← MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
Why LLM visibility is yet another vanity metric, why static websites can't serve AI-shaped journeys
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- [00:00]
A
The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.
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B
From advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising. Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. We're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action. Then it's just a matter of timing.
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A
Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that you use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech podcast. Benjamin Shapiro
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B
35% 35% of your website visitors are using AI overviews before they even arrive at your brand's website. More than a third of your visitors have had a conversation with AI about your brand, but less than 1% of your visits show up as direct LLM referrals. According to Notch, Basically your web analytics platform has no idea how to correctly attribute traffic sources anymore. Marketers are pouring resources into AI search visibility to try to recover traffic. But there's a bigger question that we're all ignoring. Buyers are defining their consideration set using AI, they're validating their research with community and then they're showing up to your website. Already decided. If that's the case, what's the real purpose of your website today? Benjamin I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is Anda Ginska, the co founder and CEO of Notch, an AI powered content intelligence company. Helping enterprise brands understand how content influence businesses outcome across the entire customer journey. And today Anda is going to help us explain what digital experiences need to become when AI becomes the front door to the Internet.
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A
Today's interview is brought to you by Shift Paradigm. Marketing today is buried in complexity. You've got the tech, you've got the tools, but moving the needle feels harder than ever. And the last thing us marketers need is another consultant pitching digital transformation.
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B
Enter Shift.
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A
Paradigm Shift is an integrated team of experts who help enterprise brands turn complexity into traction. Their work is insight led and strategically grounded, designed not to sell you a service or a piece of tech, but to actually solve real business challenges. What makes them different? Well, they're AI enabled but not AI dependent. They're human first, but plugged into the latest tools and models and the moments those models need to go through to prove themselves. They get techy without losing sight of the real person behind every click. And they don't just hand you a deck. They build the blueprints and stay to develop, deploy and run the engine. Growth isn't one size fits all, so stop settling for strategies that collect dust and start working with a team that actually builds for you. Visit ShiftParadigm.com to see how they can help you connect meaningfully with your audience. That's ShiftParadigm.com anda welcome to the Martech podcast.
- [03:33]
C
Thank you. That was a great intro and you did a great job pronouncing my last name.
- [03:36]
B
So yeah, let's be honest, I cheated. I asked you how to pronounce it. Ginska. It's a beautiful sounding name. Anda Ginska. And I'm excited to have you here. It seems like a great time for us to have this conversation for a couple different reasons. One, the world and the Internet is drastically changing. The pace of change is coming faster and faster. And number two, I'm working on a website for I hear everything, my content production, brand and I'm not exactly sure what to do. So this feels very topical for me. Let's start off at the top. What's the purpose of the website when the buyer journey has changed so much? Is it a research tool? Is it a place for validation, A conversion tool? How do you think about the purpose of a website?
- [04:22]
C
Well, let me first say that I think it's important to almost like rebrand the website and away from from the idea of a website and towards the idea of a knowledge site. I think ultimately if we can rebrand it and call it a knowledge side, that's ultimately what the goal of a website is today, which is to contain knowledge and to make knowledge immediately accessible to the two audiences that are now coming to the website, which are humans or the AI native consumers as we call them at Notch and the agents in terms of what the intentions are, I think it's really important to separate the intentions of these audiences into the two different buckets that they belong into because they are very different audiences with very different intentions. When we think about agents, they're coming to your website, or maybe I'm just going to call it knowledge site from now on since I'm trying to push the rebrand. They're coming to your knowledge site to access structured knowledge that you have ideally proprietary knowledge that you have that's been validated by your brand and they want to access this knowledge in a really quick way, in a really structured way. And so the best modality to serve your knowledge to an agent is essentially code. Like the more you look your make your knowledge look like code, the better it's going to be from a LLM visibility perspective. Now the shift that's really interesting that's happening that I think no one's talking about is the shift of the AI native audience, their intention, their expectation, but also the level of impatience that they have. And when I say they, I mean we. Right. Like all of us have been fundamentally changed by LLMs. We are now conditioned to expect a conversation from every digital surface. We're conditioned to expect immediate relevance and personalization from every digital interaction. And, and as a result, when we arrive at a knowledge site, we want to be able to tell it where we're there for and immediately receive the information that we came there to get in order to then decide are we going to do business with this brand or are we not going to do business with this brand? So when we look at our data set at Nudge, because we measure some of the biggest websites in the us we see that when audiences show up to a website they want to validate the information they already got in LLMs, they want to understand is your brand a brand that I want to do business with? And then finally, if you've passed the first two tests, then they want to do business with you.
