← The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
How LLM Search Changes SEO And E-Commerce With Andrew Higgins
00:51:37
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This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies
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top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential?
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Let's get started.
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Howdy. Welcome back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I'm your host, Matt Bertram. We are talking about everything, AI marketing, AI visibility, SEO, kind of how you deal with the gentic. Everything's very fluid. Wanted to bring in somebody. I know people have been asking about E commerce and agentic stuff. That is not my wheelhouse. So I want to be clear. I do know and have great partners that do a lot of E commerce and agentic stuff. We're doing more B2B stuff, lead gen, that sort of thing. And, and so I. Andrew Higgins. Andrew Higgins, welcome to the show. He's got a AI visibility tool. He's doing E commerce agentic. We were having some different kind of conversations around, like, is LLM visibility like baseline analytics? Right. Like, I think that that's a really interesting point that everybody's trying to add AI visibility, whether it be GA4, all the different gold standard tools, or offering LLM visibility. Everybody's doing it a little bit differently, but everybody's racing to do it. And to your point, I feel like there needs to be a baseline. It would be great if there was like a standard. I don't know if Google's going to come out and say like it is. I mean, they're switching everybody over to AI search shortly. So I know it's going to be more of a conversation. But I. But I would love to kind of get your landscape, Andrew, on what, what you're seeing in the marketplace. I know you launched a tool a while back around LM visibility. I know they're popping up everywhere. So I'd love to see what you're seeing with that. With that as well as like kind of what is going on with E commerce.
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Totally. Well, thank you for having me. I think everyone is scrambling to try and figure out the problem at the same time. And to some extent, like marketers are trying to build the plane while they're flying it. Like, pardon the old adage, but I think the reality is what we know, if we just figure out things we know. Consumer behavior and the way that people are digesting and using the Internet has wildly changed on the back of AI. The way we figure out what restaurant to go to or vacation or what to buy our moms for their birthdays. That behavior, that customer journey has changed a ton in the past few years and is changing rapidly. On an almost weekly basis. So I think when we think about whether it's AI visibility or E commerce or honestly any part of the digital marketing stack, it all is being retooled and the playbook is being rewritten. So I think the first conversation that at an industry level we're having is GEO or AI visibility or AIO or AI SEO. Like, we don't even have the nomenclature right yet. That I'm not convinced that's the market. I think that's where the conversation today is. I think that's for a couple reasons. One is because we understand SEO and we had this monolith that was Google search and governed a lot of eyeballs and the beginning of a lot of shopper journeys today. One we have, it's not a monolith. There are lots of players, there are lots of labs in large language models, and even under the hood of Gemini as an example, there's multiple models that behave differently, that collect data differently. And the biggest piece is it's no longer just 10 links. Context matters. So if you and I have a similar interaction with a large language model, we will get different results because of the context of who we are. And all of that changes the way we start to optimize. If we know people are interacting with AI instead of a brand or a retailer or social media, we have to marketers, we need to figure out how to influence those interactions. But all of that is changing.
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Well, I mean, you, you see it with like, Rand Fishkin and like, what, what he's doing, right? Like, he, like, he made the pivot to like, icp. So it's just like, who, who is the audience? Where are they at? What is happening before they even start searching, right? Like what? Like, it goes back like pendulum, back to, you know, Mad Men, right? Like, like where. What. What is the creative? What is the brand? What is the brand image? Like, where does that brand show up? Where does it want to be around? Like, I, I kind of even feel like you're like running the track. Like, you got to do reps, you got to do reps, and you got to be in those same areas consistently to be viewed as that authority, right? And so it, it's a full funnel optimization of where does your brand show up, where is your audience at? How are you speaking to them? What questions are you answering? It all comes together with, are you communicating with your target audience correctly? And wherever they're at, at whatever their need is. And that's a much bigger ask than optimizing for top 10 links. In Google.
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Well, and I think all the principles that you just walked through are the same like AI doesn't change the core principles of marketing. We have new channels, we have new use cases, we have new ways. We need to try and start measuring data. So principles are the exact same. We just understand consumer behavior is different. And that's the reason I think AI visibility is a big conversation today, I'm not sure it will be tomorrow. And reason being is step one is like understand the usage, start to try and figure out the channel, understand how AI talks about my brand, how it's different to my competitors. And then the biggest thing is if you go, if you go all the way back. Do you mentioned the Mad Men era? Well, there used to be 10 TV channels and some, a few radio stations and a few large publications. People read the newspaper. So the ability as technology has continued to we can target our user. And I think AI is another leap in the direction of your ICP is becoming less and less broad because your ability to personalize is stronger and stronger. So today when context influences how an LLM interacts with a shopper, then we as marketers need to be able to get down to that level of specificity as well. So I think core principles are still the same. I think the playbook is being rewritten, the tools, the skill stack looks different. But the hot topic today is the data which is AI visibility, which I don't think will be a long term category. I think it of course will matter. But also the data is not accurate yet. Like and you, that's the data is, this is benchmark data. And if you use 20 different tools doing something related, you'll actually get 20 different answers which is a problem.
