Tools and Tips Special - Navigating AI Search, Ads & SEO in 2025

In this episode of The Digital Marketing Podcast, hosts Daniel Rowles and Ciaran Rogers return with a fresh round of insights and hands-on tools to help digital marketers adapt and experiment in the evolving AI-driven marketing landscape. From Google's AI Max campaigns to the explosion of generative engine optimisation, Daniel and Ciaran unpack the shifts happening across search, paid media, and SEO. This isn’t just another roundup of shiny tools, this episode explores how to think strategically about the role of AI in search, the real impact on your organic performance, and the mindset required to stay ahead of the curve. What’s Inside This Episode: AI Max Campaigns in Google Ads Discover how Google’s new AI-powered campaign structure is changing the game. It’s not just another bidding strategy, it’s an integrated layer that leverages keywordless signals, context, and user behaviour across Google properties to personalise campaigns. Learn why separating these into siloed budgets might actually hinder performance and what you need to consider before rolling out. The Vanishing Organic Click While impressions are up, clicks are down. Daniel shares Target Internet’s own data showing a drop in organic click-through rates and explains why Google’s AI-generated answers, Reddit posts, and video content are pushing traditional organic listings further down the page. LLM Refs and the New SEO Frontier With AI overviews, ChatGPT, and other LLMs becoming key discovery engines, how do you make sure your brand shows up? The hosts explore LLMRefs, a tool that shows how different brands are ranking across major AI models, and reveal just how fragmented and competitive this new landscape is. Structured Data, Schema & the Knowledge Graph Daniel and Ciaran highlight the importance of schema markup and entity relationships in Google’s Knowledge Graph, using tools like the Knowledge Graph Explorer to demonstrate how Google perceives your brand and its connections. If you're not surfacing in the right contexts, it could just be due to a missing link, literally. Search Engine Optimization ≠ Generative Engine Optimization The hosts challenge the idea that SEO principles remain unchanged in the world of AI. With so many variables, location, devices, user intent, history, and model-specific behavior, your approach needs to be more agile and nuanced than ever. Key Takeaways: Performance Max and AI Max are now core to Google Ads - understanding signals and context is essential Organic traffic is declining, but impressions may still rise - CTR is the new battleground You can’t game the system anymore with a few smart keywords; LLMs require strong content, schema, and reputation The tools are out there - you just need to experiment, validate, and iterate Don’t fall into the trap of “a little knowledge” - simplifying complex changes leads to bad decisions AI models aren't clairvoyant - you need to structure and declare your content clearly 📥 Access the show notes, tools, and links at:   📩 Join the free newsletter for access to monthly live sessions: 

Episode Transcript

Ciaran (00:00):
hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast, brought
to you by target internet.com.
My name is Kean Rogers,

Daniel Rowles (00:08):
And I'm Daniel Rolls.

Ciaran (00:09):
and today we have a tips and Tools episode for you.

Daniel Rowles (00:20):
Well, it has been a while since

Ciaran (00:22):
It's been a while.
We always say that

Daniel Rowles (00:25):
Yeah.
And then we did lots andlots, then we did none.
And it's okay, we thought we'drevisit because, and there is a
theme tied in, woven into this stuff.
A few random things, but a few things.
The direction of travel with searchand generative engines and large
language models and all those things.
But don't despair 'cause we keep talkingabout this stuff, but there's some

(00:45):
fun little things in here as well.
Let's.
Let's kind of start with AIMax, 'cause that tells us the
direction of things a little bit.
We'll chat around that and then we'lljump into some different tools as well.
So Google AI Max is something,it's been in beta for a while and
they've rolled it out, so I think itwas in May that they announced it.

Ciaran (01:06):
Yep.

Daniel Rowles (01:07):
and they've now rolled it out to pretty much everyone.
And what you'll find isif you go into Google Ads.
You've got, you know,you set your objectives.
I want sales or lead generation, whatever.
It's,

Ciaran (01:15):
Hm.

Daniel Rowles (01:15):
based on those objectives, they will give you a
number of different campaign types.
But you end up with, you've gotperformance max, which is basically
paid search display, YouTube, gmail,everything kind of rolled into one,
But you can still go in and do search as.
search, text ads.
But now when you go in, they'reoffering us this AI Max option.