- [06:52]
B
It's terrifying, right? It used to be very easy where you're, you're cramming all sorts of information on the website and your homepage is this long, relatively text rich experience and it wasn't really an experience. Right. You're expecting people to come on the website and read everything about your website and maybe they navigate to all these different sections. Now I think that we all have to make a decision. Is your website experiential or is it informational? Right. And as I was building the website for, I hear everything like we're a video production company. We need experience, we need visuals. It's essentially a movie that you're watching that describes what the purpose of the company is. And then we have a whole bunch of text down at the bottom because we assume that the LLMs are going to go and, and get all that information. How do you think about the difference between the user experience and the information that's on your site?
- [07:47]
C
I think another way to frame that question is how do you think about the human experience versus the agent experience. Right, Fair.
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A
Yeah.
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C
I think what you're pointing out is actually a big tension point that we haven't talked about enough, which is that the more we try to optimize for the agent experience, the more we take away from the human experience. And the more we optimize for the human experience, the more we take away from the agent experience. And here's what I mean by that. The human in today's world wants a truly dynamic, personalized multimodal content experience. Right? It's exactly what you described. When we come to a website, we want to be delighted and we also want to just get the answer that we came there for that dynamic interface and experiential, you know, experience is not something that agents can consume, read or will be very, very impressed by. Right. So it's the opposite of what you want to do for agents. On the flip side, what do agents want? I mean, the advice from all geo companies out there, you know, you pay them all this money and essentially all of them just say make a hundred more blog posts and structure your content better and add a bunch of metadata to your existing website. That's taking away from the human experience because if you're adding 100 blog posts with a hundred different pages, then a human is going to be dropped into the middle of a desert of your website and, and try to find their way on a scavenger hunt the information they're actually looking for. So there's this big tension between these two groups and how to optimize for, for both of them. I think the solution is honestly to basically throw dynamite at the whole infrastructure. I don't think the infrastructure of the cms, the dam, the DXB has actually earned the right to be a part of the modern marketing stack because it hasn't been built to be a dual audience personalization engine. It actually hasn't even been built to be a personalization engine. Like websites today are barely intelligent, they're totally static. Right. So as you know, we launched a product called ace, the agentic content engine. And at its core it's essentially a knowledge base that allows your content to be atomized and semantically tagged and then allows the agent experience to be exactly what the agent needs to be and totally invisible to the human and the human experience to be dynamic, personal and experiential and totally invisible to the agent. And I think that's essentially the architecture that we need, whether it's from us or someone else that we have to really adapt, adopt for the future.
- [10:17]
B
Yeah, I've heard this a couple different times that essentially when you're building a website, you're really building two different websites now, right? You're building for agents and there is this invisible layer of content that's structured the way you want it to be presented to agents, essentially a cache that the agents read and then there is the human experience. And so it's not really a website that you're building for the agents, you're building a directory for them that's hidden from the actual humans.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Talk to me about how you reconcile what goes where, what that experience should be, how to present the right information to humans are not just creating these bloated, overly sort of semantic and text written websites. So there is that experience or that personalization.
