July 30, 2025 • 31 mins
Welcome back to Digital Coffee: Marketing Brew! In this episode, host Brett Deister sits down with Michael Buckbee, co-founder of Noa Toa, to dive deep into the rapidly evolving world of AI-driven search and what it means for marketers and brands alike. Together, they explore how AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google Gemini are set to reshape search marketing, why traditional SEO isn’t dead—but is quickly changing—and what marketers must do to prepare for this new era.
Michael shares his expertise as both a technologist and a marketer, revealing not just how AI is transforming search results and search user behavior, but also what practical steps brands can take right now to protect and enhance their online reputation. From addressing the realities of AI “hallucinations” to rethinking content strategy for maximum ROI, this episode packs actionable advice for anyone looking to get ahead in digital marketing.
Whether you're curious about the interplay between PR, SEO, and AI, questioning the role of brand reputation in AI search, or just want to know how to ensure your content is visible in a fractured, AI-integrated landscape, you'll find tons of insight here.
Stick around to hear Michael’s tips on how to audit your keyword strategy, make friends with your PR team, and why empathy—and actual human voices—will continue to matter even as AI becomes ubiquitous. Plus, learn about free tools and tactical tips to make sure your brand isn’t left behind as search marketing enters a whole new era.
Three Fun Facts:
- Michael Buckbee drinks an entire pot of coffee a day—he claims his "large mug" makes it only 2 or 3 cups!
- OpenAI's ChatGPT is now considered by some companies as their "most popular and least well-trained representative."
- Amazon’s new AI-powered shopping assistant "Rufus" is actually powered by the Claude LLM model, letting users ask much more specific, conversational questions while searching for products.
Key Themes:
- AI search vs. traditional search engines
- Changing strategies for SEO and marketing
- Impact of AI on brand reputation
- Preparing websites for AI indexing
- Evolving content marketing strategies
- Importance of empathy and human voice
- Future opportunities and challenges with AI
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
All right, well, thank you for listening as well. Please subscribe to this podcast and
all your favorite podcasting apps. You got a five star review
as always. Anyways, thank you for listening to Digital Coffee Marketing. We really
do appreciate it. Thank you. All right, I'll just do
this. I'll just do this intro later because my dogs are going crazy.
(00:33):
That's good. Hey guys, Brett Deister here.
Sorry for no new episodes. I was on vacation and then I got
sick for a couple weeks, which wasn't fun for
me at all. But this is gonna be the new intro for Digital Coffee Marketing
Brew. I'm going to hopefully give you more of the rundown of it and
what I hope you learn out of this episode. So first off, it is
(00:56):
Michael Buckbee this week and and he is the co founder of Noa Toa, a
service that tracks brand visibility, ranking and sentiment with AI
search services like ChatGPT Perplexity and Google
Gemini. And we go through it all with AI and search or
SEO. What I hope you learn from it is that SEO
traditionally is not dead yet, but it is good to
(01:18):
learn for the future how to use AI
search models and make sure that you are preparing for the
future. Because this is eventually going to be what it is when where people are
going to be searching through AI. I use it for my regular search. When I
just search something, I do see the Google AI search
service, I guess the top of it. So what I hope you learn
(01:41):
from this is not to be afraid of AI, but to use it for your
business, to be successful in your business. So what I
want you to put in the comments below is what is
one important thing you learn from this episode? All right, let's
get on with the episode. Hey,
thank you so much for that introduction. So I
(02:03):
write it up and then when someone reads it back, I feel very.
Did I do that? Is that what happened? I mean, it's factual, but it's a,
you know. Yeah. So thank you very much for having me on the show. This
is great. You're welcome. And the first question is all my guest
is, are you a coffee or tea drinker? Oh, coffee. I drink,
I wake up and I brew. I drink at least a pot of
(02:25):
coffee a day just to keep going. So. Yeah.
All right. I mean that's what, like six cups or
something like that? I have a fairly large mug here, so it's only
really like 2, 3. And I gave a brief
summary of your expertise. Can your listeners a little bit more about what you do?
Yeah, I think the most Relevant thing is that I've worked in
(02:48):
all those different places really as the bridge between the marketing group group
and the technology group. I am a software developer, but
I was director of demand generation at a public cybersecurity company for
almost a decade and have done a
lot of, you know, content and paid marketing
initiatives there. Never really on the agency side, but a lot of different
(03:11):
iterations of a lot of different other pieces of it.
Got you. And how is AI search different from traditional
search engines like Google? And why should marketers pay attention
to tools like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini or
Perplexity or any of the other 50 million ones that are out there?
Well, you know, I think there is a tendency, and I do this
(03:33):
too, to sort of minimize the changes that are happening and to go. And
I think an interesting thought experiment is just to pretend like, hey, say ChatGPT
doesn't exist, say all these other new things don't exist and it's still
just Google, even if it's just Google. Google is making
so many changes that are radically different in response, response to all
these companies that as marketers we have to change
(03:56):
our response, what we're doing, our content plans, our content strategy.
And Google is making a lot of changes.
All right. I mean, even with their, what, VO3 and their flux,
it seems like they're getting even better at their video content.
Generative AI creation.
(04:18):
Yeah. So, you know, there's really the generative stuff which I think gets
a lot of, you know, public attention
and you know, people are very fascinated with it. But
day to day, you know, search marketers and SEOs have been, you know, plotting
about how do I outrank my competition, how do I get my content to show
up, how do I do the right things? And we are moving
(04:41):
towards an era of ditching the 10 blue
links where you type, you know, a query in a keyword and
it comes back with 10 blue links. And then all of us, like, I'm positive
everyone who's listening to this has this very
high level expertise of looking at the top couple, making
some trust judgments, maybe looking, opening them up real quick
(05:04):
and then sort of get a synthesis out of that of like, oh, here's the
answer I was looking for. And the future, whether it's Google
with AI overviews, whether it's their new AI mode, whether it's
deep research, is really that there's going to be an intermediate in
there. And if you go and use AI
mode, which Google just last week made available to everybody,
(05:26):
and you know, the first thing it does when you put a query in is
it says, hey, I'm going to go out and read these couple websites for you.
