August 11, 2025 • 46 mins
AI is fracturing the search ecosystem and creating new opportunities for SEOs to expand their role and demonstrate greater business value in this evolving digital landscape.
• Michael Buckbee discusses how AI is changing search and creating "siteless SEO"
• Traditional SEO has primarily been Google optimization, but search is now becoming a feature embedded across multiple platforms
• ChatGPT and other AI tools are often the first touchpoint for prospects, who may never visit your website
• AI search operates on different rules than traditional SEO—domain authority matters less while content repetition becomes paramount
• The BISCUIT framework helps marketers adapt: check technical foundations, conduct business intelligence, and shift content strategy
• Post-purchase attribution surveys often reveal that AI search plays a larger role in customer acquisition than analytics suggest
• Distributing the same content across multiple platforms strengthens your position in AI search results
• Companies should track how their brand appears in AI responses and optimize accordingly
• Content strategy should include both "faceless" (informational) and "face" (perspective-driven) content
• Agentic search is emerging, where AI assistants conduct research on behalf of users and present summaries.
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Guest Contact Information:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelbuckbee/
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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing,
your insider guide to thestrategies top marketers use to
crush the competition.
Ready to unlock your businessfull potential, let's get
started.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Howdy.
Welcome back to anotherfun-filled episode of the
Unknown Secrets of InternetMarketing.
As you can hear with the sound,I am remote this week, but
trying to make it happen.
I have an exciting guest foryou today.
Everybody's been talking aboutAI.
Not a lot of the major toolstell you what's going on with
the bots.
I know everybody's feverishlyworking on it, but I thought I'd
(00:35):
bring on an expert that hasbeen operating and has a tool
that can help you see what theother bots are seeing from a
competitive intelligencestandpoint with your competitor
sites.
So I have Michael Buckbee here.
Michael, with noatoacom, andI'm excited to have you on the
(00:56):
show.
I'm going to be learning justas much as everybody else here,
because this is definitely a newarea of search and competitor
analysis.
So, michael, it's great to haveyou on.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Well, thank you so much.
This is a delight.
You know we got to meet at SEOWeek in New York and you know I
was taken by just how muchenthusiasm you have for the SEO
industry, and this is awesome.
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
No, I'm excited.
I think that the industry ischanging and people are going to
change with it or they're goingto go up behind.
I really think that it's anexciting AI agents and
everything like that and so I'mexcited to have you on because
you're working on cutting edgetech that the industry needs and
thank you so much for coming onand being part of the show.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Yeah, awesome.
I mean, you said a realinteresting thing, which is that
we are at this big time ofchange and you know you don't
want to be left behind.
But this is like a hot take.
But it's like a hot positivetake, which is I think this is a
tremendous opportunity for SEOs.
You know so much of what SEO hasbeen for the last two decades
(02:18):
has been Google optimization.
You know it hasn't been SEOreally.
It's been.
Really we're going to focus onGoogle and everything else.
And the number one thing I seewith AI is that it is just
fracturing the search ecosystemand what we're seeing is there's
going to be search as a featurein tons and tons of different
platforms and tons of differentways that your prospects and
(02:38):
customers are going to find outabout your brand in all these
different areas, and with thatcomes the responsibility of
making sure all those differentplaces they know your brand,
making sure that actually thedata is accurate and that you're
ranking in the right way, andthat's a ton of work and I think
, again, it's a ton ofopportunities and value for SEOs
.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
No, I agree, I think it's kind of SEOs growing up and
we've already seen the term SEOstart to fracture and like SEO
and optimizing for differentsocial media platforms and and
now it's just taking on this,this broader term.
As you know, mike was talkingabout relevancy engineering.
I believe it's true.
(03:19):
You have to grow into what yourrole is going to be and that's
a lot more responsibility and Ithink, like SEOs are going to
have more of a seat at the tablebecause they're going to be
guiding the brand experienceabout how your brand's found
across the entire digitalmarketing ecosystem.
So, yeah, I agree and I thinkthat the positive angle is super
(03:42):
important is this is exciting,like this is good stuff to sink
your teeth into and learn andsee where it's going, and I love
to see people experimenting andfinding out new things on
social media and sharing, and Iagree, it's a.
It's a super exciting time.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
There's been an interesting term that we've been
talking about with a lot oflike our agency customers, which
is siteless SEO, which isalmost you know to date.
So much of what we focus on islike our site and we get the
headlines right and you knowlast contentful paint, you know
loading fast and stuff, and thenit turns out people are
actually just going to chat GPTand they ask a question, they
(04:21):
get the answer and they neversee our site.
Or you know, one of ourcustomers said to us like Chad,
gpt is our most popular andleast well-trained
representative of the company,where every day people are
asking it like every crazyquestion you can imagine about
your company and, depending uponthe answer about that, maybe
they don't go any further in thesearch journey.
(04:41):
So like if you're like a SaaSand you do healthcare work and
someone asks like oh, are youHIPAA compliant?
And they ask that in chat GPTand it says no, you're not even
in the consideration, they neversee your site, they don't see
anything.
So getting that sort of stuffright is not traditional SEO
work, you know, it's just not,but it's incredibly important.
(05:02):
It's incredibly bottom line.
Like you will make or break acompany on these things and you
know again, a huge opportunityfor SEOs to expand their role,
be better for the business.
You know more budget.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
You know all of that is we're doing like webinars to
educate our clients of what'shappening, because we've been
training them so much to look attraffic right and once you get
somebody in the top threepositions in google, traffic
actually goes down becausethey're probably qualifying for
(05:36):
the people also ask and the aioverviews, and so as you move
them up, traffic goes down andso there's kind of this retrain
of what's happening and I'mtalking to a lot of people.
As they move over to using theLLMs, they're not going back to
Google.
I'm almost seeing like AIoverviews is trying to stem the
tide and then, about two weeksago, when Google released all
(05:59):
the stuff that they're doing,it's going heavy into brand
heavy into YouTube and they'rechanging the whole way that
search is done, which's goingheavy into brand, heavy into
YouTube, and they're changingthe whole way that search is
done, which I think Google isgoing to probably become more
and more like a LLM, becausejust people are not people like
it's going to be the what is itLegacy option to search the old
(06:20):
way.
Yeah, because I mean it's justchanging so much, so quickly and
I think that people are notprepared and people are confused
about what's going on and sowhat I believe SEOs need to be
doing is educating people on howsearch is changing and talking
to their clients.
That's one of the things thatwe're spending a lot of time
(06:43):
doing is kind of reteaching ourclients about what's important
and what we need to focus on.
One of the things that Irecently learned was the bots
don't look at anything that'sover.
Typically, like 90% of all, thebots don't look at anything
over 10 months old, right and soif you have content on your
site that's a couple of yearsold, it might not even be in
(07:05):
consideration.
And if the LLMs are at the topof the consideration or top of
the funnel, then you know you'regoing to have a lot of trouble
getting getting in there,because there's not a lot of
calls Right, right, there's.
Typically, if you're a chat GBT, you only got maybe six links
and a lot of times people aren'teven clicking on because
(07:26):
they're getting their answer.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
So yeah, so I mean a couple of different things there
.
I certainly I still find a lotof pushback from SEOs on like
well, yeah, and this is crazy, Italked to a lot of SEOs, almost
to a person.
They say, oh yeah, I use chatGPT all day, every day, but I
(07:49):
don't think the average personis, I don't think the normal
person is, but they do.
And you know, when we look atthe stats, you know the stats
look real weird Because like hey, google is saying they still
have so many search queriesevery day.
But the pattern we see is thatwhen people are actually trying
to research and discern and likewhich of these, what should I
(08:09):
do for this problem?
I have they go to the LLMbecause you get such a better
experience.
And then when you get to theend and it has like, oh, here's
six different brands, you thengo over and you do a
navigational search to thosebrands and that's a Google
search now, and so Google getsthe credit.
We're really sort of blurringinto attribution here.
(08:31):
Noa Toa actually started because, almost as a joke, I was
talking with some, I had anotherstartup on the cybersecurity
space and I was talking to somefounder friends and we put our
names into chat GPT and whatcame out was just like kind of
nonsense but kind of useful, notthat great.
So I made a little script thatran on my machine and just like
pulled the data down out ofopening eyes API and I made it a
(08:54):
CSV and I sent it to my formyself and for my friends who
had their own SASSs and I kindof forgot about it.
But then a couple of weekslater one of them came back and
said, hey, we've got this postattribution survey that we send
to all our customers and theykeep saying they find us with
ChatGPT.
Could I get an update on thatspreadsheet?
(09:15):
And I'm like, yes, you can.
And so that was the start of it.
And still, it's reallyinteresting to me.
We do a lot of business withSaaS and the ones that are doing
that survey of just like, hey,you bought, how'd you find out
about us?
They show much higher rates ofpeople indicating they found on
both traditional and on AIsearch than any other analytics
(09:39):
or statistics.
You know your GAs wouldindicate, know your GAs would
indicate, and so that'ssomething we've been telling our
agency partners.
You need to get your customersdoing this because it shows you
in such a better light, becauseyou know so much of this is.
You know it's dark data You'renever going to see in the
attribution.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Otherwise, so no, I I agree with you on that
attribution.
I think a lot of people arestill going to the website, but
it's in the selection phase andit's a lot more branded search
this is what we're seeing isdefinitely moving up.
I just think when people goacross the chasm, which more and
more people are, they're notcoming back.
That's essentially what I'mseeing, and so it's interesting
(10:21):
how websites need to now,because Google is still the
corpus right of the rag ofinformation.
It's not generating the answerand then verifying it.
