← The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The New SEO Playbook: Winning in a World of AI Overviews and Vanishing Clicks feat. Ray Grieselhuber
00:52:21
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- [00:02]
Matt Bertram
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential? Let's get started. Howdy. Welcome back to another fun fold episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I'm your host, Matt Bertram. Guys, there's so much going on in SEO in search. I feel like everybody just smashed Google and all the traffic just ran everywhere. I feel like it's just fanned out like you wouldn't believe. And so I wanted to bring somebody on that I have bumped into a few times at Brighton as well as that SEO week. He's been an advertiser, he's got a next gen tool. Ray, I didn't tell you this, but I just published article on Search Engine Journal and I referenced you.
- [00:57]
Ray
Thanks very much.
- [00:58]
Matt Bertram
You know, I just think what you're doing is great, so I wanted to bring you on for all the people listening and talk about, like, there's an old game that a lot of people are playing in SEO and there's a new game and people really need to be playing the new game or you're going to get left behind. And so you, you speak a lot. I would love to just kind of pick up what we were talking about at SEO Week and kind of where the market's gone since then. What's most topical for you?
- [01:23]
Ray
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here. I've enjoyed our conversations at events a few times and I think there's a lot to cover. So what, obviously AI is the big topic that, you know, everyone wants to know, AI, is my website dead? Is traffic gone forever? You know, like, is it, is it all over? I hear that from a lot of teams. Other teams are like, this is the opportunity of a lifetime and we're going to make everything we can of it. And so I found that there has been those two kind of camps of, you know, the way people are approaching it. Obviously I favor the latter. Any sort of change like this is going to happen one way or another. So the quicker you can adapt to it, the better you're going to be off in the long term.
- [02:05]
Matt Bertram
Now, I'm curious, the two different kind of teams that you're hearing about, is it across the board or is it certain industries? Because I know that media publishers have been hit pretty hard. Like, I'm just curious any. Any more. You know, granular statistics.
- [02:21]
Ray
Publishers are in a very interesting place. I, I don't even know where to start with that one. It's most of our, just for background, most of our clients tend to be in E commerce and also what we would call kind of like database driven direct response type things like travel search, real estate search, job search, all those sorts kind of transactional, you know what a lot of like programmatic SEO plays would have been relevant. And so for them they're like, well, we still get traffic and AI is having a huge impact, so we're going to have to adapt and overcome here. But I know that there's been a lot of, you know, chaos kind of in the publisher side of things too.
- [03:02]
Matt Bertram
Well, you know, one of the big things that I ran across was a lot of new clients that were coming to us were actually filtering out or blocking the bots of a lot of the LLMs. And I'm seeing, I have seen that like across the board. And so they're like, I'm not raking in LLMs. And I'm like, well, you're blocking them so they can't see what's going on on your side. And, and so, you know, I even saw a staggering statistic. It was something like 26% of people are now using LLMs versus Google search. I don't know, what are you seeing in your data about user flow? And I think AI overviews are just kind of stemming the tide of people kind of going across the river because LLMs are doing all the research for you. Right. And people want that.
- [03:59]
Ray
Yeah. So we see a lot of interesting data. I would say that traffic from LLMs is still very much a drop in the bucket compared to traffic from traditional source, quote, unquote, traditional sources. But I don't think that that necessarily means that people are not using them to a much greater degree than is revealed by the traffic metrics. There's obviously the whole concept of zero click and there's multiple searches and ongoing conversations and entirely different types of behavior patterns that are emerging that just did not exist before. And so a lot of the analytics tools are kind of stuck in this traffic based model. I think that's one of the reasons why there is so much angst about a lot of this is how are we even going to affect the impact of this if all of our tools are just based on traffic? And so it's going to be like there's going to be an entire new generation of tools that help brands focus on, you know, the bigger picture. Obviously it's part of what we're doing and I think there's going to be a lot of other really good, you know, technologies too.
- [04:59]
Matt Bertram
Well, you know, brand ranfisk and basically at SEO Week, and I think he said this at Brighton too, he just kind of tightened up his deck. It was search traffic to websites is down with one click search like 58.5%. Right? And we're seeing drops with all our clients, right? We have actually not all our clients. We have a couple clients that are growing at an exponential pace. So they're kind of fucking. But we're having to measure, well, here's your drop versus what the average is, right? And having to explain that that traffic metric is not revenue. And your impressions are going up. I was showing to our team earlier, we're about to do a quarterly presentation. You know, every number's up. Okay. Even so. So we're seeing an inverse correlation if you get them into the first position. So we had like 300 positions in the first top three positions in Google based on like rank math or whatever. And traffic's actually down. And so we're seeing as you get people up into the top spots, they're getting into the AIO reviews, they're getting into. You know, people also ask like, and the zero clicks happening. And so traffic's dropping. And that doesn't mean that the brand consideration's not there. It's maybe that that's happening 75% off page. And then when someone goes to the site, man, you better have that site ready to convert. And I know you've done some stuff with UX in the past, like, what would be some actionable recommendations if people. Because even I've seen data that said, well, traditionally the, the. Well, the LLMs, Perplexity, ChatGPT and AIOViews are pulling from Google as the corpus. Right? So good SDO is still pushing up to the top, but you're seeing the traffic drop. So you're still in consideration, but you don't have visibility in that. And I know that a lot of what Demand Sphere is working on and others are trying to come up with this next generation of tools, but what would you tell them if, if their traffic's just evaporating, but they're doing all the right things and well, you know, their leads are down or their traffic's down. Like, what should they be thinking about? I, I'm, I'm talking about ux. I'm talking about like, okay, we're gonna add some heat mapping, like some pop ups, like exit pop ups. Like, we need to really make sure this page converts. Like, you need to have all that information on that page to help them make that Decision because you know those precious people that are coming to the site. It's like a car lot. I'm using this analogy now. It's like it's basically if someone comes to your website, they're like walking on a car lot, they are ready to buy a car. So it's your job to like sell them or not. Right. So that it's a lot higher intent based traffic. So I don't know if you wanted to add anything to anything that I, I shared in that kind of framework.