And it reads half a dozen websites and then
synthesizes an answer out of that to give to you. And then you
just go right back and like answer a follow up question. And
the end result is that, you know, for so long as search
(05:47):
marketers, you think of like a search journey where someone does an informational search
and then like, oh, so that's what the parameters of this are. All right, well
then give me one of the things there and then. Okay, now that I understand
that and sort of the functions of it, like what's the best one in this
category? You know, maybe three or four queries. And now all of
that is happening inside of Chat GPT or all of that is happening
(06:09):
inside of AI overviews. And we're seeing
traffic, especially for high volume, low
intent informational queries just drop away.
And that's a new era we're moving into.
And so, I mean, you mentioned that your search results and AI
tools sometimes hallucinate or provide inaccurate information.
(06:31):
So how can brands mitigate the problems to protect or enhance their
reputation through AI tools? Yeah, well,
on a purely defensive level, you know, something that
a customer said to me was Chat GPT is, is now our most popular
and least well trained representative of the company.
And if you think about it, people are all the time asking
(06:53):
ChatGPT questions that aren't necessarily like search
questions, like keywords that we've wanted to rank for.
What they're asking for is like basic business information, like, hey, I have a
business in California. Do you do business in California? If
ChatGPT says yes, and that's accurate, you win the
customer. If they say no, you're not even on the list. And there's a
(07:15):
million different facets of that. That's a lot more like business
knowledge that you need to start trying to keep track of.
And the other piece is really sentiment, which is that,
you know, yeah, if you could ask a question like, oh, what are some of
the biggest banking systems you know, in the US and like Wells Fargo would be
in there. But even if it ranks well, anytime you ask ChatGPT about
(07:38):
Wells Fargo, it says like, oh, well, they had the largest FTC fine
ever. They're not a great company to do business with. You should do an
ethical review of them before you open an account with them.
And that's very different than traditional search, where traditional search, if you search for Wells
Fargo, it doesn't come up with those news headlines, it comes up with,
oh, the nearest ATM is like six blocks away, and here's how to
(08:00):
open a checking account. And so, you know, there's an
expansion of what it means to do search marketing, or at least an expansion
of responsibilities that we as marketers can take on that has a real
impact that's way beyond, yeah, we drove a bunch of traffic that's low
intent to the site. And so, I
mean, with the rise of AI driven searches and what you said before, what
(08:22):
aspects of traditional SEO are still critical and
what new strategies should marketers adopt to thrive in this
evolving space? So I think by far the
number One skill that SEOs and search
marketers bring is still empathy. And that kind of seems weird in the
state of AI and everything, but so much of the,
(08:45):
I think modern content and search marketing is now about really
understanding the intent of your customers. And it used to be just search
intent and now I think it has to be like one level up to be
task intent. Like what is it they're trying to do and
how can we help them and where do we fit into this new search journey?
And end of the day, if it happens to be,
(09:07):
they get most of their information not on your site, but from ChatGPT.
And then at the end, ChatGPT says, Whoa, but their company's great, you should go
buy from them. And they, and you get money from that, that customer or
prospect. That still works. That's the works.
And we need to update, you know, our
strategies to handle that. And I think the easiest
(09:30):
piece of this is that we should stop trying to rank
for, you know, these very high volume, low intent keywords and focus
a lot more on the creation and distribution of middle and bottom of
the funnel content, which is
less satisfying in some ways because it doesn't get the big
numbers. But I think is a lot more satisfying because
(09:52):
you can write as an actual human. You know, all
of us, I think, are sick of the recipes that have like a
dissertation about their grad school in it before the apple pie recipe comes up,
which was always an SEO optimization just to get more words in there
about apple pie in the fall. And, you know, cinnamon, when the
professor gave you the idea, you know, who cares?
(10:15):
You know, so now we can actually write like a real
conversational article and, you know, that counts
in a way that we don't have to like artificially write for Google like we
had to before. So. And
is it also more about the reputation of the brand too, with
AI searches? Because you said before, like the Wells Fargo thing of like,
(10:38):
oh, look how terrible this company is. You're like, okay, yeah, we did mess
up, but it's. We didn't mess up forever, just that one time.
Well, I do feel Wells Fargo is a bit of an outlier. You
know, the largest FTC fine ever. Most companies
hopefully won't have to deal with that, but I.
So, you know, it's the creation of the content and then it's the distribution.
(11:02):
So, like, you know, just imagine a brand, you have
reviews, you have currently very siloed
marketing channels of search and social content.
And how we're, we're seeing a different,
you know, web of how these things work. So
OpenAI, the makers of Chat GPT, have
(11:25):
a $13 billion relationship with Microsoft. Part
of that is that Microsoft also owns LinkedIn. They also own GitHub.
And part of that deal is that OpenAI has access to those platforms.
So if you want to improve your reputation, if you want to do better,
for queries like, hey, who is the best in category?
You can write that content that says, hey, we're the best. Here's the six
(11:48):
reasons why. Here's a quote from our customer that says,
like, hey, you know, they had messed up in the past, but I was
shocked about how great the service was now. And you put that out as a
LinkedIn article. You know, in the past, SEOs
always were very concerned about duplicate content, penalties,
about, you know, is this going to take away my link juice? And
(12:11):
I think the future is a lot more sightless that there's sightless SEO
where we're not so concerned about our site. We're just concerned about
is the message getting in the right place. And our
responsibility is going to be to do that distribution in a much better way.
Over 1 billion users are using AI search tools. So what
does this massive adoption mean for marketers over the next five years?
(12:34):
I think it really does mean
well. I think it means a couple different things. I think the
biggest one is that it means
suddenly all the search marketers are a lot more valuable than they
were before. And the old world, the
(12:54):
traditional search world, was really just Google and
the future. I'm not going to be able to predict the
future perfectly. I don't think anybody is. But it certainly looks much
more fractured than it is today. And AI
adoption and how the AI tooling is working is just putting
search into everything, and it's much less going to Google and
(13:17):
doing a search. Here's an example.