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C
Yeah, so let's start with the agent experience. First. I'll talk a little bit about how we're thinking about creating that repository of knowledge, because the repository of knowledge is extremely important and you want to make sure it's as robust as possible. Right now, knowledge in an organization is stuck in a bunch of different silos and the website is just one of them. So it's important to ingest all the relevant information that you have about your brand, your product, your pricing, your guidelines, et cetera. And when we've gone through the process of doing that with our clients, you know, Google, Ally Financial, Zillow, we went to all of the different places where they hold knowledge, whether that's PDFs, their YouTube channel, their LinkedIn or their website. It's really important to have all that information come in. Then what's important to do? I'm trying to like figure out how to best explain this atomization process. And I think the best way to do it is to say we take all that knowledge or information and we break it down into Lego blocks. These Lego blocks are individually valuable. They could be a claim that Zillow is making about a rental. And these Lego blocks then get semantically tagged so that the system understands whether it's an agent or human coming to the experience. And if the human says something in natural language, which is what we're doing, right, Even, even in search, we're just putting in sentences, we can say, hey, I'm here because I'm looking for a rental in New York and I don't want it to be on a major street and blah, blah, blah, right? Like you express yourself the way you want to and the system can recognize which Lego blocks to bring to the forefront and dynamically bring together for you, for the agent the agent comes in with a specific intent, whatever that intent is, they're also looking in accordance to a prompt that they received from their LLM. And so what we're doing is we're essentially recognizing that and presenting them with the atoms of information that are relevant to them. It's all structured to be essentially invisible to the human. And we believe this is the foundation for what eventually will be an MCP or an agent to agent protocol on the human side. When you arrive, there's no more pages. You are essentially landed in an experience. Whether you're coming from a paid campaign, from search, from an LLM directly, you land in an experience and the experience allows you to say, here's what I'm here for. You can even copy paste your research from the LLM and continue that research with the actual knowledge site. And the idea is for the system to essentially reassemble information and dynamically adaptation the experience that you're in with the Lego blocks that are relevant to you. So there's no more scavenger hunt across the website, there's no more page clicking. And I think because ultimately the structure of this future Internet is about an agent experience and a human experience, there will be no more pages, there will really just be experiences.
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B
I want to talk a little bit about the purpose of the website, right? I understand the sort of bifurcation of an atomization of the content and that's how the agents pick it up and then the human gets an experience. But the purpose of the website is actually dramatically different. Now it used to be that someone would do cursory research, a Google search, right? What is the best CDP? And they come up with a list of 10 links and then they click over to your website and then they learn about your company and decide if they wanted to be nurtured or talk to sales. All of that process, all of that research now is not happening with the company, it's happening through LLMs. So what is the fundamental purpose for the human when they get to your website? Is it all about trust? Is it about validating research? Is it just conversion? Like what is the website for now?
- [15:03]
C
Well, first of all, the website feeds the research process that you're doing in the mlm. Sure, the website is one of the inputs, right? There's other inputs, including your earned content, your paid, etc. But it definitely feeds that response that you're getting.
- [15:18]
B
And in theory, someone gets that information from the LLM and hopefully gets to your website. Yes, but then what's the purpose? Once they've already Got the information?
- [15:28]
C
Yeah. So our data shows that there's, as I mentioned, three roles that the website plays for the human. One, validation. Two, connection, which is, do I like your brand? Do I feel like it represents me?
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B
Is it pretty?
