(26) SEO in an AI-First World: How to Adapt and Win in 2025 with Andrei Țiț - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuvLfkDHdLU

Transcript: (00:00) Air search has its own advantages. For example, it increases brand awareness as we already talked about. And to be honest, brand awareness, trust, and recognition are the byproducts of good content. Doesn't matter if that content is surfaced by an AI generated summary, a video, or a blog post. (00:17) It's also going to bring you more brand positive brand sentiment because again, people recall your brand and it's much easier to do business with you. And we've also noticed that these are more qualified traffic leads. I'll give you an example for Href's website. Uh we have 0.5% of our traffic. (00:35) Our traffic is around 10 million if you check it in Hrefs. 0.5% of 10 million is coming from AI search. But those people are responsible for 12% of the signups. So those people are ready to buy, but they also have other caveats. So probably they have higher bounce rate. They're not going to search so deeply across your website. (00:55) So these are people who are ready to buy but at the same time you might lose them in a second if you don't feed them the right information. All right. Hey everybody Dave here. I'm the founder of Exit 5. We got an awesome session for you. This is the most popular don't call it a webinar live session we've we've ever done. (01:26) I I we haven't even done it yet, but um an unbeliev we almost have 2,000 people that registered for this session and I was just talking with Andre who runs product marketing at at HFS. Uh he'll be he'll be on in a second. I was saying what's funny is like you know know as marketers which you all are in here we always you know we bang our heads against the wall trying to do all these creative things for promos and then you know to to get butts and seats for something and then when you have this huge conversation and topic and issue which is uh AI and search and then you match the content and the right audience (01:56) and we sent two emails and we have 2,000 people or something you know 1,800 people registered for this. There's like 300 people here already live, which is amazing. So, I'm super excited for this session. This is truly one where like I'm trying to learn as much as I can. We've seen a bunch of discussions in in Exit 5 about this. (02:13) I see it on LinkedIn all the time. Um Andre from HRS, they have an amazing tool that you can use to do this, but they have a ton of data. Been using it for myself and it's it's really interesting. Even in our own business over the last couple months, I just looked, we had 115 um AI searches like that exit 5 showed up in the results for which is more than we had three months ago. And uh there's something really interesting there. (02:36) So, this is going to be a really informative session. You're going to learn a lot. At least you'll come out of here with more knowledge. I can't promise you that this is going to immediately solve your AI and SEO strategy overnight, but I think you're going to leave this session with the the right things to think about and the right questions to be asking. (02:53) So before we bring up Andre, um, real quick, I'm just going to tell you how this this goes down. So, um, sometimes we just do a conversation, sometimes we have some slides. Andre has some slides and some awesome data and and real facts and learns that they have. We're going to show you that. We're going to take all your questions, do lots of Q&A. We want to help you out. Obviously, it's all marketers here, so we want to help as many people as we can with their AI and SEO questions. (03:12) Uh, this will be recorded. We run this as a podcast episode later. If you want to relisten, we'll send out the recording to you if you're here. But if you're in the chat, like I want you to you're here for a reason, right? You took time out of your day. And so I want you to pop in the chat right now. There's already people, you know, shouting out from everywhere. (03:30) Uh from from San Diego, Grace is in Pittsburgh. Sarah's in Charleston, South Carolina. But first, before we bring up Andre, I want you to put in the chat real quick, why did you come here? What do you want to learn today? What is it about AI and SEO that is that you need to learn about? Um why come out of, you know, why spend an hour of your day with us? Put that in the chat. (03:47) uh real quick and then uh throughout the the rest of the session, help each other out. Put your comments and questions in there and then we'll take all the questions in the in the Q&A. Matthew wants to get ahead of the curve. Destiny says, "AI is changing everything. We need to stay current." I hear I hear you. AEO tips. I love that. (04:03) What kind of content we should be? Oh, that message already went away. We got our first lead via chat GBT. Uh and we want to stay ahead of rapid developments aka we got our first lead from chat GBT. It was good. How do we get more? I'm feel I feel that. So, uh, Alison, why don't we bring Andre up here to say hello and and we'll kick things off. Hey, folks. (04:20) Hello. There he is. Andre, look at this response, man. This is amazing. This is amazing. I know you're a pro. I hope you're excited to be with us. It's great to have you. It's Andre. He runs product marketing at Hrefs and uh he's going to be our our presenter today. Andre, I'll let you introduce yourself, say hello, and and we're off to the races. Sure. Thanks, David, for having me. (04:38) And yeah, never seen such an engaged audience. Everybody's of course trying to optimize for AI search SEO optimization. Now it's GEO LLM O. But I'm here to kind of like um more or less light a torch and uh it's quite the new uh I would say industry for us as well. We're at the forefront of SEO. We are at the forefront of AI search. (05:04) So we have the data necessary to point you in the right direction and I hope you're going to learn. So um hello everyone. My name is Andre. I'm a product marketer and I lead the product marketing department here at Hrefs. And welcome to the CMOS guide to winning in AI search with HFS. And honestly speaking, it's not about CMOS, just CMOs, but also about marketers. (05:26) And uh I know you have a lot of questions. So I actually cut a part of my presentation so that we can have a longer Q&A session. By the way, you you said you said it's not about C CMOs. I I have a private channel with a bunch of CMOs and I can tell you that this is top of mind. (05:46) Everyone from from the marketing intern to the CMO is being asked I just met with a with a CMO who was she was out for like eight weeks and just kind of diving back into the business and the very first thing she's tackling is like oh my gosh all this stuff has changed what does this mean in this world? So I think it's the it's why the response for today is so so strong is that everybody's wondering these things. (06:02) Yeah, we made it like top level kind of like uh presentation but then we figure out like hey it's everybody's question at the moment like you stressed out. So that's why I'm saying