Amazon. There's always been a box at the top of Amazon where
It says search for a product. And then recently they updated that to say
search for a product or ask a question. And you know, you used
to be able to go there and type in like coffee table and
now you can actually type coffee table for a small apartment
(13:39):
that's, you know, wood and that, you know, has good reviews. And
they are using the Claude
LLM AI model to power that.
And they have a buyer helper thing, shopping assistant
called Rufus that is actually just Claude. Like you can go into the
chat on Rufus, which is on the homepage of every
(14:01):
Amazon query and on every product page and ask like any
of these weird off questions that you used to have to go to
Google and ask. And that's just because search is now
being embedded in there. Every WhatsApp user now has
Meta's AI as a button on the home screen of WhatsApp.
And you know, a lot of this stuff I think isn't getting the attention
(14:23):
because it's dark, there's no analytics for it. No one has any
idea are people just ignoring this button
on the WhatsApp application. But it is a billion people.
Like you think someone must have clicked on it even if it just accidentally and
like, oh, this is handy. I can, you know, ask questions. So
the future's a lot more fractured, which means I think there's a lot more
(14:46):
responsibility on search marketers to make sure you show up
correctly, that you're doing well against competitors, that your information's
good. And I think
in a, in a world of a lot of change, I think I'm a positive
in this one. A lot of people are negative that AI is going to take
all our jobs. I think it's going to be a lot of job security for
(15:07):
SEOs and marketers for the next decade. Just sorting out all of this for companies.
In your opinion, what's the highest ROI content marketing
strategy right now, especially in the contents, the context of
AI and digital marketing. I think by
far the easiest, cheapest thing to do right now is to
make sure your site is not accidentally blocking any of these
(15:30):
AI bots from indexing it. And
you know, for decades we have done all sorts of things
to like massage and make it easy for googlebot to read our sites
because it then puts the information in the index and then it gives it to
users who then find us and then give us money. It is the
exact same thing with all these different AI services.
(15:52):
But even the language we use for it, we're always like, oh, Googlebot indexes
our site. But we say like, oh, ChatGPT scraping our site, they're
scraping our site to steal our content. And
you know, I have spent a lot of time in my life
writing a lot of words that have ended up on websites that are now being
scraped or indexed. And I think that's just, you
(16:14):
know, and I'm not saying put everything into the AIs, but certainly
your marketing site, make sure it's accessible. And I've
seen a lot of places that are blocking.
We mentioned googlebot, but Google now has an extended
bot that you need to make sure you're letting through. OpenAI
has three different bots, some for indexing, some for
(16:36):
interactions. And if you aren't letting these in, you're
just missing out on the foundation. So easy,
easy to verify, good starting point
and again, very high roi. You don't even have to write anything, you just have
to let it in. So. All right, hey,
sometimes easier is the better. Yeah. And so what are the,
(16:59):
the three most critical step brands should take to prepare for
the growing dominance of AI search tools? I think one, you should
do a keyword audit like hey, and you know,
really try to pull out the intent of these and to say
which of these are make the most sense going forward,
you know, and where no one has an infinite budget,
(17:22):
we can't write every article we want. So we have to put, you know,
get the most for our marketing dollar and you know,
do that and, and have that reflected in your strategy.
The next thing I'd say is that you do really want to start
building bridges with the other groups you have. I
know Digital Brew, it's you know, marketing and pr. We haven't
(17:45):
mentioned PR yet, but I think that's a crucial bridge to have. I
think PR is one of those things that's just going to become more and more
valuable because it's going to be more and more indexable
for all these different areas. And you know, this is
self serving but you know, as a maker of tooling that helps like
track all this, it is a lot to keep track of, you
(18:08):
know, even, you know, like I mentioned just
is our site accessible by all of these different indexing
bots? There's, we track 24 different ones. We have a little
free tool that lets people put in their site and just see like can they
reach our site and that that number changes every week because
you know, cloudflare gets put in place or someone puts a security
(18:30):
plug in or someone does something goo and it blocks it.
It's just a lot to keep track of. So automation is very
Useful. And whether you use our tools or you use AI to make your
own, or you use something else, I do think it's good to start thinking at
scale and automation for your processes.
And so what you're saying is PR people will finally be able to show their
(18:52):
ROI when it comes to AI search because of
context and communication will be more paramount than just
keyword stuffing. That used to be the thing.
Yeah. I mean, it's real interesting to me that so much of.
There's so many habits and I think assumptions that
(19:13):
we have made as SEOs for, you know, again, the last
couple decades that now just don't make anywhere
the same amount of sense. Like, you know, people
focus a lot on, like, oh, page rank and domain rank. Even
those have been out of phase for quite a while. It's still
something you kind of think about, like, oh, well, better links
(19:35):
from better sites. And a real question is, do any of the AI models care
about that? Do they have even a sense of this, or are they taking
just like literal terabytes of text and smashing
them together to try to come up with things? And
it's a lot more like the latter than the former. And it's getting more complicated.
As you know, there's now a lot of interconnections between traditional
(19:58):
search and AI search. But, you know, it is
a different way of thinking about rankings, and it's a different way
of doing content and trying to get
customers. And do you think even the content
creation will be more heavily towards AI? I mean, we touched about it a little
bit, but it seems like if you look on X, X
(20:20):
has a plethora of AI stuff.
YouTube kind of does, but they're a little bit more like, all right, you're gonna
have to tell me if this is AI or not. You can't just not
say anything. So are we gonna see more of that? Because even Google is getting
into the video creation through their own AI models. And we have
Runway, we have Gling as well, and all that stuff.
(20:41):
Well, so I. We're trying
to live this, you know, so this is advice, but, you know, I
believe in it enough to. To do it myself, which is we're really
dividing content into faceless and face content. And so
faceless is anything where if you read it, you don't know whose
voice it is. It's the generic corporate voice that's very
(21:04):
polished and has had Grammarly run over it eight times
and that, you know, you can't picture who wrote it.