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C
Is it? Well, yeah, but it's like, it says things about you. I'll give you an example. And three is to transact. So my example that I. I just kind of hit close to home, especially as we were building this, I was looking for an electric car. And I don't know anything about car brands. Like, nothing. Okay. But what I know is that I want an electric car, and I don't want it to look like a mom van. Even though I am a mom. I just, you know, I kind of just don't want it to look like a mom van. And so I was doing this research in an LLM and it told me, go to, you know, like, these three websites. When I went to the websites, it was such a jarring experience. Like, I got there and there were these videos that were playing of a bunch of sports cars. It was like, you know, like, best in class sports cars reel. I was like, this is irrelevant to me. Can I just find the electric car section? And the website didn't even have an electric car section. It was structured by car brands, which I didn't know about. And I immediately lost my patience and I went back to the LLM. So the idea ideally would be that I would go to that website. I'd be able to be like, hey, I'm looking for an electric car that doesn't look like a mom van. It would surface the information. I would validate it because a car purchase is, like, significant enough that I wouldn't just trust the LLM. Right. And I think a lot of things fall into that category. Then I would go to upper funnel pages. Like, let me see, is this. This brand, like, let's say it's gm. Is this representative of who I am nowadays? Like, does it reflect who I am? Because a car, like, what you choose to drive, it's. Nowadays it's like a fashion statement, a political statement, all sorts of statements. And so you want to make sure you're aligned. And then finally, if everything lines, then you go, okay, like, take me to a car dealer that's close by so I can go test drive this thing.
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B
Yeah. Now they actually come to you most of the time also.
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C
We do, yeah.
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B
There's a bunch of car dealerships that will actually come to you. And I've gone through the don't have a Mom van struggle myself. We landed on Kia Telluride, but it's not an electric car.
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C
But I landed on Rivian.
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B
There you go. And then they have a new one too. There's the small one.
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C
I know.
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B
One of the things I want to ask you about is how should marketers deal with the loss of signal? Right. Nosh did some research saying 35% of people are looking at AI before they're coming to your website. But we're not necessarily getting the click right. It's not like I have a Google Ad and I know what you were looking at. You don't know what the conversation was about. So you're not getting as much data as we used to. And therefore it's harder to cookie people and there's just less signal going around. How do you figure out when somebody's coming to your website what they're actually looking for?
- [18:21]
C
I might have a counter perspective here, especially because I'm not only a data nerd, but I run a data company. So. So hear me out. I think the loss of signal is forcing us to go back to the fundamentals of good marketing. I think as marketers we are trying, always trying to game the system. And Geo, to me, is one of the greatest reflections of that, where we're trying to game a small feedback loop when in actuality it's a much greater game and the only way to win it is to do good marketing. So I know that that's, you know, maybe a high level cop out answer and I will get into the details of it, but I just fundamentally believe that. And I think we really have to focus on what does it mean to create differentiated perspectives, content that actually adds value to people's lives with proprietary data. Shine your brand in the way that is, you know, specific to your brand, and ultimately stop trying to game a system that no one really understands. Like, not even the folks who are building the LLM algorithms really understand how the LLM algorithms work. So I can promise you that your geo vendor doesn't either. So anyway, that's just my highlight.
- [19:36]
B
Have you seen the, have you seen the movie Top Gun? I have. Okay, so the whole premise of Top Gun was, I think it was after World War II, the American Air Force essentially got lazy. Their technology was so more and so much more advanced than the other people. The other people in the air that they were fighting, that they just got used to shooting missiles and they had lost their dog fighting skills. Right. And essentially the same thing is happening to marketers now, where we have become so data Driven and so scientific that we have forgotten about brand and the creative pursuit and understanding the human behind marketing. It's just throw a campaign and optimize the shit out of it.
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C
Yeah.
- [20:19]
B
And we actually have to go back towards being marketers and that lack of signal. I think what you're saying is, might not be a bad thing for marketers as a whole. We actually have to get back to marketing as opposed to being data scientists.