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Well you, I mean that even goes into like why the models are hallucinating or whatever. It's like bad data, right? And like even when I'm like doing some programming stuff, I'm going like why did you grab that? And then I'm like go down a little bit of rabbit hole to like understand why it brought that in. And like people are sensationalizing like oh this AI got, what was it got, got really interested in like the Golden Gate Bridge or there was that like, and it was like well if you keep feeding the model there's like a decay rate and attention and like of course that's what the models do if you understand the models. But if you're looking at everything black box then you know that that data hygiene and, and understanding like the math that goes into this is really quite important. And I, I believe, I believe what you're saying because the visibility piece is like we're just trying to figure out how to measure and then once we measure it goes back into like well, is your marketing good? Because that's the debate right now with everybody on social media that I'm seeing is like GEO is completely different and then no, it's the exact same. It's just good marketing. Right. And it's, it's this back and forth. Then it's like okay, it is good marketing but how, how to do it and understanding that this is a completely different technology than Google, like Google works differently on how it gets to the answer. It might get to the same answer but, but how it gets to it and understanding that the under the hood is how you get the competitive advantage to execute. But good marketing is always going to win. And, and really I feel like market feedback and I think that that's leads into E commerce is understanding the user, the, the customer has changed, is how, how has informing you on what you need to do, on how you need to speak to them. And if you have e commerce versus like a B2B where it's offline online, like whatever and you can't track everything, you get cleaner data. So data hygiene is like, like first, right? Are you measuring everything? Right. And E commerce you get to see kind of the full experience so you can optimize what's happening and you get more data in that process because it's, you know, you're targeting the user, you're engaging with the user, they're buying online and then you're drop shipping them something or whatever. Right.
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Well I, you're, I agree completely. We don't have a feedback loop. So yeah, if this is a new discipline of marketing, we got to create the feedback loop so you can truly understand what works and what doesn't. But the interesting piece is we don't have usage data yet. So if we, yes, we have to understand the technology and understand how large language models work so that we can start to reverse engineer them to figure out how as a brand we optimize ourselves to be visible, to be present, to be discoverable. But the state of the marketing discipline of AI, search, Geo, whatever we're going to call it is, is still quite immature in that what we're actually doing under the hood is it's predictive. You're building a model of a shopper and having simulated interactions. That's kind of like buying a Facebook ad and meta saying I'm not going to tell you the number of impressions, I'm going to guess. I'm not going to tell you your click through rate and I'm not going to pass through a tag but buy my ads anyway. And we wouldn't do that. I mean there was an era of TikTok where the usage was so high that people were willing to invest advertising dollars in an exploratory way. But of course you started getting B2B APIs so you could measure these things and so you could close the feedback loop. We're still in the infancy where we don't have the feedback loop. And that's I think what a lot of marketers are trying to establish as a step one.
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Okay, so, so one of the interesting conversations which this might be out outside of this discussion, but I've, I've started to see it is I know Facebook got in trouble. I mean they're getting in trouble for a lot of stuff right now. But um, they got in trouble for really faking impressions like early on. Like, like they're. And, and you wonder why like these ads are not working the way they should. Like my, I always went back to like, are they showing them to the right people? Right. Because they need to get, they're, they're trying to hit spin numbers. Right. So they keep expanding it out, expanding it out. Google does the same thing. I saw a study recently that compared to running ads on the Google platform versus using like a DSP or something like that to buy ads for you of the target audience set. Interesting because Google is showing, I mean you're paying like a percentage to run through the dsp, but if you took the same dollar amounts, right. And go, well I'm getting 12% more just doing Google and I'm not using the DSP, what's going to be the result? Yep, the results from this study, again, like, I don't have all the details and don't quote me on it, but it looked to be really, really accurate that Google was serving ads to properties that benefited them more than benefited the user and they had a limited inventory. So like they're forcing things that are not the best use of your money to. And if you, if, if, if you have more inventory to select from and, and you kind of lock in who you're trying to reach a little bit tighter, you'll always get, you're going to get better target. Right. Like it was, it was kind of like you knew the setup, but it's so true. Right. And I feel like, I mean now to your point, measuring LLMs like different use case. Like when I see an LLM and I'm like, oh, we're in Claude. I'm like, oh my gosh, like people are stealing all our stuff. Like, you know, like that's what I think. Like, but like, like you, you all of these different channels, right? Or AIs people are going to have different relationships. And I think the battle is like which one's gonna own, like which one's gonna be the one that is the one that everyone uses. I don't care.