It's using Google as the corpusof information and being in
whatever to generate it, andthen it generates the answer.
So I think the websites arereally important to speak to the
(10:43):
LLMs, but also from a userexperience.
Once you get them there, you'vegot to convert them.
That's what I'm seeing is a lotless traffic is going to the
sites, so you need to really betalking about CRO a lot more
than SEO once you have thetraffic.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Yeah Well.
I was going to say that's agreat example of conversion rate
optimization is not an SEO taskI mean traditionally, like in
the strictest sense of it, butit makes absolute sense that
like, hey, we're, we're in thisto win, we're in this to drive
revenue, and that is where weneed to, you know, put our stake
in the ground and make our mark.
(11:18):
Yeah, yeah.
So what I've been trying totalk to people about is really
like intent.
Like you know, we've alwaystalked about search intent.
I think something where AIchanges the game is you want to
think a little bigger and youwant to think in terms of task
intent.
So, you know, you know it's notjust like what are you trying
to find for this one particularniche, but like the bigger thing
(11:40):
, and if you can provide thatand if you can plug in in the
right way, I think that's a bigopportunity for brands.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
So well, I think, really identifying that target
persona of who you're goingafter, because everyone's search
, and even everyone's LLM, islearning you and is learning
your behaviors, right.
And so, if you've searchedthings previously, and so it's
personalizing it right, and soit's going to give you an answer
that is going to give somebodya different answer based upon
(12:08):
their previous searches.
And so, if you reallyunderstand your customer and who
you're going after and wherethe places they've been and
where they're searching, I thinkthat, like you know, what is it
?
Sparktoro, right?
Sparktoro has been a great toolto understand where they might
be going.
What podcast, what is it?
Sparktoro, right?
Sparktoro has been a great toolto understand where they might
be going, what podcasts, whatsocial media accounts, what are
(12:30):
some of these areas that they'relooking at, to understand where
we need to optimize for thatarea.
And so I think that that issomething that I don't see a lot
of SEOs doing.
To your point, and I've foundwith a lot of, you know, people
are hiring people for SEO as theline item.
(12:51):
But, essentially what I've foundacross the board big companies,
small companies.
We want you to package up greatcandidates and deliver them to
them with a bow on top.
I mean, that's essentially whatthey're buying, and I have to
continue to retrain my team andremind them that, even though we
have the top rankings, what'sthe lead count right?
(13:12):
Have they closed any deals?
What's the conversion?
We're going further and furtherinto the sales.
I've done that so much, michael, that I actually have another
podcast that's called and wework a lot in the oil and gas
energy space.
It's called, you know, veryoriginal oil and gas sales and
marketing podcast.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
So you know Good SEO title.
Can't argue with that, so exactmatch podcast title.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
So I have a 30 year veteran salesperson in the oil
and gas space that talks salesand I talk marketing and we talk
about that merger between thatand like what happens, like with
, with comms, and, and how thatall works together and it it can
be applied to other industries.
But I I'm finding more and moreto be effective to build that
(13:58):
brand.
We can't just stay in our laneand touch SEO we can't just stay
in our lane and touch SEO.
There's so many otherdepartments and verticals and
skill sets that people have tohave to have an effective
campaign or funnel wheresomeone's coming all the way
through it and then the shape ofthe funnel is changing too Like
it's not this linear shape.
So I know there's a lot there,so speak on.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
I was going to say you know I'm right there with
you.
Like I have a background in,like I was demand and director
at a big cybersecurity company,worked hand in hand with this
huge, massive enterprise salesteam.
So I'm right there with you.
And something that we recommendpeople do and people listening
can do this right now is go toyour chat, gpt or cloud and ask
(14:42):
it to describe a business thatone of your clients or your own
and see what it says, see whatthe business objections are, ask
it those kinds of things andwhen, as soon as you start
prodding that stuff, I think youfind a lot of the information
that is hidden in your companyyou start to suddenly think, oh,
this should really be in theLLM.
I really wish Chad GPT knew thisabout our competitor versus us,
(15:05):
because it would make a worldof difference for this question
and so much of the traditionalenterprise sales tools like your
battle cards, you know your youknow here's our script, here's
our you know objection list thatwhen, here's how we overcome it
.
All of that is not SEO material, but all of that is vital to
trying to do the sales andmarketing movement in the modern
(15:27):
world and people are less andless eager to talk to someone
you know for this stuff and theywant to do their own research
online, especially in theenterprise space and there's,
you know I won't say they'vemade a decision before they talk
to you, but they have anopinion before they talk to you,
(15:47):
you know, and positive ornegative, and it's vital to be
able to you know these LLMs andjust provide more of a window
into what people are doing onthe cutting edge of AI search.
(16:13):
Sure.
So you know where I like todirect people to, to get started
is we wrote something calledthe biscuit framework, which is
you know, I'm very hyped aboutAI stuff.
You're very hyped about AIstuff, but there's still a lot
of people using Google.
There's still a lot of trafficin it, and how do you start to
carve out?
Here's the strategy goingforward that doesn't get rid of
(16:34):
all of that effort.
That doesn't get rid of allthat work and all that expertise
that we built up as SEOs, andso that's what it's trying to do
.
So, you know, we recommendpeople do some basic technical
things.
Um, you know how the indexingbots crawl your site from.
All these ai services is a realdifferent world than just
making sure googlebot can reachyour site.
There's a lot of them thatdon't provide traffic back to
(16:58):
you.
That, I think it's very easy tothink.
I can just block these like abig one is creative commons.
Uh, creative commons is thislike multi-organization group
that anybody can go and downloadjust massive dumps of the
internet, terabyte text files ofthe internet and, of course,
every AI company use that as thebasis to get started.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
So you were talking about Creative Commons is when
it froze out of me.
So you said Creative Commons isa great place where they've
scraped the internet and that'swhere they got started with
their body of knowledge.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Small, it's Common Crawl, not Creative Commons.
Though it does start with C butyeah.
Yeah, so Common Crawl, it'sbasically a crawler that anybody
can get the access to the dataand there's a bunch of these
where they do data collection onall these different sites.
And there's a bunch of thesewhere they do data collection on
all these different sites andyou know it's licensed,
anthropic, or you know whoeverlicenses this data.
So it's important to be thereand you know, mapping that out
(17:54):
and taking care of that is veryuseful.
And then the rest of theframework is really about
content strategy how to movelike further down funnel in your
content strategy as well as totry to address things Like a
crazy sort of thing is that?
You know, having a chat is a lotmore like having a conversation
with someone, and the example Ialways bring up is Wells Fargo,
which is Wells Fargo had somereally big fines from the
(18:16):
Federal Trade Commission, andanytime you ask a question in
chat you'd be like, oh, should Iuse my local credit union or
Wells Fargo?
It's like, well, I guess youcould use wells fargo, but just
to let you know, you maybe do anethical review of them first
before you use them and all thisstuff, and that's not what
comes up in traditional search,which is very much.
You know, hey, there's an atmtwo blocks from you.
(18:38):
Here's how you log into yourchecking account.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
So would you say that reputation management is
spilling over into SEO withthese LLMs?
I mean, that's what I heardfrom you is like Wells Fargo
needs to do reputationmanagement with the LLMs because
there's some schema out thereor you know there's a source
somewhere that's pulling in thatinformation that has high trust
(19:04):
from maybe a news site orsomething like that, and they're
you know, they're, they'retaking, they're taking that as
preferential of the lead, ofwhat to share with the user.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Well, you know you mentioned high trust less of
that, I think, than intraditional search which is that
you know there isn't really thesame notion of domain rating
and you know page rank and allof that in LLM search as there
is in traditional search and somuch of what is out.
There is really a consensusopinion based upon all of the
(19:40):
data that was available.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
And so once you scrap , scrape all the data, there's a
lot of people saying, hey,wells Fargo is maybe having some
issues, maybe they're better,but you know, so there's, you
know there's certainlyreputation like so so are you
saying that the number of pagesthat are created about a certain
(20:01):
topic and maybe what people arecoming on about social media,
as the LLMs you know, scrape allthose and then it's aggregating
the data?
Is that what's happening, orcan you talk a little bit more
about that?
Speaker 1 (20:17):
So let's.
A real challenge with all ofthis is that there's both AI
models, ai search services thatare like blended with other
things and they call out toother services.
So let's just talk likestrictly like, hey, we just made
our own AI model, now we'regoing to train it.
And if you do that and youconsider it that way, you know,
there's actually this technicalterm in the AI community a bag
(20:39):
of words which is literally likewe just throw the words in
there and then we shake itaround and it goes in this
particular order and then wepull them out in the right way.
And that's what's happening.
When, mike, you talk to chatGPT at like a real basic level,
there is not a built-in, youknow, thought of page rank.
There is not a built-in thoughtof like oh, this is coming from
(21:00):
the New York times and this iscoming from Mike's Twitter
account.
One of these should be a lotmore valuable.
Now what happens is the NewYork Times posts something
everybody on social media talksabout it, they retweet it, they
put it back out, and so you canimagine the impact they have on
what that particular opinion orthe topic is, or just the
(21:20):
pattern of the words is a lotbigger with that than it is the
smaller one.
But it's not strictly true tosay, hey, the New York Times and
I said something different, theNew York Times is just
automatically going to win onlike a trust score.
The biggest ranking factor thatwe see in AI search is
repetition, just repetition,repetition, repetition, and so
(21:42):
so much of what we recommendbeyond content.
You have to create the content,but then you have a
distribution strategy, and thatdistribution strategy, to my
mind, needs to start with.
There is not a duplicatecontent penalty, which is
something SEO people just clingto, and so it is not a problem.