And I think the future is, you know, beyond just Having
a brand voice is to have actual people, you know, as a
representative. And so that's part of the reason I'm going on podcasts, so people
hear my voice. We're investing more in video than we're doing that
(21:26):
across all the platforms. And, you know, have a weekly
newsletter, and I very deliberately write it so that if
you listen to this podcast and then you get the newsletter, you will
obviously go like, oh, I don't know if I like it. I don't know if
it's great. But I know Mike wrote this, and
I think that's the right investment to do for the future, where
(21:49):
everything else is just going to be average
AI stuff out there. And what's valuable is to have that point of view and
to have that voice. And how do you see
AI fundamentally transforming how businesses approach marketing over
the next decade beyond the search?
I think the opportunities
(22:12):
of where to jump in to the
tasks where people are trying to do things is really going to change.
And I think in some areas there'll be a lot more opportunity. In some areas
a lot less. I did mention I'm a software developer.
If you are not a software developer, it is hard to
understand how much software development has changed in the last, like, 18
(22:35):
months with AI tooling, where I know
many people who run, like, technical sites about
programming or how to use certain frameworks and stuff that have just seen their
traffic tank and have seen just a huge,
huge rise in people and not even doing
searches for any like, concepts anymore. They just
(22:57):
literally just make modifications directly to the code. So they
have Cursor, which is an AI assisted coding tool.
There's Windsurf, there's all these different packages, and just within the
actual document, you just highlight a section of it and you say, fix this, or
you say, hey, add this or change this. So it takes out
a lot of what used to be. Okay, so how do I use this
(23:19):
API? And I go out and I search the documentation or I say, what's the
best way to do this? And there's a couple different things and one of them
might be paid. And I go to that and, you know, we're
starting to see a lot of this stuff where, you know, the product of a
lot of the work that marketers do internally
is, you know, reporting and say, hey, you know, here's the
(23:40):
opportunities in this country. You know, here's what we could do. And they're
building that in a slideshow. And directly in the slideshow, you can
type like, hey, give me the top 10 podcasts you know,
and, and it will just make a list and you can do that right now.
And you know, Gemini is built into Google Docs notion, has its own
AI thing and that's weird way to sort of think about stuff
(24:02):
that this is just, you know, ubiquitous
across all these different services. And
I'm again obviously self serving. But I
really think companies and brands need to get in now at the foundation of
this where, you know, it's a lot easier
and to have, you know, the data
(24:25):
sets are only going to grow. And so to be in now
and to be part of that I think is a very smart marketing
move. So, so what excites you the most about
the future of AI search and marketing and what role do you see
yourself playing in this evolution? You know, there's
that, that to be cursed to live in interesting times is, you know, a saying.
(24:47):
And I think these are definitely interesting times. I think this is the first real
sea change we've seen in the very least search
marketing for, for a long time. And I think that's
having ripple effects to lots of other areas. And I think
with that comes a lot of opportunity and a lot
of, you know, opportunity both like as a
(25:10):
business trying to start a company to get going as
well as for, you know, maybe there's been a competitor you've
never been able to outrank. Now as maybe an opportunity,
now is the time to think. Well, all this stuff that they have put
so much inertia into and so much, you know, infrastructure
that's moving the wrong direction. We're smaller, we're more nimble, we can switch to
(25:33):
doing other stuff. So I think there's opportunities both at the
individual business level as well as sort of the macro of the
marketing community.
Yeah, I mean it seems interesting. I'm still,
I'm more on the fence about it. I still use it obviously, but I'm still
more, way more on the fence only because of,
(25:56):
I think prioritizing critical thinking is a little bit more important. I think people are
giving a little too much to AI and not really critically
thinking as much anymore. And this is me going like I've got too much
on my plate. So sometimes I do offload it to AI at times.
So I'm not, I'm not saying that I'm perfect at this either, but I do
feel like I think
(26:18):
we're trusting it a little too much, even though I do think it's a great
tool. Well, you know, there's a part.
So, you know, I have kids, they use it for some of their Homework, you
know, and I use it with them. And there's good and bad ways to do
that. It's a tremendous teacher, you know, to be able
to take it. You know, my daughter literally has written out
(26:39):
a math problem and it was an approach I wasn't familiar with. I took a
picture of it, gave it to chat GPT and said, explain how to do this
and read the handwriting, did it, said,
oh, well, this is, this sort of technique, here's the first steps and you,
1 through 10, like, oh, that makes sense. And you went through it.
Amazing. And the bad way is to do that and then
(27:00):
just write the answer out. But I think as
marketers, we still need to bring our intelligence to the
table. And I think what AI does is it raises the average
level of all of this in the same way, like Grammarly.
Not every piece of copy I've ever had has had a great copywriter
go through it for grammar and spell check and tone.
(27:23):
But now I use Grammarly and it's great. It, you know, does
all that stuff for me and that raises the average
quality level of it. And I think to my
looking at what AI does, it's never going to replace
brilliance, but it's going to just raise the average of everyone.
And so it sounds like you're using this the right way, which is that you
(27:45):
use it as a supplement. You use it as, you know, a
counterpoint. You use it to get rid of some of the drudgery of stuff.
So I think it's, you know, I think it's
great for those things. I agree entirely about not outsourcing
critical thinking and intelligence, though.
No, right. And so people were listening to
(28:08):
this episode and they're wondering where can they find you online to learn more about
you? So I
do have people email me directly. I'll give them my email, which is
mikewatoa.com it is a funny sort
of name. It's K N O W A
O T A Noah Toa. And
(28:28):
you can go to noah toa.com, put your website in and we actually
do a deep classification for free of all the existing keywords
your site ranks for, as well as give you for free,
sort of how you rank in the top sort of 10 questions
for your niche in ChatGPT. And then if you want to
do more and you want to do that for weeks on end and get reports
(28:50):
and lots of other stuff, that's all available as well.
But love talking to people and
I generally hope that people
don't despair over AI stuff and that
they think that this is a big opportunity for them and their careers in the
(29:10):
future, because I do genuinely think that's the case.
Any final thoughts for the listeners?
I think the biggest one is just try these different services.