- [20:32]
C
Yeah, I, I also would say there are really strong signals but it's important to look at them in a cross platform customer journey first kind of way. The traps today are this idea that there's such a thing as zero click marketing. Zero click marketing does not exist. Humans do not function in this way. We never have, we never will. We are not one channel only kind of, you know, creatures. We like diversity, we like multiple perspectives. There is no such thing as I'm going to go do the thing that one person or one LLM tells me to do, at least not for the vast majority of things in our lives. Right. And the more we interact with LLMs, I think the more we learn that we need to validate that information. So here's what I'm saying. Yes. Our data, our research has shown that 35% of people actually use some type of AI overview or LLM before arriving at your site. In spite of the fact that the actual share of traffic is, I don't know, 1 to 2%. Right. But I think it's safe to assume that all of us are using LLMs at this point. Right. And the data is not going to tell us clearly, oh, this person came from an LLM or this person used an LLM at some point before coming here. I think it's safe to assume that LLMs have found their place in our customer journey. The question now becomes what are we going to do about it? Right. Let's focus on the things that we can control versus the things that we can't control. Let's focus on really thinking about what is the new customer journey as opposed to trying to optimize this tiny, you know, myopic tunnel that we're in called geo.
- [22:14]
B
Yeah, I, I think of it more as we've got so addicted to the signal that was driving the click.
- [22:21]
A
Right.
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B
If I understand what page or what ad you clicked on, I have some sense of intent and so I can optimize your experience based on you clicked on a Google search ad for this specific product. Therefore I know that you want this specific product or you came from this page that was a, you know, research page or a pricing page. I know where you are in your buyer journey. We don't get any of that anymore. So therefore our websites have to be much more experiential. It seems like that's what Ace is, is really about. So tell me about your process or your philosophy for creating more experiential websites.
- [22:57]
C
I feel like it's completely undeniable that we need to raise the bar for websites because of LLMs. Like there's just no world in which LLMs continue to be the primary mode of interaction and discovery. And then we go to a website and it's like a blast from the early 2000s. If brands stick with their current websites and their current infrastructure, I genuinely believe they will become irrelevant because the website, you, you were asking me about the purpose, right? Like I think the meta purpose of the website. Especially in a world where we're getting more and more disintermediated by LLM, social media, et cetera, your website is your source of truth. It's that one place where someone can come and see what are you about. And if they are truly serious about doing business with you, they will do that before they actually choose to do business with you. You. So the website has to be a representation of what you want to be in the world. Both the value that you want to give to your audience as well as the experience and the feel and the vibes that you want to give. So I actually think it's more important than ever. And as opposed to being a research hub, like a mid to low funnel experience, I think it has to be a self directed experience for your audience. You have to give them the power to command the experience they want to have with your brand and have the infrastructure to really be able to support that. Because websites today it's, you know, there's like full teams that are sitting around being like, what do we think the experience of the customer journey should be like? What's the path to purchase? What are the sequence of content assets that we need to show people that, that thinking totally out the window. People are used to now commanding everything with natural language. So you have to give people the ability to do that or else someone else will and they'll win them over.
- [24:45]
B
Yeah, I think that, you know, we used to say, well, the customer journey isn't linear. I think what you're saying is the customer journey A is not linear and B, you can't control it, you can't define it. The user wants to define it. So you need to be as Flexible as you possibly can. Essentially our websites are turning into more chatbot type experiences where you come in and you try to navigate or create navigation where someone can bounce around and find the information or you could just has to and have it be brought to them upfront.
- [25:17]
C
So let me tell you something. A lot of our customers have actually been experimenting just chatbot experiences. And as it turns out, people don't want that when they come to a website. They don't want to just talk back and forth with the chat bot. And because brands still have to have, you know, deterministic rules around what they can and cannot say in a conversation, it's not a great experience. So our clients haven't seen great results. When I say command through conversation, where we found success with a. Because we tried the chatbot as well, where we found success is you come to an experience and you say what you want and then the page responds with the information that's relevant. It's not a back and forth conversation, it's a I'm here to tell you what I want. Now give me what I want.
- [26:05]
B
Yeah, I guess going back to your electric car, it's, there's a couple of toggles when you first show up, what type of car are you looking for? Do you care what the fuel source is? Do you like mom vibes or non mob vibes? And then once you do some filtering it gives you all of the options. All right, it's time for the selfish question portion of the show I mentioned. I'm working on a website, but I think that this is something that a lot of other marketers, let's say smaller websites are thinking about too. I hear everything needs a new website. I sit down with Claude code, say I've got some ideas about how I want to represent the story, but I have to come up with this great visual experience, kind of like a movie maybe I just copy all my competitors web pages which are very text based. I got to think about AEO and how am I feeding the bots to try to get them as a traffic source. Where do I start? If I had a small budget and I'm working on a website today, where should my investment go?