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It might not matter though. It might that, who knows? I think there will be a lot of evolution that might be like saying you have to pick one social media channel to market across. Right. That these might be use case specific.
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Well, yeah, but, so this is what I would tell you. These AIs store, okay, CHAT gbt, for example, they came out and said they're gonna remember like, I think like it's like government surveillance, whatever. But like they're gonna. Every single thing just if you're listening, look in the terms of use, every single thing you put into Chat dbt, they're keeping forever. I don't know if everybody knows that. So if you're listening that, that they came out and said that not so like FISA warrant, whatever. Like, so just know that if you're using CHAT gbt, you're using Codex. Every single thing you do is going in that. Now then you got people, Andrew, that are taking open source LLMs, putting them on their own servers, air gapping it. Like all their data is not leaving, it's not getting processed because anything you put in any of these tools is getting processed off site. So I think anthropic, you know, it was 30 days at one point. I don't know what they changed it to, but they clean all the data every 30 days unless like you store it. But perpetual memory, like memory is a big conversation, I feel like around these different AIs and how it recalls information and like the rag pulls and all that. So what people are finding that are using these tools that are consumers, not builders in these tools, is they're getting really comfortable with one AI because it knows them and it learns them. Right. And they're comfortable with the interface and they know how to use it. I mean, I feel like I know people that are jumping around between different tools, but the people that are not in the marketing space, like, like I would consider just straight consumers.
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Yeah.
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They've started to use one tool and. Right. And they get comfortable with that and, and like even there's like little debates on like, well, I like Claude better and I like chat GBT better. And then they're like talking about how they like it better but no one's tried the other one. And I feel like there, there's ingrainment in that interface and the more things you plug into it, right? And it gets better data. The, the switching costs become harder. Right? And yeah, right. And so I, I mean again, like we don't know what the future holds. Like, who knows? Like, I mean we don't even know if there are aliens yet or not. Right? But like a, like I, I would tell you that I, I think the battle honestly is who builds the best consumer tool that everybody has an AI that they filter everything through because it knows them so well and it helps them make decisions. I mean you're even seeing kids, you know, and like don't talk to it like a human. And like, I mean it's causing like all kinds of things, bad things to happen. I think that there's going to be a trusted agent like, or whatever that you're working with that, that is your primary like assistant that you filter everything through, which of course you could build some advanced things that plug in and grab the different models and all that. And there's a tool out there, guys. I think it's called po. I, I don't really use it, but it grabs all the different lms and you can ask it a question if you're using it just as a chat bot, not like as a development tool, but like, I just think people are going to have their go to and they're going to filter everything through it. So if that I can tell you right now, I was looking at, to buy something on Amazon or whatever and I was like, screenshot it, put it in there, look at the reviews, like do some additional research. Yeah, yeah, tell me this and tell me if there's something else that I, that I'm missing. And then it was like, oh, well, you know, you're, you're wanting to do this. Like it was like a supplement or something, right? It was like you're wanting to do a gummy. Like that might not be as whatever. And, and I was trying to decide between these like mushroom gummies or whatever, right? And then it basically is like, no, you need a capsule. And then these are the brands and then these are the like, like I was down this path and like these
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were like through that like consideration phase.
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Yeah, like I was there and then it just pivoted me to go like, no, you didn't think about these things. You need to figure out. And then these are the three brands that you should select from and here are the links like that user journey. Like, because you're okay going back to ll visibility. Like if, like how did I get prompted with that question? And then it represented this and someone answered it. And then these three brands answer that question the most effectively and had the most reviews and like whatever else that it got shown to me, provided me links and then I bought something over here that I wasn't even thinking about. Right. Like that's the world that we're trying to measure.
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One think about how much of that journey sat on one surface. To your point of like it sat. Whereas the fragmented like digital customer journey. Yes, you still transacted on Amazon or wherever you ended up purchasing, but pretty soon that transaction will also be able to take place with, with the AI buying on behalf of the shopper. So I think about, you know, the, I think about how long the customer journey is, is going to be on one single surface. So is this visibility is not the right question? This is. And that there will be so many use cases built into one channel. You know, this is. Yes, visibility will always matter. And you, you. But you will have to figure out how to stay visible. You will have to figure out how to. As you get into consideration and you get into competitive comparison and return policies, you'll have to make transacting easy. You know, when you think about currency, you know, currency across a bunch of different models in different markets, you know, where you have context on the shopper and pricing promotions in different regions, like this stuff gets very complicated and we know the drop offs we see in conversion and engagement when you do those things wrong.
