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Limited Supply
S15 E5: The Truth Behind SEO in the Age of AI (with Dylan Ander, Founder + CEO of Heatmap.com)
00:40:55
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e commerce, digital marketing and building consumer brands. I'm your host Nick Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling and investing in brands and through this show and my weekly newsletter at Nick Co Email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics and the insights. All so you can unlock your next hundred thousand dollars in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode. If meta CPMs are giving you heartburn, you need another top of funnel lever. Roku Ads Manager is a self service CTV platform built for growth marketers with simple setup, optimization and billing all in one place. Check it out at advertising.roku.com Limited supply.
- [00:57]
B
Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. Today I've got a fun episode. So everybody's talking about Geo. It's the new SEO. You may have heard of it as aeo. Some of you call it AI Search. Most people just call it trying to find something, trying to search for something and they end up in chat or Google and they're using AI Search or Gemini. A lot of people are now using Claude. We've seen claudebot rising. So the question has become, well, how do I get my brand to rank inside these LLMs and how do I get it to show up when I am asking to. How do I get my brand to rank when somebody's asking for the breast pregnancy supplement stack, you know, to take so your morning fog doesn't, you know, hinder your day? That's what we're going to answer. On today's episode I brought Dylan Ander. Dylan's been on before to talk about CRO, but he's actually been spending probably the last six to eight months quietly doing a lot of really transformative stuff on the GEO side, helping brands magically rank and essentially create a propaganda machine to some degree. So I, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. You will. He's got a couple freebies in terms of things that you can just email him for and he'll send over to make your own GEO journey easier. But I hope you enjoyed today's episode. It's very tactical, so get your notebooks out and I'll see you next week. All right, Dylan, well, welcome back to Limited Supply. You're one of the few guests who's come back. So excited to have you back at this time. We're Gonn be diving into something completely different. So first of all, welcome back. Thanks for being here. Appreciate your time, sir. So, you know, as we were putting this episode together and just thinking about what it could be, I think, you know, like when I, when I start consulting with a brand or talking to a brand, working with a brand, when I invest in a brand and I look at where they're going to go deploy their dollars, a lot of that chunk goes toward marketing. Maybe like 30 to 40% goes directly to marketing between agencies, staffing resources, media dollars, et cetera. And very rarely do I see the line item for SEO or brand reputation.
- [03:05]
A
Or.
- [03:08]
B
Anything in that world. And also in parallel, I would say the more I've seen SEO kind of fall off in terms of brands proactively doing it. I've also seen there's a very, very parallel decline with brands being cool and fun. And I don't know if maybe the tie there has something to do with content and building perception of the brand and its reputation, but there is definitely some sort of a tie there. But you've kind of been doing a lot of work with brands on AEO and Geo and SEO, which I think that triple stack or maybe it's actually just two things and AEOG are the same thing. You can explain in a second. But that kind of stack is basically what brands are excited about today and like pushing forward hard on today and investing, I think a lot more into that than they probably historically would have in the SEO game. Is all of that like right sound?
- [04:07]
C
Yeah, you try, you track most of it. I'll say so. So I'm going to give a little story time on this one and you'll see how like where I've allocated my time over my like E Com career. So you know, actions are your words, right? So like what I've done, where I've placed my time, hopefully it's worthwhile to you guys. So when I was like 18 on my first dropshipping stores, of course I ran ads, but I was printing money. Like you'd get one money keyword for on Google, like SEO rankings like natural and that would be what paid my rent for the month. Not like hitting a winning ad or a new landing page. Like no one did it and it was the freshest traffic ever. So I've been doing that all super high actual SEO agency. After that I had Geico I Planet Fitness, 24 Hour Fitness. Like some of my biggest clients I've ever had. Like those were I had a 2 million a year contract going on with one of them, you know, like for just SEO, like that much work. So like SEO really, you know, had scaled previously in easy ways. So Nick, does, do. Do meta ads make a lot of money?
- [05:19]
B
Of course.