don't get swayed from the title itself. It's for all marketers right now who want to get into a new traffic channel. Uh and that's AI search. (06:24) So without further ado, let's talk about organic search. So we're going to talk about how things are at the moment. And to be honest, they're not so cool. Somebody asked, "Is SEO dead?" Well, we're going to see about that. It depends. But to be honest, organic search is harder than ever. Uh there's zero quilt content. So that kind of content that answered the searchers quiry directly on the SERB. (06:49) If we check here, this is a uh research from Ran Fishkin. I I'm sure pretty much everybody knows Ran Fishkin. So according to it, 60% of the searches in the US are zeroclick searches. approximately 60% as well in Europe. On top of that, we have Google who throws at us frequent Google algorithm updates. These are kind of like curve curve balls. (07:14) So you either adapt or die if you scroll through it like it's like what how many Google algorithm updates we have here. We have a core update, a spam update, a Google search ranking bug. So they also make mistakes. Uh be sure about that. And we also have AI traffic as a slowly but surely emerging new channel. So based on our study, we analyze 3,000 sites. Uh in this study alone, we have more studies like this one. (07:40) And for larger data sets, 63% of the sites received at least one uh customer from an AI traffic referral. And this is about as much as Reddit. And Reddit traffic just picked up last November. So it's still growing and you'll see why. So given all this, the question begs, what's the mode to all these kind of changes. (08:09) Now the truth is there's always been so many marketing channels that are relevant but not so many that are relevant at the same time. And even us at HRES, we have our product marketing team and we're always asking like how can we be top of the mind for our customers? How can we meet them in their preferred channel? Something that we call fire all cannons at once. (08:26) If somebody's curious about product marketing, just fire me a um DM in LinkedIn. But anyway, what's the single constant that can withstand all the changes in this uh search landscape that's forever changing? And we ask ourselves that question. And the question is quite simple to be honest and it's under our noses. It's brand awareness. (08:51) So ultimately at the end of the day a brand is what people are uh thinking, talking and searching about and a brand also has multiple uh benefits. So on one hand for example it strengthens your SEO strategy. It also lowers your cost of acquisition across all different channels that you might have and it also increases the likelihood of showing up in those AI generated summaries. (09:14) And if you do it right, those benefits compound. Why? Because brand awareness and what more or less entails about brand awareness. So I'm talking about trust, recognition, brand affinity. Uh they will most likely protect your brand and bring more profits in the long run. So what I'm going to do in this presentation is one second. Yeah, I have three topics, but I'm just going to focus on the first two. (09:41) So, I'm going to show you how SEO is changing and how not to focus anymore on traffic, but focus on the right metrics. And I've outlined a few brand awareness metrics. And I'm also going to talk about brand visibility in the search chat bots. Now, remember, this is quite new, but we're at the forefront. We're HFS. Uh, so we have some cool data to show you. (09:59) Not going to I love I love the focus on brand by the way because this is what's so interesting. I was thinking about this the other day like you search something Google just gives you the answer people are not dumb we have Prenav who's the founder of Parark and he's been on this webinar he's like he's like your customers are not done like dumb right if you provide them value and they end up searching for you like down the road they're going to you're going to find out how they heard about you it's just like it's the internal challenge as marketers of like if these AI search (10:29) engines are now like eating our traffic and they're not giving us the credit that's where it all breaks down internally. It's like people still got the answers. They're just we're not able to track them along the way. So, I I love the focus on brand. I think this is going to be a huge topic as we get deeper in in AI. (10:46) Like brand Let's make brand bring brand bring brand back. I love that. All right, keep going. We should make some caps. BBB bring brand back. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, awesome. So, uh let's focus on our first topic uh brand awareness metrics. And to be honest, brand has always been this kind of like fuzzy, hard to measure channel. (11:10) On one hand, you have uh a few brand outcomes like brand sentiment, reputation, affinity and so forth. Those are things that are quite subjective in matter. So if you ask people like hey do you recall this kind of brand? It's a subjective answer. On the other hand, you also have some types of channels. (11:28) So this kind of branded content can exist on other channels that you do not have control over. So you don't have data and analytics but if done right you can actually reap a lot of benefits and in our uh research we found out that Google assign site a site quality score based on brand metrics. (11:47) So you have your website and Google is looking at those three uh metrics brand keywords brand mentions those are reach brand anchor text and also website clicks. Based on those three, it assigns a site quality score and the higher it is, the higher are your chances to be recollected in Google. This is traditional organic search. We'll see how it ties to AI search in a few minutes. (12:12) Uh so based on that, I want to show you a few of the brand awareness metrics we found in our own study. And the first one is organic share of voice. Now this is quite important because it shows you what's the percentage of your organic uh keywords, organic traffic amongst your whole niche. (12:31) So in other words, it tells you what's the popularity of your brand across your niche. Now I've listed here the definition and also the formula. But as I said, it's quite boring. Just remember that uh share of voice is how popular your brand is in your category or industry and that's what it matters at the end of the day. (12:50) If you're using Atres because I assume there's some people who use it. You can pop your own website into our site explorer tool. That's our competitive intelligence tool. That's what I did here. I popped in a website and also three competitors. I'm a runner so I went for Hula on cloud AS6 and Nike and I simply clicked on share of voice and I can see what's the share of voice across that niche. (13:14) So at the end of the day, what you want to do as a marketer, not necessarily as a CMO, I cannot do this here because it's not app UI. Uh I would probably glide over the chart and see who's winning and who's losing because if somebody is dipping, then most likely somebody else has taken over. (13:34) It's