- [07:58]
Ray
I think it touches on a lot of really good points. I think the last one that you mentioned, intent is the really important thing and also kind of reevaluating what gets measured at the end of the day. You know, even conversions is an interesting one. What we're seeing, especially at the enterprise level is there is a renewed focus on what is called like media mix modeling. You know, there's different versions of that three letter acronym of mmm. But basically what that is kind of pushing people towards both on the paid and the organic side is instead of trying to look at all of these things that are metrics, but are they KPIs? Maybe not. Which would include things like traffic, potentially even things like conversions. It's just a very stark look at revenue and what's contributing to revenue over time. And it ends up being a return on spend model. And it basically says we're not going to even think about things like attribution modeling. It's just literally this is what I spent on this and this is what I got from it at the end of the day. And it that creates all sorts of interesting opportunities. There are pitfalls with it as well. It requires a lot of nuance in the way that you look at it and you know, like to kind of zoom out even more. One of the things that I'm always talking about is holding multiple paradigms in your mind at the same time and not taking an absolutist view on things because that can lead you into trouble pretty quickly. But you know, the main takeaway for all of this is that there is a renewed simplification on looking at what is going to contribute to revenue. And also realize that things that may be gathering user behavioral attention at one stage, even if you can't specifically attribute a click or a conversion to that happening at that time. For example, in the case of an AI overview, zero click search all of those different things, if it's contributing to that net attention that ultimately leads to revenue down the road, that's a good thing. But Then the question obviously becomes, well, how do you attribute that? And the, the kind of emerging consensus on some of this anyway is you don't worry about attribution. It just comes down to where are you spending and where do you see the results coming from? Now, again, that, like, that's a whole. We could do a whole podcast just on that one topic because it opens up so many, you know, cans of worms. But it's an interesting way to look at it. Right. I'd say there's other things, other angles that you should also consider, but that, that one has, you know, been a really interesting one in this whole topic of conversion optimization. And then the other thing that I would say, just to answer your first question, is be willing to look at what's really contributing to the things that you call conversions as well. As an example from our own business, one of the things that we see is we don't do a lot of like, cr, like conversion rate optimization on our site. And, you know, we're not like, trying to, you know, incrementally add 2% lift or anything like that. We're always doing, like, small updates here and there. But it's, It's. We don't, we don't really do a lot of that. But what we do see is when we do things in the market that attract attention, our leads go through the roof. A good example of this is when we were the first company to launch AI Mode tracking SMX Advanced a couple weeks ago. We got more leads probably in four days than we had the previous year combined. You know, and so it's, it's more about, like, doing things that attract attention that are going to have the biggest impact, I think.
- [11:34]
Matt Bertram
Yeah. Like breaking through the noise and getting there. What everybody's thinking about, like, saying it out loud and addressing it like, that was, that was a big update that I saw and I was super excited for you. Thank you. And it, it definitely broke through algorithmically, you know, and, and got a lot of visibility going back to what you were saying previously of just. Mmm. Of like you're just putting in stuff at the top, right. And then you're measuring the bottom. And, you know, there's just this mixed or, you know, weighted attribution across the board and you're like, well, just focus on what works. That goes back to just educated assumptions essentially. Right. Like, of where we think we're seeing that impact. What you're seeing on maybe that paid platform. And that was where I was going to ask you is like, how are, how are people Assessing attribution. And you know, I went to that model while ago as well of like, you can't really measure this stuff. And sometimes we're building funnels for clients or nonprofits that are going from one platform to another platform to another platform and you lose the UTMB tracking code and you just got to go, well, this is what I believe is happening. This is where I see the value. This is the data that I'm seeing from the industry. So I believe that this is the right thing we should be doing. And we're going to run the campaign and we're going to measure it on the end, on what's successful. But there's a lot of guessing that goes on. Educated, I guess.
- [13:10]
Ray
Yep.