- [05:20]
C
Okay, sweet. The same answer is of course for Google. Whoever said like SEO is dead. I always say bless their soul, they're amazing. Thank you so much to whoever said that. Like, whoever thought that like it's changed and people don't know how to look at analytics. And like a brand as a whole, I call it like chronic attribution anxiety. Like they're just like obsessed on the money and money out and like I put spent a dollar, I made, you know, $50 back. Whatever. It doesn't work that way. That's especially not how anything organic works whatsoever. So the reason why, like I. So like I've always doubled down and continue to double down on SEO. Like if you Google the word heat map right now, depending where you are, hemap.com will be number one. Like revenue, like web, web heat map, website heat map, like any of those. We get about a third of our business@heatmap.com. my current SaaS from Google SEO Organic, like not even from the LLMs, not from referral, just straight Google Organic. So. And we don't have a branded keyword either. So that's, you know, even more indicative. So where this has now gone is SEO has become like, I like how, I think it was Neil Patel that said it. Just like the search everywhere optimization where it used to be the on site, the technicals, how Google reads everything, your blogs, how well they're interlinked, like all, all that stuff still matters. Don't get me wrong there. But what you're doing off the website is what I'm finding to be the 8020 nowadays. Are you making content on, you know, if you make an X article, that's a Dr. Like domain rating. So I'll say Dr. A lot throughout the episode. Dr. Is your domain rating. Google.com is 100. And a brand new website will be a zero. So anything in the Dr. Of 80 plus is like a legendary link. Like LinkedIn is 98, you know, X is 99. Like you know, that kind of thing. So to be able to get.
- [07:19]
B
So it's actually like an SEO hack.
- [07:21]
C
To post articles on X on X on LinkedIn. If you're on B2B, on Quora Pulse, like Quora's like articles function, blogger.com, medium, if you write one blog post. So let's say you write a blog post for your website, which is still effective. And I'll kind of get into why and how later. But you've that one blog post, that one piece of content that you write and you now are putting it like on your blog. It needs to go on blogger.com it needs to go on LinkedIn, it needs to go on Twitter, it needs to go on medium, it needs to go on all of these platforms to get more surface area for. It's like content repurposing, but just for text only. You already did it. Just have a VA go in and spend an extra 20 minutes and put it up on all of those. Now you get to interlink all those together. They all go back to your website. It's more, you know, granted, it's ugc. It's not like true do follow backlinks, if you know what I mean. Not like the backlink backlink, but it's tons of signal posting on Reddit. And now once you get into LLMs, if you want me to cross the chasm per se where. Or if you have any other SEO questions. Cause they're one. One other hack that I'll give.
- [08:34]
B
Well, I guess before we. Yeah, sure.
- [08:37]
C
No, you go for it.
- [08:38]
B
Well, I was just gonna say, like what. Before we move to LLM stuff I'd love to know, like what. What should brands be focused on when it comes to SEO? Whether they have the budget to go hire an agency and do that, or whether they just have the ability to do some stuff internally.
- [08:55]
C
Totally. So, number one, I have not really seen site speed make much of a difference. Everyone thinks that that makes a huge difference. It doesn't for Google, at least in my. At least nowadays you can go and make articles. You can use AI, but be very careful. I have some AI articles that have destroyed websites I've worked on and I have AI articles that rank beautifully. Depends how they're executed. Same as if it's a human writer, you know. So, um, go and get some articles. Um, to be honest, go spend like five to 10 hours on YouTube. Like spend like, you know, an hour a day the rest of the next week, you know, and just like learn the basics. Because what I call it, it's. I like, I find, I call it almost like backend marketing, right? Where like you have your brand, you have your ads, you've all this stuff, but then you have like the technical guts of marketing. That's kind of what SEO boils down to, right? So if you remember that when you have a YouTube short to put a link back to A certain may category page that you're trying to rank or like, you know, it's like you can always be doing exactly the work that you're doing, but put a certain link back to, you know, like different websites and like interlink things the right way. So it's like all the marketing that I do especially for SaaS and you guys have to think about it this way is just, okay, I'm doing this. How do I tweak it just a little bit to give it more SEO value and more ultimately just like, like juice value. Like, you know, and ultimately like I have some tinfoil hat Theories about LLMs later and training sets. But you know, all of this helps. It's every bit of digital real estate that you can cover. Do it. And then the other thing is semantic mentions. So backlinks are what people are used to meaning like a hyperlink from one website back to your website. And like most people know backlinks are but now it's called semantic mentions. So if like you know, Sharma Brands, for example, like if, if like if I just type something out on like a page and it met and it just says Sharma brands did blah blah, blah and whatever previously in Google. Like the you needed the Sharma brands to be hyperlinked back to your website, but now the fact that it's just on the page whatsoever it works, AI picks it up, Google picks it up, which is actually AI and LLMs because yada Allah Allah, you know, Gemini. So that's kind of the way in which it works. So it's like how much digital real estate can you cover? And the website is still important, don't get me wrong. But it's what you're doing off site is a lot, a lot, a lot.