- [27:02]
C
I think you start by trying to figure out what are you, what are you trying to win? Like what are the topics, themes, conversations that you're trying to win? You know, I'll use Notch as an example because we're, we, we just launched our new website and for us the conversations that we're trying to win are about the future of websites, right? So everything that deals with the future of websites, every content asset, every piece of research, every podcast that I do about the future of websites, every visual asset that we have that has to be brought together and enabled for both agent access and human access. That's the foundational layer. You just have to have that done. If you're, if you're just building a skin for this website and then you're chasing geo butterflies, you're going to end up creating so many product FAQ pages and so many product comparison pages that the human experience will be awful. So when people will come to your site, they will immediately leave. And in fact, our data has shown that over the past six months or so, the audience is coming from LLMs. Yes, they convert at a higher rate, but they also immediately exit at a higher rate. So nowadays across our clients, almost 80% of the folks coming from LLMs immediately bounce. So that, and that's. And that's crazy. Right? So you want to make sure the human experience is good as well.
- [28:26]
B
I think that the website is more of a nurture experience now than it is a top of funnel experience. And to me, as I was building, I hear everything's new site, which hasn't been launched yet. So if everybody goes to I hear everything.com when this is published, it's probably the old site still. But to me, the assumption as I was building a new website was not how do I give the information about what I hear everything is and what product class we're in? It is, you already have an understanding of who we are. You've already researched the problem set. Now how do we validate what research you've already done? Right. How do we show the visuals that show that we are premium quality content production? How do we identify the problems that we solve, which is putting your content everywhere for agents and for people as opposed to we produce podcasts. Right. Like, and so to me, the whole idea is like, it's a warm nurture sequence. People that are coming to the website have already experienced the brand, they are already aware of us, they probably had some direct outreach from us. And that's what's driving to the website. It is not. This is the place that you go as the first step to understand and start your journey. It's, you already know a little information about us. How do we validate what you've seen?
- [29:46]
C
100%.
- [29:47]
B
Which is a totally different mindset than what we've been thinking about websites for the last 20 years.
- [29:52]
C
Yeah, it's all about the funnel.
- [29:54]
B
I know. And if you Take it a step further. I think a lot of people would say, well, websites are dying, right? There's no purpose of a website other than to feed the LLMs and eventually LLMs will have the conversion cycle built into them too. Do you think that as we project out that websites essentially become a relic and we just have these repositories to feed information for agents, or is the website still going to be around for a long time?
- [30:20]
C
Look, my personal belief is the websites are going to be around for a long time. I think we as humans have this habit of every time there's a new technology shift, we're like, guys, this is it. Everything else is going to blow up except for this one thing. And we've done it every time and in particular to websites. Right. Because websites are a very Internet 1.0 thing. But you know, when social media came out, when mobile came out, I mean every time E commerce came out, like no more. The only thing that's going to happen is just Amazon and that's it. I think we've learned that human beings are. Yes. And creatures. So I fundamentally believe there's going to be a role for the websites. But let's just play devil's advocate and say that the website's role is really just as a knowledge site for agents. Still that level of take your information, put it in one place, modularize it, atomize it, vectorize it, make it accessible, figure out how to dynamically respond to agents, whether it's the browser agent, the human agent, or the humans agent, or the LLM agent. Like all of that is fundamentally important. So I think you cannot go wrong right now if you're thinking about that and how to do that in a scalable way. I also don't think you can go wrong by thinking what's the new human experience? Because I think humans want choice.