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Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, I mean relevancy is going to be a, a big component. But you're right. Visibility honestly doesn't matter. It's like at what stage of the buying process are you at Correct. And now here's the thing to have who like the work is what was done to make that recall happen the way it happened. Right? Like, so that's where all the like invisible work comes in. I. What was I gonna say? You were, you were talking about something. I was like, man, I need to write this down. But keep going, keep going and I'll think of it.
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But that, that is where I think the challenge becomes exponentially harder because we're not optimizing for one click and then owning that experience on our site. It's very multifaceted.
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Oh, this is what I was gonna say, so Google, if you watch like their, you know, every, every big brand and I would encourage anybody that's a marketer if you can't go to these events. And I, I don't go to all of them but like you can go watch them on YouTube or whatever. But Google's last like yearly unveil, it's kind of like the talk where Steve Jobs would always come out and unveil like the new product or whatever they're doing. So Google's big event, I, I, it's escaping me what, it's what it's called right now. But they were unveiling AI search and they were unveiling. What we're talking about is, and I think that the reason they're doing it now is they don't want to lose customers to another Surface like or another. And so they're switching to AI mode. Right. And that's why they're doing it because they already know that the whole value funnel or the search funnel is going to collapse and they want to keep it on Google. And so if everybody uses, you know, Gemini or whatever's powering AI overviews and that you can search on Google, ask all the questions and buy and they have this, you know, huge market share, they're probably going to win this next evolution, right?
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Correct.
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Because there's not, I think you're muted by the way, Andrew. I don't know, but there you go. Okay. And, and I, I mean I, I think they're making the switch, they were prepping it, but before too many people are doing the buying journey and some of these other platforms, they, they still have the market share. People are still saying they're using AI because they're looking at the overviews. Right. And like everybody feels good. I think, I think they're looking at the metrics and, and they're going to hard switch it because if they can capture everybody just to do it on Google, they'll win the next round. Right. And then all that customer will happen there. So I still think optimizing for Google is what needs to happen.
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I also, and I don't think they're conflicting like tactics, which is the, I think optima, Even the SEO vs Geo discussion, like they are, they belong in the same discussion. And there are things that are uniquely positioned for optimizing for AI that are different, do not matter with the way Google indexes traditional search. But there's also a huge overlap. Right. And so I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I think the, the reality is the like the core hygiene that is SEO will continue to be true. There's now just a bunch of other elements of building a website, marketing online, working with PR and that matter and are ingested in a different way, whether through rag or through, you know, the way large language models interpret information and also the way we search. Just when it was when you had one search and you had to win that initial keyword or that keyword phrase and you, you optimize for fewer pieces, now it's, you have to optimize, you know, along that whole journey and the way, the way you do that changes based on where you're at in the funnel.
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Yeah, no, I, I totally agree. So what are some other insights that you're seeing on the E commerce side that would be helpful to bring into
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this conversation that it's coming? First and foremost, I think agent commerce also, even by itself is a broad
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conversation like are you talking agent to agents?
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That's exactly right.
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Okay.
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So most of what I deal with on a day to day basis when I think agent commerce it is, how is E commerce going to be integrated into large language models? Like, which is I think only a sliver of the discussion because the way in which agents are going to work, you know, work on behalf of shoppers is much more plentiful than that.
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Okay. So for a while, anybody that listens to me, I kind of went down this cryptocurrency path and we have some big clients in the space that we're doing, we're doing geo work for and all that, but I really see. So there was a protocol back in like 9192 that the Internet, do you know what I'm talking about? Like that what, what? So basically there was a protocol on the Internet where you could transfer money online, but it was never used. I think this year they just turned it on and they're getting ready to move to digital currency in the banks and there's some laws being passed and everything like that because. Well, I think that the agents are going to want to use like a Solana or like something fast to, to be able to transact and fractionally buy and you're seeing it with API token usage as well. But I think it's even broader, right, like agent to agent commerce, which what I've read it's going to be like 75% like eclipsing the current E commerce market.
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The TAM projections are astronomical.