- [11:35]
B
So that's so interesting. How, how does like, like there's two Nick Sharmas, there's a chef and there's me. Right. How does Google know?
- [11:46]
C
So it depends around. So just the straight up Nick Sharma it is going to be service area. But there's also things like age. Fortunately you can't make yourself older like how long you've been around for. So if that Nick Sharma was doing online stuff before you, that Nick Sharma will always have an advantage over you. Nothing to really do about that. Right. So age is a very big one also for LLMs, it's also a very big one. How many like you know, brand mentions there are his website, how many mentions there are of him outside the website as well. And also depending on relevancy. Right. Like he's a chef. So if like you look up Nick Sharma recipe, even if you make a recipe page in your website, good luck ranking against his, you know, so and also I know that your nick.co unfortunately not nick sharma.com that exact match domain does really help. Really, really helps.
- [12:47]
B
That's a third guy.
- [12:48]
C
Yeah. No way.
- [12:51]
B
So it sounds like, yeah, it sounds like from an SEO standpoint, like if I'm for example, a supplement brand, I should actually try to invest in building out pretty almost like sub, almost like reason pages. Like, you know, if I have, let's say, you know, a calming supplement, like I should have calming as an athlete, calming as a parent, calming as a student, calming as a, you know, working professional and try to increase my surface area of what my brand is associated with so that as it gets mentioned elsewhere, there's a greater chance of that being picked up as sort of like was it called, I forget what you called it.
- [13:34]
C
A semantic, A semantic mention. So what you just, what you just discovered in a way is called programmatic SEO, which is have a base template and have AI make a thousand variations of it. Joint relief for runners, joint relief for moms, joint relief for dads, joint joint relief for men over 40, joint relief for men, joint relief for women, joint relief for kids, joint relief for tennis players, joint relief for, you know, basketball players. And like you can take that template, change it up a little bit. So ramp was very infamous in the SEO community for doing this. That they did like credit cards for. Yeah, the credit card. So ramp, like credit cards for blank. Insert any fricking business name you could think of, business type for plumbers, credit cards for electricians, credit cards for marketing agencies, credit cards for whatever. And like they'd like a thousand pages in one little subfolder. Just credit cards for blank.
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A
Wow.
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C
And that's programmatic SEO. Usually you wind up getting clapped at some point. Like Google knows, like Google doesn't want programmatic SEO all over. That's part of the AI slop kind of thing that people aren't wanting nowadays. But it is pretty huge. Like, oh, and by the way, for example, under Dylan Ander, if you put heatmap.com under this episode, it's going on Spotify, it's going on Apple podcasts, it's going on all of these. That's now being SEO minded, that every time I jump on a podcast I'm like, hey, by the way, can you make sure you put dylanander.com and heatmap.com in the description? That's being the SEO minded marketer. Always ask for those. But programmatic SEO is huge. So a lot of people call it P SEO. Then the other pseo is parasite SEO. This is personally one of my favorites. So you hear about Reddit a lot. What's cool? So I have a team member who does it as well and you can literally start ranking for a keyword within 10 minutes on Reddit. Like I'll show you like later tonight or something. Maybe not live in this episode right now. I mean I could theoretically but go in and post something on Reddit for really long tail keyword in a good subreddit and it'll be showing up on Google in the first result within 20 minutes.
- [15:54]
B
And what's now what's a long.
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C
Let's say you have that query a long tail keyword meaning like digital marketing for plumbers in New York. That's a long tail keyword. Like long tail means it's a lot of words. Usually five plus words like single words are the most valuable with the most volume. Once you get to five plus it's kind of like long tail keywords that they'll definitely some be some people on the Internet that go to click to those lower volume but crazy high intent.
- [16:25]
B
Yeah, very cool.
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C
So those were really well and how.
