Conductor AI: Your Configuration Checklist for Success

AI is rapidly reshaping the search landscape. To help you navigate and master these changes, Conductor is launching powerful new AI-centric features. This essential checklist guides you through configuring your account for optimal performance, ensuring you’ll be able to extract maximum value from Conductor AI. 

Success with these AI features hinges on comprehensive data. By optimizing your account, you'll be able to gain a clearer view of your visibility in AI search, uncover prime content opportunities with features like AI Topic Map, generate high-quality personalized content at scale, and understand how AI engines interact with your site. 

Many of these innovative features have recently launched or are coming soon. Preparing your account is a smart move, ensuring you’re ready to hit the ground running. 

Conductor AI features are part of alpha and beta releases. Aspects of their development may change or be removed with little or no notice—or, may not be included in your subscription when eventually released. If you do not have access to these features and would like to learn whether you are eligible for access, contact your Conductor representative or Support. 

Here’s your step-by-step guide to fine-tuning your Conductor account:

What to do: Maximize your relevant tracked keywords and conduct a refresh to remove any irrelevant ones. 

How to do it in Conductor: 

1. Review Your Current List: Regularly audit your Tracked Keywords ↗️ in Conductor, and ensure you are using a substantial amount of your total keyword allotment. You can check your contract limits in “Your Subscription Details” (if on current pricing and packaging), or directly with your account team (if on legacy pricing and packaging). 

2. Discover New Opportunities: Utilize Conductor's keyword research tools, like Explorer, to find relevant keywords you might be missing.

3. Clean Up: Remove keywords that are no longer aligned with your content strategy or consistently show limited opportunity.

Why it's important & How it benefits you: A focused and relevant keyword list is foundational for our new AI Topic Map. It ensures the feature provides you with the highest quality and most actionable content opportunity recommendations. This allows you to leverage your keyword allotment efficiently and enhances the accuracy of topic suggestions and gap identification. Ultimately, this feeds the AI more comprehensive and accurate data, leading to more impactful insights. 

Helpful related resources: 

• Conductor’s Guide to SEO Research: From Keyword Discovery to Opportunity Prioritization

• Setup Your Conductor Intelligence account for success

• Keep your Conductor Intelligence account in great shape

What to do: Ensure your primary web analytics platform (e.g., Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics) is fully integrated with Conductor.  

How to do it in Conductor: 

1. Access Integration Settings: Navigate to the analytics integration section within your Conductor settings.

2. Follow Platform-Specific Guides: Refer to the Knowledge Base for detailed step-by-step instructions on connecting your specific analytics provider.

Why it's important & How it benefits you: Integrating your analytics provides Conductor AI features with essential performance data. This is critical for AI Topic Map to identify underperforming content and highlight optimization opportunities. It also allows you to effectively track the business impact of content created or optimized using Writing Assistant ↗️ and its next generation capabilities. This ensures you have an accurate representation of your opportunities and performance in the evolving AI-driven search landscape. 

What to do: Group all your digital brand assets—including your main websites, microsites, Amazon stores and social media channels—within your web property groups in Conductor. 

How to do it in Conductor: 

1. Manage Web Properties: Go to the Web Properties ↗️ management area in your Conductor settings.

2. Add Domains/Subdomains: Ensure all relevant website domains and subdomains are listed.

3. Include Social Channels: Add your primary social media profiles (e.g., YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn) under the appropriate web property. Remember, you can add multiple social channels under a single web property definition.

4. Add any other owned content: Add any other branded microsites or owned media pages on third-party sites.

Why it's important & How it benefits you: A comprehensive definition of your brand's digital footprint allows Conductor AI to understand your brand more holistically. This is particularly vital for the new AI Search Performance feature, enabling it to accurately track your brand mentions and website citations across various AI search engines. This provides you with a complete and accurate view of your visibility in the new AI search ecosystem. 