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Yeah, right. And so like it's not even, it's like the agentic E commerce. Okay, that's like I guess a good framework for it. I would just say the agent economy, like agents to agents talking on your behalf based on like what you've done. And I was, I was doing a little bit of stuff on ebay where I was like trying to get it to bid on stuff and, and then I didn't put in some guardrails and I bought a bunch of comic books essentially. My wife was like oh my gosh. But, but I mean I wanted to test it out right. Of like what's happening. And it was, it was a really good experience to know what's possible and like kind of where things are going and I think there's a lot of catch up. But yeah, I, I, I mean I, you're plugging in every API and MPC to these things. Like they're going to be connected in like they're going to, they're going to know like okay, you put like I was, I was, I spoke at a conference and it was like cameras, sensors, LLM models are on all this stuff. So you know, okay, we're talking direct to consumer. Your refrigerator, the Internet of things knows like where your milk's at and then knows what you buy and, and then it sends you an alert, hey, would you like me to order the smell? You know it orders it and then people deliver it to your house. Right? Like that, that is going to be happening very soon. And, and so I have been looking at like, okay, where are we going as an agency? And I bought another kind of governance AI. It's called Modal Point. I haven't been talking about it a lot but it's, it's really like about data hygiene and like what is your data doing and where is it going and like what's happening. And the other piece that I'm kind of like looking at is going how are people going to sell to these agents? How are they going to integrate their business and services? And I even interviewed a guy from Google right before COVID which was weird that it was right before COVID But what he told me is he said every business and you know, he's talking like I was talking B2B. He said every business should have a shopping cart on their website and be able to do commerce through their website as much as possible because he said everything's going that way and if you just think about how it's all going to be interconnected, it is 100%.
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And I, the, yeah, so I try and simplify this at least so I have like language that I understand in, you know, As a, as a career, as a marketer. And so like I just think of them as use cases and channels still. It's so easy to get like mired down in the language and the technology of AI that you get lost to your point. Like there will be a bunch of use cases of agenda commerce. There will be like, is this agent to agent? Is this as simple as how do we make E commerce storefronts and transactions work in a, in a large experience within a large language model? Is this, or is this an eight year, a human's own agent working and you're still buying directly on E commerce sites? Like I think we'll see all versions and permutations of. But the nice thing is at least as this matures, especially at least from the large Labs and the LLMs that have, you know, the majority of usage protocols are starting to be released, you know, like Stripe is, Stripe has done their integration with ChatGPT. You're starting to get the foundations and be able to see at least a little bit into the future and it allows you to start building tools and strategies and figure out what to do.
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Well, I, I want to, I want to buy into Stripe and it's like privately held, right? Like, like stripes in the middle of all of it. Right. And I even think what the, what's his name started Square. What is his name? Yeah, yeah, Dorsey is, I'm telling you, like they, they're right in the middle of. And I think Elon Musk knows what's going on to all the people guys, right? All the people guys were trying to do this, right? They were trying to do this and the technology just wasn't caught up yet. And to your point, the fragmented like growth is going to happen, like certain businesses and people are going to get it and there's going to be a huge tail on this thing. But I mean it's all eventually going to end up there. And, and, and to your point, like, I just think that knowing that the, the, I mean, do you remember when QR codes came out? Like no one was using QR codes.
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They popular in Asia, but the North American market for some reason QR codes didn't work in marketing.
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Yeah, it didn't, it didn't work. And then Covid happened and that use case came and you're like, you can't touch anything. And now everybody's got a QR code, Everybody knows how to use it.
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Every menu.
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Yes, yeah, yeah, everything. Right. And, and so, you know, maybe there's going to be some kind of catalyst, like that. But I, I see agentic, whatever. You know, people have different names too, right? Like autonomous and like everybody's using their own branded, like connected, whatever, Connected worker, like. And so. But I see cryptocurrency as kind of this like frontier technology. And payments, let's just call it payments really is what I think it is more than anything else. Like there's a couple cool things, but different use cases. But I think payments is the big thing. And then you got Agentic and then you got, well, like decision infrastructure essentially. Like how do you.
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Which is data.
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Yeah, which is data, but big data data lakes. Like how do you hook it all together? And all these things are just coming together and I feel like there's just so much in that space in any direction. It just is going in all these different directions and it could turn into all these different use cases. And I think that where those points meet is where everything's going eventually. And as those things kind of collide into each other and people develop new things, like, here's the coolest thing for anybody that hasn't done any programming. You don't need to know how to program. You just need to know how to know what you built and kind of understand like maybe the blueprint piece of it. But like I got a 3D printer right here. I mean I can create whatever in my head and then it can make it like the, like the possibilities of where things are going. And then like, I mean you, I could just, I mean there's technology that I could just drop ship that to somebody super easy. Or you could probably have 3D printers that would make stuff. And then someone has a bunch of them working and they drop ship them for you. Like, I mean that's. And then you talk about organs they're doing it with. Or like the. Where everything's going is just mind blowing. And marketing is right in the middle of it. And marketers. I went to this conference, Andrew, that, that is all agencies, owners. And what they were telling everybody is you need to learn to be the AI expert and clients are going to outsource that to you. And like, and that's what the data is showing. And everybody was like, I did not go to college for this.