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B
How are brands now like starting to position themselves? So it sounds like for example like Reddit is one of these big sources. I know, I remember seeing Sam Altman was talking about YouTube was also another big source of information. Like there's okay, so there's Chat, GPT, there's Gemini, there's Perplexity, there's Claude, there's Manas, there's you know, there's basically all these different models. How, how do you think like do they all pull from the same few sources? Are they pulling from different sources? Is there a, is there a way, is there like a central way to, to see how it shows up? Like for example there's, there's that one software, I'm forgetting the name of it where you can see how your klaviyo email shows up across. Oh it's called litmus across like 46 different and browsers, you know, is there one of those for aeo? Is that how brands are doing it? Like give us the one on one.
- [17:25]
C
Yeah, totally. So first off the name, right It's AI as so like trying to manipulate what is recommended in you know, LLMs, whether Claude, Gemini, you know, chat, whatever. So a lot of people call it Geo, aeo, AI, SEO, AI search, it's all the same thing. So generative engine Optimization or AEO is Answer Engine Optimization. So each of them have a name. I just call it geo. I feel like it just rolls off the tongue easiest. So I'll say Geo for all intensive purposes for the rest of this episode. Or AI SEO, I say sometimes as well, just depending on who you're speaking to. So the art of getting your Brand recommended on LLMs over other brands and your competitors. So that is what GEO is. That's just the tldr. It's a big black box because people don't necessarily know what it is. But what I will say the 80% of this is ranking in the top 10 of Google. If you don't rank it somewhere in the near the top, it's not like one to one. So to answer your question about like what these LLMs look for, we all know there's Bing as well. Bing actually has like a good amount of search traffic as well. How come Bing doesn't have the same 1 to 10 rankings as Google? Because they look for different things, they value different things. DuckDuckGo is another one that like in Asia is highly adopted. DuckDuckGo doesn't really share much in common with the top 10 on Bing, the top 10 on Google because they have different things that they look for and value. So some of them may value like I know one thing on Google that's huge is if you click from Google to, to a page or a website and you go back, that destroys your rankings. Means you didn't find what you wanted. Some people, you know, some search engines care how long they stay on the website. They scroll all the way down, they have tracking pixels, you know, like they know what's going on. So each of them look at something different, but that's search engines. Meaning like you type in and you get static answers back. Now we're in the age of LLMs. In LLMs, there's two ways that you can get answers. Number one is from the training data set. Before most people knew about chat, 3.0, I think was the first one that actually had an interface. I was using it with GPT2 where it was only through API. Ever since there's been a UI front end set. There's, there's just this. They just scraped all the Internet and put together as much as they humanly could and they update it every 12 to 18 months. So right now chat a lot of the times, if you notice it thinks that, that it's the end of 2024 or like early 2025 because that was the last time the training data set was like, you know, was like, you know, updated so the past 12 months and like what's ranking number one today? If chat does not do any like live search or Claude does not do any live search, what was ranking number one like about a year ago is actually what's going to be coming up. Then the second option is the live search where like, if you say like, like what are the top, you know, like what are the current top like earplug brands current or like new or like what is type stuff that means shop. The LLM is going to go do a live search and then there's something called the query fan outs which like you might have heard of before, which is like what chat does is you can literally see it in the ui. I'm sure you've seen it used before, where it'll take these really long questions. Go Google them or go to Bing, right, their Microsoft connection. That's how Bing matters. And you put them together, those super long tail ones and then it'll give its answers based on that. So there's a mix of how do I get into the training data set? Because that's like rent free memory for the rest of forever. We don't know what UI is going to look like, whether it's wearables like a watch, whether there's something in your eyes. If Elon figures out how to make us like, you know, make Jarvis in our brains like sick. We don't know what UI the future of UI is going to be. But all I know is that the training data set is going to be there for LLMs for forever. So all I think about is tying it back to the digital real estate of how brands should think about it. How do I get myself everywhere, literally touching everywhere. A name, a mention of something in as many places as humanly fricking possible. Because all these LLMs look for different things, which I'll go into in a bit more specific. But that's the reason why for these LLMs you want to kind of be everywhere because if they see you in enough places they're like content clusters. So like the way I say it is SEO used to be like two dimensional. Like there's backlinks and there's your website and backlinks to other websites, but now they're like content clusters, which is what I call geo. It's like you have a YouTube video that's embedded on your website. Your website links to this, you know, third party resource. That third party resource is going to something else. You have A medium article go into your blog. You have the medium article that's going to your blog on Reddit as a link. Like they're kind of like these like clusters of associated content and it goes across websites and that's how AI doesn't care what your domain is, just wants the best information and that's how each of them look different. Like Wikipedia is one of the biggest sources for chat. If I make you a Wikipedia page, it's hard, you need good press first. You'll instantly start coming up in chat. It's crazy. Reddit, you'll start instantly coming up in Gemini and chat as well for Claude. If you have.gov or edu links because they're very, you know, engineering focused, you'll go straight to the top. Like it's all like each of them are looking for something a little different. Obviously chat has like tenfold the most volume. Gemini is coming up pretty quickly though actually it's about like 40 ish percent of chats volume I believe at the moment. So it's not nothing.