not just Google uh algorithm updates, those that I mentioned in the beginning, but it's probably somebody, a competitor most likely that's doing a better job than you. And this is like a top level metric to see what's happening. Uh, and then you just go on into the weeds and check out what's happening and and so this this like share of voice as it relates to a handful of competitors that you pick. (13:57) Is that more of a use useful metric than like for us for example the the company is called Exit 5. If I look that up in in Google or Hrefs or whatever, I often see a lot of, you know, searches for Exit 5 that actually don't relate to the company. So the better exercise would be like who are the three or four perceived competitors and how are we showing up in search compared to them? Yep. (14:16) U as long as you know your competitors you can see and your niche in general you can see what organic keywords this is more or less the share of organic keywords and the traffic it brings the traffic it's brought by those keywords and yeah it's a way to measure as I said the popularity of a brand in a particular niche. This is just one of them. I have three more. (14:38) Um, the next one is more or less closely tied to this one and it's called organic share of traffic value. Now, what's traffic value? Probably asking. So, I'm going to explain that. Uh, traffic value. We thought of, okay, measuring content ROI is quite hard. (14:58) There are several methods to do that, but we're like, okay, what if we show people how much money you've saved if that content were to be paid for in Google Ads? So, that's what traffic value shows you. What's the value of my organic content in Google if it were to be advertised via PPC in Google ads? So, a meta extension to that is the organic share of traffic value. Similar to share of voice, but it shows you the value of your brand relative to your other competitors. (15:29) And what I did here was play around again with the same uh tool, but this time I changed the metric to share of traffic value. And I got here some dollar values. So, hawa.com, for example, their organic traffic, if it were to be advertised on Google Ads, it would cost $1.6 million. Uh, compare that to Nike, that's $18.7 million. It kind of helps you as a content marketer and also as a marketer in general to evaluate what's the value of your organic content right now in Google. And if you have a CFO at the end of the day who's like hardressing you like, hey, what's the ROI of your (16:01) content? And this is also something nice to show them um without having to scramble a bunch of cells. This is the per this is like the ultimate answer for like what's the ROI of content? Why are we writing all these articles? Yeah, exactly. Um as I said there are several methods to measure that but we thought like okay let's rethink the problem like how much money you would actually pay for this content to be advertised in Google and reach at the height that you're currently at. So yeah, uh those two things are quite (16:33) important when it comes to this new brand world as I said because it gives you an idea about okay, where's my brand position in Google search? We're still talking about Google search and also what's the value of my content if we were to buy ads in Google. All right, we covered those. (16:50) And the next one is branded keyword search volume. This will tie directly to AI search. I'm going to answer in some of the questions later on. Uh why? because basically this shows the search demand for your business. So it's very simple if you don't if this is not growing your brand is more or less dying. (17:08) So there's no uh pipeline there's no revenue there's no profits. So essentially you want to see this branded keyword search volume growing over a sustained period of time. And uh to illustrate even better, we actually conducted our own study and found out like hey more like 50% almost 50% of searches in Google are actually branded. So this is even a better reason to track it. And we also looked at other studies. So this is from Kevin Indig. (17:33) I'm assuming most of you who work in SEO know him. He has this uh substack newsletter growth memo and he actually found out that branded search volume is the biggest predictor of mentions in chat GPD. More on that later. Uh, if you want to check what's the global search volume for your own brand, just go to HFS keywords explorer. (17:52) That's our standard keywords explorer tool and type in your brand followed by a few misspellings. So for us, it's a hrefs whatever how however you might misspell it in your own language. Then go to the matching terms report. This will extend this will expand the base of initial seed keywords and then look at global search volume. So for us that's 1. (18:12) 7 million the volume in itself for the keywords that we it brings and there's also a metric it's called growth forecast for us it's always growing so we know that we're doing a great job this is more like a north metric star in terms of okay are people thinking about us are they remembering our brand when it comes to SEO marketing in general so that's the kind of thinking you should have as well uh are people remembering our brand in the long run in the past 12 months and future 12 months. If yes, you should see some positive deltas. If not, (18:43) then you should probably ask yourself some questions. But this kind of metric helps you focus on this and not just necessarily only on traffic. Um the next one, and this is the last one, it's called branded keywords traffic. It's quite simple. Uh before I showed you that, okay, you can check the effective effectiveness of your brand awareness campaigns. (19:09) How much search volume uh do I bring? but actually how much traffic is converted. Like we're talking about traffic at the end of the day. Branded keywords do exactly that. And we have a very easy widget. So you can see a breakdown of branded versus non-branded organic traffic. And there's some deltas here. (19:26) Uh quite negative in our case probably because of AI overviews. But I did this presentation. I created the slides like three or four months ago. So uh I'm sure these things have changed. The way to look at it is with the mindset of again are my branded uh keywords and the traffic coming from them increasing if not I should probably make some due diligence and see why. (19:45) Now of course I didn't talk about all those brand awareness metrics that you should track uh my colleague here Louise she wrote a very interesting article on it. I didn't talk for example about social media traffic or direct traffic people remembering your website and typing in your uh main domain. (20:04) So, if you want to check it, check it out, then you can uh scan the QR code and it on your own. Hey, one one one quick follow uh quick follow up on that. Uh um by the way, someone in the chat is asking where's the where's the Q&A? At the top at the top of this chat box, there's a Q&A tab. Just if you put it in there, then we sort by like most upvoted later. (20:23) Uh and then someone asked in the chat just quickly, Stephen