Loading summary
Transcript113 lines
- [00:01]
A
After 12 years of running Social Media Marketing World, I can spot the difference between two types of marketers pretty instantly. You've got the reactive marketers who come looking for quick fixes they need to solve Instagram's latest algorithm change or figure out why their Facebook ads are not working. They walk away with answers, but months later they're back in the same cycle. Then you've got the visionary marketers who come looking for the complete picture. They they want to understand how AI enhances their marketing, how paid and organic strategies complement each other, and how to build a marketing system that adapts to any change. They walk away transformed and they stay ahead for years to come. Listen to what Fadan Aladdon said after attending this conference changed my life in many ways. It changed my vision, it changed the way I was approaching my strategies in marketing and I made wonderful connections. Social Media Marketing World 2026 gives you complete AI mastery platform specific strategies for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok plus integration frameworks that connect everything together. Grab your tickets today by visiting social mediamarketingworld.info and transform your marketing approach before change forces your hand.
- [01:16]
B
Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now here is your host, Micha. Hello, hello, hello.
- [01:27]
A
Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host Michael Stelzner and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads and more sales. Today we're going to explore a little bit of AI. I'm going to be joined by Marcus Sheridan and we're not going to explore AI like I do on my AI Explored podcast. Instead what we're going to do is look at where the world is going when it comes to AI results, whether those results be ChatGPT or Google's AI or any other kind of AI. We're going to talk to a really top end content expert and we're going to get his views on where he believes the world is going so that you and your business show up in AI search results. The truth of the matter is customer behavior, consumer behavior is shifting. You probably know it yourself. You probably go to AI multiple times a day to get answers to questions as a result of it. You want to make sure your business shows up in those results and that's what we're going to talk about today. By the way, if you're new to this podcast, be sure to follow this show so you don't miss any of our future content. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Marcus Sheridan.
- [02:45]
B
Helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide.
- [02:53]
A
Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Marcus Sheridan. If you don't know who he is, you gotta know Marcus. He's the author of multiple books, including they Ask youk Answer and Endless Customers. He is an extremely popular keynote speaker. His latest venture is aitrustsignals.com the leading tool for determining if AI will recommend your business. Marcus Sheridan, welcome back to the show.
- [03:14]
B
Let's go, Stells. I don't know what number this is.
- [03:16]
A
It's a lot.
- [03:17]
B
It's a lot. And I'm happy to be here. And I certainly appreciate your community and.
- [03:21]
A
I appreciate your wisdom. So today, Marcus and I are going to expl how to show up in AI. So, Markus, for context, for some people who don't know who you are, you've been around for a long time. You used to be known as the river pools guy, then you're known as the sales lion. And then you're known as kind of a content marketer. And now obviously, you're pivoting or expanding, as I like to say, like me, into the world of AI. So given those lenses for people that don't know who you are, I would love to understand, like, from your perspective, why is visibility in AI so critical for marketers, entrepreneurs, anybody else who happens.
- [03:59]
B
To be listening in terms of the way we're found online, Mike, I think this our entire future, I mean, let's just look at the last 20 years. In the last 20 years, for the most part, you had to win over two parties as a business. Number one, you had to win over the customer. That's never going to change, right? That's always going to be true. Number two, you had to win over the search engine. And of course, the way you went over the search engine was essentially twofold. Either A, you did it through great content like content marketing or SEO. That's one way they recommended you the search engine. Or B, you gave them money, right? That's called paid ads. And that was the better part of 20 years. Suddenly we see ChatGPT enters the fray. Now we've got all these LLMs as these different platforms. And here's the part that I think so many people are still just for some reason missing out on. Because when we look at the future, do we think the future is one where we do a search or we do a query and we see dozens of blue links that we can choose from? Or is it one where we do a search, we do a query, and we get a very specific answer to our specific needs? The answer has a justification or an explanation as to why it said what it said. And then it even says to us, and, oh, by the way, we can take an action. The next step, if you would like to take that next step. Now, if you talk to anybody, Mike, they're like, it's obvious. That's where we're headed. Blue links are going to die. I'm not going to sit here and say Google's going to die. I mean, eventually will. Because all platforms do explain what you.