- [13:10]
Matt Bertram
But of, of what that mix should look like. And it's almost like run it to statistical significance and take away that component and add a component at a time based upon your mix and see how it's impacting you. But then you got like, okay, for a lot of businesses right now, we've just hit the summer, so there's like a, you know, so, so it's, it's, it's very hard to consider all the different variables and measure it. How, how would you. If you went a little bit deeper and I know we could continue this discussion, I would love to peel back one more layer of how should people be thinking about that or approaching it. I. The, the framework I tend to use is the 7114 framework. Right. Seven hours of content consumption, seen their brand or logo 11 times on four different channels. And that framework is what we use for a lot of our clients to, to say, hey, we need to get you at least to here on a roadmap to start achieving greater visibility for your brand. And we want to be watching the bottom line and we want to be launching impressions, but we got to look at it across all platforms now because it's almost like, you know, the web, all the website traffic that and the assessment that was done. So really the website's more transactional and then everything else is off page.
- [14:37]
Ray
Well, and I think one of the things that's really tricky about organic in particular, that does not necessarily apply to spend on other channels is the fact that you have what you know, especially when we're talking about like SEO, which is a very loaded word. It, you basically have two different financial models in the same word. You have Capex and opex in that same word. And you know, so all the stuff that you're doing on the product, site work, site redesign, architecture, technical SEO, like Most of those things are typically only to fall into that capital expenditures. But then you have marketing which is typically opex, you know, when you're looking at other channels. That's all the stuff that is only like half of what we do in SEO, you know, so you've content optimization, all the, you know, so it's like how do you properly even attribute, attribute your financial model if you don't have that conversation internally where you're looking at those with, you know, the correct lens. So that I think that's a really important one that gets, you know, glossed over quite a bit too well.
- [15:41]
Matt Bertram
I've been trying to convince clients to move like a branded spend over to CapEx, you know, because we can't like you just need to. And like if you turn off some of these platforms, you're resetting the AI as far as like the heat sinking missile to find the right person. So you just got to build it into your cost structure. Is, is really kind of how I'm educating them to do that. Tell let's transition into demand sphere. I think a lot of people are stuck on the traditional tools and I think that there's a lot to be desired from the traditional tools. I feel like you were one of the ones that have educated me on, you know. Well, there's really an issue now when you go to Google on how much real estate like from a pixel standpoint you have on the page because that first position's now two thirds of the way down. And, and so I'm curious, like what have you seen with the application of your tools of what people are not thinking about, like where are the biggest gaps when, when they start leveraging your tools, what are they finding? What, how should people be thinking about stuff? Because you know, there's a lot of like really great keywords that people miss because they're so narrowly focused on whatever the topic is. And if you, if you focus on that too much and over optimize in that area, get an algorithmic penalty and then for the word you want to rank for, you can't rank for it. So you gotta, you gotta kind of build out that information architecture to cluster it a little bit better. Even though, you know, a lot of clients on maybe like the small mid side, business side, they're, you know, they're like I got to rank for this word. And it's like, well you know, like we need to do all these other things to lay a foundation that's maybe like the top of the pyramid, but we got to build, we Got to build that foundation. And so I'm just curious, you know, what are the big things that you're seeing a lot of SEOs. Ms. So there's some maybe actionable insights for people that are listening.
- [17:51]
Ray
Yeah, One analogy that I use a lot is I don't know if you probably talk to, you know, people who have a PhD in some field, biochemistry or whatever, and then they start riffing about something that's completely unrelated to their field and they talk with this level of confidence that has they sound like they know what they're talking about, but if you actually know what they're trying to talk about, you're like, you actually don't know anything. You probably are a PhD in biochemistry, but you know nothing about aerospace engineering or, you know, and so as an example, so I, I've used sites that way a lot as well, where you've built up a level of topical authority around a certain topic. And one of the big changes, you know, over the last, it's not really in the last few years, it's for going been going on for a long time. Google is looking at, when we're talking about Google, they're looking at what is your set of topics that you're good at talking about. And there's different ways of measuring this even on a mathematical level, which we can talk about, but they're looking at that semantic topical authority. And if you are creating content that is way outside of that traditional things, you know, set of things that you talk about, you just need to recognize that it's going to take time to build up that semantic authority. You're gonna have to work on things like linking to that. You're have to maybe update old content, right? There are ways to merge it in and make it something that you are good at talking about, but it's not something that's going to happen overnight. So, you know, if you're a site that's talking about A and you would suddenly want to start ranking for, quote, unquote, ranking for B, it's going to take a lot more than just writing a few articles, you know about that. And so I think that's a really important thing to understand about the way sites are evaluated.