(01:37):
So Kira, why don't you start

Ciaran (01:38):
I,

Daniel Rowles (01:39):
what

Ciaran (01:39):
well, so I,

Daniel Rowles (01:40):
the loop

Ciaran (01:40):
yeah I was really lucky the guys at Google invited.
Me and my account manager up to Google.
So we went up to London and they Google.
Thank you.
Put on an excellent show.
The, my only criticism is yourcoffee that you service is terrible.
You can't put coffee in an urnand leave it there for several
hours and expect it to be nice.
Let's not leave a bad bittertaste in people's mouths.
Two hours later.

(02:01):
Anyway, aside from that, yeah, the event was excellent and I learned
a ton of stuff, but one of the thingsthey were really keen to point out to
people, like a lot of people have gotthe wrong idea about Google AI Max.
'cause they think it's awhole new bidding strategy.
It's not, it's actuallyreally intrinsically tied
to your search campaigns.
Right.
So it's kind of newfunctionality for search ads.

(02:21):
And I think one of the key thingsI got from my Google account
manager was very much that.
Everybody's doing the same thing.
Like we're all rushing to test this,or let's get a separate budget.
Let's test it out.
Let's see how it works, let's learn it.
And actually, in this instance, that'smaybe not necessarily the best way
of doing this or rolling this out.
'cause actually being searched, itrelies on like lots of signals and

(02:43):
lots of data from your account.
So if you set up something completelyseparate, you're sort of slightly on
a back foot if you go down that route.
So what is it?
They made a big thing athow it very cleverly uses a
lot of key word lus signals.
That they have within their data sets.
So, you know, when you start to unpackthis and think about the revolution

(03:07):
that's going on before our very eyes,like guys, we're seeing history happen
here, right here, there's some reallybig changes being made this year that
are gonna have a knock on effect in abig way to everything we do, not just
in marketing, but in, in the real world.
Full stop.
The big shift has been, you know,the introduction of, first of all AI
summaries and then AI chat functionalityactually within the Google interface.

(03:31):
And what Google is saying isthey've seen a huge surge in.
Like the number of searches that they'redealing with are on a day-to-day basis
that's massively grown, but also thelength of them and also some radical
shifts in how people are interacting.
So actually now, because people are alot more used to like dealing with AI
and having back and forth conversationsyou know, rather than just picking two or

(03:55):
three words and doing their search, youknow, they're actually, they're seeing
searches grow to like eight to 12 words.

Daniel Rowles (04:02):
But, and it's the context piece that's really interesting to me
because the signals they're talkingabout, the more you read into it,
That it's about the sequence of thingsthat you maybe have searched for
previously and where you might end

Ciaran (04:14):
absolutely.
So, so a lot of their, likeperformance Max for example, did,
started the ball rolling on this.
So, you know, that was able to lookat a lot of context across a lot of
different Google properties, a lotsof different stages of the funnel.
To like get a picture of, well, youknow, from what we know about the
people using Google and the, what doesthe data say about who's interested

(04:35):
in what and who might be enticed intosomething completely new that they
haven't perhaps thought of before.
So, you know, it was a fantastic,it was the first time we'd ever had,
you know, one campaign type thatcould do like full funnel stuff.

Daniel Rowles (04:48):
Right.

Ciaran (04:49):
anybody that's, you know, seriously pursued this has, you know,
realized fantastic gains from it.
It was, it's brilliant.
It gets harder as everybodyjumps on that bandwagon.
'cause suddenly, you know, youdon't have that competitive edge.
Your competitors weren't using it.
I think probably, pretty much everybody'sprobably using Performance Max now.
Some better than others has to be said.
But the thing with this is there'sa whole bunch of new signals,

(05:11):
I think Google have now got so.
You know, people, as we know for a lotof searches, if they're, particularly
if there's like an AI answer likeadditional summary boxes, you know,
a lot of publishers have seen amassive drop in the number of organic
clicks that they've been getting.
And Daniel, you were saying, even atTarget Internet, we've seen some big
shifts, like big improvements in,in like impression rates for sure.

(05:35):
But the problem is no one's scrollingdown to where the organic listings are.
'cause the A, they'regetting the answer up top.

