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A
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 filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. We are working on new intro, so apologies everyone. We have rebranded. We are also moving on to YouTube. So if you would go check us out on YouTube. It's pretty pitiful to be honest. I would love a review if you're getting value from this podcast. We've been doing it 12 plus years. Thank you so much for being here. Right now we're doing a series with a number of different agency owners on all the different things that are changing within the SEO landscape. So I wanted to bring on another SEO agency owner, Salman Timothy. Welcome to the show.
B
Thank you so much, Matt. Super excited to be here and I love talking to veterans like yourself. So this is going to be fun.
A
Yeah. Well, why don't you just kind of set the table on what you're seeing in, in the changing world of digital marketing and SEO and we'll kind of get started from there.
B
Yeah. It's funny. You've been doing this for 10 plus years. So are we. And I was just saying off the stage that every year of this last 10 years we've been seeing changes. It hasn't stopped. Right. So I don't see this any different from being in the, in the, in the, in the weeds. We know that every year Google always rolled out a different update. So everything we did, we were like, oh, screw that, doesn't work anymore. Throw it away. We need long form content. Oh, no, we don't need that anymore. We need question, answer content. Oh, we don't do that anymore. We do this now. Right? Like we, it's not about the, it's not about the quantity of the backlinks. It's the intent of the backlink. It's this, it's that, it's zero click. It's like, okay, like, did we ever get a day off? You know?
A
No.
B
We didn't get a week off. So. So right now what we're dealing with is fundamentally the way that we, you know, search or look up information has changed. And I think it's a natural progression of. We got tired of clicking on the blue links and doing our own assessments and our own summaries in our brains on. Well, I clicked on 10 links and 10 different things came up and nine out of the 10 was this. So I guess, you know, we were coming to conclusions on our own. Now ChatGPT will just summarize the 10 blue links and tell you one sentence what it is. So why would we go and do what we used to do? Right. So there's a fundamental shift in the way that we changed. We changed the way we, we look up information, we make buying decisions. So to kind of give you. What I'm seeing every day is that the searches became prompts and prompts are now in three different forms. Right. The top of funnel proms, the middle of funnel problems, and then the bottom of funnel prompts. And we talk about long tail keywords. Well, we have long tail prompts and. And there's no two people searching the same. It has become so different that if, if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably the 1% of people that know what's going on with the industry. You know, that sitting around anymore is not going to work. We have to change. We need to create a different experience so that LLMs can see our content. Right. Can understand what we're talking about, and then hopefully put us in the top of the little summary of who to work with if they have this problem.
A
Yeah. I can tell you from the clients that I've been working with that have like reached out to us, we've landed some really big clients recently at ewr, which is the sponsor of this podcast that keeps it going. So thank you for 12 plus years of sponsoring and funding this. We have a lot of people that used to run a lot of paid ads.
B
Yep.
A
To landing pages without videos or anything on those landing pages or a B testing it. And that used to work really well. You could just throw a lot of money at stuff. You could run ads to landing pages. Google was like the biggest part of the bucket. Maybe you run a little bit of Facebook ads, maybe do some retargeting. You know, you're talking about building a little bit of funnel here. Maybe you're dripping emails, maybe you're not, or text messages. And SEO was typically an afterthought from a lot of the clients that we're seeing recently. And now you're trying to play catch up of not just like years of not doing SEO, but now you're into entity SEO, you're into gio, you're into a. Oh, like, you know, I, I've kind of coined the term LLM visibility because I think AI visibility is like the broader kind of subset of that. And then I think it's going to be multimodal in the future. Like it's going to be on Any device. Like, how do you get in front of people? But, but it's all really about. And, and where I started, if you look at, like, some of the books I've written, it was all about personal branding. It was about branding. It was. And, and so it's like amp, that effect of, of who you are as an entity and then how you do that and the execution of that is where you get into the tactics. And, you know, it's still in debate. I mean, my LinkedIn, it just blows up with just different people on different sides of, like, SEO's dead. You know, it's all Gio. It's just the same thing. It's a little bit different. Like, everybody's fighting about it, right. And I. And it constantly is changing, right? The LLMs are adapting, they're learning. Like they're leaning on Google, then they're not. And then, you know, Reddit's important, then it's not like it. Yeah, it's a. Like you said, it's a constantly moving target. And, you know, what is the flavor of the day today? But the one thing that sits behind it all is if you're building high quality, relevant content for the user, no matter how they're. They're finding it through search, whether it's social media or paid ads or SEO or LLMs or whatever it is, they're still getting to that piece of content. And you got to focus on, is this a good piece of content or not? Does it help the user? So I think the user experience has changed. But, like, what is the core of what you're offering? That really should still be the focus. It shouldn't be about all the tips and tricks. And that's why we're really trying to change the name. Like the unknown secret center Marketing should have been really like a marketing package that you bought, like a Frank Kern sort of, you know, kit or something like that. We never ended up launching that, even though a lot of people have wanted us to do that. And who knows, maybe it's. Maybe it's still in the cards, but it's really about communicating effectively and keeping your data clean so the LLMs understand what's going on and who you are, just like the search engines. And I mean, that's why the LLMs don't use Facebook, because the data is really noisy and there's different topics and, you know, information's not being organized correctly. I think that's what it really comes down to is clean data.