You post something to your site, you post an article Great.
(22:05):
You go to LinkedIn and maybeyou post a link to it, maybe you
post a summary.
You could take that wholearticle, post it as an article
to LinkedIn.
You could take that wholearticle, make a video of someone
reading it, put it on YouTubeand that still counts.
That's not a duplicate contentpenalty, but it's a way of
getting your message out there.
And a real aspect of this iswhen you stop competing at the
(22:29):
top of the funnel and you starttrying to really like, fill in
the gaps and handle the lowerpart, where people are trying to
discern this and, like you knowhow much content is out there
saying like, hey, we're the best.
For this reason, here's ourreviews, here's this great
experience we had.
You aren't competing with that,you're just publishing into,
(22:49):
like an open space, so muchbetter, so much better for your
company.
And you know, just 360 on themarketing.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Interesting that that that opens up a whole new
thought of different kinds ofstrategies.
It also makes me fearful thatthere's just going to be crazy
amounts of spam content andcontent that's going to be
generated Like how are peoplegoing to combat that?
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Well, in a lot of ways this is a reinvention of
search and that you know, chatGPT is trying to become Google
faster than Google can becomechat GPT, and you know, I think
eventually there will be a lotmore in terms of, maybe, trust
scores, maybe some of theseother things.
But you know there's alsoaspects of this where it's I
(23:42):
don't know.
There there are terrifyingaspects of this and I, I too,
worry about, just like the blackhat spam just repeat the same
thing a million times and eventhe old tricks of like oh well,
the background on my page iswhite, so I made the font white
on my text and put it at thebottom.
Like those were some of theoriginal tricks, like some of
the AI search people did andthey worked.
(24:04):
But you know, I think as anindustry we've also matured and,
you know, for the areas whereit makes a lot more sense, I
think there is big reputationalissues with doing that.
Like you can't just post theexact same message to LinkedIn a
million times.
Even Twitter is very strictabout like you know, you can't
(24:25):
publish the same message a lot.
So there's limits to all thesethings as well, and new
challenges.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
The last thing I'll say about that.
I just got done with this, likeIBM training, like I said, and
they were talking about makingimages and certainly you can put
weights on different words, butit also was recommending, like
in the training, just repeat theword multiple times where you
want like it to wait.
(24:52):
And I was like you know, and Iwas like Red, red, red, red, red
, yeah, yeah.
You're like I want more red, sored, red, red, red, red, and it
understands that.
And then now I'm like going, oh,alt text, and I'm just like,
(25:12):
okay, this is all fresh, right,this is all new and it's
learning and it's it'sfoundational and and it's
growing.
I would love to move into someof the stuff that you're
specifically doing and what yourcompany is doing and how you're
looking at competitive analysis, because I think that that's a
real need for people right nowis I'm talking to a number of
different kinds of CMOs and theywant to know all kinds of
competitive information of howare they doing just as, like a
(25:35):
weighted metric versus everybodyelse.
Like how many webinars are theydoing, how many emails are they
sending?
How are they like what ishappening with everybody else to
, to create a barometerinternally to say where do we
fall Right?
And so I would love to hearfrom you looking at the
competitive nature of well, howmany times are the bots going to
(25:56):
that site?
What pages are they going to?
You know, what are they rankingfor?
That's what I think the burningquestion is on everybody's mind
and and you're just soknowledgeable on that at SEO
Weekend I would love to sharethat with anyone listening.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
So you know at some level what we're doing.
You know is you know an AIspecific version of a rank
tracker, and there's been ranktrackers for a long time.
I think what's different isthat we are not strictly trying
to track ranks just on a url,that we do it.
Off your url you can actuallyput in their technically
(26:31):
unlimited number of like productnames are you tracking entities
or brands, or like how, how areyou?
Speaker 2 (26:38):
how are you the easiest way to?
Speaker 1 (26:39):
consider is just strings that you know, like, hey
, like, because, um, it can beso different.
What the responses are that,like you know, the cyber
cybersecurity company I used towork at, they had you know a
dozen different products and youcould ask like, hey, what's the
top product?
And you know this part.
It doesn't have a brandassociated in the answer, it
just says what the product nameis.
(26:59):
So we have to track all that.
So, as part of thecompetitiveness, we try to track
both the domains, the actualname of the company, all the
product names you know.
Even if you wanted to, youcould go as far as, like, key
executives or spokespeople,because all of that comes out
and I think that's a realdifferent thing and so we track
(27:20):
that against.
You know there's different typesof searches.
You know there's different typesof searches, but the ones that
we're most focused on are thecompetitive searches, which is
like what is the best incategory and how you show up
there.
And you know there's some tweaksyou can do to how you call this
stuff, but that is fairlystable and it's very similar to
(27:45):
the sort of ranking order ofwhat you get out of traditional
SEO or search and it'sinfluenced by a lot of the same
factors.
But there's enough nuance in itthat when you look at the
competitive side of this thatyou want to be doing more in
terms of both what we callfaceless content and face
content.
So the faceless content is whatlike gets the raw ranking in
(28:05):
there and the face content issort of the conversion part of
it.
So you know, the facelesscontent is anything if you can
read it and you can't, like,hear Matthew's voice in it,
can't?
You know there's no point ofview that I think it's a lot
more of a challenge where theface content is much more you
know like, oh, there's arelationship and that it's
(28:27):
converting on that basis and Irealized I don't think I
answered the competitiveness asmuch as you were hoping for in
that.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
You gave me another question too, and my question is
like predictions right, do youthink that there's going to be
more of a draw towardscommunities and people wanting
to trust people?
Because, like everybody, like alot of the online stuff that's
(28:56):
coming like I already see it,it's online bots or it's
faceless YouTube pages orwhatever it is Do you think that
there's going to be a gravitytowards, like a human being, uh,
or an individual, which youknow they're leveraging ai,
whatever they're they're?
making themselves moreproductive, but it's there's
still a human being at the coreof it that someone can know,
(29:18):
like and trust and and it itstarts to move more towards like
, what are people in thiscommunity saying?
What is this individual sayingversus, you know, just a
faceless brand Like I've kind ofseen that with spokesperson
like spokespeople, but nowyou've got influencers saying
stuff.
So you're like, do they evenreally believe what they're
(29:38):
saying?
Like I just think that it'svery noisy right now and I'm
just curious, as you're workingwith clients, you know, where do
you project the ball going,like, where's the puck headed to
right now with what's going on?
Like when it all shakes out?
I'm just curious.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
So I think um, at least in my mental model of this
, is that the face content isthe multiplier for the faceless
content, which is, you know,like the same way we're talking
about the New York Times.
They publish something, it goesall over the place versus you
know, my much smaller footprint.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Let's go back to the competitive component of kind of
what you're doing and howyou're viewing that with your
company.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Yeah, so, like on the strictest case, we want people
to focus on, you know, a smallnumber of high value competitive
searches, most of which takethe form of like what is the
best in my category, who is themost trustworthy?
Those kinds of things, and youwant to make sure you show up in
there.
And those are not the end allbe all of tracking
(30:41):
competitiveness, because that'ssort of like the tip of the
pyramid.
There's a tremendous amount ofknowledge that you need
underneath this in order to getthose influenced, which is all
the parts of the rest of thesearch journey, which is that,
you know, people start with,like I'm having this problem,
how do I get the solution?
And then it eventually tricklesdown to okay, now that I
understand the right terms andthe way of this, tell me what to
(31:03):
do.
And, you know, depending uponhow you phrase that and how
aggressive you get with the LLMs, they will tell you like oh,
you should get the Ford, youknow, truck over the Chevy, and
that's very persuasive.
To go through that and that iswhere we're trying to get people
to influence is not all thebits leading up to making that
(31:25):
final question of like whatshould I buy?
Who should I go with?
Who should I give my money to?
Speaker 2 (31:31):
So right at the bottom of the funnel, all those
kinds of transactional terms,and, and and by by related terms
, very interesting.
What are?
What are?
Can you share some case studiesof, of, of maybe utilizing
these tools and like what you'vedone to influence the results
and the impact that it had?
Speaker 1 (31:51):
Sure.
So I was going to say something.
We do so when you put your sitein, we do what we call a deep
classification of it.
So this goes through all theexisting keywords that your site
ranks for and we try to thenpull out the intent of those
along with some information withyour site.
We try to then pull out theintent of those along with some
information with your site, andwe sort of build that funnel out
of all your words and say like,well, these are the
(32:13):
informational, these are theones that are looking for stuff,
and then at the bottom of it wehave those very you know the
business terms and what we'veseen our most successful
customers do is do that contentstrategy shift and with that, at
the very least, they feel moreeffective.
You know, in terms of actuallyinfluencing sales, you know the
(32:40):
attribution is still a bit of adark art, but certainly they
haven't seen sales go down bitof a dark art, but certainly
they haven't seen sales go down.
And in a couple of cases we'veseen very much like competitor
brands.
Like one of the first peoplestarted using this was like a
podcast hosting network andthat's pretty much a commodity.
It is also very strictly whatis the best podcast host to use.
(33:01):
And they were able to rank muchbetter in chat, gpt and cloud
and all these other systems thanthey were in traditional search
, in large part because they dida lot more user generated
content and they did a lot morewith being active on reddit and
they did a lot more um withreally hitting these bottom of
the funnel terms, in partbecause you know they started
(33:22):
seeing what the content strategyshifts were.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Yeah, I would love to go back to your your full on
framework of how you look atsearch.
If you'd be willing to gothrough that, I would love to.