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I think it was Mark Cuban the other day on tvpn. But like this is the new category, right? Is AI integration. We had digital transformation. We had, we had to move into the cloud at one point. But like, how do you build new digitally native businesses? And those businesses that are not digitally native, how do you make that integration Seamless like that is a massive category and I think that brands and businesses don't have enough internal expertise yet. Like that will change over time and then there will. But right now there's a big chasm and I, at least for marketers specifically, I think there's one luxury is you don't need, you don't need to be all the way at the bleeding edge because the marketing doesn't become relevant until the consumer behavior like substantiates it. So we actually don't need. It's one, we should understand the systems and talk about it because it's important. But like we sort of get the fast follow because we don't need to beat our customers to a channel or to a use case. We just have to be incredibly responsive
- [34:16]
B
and nimble and, and the clients have a lot of regulation and internal stuff that they have to deal with. So they want to push it to us right now because they can't do it yet. Right. Like literally they're trying to outsource it because they can't bring it in house yet. Like they haven't all figured it out. So now is like this kind of golden sweet spot, whatever, for anybody that's listening, that's in marketing, to take advantage of it and become that expert in. I mean there was people when, when Chachi BT really came, came on the scene, even people in our organization that didn't know how they felt about it and kind of was like, I'm not sure about this and people are concerned and I'm like, this is not like just a fad. This is a trend, this is a movement. And we gotta get on this bandwagon and in front of this and become AI first, AI native as quickly as we can. Because that experience compounds. Like I see it and even people on my team, I got power users, I got people that are dabbling and the power users are compounding their really quick. Right. Yeah. And then like if you're, if you're getting into it, yeah, you're going to compound too. But how much, how much far ahead is this person or this company going to be ahead of you before you jump on it? You know, 100%.
- [35:41]
A
I mean, I, I think. And also it's hard to build really great marketing when you also have thrashing like at the foundational level. I mean, as, as we have the ability to advertise across AIs as we have the ability as commerce really like gets its footing and becomes a real thing that shoppers rely on, like there's going to be a bunch of changes. So I think it actually it. It's very hard. You have to sort of thread the needle by like this matters. Brands, marketers, businesses need to start like understanding this is how they're shopper and how businesses buy and research and use the Internet. But at the same time there is such thing as being too far out in front of your skis because things are going to change on a dime.
- [36:24]
B
So it's called Parsnip, right? Is that right?
- [36:28]
A
Like the vegetable?
- [36:29]
B
Yeah. Like everybody. So that's interesting. Okay. I want to talk about that for a second before we get into it is. I feel like I'm seen. And we're. We're actually launching a campaign next month. Next month. We're launching a campaign next month. But I'm seeing so many AI companies find a thing like whatever it is bear. Like, like. So in this space there's bears, there's carrots. There's like any kind of like thing that everybody knows what it is and can remember it but then they like put their spin on it. So you, you, you can subconsciously. I. I forget what it's called. But you're. You're creating a peg to something that they know about. And so it's helping you with memory recall. But it's something different enough that it's not AI is going to know the difference in whatever it is. Does that make sense?
- [37:28]
A
100. Naming is hard. I mean I. This. It's. It's like one of those silly things that like entrepreneurs like. It's actually. It's actually a hurdle and I think it's challenging. I think it would be to our benefit if people liked Parsnips the vegetable more. It's a pretty inconsequential vegetable. So we have to make it into a more consequential software business. But no but like naming. Naming is hard.
- [37:50]
B
So. So just to finish out kind of what I was saying is. So we re. We used to be called E Web Results. We've been around 26 years. Our agency's been around a long time. We did web development. I don't talk about it a lot on the podcast. Our audience set of who we work with and who listens completely different. EWR sponsors Podcast. Probably should do a commercial. But essentially the brand. There was a E in front of everything. Right. With the Internet. Right. So E Web results. E Web style. E Web Results were really in vogue. But you know, 10 years after no one uses the E. It was kind of like we need to update it. So we did the KFC thing. That's all I could think of. The kfc. Kentucky Fried Chicken went to kfc. We shortened it to EWR Digital. But nobody can remember ewr. They can't remember it.
- [38:42]
A
Interesting.
- [38:43]
B
Okay. Right. And so I'm trying to peg it to something that people remember.
- [38:48]
A
Yeah.
- [38:49]
B
So we're launching a campaign. We're doing a big rebrand. EWR is an airport ticker symbol. Anything that's government, you have no, like, marketing rights to. There's huge volume. Anybody that goes through EWR is usually going international. Right. So our business users are multinational companies. We work with a lot of energy companies. They know of ewr. And people at business conferences will be like, ewr, like, are you out of New York or Newark? Or like, you know, like, whatever. So I was just like, okay, this is the cl. I'm not going to change the name again because a rebrand. And I've done a number of podcasts about this. I would not encourage anybody to do a rebrand if you don't have to. It is tons of work. Painful. Like, there's so much legacy stuff out there. You're talking about data, hygiene. It's bad. And, and, and even these, the memory sets on the search engines. And now I like, it's going to be difficult.