B
So 100%. I definitely agree with you there. If we did proper SEO. Like you said, there's a lot of brands that didn't do it because they were getting traffic from referrals or whatever it is, influencers, you name it. But if we had schema markup, really good FAQ section, built it out really well, meaning the answers were clear and concise, then Chat GPT or Claude or Gemini GRA can read it and understand and summarize it to the users. Now, if you have a website that doesn't have an FAQ section, that doesn't have just answering questions that your users have, because even in Google, they've already said that before ChatGPT made all this change, that you need to be answering questions. You need to be answering questions. People have questions, they go to Google, ask questions, and then they created people also asked. I mean, we were seeing all of this and we were answering those questions that Google said you should be answering on Klein's website. Right. It's like it kind of sort of came to a conclusion that this is where the world is going. And now I think we just took it to another level. Yeah. Because of the fact that prompt, you can write it incorrectly, put in different orders, you can, you know, you can just be really dumb about it and not even act like you know what you're talking about in Chat GPT or Claude or whatever it is, Perplexity will find they'll read your mind and then give you an answer. So at this moment, the website owner, the webmaster, has to do even a greater job explaining what you do. You have to be even more focused on the quality. Like you said, it has to be even more granular about what you. Who do you serve? Who do you not serve? Put things in a table format. You know what I mean? Do you help hospitality? Then say yes. Do you help manufacturing industry? Say yes. Because then ChatGPT reads and say yes, they do. Because that's the level of details people are asking.
A
Yeah, I mean, what is Google's like? Right? They had two missions. One not be evil, and they remove that one, and then the other one is organizing all the information in the world. Right. And so that's what SEOs are doing, is helping organize that, that information out there. And that's what the LLMs are looking for, is nicely organized information. So if you can help them find that information about you, you're more likely to show up. And I think that that's really what the whole debate is about, is, you know, how are you communicating? Like, well, you know, also, like, you need to understand what your brand is and who you serve. And that's one of the things that I've seen with LLMs is like, you can't be an expert on everything and you can't serve everyone. Like, pick a focus, right? These are things that I feel like Google's been with the, like, people also ask, like you said, have been leading us in this direction for a long time. They have the data, they see where the users are going and they're, they're trying to help use SEOs to organize the information on the web so that the right brands show up. And so again, I mean, if people ask me like, what do you do? Right? Because I mean, I don't even think my wife understands like what I do. Like, I don't think she's like, what is SEO? It's like you're organizing information online to make it more useful. And I think if that's like the guiding star into what you're doing, it, it, it helps you answer what you should be doing and what you shouldn't be doing and what, what's the quality of what you're doing and what she, what you don't have it. Like, I can give you actually a lot of examples of things that you shouldn't be doing. And then you look at the people that are winning and you go, okay, they're winning in your category for what? Why are they winning? What, what are they doing? How are they positioning themselves? Like, I, again, I don't think that there are any really secrets. Even LLMs can give you insights though, that, that you wouldn't normally see or trends. And so I think that how we work is absolutely changing and taking a bunch of fractured information. And that's what search did, right? Search fractured, where people are finding information all over the place and then it's our job to grab it all and put it back together, I guess. Yeah.
B
Practical tips are we cannot ignore any word on our website or any sections or the speed being mobile friendly and all the things that we already should be doing as good SEO. I think AEO is just good SEO plus, you know, things that you should be doing.