Yeah, sure, break that down.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Yeah, so you know I said there's things you should
do today that are easy technicalthings, you know.
Make, check your robots thattext.
If you're do today that areeasy technical things you know
make, check your robotstxt.
If you're not familiar with howto interpret it, copy it out,
put it in a chat, gpt, it willtell you what you've done you
know, you know we have an activechecker.
Make sure that you can beindexed by all the sites and
(34:00):
then, from there, start to thinkabout you know your business
intelligence, which is all ofthe sales sort of things we
talked about.
Start to think about you knowyour business intelligence,
which is all of the sales sortof things we talked about.
Start to think about how it isconsidered with respect to you.
Know the sentiment about yourcompany.
There's a lot of easy questionsyou can ask, like is my company
trustworthy?
(34:20):
Like that's a great thing toask, that's a great thing to
track.
Ask those kinds of questionsand then start to track the
questions of, like the directcompetitive ones Are we the best
in the category?
Who is the best?
Who is considered better orworse?
And track all that.
And you know, once all of thatis done, you know you can then
(34:40):
start to actually do the contentshifts and what we see is then,
once you have that, you canlook at how it changes over time
, the responses, and thenreflect back what the latest
output is.
So chat GPT again, like we do alot of work with SAS, so it's
very like here's the keyfeatures, like the older
versions of chat GPT, you wouldsay who's the best.
(35:01):
They would just give you a listof 10 names and now they
literally break it out Likehere's the key features and
here's best, for like, those aretitles, like each three
subheads in the markdown of theresponse.
And so our customers are now.
They're like great, this isjust gold.
I'm going to go write anarticle.
It's like why are we the bestfor this category?
Here are our key features veryexplicitly.
(35:24):
These are much better and thisis what differentiates us from
our competitors.
Put that out there.
And that's, of course, justcatnip to you know, chat GPT,
and it's a little bit differentfor Claude, and it's a little
bit different for Gemini.
But that's the strategy is to,you know, reflect back the end
results we see out of it.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
What I'm seeing off page is a lot of people are
talking about how to incorporate, from a vector standpoint, your
brand with like whateverservice or term that you're
offering, and there's been a lotof people talking about, in the
traditional sense, how toutilize like into TSEO really,
and I really like your take onhow you need to better define
(36:07):
these associations and what youwant people to know about you.
I'm hearing a lot of likeinterview style.
You need to ask chat, gbt orClaude or whatever platform
you're using, what they thinkabout you and then take that
into consideration of the kindof content you need to give them
.
I mean, it even goes back in mymind to when you think about
(36:30):
GMB or GDP, how you don't even alot of companies don't even put
their terms or, sorry, theirhourly operation, like the hours
that they're on their websiteRight, and so this becomes like
the standard and it's like, well, it it wants to check it, like
(36:50):
for trust.
From a trust standpoint to yourwebsite.
You really need to includethose things on your website and
a lot of people get upset ifthey don't update, like on a
holiday, weekend or somethinglike that, if they say that the
store is open and it's not right.
Right, or the business is open,and so it's really interesting
to me just about how everythingis evolving.
(37:14):
I mean how, michael?
Because a lot of SEOs listen tothis as well as web developers,
and a lot of this stuff justkeeps being put on the back of
their shoulders.
How do SEOs need to bettercommunicate this to leadership
or clients of?
Like what you're asking for isnow 10x more work to you know,
(37:38):
all these fracture platforms torank and to do all these things,
which I think that that's goingto translate into well larger
retainers and higher paid SEOs,and I think that that's a good
thing over time, but in themedium term, there's going to be
a lot of frustration across theboard of how do we do these
things and just loading up SEOswith additional work that is
(38:04):
really outside their scope, andit's just like a lot of
companies can't afford theamount of work Like so it's like
the leverage that LLMs give youon the productivity side,
outpacing the amount of workthat you have to do, like I
haven't seen a chart yet thatsomeone shows you where that
breakeven point is, but I thinkthat that's essentially what
(38:27):
what's happening.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
I think it's going to look a lot like social.
You know, like social has a lotof the same issues where, like,
you have to make a decision onevery platform of like, well, do
we start a TikTok channel formy, my enterprise?
You know farming equipment, youknow.
You know, like, maybe, um, oryou know, is there a way to be
better with distribution?
Is there a way, you know, tohandle some of these things in a
(38:51):
better way?
But I do think there's a lot tobe learned from you know our
friends on the social side ofthings where they have very
messy attribution.
They have a lot of, you know,metrics that are they vanity
metrics?
Is this audience metrics?
Is this?
You know what exactly is there.
And you know a lot of the sametroubles with attribution.
And you know I, you know Imentioned before the the more
(39:15):
post-purchase attribution youcan do and surveys and stuff
like that's proven to be a realwin and a very bottom line win
as far as like putting people ina good light, bottom line win
as far as like putting people ina good light.
And I think there's just goingto be you know a lot more of
that, unfortunately whereanalytics is just going to get
worse and worse and we're goingto need more and more you know
(39:37):
elements outside of that tocompensate.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
So I agree, Interesting.
You say social.
That's.
One of the things that we'reworking on internally at EWR is
to build a really robust socialteam to complement the SEO team,
not because we think it's niceto have, because we think it's
need to have today.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Um, just that, both owning your own distribution
platform as well as your owncontent platform uh, the need
for site with SEO, the need tosucceed in these other areas,
and I think the great benefit ofit is that, as far as selling
this to upper management, whatyou're selling is more effective
(40:21):
marketing in general, even ifit's not exactly search like you
know it's it's really hard to,it's all directionally positive.
you know saying, hey, cmo, let'smix up our LinkedIn or
Instagram and talk more aboutthe company, how we're great in
these specific ways, like, yes,that's going to benefit this,
you know, search we're trying tooptimize for Also, that's just
(40:43):
great content.
That is just, you know,straight down the middle, good
content for us to have.
Anyway, there's no risk there,you know.
So that's very different thanyou know.
I think a lot of people havelike set aside AI stuff.
Is this like new, kooky, tootechnical thing?
And I think a lot of this justcomes back to being really
understanding your customers,really speaking their language,
(41:05):
really trying to reach themwhere they're at and, as a
benefit, if you do all that inthe right ways and the right
framing, you're going to justreally do well on AI search as
well.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Awesome.
Well, michael, I've learned somuch already and it's really got
me thinking of some of thethings that we might want to
firm up even more that we'recurrently doing.
Is there anything else that,like we haven't covered in your
conversation our conversationthat you think might be valuable
to anyone listening, if they'retrying to wrap their head
(41:35):
around all this?
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Yeah, you know, I think there is a big trend
that's happening that is likeguaranteed to be occurring, and
it has a funny name, which isagentic search, which is just
means search with agents.
And even that, I feel like, istoo highfalutin you know it's
too like fancy a term for it,cause it's really just like
(41:57):
almost a bot doing some of theGoogling for you.
And if you take that term forit, you know, uh, there's a lot
of tools that are doing this.
Google's AI mode is the biggestone, which is kind of like a
light version of their deepresearch stuff, which is, you
know, it goes out, it finds 10links, it looks at the content
of those 10 links and then itbrings it back to you with a
(42:19):
little bit of a summary and arecommendation.
And that's an agent.
It made some decisions for you,it is custom to you, it's not
the generic answer everyone gets.
It's got a little morediscernment and rationale on it
and we're going to see more andmore systems like that and even
just holding in your mind thatpattern, that like, oh, I need
(42:41):
to write this page on my sitethat describes what we do in a
way that the bot can read it,understand it and then, when it
weighs us versus our competitor,it recommends us to the user.
That's ultimately going to seethis in a summary, and that's
something real different thantrying to write just the right
headline for it or doing thesedifferent pieces.
And I think in some places it'sgoing to be different content,
(43:04):
that there's more like a humanversion of it and more a face
and faceless version of it.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Awesome.
I think that that's a greatunknown secret of Internet
marketing.
Right there, would you say, outof everything you talked about,
what is the one thing that youwant people to take away and
take action on?
That's the most important thingthat needs to be happening
right now.
I heard create content aboutyour brand and put it out there
(43:35):
to make sure you're answeringthe questions that people might
be asking across multipleplatforms.
That's what I, what my yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
You know, I think there's an even easier one,
which is and this isself-serving, but you know we're
marketers.
You know, like, on our site, wehave a we call it like an AI
search console and it reallydoes.
It runs through like 24different bots that are indexing
your site and we have so manypeople find out issues from this
that are just the basic stuff,like cause you can write stuff,
(44:12):
but if it's not being indexed,doesn't matter.
You know like, and so it's free.
It's super easy to try out,like.
Just start there at least toget your foot in the door and to
start thinking about like hey,you know these are important,
this is something we want toinfluence, and get started there
.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
So so noatoacom's no-a-t-o-acom, or is it ai?
Sorry Okay com.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
I want to make sure we got the com we're doing it
for real Awesome.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
So, michael, if someone enjoyed this
conversation I know I have andthey want to hear more about
what you're doing.
I know you're active onLinkedIn.
Yeah, how do people find you?
What, what?
Where should people besearching?
Speaker 1 (44:48):
Yeah, Go to go to noatoacom.
It is a free signup.
It gets you like a couple ofquestions that you can ask from
a chat GPT.
You can put them in yourself,like whatever you want to know.
We'll track those for you forfree to just see what the
reports are.
We will check for the bots andyou'll get our newsletter and
(45:14):
the newsletter.
If you heard me today, it isvery much written in my voice.
It is a face version of thisthat I write every week.
That has, you know, aninterpretation of like what's
happening and things, not justsort of a regurgitation.
