May 14, 2026 • 20 mins
In this episode of "Full Tech Ahead," host Amanda Razani interviews Josh Koenig, co-founder and SVP of Marketing at Pantheon.
They discuss how the rapid adoption of AI agents and LLMs is fundamentally changing web traffic and search behavior. As more people "ask" AI instead of searching Google, organic website traffic is dropping, but the visitors who do click through are highly "primed" and ready to act.
Koenig advises companies against turning their websites into chatbots; instead, they should focus on AI Engine Optimization (AEO) by ensuring lightning-fast load times, properly structured content, and strong third-party reviews.
He also warns against the flood of bland, AI-generated content ("AI slop"), emphasizing that a unique brand voice is essential to stand out. Finally, he notes that as privacy changes make tools like Google Analytics less reliable, the future of metrics lies in server-side, full-clickstream tracking.
Key Quotes
"The majority of people are no longer searching. They're asking and they're having an AI, an agent, an LLM, sort of start their research."
"Trying to beat ChatGPT or Claude at its own game on your website is probably not smart."
"Fundamentals are what matter more than ever... having your website be fast, having your content be good, having a team that can move quickly without breaking things."
Takeaways
Traffic is Down, but Intent is Up: AI answers simple queries directly, reducing overall organic website traffic and increasing cost-per-click. However, visitors who bypass the AI to reach your site are much further along in their journey and highly motivated.
Optimize for AI Crawlers: To be cited in AI overviews, your website needs three things: high speed (AI bots won't wait for slow pages), well-structured content (using Q&A formats and clear H1/H2 tags), and a strong reputation on third-party review sites.
Avoid "AI Slop": The internet is being flooded with cheap, mediocre, AI-generated content. To succeed in marketing, you must educate and entertain by starting with a strong point of view and a distinct human voice that AI cannot replicate.
The Future of Analytics: Increased privacy settings and opt-outs are making traditional tools like Google Analytics less reliable. Businesses will need to shift to server-side (clickstream) tracking to accurately measure true human engagement and track how often AI crawlers are querying their sites.
Find Amanda Razani on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-razani-990a7233/
Follow the FTA LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/full-tech-ahead/
Visit the FTA website: https://fulltechahead.com/
Check out the Substack Channel: https://fulltechahead.substack.com/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:19):
Hello and welcome to Full Tech Ahead.
I'm your host, Amanda Rosani,and today I'm excited to have
Josh Koenig.
He is the co-founder and seniorvice president of marketing at
Pantheon.
How are you doing today?
SPEAKER_01 (00:32):
Um, great.
Thanks for having me here,Amanda.
SPEAKER_00 (00:34):
Happy to have you on the show.
Can you first share with ouraudience what does Pantheon do?
SPEAKER_01 (00:39):
Uh of course.
So Pantheon is a websiteoperations platform.
And what that means is we runpeople's websites and we really
focus on professional teams andsites that matter.
So we're used by thousands ofpeople who build the web as a
profession every day, and theysupport tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands ofwebsites that are collectively
(01:01):
reaching well over a billionunique visitors every month.
Today, in today's era wherethere's higher stakes than ever
for what's going on with theinternet and what you actually
do with the web has a pretty biginfluence on whether your
business or cause or uhorganization will be successful
or not, we help teams that needto really professionalize their
(01:22):
practices, whether that's uhtrying to work with uh teams so
that you can have projectsworking in parallel, um,
figuring out how to makereleases to your website without
putting them at risk, uh, orincorporating AI into your
practices.
Like for instance, um, wesupport a lot of people running
WordPress websites.
And as they're trying tointroduce an AI as a companion
(01:42):
to their team or as part oftheir development workflow, it's
really important that they haveversion control on every change
that gets made so theyunderstand what change we made,
what change was suggested by theLLM.
They have a process forreviewing every change that's
suggested before it getsreleased to the site.
This is for the code of the siteitself, not just for the
articles or or uh or posts.
And Pantheon actually does allthis kind of automatically.
(02:04):
Every website on Pantheon isunder version control, and you
can just connect your GitHubaccount and deploy directly to
our platform.
You can see uh a proposed changeon in a preview environment
automatically.
Um it's all set up for yourather than having to have kind
of like a DevOps guru on yourteam that can put all that
together.
Um, so that's a really excitingplace to be.
(02:24):
And, you know, in terms ofeverything that's going on with
the web, you know, we have astatistically significant uh
sample of traffic.
Like we can tell what's whattrends are actually happening
and uh sort of what's going onwith the weather on the
internet.
And uh, I don't know, it's apretty interesting and exciting
place to be, you know, as a as amarketing professional, being
able to kind of see how thesausage gets made.
SPEAKER_00 (02:45):
Great.
Well, so then you'll have a lotof insight on the impact of AI
as far as that traffic goes.
What from your experience, whatare some critical things that
you're noticing right now?
SPEAKER_01 (03:00):
Well, I think broadly, um, what what is being
noticed overall is the thepattern of behavior for people
to encounter information on theweb has changed and is still
changing, but there's been asort of a fundamental shift in
the last year.