A
So, so let's go into that, like all these different definitions, what are the definitions of SEO that you're using? And, and then how would you define them each? I would just, I would love to hear your vocabulary terminology.
B
I, I, I just, I, I love your LLM visibility. I think that's a really good way of describing it. But the way that we've been using it as probably people are coining it Is AEO Answer Engine Optimization. Because it's kind of, it includes Google, it includes, yeah, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and all of that. You can do geo generative engine optimization, you can do something like that. But I don't think it really truly matters as the industry, like you said, is not clear on what is it that they want to call it. I know for a fact that we are no longer just going and clicking on blue links. That's where our clients are coming to us and saying, hey, we need to show up in ChatGPT. So what we did is we built an engine. We've always had our own technology that goes and can create the prompts that customers are going to type in in these three different levels. Top of funnel prompts. What are the companies that are good at X, what are the top companies? Right? So we can go and get those prompts and then we will run those prompts and we can identify which brands are being shown as a result by these systems. I get leads from Chat GBT every single day. So I create a lot of training resources around this. So I said if you can figure out the prompts, that's about half the problem. So top of funnel, middle of the bottom of funnel and then we find out the brands that are being mentioned and then we can go and do the same good old SEO research. Why are they showing up? And those are citations essentially. And so we can reverse engineer what they're using to get to those answers so our clients, the people that you know, we're called to serve, can actually get the same result. It is reverse engineerable, but the problem is there's no systems out there who can go track the prompts, the results of the prompts, what ranking that the results are coming up with and how do you change the rankings of these things? But the good thing is it can be changed. We're doing it every single day. And then once you have that information, how do you track it so that you can make sure your clients are increasing right in those answers? They legitimately should have the option to do it because they are good businesses. It's just that like I said, a lot of people ignored proper SEO. They could be a hundred million dollar business, but the one that Chat GPT shows could be a little 2 million dollar company with great marketing guy like you, you know what I'm saying? So they're like, hey, it show up and they're freaking out. How are all these people finding you? But $100 million company has never done anything. So they just waited it out.
A
Yeah. So I want to parse out some of the things that you said. You know, first, like, I, I, I do have a score that, that I've kind of been putting together, and I think that we're on a similar line of thinking from a LL visibility standpoint. So really, the LLM visibility for me is I've broken it apart and saying, okay, there's things that benefit SEO that also benefit AI, and there's kind of this Venn diagram overlap I'm really looking at. Okay, let's just look at the LLMs and what matters to them. Now, certainly there's other things that you can do, but I think that's where the geo, the, you know, aeo, like, like it gets, it gets messy and it gets blended. And you know, I would say geo see ao geo. Like, you know, like GEO is kind of, I would say more of what I'm doing, but I'm really focusing on the generative engines. I'm focused more on the LLMs and like, okay, let's, let's get a score that we can focus on, on how well you're doing from like a AI readiness standpoint. Right. And there's a lot of tools out there that are starting to pop up. There's a couple. Like, a buddy of mine just got into Y Combinator, he's doing one of these tools as well, where they basically track the rankings and average it out over the searches. You know, that's not even like a perfect answer in my opinion, because your LLM. Right. And okay, so like, if we, if we scoot back a little bit and look big picture, LLMs don't matter today or not as much now. I think they matter on the reputation management side because I'm actually seeing some of the data from like, similar web and stuff. When people go to a site, guess where they go right after the site. Where the, where the, where the referral traffic's going. The referral traffic's going from the site to the main source of ChatGPT or, you know, Gemini or whatever. Perplexity. So people are going to check out a site. They're finding it from an ad or however you're finding it, and some of them are finding it through the LLMs, but they're going to check it with their ChatGPT or whatever they're using there. I think everybody's going to have like a personal LLM that they're going to trust and believe in. Okay. And I think that, you know, really, how do you get inside the training data? Of that LLM that you're talking to, like you talked about, middle of the funnel, top of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, I think is a great kind of format and also a great kind of matching component of what you're doing. But the personalization component, when you're doing keyword tracking, even all these tools that are coming out like your LLM, if we did the same prompt search and I did the same prompt search based on my instruction set of what saved about me is going to get different results based on location, based on interest, based on previous searches. And so attribution is probably one of the biggest or hottest topics out there. Of like, well, you know, are any of these tools and all the major tools are coming out with new, new ways to track stuff. But already the old ways to track stuff was horrible in itself. Like, I mean, you can't trust, like I had to look at three different tools and always triangulate what the answer was of what I'm going to try to do because they all don't give you the same data. There's no consensus data of actually what it is and where it's pulling from. And so, you know, I would love to understand more about, you know, what, what are the tools? We're building a couple of tools that are not like, we're not trying to, like, we're not trying to sell, sell the tools, but we're working on, on the back end for stuff we're doing internally. I would love to understand kind of what you're doing, some of the use cases, maybe some of the case studies that, that you found and just kind of share notes. I think that that's what people like on this call the most is you get to share notes of what's working for people. And you know, everything used to be very close to the best. When you're doing SEO, you're like this strategy, I don't want to get it out there. But now I think everything's like out there and there's multiple points of view. And so, yeah, so I just love to dig into that a little bit more.