So trying to be helpful and addvalue to people.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
So, yeah, awesome.
Well, thank you so much forcoming.
On the unknown secrets, I amgoing to go do it after this
myself.
I know I was looking at it andI'm I'm super excited.
Thank you so much for comingand sharing some valuable
knowledge with everyone here.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
Well, thank you so much for having me.
Honestly, it was great meetingyou in New York.
It was great talking to you nowand have a good week, bye.
Speaker 2 (45:47):
All right, until the next time, everyone, my name is
Matt Bertram.
Bye-bye, for now, it's notgoing.
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing,
your insider guide to thestrategies top marketers use to
crush the competition.
Ready to unlock your businessfull potential, let's get
started.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Howdy.
Welcome back to anotherfun-filled episode of the
Unknown Secrets of InternetMarketing.
As you can hear with the sound,I am remote this week, but
trying to make it happen.
I have an exciting guest foryou today.
Everybody's been talking aboutAI.
Not a lot of the major toolstell you what's going on with
the bots.
I know everybody's feverishlyworking on it, but I thought I'd
(00:35):
bring on an expert that hasbeen operating and has a tool
that can help you see what theother bots are seeing from a
competitive intelligencestandpoint with your competitor
sites.
So I have Michael Buckbee here.
Michael, with noatoacom, andI'm excited to have you on the
(00:56):
show.
I'm going to be learning justas much as everybody else here,
because this is definitely a newarea of search and competitor
analysis.
So, michael, it's great to haveyou on.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Well, thank you so much.
This is a delight.
You know we got to meet at SEOWeek in New York and you know I
was taken by just how muchenthusiasm you have for the SEO
industry, and this is awesome.
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
No, I'm excited.
I think that the industry ischanging and people are going to
change with it or they're goingto go up behind.
I really think that it's anexciting AI agents and
everything like that and so I'mexcited to have you on because
you're working on cutting edgetech that the industry needs and
thank you so much for coming onand being part of the show.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Yeah, awesome.
I mean, you said a realinteresting thing, which is that
we are at this big time ofchange and you know you don't
want to be left behind.
But this is like a hot take.
But it's like a hot positivetake, which is I think this is a
tremendous opportunity for SEOs.
You know so much of what SEO hasbeen for the last two decades
(02:18):
has been Google optimization.
You know it hasn't been SEOreally.
It's been.
Really we're going to focus onGoogle and everything else.
And the number one thing I seewith AI is that it is just
fracturing the search ecosystemand what we're seeing is there's
going to be search as a featurein tons and tons of different
platforms and tons of differentways that your prospects and
(02:38):
customers are going to find outabout your brand in all these
different areas, and with thatcomes the responsibility of
making sure all those differentplaces they know your brand,
making sure that actually thedata is accurate and that you're
ranking in the right way, andthat's a ton of work and I think
, again, it's a ton ofopportunities and value for SEOs
.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
No, I agree, I think it's kind of SEOs growing up and
we've already seen the term SEOstart to fracture and like SEO
and optimizing for differentsocial media platforms and and
now it's just taking on this,this broader term.
As you know, mike was talkingabout relevancy engineering.
I believe it's true.
(03:19):
You have to grow into what yourrole is going to be and that's
a lot more responsibility and Ithink, like SEOs are going to
have more of a seat at the tablebecause they're going to be
guiding the brand experienceabout how your brand's found
across the entire digitalmarketing ecosystem.
So, yeah, I agree and I thinkthat the positive angle is super
(03:42):
important is this is exciting,like this is good stuff to sink
your teeth into and learn andsee where it's going, and I love
to see people experimenting andfinding out new things on
social media and sharing, and Iagree, it's a.
It's a super exciting time.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
There's been an interesting term that we've been
talking about with a lot oflike our agency customers, which
is siteless SEO, which isalmost you know to date.
So much of what we focus on islike our site and we get the
headlines right and you knowlast contentful paint, you know
loading fast and stuff, and thenit turns out people are
actually just going to chat GPTand they ask a question, they
(04:21):
get the answer and they neversee our site.
Or you know, one of ourcustomers said to us like Chad,
gpt is our most popular andleast well-trained
representative of the company,where every day people are
asking it like every crazyquestion you can imagine about
your company and, depending uponthe answer about that, maybe
they don't go any further in thesearch journey.
(04:41):
So like if you're like a SaaSand you do healthcare work and
someone asks like oh, are youHIPAA compliant?
And they ask that in chat GPTand it says no, you're not even
in the consideration, they neversee your site, they don't see
anything.
So getting that sort of stuffright is not traditional SEO
work, you know, it's just not,but it's incredibly important.
(05:02):
It's incredibly bottom line.
Like you will make or break acompany on these things and you
know again, a huge opportunityfor SEOs to expand their role,
be better for the business.
You know more budget.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
You know all of that is we're doing like webinars to
educate our clients of what'shappening, because we've been
training them so much to look attraffic right and once you get
somebody in the top threepositions in google, traffic
actually goes down becausethey're probably qualifying for
(05:36):
the people also ask and the aioverviews, and so as you move
them up, traffic goes down andso there's kind of this retrain
of what's happening and I'mtalking to a lot of people.
As they move over to using theLLMs, they're not going back to
Google.
I'm almost seeing like AIoverviews is trying to stem the
tide and then, about two weeksago, when Google released all
(05:59):
the stuff that they're doing,it's going heavy into brand
heavy into YouTube and they'rechanging the whole way that
search is done, which's goingheavy into brand, heavy into
YouTube, and they're changingthe whole way that search is
done, which I think Google isgoing to probably become more
and more like a LLM, becausejust people are not people like
it's going to be the what is itLegacy option to search the old
(06:20):
way.
Yeah, because I mean it's justchanging so much, so quickly and
I think that people are notprepared and people are confused
about what's going on and sowhat I believe SEOs need to be
doing is educating people on howsearch is changing and talking
to their clients.
That's one of the things thatwe're spending a lot of time
(06:43):
doing is kind of reteaching ourclients about what's important
and what we need to focus on.
One of the things that Irecently learned was the bots
don't look at anything that'sover.
Typically, like 90% of all, thebots don't look at anything
over 10 months old, right and soif you have content on your
site that's a couple of yearsold, it might not even be in
(07:05):
consideration.
And if the LLMs are at the topof the consideration or top of
the funnel, then you know you'regoing to have a lot of trouble
getting getting in there,because there's not a lot of
calls Right, right, there's.
Typically, if you're a chat GBT, you only got maybe six links
and a lot of times people aren'teven clicking on because
(07:26):
they're getting their answer.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
So yeah, so I mean a couple of different things there
.
I certainly I still find a lotof pushback from SEOs on like
well, yeah, and this is crazy, Italked to a lot of SEOs, almost
to a person.
They say, oh yeah, I use chatGPT all day, every day, but I
(07:49):
don't think the average personis, I don't think the normal
person is, but they do.
And you know, when we look atthe stats, you know the stats
look real weird Because like hey, google is saying they still
have so many search queriesevery day.
But the pattern we see is thatwhen people are actually trying
to research and discern and likewhich of these, what should I
(08:09):
do for this problem?
I have they go to the LLMbecause you get such a better
experience.
And then when you get to theend and it has like, oh, here's
six different brands, you thengo over and you do a
navigational search to thosebrands and that's a Google
search now, and so Google getsthe credit.
We're really sort of blurringinto attribution here.
(08:31):
Noa Toa actually started because, almost as a joke, I was
talking with some, I had anotherstartup on the cybersecurity
space and I was talking to somefounder friends and we put our
names into chat GPT and whatcame out was just like kind of
nonsense but kind of useful, notthat great.
So I made a little script thatran on my machine and just like
pulled the data down out ofopening eyes API and I made it a
(08:54):
CSV and I sent it to my formyself and for my friends who
had their own SASSs and I kindof forgot about it.
But then a couple of weekslater one of them came back and
said, hey, we've got this postattribution survey that we send
to all our customers and theykeep saying they find us with
ChatGPT.
Could I get an update on thatspreadsheet?
(09:15):
And I'm like, yes, you can.
And so that was the start of it.
And still, it's reallyinteresting to me.
We do a lot of business withSaaS and the ones that are doing
that survey of just like, hey,you bought, how'd you find out
about us?
They show much higher rates ofpeople indicating they found on
both traditional and on AIsearch than any other analytics
(09:39):
or statistics.
You know your GAs wouldindicate, know your GAs would
indicate, and so that'ssomething we've been telling our
agency partners.
You need to get your customersdoing this because it shows you
in such a better light, becauseyou know so much of this is.
You know it's dark data You'renever going to see in the
attribution.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Otherwise, so no, I I agree with you on that
attribution.
I think a lot of people arestill going to the website, but
it's in the selection phase andit's a lot more branded search
this is what we're seeing isdefinitely moving up.
I just think when people goacross the chasm, which more and
more people are, they're notcoming back.
That's essentially what I'mseeing, and so it's interesting
(10:21):
how websites need to now,because Google is still the
corpus right of the rag ofinformation.
It's not generating the answerand then verifying it.
It's using Google as the corpusof information and being in
whatever to generate it, andthen it generates the answer.
So I think the websites arereally important to speak to the
(10:43):
LLMs, but also from a userexperience.
Once you get them there, you'vegot to convert them.
That's what I'm seeing is a lotless traffic is going to the
sites, so you need to really betalking about CRO a lot more
than SEO once you have thetraffic.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Yeah Well.
I was going to say that's agreat example of conversion rate
optimization is not an SEO taskI mean traditionally, like in
the strictest sense of it, butit makes absolute sense that
like, hey, we're, we're in thisto win, we're in this to drive
revenue, and that is where weneed to, you know, put our stake
in the ground and make our mark.