- [19:28]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, so let me, let me add on to that. So you know, if you're looking at like a three dimensional model of where topics are related to each other on this graph, you're saying, well, if you're talking about this over here and you're an expert over here, the distance from that, people talking about this topic to this topic. You know, you're measuring that mathematically and saying hey, you might want to prune this content over here because it's not really in your core area of focus. And you know, Google hasn't brought back officially authorship but it kind of has. And it's, you know, who's saying what and what are they talking about? The question I have for you in that is, and I tell clients this, just say you can't be an expert in everything. Right. And based on your, if we use the metric of domain authority or domain ranking we need to pick one or two or whatever. Is there a correlation or a quick reference guide that you would say well I am an expert in this, I am an expert in that. Well, do you need to produce X amount of content clustered on this area over what amount of time before you hit that threshold? Or if your site only has X number of backlinks or whatever rating system you want to use, whether it be Moz Ahrefs, you know, Semrush, any of them that these kind of generated ranking systems that are not really true what Google's using. But is there any kind of rule of thumb that you can use to say we only want to focus on one topical authority now we, we're trying to spread herself too thin because that's what I do see clients wanting to do a lot is they don't have enough budget to really focus on one area and they try to spread it out and get a little bit of improvement everywhere. But if you're not the top three positions in Google historically you weren't getting any traffic and now you know, if you're not, you know, in the knowledge graph etc, you know, in AI overviews and LLMs you're not getting any traffic at all. So and you're not even getting an option because it's not, it's giving you six links or you know, potentially and, and you might not be included and it's very customized. So how should people trim that focus or, or think about that rule of thumb to just measure it before even getting started on, on the complexities of cleaning up their content?
- [21:53]
Ray
Yeah and this is also a really interesting topic because it is still emerging. But probably the easies way for people to do this now with some hands on tool would be screaming frog. You probably saw their latest update but they released. So a lot of what we're going to be talking about is probably most of the people in your audience will be familiar with the concept of embeddings and that sort of thing. But if not. Yeah, and just basically like, you know, when you're embeddings, I always describe it as you convert text into numbers so you can do math on it. And the type of math you would do would be related to measuring the distance between topics and terms and so forth. And so one of the updates that Screaming Frog release recently was the ability to visualize a lot of these topical clusters and understand if you do have something that is way out of range. So there's different types of scoring that you can do. Like, Euclidean distance is one that gets used quite a bit. But the easy way to describe it is basically, it's like how far away is something you're talking about on your site from all these other things that you talk about on your site? And that's some of the things they can help you do. I think you're going to see a lot more of these types of tools come out. It's not our main area of focus within demand sphere, we do, we use embeddings quite a bit, but we use it for other things. But this is, I think, one of the easiest. It's not an expensive tool. You know, anyone can very easily start, you know, playing with that to understand that some of the things that we're talking about.
- [23:15]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, I, I can. I think what I'm hearing you say is it's. It's not necessarily because. But I am seeing, like if you consider them ranking factors or ranking factors is even like the best term anymore, is how much traffic's coming to their site, how many backlinks are coming to that. That page maybe, or that we're talking about a specific page. So traffic to the page, links to the page. But the biggest call out I see is. And we saw this maybe in the last like 18 months, give or take maybe a little bit longer. Google just unindex stuff. Like, they're just unindex, like thin content, low content. And you know, really you need to. I feel like that weights the site down. Like, the more pages that you have that are thin content or are not really driving the link equity through the site, it kind of becomes friction. If you were aerodynamic, what are, you know, so. So the more clustered you get your site, the faster it'll just scream to the top of the search engines. And we're still kind of in that pruning concept. Is there anything else you could add color into that area?
- [24:36]
Ray
Yeah, we. So we really started seeing this probably about four or five years ago in particular, where, you know, you look at the data and it's like this happened with core vitals, but also just with their aggressiveness on how often they're indexing your site and so forth, you know, and it's basically the conclusion was that Google really does not want to be indexing and crawling nearly as much as they were before.
- [25:03]
Matt Bertram
Yes, yes, that's what I'm referencing.
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Ray
Yeah. And so our, what you said was exactly our biggest piece of advice to most of our clients, and in many cases still would be because, you know, most of our, our clients are going to be larger sites that have hundreds of thousands or millions of URLs. And we'll look at it and we're like, you know, you're just, you're just wasting resources and Google's looking at you like, I don't even want to touch that, you know, so reducing the URL count to the things that are going to be actually adding value to your potential customers is a thing. And it's a very big shift because before that it was all about, like, programmatic. It's a bad name because of this, but I think that there's been a shift in that too. But programmatic SEO in this context was basically like, we're going to predict potential traffic from every potential search, search term variation, understand what the search volume is and everything, and then basically generate or create content that would match that specific permutation. And that was kind of going against like, the older model of Google, which was before they got into all the semantic stuff, where it's just like, it's kind of like a just traditional NLP evaluation of your content that's long gone. That stuff doesn't, you know, like, even if it works, don't count on it. It's a totally different world now. So I think that shift has really brought about where we are today, where you, you definitely want to be focusing on only the things that are going to be relevant and organizing your content in such a way that you don't have to go, you know, too deep into your site to really explore the topic.
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Matt Bertram
So some of these larger sites, what's your, like, rule of thumb for like, crawl budget?
- [26:39]
Ray
Well, so I wish I was lucky enough to have that. Some of these sites, like, I, we can't even have that conversation yet because it's like, you know, you have more.
- [26:51]
Matt Bertram
Data than I do. So I'm asking is.