You know, the majority of peopleare no longer searching, they're
(03:20):
asking.
And there's uh, you know,they're having uh an AI, an
agent, an LLM sort of starttheir research and do a bunch of
work for them that they wouldpreviously have gone to Google
and started sifting through allthose results themselves.
And so in a certain cases whereit's like it's a simple answer
to a simple question, you know,they they're not gonna go to
(03:41):
anybody's website at all.
They're just probably gonna getthe answer and move on with
their lives.
Uh, if it's a more complicateduh type of process or a higher
stakes question that they'retrying to figure out, then you
know, they're gonna stillencounter the the websites that
they're uh gonna be researching,but it'll be a different stage
in their journey.
And practically what that meansin the data is you can just see,
(04:02):
you know, kind of traffic towebsites as a direct result of a
search, a referral, an organicvisit, uh uh, you know, what we
call it, those are down, andthey're down a lot, um,
depending on what site you'reyou're looking at.
I mean, you know, this hasreally impacted, I think,
clickbait more than anythingelse, RIP clickbait, but uh
that's not that's not the worstthing in the world.
But it is it is really difficultfor people who you know use
(04:24):
organic uh SEO uh as a source oftheir demand.
Um this has also impacted um uhthe the cost uh per click on
most paid platforms as well,because there's just fewer
clicks to go around, which meansthe cost is going up uh quite a
lot.
And um, but you know, the otherthing that's true is these
(04:45):
visits that are coming in, theseare people that are already, you
know, they're already midwaythrough their journey, perhaps,
uh, before they're encountering,you know, your site, your
property, which means they'reprimed, they're they're probably
ready to go for whatever it isthey're trying to figure out.
And despite all the hype, OpenAIhas quietly walked back their
whole like let Chat GPT buy itfor you thing, because it
(05:06):
frankly didn't work, you know,despite um what people what may
be possible, who can say what wewhere we'll be five years from
now.
But the reality is today, whenit comes to meaningful action,
people still take that actionthemselves.
They're not, they're not, we'renot at a point where you can
just let an agent do everythingfor you.
And so when those visitors arereaching your site, you know,
they are ready, they're they'refurther along, they're ready to
(05:28):
go, they're ready to buy, theyhave a question that that the
agent couldn't answer for them.
They're looking to get into thedetails to potentially do some
more uh comparison orverification.
And so those experiences thatyou can deliver when that person
does arrive are actually morecritical than ever before.
And it kind of you know raisesthe stakes or or deepens the
(05:49):
challenge of digital marketingbecause it's not just like throw
up a flashy landing page andhave the right CTA to get
someone to like view a secondpage or so forth.
It's like when someone shows up,they have a purpose and you
really have to meet them wherethey are and and and carry that
journey forward from there.
So I again like this is all kindof turn things upside down in in
(06:10):
the biz.
Uh, and we're certainly not donewith the with change yet, but uh
we're starting to see some somepretty solid patterns emerge in
terms of what works and whatdoesn't.
SPEAKER_00 (06:20):
Yeah, absolutely.
I have so many questions.
You shared a lot there.
So let's rewind.
First of all, so the customerexpectation, they're expecting
that aid from an AI source.
So should companies take note ofthis and be integrating some
sort of AI tools onto theirwebsite if they don't already
(06:42):
have one?
SPEAKER_01 (06:44):
You know, that's a that's a a a really interesting
question.
And I have a little bit of acontrarian take on this, which
is that trying to beat Chat GPTor Claude at its own game on
your website is probably notsmart, right?
The the the chatbot experience,now now there is validity in
having like if you have customerservice or support and figuring
(07:04):
out how to scale your team andbe able to answer more questions
quickly, um, like you can do alot with those tools, and and
that's very valid.
But I think there's this notionthat like the whole experience,
just because chat GPT is here,you know, people want to chat
with every website.
That's not being borne out inreality.
And the and the the fact is thatthe the leading AI labs, you
know, anthropic, openai, chat,uh chat GPT, Claude, and and
(07:28):
Google, Gemini, um, they've gotmassive teams that are devoted
to making that productexperience delightful.
And that's part of why they'reso popular, is because they are
really well done.
And replicating that quality ofexperience um on your own um is
hard.
And so I don't think liketurning your website into a chat
(07:48):
experience uh primarily is goingto work very well for people.
The the uh the places where Ithink you can leverage this
technology to do better, again,customer service, this is this
is becoming pretty well uh welltrod.
Um people who have overdone it abit by like trying not to have
people take do customer serviceand only have AI, and that
doesn't work.
Uh, but but figuring out how togive quicker responses that are
(08:11):
more on target um and and havehumans in the loop to oversee uh
customer service and supportclearly works.
Um and the other is if someoneis doing content search on your
site, um, rethinking thatexperience um a little bit uh
because the uh the audience outthere is being primed by what
they're getting from Google interms of an AI overview.
(08:32):
And that, if done right, nowthis is tricky because you got
to put some work into thinkingabout designing that experience
and what content you have tobring to bear, but an AI
overview in search on your siteuh is also something that is
showing a lot of promise.