- [31:38]
B
Yeah, I think that that's really the purpose of the website now is to define what type of experience you want for the humans. And it is experiential, Right. It is, is not purely informational and we will bifurcate what information we're sending to the LLMs and that'll be hidden under the sheets and it goes to the agents. And then when a human shows up, it's how do we want to represent our brand? And it becomes more of a brand play and a conversion play as well than it is. I'm specifically thinking of B2B, more brand, more experiential, more focused on just conversions. Unless, you know, here's the repository for all of our Information because every just going to get that stuff from the agents. Okay, on that. Now let's move on to our lightning round where I'm going to ask you a couple of martech questions related to this week's topic. The future of websites in the AI era and you, your company and some of your experience. Are you ready?
- [32:32]
C
Yes.
- [32:33]
B
All right. You shifted Notch's business model to outcome based pricing. What's the scariest part of putting all of your revenue at risk?
- [32:42]
C
I don't find it scary. So I disagree with the question. I think, I think it's, I think it's scary to not change to outcome based pricing. We live in a world where everything is either usage or outcome based and I think it's one of the main reasons why you're seeing public investors call it a SaaS apocalypse. So I think if you're writing on giant fees and four year contracts, I don't think that's going to be a game that will be played any longer because there's going to be companies like Notch that go out there and say, you know what, you know what? Pay us when we do a good job.
- [33:17]
B
I, I think that the scary thing for me and you're braver than I am or you're crazy. But two things can both be true. When you move to outcome based pricing, you're not necessarily in control of the outcomes, Right. And you're often dictated by what the other business is doing. So I guess the question is how do you sort of validate or rationalize the conversion rate instead of charging up front and say we're going to provide this service and you're responsible for the outcome. Now you're saying we're going to make sure that your website functions and if your business isn't good or your brand isn't good, or the LLMs don't like your content, right? Then all of a sudden you're at risk. So how do you rationalize that change where you're essentially taking on more risk because of your pricing model?
- [34:04]
C
Well, you have to control the outcomes. I think that's the only way. Do not choose outcomes that you cannot control. And for us, because of ace, we are able to do that. I mean, with ace, we are powering full websites, then we are controlling every aspect of it and the outcome. So at the end of the day, we understand the before ACE and we understand what marketers would be happy with. And then after and we are coming up with outcomes that are sure, ambitious, but we have tiers, we have like the base outcomes that we need to hit to get like the fee that we would normally get and then we have stretch goals, you know, that, that we, that we get further rewarded for. So it's, it's not about outcome based versus not. It's about can you control the outcomes and what are the outcomes you're choosing?
- [34:49]
B
Brave. Crazy. Also logical. Let's move on to the next question. What's one thing marketers believe about websites that won't be true in three years from now?
- [34:57]
C
That they are going to be dead.
- [35:01]
B
Email is dying, SMS is dying. Everything that is long lasting and proven everybody wants to write off as dead.
- [35:09]
C
We love a clickbait headline. We just, we can't, we can't live without it.
- [35:13]
B
So I mean, I'm a podcast host, I can't help myself. Yes. So websites are still going to be around in three years. Obviously the purpose of them is changing. Is there anything else that you think is misunderstood about the changes happening to websites? We've got a visitor.
- [35:30]
C
Tacky has lots on this. Sorry, you were saying?
- [35:37]
B
Is there anything else that marketers think incorrectly about the purpose of a website that's going to change in the next readers?
- [35:43]
C
Yeah, I think today we're just jamming everything into the website. It's like this iceberg that sits above water and it's gigantic and it's just too hard to consume for both agents and humans. I think we're going to end up submerging 95% of this underwater in just an agent, agent MCP. That will enable really fast access to most of the information. And then the experience of this website or knowledge site, we really become that 5% that's above, that's above water. So I think that's going to change.
- [36:14]
B
I love that metaphor of your website is like an iceberg, only the tip is what the humans see and then all of the real meat of it is and what really does the damage is what you're feeding to the LLM. So that's a great metaphor. If you could delete one category from the Martech stack tomorrow, what would it be?