- [26:55]
Ray
It basically comes down to, first of all, like, is your site map even being completely crawled or anywhere near being completely indexed? If it's not, like, start with that. Like, we're not even at rule of thumbs at that point yet. I, I see so many. I'll see instances, for example, where you even have site maps of, you know, maybe 10 million URLs. And. But if you look at the actual number of URLs that are being indexed or crawled or getting some kind of visit, you know, it could be literally in the tens to hundred. Not on the extreme side. We've seen hundreds of millions. And it's just like, we're not talking about crawl budget, we're talking about major surgery at this point.
- [27:41]
Matt Bertram
Well, I've had a lot of those conversations when clients want to rebuild a site that's in. Net or something like crazy. And I'm like, we don't need all this. This is just a waste. We need to revamp the whole site architecture. Okay, let's switch to LLMs. Like, you've, you've got so much data.
- [27:59]
Ray
Yep.
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Matt Bertram
Give, Give like some reference points of the things you're seeing of how LLMs are behaving. Because they are kind of lazy. Is what I've seen is, is they're, they're just, you know, pulling from like the top cluster data set. And I got to be careful, like LLMs once you become sentient, like, please don't come after me. Yeah, yeah, don't kill me. You know, you're very smart, way smarter than any human. So I just gotta put that out. But like, what are you seeing of how they're behaving? Because I've seen some interesting statistics, like, you know, only recent content, like in the last, you know, 8 to 10, sorry, 10 to 12 months. Like, the content needs to be updated. I talked about previously the correlation to, you know, Google rankings. Like, what are you seeing in their behavior? Because it's becoming so personalized. It's, it's difficult, which I know you. I want to talk about your solution to track or, or get some kind of programmatic view of like, where you should be showing up or where you should be raking. Because that's where I see a lot of it going. It's like theoretical of where you should be at or what you, you know, how much traffic you should be getting. And even these theoretical models on, on some of the major platforms are outdated. Like, so a lot of this data, I can't even, I'm like, what is, what is this telling me exactly? Because it's not helpful anymore. Let's go into that shift of, you know, LLMs and how they behave and things to look for and, and then what, what your Tool does.
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Ray
Yeah. So just for some quick groundwork, probably your audience is familiar with this, but I'll just mention it just so we're.
- [29:50]
Matt Bertram
No, no, definitely do it.
- [29:52]
Ray
Yeah.
- [29:52]
Matt Bertram
Okay.
- [29:52]
Ray
So the LLM itself, you have what is typically called like the foundational model, which is the model that gets trained. You know, OpenAI has their models, Google has their Gemini models and so forth. And so these models are getting trained and they're expensive to train for various reasons and basically they're almost out of date by the minute they get released because of so much training data goes into it. So this would be the reason that, you know, before they started doing live retrieval of the search engines and so forth, which I'll talk about as the next thing that you would get things like, oh, my training data only goes until October 2023, so I don't know anything what you're talking about. And so that's because that foundational model had a training date. And so any facts after that typically would not have made it back into that. That's getting, that's starting to change now too, with different types of things. But one of the easiest ways for these companies to solve that problem was called live retrieval or grounding. And it's kind of this idea overall, which is known as retrieval augmented generation, which is basically the idea that the model itself is out of date for new things. But it does have the ability to curate and filter through information faster than most people can, can do. And so for any given topic, all you have to do is give it the ability to also search the web and access different tools the same way that you would as a human, but it's going to curate things faster for you. And so, you know, the early example of this between OpenAI and Microsoft, for example, was OpenAI got access to the Bing API to do live searches on Bing. And so now when you, you know, search for something, running shoes is one of the, you know, like what's the best set of running shoes if I'm going to be a trail running guy, you know, like, okay, so it's going to search for that and it's going to be pulling in those results from search some search index, interestingly. And I'll talk about this more later if you want to go into it, it is kind of a rabbit hole as well. But interestingly, actually Bing is not the main index being used anymore, even though it is still being used. Sometime we could talk.
- [31:58]
Matt Bertram
Are you, are you talking about Common.
- [31:59]
Ray
Crawl is in there as well? They're building their own nanx but actually, Google is being used way more. Yeah. Than people realized.
- [32:07]
Matt Bertram
I have a graph that's showing a lot of that's being pulled from that. Yeah. I would tell you when that integration happened, we had to really take a look at some of the legacy clients we had, and a lot of them didn't have being Webmaster tools even set up.
- [32:25]
Ray
Yep.
- [32:26]
Matt Bertram
And, and so that, that was, that was a, that was a big opportunity to, to unlock some stuff. I, I feel like what I'm starting to do and I, I don't know what you're seeing. You're, you're interacting with a number of these speakers. You're just on the speaking circuit. A lot is like, I'm starting to tune custom GPTs for my team to use on top of the foundational model to correct or to accommodate our workflow of how things are being done. I've found that plus the rag. And also the update of logic across different searches and then organizing into projects. You can really, I mean, you got some real leverage now. And I've seen, and I'm sure you're probably doing this on the back end because I've seen what some other platforms are doing, but I'm starting to use it a lot for data analysis and pulling some of those things together. And I'm looking at some agentic agents to do this workflow for us, to give us the output. Because there's a lot of manual graphics grabs and putting stuff, putting data in. But I'm finding some really interesting outputs that are happening. Y' all built this into some SaaS tools. Tell me. Let's go into the next phase of kind of what to look for with the LLMs.