Daniel Rowles (05:43):
Yeah.
So just to give people some context,within Search Console, you can see.
How many search impressions yougot and you can see how many
clicks that you've got, and ourimpressions are at all time high.
We continue to publish content, wecan continue to optimize it where our
rankings are getting better all the time.
But actually a number of clicks not anall time low at all because it's, we've
been going up gradually over the years,but it's, it has dipped in the last.

(06:04):
Six to 12 months.
And that, that percentage ratiobetween them is different.
And you're absolutely right.
It's because there are adsat the top of the page.
There's a IO fees, top of the page.
There's all those, youknow, different results.
Like we're seeing Reddit show up more,

Ciaran (06:15):
Yeah.

Daniel Rowles (06:15):
more videos show up.
'cause they seem to be more human

Ciaran (06:18):
Yeah.

Daniel Rowles (06:18):
We're just not getting the clicks in the same way.

Ciaran (06:20):
You see, Google aren't getting the clicks in the same way either, right?
So that creates a problem.
So previously they would've beenable to see, you know, who's
clicking on which organic links andthat, you know, for their system.
That might put you in therunning for certain ads, right?
That would make sense.
Now they're not getting that dataeither, but what they are getting is
a ton of data on who's asking ai what.
You know, who's looking at whichAI summaries who's dwelling on a

(06:43):
particular summary, and then what'sthe follow on question, right?
When you've got ai, you can use AI tostring together lots and lots of signals
like that for every single individual, andproduce what I'm assuming is what they're
referring to by the key wordless signals.

Daniel Rowles (06:59):
And I think that's the whole thing is that you might
show up, you get really good resultsfor four or five search terms.
You're not getting aclick, but you might get a
The sixth
'Cause it's a sequence

Ciaran (07:06):
Yeah.

Daniel Rowles (07:06):
deduction that people are going through to some extent.
So it's really

Ciaran (07:09):
Well, it's even more than that in a way when you think about it.
'cause actually somebody might justbe researching, I dunno, they might be
researching baby names, for example,

Daniel Rowles (07:17):
right.

Ciaran (07:17):
That combined with lots of other behavior.
What videos are they watching on YouTube?
You know, What comments are theymaking in the comments section?
All these things.
They're all, what emails arethey getting from who on Gmail?
You know, if you've got the rightpermit, you've given the right
permissions, it's able to use that.
If you've got Chrome, what arethe websites that are looking?
It's all being fed into the mix.
And actually when you start tojoin the dots for a whole bunch of

(07:39):
different signals in this way, andyou start to train your AI to make use
of this, of course there's a ton ofvalue that you can extract for that.
In terms of.
Who would be receptive to, to which kindof advertisers and what kind of message?
I think that's, I mean,it's mind blowingly complex.
That's the first thing I would say.
This is increasingly, I find it verydifficult to get my head around,

(08:01):
okay, how do you unpick this?
How's this actually working?
But in a way, you don't need to, right.

Daniel Rowles (08:06):
Well, that's the one I was the things I was gonna say, because
increasingly you've got a couple of,if there's three kind of main slider
buttons and it's you slide one to say,well, yeah, expand my keywords to keyword
list signals and things like that.
And then you talk about creative assets.
Yes you can.
You can create new creativeassets and then it goes through
and says, and actually can weuse different landing pages?
We're gonna select the mostappropriate landing page.

(08:27):
Now my terror with that.
Is historical, which is looking atexpensive word campaigns where basically
what would happen is that it wouldstart fine, oh, well, you're gonna rank
well for this keyword and I'm gonnasend you through to this landing page.
And the reality is I'm alreadyranking for that organically.
And it's not a term that'sgonna convert at a high rate,
Actually campaigns only optimizedfor achieving your desired outcome.

Ciaran (08:50):
Yeah.

Daniel Rowles (08:51):
So they're not gonna do the things it used to do when it was a little
bit more basic in from my insight so far.