- [23:51]
A
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- [24:11]
B
So in this case like your entire goal is to basically figure out where these platforms are constantly pulling their training sets or where they're looking by default. And those might be also changing or evolving as time goes on and then trying to figure out how to place things in there so that when somebody goes for that long tail keyword, it goes and ideally finds what you had placed in there.
- [24:37]
C
Precisely. And then the other cool part about it in that long tail is the reason parasite SEO, meaning like you make a LinkedIn article and then you send a bunch of backlinks that like LinkedIn article or you like push a couple of your assets to that LinkedIn article. That LinkedIn article can rank number one, your website can be number three, some random person's number two. You can also be number four with like a Reddit post, you know, so it's like you can actually dominate a lot of the SERP or the, you know, keyword the search engine ranking and like if you dominate a lot of the, you know, what's on the page, the LLM doesn't care who it's pulling from. It's really like three of those top four is your content, talking about your brand. So the LLMs, like, you just want to smother as many of the top 10. It used to be SEO, used to be about clicks, bring in the money. Now it's like cover as much of the real estate on Google as you humanly can and then you'll get into the LLMs.
- [25:37]
B
Yeah, that's very cool. So how, I guess, like, what, what do what can. Like tactically, what can brands actually do right now to. To stay ahead of that? Because it sounds like one of them is just being pretty omnipresent as much as possible across YouTube, Reddit, blog content, you know, maybe even like partnership opportunities. Have you ever recommended, for example, like a brand to go do a partnership with a government agency for that reason?
- [26:11]
C
I've never recommended it for that reason, but if they're doing it, it is a huge upside, like, tremendous upside. So one thing I highly recommend that anyone could do, whether you're B2B or E comm brand, right? Or. Or an agency, to be honest, actually it works well for all of them. Go do like a really just banging, slamming piece of content that is research. Come up with like, things that haven't been like, connected before. Like AI won't be able to do it right. It has to be kind of human. Like, you've observed, like, you know, like, let's say you do a poll of a thousand people. Like, Nick, you have a pretty large Twitter following. Let's say you go on Twitter and you ask everyone, like, what are you focused on in digital marketing right now? You know, and you get 2,000 answers. Go make an entire article about that. You now get to say, here's some trends of the digital marketing industry in 2026 that is now an asset. Like, kind of think of it as a lead magnet. Like something that other companies are going to want to link to and mention because it makes them look good because you made something so awesome that other people should see. So whether you're like in supplements, if you make like the ultimate guide, let's say runners are like a big part of your I. If you make the most badass guide to, like, you know how to choose the right sneaker, even if you're like, you know, a different type of company, or you do sell sneakers, if you just make it outside your brand, truly independent, how to choose the best one, what runners, like, use the best ones. And Usain Bolt, what did he wear? Yada yada. Like, if you make something that is just so amazing in content and you do like two or Three of those, you can outreach, you can automate it, like instantly is a software that automates it and you just kind of like mention, like, hey, built this guide, would love to be included. And like, it's insane. Like, touch list. People just add it in because, like, they read it, they're like, oh, my God, this is amazing. This will make our website look even better. And they go and put it in. So it's really easy. And like, especially if you have like something viral on socials and you link to an asset that like, has the description, they now link to it. So it's. How do you get, you know, making just a slamming piece of content as brand. So that'll be number two. Number three that I also have is duplicating collections pages. This is a huge hack for Shopify right now or any E Comm brand. So let's say you're a fashion company. You sell tote bags as like your hero sku tote. So you have your like, tote bag, like collection page. You duplicate it. The URL will be Tote bags for women. The H1, the headline will be Tote bags for women. You'll have all your products and down at the bottom you have an FAQ or some copy of like 500 words, maybe of paragraph text about tote bags for women. Now you duplicate it again. Tote bags for men. Even though if they're like unisex, for example, tote bags for mothers, tote bags for. Kind of like you said on the parasite. Programmatic.