- [39:45]
A
I learned faster, though, so that's to your benefit. As in, it takes a lot longer to climb the, you know, the blue links in traditional search. It's faster.
- [39:53]
B
Fair enough. So. So we're going to be doing this whole campaign on, like, kind of take yourself to the skies, like, like, as a hub for whatever. Like, we're going to do like this big play on it.
- [40:04]
A
Yeah.
- [40:05]
B
And then I get. And then my team, we were kind of debating it and. Sorry, I'm going on a tangent, everybody, but we were doing that. It's interesting, I think. Hopefully you'll find. So basically they're like, no, we're going to get confused at the airport. And I was like, is that a bad thing necessarily? Because AI, I can tell you, it listens to us and it knows, like, who we're around and they know your behaviors. So if you're a business traveling person and you're looking for a marketing company, it will probably know, hey, I don't know which one to show this to. But if you're just like a regular user and you're not looking for a marketing agency, it's going to know to serve ewr. So there's going to be some confusion. We're going to get a little bit of lift, I think temporarily from ewr.
- [40:52]
A
Pun intended.
- [40:53]
B
Yeah, well, yeah, pun intended, I guess. Yeah. I gotta. There's a lot of fun things actually. I'm thinking from a marketing standpoint we could do. But, but same thing. Like I just, I see this consistently with new companies is they're tagging it to something of a word or a topic or a object that people are familiar with. And then you add AI or whatever you're doing on it and, and now you're like, oh, I remember that. And you know, like it's totally different than that thing. So I, I think I'm, I'm. That was a long winded way to congratulate you on the naming of it is difficult and you did something that people already have in their brain.
- [41:36]
A
That's the help. And we have, we have an emoji we can use because there's a carrot so we can shorthand it to the emoji keyboard if we need to.
- [41:43]
B
Yeah. So tell me a little bit about kind of how you started and then where you see the opportunity now. Because as, as we start talking about the beginning of this, AI visibility may not be a category, it's just kind of a standard infrastructure as we move forward.
- [42:01]
A
Yeah, I absolutely think that there will. A pure play AI visibility platform will not be the type of tools we're talking about. And I don't know, the time Horizon is this six months, this 12 months. I think you have to understand AI visibility, I think you need to optimize for it. But that dovetails into the use cases as a marketer that you actually need to perform. Right? Yeah. A big piece of that is content. Right. One of the core ways to go combat traditional SEO and improve geo visibility is through developing great content. Like Parsnip is not a content company. Right. There are some really great AI visibility tools that in my mind, these are content companies. Right. There will be. When I think of Parsnip, we have AI visibility tool that does exactly what brands need. You figure out how you index today, you go through, you figure out how you rank against competitors and then you spit out recommendations on how to get started. That's cool. I think the core competency though is for us is agenta commerce. So figuring out if we have this really long customer journey where you have to build content, you have to update parts of website schema and product feeds and you're going to be able to advertise across AI. You will have software tools that help, I think, and have competencies in each of those for us it's figuring out if you understand your visibility, how do you inter integrate that with the ability to sell on the surface. So that, and we're E commerce folks, you know, historically that's, that's our background. We built kind of software at the intersection of social media marketing and E commerce for the last decade. So in many ways it's the same. You know, just the usage that we're helping marketers respond to is not people on social media, it's people using large language models.
- [43:49]
B
Yeah. And what you started talking about, where I keyed in on it specifically and I haven't done a podcast since the new Google Core release, which content AI generated content. A bunch of directory sites got taken down. There are things that you need to do when you're generating content and tools like parsnips help you make sure you're checking all the boxes, like make sure you're. If you are using AI to help generate the content, there, there are fundamentals and things that you need to be doing to make sure that you don't get taken down and usually attaching it to a human, there's kind of eat that you need to focus on expertise, authority, trust, experience. I mean Google came out and I thought they waved the light flag and said, hey, if it's useful content, it's fine. I feel like AI genericated generated content was pretty targeted in this last update. But there's things that you can do to mitigate it. There's things that you need to be thinking about and it's constantly evolving to your, to your point, Andrew. And the consulting and strategy piece I think is big of what people are looking for and in tools providing that, that, that knowledge to say what do I need to be focused on? What do I need to be learning at? Because I'm not going to be the expert in this. I'm trying to do my job and all this other stuff. And so I think these kind of tools are really, really helpful to give you almost like a checklist or synthesize it down or abstract it out so that you kind of have a direction of like these are the buoys that I need to start to hit or go in that direction.