(11:18):
Yeah, yeah.
So what I've been trying totalk to people about is really
like intent.
Like you know, we've alwaystalked about search intent.
I think something where AIchanges the game is you want to
think a little bigger and youwant to think in terms of task
intent.
So, you know, you know it's notjust like what are you trying
to find for this one particularniche, but like the bigger thing
(11:40):
, and if you can provide thatand if you can plug in in the
right way, I think that's a bigopportunity for brands.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
So well, I think, really identifying that target
persona of who you're goingafter, because everyone's search
, and even everyone's LLM, islearning you and is learning
your behaviors, right.
And so, if you've searchedthings previously, and so it's
personalizing it right, and soit's going to give you an answer
that is going to give somebodya different answer based upon
(12:08):
their previous searches.
And so, if you reallyunderstand your customer and who
you're going after and wherethe places they've been and
where they're searching, I thinkthat, like you know, what is it
?
Sparktoro, right?
Sparktoro has been a great toolto understand where they might
be going.
What podcast, what is it?
Sparktoro, right?
Sparktoro has been a great toolto understand where they might
be going, what podcasts, whatsocial media accounts, what are
(12:30):
some of these areas that they'relooking at, to understand where
we need to optimize for thatarea.
And so I think that that issomething that I don't see a lot
of SEOs doing.
To your point, and I've foundwith a lot of, you know, people
are hiring people for SEO as theline item.
(12:51):
But, essentially what I've foundacross the board big companies,
small companies.
We want you to package up greatcandidates and deliver them to
them with a bow on top.
I mean, that's essentially whatthey're buying, and I have to
continue to retrain my team andremind them that, even though we
have the top rankings, what'sthe lead count right?
(13:12):
Have they closed any deals?
What's the conversion?
We're going further and furtherinto the sales.
I've done that so much, michael, that I actually have another
podcast that's called and wework a lot in the oil and gas
energy space.
It's called, you know, veryoriginal oil and gas sales and
marketing podcast.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
So you know Good SEO title.
Can't argue with that, so exactmatch podcast title.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
So I have a 30 year veteran salesperson in the oil
and gas space that talks salesand I talk marketing and we talk
about that merger between thatand like what happens, like with
, with comms, and, and how thatall works together and it it can
be applied to other industries.
But I I'm finding more and moreto be effective to build that
(13:58):
brand.
We can't just stay in our laneand touch SEO we can't just stay
in our lane and touch SEO.
There's so many otherdepartments and verticals and
skill sets that people have tohave to have an effective
campaign or funnel wheresomeone's coming all the way
through it and then the shape ofthe funnel is changing too Like
it's not this linear shape.
So I know there's a lot there,so speak on.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
I was going to say you know I'm right there with
you.
Like I have a background in,like I was demand and director
at a big cybersecurity company,worked hand in hand with this
huge, massive enterprise salesteam.
So I'm right there with you.
And something that we recommendpeople do and people listening
can do this right now is go toyour chat, gpt or cloud and ask
(14:42):
it to describe a business thatone of your clients or your own
and see what it says, see whatthe business objections are, ask
it those kinds of things andwhen, as soon as you start
prodding that stuff, I think youfind a lot of the information
that is hidden in your companyyou start to suddenly think, oh,
this should really be in theLLM.
I really wish Chad GPT knew thisabout our competitor versus us,
(15:05):
because it would make a worldof difference for this question
and so much of the traditionalenterprise sales tools like your
battle cards, you know your youknow here's our script, here's
our you know objection list thatwhen, here's how we overcome it
.
All of that is not SEO material, but all of that is vital to
trying to do the sales andmarketing movement in the modern
(15:27):
world and people are less andless eager to talk to someone
you know for this stuff and theywant to do their own research
online, especially in theenterprise space and there's,
you know I won't say they'vemade a decision before they talk
to you, but they have anopinion before they talk to you,
(15:47):
you know, and positive ornegative, and it's vital to be
able to you know these LLMs andjust provide more of a window
into what people are doing onthe cutting edge of AI search.
(16:13):
Sure.
So you know where I like todirect people to, to get started
is we wrote something calledthe biscuit framework, which is
you know, I'm very hyped aboutAI stuff.
You're very hyped about AIstuff, but there's still a lot
of people using Google.
There's still a lot of trafficin it, and how do you start to
carve out?
Here's the strategy goingforward that doesn't get rid of
(16:34):
all of that effort.
That doesn't get rid of allthat work and all that expertise
that we built up as SEOs, andso that's what it's trying to do
.
So, you know, we recommendpeople do some basic technical
things.
Um, you know how the indexingbots crawl your site from.
All these ai services is a realdifferent world than just
making sure googlebot can reachyour site.
There's a lot of them thatdon't provide traffic back to
(16:58):
you.
That, I think it's very easy tothink.
I can just block these like abig one is creative commons.
Uh, creative commons is thislike multi-organization group
that anybody can go and downloadjust massive dumps of the
internet, terabyte text files ofthe internet and, of course,
every AI company use that as thebasis to get started.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
So you were talking about Creative Commons is when
it froze out of me.
So you said Creative Commons isa great place where they've
scraped the internet and that'swhere they got started with
their body of knowledge.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Small, it's Common Crawl, not Creative Commons.
Though it does start with C butyeah.
Yeah, so Common Crawl, it'sbasically a crawler that anybody
can get the access to the dataand there's a bunch of these
where they do data collection onall these different sites.
And there's a bunch of thesewhere they do data collection on
all these different sites andyou know it's licensed,
anthropic, or you know whoeverlicenses this data.
So it's important to be thereand you know, mapping that out
(17:54):
and taking care of that is veryuseful.
And then the rest of theframework is really about
content strategy how to movelike further down funnel in your
content strategy as well as totry to address things Like a
crazy sort of thing is that?
You know, having a chat is a lotmore like having a conversation
with someone, and the example Ialways bring up is Wells Fargo,
which is Wells Fargo had somereally big fines from the
(18:16):
Federal Trade Commission, andanytime you ask a question in
chat you'd be like, oh, should Iuse my local credit union or
Wells Fargo?
It's like, well, I guess youcould use wells fargo, but just
to let you know, you maybe do anethical review of them first
before you use them and all thisstuff, and that's not what
comes up in traditional search,which is very much.
You know, hey, there's an atmtwo blocks from you.
(18:38):
Here's how you log into yourchecking account.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
So would you say that reputation management is
spilling over into SEO withthese LLMs?
I mean, that's what I heardfrom you is like Wells Fargo
needs to do reputationmanagement with the LLMs because
there's some schema out thereor you know there's a source
somewhere that's pulling in thatinformation that has high trust
(19:04):
from maybe a news site orsomething like that, and they're
you know, they're, they'retaking, they're taking that as
preferential of the lead, ofwhat to share with the user.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Well, you know you mentioned high trust less of
that, I think, than intraditional search which is that
you know there isn't really thesame notion of domain rating
and you know page rank and allof that in LLM search as there
is in traditional search and somuch of what is out.
There is really a consensusopinion based upon all of the
(19:40):
data that was available.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
And so once you scrap , scrape all the data, there's a
lot of people saying, hey,wells Fargo is maybe having some
issues, maybe they're better,but you know, so there's, you
know there's certainlyreputation like so so are you
saying that the number of pagesthat are created about a certain
(20:01):
topic and maybe what people arecoming on about social media,
as the LLMs you know, scrape allthose and then it's aggregating
the data?
Is that what's happening, orcan you talk a little bit more
about that?
Speaker 1 (20:17):
So let's.
A real challenge with all ofthis is that there's both AI
models, ai search services thatare like blended with other
things and they call out toother services.
So let's just talk likestrictly like, hey, we just made
our own AI model, now we'regoing to train it.
And if you do that and youconsider it that way, you know,
there's actually this technicalterm in the AI community a bag
(20:39):
of words which is literally likewe just throw the words in
there and then we shake itaround and it goes in this
particular order and then wepull them out in the right way.
And that's what's happening.
When, mike, you talk to chatGPT at like a real basic level,
there is not a built-in, youknow, thought of page rank.
There is not a built-in thoughtof like oh, this is coming from
(21:00):
the New York times and this iscoming from Mike's Twitter
account.
One of these should be a lotmore valuable.
Now what happens is the NewYork Times posts something
everybody on social media talksabout it, they retweet it, they
put it back out, and so you canimagine the impact they have on
what that particular opinion orthe topic is, or just the
(21:20):
pattern of the words is a lotbigger with that than it is the
smaller one.
But it's not strictly true tosay, hey, the New York Times and
I said something different, theNew York Times is just
automatically going to win onlike a trust score.
The biggest ranking factor thatwe see in AI search is
repetition, just repetition,repetition, repetition, and so
(21:42):
so much of what we recommendbeyond content.
You have to create the content,but then you have a
distribution strategy, and thatdistribution strategy, to my
mind, needs to start with.
There is not a duplicatecontent penalty, which is
something SEO people just clingto, and so it is not a problem.
You post something to your site, you post an article Great.
(22:05):
You go to LinkedIn and maybeyou post a link to it, maybe you
post a summary.
You could take that wholearticle, post it as an article
to LinkedIn.
You could take that wholearticle, make a video of someone
reading it, put it on YouTubeand that still counts.
That's not a duplicate contentpenalty, but it's a way of
getting your message out there.
And a real aspect of this iswhen you stop competing at the
(22:29):
top of the funnel and you starttrying to really like, fill in
the gaps and handle the lowerpart, where people are trying to
discern this and, like you knowhow much content is out there
saying like, hey, we're the best.