- [29:30]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
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C
Because collections and this does rank really well.
- [29:34]
B
Like, this wouldn't get caught up in the same way that the programmatic SEO would.
- [29:38]
C
I currently am working with someone who has about 300 collections pages and they only need about four.
- [29:49]
A
Wow.
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B
And it's working. It's. It's showing up in these rankings.
- [29:54]
C
It is ripping. It is ripping. It's like. But the thing about this too, which is cool, like, let's say you have like an advertorial listicle, like landing, like a true landing page. It's not accessible by your main website. Think of these as like Google and LLM landing pages. They're not accessible. I like. Exactly. It's like they're on the website. You interlink between all of them together. You link them all together. But yeah, it's just crazy how it works.
- [30:26]
B
And is there any change in the actual what's on the page? Or is it still just the same merchandise stuff? Or is the content different and the content different?
- [30:36]
C
Same merchandise. So you change the URL, you change the headline and you change the content that's at the bottom below the products.
- [30:46]
B
Got it. And you're just ripping all that from Claude?
- [30:49]
C
No, like, well, I go and do research. Like use either Ahrefs or Semrush. Those are the two biggest SEO tools to go use. So you go and do some keyword research of like, what has good volume, what's competitive, what's not, what can we just snipe a quick collection page on and go and build it kind of thing. So that's one that works really well. And then also for SaaS or agency, like, you know, kind of like digital marketing for plumbers, for electricians, if you do like home spaces or like supp, like let's say you're doing ecom brands. So like Facebook ads for supplement companies. Facebook meta meta ads for supplement companies. Better ads for leather or for like, you know, fashion companies. Meta ads for whatever. You can kind of do that and cover like 20 or 30 of them. And then let's say chat, because it has memory, knows that you own a supplement company. It's going to have that memory and look for, okay, my human owns a supplement company. What's the best meta ads, like company for me? And that's how you do it. And if you cover a good amount of them and you don't spam it, too crazy. I like to say there's like a lot of black hat methods, which is like borderline illegal stuff to do in like white hat ways, which is like fully clean. So it's like you can take like inspiration from some of those absolute spammers, but do it in a clean way. So like maybe you target like 20 industries. Google's not gonna, you know, like shoot you down for having 20 pages of a similar type. If you have 20,000, they're gonna be like, no, thank you. But like 20 is not gonna get you across.
- [32:31]
B
Most people won't even get to that level.
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C
Yeah, no, that'd be a lot of time. I'd be proud of them if they get that far. They're just using AI automation to spam it, to be honest.
- [32:40]
B
Right, and you're also saying you can go and use the SEO recommended keywords against geo.
- [32:48]
C
Correct. So now getting into the tracking of these, currently there are some softwares. So right now you have Ahrefs and Semrush. Those are the two biggest like SEO tracking softwares for like Google and Bing and those types of ones that Google exposes that data. No. Ll, like they have an API that You can go in and see what Google's doing. LLMs do not have that outwards data. They don't show volume of what people are searching. They don't show it because think about it, there's no such thing as keywords anymore. A keyword is part of a query, AKA a query is part of a question which is part of a conversation. So now conversations are what's happening and you're trying to like weasel your way in by association, right? So you need them to know exactly what you're known for. That's topical authority. And in these tools, what you do, like if you're paying for wicked expensive ones and you want to track it, I have an N8N template that I can literally send to you guys. If you want to email me, I'll send it to you. It just ping 25. So it's Dylan, Dylan Andrew dot com, all in the name.
- [34:05]
B
Everybody should go get that.