There's so many different ones. There's a lot of free stuff. You don't need
to spend a tremendous amount of money. You don't need to even buy my
stuff to get started. Go to ChatGPT, ask it about your
(29:33):
company, ask it about yourself, see what it knows. And
I think you'll find even if it's not wrong information,
it's not exactly how you want to be represented. And I think that's
the first step, you know, to just being aware of this and to start to
make moves to improve things. All right, well, thank
you, Mike, for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and sharing your knowledge on
(29:55):
AI, digital marketing and search. Well, thank you
so much for having me. This is a great discussion. I do worry I
spoke too much. Maybe I had too much coffee before coming on here. It was
one of those days. But genuinely thankful for the
opportunity to chat to you and not your audience.
(30:16):
All right, guys, so what'd you think about the episode? Did you find anything
important or did you like anything about it? Or was there some aha
moments within that episode? Let me know in the comments
below. But also thank you for for listening as always. And please
subscribe to this podcast or subscribe to the YouTube or
if you're on Rumble as well. And join me next week as I
(30:39):
talk with another great thought leader in the PR marketing industry.
All right, guys, just learn how to do AI search or learn how
to get your website on AI search. Don't forget the
traditional still, it's still very important. And see you next week
later.
All right, well, thank you for listening as well. Please subscribe to this podcast and
all your favorite podcasting apps. You got a five star review
as always. Anyways, thank you for listening to Digital Coffee Marketing. We really
do appreciate it. Thank you. All right, I'll just do
this. I'll just do this intro later because my dogs are going crazy.
(00:33):
That's good. Hey guys, Brett Deister here.
Sorry for no new episodes. I was on vacation and then I got
sick for a couple weeks, which wasn't fun for
me at all. But this is gonna be the new intro for Digital Coffee Marketing
Brew. I'm going to hopefully give you more of the rundown of it and
what I hope you learn out of this episode. So first off, it is
(00:56):
Michael Buckbee this week and and he is the co founder of Noa Toa, a
service that tracks brand visibility, ranking and sentiment with AI
search services like ChatGPT Perplexity and Google
Gemini. And we go through it all with AI and search or
SEO. What I hope you learn from it is that SEO
traditionally is not dead yet, but it is good to
(01:18):
learn for the future how to use AI
search models and make sure that you are preparing for the
future. Because this is eventually going to be what it is when where people are
going to be searching through AI. I use it for my regular search. When I
just search something, I do see the Google AI search
service, I guess the top of it. So what I hope you learn
(01:41):
from this is not to be afraid of AI, but to use it for your
business, to be successful in your business. So what I
want you to put in the comments below is what is
one important thing you learn from this episode? All right, let's
get on with the episode. Hey,
thank you so much for that introduction. So I
(02:03):
write it up and then when someone reads it back, I feel very.
Did I do that? Is that what happened? I mean, it's factual, but it's a,
you know. Yeah. So thank you very much for having me on the show. This
is great. You're welcome. And the first question is all my guest
is, are you a coffee or tea drinker? Oh, coffee. I drink,
I wake up and I brew. I drink at least a pot of
(02:25):
coffee a day just to keep going. So. Yeah.
All right. I mean that's what, like six cups or
something like that? I have a fairly large mug here, so it's only
really like 2, 3. And I gave a brief
summary of your expertise. Can your listeners a little bit more about what you do?
Yeah, I think the most Relevant thing is that I've worked in
(02:48):
all those different places really as the bridge between the marketing group group
and the technology group. I am a software developer, but
I was director of demand generation at a public cybersecurity company for
almost a decade and have done a
lot of, you know, content and paid marketing
initiatives there. Never really on the agency side, but a lot of different
(03:11):
iterations of a lot of different other pieces of it.
Got you. And how is AI search different from traditional
search engines like Google? And why should marketers pay attention
to tools like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini or
Perplexity or any of the other 50 million ones that are out there?
Well, you know, I think there is a tendency, and I do this
(03:33):
too, to sort of minimize the changes that are happening and to go. And
I think an interesting thought experiment is just to pretend like, hey, say ChatGPT
doesn't exist, say all these other new things don't exist and it's still
just Google, even if it's just Google. Google is making
so many changes that are radically different in response, response to all
these companies that as marketers we have to change
(03:56):
our response, what we're doing, our content plans, our content strategy.
And Google is making a lot of changes.
All right. I mean, even with their, what, VO3 and their flux,
it seems like they're getting even better at their video content.
Generative AI creation.
(04:18):
Yeah. So, you know, there's really the generative stuff which I think gets
a lot of, you know, public attention
and you know, people are very fascinated with it. But
day to day, you know, search marketers and SEOs have been, you know, plotting
about how do I outrank my competition, how do I get my content to show
up, how do I do the right things? And we are moving
(04:41):
towards an era of ditching the 10 blue
links where you type, you know, a query in a keyword and
it comes back with 10 blue links. And then all of us, like, I'm positive
everyone who's listening to this has this very
high level expertise of looking at the top couple, making
some trust judgments, maybe looking, opening them up real quick
(05:04):
and then sort of get a synthesis out of that of like, oh, here's the
answer I was looking for. And the future, whether it's Google
with AI overviews, whether it's their new AI mode, whether it's
deep research, is really that there's going to be an intermediate in
there. And if you go and use AI
mode, which Google just last week made available to everybody,
(05:26):
and you know, the first thing it does when you put a query in is
it says, hey, I'm going to go out and read these couple websites for you.
And it reads half a dozen websites and then
synthesizes an answer out of that to give to you. And then you
just go right back and like answer a follow up question. And
the end result is that, you know, for so long as search
(05:47):
marketers, you think of like a search journey where someone does an informational search
and then like, oh, so that's what the parameters of this are. All right, well
then give me one of the things there and then. Okay, now that I understand
that and sort of the functions of it, like what's the best one in this
category? You know, maybe three or four queries. And now all of
that is happening inside of Chat GPT or all of that is happening
(06:09):
inside of AI overviews. And we're seeing
traffic, especially for high volume, low
intent informational queries just drop away.
And that's a new era we're moving into.
And so, I mean, you mentioned that your search results and AI
tools sometimes hallucinate or provide inaccurate information.
(06:31):
So how can brands mitigate the problems to protect or enhance their
reputation through AI tools? Yeah, well,
on a purely defensive level, you know, something that
a customer said to me was Chat GPT is, is now our most popular
and least well trained representative of the company.