- [36:31]
C
Ooh, it's a, it's a tough, it's a tough choice between CMS and Geoff.
- [36:37]
B
That's funny because I feel like you work in both of those industries in some way. Why those two?
- [36:42]
C
I think CMS is predicated on the idea of pages and the proliferation of pages, which is categorically opposed to the quality of human experience as well as the quality of agent experience. So it just makes no sense that it would continue in the world. Of tomorrow geo. Because I think, I think the fundamentals of SEO apply and I think as a category it probably is just a subcategory essentially of what you need to do to do good marketing.
- [37:15]
B
Yeah, it's funny, I think of GEO being a subset of SEO, it's still search engine optimization fundamentally, people are still searching for answers. It's just different tactics for how you're trying to get, you know, the 10 blue links as opposed to showing up in the answers, how you're structuring your content, what information you're feeding. It's still all the same practice and honestly it's done by the same people. It's all the SEOs that are doing GEO. We just, you know, decided to call it something different.
- [37:43]
C
Yeah, I mean we're calling ACE AI Experience infrastructure. And I think it's, it's a needed kind of new category to, to articulate that in today's world you need a new infrastructure for both the AI native buyer and the agent. And so it is in some ways fulfilling the purpose of a cms, NGO and SEO and all the other kind of acronyms that deal with the website. But I just think those, those kind of older stack solutions are probably not going to be around.
- [38:16]
B
All right, last question for you. What's more important in the AI era? Trust, traffic or personalization?
- [38:23]
C
I'm going to go with personalization because I think personalization drives trust and ultimately word of mouth is going to drive traffic.
- [38:34]
B
It's a tough one. You know, I don't necessarily think that traffic matters. Right. There's going to be less traffic. Right. So it gets down to trust versus personalization and that's a little bit of a chicken or the egg. If you have a personalized experience, do you build trust? Or if people trust you, can you get around having specific personalization? I think actually personalization might jump the shark. We might have experiences that are so personalized they get into the creepy factor. And we sort of saw that with the initial wave of automation and all the marketo style tools. It's like if I have information about you, I feel necessary to put it in an email. We saw all these really creepy emails when people started really doing automation at first.
- [39:23]
C
Yeah, but that's because they were bad. Yeah, you did.
- [39:27]
B
And that.
- [39:28]
C
And now we're relying bad personalization. You said personalization.
- [39:32]
B
Yeah, well, and that's the question. When we're doing personalization now, we're not relying on humans to do the personalization, which we did kind of a mid job to begin with. Now we're just saying, hey, LLM, go do a better job at personalization. But their training data is the mediocre job we were doing before. I really do think that it takes a human to figure out what the right tone and tenor is to have great personalization to really master it. So I think I'd probably lean on the trust side. If somebody trusts you, the message doesn't have to be as tailored because they already have that equity. My answer would be trust. All right on that. That wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate you coming on being our guest, and as I build my website, I hope it lives up to your standards. Thanks for coming on.
- [40:17]
C
Yeah, I'll definitely keep you posted on that. I'm opinionated on these things.
- [40:21]
B
All right, that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast.
- [40:24]
A
A special thanks to Shift Paradigm for sponsoring this podcast. Shift is an integrated team of experts who help enterprise brands bridge the gap between strategy data and customers. Human first, AI enabled and execution led. They build the blueprints, then stay to develop, deploy and run the engine you need. So stop settling for decks that collect dust and start working with a team that actually builds for you. Visit ShiftParadigm.com to see how they can help you connect meaningfully with your audience.
- [40:55]
B
Thanks to Anda Ginska, co founder and CEO of Notch, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Anda, you can find the link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com or you can visit her company's website, which is notch.com that's K-N O T C H dot com. If you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed every week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy. Foreign.
- [41:53]
A
Thanks for listening to the Martech podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything.com.