- [45:35]
A
But it's because most folks like, we like, we nerd out and talk about these things all day. But most folks go, okay, I understand this. You know, I understand people are using chatbots every day and having conversations I care about for my business, but they don't know where to start. So yes, when I think of, when I think of what parsnip looks like today it makes it as easy as possible to understand where you stand and how you get started. What are the 30 things you should start? I don't think that's the full picture. And I, and, and so I think we're going to see the evolution really fast. Like we made the decision not to go deep down the content route. I think there will be great content companies that support GEO and AI visibility. And I'm also a little, these are my words. You know, this wasn't part of the Google announcement, but like why AI content was targeted. I don't think it was targeted because AI can't help build great useful content. I think the problem was some of the early GEO strategies are kind of like when we used to put clear text on websites for keywords in old school search, you know, you'd have your website, then you'd have your keyword 30 times in clear font, you know, so that, you know, Google pick. I think that we, there's, there was a little bit of. We're going to have use AI to generate derivative content, answer the same thing 50 different ways. That was not useful.
- [46:55]
B
So, so like yeah, yeah, it's spam filter. Yeah, yeah, it's just a spam filter. It's like it's not genuinely useful content. Yeah, yeah. Hey, so I, I was talking to somebody and I, I use the term AI slop and they got a, they actually got offended. It was like a big like. And then like I'm like this is the word of the year for like what, what, what, what, what dictionary was it, Was it Webster or something that AI slop was the word of the
- [47:25]
A
year where they do word of the year.
- [47:27]
B
Yeah. And yeah, it was AI slop. I was like, I was like, sorry, like I didn't think that this was offensive but you got to be careful. AI slop.
- [47:37]
A
So it's, it's about usefulness. And to your point, like, like AI, by the way, there's great AI content out there. There's also really horrible AI content out there. And, and so I think using, it's like using the right tool to solve the right problem. Like AI will be the answer in a lot of those contexts. But it doesn't mean that you flood the system. It's also not the way the Internet can work. If agents are having conversations with themselves proactively on behalf of the shopper to infinity, like nobody wins ultimately that's a, that's a bad format.
- [48:11]
B
So, so Andrew, we gotta, we're getting close to time here. I Gotta wrap up. I would love to hear like what is the biggest takeaway that with companies you've worked with consistently on the e commerce side that they've just failed to do or there's a gap, a blind spot in that they could help improve their, whatever they need to do, ranking, visibility, access to the right customers, kind of in that vein and then share a little bit more about where you're posting online. Like kind of where your conversations are happening so people can follow you and plug whatever you would like to plug.
- [48:48]
A
Absolutely. Well, thank you, thank you for having me as well. Been a fun conversation. I think the biggest, the biggest issue most folks have is it's kind of like analysis. It's paralysis through analysis is everyone is having these types of conversations like the one we had today and assume they have to like hop over the chasm. And specifically with commerce there are baby steps and there are things that if you market or sell online, things you absolutely need to be doing that are not overly challenging. It's just more likely than not this isn't a marketing discipline that your team is up to speed on. So there are ways to take bite sized chunks is the biggest feedback. There are ways to make sure you have a correct tracking pixel for ChatGPT or integrate a product feed or make, make sure that your product catalog is organized with a schema that LLMs can read. Like very simple stuff that every E commerce professional or digital marketer, they understand the tactics but I think there's a disconnect between all the things they're really good at and they've done their whole careers and AI and there's not enough conversation that's connecting them so they go AI is this big quagmire, we need to figure it out. And then they understand tagging and product feeds and tracking and content marketing and, and so figure out the way to take a few small steps and start working in the direction.
- [50:08]
B
Love it, love it.
- [50:10]
A
And then obviously we, you know, partnership is. We are, we launched the business in November but we do a lot on LinkedIn and our website are the easiest places. But we've tried to make, it's a, it's a free tool to try. We've tried to kind of put our money where our mouth is in terms of make it really easy to get started and just start to figure out what the roadmap should look like.
- [50:31]
B
Very cool. Well Andrew, thank you so much for coming on. I think this was a great discussion. I think that you know, you get a bunch of PhDs in the room and they're talking about a bunch of AI stuff on both sides and nothing gets done and you gotta, you gotta have somebody that comes in and translates it and hopefully we, we did that for you today for people listening, like understanding where things are going, maybe some action steps and kind of giving you that general direction to take the next step and to move forward. We do do coaching and classes if you want to reach out, find out more information about that. Best seopodcast.com until the next time guys, my name is Matt Bertram. If you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet which maybe is AI, not the Internet anymore, reach out to EWR for more revenue in your business. Thank you so much Andrew for coming on. Thank you everybody for listening. Talk to you later. Bye bye for now. Thanks Matt.