And if you think about it, people are all the time asking
(06:53):
ChatGPT questions that aren't necessarily like search
questions, like keywords that we've wanted to rank for.
What they're asking for is like basic business information, like, hey, I have a
business in California. Do you do business in California? If
ChatGPT says yes, and that's accurate, you win the
customer. If they say no, you're not even on the list. And there's a
(07:15):
million different facets of that. That's a lot more like business
knowledge that you need to start trying to keep track of.
And the other piece is really sentiment, which is that,
you know, yeah, if you could ask a question like, oh, what are some of
the biggest banking systems you know, in the US and like Wells Fargo would be
in there. But even if it ranks well, anytime you ask ChatGPT about
(07:38):
Wells Fargo, it says like, oh, well, they had the largest FTC fine
ever. They're not a great company to do business with. You should do an
ethical review of them before you open an account with them.
And that's very different than traditional search, where traditional search, if you search for Wells
Fargo, it doesn't come up with those news headlines, it comes up with,
oh, the nearest ATM is like six blocks away, and here's how to
(08:00):
open a checking account. And so, you know, there's an
expansion of what it means to do search marketing, or at least an expansion
of responsibilities that we as marketers can take on that has a real
impact that's way beyond, yeah, we drove a bunch of traffic that's low
intent to the site. And so, I
mean, with the rise of AI driven searches and what you said before, what
(08:22):
aspects of traditional SEO are still critical and
what new strategies should marketers adopt to thrive in this
evolving space? So I think by far the
number One skill that SEOs and search
marketers bring is still empathy. And that kind of seems weird in the
state of AI and everything, but so much of the,
(08:45):
I think modern content and search marketing is now about really
understanding the intent of your customers. And it used to be just search
intent and now I think it has to be like one level up to be
task intent. Like what is it they're trying to do and
how can we help them and where do we fit into this new search journey?
And end of the day, if it happens to be,
(09:07):
they get most of their information not on your site, but from ChatGPT.
And then at the end, ChatGPT says, Whoa, but their company's great, you should go
buy from them. And they, and you get money from that, that customer or
prospect. That still works. That's the works.
And we need to update, you know, our
strategies to handle that. And I think the easiest
(09:30):
piece of this is that we should stop trying to rank
for, you know, these very high volume, low intent keywords and focus
a lot more on the creation and distribution of middle and bottom of
the funnel content, which is
less satisfying in some ways because it doesn't get the big
numbers. But I think is a lot more satisfying because
(09:52):
you can write as an actual human. You know, all
of us, I think, are sick of the recipes that have like a
dissertation about their grad school in it before the apple pie recipe comes up,
which was always an SEO optimization just to get more words in there
about apple pie in the fall. And, you know, cinnamon, when the
professor gave you the idea, you know, who cares?
(10:15):
You know, so now we can actually write like a real
conversational article and, you know, that counts
in a way that we don't have to like artificially write for Google like we
had to before. So. And
is it also more about the reputation of the brand too, with
AI searches? Because you said before, like the Wells Fargo thing of like,
(10:38):
oh, look how terrible this company is. You're like, okay, yeah, we did mess
up, but it's. We didn't mess up forever, just that one time.
Well, I do feel Wells Fargo is a bit of an outlier. You
know, the largest FTC fine ever. Most companies
hopefully won't have to deal with that, but I.
So, you know, it's the creation of the content and then it's the distribution.
(11:02):
So, like, you know, just imagine a brand, you have
reviews, you have currently very siloed
marketing channels of search and social content.
And how we're, we're seeing a different,
you know, web of how these things work. So
OpenAI, the makers of Chat GPT, have
(11:25):
a $13 billion relationship with Microsoft. Part
of that is that Microsoft also owns LinkedIn. They also own GitHub.
And part of that deal is that OpenAI has access to those platforms.
So if you want to improve your reputation, if you want to do better,
for queries like, hey, who is the best in category?
You can write that content that says, hey, we're the best. Here's the six
(11:48):
reasons why. Here's a quote from our customer that says,
like, hey, you know, they had messed up in the past, but I was
shocked about how great the service was now. And you put that out as a
LinkedIn article. You know, in the past, SEOs
always were very concerned about duplicate content, penalties,
about, you know, is this going to take away my link juice? And
(12:11):
I think the future is a lot more sightless that there's sightless SEO
where we're not so concerned about our site. We're just concerned about
is the message getting in the right place. And our
responsibility is going to be to do that distribution in a much better way.
Over 1 billion users are using AI search tools. So what
does this massive adoption mean for marketers over the next five years?
(12:34):
I think it really does mean
well. I think it means a couple different things. I think the
biggest one is that it means
suddenly all the search marketers are a lot more valuable than they
were before. And the old world, the
(12:54):
traditional search world, was really just Google and
the future. I'm not going to be able to predict the
future perfectly. I don't think anybody is. But it certainly looks much
more fractured than it is today. And AI
adoption and how the AI tooling is working is just putting
search into everything, and it's much less going to Google and
(13:17):
doing a search. Here's an example.
Amazon. There's always been a box at the top of Amazon where
It says search for a product. And then recently they updated that to say
search for a product or ask a question. And you know, you used
to be able to go there and type in like coffee table and
now you can actually type coffee table for a small apartment
(13:39):
that's, you know, wood and that, you know, has good reviews. And
they are using the Claude
LLM AI model to power that.
And they have a buyer helper thing, shopping assistant
called Rufus that is actually just Claude. Like you can go into the
chat on Rufus, which is on the homepage of every
(14:01):
Amazon query and on every product page and ask like any
of these weird off questions that you used to have to go to
Google and ask. And that's just because search is now
being embedded in there. Every WhatsApp user now has
Meta's AI as a button on the home screen of WhatsApp.
And you know, a lot of this stuff I think isn't getting the attention
(14:23):
because it's dark, there's no analytics for it. No one has any
idea are people just ignoring this button
on the WhatsApp application. But it is a billion people.