B
Definitely, I agree. Everything is out there. The problem is who do you trust? What do you take? Because you only have limited time to implement. So right now I think the tool business is relatively early. There's just no tool out there that's going to give you what you need. There's no semrush or ahrefs that's A already or G already. So that's my take on tools. We have a business that we built years and years ago, it's called ClickX. We built our own tool to onboard clients and do automated reporting and things of that nature to help us scale as a business. So we have every API that you can imagine already connected to it. We have chat GBT, perplexity, we have email marketing, HubSpot, you name it. And so we're able to just expand onto our own tool set that we built and that's how we're figuring out what is happening in the marketplace. So we could run any and all searches in Perplexity, Claude chatgpt and actually see the answers that it provides. So then we can take that and then say, hey, here's where my customer is. And if it's giving you 1, 2, 3 and 4, then we assume that that is what it's giving to everybody. You're absolutely right. My LLM knows me, who I am, what I like, and it tells me, oh, you're a health freak and you like to eat healthy. So here's your three options. Because it doesn't tell me the poor, you know, restaurants. When I ask for a restaurant, it does it automatically. But for the most part, I think we can use the generic answers to find out where our customers are and then figure out how we can rank them. We already do that today. And we also can see 1, 2, 3 or 4, who are the brands that are showing up. The best part, I think as an SEO, which maybe the general public can't figure out, is going and finding the links that those websites have where they're mentioned. Those are the hard part because Chat GPT doesn't have anything to go by like Google, so they use something else to figure out why, in what order do these things matter? Right? So there's the, the authority engine, basically the recommendation engine. And how do we really figure out what, how do we influence this? And so our research has been we have to go get the same links that the other guys that are showing up. Doesn't matter the size of the company, they have consistent citations, they have quality data. And so the two things, just like SEO did back in the day, good quality links and frequent mentions of your brand in different places are the exact same factors that they're using it. What is interesting, Matt, is that just because you show up in AI overview, you don't automatically show up in Chat, CBT or Perplexity. We are seeing three different visibility percentages depending on the same prompt. Our companies are mentioned different times. So one of them actually, from our examples, Google is like the worst chatgpt keeps showing up more and more particular brand and perplexity might be less. And Google's like, I don't know, maybe Google has more brands to show so our clients or people that we're working with aren't showing up as much. It hasn't been the opposite where you're showing up so much in Google, not in other places. So we were under the impression that they're taking the blue links, just being honest, like I'm being an old school SEO and then just creating a new version of answers, you know what I mean? Like, hey, people don't want to click on that. They want this. So let's just take all of this and just give it to them. But no, they're not doing that. They're giving me completely different answers than what Google's AI overview is doing.
A
Yeah, I think it's around the logic of how they're figuring out what the value of a brand is. And so now you're not thinking about. And like there's been a couple studies, I believe it's AHREFS that came out with the study. It was like something like 21 or 27% of the answers that were being shown weren't even indexed. Okay. It's like so, so like, I mean we know Google doesn't follow the no follow. So like they're, I mean, and I asked Chad gbt this after I saw that study and it was like, no, like it has to be indexed and blah, blah. And I'm like, okay, well where are, where's all this data that you're coming from? And a lot of it is getting ingested that might not be indexable. Right. Like that's, that's in the, the training sets. But how they're determining what brands to show is a completely different like workflow or process. I mean they're like, they're intelligent. Like they are intelligent and they're using intelligence like a really intelligent person would do to research a brand. So they're finding all kinds of different stuff they're looking at. They're not just mapping Google now. I think at the beginning when they just opened up the grounding trading sets, they started to do that because that's kind of the, what you lean on. You're like, hey Google, like I'll lean on that. But, but I, I'm seeing the LLMs even evolve into how they're searching for information and presenting information find it. Which is really fascinating to, to follow. I would love to hear more kind of case studies or things that you're seeing in the data.