said, did I hear did I hear you correctly that brand searches are the highest correlation to showing up in chat GPT? brand search volume which ties directly to brand searches. Yes. Cool. Okay. All right. Keep going, sir. Yep. No worry. Uh we're on to part number two. We have a lot of questions, so I'm going to keep it short. (20:42) I think you're going to get much more value from those questions uh being answered live, but I also want to prep the train for that. So, we're on to our next part, which is brand visibility and AIR chat bots. And before going into that, I actually want to make it more engaging. So, I'm curious how many of you are already tracking AI mentions. (21:02) Just a simple yes and no. I think there's a poll should be on the screen. Yeah. Do you already track brand mentions in AI search? So, probably go to the polls tab and say yes, no. I'm just curious. A lot of nos. A lot of nos. Wow. I I thought people would be more into it, especially because it's a mainly a US-based audience. So, but yeah, a lot of people are not tracking it. Wow. (21:28) Interesting. So, out of those who are tracking it, the 34% again, I'm curious. Chat, GPT, Perplexity, Google A or views, what's your poison? Yeah. So, I I I recently did this did this for us for Exit 5 and we we just started tracking AI mentions, AI AI search. Same thing here. (21:53) It's basically been like 95% chat GPT and 1% perplexity. But the last two months that I've looked at it, it's it's more every month. And I we're definitely crossing the the chasm here because even somebody like my wife doesn't work in tech. We all work in tech. Obviously, we're on the early edge of this. (22:12) Like she's now using Chat GBT for her basically Google replacement, right? And there's there's certain things you go to Google for. Uh but a lot of that search is just consumer beat the attention has shifted to use chat GBT we're seeing in our business and you know I haven't seen much in the other sources so this is interesting to to to match this up with everybody cool yeah I'm happy to see co-pilot here in the top three I'm going to talk about them are obviously chat GPT overviews and perplexity claude quite useful for content writing I use it myself but also for coding co-pilot probably some people who work (22:42) at big orgs and they're forced to use it. But I'm happy to see co-pilot among those as well. All right. I think Allison, we can go back to the presentation. Thank you. So, you might think like, okay, Google is actually losing some market share um in favor of those AI chatbots, right? And that's why they actually released AI overviews. Well, not quite. So, uh sorry, I cannot. (23:09) Yeah, I can move on. Uh so as I said, Google is not necessarily losing market share as you might think. In fact, three months ago when I created these slides, the top three AI chatbots which were which are GE uh Perplexity and Google AI overviews and chat GPT were bringing in 345 times uh less traffic than Google alone. (23:35) Right now uh Chad GPT is bringing 100x less than Chad GPT than Google alone. Sorry. So probably by the end of the year if it goes in the same rhythm it's going to be more or less on the same footing. But what I want to stress out here is the fact that AI search sends just 0.1% of total referral traffic. So right now uh it's quite uh small and if you check it here it's right next to email and paid and when you compare compare it to search it's probably yeah just dwarf. So my point here is that even though it's small, one does not simply use AI search merely for (24:09) clicks and I'll tell you why. AI search has its own advantages. For example, it increases brand awareness as we already talked about and to be honest uh brand awareness, trust and recognition are the byproducts of good content. Doesn't matter if that content is surfaced by an AI generated summary, a video or a blog post. (24:31) It's also going to bring you more brand uh positive brand sentiment because again people recall your brand and it's much easier to do business with you. And we've also noticed that these are more qualified traffic leads. Um I'll give you an example for Href's website. Uh we have 0.5% of our traffic. Our traffic is around 10 million if you check it in Hrefs. 0. (24:53) 5% of 10 million is coming from AI search. But those people are responsible for 12% of the signups. So those people are ready to buy, but they also have other caveats. So probably they have higher bounce rate. They're not going to search so deeply across your website. (25:11) So these are people who are ready to buy, but at the same time, you might lose them in a second if you don't feed them the right information. So um how to track brand mentions in AIR chatbots? Well, our answer to it, this is the ATS answer. It's called Brand Radar. It's an LLM visibility tool. Uh and this is how it looks like. (25:35) Essentially, you can check your mentions in Google AI overviews, but we also can check them in chat. GPT and Perplexity. I need to update my slides because we already offered them. Microsoft C-Pilot is next and Claude as well. So, anybody who answered all the uh other quiries, I think there was 2% Microsoft pilot, 3% Claude, we're also on track for that. (25:58) But essentially this is our way of uh covering this gap and to be honest everybody's more or less searching or developing an LLM visibility tool. You had the other guys that you mentioned Dave uh previously you had them on the uh talk but we are at so we have pioneered SEO and we are still doing that for the AI search industry. (26:18) Now to show how it works I'm just going to show very clearly. I know you don't like product plugs and stuff like that, but this ties directly to what you've come here for. So, in my case, I've searched for a broader niche, basketball shoes, and then I have a few mentions here. So, unlike other tools, you can search for brands. I did search for Nike. (26:37) Then I had the AI suggest more competitors to my initial search. And by this way, I'm actually checking for these brands across this larger basketball shoe. But as I said, we're not like the other tools because we also let you to check products and or services if you have enough search volume for them across those AI chatbots. (27:02) But coming back again, so I'm searching for Nike's presence in AI chatbots across Google AI overviews. You can choose whatever um LLM you want. So Chad GPT or Perplexity uh in the basketball shoes niche. And what you'll get I'm not sure you can see it here quite clearly but you'll get the number of mentions impressions as well and all those competitive share and competitive reach. (27:28) So you're knowing okay what's the flow how am I comparing relative to my competitors and what should I do about it. Uh the results you see them here athletic shoe industry and to the right you have the AI overview in this case what again can be chat GPT or perplexity and how we pull how the AI generates that and features your brand. Now, a cool bonus tip here. (27:48) You can also track AI visibility gaps because that's what people are doing. And this is, I think, the lowest