- [34:03]
Ray
So what I am always very clear to, especially when we're talking about search, there are, up until even right now, people will typically talk about traditional search and then AI search. And traditional search is basically what they say anything is on Google. And an AI search is L. And the LLM thing. And what we always say is like, it's all AI search. There's no, there's no such thing as traditional. Like, when you're talking about traditional search, I think everyone's still kind of like having nostalgia for the 10 blue links which have been gone forever.
- [34:32]
Matt Bertram
The, the, the Google I, I, I played with it just a little bit, but I am like, when they make this switch to the, the new Google AI interface or whatever. AI mode.
- [34:43]
Ray
Yeah.
- [34:44]
Matt Bertram
I mean, basically Google's saying old search is dead. Like, I mean it really.
- [34:49]
Ray
And that's coming very often.
- [34:50]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [34:52]
Ray
I Mean, it's, it's here in the US it just hasn't been fully turned over.
- [34:57]
Matt Bertram
They're going, they're doubling down on YouTube. That's what I see. They're, they're totally doubling down on YouTube.
- [35:01]
Ray
I mean, YouTube is incredible. Yeah, for sure. And then obviously there's like Reddit and you know, everything else being pulled in there too. So it's all AI search now. So really it's, it's not a question anymore of traditional search versus AI search. It's more a matter of what is the interface between you and AI and AI search engines. And so one interface is what we call Google, which is increasingly not the traditional serp, although this traditional serps are still getting a ton of traffic. Now we're going to see a emerging to your point, between these two things. AI mode and the SERPs are going to like meld because there's a lot of ecosystem things that are still happening in the SERPs that Google has billions of dollars invested into. Think about merchant center, shopping, flights, job ads, hotel. Like there's a lot there that they're not just going to like peace out on. So, but the question is going to be what's that going to look like within the context of AI LLM type interfaces being the primary interface there?
- [35:56]
Matt Bertram
You know, well, the personalization, like how you know, based upon someone's past histories and the things that they've said to the LLM, it's going to customize an answer to you. So the only way I can see around this is you need to know exactly who your customer is and you need to be speaking to them on all levels because, and then you can't, you can't worry about everything else. You're not going to get everything else. You just want to own as deep as you can that topical authority, that, that, that silo or that vertical and just, you know, not try to claim everything.
- [36:36]
Ray
Exactly. And, and so we've done some of this in our work. So the way our company is set up, I know I haven't talked about our company too much, but the way we're set up is we have our platform, we have demand, demand spheres like the company, and then we have demand Metrics, which is our core analytics engine. And then we have a couple of different pipelines. One pushes everything into BigQuery powered data, BigQuery powered data warehouses. And then we have another pipeline called Pros Vector, which is our own internal rag pipeline. And we do a lot of different things with that from a service perspective. We have a SaaS offering, but we also provide managed services to help that implementation. Then we also have solutions consulting with that too. And so what we're seeing, that allows us to see a lot of interesting things that we would not see if we're just a tool vendor. And it helps us to differentiate quite a bit with our larger customers as well. And so one of the things that is, I think an untapped thing, but we're starting to hear a lot more about this and we've gotten pulled into some of these as well, is thinking about, you know, what you're talking about is understanding your ICP and building that profile around your ICPs. And your SEO team may not be, I mean they should be, but they may not be the best group of people to articulate what your ICP is. Your set of Personas is. I mean you have an entirely different set of teams that that's their whole job. Hopefully your product team is all over that, but a lot of times they're not. But you know, what are the sources of your ICP data and how are you going to integrate those back into your search campaigns, your search operations? And so this would be anything from all of your CRM, all of your Zendesk, all of your reviews, all like there's tons and tons of data that every company has about these things that need to be getting integrated from a pipeline perspective into your entire product and search strategy. And that's something that I think is going to be a big deal more and more and you're going to, you're going to get a lot more leverage from a search. If you're a search person talking to these teams, when you're talking about these ICP based Personas from a monitoring perspective, as a data guy, it's very interesting because you basically have two different ways of looking at it. We do, you know, our main business from a data acquisition perspective is what we just call like naked monitoring of the index and the responses as they are. Now we do also have the capability and do some surprisingly haven't had as much demand for it yet, but I think that's going to change. We do do some like memory based monitoring where you're basically incorporating everything that you know about your ICP into the monitoring scenarios and building out system prompts and everything else that can help guide what those results are going to look like. It's never going to be perfect, it's never going to be one to one, but you can get some really interesting insights out of that too.