The other thing is, you know,again, rather than trying to
like turn your site into a chatbot, the other thing to think
(08:53):
about though is just what theoverall expectations around user
experience, navigation, layout.
Again, like a lot of the stuffthat we do with uh with websites
is based on patterns that are,you know, well over 10 years old
in terms of how we think aboutmenus and navigation and other
stuff.
So I think that there's a lot ofroom for experimentation with
(09:14):
design.
I just don't think it's a goodidea to try to make your site
its own, you know, chat GPTexperience.
SPEAKER_00 (09:22):
Okay.
So, and then something else yousaid, people are used to
focusing on SEO.
So that's kind of it seems likeit's going out the door in favor
of more AI optimization.
So, what tips or advice do youhave for business leaders as far
as how do they make sure thatthey're reaching those AI
(09:43):
optimization key points?
SPEAKER_01 (09:46):
Yeah, yeah, that's that is probably one of the most
critical questions right now.
And um, you know, disclaimer upfront, TLDR, we don't really
know for sure because the modelsall work differently and they're
all changing pretty rapidly.
However, people have beenworking on this pretty hard for
a couple of years now, andagain, some core underlying
(10:07):
patterns are emerging.
So the good news is, you know,we've we've had uh decades of
you know having a machineaudience for websites with SEO,
like that's always been a partof the practice.
Um, and uh a lot of the same alot of the core underlying
things that you should be doingum for SEO uh also at work and
(10:27):
they're that's good for AI as anodd, it it's just another
crawler on some level.
So having your website be wellstructured uh and so forth is a
good idea.
I think things that are emergingas perhaps more important than
ever is the sidebar.
These are also things that aregood for human visitors too.
So it's not like you do likebizarre, weird things to appease
the artificial intelligence, andlike that's not helping you out
(10:49):
with your regular visitors.
More than more important thanever, uh the speed of the
website really does appear tomatter.
Like highly cited sources uh inAI overviews on average are 30
to 40% faster in deliveringresponses than ones that aren't
cited.
And this is both because uh thatsends us a trust signal in, just
(11:10):
like it did with Google, havinga faster website would help you
rank more highly.
But also a lot of times when theuser experience user types in a
question and the little bot islike thinking, it's actually
searching the web and and andtrying to scan for like current
information because the model'ssort of training data is
inevitably out of date, right?
It's from before.
And so if there's a any kind ofquery that involves up-to-date
(11:32):
information, the the AI is gonnatry to refresh that in real
time.
And as like I said before,there's legions of engineers and
product designers trying to makethat experience for the end user
as delightful and sticky aspossible.
They don't want to make thatuser wait.
And so if your website is slow,like you know, Claude just
basically will give up and notwait on the response.
Just like humans will, though.
(11:53):
Like, you know, if your websiteis slow, they're whoops, wipe,
I'm done.
I don't I don't that moving on.
That didn't uh uh answer myquestion.
Um, so speed is more importantthan ever.
Uh and then the other thingthat's more important than ever
is structured high-qualitycontent.
Um, and this is actually where Imean, let's be honest, when
people are doing SEO content,very often they're not producing
(12:18):
the highest quality, mostinsightful, uh differentiated
breakthrough stuff.
They're trying to be relevant inthe eyes of Google on a topic in
general.
And the truth is that is thekind of content that an uh LLM
can just spit out now.
Uh it's not differentiating, uh,it's not providing a distinct
(12:38):
point of view, um, and and oftenyou know it's just like overly
long and wordy because it wantsto mention a keyword as many
times as possible.
That type of content doesn'treally help you with uh with an
AI.
What does help you is umstructuring your content um as
uh as more like a question andanswer, because that does appear
to have some influence in in howthings get cited, uh, in just
(13:02):
making the text really clear,like having your headings be
used properly, you know, H1, H2,H3, and you know, uh building uh
and if your your documentsfollow kind of a clear outline,
that will help it be more likelyto be digested.
The other thing that reallyhelps, and this is not about
your site, but it has been acornerstone of digital
marketing, like I mentionedquestion and answer before.
(13:24):
Um, these tools take uh reviewsites and what people say about
stuff online in forums, likefamously Reddit, but not just
Reddit, they take those things,it takes those things pretty
seriously.
Um, and so you know, having agood presence, making sure
you're looking after um how youshow up in reviews, how you're
discussed online in third-partysources.
(13:45):
Also really important.
If anybody asks about yourcompany by name, you can bet
that the bots will be filteringa bunch of those QA's into the
results.
So, you know, um that those arethree things that we know for
sure.
There's a lot of other stuffthat's out there that, you know,
may matter more, may matterless.
Like the whole um, you know,LLMs.txt we're up in the air as
(14:05):
to whether that really helps ordoesn't.
Um, there's a bunch of stuffthat like the internet giants
are playing around with, butit's kind of inconclusive.
But we can say for sure thathaving a speedy website with
well-structured content and goodreviews online will help you out
tremendously in AI.
And guess what?
You need those things anyway.
SPEAKER_00 (14:21):
Yes.
Yeah, and I think an anotherpart of this is I'm seeing more
and more people say that they'revery tired of what they call AI
slop.