For this reason, here's ourreviews, here's this great
experience we had.
You aren't competing with that,you're just publishing into,
(22:49):
like an open space, so muchbetter, so much better for your
company.
And you know, just 360 on themarketing.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Interesting that that that opens up a whole new
thought of different kinds ofstrategies.
It also makes me fearful thatthere's just going to be crazy
amounts of spam content andcontent that's going to be
generated Like how are peoplegoing to combat that?
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Well, in a lot of ways this is a reinvention of
search and that you know, chatGPT is trying to become Google
faster than Google can becomechat GPT, and you know, I think
eventually there will be a lotmore in terms of, maybe, trust
scores, maybe some of theseother things.
But you know there's alsoaspects of this where it's I
(23:42):
don't know.
There there are terrifyingaspects of this and I, I too,
worry about, just like the blackhat spam just repeat the same
thing a million times and eventhe old tricks of like oh well,
the background on my page iswhite, so I made the font white
on my text and put it at thebottom.
Like those were some of theoriginal tricks, like some of
the AI search people did andthey worked.
(24:04):
But you know, I think as anindustry we've also matured and,
you know, for the areas whereit makes a lot more sense, I
think there is big reputationalissues with doing that.
Like you can't just post theexact same message to LinkedIn a
million times.
Even Twitter is very strictabout like you know, you can't
(24:25):
publish the same message a lot.
So there's limits to all thesethings as well, and new
challenges.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
The last thing I'll say about that.
I just got done with this, likeIBM training, like I said, and
they were talking about makingimages and certainly you can put
weights on different words, butit also was recommending, like
in the training, just repeat theword multiple times where you
want like it to wait.
(24:52):
And I was like you know, and Iwas like Red, red, red, red, red
, yeah, yeah.
You're like I want more red, sored, red, red, red, red, and it
understands that.
And then now I'm like going, oh,alt text, and I'm just like,
(25:12):
okay, this is all fresh, right,this is all new and it's
learning and it's it'sfoundational and and it's
growing.
I would love to move into someof the stuff that you're
specifically doing and what yourcompany is doing and how you're
looking at competitive analysis, because I think that that's a
real need for people right nowis I'm talking to a number of
different kinds of CMOs and theywant to know all kinds of
competitive information of howare they doing just as, like a
(25:35):
weighted metric versus everybodyelse.
Like how many webinars are theydoing, how many emails are they
sending?
How are they like what ishappening with everybody else to
, to create a barometerinternally to say where do we
fall Right?
And so I would love to hearfrom you looking at the
competitive nature of well, howmany times are the bots going to
(25:56):
that site?
What pages are they going to?
You know, what are they rankingfor?
That's what I think the burningquestion is on everybody's mind
and and you're just soknowledgeable on that at SEO
Weekend I would love to sharethat with anyone listening.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
So you know at some level what we're doing.
You know is you know an AIspecific version of a rank
tracker, and there's been ranktrackers for a long time.
I think what's different isthat we are not strictly trying
to track ranks just on a url,that we do it.
Off your url you can actuallyput in their technically
(26:31):
unlimited number of like productnames are you tracking entities
or brands, or like how, how areyou?
Speaker 2 (26:38):
how are you the easiest way to?
Speaker 1 (26:39):
consider is just strings that you know, like, hey
, like, because, um, it can beso different.
What the responses are that,like you know, the cyber
cybersecurity company I used towork at, they had you know a
dozen different products and youcould ask like, hey, what's the
top product?
And you know this part.
It doesn't have a brandassociated in the answer, it
just says what the product nameis.
(26:59):
So we have to track all that.
So, as part of thecompetitiveness, we try to track
both the domains, the actualname of the company, all the
product names you know.
Even if you wanted to, youcould go as far as, like, key
executives or spokespeople,because all of that comes out
and I think that's a realdifferent thing and so we track
(27:20):
that against.
You know there's different typesof searches.
You know there's different typesof searches, but the ones that
we're most focused on are thecompetitive searches, which is
like what is the best incategory and how you show up
there.
And you know there's some tweaksyou can do to how you call this
stuff, but that is fairlystable and it's very similar to
(27:45):
the sort of ranking order ofwhat you get out of traditional
SEO or search and it'sinfluenced by a lot of the same
factors.
But there's enough nuance in itthat when you look at the
competitive side of this thatyou want to be doing more in
terms of both what we callfaceless content and face
content.
So the faceless content is whatlike gets the raw ranking in
(28:05):
there and the face content issort of the conversion part of
it.
So you know, the facelesscontent is anything if you can
read it and you can't, like,hear Matthew's voice in it,
can't?
You know there's no point ofview that I think it's a lot
more of a challenge where theface content is much more you
know like, oh, there's arelationship and that it's
(28:27):
converting on that basis and Irealized I don't think I
answered the competitiveness asmuch as you were hoping for in
that.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
You gave me another question too, and my question is
like predictions right, do youthink that there's going to be
more of a draw towardscommunities and people wanting
to trust people?
Because, like everybody, like alot of the online stuff that's
(28:56):
coming like I already see it,it's online bots or it's
faceless YouTube pages orwhatever it is Do you think that
there's going to be a gravitytowards, like a human being, uh,
or an individual, which youknow they're leveraging ai,
whatever they're they're?
making themselves moreproductive, but it's there's
still a human being at the coreof it that someone can know,
(29:18):
like and trust and and it itstarts to move more towards like
, what are people in thiscommunity saying?
What is this individual sayingversus, you know, just a
faceless brand Like I've kind ofseen that with spokesperson
like spokespeople, but nowyou've got influencers saying
stuff.
So you're like, do they evenreally believe what they're
(29:38):
saying?
Like I just think that it'svery noisy right now and I'm
just curious, as you're workingwith clients, you know, where do
you project the ball going,like, where's the puck headed to
right now with what's going on?
Like when it all shakes out?
I'm just curious.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
So I think um, at least in my mental model of this
, is that the face content isthe multiplier for the faceless
content, which is, you know,like the same way we're talking
about the New York Times.
They publish something, it goesall over the place versus you
know, my much smaller footprint.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Let's go back to the competitive component of kind of
what you're doing and howyou're viewing that with your
company.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Yeah, so, like on the strictest case, we want people
to focus on, you know, a smallnumber of high value competitive
searches, most of which takethe form of like what is the
best in my category, who is themost trustworthy?
Those kinds of things, and youwant to make sure you show up in
there.
And those are not the end allbe all of tracking
(30:41):
competitiveness, because that'ssort of like the tip of the
pyramid.
There's a tremendous amount ofknowledge that you need
underneath this in order to getthose influenced, which is all
the parts of the rest of thesearch journey, which is that,
you know, people start with,like I'm having this problem,
how do I get the solution?
And then it eventually tricklesdown to okay, now that I
understand the right terms andthe way of this, tell me what to
(31:03):
do.
And, you know, depending uponhow you phrase that and how
aggressive you get with the LLMs, they will tell you like oh,
you should get the Ford, youknow, truck over the Chevy, and
that's very persuasive.
To go through that and that iswhere we're trying to get people
to influence is not all thebits leading up to making that
(31:25):
final question of like whatshould I buy?
Who should I go with?
Who should I give my money to?
Speaker 2 (31:31):
So right at the bottom of the funnel, all those
kinds of transactional terms,and, and and by by related terms
, very interesting.
What are?
What are?
Can you share some case studiesof, of, of maybe utilizing
these tools and like what you'vedone to influence the results
and the impact that it had?
Speaker 1 (31:51):
Sure.
So I was going to say something.
We do so when you put your sitein, we do what we call a deep
classification of it.
So this goes through all theexisting keywords that your site
ranks for and we try to thenpull out the intent of those
along with some information withyour site.
We try to then pull out theintent of those along with some
information with your site, andwe sort of build that funnel out
of all your words and say like,well, these are the
(32:13):
informational, these are theones that are looking for stuff,
and then at the bottom of it wehave those very you know the
business terms and what we'veseen our most successful
customers do is do that contentstrategy shift and with that, at
the very least, they feel moreeffective.
You know, in terms of actuallyinfluencing sales, you know the
(32:40):
attribution is still a bit of adark art, but certainly they
haven't seen sales go down bitof a dark art, but certainly
they haven't seen sales go down.
And in a couple of cases we'veseen very much like competitor
brands.
Like one of the first peoplestarted using this was like a
podcast hosting network andthat's pretty much a commodity.
It is also very strictly whatis the best podcast host to use.
(33:01):
And they were able to rank muchbetter in chat, gpt and cloud
and all these other systems thanthey were in traditional search
, in large part because they dida lot more user generated
content and they did a lot morewith being active on reddit and
they did a lot more um withreally hitting these bottom of
the funnel terms, in partbecause you know they started
(33:22):
seeing what the content strategyshifts were.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Yeah, I would love to go back to your your full on
framework of how you look atsearch.
If you'd be willing to gothrough that, I would love to.
Yeah, sure, break that down.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Yeah, so you know I said there's things you should
do today that are easy technicalthings, you know.
Make, check your robots thattext.
If you're do today that areeasy technical things you know
make, check your robotstxt.
If you're not familiar with howto interpret it, copy it out,
put it in a chat, gpt, it willtell you what you've done you
know, you know we have an activechecker.
Make sure that you can beindexed by all the sites and
(34:00):
then, from there, start to thinkabout you know your business
intelligence, which is all ofthe sales sort of things we
talked about.
Start to think about you knowyour business intelligence,
which is all of the sales sortof things we talked about.