B
Yeah. So going back to it, it's, it's interesting because some, sometimes if the company is well known, they're going to get mentions more because there's just a lot more citations of that brand out there and the consistency is there. And other times, if you're in a very niche market, like, you know, we have a client that's in the. They do training and equipping, you know, professionals for certain certifications and all of this stuff. Nobody does that stuff. It's a very niche, you know, HR people look for it. Those people are. They get found more, but there's not a lot of searches. So it was easy to get that particular company to get found. It's either, you know, some of these big testing firms or boom, this consulting company. Right. So it wasn't hard for them. We have executive search companies that we're helping with and, and when you have a muddy, I would say, extremely competitive industry, it's harder to break through that, just like it is now Google, because the bigger the brand, as you said earlier, it's going to, it's going to be hard to beat them. So what we're finding out is how do we make a small brand show up in these, in these things? The only thing we can control are these brand mentions that we're talking about. Right. So one of the things that we've found, believe it or not, this is like pure internal testing and research is this podcast right here is considered media. And so when I show up to this podcast, it is actually being transcribed. If you put this on Apple or on Spotify or anywhere YouTube, it's getting transcribed and it's getting used in AI training. And so. And it's considered another citation, another brand mention. And so if you want to follow the latest of a brand, just follow the founder like you, and then listen to what they're saying. So I think ChatGPT is going to have better answers, or cloud or perplexity, you name it, because it's actually consolidating all these things, whereas Google wasn't doing that. It's actually studying you and I as a brand and following us around and studying everything that we put out there and updating its own. Does that make sense research? Because we've influenced the answers or we've influenced the order in which the companies are showing up by showing up in media. So we've then began getting our customers on podcasts. It's not a clear answer. I wish I can just say, hey, you do these three Things we have our own framework. But it's things like that that I'm sharing that we're seeing is influencing the results. So a press release back in the day mattered because it was like a good quality link for a day or something. But a press release also is media and you can put in. So I have a client who launched a brand new YouTube channel and there was no mention of this company in chat GPT. After they launched a YouTube channel, they put a couple of video, you go to ChatGPT. Well, we put out a press release about the channel and all of this. Then you go to ChatGPT and it knows everything about this, this YouTube channel. So we're like, hey, I think we're trying to figure out how they're doing it. The good thing is, I think it's the exciting part that they wrote an algorithm. So just like Google algorithm, if you can figure that out, right? Like it's not impossible to figure it out, but I think it's easier than actually people make it out to be. So we're doing good old outreach, brand mentions, right? Quality press mentions and podcast interviews and things that we can influence that are then able to then change what they know about you. If LLMs don't know about what you do because you give it more no information. We don't have structured data on your website. You don't have any content, right? You don't have schema markup, you're not answering questions, then it doesn't matter. We're not going to show up. That's sort of like your foundational things. And then from there you just got to go keep working on creating content on YouTube and making sure the same exact answers are being done. It's a lot more content creation. However, it's totally changeable. And we're seeing, and we're tracking every day, so we're seeing how the answers are being influenced by the activity that the brand is doing.