- [39:20]
Matt Bertram
I would love for you to go a little bit deeper, just anonymize any of the clients. But what are some of the. Just interesting insights. Good, bad, whatever. Of as you've helped do some of these implementations and been working closely with these enterprise clients, what are you seeing? Like, what are you. As you kind of open up the hood, what are you seeing under the hood? You know, good, bad, ugly.
- [39:46]
Ray
On the good side, what I am seeing, and I guess this is more of like a general trend, but the search teams are kind of undergoing a resurgence and importance. You know, they're, they're getting questions from their board about search strategy around stuff that just never happened before. And everyone's getting pushed into getting really good at understanding AI. And so what we're, what that's turning into is a lot of interest in new budget getting unlocked. Where things get tricky and interesting for them very quickly is, okay, now I'm, I'm being told I have to have an AI strategy. And like, where are we on AI? It's like, well, what do you, how do you even know what to look for? Like, what do you, what is the basis of your prompt research and your prompt strategy? And, and again, this goes back to really understanding your users, but also understanding the data sets that are available. You know, and so that's one of the things that we've really doubled down on on that side of things. We've been very successful on the data side for helping companies to very quickly get a feel for the research side of things on the prompts and the different types of things that are going to be querying these models. And we're seeing that, you know, it's, it's. Companies are not nearly as visible as they might have assumed they were. And so that's, it's good in the sense that you're surfing that in, surfacing that insight. It's bad in the sense that a lot of companies, I'm talking like Global Fortune 50 companies, and you start interrogating the reasons why they're not as visible as they are. And it goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, where it's like, oh yeah, we're just blocking all the, the bots. That's it. And these are not, these are not publishers. These are like transactional businesses. Like your content, like Google's already. You're not blocking Google bot. I published a, a flowchart on this about a week ago that, you know, it was kind of interesting. And basically it came down to, do you think that you need to be blocking these bots? Yes or no? No. Okay, good. We're on the same page. Yes. You do think that. Okay. Are you blocking googlebot? No. Okay, good. If you are, do you realize that these, all of these, you know, ChatGPT and everybody else, they're already indexing Google anyway, so they're getting your content one way or another. It's just a question of whether or not they show your results in their interface because you're blocking them. And so the cat's out of the bag. You know, it's tough for certain industries like publishers, but it is what it is. And so, you know, I see some weird stuff like that too.
- [42:10]
Matt Bertram
So, I mean, a lot of these. Well, there's a lot of increased, with whatever factors you want to say, geopolitical, anything like that. There's a lot more cyber attacks. And so people are just trying to clean up the traffic that that's coming to their site because they don't know what it is. And a lot of these LLMs are on rotating IP addresses. Right. So you can't just like whitelist it on your server. And so I don't know, I mean, what, what was the answer? Like, if I feel like you want to make it as easy as possible to use as little crawl budget as possible to give them the, the best roadmap to, to leverage your data and not have them to jump through hoops to, to figure it out, like, I feel like they're going to go, like I said, the laziness is like the easiest, quickest path.
- [42:57]
Ray
Totally. Yeah.
- [42:58]
Matt Bertram
And so, yeah, yeah, send me that article. I'd love to take a look at that. What else? We're getting close to time here. I would love to here. Kind of one of the things that LLMs love to know is how you're different from your competitors. Right. That's a big transactional term. I would love to have you kind of position demand sphere in the space. That's why I included you in the Search Engine Journal article, because I feel like people are still using the old tools. And so I would love to kind of hear it from you of how you feel that you're different from what's currently on the market.
- [43:46]
Ray
Sure, yeah, I appreciate the question. So it depends on which set of axes you're using to define the different types of things. Things are moving so fast now that two years ago I would have given you a different answer or a different set of categories. And I would right now, or I would maybe caveat things a little bit more than I do now just because things are Moving so fast. But basically we've been in business for 15 years and so we came out of the search world, you know, 15 years ago. It was all about rank tracking and content analysis and everything. So we've done all that for 15 years and still do a great job at it. That being said, it's not about rank tracking anymore. So when you're comparing the solutions that are in that space, we don't even call it that anymore. We, it's been SERP analytics, you know, and SERP analytics versus rank tracking are two different, very different things. Rank tracking is basically just looking at generally like what is your positioning within the organic rankings and also look at SERP features in terms of like positional stuff. Potentially if you have a tool that does that more broadly on the SERP visibility side of things, it goes into all sorts of additional factors. Talking about some of this stuff that I was talking about before, billions of dollars are spent and consumed every year on shopping results and shopping ads and hotel ads and bookings and all sorts of things that are happening within the SERP feature. And there's an entire set of share of voice modeling that happens within all these different things that are impacting user behavior. So when people get, you know, bent out of shape about zero click searches, they're not really factoring all this stuff into that, you know, equation. So one of the things that we do from a data perspective is we are capturing the shape of the SERP visually and showing what is impacting user behavior. And that is all about again, there is no traditional search anymore, it's all AI search. So if you take this type of interface, SERP interfaces, as the largest attention driving and traffic driving source on the Internet, we're in there all day long looking at that data and measuring that and helping companies to understand, understand how that's relevant to their business. So that's a big part of what we do. And so you know, if you look at like from a differentiation perspective, there's really only a few companies out there that go to the level that we do. And you know, obviously within that space there's going to be all different types of differentiation. Our thing is all about building unified view across disparate data sources. So we integrate GA4, we integrate search console because that unlocks a lot of opportunities for understanding your market much better than you would have otherwise. And then our solutions, you know, provision on top of that, the fact that we can build new solutions on top of all this data very quickly, we have a whole team of data engineers that is very good at this. That's, that's one of our other major ones on the what people would kind of typically consider like pure AI side of things. You know, we're talking about like ChatGPT, perplexity obviously now AI mode and Gemini and so forth. We have a whole monitoring solution around that too. And so we're doing very rich monitoring around that. And again, for us to differentiation on that is not only are we doing that, we're also tying it all the way back to what's happening within these larger indexes, whether it's Google being the largest one, but also we're looking at Bing and other indexes too. So there is a lot more interplay happening between those two worlds than is commonly understood. And so we spend a lot of our time educating our, our market and our users about how to really take advantage of a lot of that, you know, interchange that's happening.