Start to think about how it isconsidered with respect to you.
Know the sentiment about yourcompany.
There's a lot of easy questionsyou can ask, like is my company
trustworthy?
(34:20):
Like that's a great thing toask, that's a great thing to
track.
Ask those kinds of questionsand then start to track the
questions of, like the directcompetitive ones Are we the best
in the category?
Who is the best?
Who is considered better orworse?
And track all that.
And you know, once all of thatis done, you know you can then
(34:40):
start to actually do the contentshifts and what we see is then,
once you have that, you canlook at how it changes over time
, the responses, and thenreflect back what the latest
output is.
So chat GPT again, like we do alot of work with SAS, so it's
very like here's the keyfeatures, like the older
versions of chat GPT, you wouldsay who's the best.
(35:01):
They would just give you a listof 10 names and now they
literally break it out Likehere's the key features and
here's best, for like, those aretitles, like each three
subheads in the markdown of theresponse.
And so our customers are now.
They're like great, this isjust gold.
I'm going to go write anarticle.
It's like why are we the bestfor this category?
Here are our key features veryexplicitly.
(35:24):
These are much better and thisis what differentiates us from
our competitors.
Put that out there.
And that's, of course, justcatnip to you know, chat GPT,
and it's a little bit differentfor Claude, and it's a little
bit different for Gemini.
But that's the strategy is to,you know, reflect back the end
results we see out of it.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
What I'm seeing off page is a lot of people are
talking about how to incorporate, from a vector standpoint, your
brand with like whateverservice or term that you're
offering, and there's been a lotof people talking about, in the
traditional sense, how toutilize like into TSEO really,
and I really like your take onhow you need to better define
(36:07):
these associations and what youwant people to know about you.
I'm hearing a lot of likeinterview style.
You need to ask chat, gbt orClaude or whatever platform
you're using, what they thinkabout you and then take that
into consideration of the kindof content you need to give them
.
I mean, it even goes back in mymind to when you think about
(36:30):
GMB or GDP, how you don't even alot of companies don't even put
their terms or, sorry, theirhourly operation, like the hours
that they're on their websiteRight, and so this becomes like
the standard and it's like, well, it it wants to check it, like
(36:50):
for trust.
From a trust standpoint to yourwebsite.
You really need to includethose things on your website and
a lot of people get upset ifthey don't update, like on a
holiday, weekend or somethinglike that, if they say that the
store is open and it's not right.
Right, or the business is open,and so it's really interesting
to me just about how everythingis evolving.
(37:14):
I mean how, michael?
Because a lot of SEOs listen tothis as well as web developers,
and a lot of this stuff justkeeps being put on the back of
their shoulders.
How do SEOs need to bettercommunicate this to leadership
or clients of?
Like what you're asking for isnow 10x more work to you know,
(37:38):
all these fracture platforms torank and to do all these things,
which I think that that's goingto translate into well larger
retainers and higher paid SEOs,and I think that that's a good
thing over time, but in themedium term, there's going to be
a lot of frustration across theboard of how do we do these
things and just loading up SEOswith additional work that is
(38:04):
really outside their scope, andit's just like a lot of
companies can't afford theamount of work Like so it's like
the leverage that LLMs give youon the productivity side,
outpacing the amount of workthat you have to do, like I
haven't seen a chart yet thatsomeone shows you where that
breakeven point is, but I thinkthat that's essentially what
(38:27):
what's happening.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
I think it's going to look a lot like social.
You know, like social has a lotof the same issues where, like,
you have to make a decision onevery platform of like, well, do
we start a TikTok channel formy, my enterprise?
You know farming equipment, youknow.
You know, like, maybe, um, oryou know, is there a way to be
better with distribution?
Is there a way, you know, tohandle some of these things in a
(38:51):
better way?
But I do think there's a lot tobe learned from you know our
friends on the social side ofthings where they have very
messy attribution.
They have a lot of, you know,metrics that are they vanity
metrics?
Is this audience metrics?
Is this?
You know what exactly is there.
And you know a lot of the sametroubles with attribution.
And you know I, you know Imentioned before the the more
(39:15):
post-purchase attribution youcan do and surveys and stuff
like that's proven to be a realwin and a very bottom line win
as far as like putting people ina good light, bottom line win
as far as like putting people ina good light.
And I think there's just goingto be you know a lot more of
that, unfortunately whereanalytics is just going to get
worse and worse and we're goingto need more and more you know
(39:37):
elements outside of that tocompensate.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
So I agree, Interesting.
You say social.
That's.
One of the things that we'reworking on internally at EWR is
to build a really robust socialteam to complement the SEO team,
not because we think it's niceto have, because we think it's
need to have today.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Um, just that, both owning your own distribution
platform as well as your owncontent platform uh, the need
for site with SEO, the need tosucceed in these other areas,
and I think the great benefit ofit is that, as far as selling
this to upper management, whatyou're selling is more effective
(40:21):
marketing in general, even ifit's not exactly search like you
know it's it's really hard to,it's all directionally positive.
you know saying, hey, cmo, let'smix up our LinkedIn or
Instagram and talk more aboutthe company, how we're great in
these specific ways, like, yes,that's going to benefit this,
you know, search we're trying tooptimize for Also, that's just
(40:43):
great content.
That is just, you know,straight down the middle, good
content for us to have.
Anyway, there's no risk there,you know.
So that's very different thanyou know.
I think a lot of people havelike set aside AI stuff.
Is this like new, kooky, tootechnical thing?
And I think a lot of this justcomes back to being really
understanding your customers,really speaking their language,
(41:05):
really trying to reach themwhere they're at and, as a
benefit, if you do all that inthe right ways and the right
framing, you're going to justreally do well on AI search as
well.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Awesome.
Well, michael, I've learned somuch already and it's really got
me thinking of some of thethings that we might want to
firm up even more that we'recurrently doing.
Is there anything else that,like we haven't covered in your
conversation our conversationthat you think might be valuable
to anyone listening, if they'retrying to wrap their head
(41:35):
around all this?
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Yeah, you know, I think there is a big trend
that's happening that is likeguaranteed to be occurring, and
it has a funny name, which isagentic search, which is just
means search with agents.
And even that, I feel like, istoo highfalutin you know it's
too like fancy a term for it,cause it's really just like
(41:57):
almost a bot doing some of theGoogling for you.
And if you take that term forit, you know, uh, there's a lot
of tools that are doing this.
Google's AI mode is the biggestone, which is kind of like a
light version of their deepresearch stuff, which is, you
know, it goes out, it finds 10links, it looks at the content
of those 10 links and then itbrings it back to you with a
(42:19):
little bit of a summary and arecommendation.
And that's an agent.
It made some decisions for you,it is custom to you, it's not
the generic answer everyone gets.
It's got a little morediscernment and rationale on it
and we're going to see more andmore systems like that and even
just holding in your mind thatpattern, that like, oh, I need
(42:41):
to write this page on my sitethat describes what we do in a
way that the bot can read it,understand it and then, when it
weighs us versus our competitor,it recommends us to the user.
That's ultimately going to seethis in a summary, and that's
something real different thantrying to write just the right
headline for it or doing thesedifferent pieces.
And I think in some places it'sgoing to be different content,
(43:04):
that there's more like a humanversion of it and more a face
and faceless version of it.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Awesome.
I think that that's a greatunknown secret of Internet
marketing.
Right there, would you say, outof everything you talked about,
what is the one thing that youwant people to take away and
take action on?
That's the most important thingthat needs to be happening
right now.
I heard create content aboutyour brand and put it out there
(43:35):
to make sure you're answeringthe questions that people might
be asking across multipleplatforms.
That's what I, what my yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
You know, I think there's an even easier one,
which is and this isself-serving, but you know we're
marketers.
You know, like, on our site, wehave a we call it like an AI
search console and it reallydoes.
It runs through like 24different bots that are indexing
your site and we have so manypeople find out issues from this
that are just the basic stuff,like cause you can write stuff,
(44:12):
but if it's not being indexed,doesn't matter.
You know like, and so it's free.
It's super easy to try out,like.
Just start there at least toget your foot in the door and to
start thinking about like hey,you know these are important,
this is something we want toinfluence, and get started there
.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
So so noatoacom's no-a-t-o-acom, or is it ai?
Sorry Okay com.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
I want to make sure we got the com we're doing it
for real Awesome.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
So, michael, if someone enjoyed this
conversation I know I have andthey want to hear more about
what you're doing.
I know you're active onLinkedIn.
Yeah, how do people find you?
What, what?
Where should people besearching?
Speaker 1 (44:48):
Yeah, Go to go to noatoacom.
It is a free signup.
It gets you like a couple ofquestions that you can ask from
a chat GPT.
You can put them in yourself,like whatever you want to know.
We'll track those for you forfree to just see what the
reports are.
We will check for the bots andyou'll get our newsletter and
(45:14):
the newsletter.
If you heard me today, it isvery much written in my voice.
It is a face version of thisthat I write every week.
That has, you know, aninterpretation of like what's
happening and things, not justsort of a regurgitation.
So trying to be helpful and addvalue to people.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
So, yeah, awesome.
Well, thank you so much forcoming.
On the unknown secrets, I amgoing to go do it after this
myself.
I know I was looking at it andI'm I'm super excited.
Thank you so much for comingand sharing some valuable
knowledge with everyone here.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
Well, thank you so much for having me.
Honestly, it was great meetingyou in New York.
It was great talking to you nowand have a good week, bye.
Speaker 2 (45:47):
All right, until the next time, everyone, my name is
Matt Bertram.
Bye-bye, for now, it's notgoing.
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