Ciaran (08:56):
They've also put a lot more control in than we had initially
when Performance Max was released.
So for example, you do have the abilityof turning off the, well let Google
decide what landing pages it uses.
You know, this is the.
The challenge here, right?
For years, everybody's been optimizingall of their websites and content for

(09:17):
the same two to three word phrases, andnow suddenly genie's out of the bottle,
and no one's using those two, threewords such in the same way anymore.
Like for sure, they're still using them.
A lot of people are, you know, skippinga whole section of the discovery phase
that they would previously have donewithin search and through clicking on

(09:37):
your organic links and stuff, and they'lljust jumping straight to the answer.
And so we're moving from a situationwhere there was space for, you know,
three or four ads and, you know, halfa dozen organic links to a place where,
frankly, that's not the case anymore.
And they're still there,but no one's clicking them.
Like it reminded me, I was chattingto somebody about it today.
It reminds me of, remember back in,oh, probably go back to 20 11, 20 12

(10:02):
when Google had a whole bunch of notso hot ads on the right hand side.

Daniel Rowles (10:07):
And

Ciaran (10:07):
you

Daniel Rowles (10:07):
the

Ciaran (10:07):
got like 15 and at the bottom of the page, like 15 like column
thin, skinny column of 15 blue links.
And it was funny.
It was reserved for the ads thatweren't really quite as relevant.
But we'll show them anywaybecause it keeps the adv.
Yeah, just give 'em a chance.
And they were terribly low quality andnobody got very good results from them.
And there was outragewhen people removed them.

(10:27):
People thought, well, now I'msqueezed into fighting for,
you know, top three position.
Well, yeah, but actually when we looked atthe data, everyone ignored the long thing,
skinny column because it was terrible.
Like it wasn't really very targeted.
Like this is similar in a way, right?
We're going, we're now moving toa place where like, just one thing
it's gonna get the edge and maybea few things might get sort of sub

(10:48):
mentions if you look at the sources.
But actually.
Yeah, the game has changed massivelyand what I'm excited about is AR
Max, I think gives us quite earlyon tools to start chewing into that.
You know, that's the exciting thing.
I think also though, with that weundoubtedly, we've lost a huge amount of.

(11:09):
Perceived control that we had, perhapsonce that had over our organic listings.
Like I think people have beenasking me, what can we do to
rescue our organic position?
I'm like, well, winging a prayer,but nothing really, because
every, the world's moved on.
Yeah.

Daniel Rowles (11:23):
Yeah,

Ciaran (11:24):
moved on.

Daniel Rowles (11:24):
talk about that organic piece bit in a moment.
'cause it's gonna come up a load and a fewmore of the tools we talk about as well.
Before we get into some of that heavier

Ciaran (11:31):
Yeah.

Daniel Rowles (11:31):
to a fun tour

Ciaran (11:32):
Yeah.

Daniel Rowles (11:33):
This is one you pointed out to me.
This is something in GoogleLabs, so if you're not

Ciaran (11:36):
Oh.

Daniel Rowles (11:36):
Labs do

Ciaran (11:37):
So
Good.

Daniel Rowles (11:38):
and it's just called Gen Type.
Well again, as ever,everything's in the show notes.
Target internet com podcast.
You explain it.
'cause you showed this to me and Ithought this was, it's actually a lot of
fun and it could, it's quite useful as

Ciaran (11:49):
So you, you can create a full on like graphical alphabet.

Daniel Rowles (11:54):
A font,

Ciaran (11:55):
a font.

Daniel Rowles (11:55):
font

Ciaran (11:55):
Yeah, a font set just by giving it a prompt.
Right?
So I got hold of this and I did somethingfairly pedestrian and mundane, and
I thought, well, that's quite fun.
That handed it to my 15-year-olddaughter, Izzy and said, is look at this.
And she was like, OMG.
The first thing she did was sheinstructed it to create an alphabet
made up of vomiting unicorns,but they had to vomit rainbows.

(12:20):
I'm like, wow.

Daniel Rowles (12:21):
the thing of beauty.
It

Ciaran (12:22):
I'm waiting for it to produce this thing and it's never gonna cope with that.
And it totally did it.

Daniel Rowles (12:25):
sure as

Ciaran (12:26):
Yeah, it totally did it.

Daniel Rowles (12:27):
But I think the key thing is it's a nice little use case of
generative AI creating images, but doingsomething that's kind of fun with it as

Ciaran (12:34):
Yeah.