hanging fruit you can do. So, what I did here is show me keywords that trigger AI overviews that contain Adidas. It would this could be your competitor, for example. But, show me at the same time overviews that do not contain Nike. And I'm a big Nike fan. (28:08) So Nike for the quiry worst basketball shoes is not mentioned by any uh AI generated uh summary in Google. So I guess Nike is doing a great job at this. This could be again your brand. So you could plug in here all your competitors that are not necessarily uh that are showing up in AI overviews or whatever LLM of your choice and your brand that isn't so you can cover them. (28:33) I think this is the lowest hanging fruit so far. Um I'm going to talk about that a bit more. It's a small product plug. Don't want to bore you with it. How to get mentioned by AIR chat bots. It's quite new. So there each LLM more or less has its own rules and they also have more or less a bias in terms of what kind of results they want to show. (28:56) But we actually identified two things that are shared across all those chat bots. First one is don't block LLM crawlers. Blocking them means brand suicide. That's a no-brainer. A better way to do is to actually direct them what kind of content needs to be crawled in order for it to be uh pulled in AI generated summaries. So, um there's the robots.txt file. There's also an LLM.txt file. (29:20) Right now, to be honest, it's quite ignored by the LLMs, but we can talk about that in the Q&A. Be sure to mention there all the pages that you think are useful and hide all the private proprietary information that shouldn't be crawled. So pageionation for example shouldn't be crawled because unlike search you don't need to show them that look we have so many pages about this topic. (29:43) No, you just need to feed them the right information. Uh the next thing that's also common across all those LLMs is the fact that you need to create deep comprehensive content. So keyword stuffing SEO is dead in terms of that welcome topical coverage. This is a study that shows that okay out of those content related factors which one is the most promising to surface your brand in chat GPT and all the rest of the LLMs and those that do that are word count, sentence count and domain rating. So the authority of your website. (30:15) Wait, can can you go can you back can you go back one side for a sec on this one? Don't block LLM crawlers. Is this something that most people on their website like would they be set up to block them right now and they should go back and and change this after or is there a default here? There's no default. (30:35) Your robots txt file is the file that tells okay what kind of crawlers can parse and cannot parse information. uh if somebody from your dev team probably blocked them by default or I don't know they were too afraid to have all their content scrapped. You're an art exhibition and you don't want your art to be scrapped or something like that. (30:56) You might want to check it and say okay we allow those to scrap our website so we show up in the AI generated. Perfect. So so like super actionable leaving this today would be like make a note right now and go back and either talk to your developer or whoever runs manages your website and and make sure you're you're not doing this. Yeah. (31:12) and also mention that um the pages that you need to crawl and the ones you need to hide because obviously everybody has private proprietary data. You don't want that to be surfaced by LLMs. So a smarter way is to actually direct the LLMs what kind of information. Okay. All right. Keep going. No worries. Um as I said the second most important thing that's shared across all those elements the fact that you need to create deep comprehensive content. (31:38) So, forget about keyword stuffing and focus more on creating content that answers the searchers quiry, searchers intent. We'll talk about that in the Q&A because this is just the simple stuff. I'm going to talk about the actual science behind it. But we're back to the brand world and as our CMO Tim Solo said, um, that's what we did at HR for the past more or less 10 years. (31:56) So, we created great tools for marketing and SEO. We then published tons of content typing uh tying hers to the different problems and outcomes marketers have. And then we educated and supported all of all of our customers so they could become themselves evangelists for our brand. So yeah uh whether it's called GEO LLM or AEO I think some people are preferring more or less this latter term for now. (32:22) Somebody asked me the other day I had a VC friend of mine messaged me and he's like what's your opinion on GEO? I'm like I have no idea what's GEO. He's like, "Dude, how do you run a marketing business and you don't know what GEO is?" I'm like, "I don't I just haven't heard, oh, AI search. Of course, people are talking about AI search. (32:40) Just more acronyms for us." All right. Yeah. Generative um experiences or something like that. Um but yeah, what I want to say is that all those uh signals that are kind of murky, we're still in a black hat world when it comes to a search, they are still based on SEO signals. (33:00) So, if you want to read more about this, Ryan Law, our content marketing director, wrote about it. You can scan the QR code and read it on your own. But yeah, um I'm going to skip this part. Not that important for you. I'm more curious about the Q&A uh part because I have a lot of data in my head. It's locked here and I want to People are chomping. (33:19) They're chomping at the bit. So, uh I'm going to go to the Q&A for a second. I want to go find this um this question that I saw in chat. If I can't find it, I'll try to paraphrase. But sure, the question was basically, okay, but what happens if people get these answers from the LLMs and then aren't they just going to go and plug in that URL directly in the site? Uh, anyway, and isn't that not that that's not the that's not the AI and SEO point. (33:44) That's more of like the why how all of this attribution stuff is kind of going away in this in this AI search search world. Yeah, speaking of attribution, um those LLMs are kind of making it hard for you to track attribution and we have a study. (34:03) Patrick Stocks, our tech advisor, already did that and he took all the LLMs, the most popular ones, and checked their referral traffic. Um Claude is the only one who sends proper referral traffic. Uh chat GPT and Proplexity, they do the same only when you access the web version, but they don't do it as well. uh so well they don't do it basically for the desktop version and everybody's more or less having their own way of hiding the information either being shown as direct or unknown traffic in your Google Analytics dashboard. Um we do track it natively in nature. We have a tools called web analytics. (34:36) Basically alternative to the traditional the G4 one and you can see they're broken down by channel but for now just so you know it's not you it's LLM. So some of them do parse referral some of them don't. And those that do as I said are clo and chat GPT and perplexity