Previously, I wrote about why niche content has an advantage in AI search. I got one message back more than any other: “Okay, but how do I actually find mine?” Fair question. Here’s the method I use.
When I wrote about Generative Engine Optimisation, the premise was straightforward: AI search rewards specificity. A broad question pulls from thousands of competing sources. A narrow, specific one shrinks that pool dramatically — and if you’re one of the few genuinely relevant answers, you get cited.
What I didn’t provide was a method for actually finding that narrow, specific thing. I said “get specific about who you serve and what you uniquely know”. Here’s the follow-up — an actual process, not just the theory.
Why “broad” feels safer, and why it isn’t anymore
Most of us default to broad positioning because it feels like more opportunity. “I write about marketing” reaches more people, on paper, than “I write about how solo marketers use AI agents without a governance team.” Broad has always felt like the safer bet — more search volume, more potential readers, less risk of talking to an empty room.
That logic held up when ranking was a link-and-keyword contest. It doesn’t hold up against a system that evaluates whether you’re the single best, most credible answer to a specific question. Broad positioning means you’re one voice among thousands, all making similarly broad claims, none of them particularly citable. Specific positioning means you might be one of a handful of genuinely relevant sources — and that handful is exactly who gets cited.
The fear under “broad feels safer” is usually “what if nobody’s searching for the narrow thing.” In practice, the opposite tends to be true: nobody searches for “marketing,” but plenty of people search for the exact specific problem you’d cover if you let yourself get narrow.
The method: three questions, stacked
Your micro-niche sits at the intersection of three things, not one. Most people only ever define the first.
1. What’s the broad topic?
Start wide, honestly. “Marketing.” “Skincare.” “Parenting.” Whatever the general territory is. This is the easy part and it’s not the answer — it’s the starting point.
2. Who, specifically, in what specific situation?
Not “small business owners.” Not “women in their fifties.” Get concrete: solo marketers without a governance or compliance team. Women navigating menopausal skin changes who also have deeper Asian skin tones. Parents returning to work after a long career break, in a specific industry, at a specific seniority level.
This is where most people stop, and it’s already a big improvement — but it’s still not quite narrow enough to be a genuine advantage, because plenty of other people can also describe roughly the same audience.
3. What do you know, specifically, that most people covering the broad topic don’t?
This is the part almost nobody does, and it’s the part that actually creates the advantage. Not “I know about marketing” — everyone covering marketing claims that. What’s the specific angle that comes from your actual lived experience? Thirty years inside agency and client-side marketing, watching AI shift from novelty to infrastructure in real time. A personal ritual passed down from your mother that turns out to map onto real dermatological research. A specific professional failure or turning point that taught you something the textbooks don’t cover.
Your micro-niche is where all three answers overlap — not the broad topic on its own, not the specific audience on its own, but the very small space where a specific audience’s specific problem meets the specific thing you, uniquely, know how to say about it.
A worked example, from my own two sites
I didn’t invent this method after the fact to explain something I’d already done by instinct — but looking back, both of my own sites are built on exactly this stack, and it’s worth showing the working.
The Scented Abode: broad topic is beauty and skincare. Specific audience is women over fifty navigating menopausal skin changes. The overlap that makes it a genuine micro-niche is the further layer on top — skincare and fragrance specifically for Asian skin tones, written by someone living that intersection rather than covering it from the outside. Broad “beauty blog” is invisible in AI search. “Skincare and fragrance for menopausal women with Asian skin tones” is a pool of maybe a handful of genuinely relevant sources — and I’m trying to be one of them.
Mummy Marketing: broad topic is marketing and AI. Specific audience is senior marketers and solo business owners trying to work out what generative AI actually means for their work, without a research team doing it for them. The overlap is thirty years of client-side and agency experience, applied in real time to live problems as they come up, written honestly rather than as polished thought leadership. That’s a much smaller pool than “marketing blog,” and a much more citable one.
Neither of these felt narrow when I was living them. They only look narrow written down as a formula. That’s usually how you know you’ve actually found one — it feels like “obviously, that’s just what I know,” not like a clever positioning exercise.
Test it the way I test everything now
Here’s the check I’d suggest, because it’s the most honest one available: once you think you’ve found your micro-niche, go and ask an AI tool the question your ideal reader would actually type — a genuinely specific version of it, the way you’d type it to a friend, not a keyword-stuffed version.
Then ask the broad version of the same question.
If your site doesn’t come up for either, that’s useful information, not a failure — it usually means the content isn’t specific enough yet, or isn’t structured clearly enough for AI to extract a direct answer from it (go back to my original post for the structural side of that). But if you notice your specific version starts pulling in more relevant, narrower sources than the broad version — good outside voices you respect, other people doing genuinely specific work — that’s a sign you’re now competing in the right, much smaller pool.
A note on the discomfort
Getting specific feels like a loss before it feels like a gain. It always does. You’re consciously ruling people out. It can feel like you’re making your potential audience smaller on purpose, which is a strange thing to choose deliberately.
But the broad audience you’re “keeping” by staying general was never really yours in the first place — it was theoretical reach you weren’t actually capturing, because you were one indistinct voice among thousands of others also claiming to serve everyone. The narrow audience is smaller on paper and larger in practice, because you can actually reach the people in it, and AI search can actually identify you as the answer for them.
Your action list this week
If you do nothing else, do these three things:
- Write out your own three-question stack — broad topic, specific audience, specific thing only you know — and see what sits at the overlap
- Type both a broad and a specific version of your ideal reader’s real question into an AI tool and compare what comes back
- Go back through your last five posts and check whether they were written for the broad topic or the specific overlap — rewrite one opening paragraph to speak directly to the narrow version
If you’ve been circling your own micro-niche and haven’t quite landed on it, I’d genuinely like to hear where you’re stuck — reply or leave a comment, and I’ll try to help you think it through.