What to do: Create comprehensive Content Profiles for Writing Assistant to meticulously guide AI content generation according to your brand standards. 

How to do it in Conductor: 

1. Access Content Profiles: Navigate to the Content Profiles ↗️ section. This may be within Writing Assistant (step 3 when starting a new draft) or a dedicated "Settings > Content Profiles" area in the new menu.

2. Create or Edit a Profile: For each profile, you will manually input your detailed style guide information. This includes:

• Voice and Tone: Define the desired feeling and attitude of your content (e.g., formal, informal, witty, empathetic).

• Target Audience: Describe the characteristics of your intended readers (e.g., expertise level, interests, pain points).

• Terms to Exclude: List any specific words, phrases, or jargon that the AI should avoid, whether for compliance reasons or brand preference.

• Key Company/Product Information: While initial versions may rely on "Additional Instructions" or weaving this into voice/tone descriptions, be prepared to input core company messaging, product details, and unique selling propositions.

1. Utilize Multiple Profiles: Create distinct Content Profiles if you manage different brands, product lines, content initiatives (e.g., blog vs. product pages), or need to address varied target personas.

Why it's important & How it benefits you: Content Profiles are essential for ensuring that AI-generated content consistently and accurately reflects your unique brand identity, voice, style, and critical compliance requirements. This dramatically reduces manual editing time, enables the scaling of on-brand content production, and transforms AI into a genuine extension of your marketing team. You'll move from generic AI outputs to truly personalized and impactful content. 

Helpful related resources: 

• Conductor AI Launch: What’s New in Writing Assistant?

• Writing Assistant Best Practices

What to do: Create and consistently maintain well-defined Page Groups that segment key sections of your website. 

How to do it in Conductor: 

1. Identify Key Site Sections: Determine logical groupings for your content (e.g., blog, specific product or service categories, resources, content generated by AI).

2. Create Page Groups: In Conductor, build these Page Groups ↗️ using URL patterns, meta data, or other relevant criteria.

3. Maintain and Update: Regularly review and update your Page Groups as your website structure and content evolve.

4. Track AI Content: Crucially, establish a dedicated Custom Page Group for all content you generate or optimize using Conductor's new AI features. This will allow you to easily monitor its performance.

Why it's important & How it benefits you: Well-structured Page Groups enable more granular analysis and allow you to take targeted actions with Conductor AI features. For instance, within Writing Assistant ↗️, Page Groups can refine automated internal linking suggestions, directing them to specific, relevant content sets. Effective Page Groups also empower you to isolate and closely monitor the performance and impact of your AI-generated or AI-optimized content.   

What to do: If you are a Conductor Monitoring Enterprise customer, ensure Log File Analysis is correctly set up and configured to capture data from AI crawlers. 

How to do it in Conductor: 

1. Implement Log File Analysis: Work with your dedicated Conductor team and your IT department to implement Log File Analysis, if you haven’t already. 

2. Configure Log Sources for AI Bots: Update your log file source configuration (e.g., Fastly, Akamai, Cloudflare, CloudFront) to explicitly include the user agents for new AI crawlers, such as those from ChatGPT Search (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, GPTBot) and Perplexity (PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User). Critically, ensure these AI user agents are not being filtered out by your existing configurations. Consult Conductor's setup guides for detailed instructions specific to your log file source.

Why it's important & How it benefits you: This setup provides invaluable visibility into how frequently traditional search engine crawlers and, importantly, new AI search engine crawlers (like those from ChatGPT and Perplexity) are visiting and indexing your site's content. This data is the backbone of the new AI Crawler Activity feature, which will report on these AI bot interactions. Understanding AI crawler behavior is key to optimizing your technical SEO for AI readiness and ensuring your content is discoverable by these emerging platforms. 

In Summary

By proactively addressing these configuration points, you'll be in the best possible position to leverage the full capabilities of Conductor AI as these exciting new features become available. Get ready to enhance your insights, streamline your workflows, and do your job more efficiently than ever before!