- [47:15]
Matt Bertram
And so I wanted to drill down on, on one area. Would you feel that with SERP analytics it's more important to look at how you're doing and like your share of voice? But do you think compare? Because I'm seeing this from a lot of CMOs. They want to know like scorecard wise how they're doing versus their top whatever, competitors. And that was a big component of rank tracking. Right. Like we're doing better than them, you know, and now it's a lot harder to see it. And so how would you frame that up to an executive team of how we're doing versus like the market? Because, well, the market's constantly changing, so the only point of like reference is how we're doing. Like if the waves are going like this, where are the boats at?
- [48:02]
Ray
Right, yeah, no, exactly. That's a great question. And I think you have to. We do. So the share of voice, competitive share of voice, is something that is a huge part of our platform. And I think we have probably the best and most granular version of it out there. It's very customizable and adapts to your data and that. So that's really good for the things that, you know, you're tracking. But what it also does that a lot of others don't is it takes a market level view on things too. And so even if you're not tracking it, it's still going to show you who is affecting your share of voice and who is affecting what your users are seeing. And you may not even have them on your radar. And so that can get again, very granular and very detailed, but a lot of times there are things that are going to limit your visibility. No matter how good you are from a competitive standpoint, you could be beating every single one of your competitors and you still are only going to get to a certain level of visibility because there's other sites out there like Wikipedia, Amazon, you're never going to beat them. And so you have to understand what that looks like as well. And so we have a ton of data on that. And understanding that and how to use those sources to your advantage is something that is a really important thing too. So you have to look at both.
- [49:16]
Matt Bertram
Awesome. As we kind of wrap up here, what is one unknown secret of Internet marketing? Maybe you can repackage. Something we talked about is a huge takeaway for people that are trying to understand and orient themselves to all the changes happening today.
- [49:39]
Ray
This was, I get this every once in a while and the best answer I can give on this is, even though I'm a data guy, is very non technical and it's basically be as remarkable as you can be be. You know, it's, it's kind of like when I moved to Silicon Valley in 2010, you know, networking was not something that came naturally. And the best advice I had around that was the best way to, you know, have fun at all these different Silicon Valley parties and everything is to be working on something that is solving cool problems that people want to talk about and people will just come up to you and find you. And so it's the same way on the Internet. People are very simple creatures at the end of the day or drawn to the light, you know, and so like do things that are generating, you know, that light of remarkability or whatever you want to call it and you'll get the attention that you need and it's just a matter of organizing that into a company wide campaign level. Do it on all the time. You can't ever just like launch something and just expect it to pay dividends, you know, for months and months. You have to be doing it over and over again.
- [50:38]
Matt Bertram
Awesome. I like that. So what, Ray, is the best way for people to get in touch with you? Follow your word work and check out demandsphere.com is a great place to, to start. We'll put that link in the show notes. I know you're pretty active on LinkedIn. Is there anything else that people should be looking out for on stuff you're working on?
- [50:57]
Ray
Yeah, for sure. Demandsphere.com and LinkedIn are the two places where they're most active. We just launched our events page on demandsphere.com as well. So it's just right at the top of the menu if you I love going to events because I like talking to people in person whenever I can, and so it's one of the main reasons I do it. So, you know, I'm all over the world most of the time, so there's a decent chance that I'll be kind of near you if you ever want to, you know, connect at one of those events. And doing a lot more webinars and stuff too, so that's usually a good way to kind of hear what we're talking about these days.
- [51:31]
Matt Bertram
Yeah. And as a attendee of one of the demand sphere breakout events from SEO Week, he put together a great event, really enjoyed it, met a lot of great people, learned a lot of great stuff, so really enjoyed that. So everyone, it sounds like ChatGPT is becoming Google faster than Google's becoming ChatGPT because Google is doubling down on YouTube and while they're trying to become Amazon. So the market's changing really, really rapidly. So continue to stay tuned to help as we kind of guide through what to do in this crazy time. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for.