It seems to be more and morenoticeable, dry, bland,
different phrases that are usedover and over again.
Uh people are getting tired ofthat.
SPEAKER_01 (14:40):
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I think the the whatthis technology can do with very
little effort is producereplacement level, median,
middle of the road copy.
And, you know, uh again, likeunder time pressure and volume
pressure, historically, greatfirms and wonderful people have
(15:01):
had to crank out replacementlevel, medium quality uh copy,
but now the cost of it has gonedown to almost zero and it can
be done automatically.
And so what you have as a resultof that is like um one of the
the sources I was I'm working onuh on the uh a whole data study
around this based on what we cansee with our traffic and a few
other things from uhspecifically looking into AI
optimization.
(15:22):
And one of the sources is astudy a guy did uh just to see
how quickly things got pickedup.
But his uh his case for hisstudy was well, I had to make a
website to do this, so I had Idon't remember which one he
used, but he had a um uh an AIbuild like a 60,000 article
website uh with a bunch of liketips and tricks for like how to
(15:44):
you know do better digitalmarketing, I think.
And uh he said, you know, itended up costing about like$13
in token consumption, and ittook about two hours.
And it's just and if you look atthe you know, you look at the
site that he made, it's like,oh, this is really bland, it's
super forgettable, but it workedas a test of how quickly do
things crawl a new website.
Um and and so the end at the endof the day, like bland stuff is
(16:06):
just now ubiquitous.
Like we're we're just flooded,the zone has been flooded with
forgettable content.
And and the thing about that is,you know, it doesn't hook
anyone's attention, it doesn'thave a point of view.
If you're in the game ofmarketing, you're you have to do
two things, ideally both at thesame time, which is to educate
and entertain, put those thingstogether, and you've got great
(16:27):
marketing.
And you can certainly use AI tohelp with that.
It's not saying that theseshould never be, this should
never a tool that shouldn't beused.
Obviously, this is changing, youknow, many any practice that
uses language is being changedby this.
But you have to be very tastefulabout how you use it, how you
leverage it as a in your contentproduction process.
(16:48):
And if you don't start with apoint of view, an opinion, and a
voice, then what's gonna comeout on the other side is just
gonna be more of that noise.
And so that's like that's reallythe challenge is like how do you
create how do you createsomething that's worth spending
time on?
And then, you know, secondarilyor primarily, you gotta have
something that's worth spendingtime on, and then secondarily
you've got to get people'seyeballs to it.
(17:09):
But again, same as it ever was,right?
SPEAKER_00 (17:11):
Yes, absolutely.
So my last question would beknowing all of this, how what
tips or advice do you have forbusiness leaders as far as how
can they track metrics?
You said they're dwindling now,there's less people actually
coming to their sites, andpeople are used to they ask for
this data for their media kitsto show their value.
(17:33):
And if that's dwindling, how canthey track, where can they make
that up?
SPEAKER_01 (17:38):
Well, so I think there's um there's a couple of
different things that arehappening.
There's a third factor in thethe stats that I didn't mention
before because it's actuallybeen going on for longer, but
just like the pendulum isswinging back towards people
having privacy online, which asan end user of the internet, I
actually think is good.
Uh, but the flip side of it isGoogle Analytics no longer
(17:58):
reliable, right?
Um, it's not gonna show youpeople who opt out of your
consent framework.
It's not gonna show you peoplewho have their browser settings
turned up or who have a plug-infor privacy.
Like there's just a lot ofpeople that are not gonna be
measured uh the way that thattool measures because it
requires them to opt in andconsent to a rather invasive uh
(18:19):
uh use of the data.
And so I think we're gonna seeit's this is not really usable
yet, but you're starting to seeit with like Cloudflare's put up
like their first stab at ananalytics framework.
We're actually working onsomething very similar at
Pantheon, and I think others areas well, where when you have
part of your tech stack that canactually measure just the full
(18:41):
click stream, like every singleinteraction with the site, um,
and then can give you data fromthere, that's then a useful sort
of source.
And that's kind of what we lookat.
We can tell how much ishappening with like the AI
crawlers, how much is happeningwith stuff that like it doesn't
identify as a crawler, butdoesn't really look authentic
either.
And then how much of thistraffic really does look like
it's you know valid humantraffic, whether or not they're
(19:04):
letting themselves be cookied ornot.
Um, and so I think you know,we're that is uh kind of a like
live active development workthat's happening on several
fronts right now.
But I believe that these aregonna be the tools people will
need, particularly if they'rejust trying to demonstrate like
high-level value.
Like, yes, we are actuallygetting people engaged with our
with our content.
In fact, like you're gonna beable to measure how often your
(19:26):
web uh site was uh live queriedby uh by AI.
And that's a valuable metric.
That means that like people areasking questions and your site
is part of the response.
Um, now it's not it's not thesame as getting them to your
site itself, but it's still thatis uh a good signal, right?
So all those things are just arejust starting to come together
now, and I think people that arethat are eager to have the
(19:48):
answers to those questions willwill have more and more, you
know, later this year, honestly,as these tools really do start
to come together.