- [34:07]
C
Yeah, you guys should go grab it. It's so simple and you can just put it up, you don't need to do anything. It'll like plug and play work and it makes 25 prompts all around the type of domain that you enter in and then it pings Claude 25 with all 25 of those questions. It pings grok, it pings chat, it pings, you know, each of the APIs and tells you if you were men mentioned or not and puts it into a spreadsheet and that's it. So like all these like, you know, like profound, they raised I don't know, hundred million dollars for something that I've been able to vibe code in like, you know, two days, which, like, you know, or sorry, let me rephrase. The 80, 20 of what these softwares do I've been able to code, right? Like they do have some advanced features, but like I don't necessarily do those, I'm more like human on those sides. Like you don't want the AI slop to become too much. So effectively that's all they're doing. Which is the, the way that you measure AI and like the way that you measure geo, there's three, there's three metrics that matter. Number one is share of voice. So if a hundred people ask what are the best leather tote bags, for example, how many times do you come up versus your competitors come up. It's a percentage of the time. So it's think of it like a pie chart, like what percentage of the pie is yours? Does yours come up versus other people's? That's number one. Number two is your mention rate. If 100 people ask you know those same questions, how many times is your brand mentioned? Because again like a semantic mention, it doesn't need to be linked. And then the third is a citation rate which is if 100 people ask the same question, how many times is your is a link to your website included in the answer? So those are the three number. There's the three metrics that you use to kind of together see what we have right now, we don't know total volume. And the other thing of you chronic attribution anxiety. People that are like chat doesn't drive sales guys. This is top of funnel. I always say it's super top of funnel and then uber tiny bottom of funnel. Right. But people will go into Google or go type in the name and it's direct traffic. So if you see your direct traffic climbing probably means you know things are going well in the LLM world. So one to one like on utms of like, you know, the query train of like chat equals whatever. Like with the question mark, the UTM of chat GPT or Claude or Gemini, you're going to see dozens of dollars of sales or hundreds of dollars of sales, maybe even a thousand, you know, if you're like a huge brand. But that's not where the money is coming from, right? Like let's say you do social media on Instagram. Like let's say you're clipping for example, like shout out zagged awesome agency for clipping. Like you know, if you go viral on TikTok, you're not going to be like hey, where's the UTM from TikTok? Like it's not like the things in the bio people went and searched it either went to Google and searched it or they just went and typed in the website. You know, so you can't look at LLMs in that one to one fashion. I also hot topic and very bearish on LLM ads like the ones that chat CBT is doing soon. I'm actually very bearish on it. So that's a hot one. I know I gave you a mouthful over there, but that's the landscape in how to actually look and execute on this type of stuff.
- [37:43]
B
Yeah, all of it is so fascinating. Do you feel like a lot of this is constantly changing too? Like tactically the stuff that's that we talked about today, like you think a year from now this is going to be the same playbook or.
- [37:58]
C
So I think I'll give an analogy to like call it like you know, meta ads, going straight to a landing page, right? That's been going on for what, 15 years now. Same process works, it's just how it's done is different. Like back in the early days, it used to be if you could like buy in one click and then just enter your credit card and go, that would work perfectly. Like literally the least number of clicks possible, the better your performance. Now pages per session is like 5x. You know, like people like searching around, taking their time, feeling good about it, they're savvy. So it's like, yeah, the principles are the same. You need to emotionally appeal to someone from an ad to a website to get them to purchase. You know, like being everywhere, being trustworthy, like, you know, like these LLMs are not humans. They don't have a gut feeling. They only have raw data to go off of. That's why they love Reddit, because it's so human to human. So it needs to fill that human void with data as much as it can. And that's ultimately where like that gap will come.
- [39:19]
B
Amazing. Dylan, where can people reach out to you to either learn more to grab that the crawl file to ask you any general geo questions. What's the best way to get in contact?
- [39:32]
C
It's Dylan Ander on all socials. Dylan, Dylan ander.com for email. This stuff. If you guys couldn't tell, usually I make it a two way conversation. I think I might have spoken a lot more on this one because I love the topic. But yeah, if you guys need any help on it, just let me know. Reach out anytime. I'm happy to support most of you guys. I mean he's the CRO dude but I've, yeah, I've had a little coming out party of, you know, working on this LM stuff and doing it for so long.
- [40:01]
B
You're basically the three letter acronym guy.
- [40:04]
C
Heck yeah. Well, my, my, my initials are dpa.
- [40:08]
B
There we go. That's funny. All right, Dylan, thank you for coming on.
- [40:14]
C
Pleasure brother.
- [40:15]
A
Thanks for listening.
- [40:16]
B
We'll be back next time to cut.
- [40:17]
A
Through the noise on Steve CPG retail and E commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so.
- [40:25]
B
You don't miss the next one.