Daniel Rowles (12:34):
there's loads of useful cases for it as
well, but it is a bit of fun.
But there's some nice stuff inGoogle Labs that you can experiment
with and go, actually, I could seethat's gonna be applied as well.
So that's gen type.
Take a look at that.
Right.
Let's move on.
LLM refs.

Ciaran (12:48):
Yeah.

Daniel Rowles (12:48):
of the many tools that are appearing to try and help you with
search engine optimization, but fromthe generative engine side of things.
So the idea of how do you show upin the AI overviews, how do you
show up in chat, GPT and so on.
The nice thing about LLM refs is theyhave a very robust and solid free trial.

Ciaran (13:07):
Yeah.

Daniel Rowles (13:07):
Kieran pointed this out to me.
We've been playing aroundwith it a fair bit.
And rather than doing what HubSpotAI grader does, which is HubSpot AI
grader, you put your brand in and ittells you how visible your brand is.
It thinks in a number ofdifferent large language models.
This you put a search term in and ittells you the brands that are doing well.
And it shows you howthey're kind of branding.

(13:28):
It gives you some scores aroundthose kind of things as well.
So as with any of these tools.
I think there's two main issues.
One, it starts to make you realizehow complicated, really unpicking this
generative engine optimization piece ishow you show up in a large language model,
how many things there are to think about.
And we'll come to that pointin a moment 'cause Kieran

(13:50):
was talking to me about that.
But also.
Where's the testing to prove this?
Where's the data to back this up?
Where is the definitive case?
Oh, this is what it is now.
It's gonna be fixed likethis for a period of time.
I think there's a lot ofpeople just testing, trying,
experimenting, coming up with tools.
This is a great example of a tool, butI don't think there is a definitive

(14:10):
answer to these questions yet.
So that, and that's part of the game.
It always has been.
SEO.
He is trying to understandit and game it and get there
before other people and so on

Ciaran (14:18):
Yeah.

Daniel Rowles (14:20):
But it is complicated, and I think that
actually search has been complicatedthan people have realized for a
'Cause a lot of this stuff was goingon in the background with the Google
algorithm when they started tobring AI into the Google algorithm.
Anyway, so really thisidea of understanding SEO.
Generative engine optimization, ifit's the same thing or something

(14:40):
separate, has actually got wildlymore complicated, and there's just
so much more to do that it becomesslightly overwhelming and therefore
you're gonna need help with this.

Ciaran (14:50):
It is every time this iterates, it becomes exponentially more complicated.
Right?
So what do I mean by that?
Well, let's just go on ajourney through time, shall we?
Like back in the day?
There was Google and therewas one like search index.
And then few years later we had,you know, mobile search results

(15:11):
were sometimes slightly different.
So that complicated things.
And then there was this massiverevolution that sort of happened
silently, where actually there was nosuch thing as being number one in Google.
You had to ask number one for who.
And then number one for whoand where and on what device

Daniel Rowles (15:28):
Right.

Ciaran (15:29):
And in what context.
Right?
So each time this happens, you'remassively adding to the number
of variables, and it's led tolike a running joke actually.
I, I was at this year's Brighton, SEO.
The running joke was, you know,when you ask an SEO any question.
They say, you know, the answer isalways, ah, well it's complicated

Daniel Rowles (15:47):
Right.

Ciaran (15:48):
because it's, and it's getting more complicated by the day.
So this is the thing.
I think the it, I'm really quite sickof hearing senior marketers, you know,
marketing directors, you know who you are.
You, you'll recognize thepeople that have wound me up.
You'll know who I'mhaving to go at, right?

(16:08):
Like they go off, they look at somewebinar that's shoved at them for
free on LinkedIn and they come backthinking they've got all the answers.
'cause they've found this expert whothinks that, you know, this is really
and they announced to their team that weneed to get on top of AI search and like.
Just because they've identifiedthat there's an issue there,
they've solved it, they've stakedthe ground, and they now own this.

(16:32):
Right?
And it's just really annoying.
So if you are in this, caught in theseheadlights right now, I'm sure a lot of
you are actually the ll M refs.com demowill help you to explain to these senior
serial summarizes, we'll call them.
That's what they do.
They're like ah, blatantly sim

Daniel Rowles (16:51):
summarizes.