SPEAKER_00 (19:55):
Great.
Well, if there was one keytakeaway you could leave our
audience with today, what wouldthat be?
SPEAKER_01 (20:00):
I think the key takeaway is fundamentals are
what matter more than ever.
Uh it's easy to get spun up inthe middle of this giant hype
cycle that we're in and thinkthat everything is changing and
forget what you knew and so onand so forth.
And it and look, everything ischanging, but some things, you
know, don't, right?
Having your website be fast,having your content be good,
(20:22):
having a team that can movequickly without breaking things,
like that's how you keep up withwrapping in a rapidly changing
environment.
Um, and uh that's what we existto help people do.
So it's I'm happy to just talkabout it.
It's a it's a great story.
SPEAKER_00 (20:34):
Wonderful.
Well, thank you so much forcoming on the show and sharing
your insights with us today.
SPEAKER_01 (20:39):
Yeah, thank you for having me, Amanda.
This is a pleasure.
SPEAKER_00 (20:41):
And thank you to our audience.
If you have any questions orcomments, make sure to leave
those and I'll try to respond asquickly as possible.
Have a wonderful day.
Hello and welcome to Full Tech Ahead.
I'm your host, Amanda Rosani,and today I'm excited to have
Josh Koenig.
He is the co-founder and seniorvice president of marketing at
Pantheon.
How are you doing today?
SPEAKER_01 (00:32):
Um, great.
Thanks for having me here,Amanda.
SPEAKER_00 (00:34):
Happy to have you on the show.
Can you first share with ouraudience what does Pantheon do?
SPEAKER_01 (00:39):
Uh of course.
So Pantheon is a websiteoperations platform.
And what that means is we runpeople's websites and we really
focus on professional teams andsites that matter.
So we're used by thousands ofpeople who build the web as a
profession every day, and theysupport tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands ofwebsites that are collectively
(01:01):
reaching well over a billionunique visitors every month.
Today, in today's era wherethere's higher stakes than ever
for what's going on with theinternet and what you actually
do with the web has a pretty biginfluence on whether your
business or cause or uhorganization will be successful
or not, we help teams that needto really professionalize their
(01:22):
practices, whether that's uhtrying to work with uh teams so
that you can have projectsworking in parallel, um,
figuring out how to makereleases to your website without
putting them at risk, uh, orincorporating AI into your
practices.
Like for instance, um, wesupport a lot of people running
WordPress websites.
And as they're trying tointroduce an AI as a companion
(01:42):
to their team or as part oftheir development workflow, it's
really important that they haveversion control on every change
that gets made so theyunderstand what change we made,
what change was suggested by theLLM.
They have a process forreviewing every change that's
suggested before it getsreleased to the site.
This is for the code of the siteitself, not just for the
articles or or uh or posts.
And Pantheon actually does allthis kind of automatically.
(02:04):
Every website on Pantheon isunder version control, and you
can just connect your GitHubaccount and deploy directly to
our platform.
You can see uh a proposed changeon in a preview environment
automatically.
Um it's all set up for yourather than having to have kind
of like a DevOps guru on yourteam that can put all that
together.
Um, so that's a really excitingplace to be.
(02:24):
And, you know, in terms ofeverything that's going on with
the web, you know, we have astatistically significant uh
sample of traffic.
Like we can tell what's whattrends are actually happening
and uh sort of what's going onwith the weather on the
internet.
And uh, I don't know, it's apretty interesting and exciting
place to be, you know, as a as amarketing professional, being
able to kind of see how thesausage gets made.
SPEAKER_00 (02:45):
Great.
Well, so then you'll have a lotof insight on the impact of AI
as far as that traffic goes.
What from your experience, whatare some critical things that
you're noticing right now?
SPEAKER_01 (03:00):
Well, I think broadly, um, what what is being
noticed overall is the thepattern of behavior for people
to encounter information on theweb has changed and is still
changing, but there's been asort of a fundamental shift in
the last year.
You know, the majority of peopleare no longer searching, they're
(03:20):
asking.
And there's uh, you know,they're having uh an AI, an
agent, an LLM sort of starttheir research and do a bunch of
work for them that they wouldpreviously have gone to Google
and started sifting through allthose results themselves.
And so in a certain cases whereit's like it's a simple answer
to a simple question, you know,they they're not gonna go to
(03:41):
anybody's website at all.
They're just probably gonna getthe answer and move on with
their lives.
Uh, if it's a more complicateduh type of process or a higher
stakes question that they'retrying to figure out, then you
know, they're gonna stillencounter the the websites that
they're uh gonna be researching,but it'll be a different stage
in their journey.
And practically what that meansin the data is you can just see,
(04:02):
you know, kind of traffic towebsites as a direct result of a
search, a referral, an organicvisit, uh uh, you know, what we
call it, those are down, andthey're down a lot, um,
depending on what site you'reyou're looking at.
I mean, you know, this hasreally impacted, I think,
clickbait more than anythingelse, RIP clickbait, but uh
that's not that's not the worstthing in the world.
But it is it is really difficultfor people who you know use
(04:24):
organic uh SEO uh as a source oftheir demand.