the web versions but not the desktop ones. Okay. (34:59) I'm going to summarize a bunch of questions and I'm going to just ask you my I'll I'll get to some of them but I'm going to ask you kind of the overarching one which is all right you're run product marketing at this company that has deep experience in SEO things are changing you all are learning a lot about AI tell us like right now if I'm listening to this and I don't have a I don't have I haven't changed my content strategy my my SEO strategy for this AI world like what are the what are the one or two most actionable next steps that I need to be thinking about. I'm going to use this quarter to (35:29) kind of like re-evaluate our content efforts to to be relevant in this AI world. If you're my trusted marketing advisor, what what would you what would you tell me to do? What direction would you point me in? Awesome. Yeah, very good question. Uh I would stress out two things. So, first uh that's how I started the presentation. (35:48) We need to focus on few different metrics than we were used to in the SEO world. We did our own study and those metrics are branded search volume, branded um anchor text and also um it was clicks in my presentation but we found it it's branded traffic and by that I mean that you need to check whether or not your brand popularity is increasing over time and when it comes to branded anchor text the good news is it doesn't need to be interlin. So uh you don't need the hyperlink there. (36:19) You don't need to pay for a expensive backlink 300 400 bucks that's going to be useless anyway in time. So in the new AI search world backlinks don't matter anymore. But branded co-mentions or branded rich anchor text matters. So I give you an example. If we write content for hrefs and we mention somebody from our team. (36:39) So I'll say team solo uh our CMO. I'm not going to say that. I'm going to say href CMO team solo. so that I give the LLM some context as to uh who is this person and how he is he tied to the brand in itself. So number one I would probably look for other um metrics that I'm currently used with and I told them it's branded search volume branded reach anchor text uh clicks but also branded traffic. (37:09) Second um it has to do with I I think I need to be a bit more scientific. I need to explain how LMS take information and as I said yeah just that that's the thing I was going to ask you because it's like okay cuz I remember like coming up and I was reading the HF's blog um what were these other tools you know Semrush Buzz Buzz Sprout all these tools I used to use for like the 2010 era of content it was like guest it was guest blogging or like I'd want to basically get hrefs to mention me in their blog or HubSpot to mention me and it was like this game of of backlinks and the point of backlinks was like backlinks were a signal to tell Google that like hey you got a backlink (37:44) from this like high authority domain that that's valuable is that is that going away like how do you if if I'm a business and I don't have brand mentions how do I how do I go get placed in in different places man there there's so much there's too many questions to be honest but to answer this question right now how do you get those brand mentions again we're going back 10 years ago how we did traditional marketing you try to get more mentions through PR campaigns. (38:11) You're trying to get mentioned in the niche publications in your industry. I don't know, you have a cycling uh e-commerce store, then be sure to get mentioned in all the cycling niche magazines, websites that exist on the internet. You also want to partner up with influencers. So, that's going to cover the PR part. (38:31) PR is packed. Exactly. Uh in terms of what kind of content you should create, you should create user generated content. So definitely tutorials on YouTube or any kind of video and also be active in communities that can be crawled. So Reddit, Kora, having a Wikipedia page. These all help you to gain more visibility in front of LLMs and also perceive your brand as some a brand that has like a history and also authority. (39:00) Some people might ask okay should we write informational content? I'm seeing this question like AI overviews for example in Google at least uh you have the zero click content we call them crocodile charts because the impressions are going up and the clicks are going down and that's mostly because AI is stealing those clicks from you and we found out that more or lessformational content is dying but this doesn't mean that you should not write any moreformational content on the contrary you want to actually think about thatformational content content as (39:32) topfunnel content. You want to insert yourself in the buyer's journey as early as possible so you can actually influence people uh further down the road. Now, there's a caveat here. You would don't want to write something that's very generic and can be generated by an AI. (39:51) And I'm going to talk about how AI generates this type of content. Uh so don't try to create copycat content. Uh like I don't know, I'll give you an example. Uh what is project management? I used to work for a project management tool. I'm not going to write the a very long definitional article just to top the other ones and make it a bit Yeah, it's just a word salad. That was my whole like original SEO play when I worked at Drift. (40:16) We just basically wrote like what is for all of the topic maps of things that people in our audience were were interested in. And then it was like, you know, then like let's say you sold like um auditing software. It'd be like here's 10 auditing tools you need to try and like your company was number seven on that list. Like all that stuff goes away. Yeah. (40:34) Um Claude for example has just disclosed is it's what's called crawling mechanism or whatever machine learning mechanism not crawling mechanism and they have a tag it's called never search. So basically for very generic topics like this one, it's going to instruct its LLMs not to search on the web or into its own database to search for an answer. (41:00) So it doesn't make sense for you as a content marketer to write copycat content and to just make sure you write a word salad that's going to be better than the rest. Which will bring which brings me back to the second point I wanted to make when you asked my question. I think it's important to understand how um those kind of LLMs are generating the answers because it's quite different than SEO. (41:19) So in SEO in traditional search, let's call it traditional search, you had Google uh there was a quiry somebody was asking like I don't know pickle ball because it's quite famous right now. And then um did this is pickle ball for example and Google would uh check its database to see okay what pages closely answered the quiry pickle ball it's quite general to be honest it's not what is pickable how is pickable different than paddle or whatever so it would probably surface draws from its index a lot of stuff in LM world imagine that you have a fan out quiry so somebody is asking a quiry (41:55) pickle ball that pickle ball is going to be fanned out just like we have a fan. And what's doing it's finding relative terms of pickle ball. So it's what is pickle ball? Pickle ball for beginners. Pickle ball versus paddle. And it's taking all that context from those relative terms to create a comprehensive more or less article not necessarily article uh answer that could answer that from all the angles when you type in pickle ball. So I'm not going to talk about the science behind it. This is just like dumbed down version of it. (42:30) What matters more now in AI search is to actually have a topic that's super well covered in-depth topical coverage and the way it's going to be retrieved by LM is how close it is to my actual initial quiry. That's called cosine uh variable. So that's the mathematical formula. But just remember this, the closer it is to the topic itself, the closer semantically speaking, the closer it's going to be recalled by the LLM. So we're going away from keyword stuffing. We're not looking into that anymore. (43:02) We're trying to cover a topic as much as possible through topical clusters from each angle. And the way people I mean the way information should be structured also matters here. So we're not trying to write again word silence like you have a recipe and you're talking about how you were taught that recipe by your grandma or something. (43:26) LLMs in general preer more this kind of like too long didn't read format. So try to answer make your point in each subtopic in itself and then if people are interested and want to delve deeper into a topic then you can further uh detail the steps in a in in the paragraph itself. always frontload the main idea when it comes to covering subtopics in a particular topic. (43:47) And for those of you I didn't show that that's how we do it in nature. So we're trying to crunch those numbers and make that similarity coin similarity into something more easier to digest and understand. So we have a a topical coverage score. We're also going to break down that score on each subtopic and you can see how much closer you are when it comes to being to writing something that's going to be retrieved by the LLMs. I know a lot to pack. No, this is great there. (44:16) I mean, look, this is such a like there there's not it's not possible to do an hour on this and like give you the recipe and then like it's just like anything in marketing like there is there is going to be no playbook out. You're not going to be able to just like it's not like you're going to get these three paint by number steps from Andre after this and then three weeks from now you're going to magically double your website traffic because of chat GPT. But I think everyone is kind of readjusting and rethinking our marketing strategy. (44:42) And I tried I kind of always skew back to like the timeless lessons in marketing. Uh that's why I don't care if it's B2B, B TOC, whatever. I I I the my big light bulb and I'm taking my own notes during this is like we are going back to brand. We are going back to being interesting and relevant. (45:02) And when I heard you say, you know, I kind of went back to um a decade ago there was this movement in in SEO and content and it was like create 10x content, right? And I I I think that is still true to this day. It's like your goal is not to write these listicles. It's like how can we do original research research? How can we create really interesting content? Okay, here's the things that the the AI is going to answer, but we can give you 12 really specific examples from our customers who are in your niche and use examples and and really go deep as opposed to like, yeah, everyone can use Chat GBT to write, you know, junior (45:32) level blog posts, but we're going to write we're going to publish, you know, two or three meaty in-depth articles a week or we're going to do one original research report a quarter. I love that trend. And then also, this is what's crazy about all this stuff. (45:49) It's like I'm out there saying for the last couple years PR is dead because of influencers and like the shrinking media landscape, but now it's like there's actually a stronger appetite than uh than ever for PR. I think it PR doesn't necessarily mean traditional publications, but I think you mentioned like someone has a a substack or someone has a a community finding the influencers in your world and having interesting stuff that they can write about that that also can be surfaced in the in the LLM. That that's super interesting. (46:14) One of my questions summarizing some of this stuff back to you is like does distribution matter because it used to be my friend Ross Simmons would always say you know distribution is king right you you can't just create content you got to distribute it so what if you go and you have you don't have a lot of website traffic today but you create this amazing piece of content how do I you know in the old world it would be like get back links to that do I need to think about distribution like I can't just write it and hope that the LLMs (46:38) will crawl this like is there some play there that I need to be thinking about Yeah. Uh, so I think Ross is quite famous for redistributing content or repurposing content in different formats. Kind of works, but for us at it doesn't because you have so many different channels, so many audiences, so many frameworks or playbooks. (46:58) And a YouTube uh how to tutorial is not the same with a podcast on Apple for example or on Spotify. Um, but to come back to your question, I do think that AI search is more about an omni channel strategy. So before you have organic search lowhanging fruit it's like forever dripping you don't need to invest too much in it just people who write content makes make some decent content put some backlinks and it's going to trickle it's fine but now uh that kind of era is over we have omni channel presence so the AI is going to take multiple sources it's going to take Reddit Kora it's going to (47:33) take a Wikipedia page it's going to take uh listicles from I don't know G2 captera it's going to take any kind of PR stunts from influencers your own brand or events in itself maybe you have an event that your brand hosts and it's important so right now as I said there's never been so there's always been a lot of channels to acquire traffic but never so many that matters all at once so AI search think of it as omni channel approach and what I would do because I I saw some questions in the chat first (48:05) thing you want to check the traffic like you said do I get traffic from May I search? Let's see how much. If you get substantial traffic and you see a positive delta each month, then it's clearly a new acquisition channel and should probably get into it as fast as you can reap the benefits as it's still uh early inception. (48:29) Uh two, uh next thing is to actually, as I said, forget about keyword stuffing. The good part is that you don't need to buy back links anymore because all that matters is topical coverage. how well and in-depth you're covering a topic with your own expertise, authority, data, something