Like you think someone must have clicked on it even if it just accidentally and
like, oh, this is handy. I can, you know, ask questions. So
the future's a lot more fractured, which means I think there's a lot more
(14:46):
responsibility on search marketers to make sure you show up
correctly, that you're doing well against competitors, that your information's
good. And I think
in a, in a world of a lot of change, I think I'm a positive
in this one. A lot of people are negative that AI is going to take
all our jobs. I think it's going to be a lot of job security for
(15:07):
SEOs and marketers for the next decade. Just sorting out all of this for companies.
In your opinion, what's the highest ROI content marketing
strategy right now, especially in the contents, the context of
AI and digital marketing. I think by
far the easiest, cheapest thing to do right now is to
make sure your site is not accidentally blocking any of these
(15:30):
AI bots from indexing it. And
you know, for decades we have done all sorts of things
to like massage and make it easy for googlebot to read our sites
because it then puts the information in the index and then it gives it to
users who then find us and then give us money. It is the
exact same thing with all these different AI services.
(15:52):
But even the language we use for it, we're always like, oh, Googlebot indexes
our site. But we say like, oh, ChatGPT scraping our site, they're
scraping our site to steal our content. And
you know, I have spent a lot of time in my life
writing a lot of words that have ended up on websites that are now being
scraped or indexed. And I think that's just, you
(16:14):
know, and I'm not saying put everything into the AIs, but certainly
your marketing site, make sure it's accessible. And I've
seen a lot of places that are blocking.
We mentioned googlebot, but Google now has an extended
bot that you need to make sure you're letting through. OpenAI
has three different bots, some for indexing, some for
(16:36):
interactions. And if you aren't letting these in, you're
just missing out on the foundation. So easy,
easy to verify, good starting point
and again, very high roi. You don't even have to write anything, you just have
to let it in. So. All right, hey,
sometimes easier is the better. Yeah. And so what are the,
(16:59):
the three most critical step brands should take to prepare for
the growing dominance of AI search tools? I think one, you should
do a keyword audit like hey, and you know,
really try to pull out the intent of these and to say
which of these are make the most sense going forward,
you know, and where no one has an infinite budget,
(17:22):
we can't write every article we want. So we have to put, you know,
get the most for our marketing dollar and you know,
do that and, and have that reflected in your strategy.
The next thing I'd say is that you do really want to start
building bridges with the other groups you have. I
know Digital Brew, it's you know, marketing and pr. We haven't
(17:45):
mentioned PR yet, but I think that's a crucial bridge to have. I
think PR is one of those things that's just going to become more and more
valuable because it's going to be more and more indexable
for all these different areas. And you know, this is
self serving but you know, as a maker of tooling that helps like
track all this, it is a lot to keep track of, you
(18:08):
know, even, you know, like I mentioned just
is our site accessible by all of these different indexing
bots? There's, we track 24 different ones. We have a little
free tool that lets people put in their site and just see like can they
reach our site and that that number changes every week because
you know, cloudflare gets put in place or someone puts a security
(18:30):
plug in or someone does something goo and it blocks it.
It's just a lot to keep track of. So automation is very
Useful. And whether you use our tools or you use AI to make your
own, or you use something else, I do think it's good to start thinking at
scale and automation for your processes.
And so what you're saying is PR people will finally be able to show their
(18:52):
ROI when it comes to AI search because of
context and communication will be more paramount than just
keyword stuffing. That used to be the thing.
Yeah. I mean, it's real interesting to me that so much of.
There's so many habits and I think assumptions that
(19:13):
we have made as SEOs for, you know, again, the last
couple decades that now just don't make anywhere
the same amount of sense. Like, you know, people
focus a lot on, like, oh, page rank and domain rank. Even
those have been out of phase for quite a while. It's still
something you kind of think about, like, oh, well, better links
(19:35):
from better sites. And a real question is, do any of the AI models care
about that? Do they have even a sense of this, or are they taking
just like literal terabytes of text and smashing
them together to try to come up with things? And
it's a lot more like the latter than the former. And it's getting more complicated.
As you know, there's now a lot of interconnections between traditional
(19:58):
search and AI search. But, you know, it is
a different way of thinking about rankings, and it's a different way
of doing content and trying to get
customers. And do you think even the content
creation will be more heavily towards AI? I mean, we touched about it a little
bit, but it seems like if you look on X, X
(20:20):
has a plethora of AI stuff.
YouTube kind of does, but they're a little bit more like, all right, you're gonna
have to tell me if this is AI or not. You can't just not
say anything. So are we gonna see more of that? Because even Google is getting
into the video creation through their own AI models. And we have
Runway, we have Gling as well, and all that stuff.
(20:41):
Well, so I. We're trying
to live this, you know, so this is advice, but, you know, I
believe in it enough to. To do it myself, which is we're really
dividing content into faceless and face content. And so
faceless is anything where if you read it, you don't know whose
voice it is. It's the generic corporate voice that's very
(21:04):
polished and has had Grammarly run over it eight times
and that, you know, you can't picture who wrote it.
And I think the future is, you know, beyond just Having
a brand voice is to have actual people, you know, as a
representative. And so that's part of the reason I'm going on podcasts, so people
hear my voice. We're investing more in video than we're doing that
(21:26):
across all the platforms. And, you know, have a weekly
newsletter, and I very deliberately write it so that if
you listen to this podcast and then you get the newsletter, you will
obviously go like, oh, I don't know if I like it. I don't know if
it's great. But I know Mike wrote this, and
I think that's the right investment to do for the future, where
(21:49):
everything else is just going to be average
AI stuff out there. And what's valuable is to have that point of view and
to have that voice. And how do you see
AI fundamentally transforming how businesses approach marketing over
the next decade beyond the search?
I think the opportunities
(22:12):
of where to jump in to the
tasks where people are trying to do things is really going to change.
And I think in some areas there'll be a lot more opportunity. In some areas
a lot less. I did mention I'm a software developer.
If you are not a software developer, it is hard to
understand how much software development has changed in the last, like, 18
(22:35):
months with AI tooling, where I know
many people who run, like, technical sites about
programming or how to use certain frameworks and stuff that have just seen their
traffic tank and have seen just a huge,
huge rise in people and not even doing
searches for any like, concepts anymore. They just
(22:57):
literally just make modifications directly to the code. So they
have Cursor, which is an AI assisted coding tool.