A
Yeah, I think that was great, great points. I think that share a voice in media is key and the easiest way for most brands to do that is YouTube. You saw in the big announcement from Google, they pivoted to YouTube. I mean again, they see where these things are going. I think that they're under a lot of pressure to come up with new subscription models with ads that are kind of moving away and they're trying to, I mean, I don't know if we're going to see ads in LLMs. I, I mean they say they're not, but I, I, you know, it remains to be seen. You know I, I think press releases are phenomenal as well. I think there's different places to get citations and what the training sets look like. A lot of educational based stuff. One of the interesting things that I would consider maybe a pro tip it was something that, that we learned recently as we were building out a new site was elements don't pick up iframe embeds. Okay so how many websites out there have a lot of really important content in an iframe embed? And well, it's not schema unless you, you know, if, unless you're labeling it, unless maybe you have some schema markup referencing what it is that's not going to show up. So schemas, you know, people debate on whether schemas appointed structured data. It helps build trust. And that's what Google's about is, is, is building that, that, that trust. So I think that there's a lot of stuff that that's changing and it questions your assumptions and like I love to like know what I know and then go like let me go test it, let me go see if something's different. Let me go kind of tweak it. Let me go see what, see what happens. And so I'm really enjoying the discovery process that you know, everything's different, everything's, everything's new. It's kind of like an unexplored land. I've done a couple posts, I have a newsletter on LinkedIn that I need to probably do a little bit more consistently. But you know, I did the post about it's kind of like, you know, Columbus Day. We just had Thanksgiving. I know this will be released probably in January, but we're doing this right after Thanksgiving. It's new land, it's new territory that, that is unexposed now. Certain people just inherited it. But if they're not really doing the things they need to do, they're not going to be, they're not going to maintain that ownership. And also you can't just stumble on this anymore. Like it, it's, it's very intentional. I think a lot of, a lot of what's happening. You've made some really interesting points which you know doing a press release before a campaign that you launch is, is something that's pretty standard. But seeing it in the data of you have a YouTube channel and then you're calling attention to it like there's a paper out there. Attention is everything. That kind of kicked this whole thing off with the LLMs. You're calling attention to that and then LLMs are going and checking it out, kind of swarm theory. And then they're going and checking out the podcast and then they're indexing the whole podcast and it gets into training data. That's a super interesting insight.
B
Every single one of our clients automatically are getting this level of support. It's not an add on. You don't go and say, oh, I want the traditional SEO and then can you give me this other thing? We can't. There's no way. It's all intertwined. So we have the opportunity to test all of our theories against all of our existing clients as well as the ones that are coming in by me putting out a lot of resources and content and you know, just what we're finding every single day. And it's been interesting to, to say the least because no one's ever. This is a new territory even for the, the experts of the experts. They're still figuring it out. So back to your point, Matt. Expert mentation is what we do. We've always done that. We never knew anything until we can prove something. And then, and eventually it stopped working. And I think the same exact thing is going to happen. I believe that marketers are going to ruin Chat GPT because we now know what the freak we need to do. And that means that we can't trust it like we used to trust. And right now it's probably clean. But eventually, as you know, everybody can figure out how to show their brand up there and so it's going to become more harder and some other thing is going to pop up to make, make it harder or to, to actually have the, the quality data. The, the, the more interesting thing I think is our customers do not care how, what you do. They want their answer. So I think we need to solve for the customer we are. And I don't want to be the guy that's, that's got the secret to showing up in Chat gbt. That's not the, that's not the thing. We, you and I have clients and I have hundreds of millions of companies out there. They have a specific type of customer they're trying to serve. They don't need everybody. They just need the kind of people. If you're, if you make some sort of an engine for a plane that only fits these types of planes, that's the only kind of customers are really going to help. You don't need everybody else calling you. But the problem is you need to inform these LLMs what you do and who you do it for. And the specificity of your services. And so for small businesses, you can only serve a small geographic target. So somebody in Nebraska is going to help you. If you're in Texas, you don't need the traffic from Texas or from somewhere else. So I think if we could just hone in on there's enough money to be made for everybody. That's number one. There's no, like, you're not going to miss out on it. But what we are going to miss out on if you don't have enough information about you and who you want to have as a customer and if the LLMs don't know, it cannot answer the prompt. So every time we're doing this, we measure the visibility before we start working with people and then we look at the visibility after we start working with people. It's often that their own brand isn't mentioned for the thing that you do. So if you're a real estate agent, I have just brought on a real estate client in town or where they are, they don't show up in the town. They're selling luxury homes in the town that they serve for I don't know how long, they don't show up. And you know why? Because every real estate agent has a cookie cutter website. Matt. You know this. Everybody's got the same thing, some kind of MLS search. There's no schema markup, there's no content. There's nothing about what you do. They just people that know you go to your website, it was never a funnel. It was never a top of funnel, middle of funnel. And then, oh, I want to buy a house. There was always like you said, some iframe or something of mls. And so they're like, salmon, I can't have this because If I sell $1 million house, it is enough to pay for your services for the whole year or whatever it is. Right? Like, like I was like, yeah, you're right. You know, it's like, do you see like how much money is on the table if you don't show up? It's, it's tens and thousands of dollars per month that you could be missing out because you didn't put anything about you on the Internet because, you know, word of mouth referrals and whatever is how you relied on it. And that person was like really frustrated because this is the reality, this is the new reality.