Um this has also impacted um uhthe the cost uh per click on
most paid platforms as well,because there's just fewer
clicks to go around, which meansthe cost is going up uh quite a
lot.
And um, but you know, the otherthing that's true is these
(04:45):
visits that are coming in, theseare people that are already, you
know, they're already midwaythrough their journey, perhaps,
uh, before they're encountering,you know, your site, your
property, which means they'reprimed, they're they're probably
ready to go for whatever it isthey're trying to figure out.
And despite all the hype, OpenAIhas quietly walked back their
whole like let Chat GPT buy itfor you thing, because it
(05:06):
frankly didn't work, you know,despite um what people what may
be possible, who can say what wewhere we'll be five years from
now.
But the reality is today, whenit comes to meaningful action,
people still take that actionthemselves.
They're not, they're not, we'renot at a point where you can
just let an agent do everythingfor you.
And so when those visitors arereaching your site, you know,
they are ready, they're they'refurther along, they're ready to
(05:28):
go, they're ready to buy, theyhave a question that that the
agent couldn't answer for them.
They're looking to get into thedetails to potentially do some
more uh comparison orverification.
And so those experiences thatyou can deliver when that person
does arrive are actually morecritical than ever before.
And it kind of you know raisesthe stakes or or deepens the
(05:49):
challenge of digital marketingbecause it's not just like throw
up a flashy landing page andhave the right CTA to get
someone to like view a secondpage or so forth.
It's like when someone shows up,they have a purpose and you
really have to meet them wherethey are and and and carry that
journey forward from there.
So I again like this is all kindof turn things upside down in in
(06:10):
the biz.
Uh, and we're certainly not donewith the with change yet, but uh
we're starting to see some somepretty solid patterns emerge in
terms of what works and whatdoesn't.
SPEAKER_00 (06:20):
Yeah, absolutely.
I have so many questions.
You shared a lot there.
So let's rewind.
First of all, so the customerexpectation, they're expecting
that aid from an AI source.
So should companies take note ofthis and be integrating some
sort of AI tools onto theirwebsite if they don't already
(06:42):
have one?
SPEAKER_01 (06:44):
You know, that's a that's a a a really interesting
question.
And I have a little bit of acontrarian take on this, which
is that trying to beat Chat GPTor Claude at its own game on
your website is probably notsmart, right?
The the the chatbot experience,now now there is validity in
having like if you have customerservice or support and figuring
(07:04):
out how to scale your team andbe able to answer more questions
quickly, um, like you can do alot with those tools, and and
that's very valid.
But I think there's this notionthat like the whole experience,
just because chat GPT is here,you know, people want to chat
with every website.
That's not being borne out inreality.
And the and the the fact is thatthe the leading AI labs, you
know, anthropic, openai, chat,uh chat GPT, Claude, and and
(07:28):
Google, Gemini, um, they've gotmassive teams that are devoted
to making that productexperience delightful.
And that's part of why they'reso popular, is because they are
really well done.
And replicating that quality ofexperience um on your own um is
hard.
And so I don't think liketurning your website into a chat
(07:48):
experience uh primarily is goingto work very well for people.
The the uh the places where Ithink you can leverage this
technology to do better, again,customer service, this is this
is becoming pretty well uh welltrod.
Um people who have overdone it abit by like trying not to have
people take do customer serviceand only have AI, and that
doesn't work.
Uh, but but figuring out how togive quicker responses that are
(08:11):
more on target um and and havehumans in the loop to oversee uh
customer service and supportclearly works.
Um and the other is if someoneis doing content search on your
site, um, rethinking thatexperience um a little bit uh
because the uh the audience outthere is being primed by what
they're getting from Google interms of an AI overview.
(08:32):
And that, if done right, nowthis is tricky because you got
to put some work into thinkingabout designing that experience
and what content you have tobring to bear, but an AI
overview in search on your siteuh is also something that is
showing a lot of promise.
The other thing is, you know,again, rather than trying to
like turn your site into a chatbot, the other thing to think
(08:53):
about though is just what theoverall expectations around user
experience, navigation, layout.
Again, like a lot of the stuffthat we do with uh with websites
is based on patterns that are,you know, well over 10 years old
in terms of how we think aboutmenus and navigation and other
stuff.
So I think that there's a lot ofroom for experimentation with
(09:14):
design.
I just don't think it's a goodidea to try to make your site
its own, you know, chat GPTexperience.
SPEAKER_00 (09:22):
Okay.
So, and then something else yousaid, people are used to
focusing on SEO.
So that's kind of it seems likeit's going out the door in favor
of more AI optimization.
So, what tips or advice do youhave for business leaders as far
as how do they make sure thatthey're reaching those AI
(09:43):
optimization key points?
SPEAKER_01 (09:46):
Yeah, yeah, that's that is probably one of the most
critical questions right now.
And um, you know, disclaimer upfront, TLDR, we don't really
know for sure because the modelsall work differently and they're
all changing pretty rapidly.
However, people have beenworking on this pretty hard for
a couple of years now, andagain, some core underlying
(10:07):
patterns are emerging.