There's Windsurf, there's all these different packages, and just within the
actual document, you just highlight a section of it and you say, fix this, or
you say, hey, add this or change this. So it takes out
a lot of what used to be. Okay, so how do I use this
(23:19):
API? And I go out and I search the documentation or I say, what's the
best way to do this? And there's a couple different things and one of them
might be paid. And I go to that and, you know, we're
starting to see a lot of this stuff where, you know, the product of a
lot of the work that marketers do internally
is, you know, reporting and say, hey, you know, here's the
(23:40):
opportunities in this country. You know, here's what we could do. And they're
building that in a slideshow. And directly in the slideshow, you can
type like, hey, give me the top 10 podcasts you know,
and, and it will just make a list and you can do that right now.
And you know, Gemini is built into Google Docs notion, has its own
AI thing and that's weird way to sort of think about stuff
(24:02):
that this is just, you know, ubiquitous
across all these different services. And
I'm again obviously self serving. But I
really think companies and brands need to get in now at the foundation of
this where, you know, it's a lot easier
and to have, you know, the data
(24:25):
sets are only going to grow. And so to be in now
and to be part of that I think is a very smart marketing
move. So, so what excites you the most about
the future of AI search and marketing and what role do you see
yourself playing in this evolution? You know, there's
that, that to be cursed to live in interesting times is, you know, a saying.
(24:47):
And I think these are definitely interesting times. I think this is the first real
sea change we've seen in the very least search
marketing for, for a long time. And I think that's
having ripple effects to lots of other areas. And I think
with that comes a lot of opportunity and a lot
of, you know, opportunity both like as a
(25:10):
business trying to start a company to get going as
well as for, you know, maybe there's been a competitor you've
never been able to outrank. Now as maybe an opportunity,
now is the time to think. Well, all this stuff that they have put
so much inertia into and so much, you know, infrastructure
that's moving the wrong direction. We're smaller, we're more nimble, we can switch to
(25:33):
doing other stuff. So I think there's opportunities both at the
individual business level as well as sort of the macro of the
marketing community.
Yeah, I mean it seems interesting. I'm still,
I'm more on the fence about it. I still use it obviously, but I'm still
more, way more on the fence only because of,
(25:56):
I think prioritizing critical thinking is a little bit more important. I think people are
giving a little too much to AI and not really critically
thinking as much anymore. And this is me going like I've got too much
on my plate. So sometimes I do offload it to AI at times.
So I'm not, I'm not saying that I'm perfect at this either, but I do
feel like I think
(26:18):
we're trusting it a little too much, even though I do think it's a great
tool. Well, you know, there's a part.
So, you know, I have kids, they use it for some of their Homework, you
know, and I use it with them. And there's good and bad ways to do
that. It's a tremendous teacher, you know, to be able
to take it. You know, my daughter literally has written out
(26:39):
a math problem and it was an approach I wasn't familiar with. I took a
picture of it, gave it to chat GPT and said, explain how to do this
and read the handwriting, did it, said,
oh, well, this is, this sort of technique, here's the first steps and you,
1 through 10, like, oh, that makes sense. And you went through it.
Amazing. And the bad way is to do that and then
(27:00):
just write the answer out. But I think as
marketers, we still need to bring our intelligence to the
table. And I think what AI does is it raises the average
level of all of this in the same way, like Grammarly.
Not every piece of copy I've ever had has had a great copywriter
go through it for grammar and spell check and tone.
(27:23):
But now I use Grammarly and it's great. It, you know, does
all that stuff for me and that raises the average
quality level of it. And I think to my
looking at what AI does, it's never going to replace
brilliance, but it's going to just raise the average of everyone.
And so it sounds like you're using this the right way, which is that you
(27:45):
use it as a supplement. You use it as, you know, a
counterpoint. You use it to get rid of some of the drudgery of stuff.
So I think it's, you know, I think it's
great for those things. I agree entirely about not outsourcing
critical thinking and intelligence, though.
No, right. And so people were listening to
(28:08):
this episode and they're wondering where can they find you online to learn more about
you? So I
do have people email me directly. I'll give them my email, which is
mikewatoa.com it is a funny sort
of name. It's K N O W A
O T A Noah Toa. And
(28:28):
you can go to noah toa.com, put your website in and we actually
do a deep classification for free of all the existing keywords
your site ranks for, as well as give you for free,
sort of how you rank in the top sort of 10 questions
for your niche in ChatGPT. And then if you want to
do more and you want to do that for weeks on end and get reports
(28:50):
and lots of other stuff, that's all available as well.
But love talking to people and
I generally hope that people
don't despair over AI stuff and that
they think that this is a big opportunity for them and their careers in the
(29:10):
future, because I do genuinely think that's the case.
Any final thoughts for the listeners?
I think the biggest one is just try these different services.
There's so many different ones. There's a lot of free stuff. You don't need
to spend a tremendous amount of money. You don't need to even buy my
stuff to get started. Go to ChatGPT, ask it about your
(29:33):
company, ask it about yourself, see what it knows. And
I think you'll find even if it's not wrong information,
it's not exactly how you want to be represented. And I think that's
the first step, you know, to just being aware of this and to start to
make moves to improve things. All right, well, thank
you, Mike, for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and sharing your knowledge on
(29:55):
AI, digital marketing and search. Well, thank you
so much for having me. This is a great discussion. I do worry I
spoke too much. Maybe I had too much coffee before coming on here. It was
one of those days. But genuinely thankful for the
opportunity to chat to you and not your audience.
(30:16):
All right, guys, so what'd you think about the episode? Did you find anything
important or did you like anything about it? Or was there some aha
moments within that episode? Let me know in the comments
below. But also thank you for for listening as always. And please
subscribe to this podcast or subscribe to the YouTube or
if you're on Rumble as well. And join me next week as I
(30:39):
talk with another great thought leader in the PR marketing industry.
All right, guys, just learn how to do AI search or learn how
to get your website on AI search. Don't forget the
traditional still, it's still very important. And see you next week
later.
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