that your competitors and LLMs cannot generate on their own. (48:48) And the way to do that, as I said, is uh focus on branded reach anchor text. uh you also want to write the frontload do the main information across various subtopics in your article in each paragraph so LLM can parse it very fast and somebody who wants to know more about it can read the rest of the paragraph um and yeah that's that's about it as a starting point so track first do I have actually traffic coming from those uh AI search bots in general If yes, uh you could check the AI mentions in themselves. I've shown you at brand radar. You can track it across AI (49:30) overviews, chat, GPT, perplexity whatsoever. That's going to surface some visibility gaps. It's going to tell you what's your search demand also because we also allow you to track that. So, is my brand being recalled by people? Are my brand awareness campaigns paying off or not? And then when it comes to content writing, do what I said, optimize for op uh content coverage. (49:54) So topical coverage that's very in-depth and also owns your own data. So it's not a copycat of whatever type of content and try to frontload information across each paragraph so it's easy to be parsed by those LLMs. Of course, also make sure that your website is parsed by LLMs. Uh so the llm.ext file doesn't ignore them. To be honest, those guys are kind of playing dirty. As I said, it's kind of like a black blackhead world. (50:24) They're ignoring your robots and LLM text files on purpose because each one of them is trying to get more market share, more users, more accurate answers, comprehensive like that in one or two seconds. So that's probably something that's going to be ignored, but it's a good practice. It's a social contract more or le showing the web, okay, what's parsible, what's not, and what you should crawl and stuff like that. (50:47) How do you think about measurement in this world? not as uh not specific to to I guess it is specific to to content here for a lot of us you know content is the is the is the brand investment creating content in some form if we can if we can no longer say and I think a lot has changed because of this but if we can no longer say hey here are the 46 MQLs that we you know generated from this piece of content I'm just curious based on your company the people you all are talking to how do you think measurement and and talking about mark the marketing's investment in content. How do you think (51:24) that story plays out in the AI world? Uh I spoke about that mostly in the first part of the presentation. So we more or less need to shift away from the traditional way of reporting stuff because as I said we have these crocodile charts. So impressions are going up that's cool but the clicks are going down. Why? Because there's zero click content mainly because the answers are generated by AI. (51:49) But there's other metrics. I'm not saying those are those are functioning for us but might not function for you. So I'll probably look at what my share of uh traffic value. So how much would my content be uh moneywise dollar-wise uh if it were to be acquired via PPC ads in Google ads. (52:12) That's one way of doing it for organic search. For AI search in itself as I said it's quite murky. they don't provide referral data. Uh but coming back you said sorry my bad you were talking about content right the value of content. Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's how I would val uh how I would measure it. The other way yeah it's quite easy and cheap to create content but you cannot spam the internet and create copycat content as I said because that's not going to be surfaced. And for general quiries, there's that never search tag in their own database (52:48) that doesn't prompt them or it stops them to prompt something that's like common knowledge. So as somebody said, double eat e expertise um experience, authority and trustworthiness. These are SEO signals. They signal to Google and also to LLMs in general that okay, you're the topical authority on a specific subject. (53:19) So you're the subject matter expert on this and your subject is the closest to this quiry that's being pulled. So it's easier for him to pull it before your competitors. Okay, there's a we're going to have to do some type of followup or AMA or something. There's a bazillion questions on this which is an amazing signal. Look, I think that my my takeaway from this today is like super super interesting and informative. (53:40) I think there's a lot I've been making a ton of notes. I'm just thinking about like moves that we need to make as as a business. I think every business is going to be impacted by this in some way. And I think look, you can sit on the sidelines and you can say, "Oh, this is the worst thing ever. AI is going to ruin all of us. (53:57) " Uh or you can say like I think there's I'm I'm an optim my nature as an optimist and I I see an opportunity here just like there was with marketing when marketing became digital and internet marketing became a thing. I've seen time and time again in my career the people that create advantages for themselves the companies and the people are the early adopters. (54:14) And so I think having Andre on to share some of this stuff is is just for you to start planting those seeds like man you're going to go into one of these planning sessions with your team and somebody on your team maybe your boss wants you to just keep doing business like we've always done before. (54:32) Now's the opportunity to say well hold on look like we're starting to see some changes in search and things are shifting to AI like I want to shift our content strategy to match here and this is the way you start to make progress against some of the stuff. All right, roll that poll sister. Uh we got we got a quick poll just to get some feedback. Uh measure this measure this event on uh on one to five. So so throw that poll. Andre, great to have you. (54:51) We'll send you all this. There's a lot of follow-up. We should create some some follow-up content from here. Obviously, go find Andre on LinkedIn, connect with him, send him a message. Maybe, you know, you can get be your your private marketing whisperer in the in the in the DMs or the Andre robot will come in and and help you out. But uh it's great to have you. Huge fan of what you all are doing. (55:09) Perfect example of a company I think that is going to is leading through education and I think that is also a timeless piece here. How can you be that for your brand? Lead with education. Be the expert for your customers. Go deep. Get specific real examples. You can help your customers win. Andre, great to see you. Thanks everybody for coming. This was a record turnout today. Holy smokes. (55:28) We had over 500 people here live at one point which is amazing. So great job Andre. Go for go for a run. Get the get the wiggles out. Go for a run and enjoy the rest of your day. Yeah. Thanks a lot for having me and you can reach out to me on LinkedIn and I'm also follow up with all of your questions. All right, sounds good. See y'all later. Okay.