So the good news is, you know,we've we've had uh decades of
you know having a machineaudience for websites with SEO,
like that's always been a partof the practice.
Um, and uh a lot of the same alot of the core underlying
things that you should be doingum for SEO uh also at work and
(10:27):
they're that's good for AI as anodd, it it's just another
crawler on some level.
So having your website be wellstructured uh and so forth is a
good idea.
I think things that are emergingas perhaps more important than
ever is the sidebar.
These are also things that aregood for human visitors too.
So it's not like you do likebizarre, weird things to appease
the artificial intelligence, andlike that's not helping you out
(10:49):
with your regular visitors.
More than more important thanever, uh the speed of the
website really does appear tomatter.
Like highly cited sources uh inAI overviews on average are 30
to 40% faster in deliveringresponses than ones that aren't
cited.
And this is both because uh thatsends us a trust signal in, just
(11:10):
like it did with Google, havinga faster website would help you
rank more highly.
But also a lot of times when theuser experience user types in a
question and the little bot islike thinking, it's actually
searching the web and and andtrying to scan for like current
information because the model'ssort of training data is
inevitably out of date, right?
It's from before.
And so if there's a any kind ofquery that involves up-to-date
(11:32):
information, the the AI is gonnatry to refresh that in real
time.
And as like I said before,there's legions of engineers and
product designers trying to makethat experience for the end user
as delightful and sticky aspossible.
They don't want to make thatuser wait.
And so if your website is slow,like you know, Claude just
basically will give up and notwait on the response.
Just like humans will, though.
(11:53):
Like, you know, if your websiteis slow, they're whoops, wipe,
I'm done.
I don't I don't that moving on.
That didn't uh uh answer myquestion.
Um, so speed is more importantthan ever.
Uh and then the other thingthat's more important than ever
is structured high-qualitycontent.
Um, and this is actually where Imean, let's be honest, when
people are doing SEO content,very often they're not producing
(12:18):
the highest quality, mostinsightful, uh differentiated
breakthrough stuff.
They're trying to be relevant inthe eyes of Google on a topic in
general.
And the truth is that is thekind of content that an uh LLM
can just spit out now.
Uh it's not differentiating, uh,it's not providing a distinct
(12:38):
point of view, um, and and oftenyou know it's just like overly
long and wordy because it wantsto mention a keyword as many
times as possible.
That type of content doesn'treally help you with uh with an
AI.
What does help you is umstructuring your content um as
uh as more like a question andanswer, because that does appear
to have some influence in in howthings get cited, uh, in just
(13:02):
making the text really clear,like having your headings be
used properly, you know, H1, H2,H3, and you know, uh building uh
and if your your documentsfollow kind of a clear outline,
that will help it be more likelyto be digested.
The other thing that reallyhelps, and this is not about
your site, but it has been acornerstone of digital
marketing, like I mentionedquestion and answer before.
(13:24):
Um, these tools take uh reviewsites and what people say about
stuff online in forums, likefamously Reddit, but not just
Reddit, they take those things,it takes those things pretty
seriously.
Um, and so you know, having agood presence, making sure
you're looking after um how youshow up in reviews, how you're
discussed online in third-partysources.
(13:45):
Also really important.
If anybody asks about yourcompany by name, you can bet
that the bots will be filteringa bunch of those QA's into the
results.
So, you know, um that those arethree things that we know for
sure.
There's a lot of other stuffthat's out there that, you know,
may matter more, may matterless.
Like the whole um, you know,LLMs.txt we're up in the air as
(14:05):
to whether that really helps ordoesn't.
Um, there's a bunch of stuffthat like the internet giants
are playing around with, butit's kind of inconclusive.
But we can say for sure thathaving a speedy website with
well-structured content and goodreviews online will help you out
tremendously in AI.
And guess what?
You need those things anyway.
SPEAKER_00 (14:21):
Yes.
Yeah, and I think an anotherpart of this is I'm seeing more
and more people say that they'revery tired of what they call AI
slop.
It seems to be more and morenoticeable, dry, bland,
different phrases that are usedover and over again.
Uh people are getting tired ofthat.
SPEAKER_01 (14:40):
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I think the the whatthis technology can do with very
little effort is producereplacement level, median,
middle of the road copy.
And, you know, uh again, likeunder time pressure and volume
pressure, historically, greatfirms and wonderful people have
(15:01):
had to crank out replacementlevel, medium quality uh copy,
but now the cost of it has gonedown to almost zero and it can
be done automatically.
And so what you have as a resultof that is like um one of the
the sources I was I'm working onuh on the uh a whole data study
around this based on what we cansee with our traffic and a few
other things from uhspecifically looking into AI
optimization.
(15:22):
And one of the sources is astudy a guy did uh just to see
how quickly things got pickedup.
But his uh his case for hisstudy was well, I had to make a
website to do this, so I had Idon't remember which one he
used, but he had a um uh an AIbuild like a 60,000 article
website uh with a bunch of liketips and tricks for like how to
(15:44):
you know do better digitalmarketing, I think.