Ciaran (16:52):
blatantly simplifying ridiculously complicated things, right?
Because you can show them with this.
Actually, let's just, with usingthe free version, let's just run
the numbers on one key phrase.
Like pick one really popular keyphrase and what it'll do is it'll
ping out how like the top like 30like references in not just one,

(17:12):
but like almost a dozen differentlarge language learning models and

Daniel Rowles (17:16):
It

Ciaran (17:16):
the little top, yeah there's little top right hand
dropdown you wanna look at, right?
'cause I hadn't spotted it initially.
You sort of miss it in the interface,but actually you can choose.
The results that you're getting,like, well, what do you wanna look at?
Do you wanna look at Claude or chatGBT or do you wanna look at you
know, Gemini AI or Google answers,or, you know, what element do you
wanna include within this summary?

(17:36):
And it calculates it all up for you.
And it is just mind boing.
And that's just for one phrase.
This is something we've gonefrom like one source to like.
Like almost a dozen,just in one foul leap.
And the dust really hasn'tsettled on which of these are
gonna be most influential.
You know, no one knows which isgonna be the most influential
large language learning model inone space this time next year.

(17:59):
Or even a Chris like Christmas this year.
No one really knows how, where that'sgonna go or how that's gonna roll out.
Remember there's a massive arms race goingon with the functionality that's available
to various different people at the moment.
So, so for that reason, I think l.Refs deserves a very cool mention.
You get a ton of value out of it if you

Daniel Rowles (18:17):
free one.
Yeah,

Ciaran (18:17):
to it.
Yeah.
But if you subscribe,you can do a lot more.
Like it is very much locked down.
But I think just looking at thatdemo, it's so easy to access.
You just connected to a Googleaccount and away you go.

Daniel Rowles (18:28):
Now

Ciaran (18:28):
yeah.

Daniel Rowles (18:29):
They've upset me with one thing though.

Ciaran (18:30):
Oh, they did upset you, didn't they?
Yeah.

Daniel Rowles (18:32):
quite drastically.
So on, on one of theirkind of blog type pages.
And we are just having a littlebrowse round as we do, make sure
we kind of think the tool's.
Okay.
And the headline said, and I'm not gonnago into this because I'm gonna get dragged
down a rabbit hole and I don't wanna,he said, meta descriptions are the new H

Ciaran (18:47):
Oh,

Daniel Rowles (18:48):
I then lost the bill to live.
It was just like no.

Ciaran (18:50):
did that upset you, Daniel?

Daniel Rowles (18:51):
Just because this idea, you know how long I spent,
I reckon I spent eight yearstelling people meta descriptions
had no impact on Google, right?
Other than it would show up and it mightget a higher click through rate, but it
wasn't directly impacting the algorithm.
And I remember repeating things and thenthey, is that the same as meta keywords?
And I was like no, it's a differentthing completely, but your H one's really
important and that, and now we're sayingthings like this is the same as this.

(19:12):
To what your point was earlier on.
Like someone will hear something at aconference and go, that's the gospel
Right?
And it is that a little knowledgehas always been a dangerous

Ciaran (19:19):
yeah,

Daniel Rowles (19:19):
I work in lots of organizations, worked in academia
a lot to big universities,

Ciaran (19:24):
yeah.

Daniel Rowles (19:24):
a professor would come back, go, why aren't
we ranking for this search

Ciaran (19:27):
Yeah.

Daniel Rowles (19:27):
would just be, 'cause it's not relevant because
it's just not in the user journey.
And it was just one of those kind of

Ciaran (19:33):
Well, my favorite because I, according to Google, only 30
people a month search for that.
Like, you know, that's.

Daniel Rowles (19:38):
Right, exactly.
It's like no one's searching forit, except we're getting 10,000
visits a month on that search term.
So I'm not sure that's true, but yeah.
Anyway let's move swiftly on.
I hope LLM refs, if you're listening,you can redeem yourself by leaving
us a comment of what you were sayingwith that and we will get into it.
Right.
Actually on this, I thoughtthis was quite interesting.
Google have published some advice, AIexperience advice, and it's like you

(20:00):
get the lovely Google documentation thatsays this is how search works and this
is what you should do, and it gives youthe really kind of straightforward stuff.
They've actually written some reallynice stuff about succeeding in AI search,
and it talks about those fundamentalsof, you know, the good quality
content, understanding user intent.
Knowledge graphconnections between things.
So we'll put the link into the shownotes 'cause it's developer.google.com.