A
You know, I think it's. Marketers should do a better job of when they're presenting to clients on what the lost opportunity cost is of not utilizing. And I think you hit on that, one of the things that I, that I started to think of when you were talking and we're getting close to the end of the podcast, so I want to give you time.
B
Oh, man, Too bad.
A
Yeah, I know this has been a great discussion and I would love to keep going. I just got a hard stop here, but essentially I was on a speaking tour and there was like a VP of Coca Cola. I don't remember her name, but she said something. She said a focus beam of light attracts more moths in the darkness. Okay. And everybody understands that, that analogy that when I talk to a lot of brands, they're trying to be everything to everybody and they're trying to serve too big of an area or a specific area. And Google looks at trust. Google's. Do you really have clients in this area? Do you really serve this area? Can you really do all these things? Excellent. Because I want to give the best absolute answer. And so that's what I'm seeing happen with LLMs as a multiple is you need to get really, really clear who you are and what you do and who you serve. And you need to build content around that based on the customer journey, based on the target Persona that you're going after. And the more you get focused, you can amplify that focus. But you want to, like all of us, want to get clients that fit the box of where we serve the clients the best, the type of customers or even the type of people to people, because people do business with people that we want to work with. Like trying to serve everybody. You're going to be that jack of all trades, the expert of none. Like that, that analogy. And I'm not saying that people aren't experts in multiple things, but you got to prove that to the LLMs, you got to prove that to the search engines. And it's a lot easier to start small and expand out just like the GMBs do. So I just kind of wanted to highlight that for everybody is having a focused beam of light of what you do clarifies it for search engines, LLMs alike. Solomon, I really liked the insights you shared. I would love to have you back on. We can talk further as things continue to progress. How do people find some of these resources? Follow you, get in touch with you, hire you?
B
Absolutely. No. Happy to give all my resources away. I actually created a lot of resources around this very thing. AI visibility. I put a 45 minute free training out on the Internet. It's just a simple website. They can go to 10x10x.info literally it's free. You don't have to do anything. I don't buy anything. The reason I do that is I want to make sure that small businesses, those companies that desperately need the help, maybe they can't afford a consultant or whatever else they should know what to do so they can actually do and get to a place where they can start paying for services because there's so many business are going to be lost. It's going to be like Internet all over again. Where do I start? How do I do it? You know, people thought, talk to me and say well I can go train it myself. I said you can't. They don't take what you and I say and, and change the, the training. It doesn't do that.
A
People were trying to talk to AI in the beginning to like make it remember them and, and it doesn't, it doesn't.
B
So, so that's what I mean. Right. So things, there's some, just think simple things. We want to add value to as many people as possible. So they do that. They can go connect with me on social media but it's more about educating yourself, learning, finding the right people to help you based on the size of your businesses. But yeah, so if they want to email me, happy to help. It's all on my, that website10x.in fox awesome.
A
Well I'll put your links in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for coming on Solomon. Really enjoyed it everyone. If you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet. Well, I used to say the Internet but maybe it's LLMs. I don't know. I think that we're going to have a AI revolution here. Reach out to EWR for more revenue in your business. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked or anything we said, please leave a comment. I do read all the comments. Please leave a review. Follow us, Check us out on YouTube. It's really like I said, it's really sad. We need to do some stuff there but we're, we're working hard to make that quality content for you. We got shorts and all that sort of thing. So I'm going, we'll give you some of those to share as well. So thank you so much everybody. We appreciate it. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for.
Podcast: The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
Episode: What Actually Drives Citations in LLMs With Solomon Thimothy
Host: Matthew Bertram
Guest: Solomon Thimothy
Date: February 2, 2026
In this episode, host Matthew Bertram and guest Solomon Thimothy, both seasoned SEO agency owners, delve into what actually drives citations—and thus visibility—in large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. With the fusion of traditional SEO and next-gen AI-driven search, they explore tactical shifts, content frameworks, and actionable insights for brands and marketers wanting to win this new era of digital discoverability. The conversation is insightful and packed with practical tips, case studies, and forward-looking strategies.
This episode is a must-listen for marketers, SEO professionals, and business owners trying to future-proof their online visibility in the age of LLMs. Key takeaways include:
For anyone eager to dominate the next wave of search and ensure their business is not invisible to the emerging AI engines, this episode provides a roadmap to action and a warning to those standing still.