traditional SEO. Ranking for a target keyword is no longer the end goal. The goal is to optimize for AI systems like Facebook Search to deem your brand the best and the most relevant answer to a query.
You can have a quick look at your server logs. The presence of meta-externalagent indicates that you are being crawled. Quite often this is considered a positive sign. It reflects that Meta has found your site. What worries is what Meta sees when they find your site.
Facebook Search Indexing May Already Be Crawling Your Site
AI retrieval systems don’t appreciate broad content. Instead they prefer content that is specific and repetitive across many pages. A website built on well defined topics and entities is likely to rank much better than a website built on a keyword theme that is not aligned with how users search.
There is a recognizable pattern among the numerous AI search systems – each of them puts a great deal of effort into the development of brand authority. In fact, if a system chooses to surface your content as a response to a query, then one of the things they evaluate is whether you have established authority within your brand domain and not simply if you possess a page that contains your brand name.
Facebook Search Signals That Brand Authority Matters More Than Ever
Generally, they analyze all digital interactions including reviews and mentions of your company, links (or backlinks) to/from your company, your digital social presence, and the uniform organization of your company contact data (NAP) throughout the World Wide Web. As a result, the companies that have invested in brand authority have built a substantial competitive advantage.
Most brands do not even attempt to quantify or analyze AI-enabled search. Brands solely analyze the metrics that are readily available to them (i.e. clicks, sessions, and rankings). Traditional metrics only represent a very small percentage of total user interactions. Thus, if AI bots are going to be the primary means people use to analyze information and make decisions, and if users are only going to interact with your company’s website after they have accessed and analyzed the results of your competition, then your traditional metrics will be meaningless.
Getting Ahead of Facebook Search Before the Competition Does
It’s just a matter of time before Facebook Search is one of many AI-powered platforms and tools. The slow roll out will happen and after some companies use it, the rest will wake up to the opportunity they’ve missed. The companies that use Facebook Search while others ignore it will be the companies that dominate when Search reaches full market potential.
AI-based discovery is a visibility issue across multiple domains, and Facebook Search is just one of the ways signals have to be put out to support content and brand. It is one of the integrations that will be beneficial to your brand.
This should be treated as part of a wider AI visibility strategy due to the nature of Search. Your content, brand signals and Identity will be unified in the digital sphere, and Facebook Search will be an increasingly important facet of the digital world to your organization.