And uh he said, you know, itended up costing about like$13
in token consumption, and ittook about two hours.
And it's just and if you look atthe you know, you look at the
site that he made, it's like,oh, this is really bland, it's
super forgettable, but it workedas a test of how quickly do
things crawl a new website.
Um and and so the end at the endof the day, like bland stuff is
(16:06):
just now ubiquitous.
Like we're we're just flooded,the zone has been flooded with
forgettable content.
And and the thing about that is,you know, it doesn't hook
anyone's attention, it doesn'thave a point of view.
If you're in the game ofmarketing, you're you have to do
two things, ideally both at thesame time, which is to educate
and entertain, put those thingstogether, and you've got great
(16:27):
marketing.
And you can certainly use AI tohelp with that.
It's not saying that theseshould never be, this should
never a tool that shouldn't beused.
Obviously, this is changing, youknow, many any practice that
uses language is being changedby this.
But you have to be very tastefulabout how you use it, how you
leverage it as a in your contentproduction process.
(16:48):
And if you don't start with apoint of view, an opinion, and a
voice, then what's gonna comeout on the other side is just
gonna be more of that noise.
And so that's like that's reallythe challenge is like how do you
create how do you createsomething that's worth spending
time on?
And then, you know, secondarilyor primarily, you gotta have
something that's worth spendingtime on, and then secondarily
you've got to get people'seyeballs to it.
(17:09):
But again, same as it ever was,right?
SPEAKER_00 (17:11):
Yes, absolutely.
So my last question would beknowing all of this, how what
tips or advice do you have forbusiness leaders as far as how
can they track metrics?
You said they're dwindling now,there's less people actually
coming to their sites, andpeople are used to they ask for
this data for their media kitsto show their value.
(17:33):
And if that's dwindling, how canthey track, where can they make
that up?
SPEAKER_01 (17:38):
Well, so I think there's um there's a couple of
different things that arehappening.
There's a third factor in thethe stats that I didn't mention
before because it's actuallybeen going on for longer, but
just like the pendulum isswinging back towards people
having privacy online, which asan end user of the internet, I
actually think is good.
Uh, but the flip side of it isGoogle Analytics no longer
(17:58):
reliable, right?
Um, it's not gonna show youpeople who opt out of your
consent framework.
It's not gonna show you peoplewho have their browser settings
turned up or who have a plug-infor privacy.
Like there's just a lot ofpeople that are not gonna be
measured uh the way that thattool measures because it
requires them to opt in andconsent to a rather invasive uh
(18:19):
uh use of the data.
And so I think we're gonna seeit's this is not really usable
yet, but you're starting to seeit with like Cloudflare's put up
like their first stab at ananalytics framework.
We're actually working onsomething very similar at
Pantheon, and I think others areas well, where when you have
part of your tech stack that canactually measure just the full
(18:41):
click stream, like every singleinteraction with the site, um,
and then can give you data fromthere, that's then a useful sort
of source.
And that's kind of what we lookat.
We can tell how much ishappening with like the AI
crawlers, how much is happeningwith stuff that like it doesn't
identify as a crawler, butdoesn't really look authentic
either.
And then how much of thistraffic really does look like
it's you know valid humantraffic, whether or not they're
(19:04):
letting themselves be cookied ornot.
Um, and so I think you know,we're that is uh kind of a like
live active development workthat's happening on several
fronts right now.
But I believe that these aregonna be the tools people will
need, particularly if they'rejust trying to demonstrate like
high-level value.
Like, yes, we are actuallygetting people engaged with our
with our content.
In fact, like you're gonna beable to measure how often your
(19:26):
web uh site was uh live queriedby uh by AI.
And that's a valuable metric.
That means that like people areasking questions and your site
is part of the response.
Um, now it's not it's not thesame as getting them to your
site itself, but it's still thatis uh a good signal, right?
So all those things are just arejust starting to come together
now, and I think people that arethat are eager to have the
(19:48):
answers to those questions willwill have more and more, you
know, later this year, honestly,as these tools really do start
to come together.
SPEAKER_00 (19:55):
Great.
Well, if there was one keytakeaway you could leave our
audience with today, what wouldthat be?
SPEAKER_01 (20:00):
I think the key takeaway is fundamentals are
what matter more than ever.
Uh it's easy to get spun up inthe middle of this giant hype
cycle that we're in and thinkthat everything is changing and
forget what you knew and so onand so forth.
And it and look, everything ischanging, but some things, you
know, don't, right?
Having your website be fast,having your content be good,
(20:22):
having a team that can movequickly without breaking things,
like that's how you keep up withwrapping in a rapidly changing
environment.
Um, and uh that's what we existto help people do.
So it's I'm happy to just talkabout it.
It's a it's a great story.
SPEAKER_00 (20:34):
Wonderful.
Well, thank you so much forcoming on the show and sharing
your insights with us today.
SPEAKER_01 (20:39):
Yeah, thank you for having me, Amanda.
This is a pleasure.
SPEAKER_00 (20:41):
And thank you to our audience.
If you have any questions orcomments, make sure to leave
those and I'll try to respond asquickly as possible.
Have a wonderful day.
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