(20:21):
Understand their search section.
But this is somethingyou highlighted for me.
And it's not to say this is acompletely robust tool, but it did get
me thinking on the lines of, actuallysearch has been more complicated than
we've realized for a while, whichwas the knowledge graph explorer.
So let's take a step back.
The knowledge graph is the ideathat Google works on entities.

(20:41):
That is the connectionsbetween different things.
It will know that Target internet isa company, it will know that digital
marketing podcast is a podcast.
Ki iss a person, Daniel's aperson, and it'll kind of know the
connections between those things.
And that's how it's working out to someextent, connections the kind of semantic
connections, the context, but also thevalidity in the kind of authenticity

(21:02):
and authority of those things as well.
So it's a. Very interestingcolor piece, but the knowledge
graph, explore this thing.
You can put something in and it willtell you the things it's connected to.
Now it's reasonably limited, it doesshow you that you can kind of play around
with this knowledge graph a little bit.
It was interesting that I put the companyname in and all it came up with was my
name and our managing director's name.

(21:25):
and then when I had, it had lots andlots of different Daniel Rose, so
I clicked through to some of those.
Some are with me as an author,others were, me as a movie star.
I was quite

Ciaran (21:32):
That you apparently were a movie star in a black and
white movie back in the 1930s.

Daniel Rowles (21:37):
I've aged very well,

Ciaran (21:38):
You have?
Yeah.

Daniel Rowles (21:40):
so, so it's very imperfect, but what it does get you thinking about
is that connection between things isreally important that's what these large
language models, and that's what Googleare trying to work out, is authority.
Authenticity and all those thingsthat you've got in e experience,
expertise, and trust and so on.

(22:00):
really all we're gettingto is SEO is dead again.
And I'm sorry to go down this path again,but it's just like the more complex it
gets, the less I'm gonna think about it.
'cause it's just a bit

Ciaran (22:09):
It is overwhelming, but I think what was really interesting
about that example you just gave wasthat clearly it had got it wrong.
And then this is what you all needto be doing is looking at tools like
this and going, well, what has thisgot wrong about us, our organization?

Daniel Rowles (22:23):
it.

Ciaran (22:24):
And so I've been using this and working out, well, why doesn't it know
that we're a member of, you know, this bigimportant thing that we're a member of?

Daniel Rowles (22:32):
Yeah.

Ciaran (22:32):
Oh.
Because actually we haven'tmade it obvious on our.
Like we've linked, you know, maybewe've linked to, you know, just the
organization's logo, but we haven'tlike, put the hyperlink in there or,
you know, little things like what's onour about page, do we mention it there?
Like, you need to make this stuffreally clear and then the AI will
trip over it and go, ah, okay.
I understand the context.

(22:53):
Like it's smart, but it's not clairvoyant.
Right.
You have to create the links.
You have create the links.

Daniel Rowles (22:58):
smart, but it's not clairvoyant.
like that.
I think that it just ends up basicallybeing so complicated because saying
what shows up in organic search?
What shows up in these differentLLMs, what's being referenced
in each of those LLM results?
What are the AI over?
And you kind of get, oh, thisoverwhelming and actually.
These fundamental building blocksof understanding user intent, doing

(23:20):
your structured schema markup.
and actually we will do an episodeentirely on this because I think
Such an important topic.
So, or do

Ciaran (23:26):
Yep.

Daniel Rowles (23:27):
on that.
So actually within the code sayingthis is an article, this is an f, a Q,

Ciaran (23:31):
Yep.

Daniel Rowles (23:31):
of things as well.
just making connections between things,'cause the knowledge graph and so on.
All of this is building upthat overarching picture.
As well.
Advocacy, really important peoplesaying nice things, leaving reviews,
all those kind of things as well.
So I do think, yes, there are new tools,it's changing very rapidly, but still
coming back some of those fundamentals,

(23:52):
Right?
Another one, somebody that did get incontact, 'cause we're gonna give the
opportunity to get in contact the moment,but somebody that did get in contact

Ciaran (23:58):
Yeah.

Daniel Rowles (23:58):
Zoomer.

Ciaran (23:59):
Oh.

Daniel Rowles (23:59):
And what ADD Zoomer allows you to do is to connect up all of your ad
platforms into one place and manage themfrom a place wherever you're an individual
organization or an agency as well.

Ciaran (24:11):
I've used ad it's good.
And it do some, it's a great tool.
It does a lot of stuff like it, itlooks around a lot of corners for you.
And I like the fact that it,you know, like all of your ad
platforms it covers a lot of them.
So yeah, check it out.
It's good.

Daniel Rowles (24:24):
It brings it into one place and it'll also Google ads,

Ciaran (24:27):
I.

Daniel Rowles (24:28):
but also it'll bring in your Google Analytics
and those kind of things as well.
And they've given us a discount code.
As well.
So if you wanna take a look at it thereis a free trial, but if you do, sign up.
Gonna discount targetinternet com podcast.

Ciaran (24:39):
I've got an extra tool I wanna squeeze in.
'cause I got very excited about this.
I've only just started playingaround with it, but it's a tool by
Google and it's called Notebook lm.

Daniel Rowles (24:49):
I Mentioned this a
few times, but I was gonna say,I don't think you played with it

Ciaran (24:51):
No, I've been playing around with a little bit more.
What I love about it is you can uploadyour own data into it, and then it
becomes a language model just purelyfocused on what you've given it, and
I think that's massively exciting.

Daniel Rowles (25:03):
One example of this, I was playing this the other day and I
went through and uploaded five podcastsit will transcribe them for you and
then you can query them as a whole.
I was trying to understand howmuch we'd mentioned S-E-O-G-E-O,
LLMs and all those kind of things.
But what was lovely is itwill create a mind map.

Ciaran (25:19):
Yeah.

Daniel Rowles (25:19):
And actually in the last couple of podcasts, I've
included the mind maps that it's
Back

Ciaran (25:23):
clever.

Daniel Rowles (25:24):
As well, just so just to get people get an idea of
About.
Played with it, it's brilliant

Ciaran (25:27):
it's just got so much potential.
There's so many cleverways you could do this.
Well, well, it's got me thinking ismaybe that's where we need to go with
the complexity that we're facing.

Daniel Rowles (25:37):
We were talking about this in an organization I was in
the other day about trusted sources,
And actually you could do thisalready with a decent prompt, which
is say, get me the latest digitalmarketing news, but only from
How about you could create a version ofGoogle or a large language model that just
looked at the websites that you trustedsaid, I don't wanna get it from everyone.
I just wanna look at these places.
Now, it might limit your viewpoint.
You'll be really careful ofthe echo chamber type thing
that makes that even worse.

(25:58):
Actually this is kind of where it's going.
If you look at chat, g, PT and Gemini,the fact they have connectors that
allows you to connect your internaltools and things like that is definitely
the direction of travel as well.
And we will get into that whole agentspiece again in future kind of episodes.
As well, I wanna give a shout toone more tool, which we'll put into
show notes before we finish up.
And it's one that we've spoken aboutbefore, but our friends over at nutshell.

(26:19):
So, if you're not familiar,nutshell is a CRM.
System, but it was basicallya bit of an outlier.
Originally, it, we had avery specific use case.
And it's grown they really pridethemselves in is robustness of the tool.
And it is an absolutely excellent tool,but actually from a pricing point of
view, it's much lower cost than a lotof the other CRMs that are out there.

(26:41):
it's very transparent on its pricing.
In terms of you need this package, andthen you've got 20,000 contacts, right?
Here's your price.
So I really do recommend it, butthey have given us a discount code.
So 15% off when you sign up.
If you are.
Looking at CRMs one, take a look at it.
And we are doing a big comparisonof CRMs coming up as well.
And nutshell is coming up very wellin our comparisons at the moment.

(27:03):
, If you have got a tool we haven'tspoken about, please do submit
it . We do Take a look at them.
And thank you as ever for listeningto the Digital Marketing podcast.
For more episodes, resources toleave a review or to get in contact,
go to target internet.com/podcast.