- [05:26]
A
Mean by blue links, because people may not understand what that means.
- [05:28]
B
Blue links, you've been clicking on for 20 years. When you go to Google, that's the blue links, and that's not your future because you don't know, really, like a blue link wasn't built for you. It was built primarily based on words that were on that screen that meet an algorithm's demand and therefore shows the thing. Why this is so powerful, though, if we look at it, Mike, it's like, you know, back in the day, if you weren't on the first page of Google, that really sucked. But hey, at least I'm on page two and I'm making progress. It doesn't work like that today. You're either recommended part of the answer or you're rejected. There's nothing in between. That's it. That's where this is so different. It's like a different way of thinking because it's like, wow, there's. It doesn't matter that I'm on. There's no page two. I'm just not there. And as everybody shifts over and I think so many are saying, well, Google's not slowing down. Come on, y'.
- [06:26]
A
All.
- [06:27]
B
I have polled every audience for the last six months that I've been with Mike in every audience. I've said, how many of you now use ChatGPT as your preferred means of finding answers online or getting what you want online? For my audiences, blue and white collar mix, 50%. What's that number going to be in six months and 12 months? We're not going back to the way legacy Google has been built, which means we have to find a way to make sure humans continue to love us. But now AI's got to love us and they got to trust us. Because they don't trust us, they're not going to recommend us.
- [07:06]
A
So. And I'll just throw in my thoughts on this because folks that listen to the show may know that I have another show called AI Explored. And I talked to lots of people over there, like Rand Fishkin. I can't remember if I talked to him here or there, to be honest with you, but I'm with you. I believe that Google is going to eventually just be the single best answer. This is the phrase I've been using for a long time. I believe that this is how it works with humans. You go to someone like I go to Marcus. If I'm interested in certain things that Marcus is an expert in, and I don't ask him to give me a list of five things. I ask him to tell me what's best, right? What is the best pool? He's going to say fiberglass. And he's going to make a case and he's going to pitch me on it, and he's going to tell me what's wrong with a traditional concrete inbound pool, which I did way before I knew Marcus. But this is kind of where we're heading, right? Because we're going to look back and we're going to say, do you remember when we had to make a choice between thousands and millions? Do you remember they used to tell us, Marcus, how many responses? That's right, 12.8 million.
- [08:02]
B
Yes, that's exactly right. And it's going to feel very, very antiquated. Humans always move towards the three Fs. One, is it faster? Two, is it more friction free? Three, will it eliminate fear? So those are really the three Fs of innovation. If you just look across the board and if you're like, hey, well, like, how do you predict so many things? How can I predict things in the future? Just look at what's going to be faster, what's going to be more friction free, and what's going to help eliminate fear. It's exactly where AI is headed. But AI realizes it has had this problem of hallucinating. It's had this problem of people thinking, oh, it gives me bad information. So every single evolution of AI and the answers you're getting is built on, hey, it wants to give you an accurate answer. It wants it to be true, it wants it to be right. It wants you to trust it like you would the greatest assistant and greatest friend in the world.
- [09:03]
A
Marcus, what happens when your business does not show up in the AI results?
- [09:07]
B
Today you might not really feel it. Tomorrow, you're going to really feel it. In a year, you're going to say, what happened to it all? Because the other problem to this, Mike, is this what happens? And this is, there's plenty of debate on this, but what happens when paid ads just aren't a play any longer? So many businesses depend on Google Ads to drive the majority of their business right now. So if everybody is shifting over to a world where, okay, I see this screen and I've got the AI summary and I've got the sponsored results and then I've got the other, all the other blue links, when we shift from that to just give me the answer. People aren't realizing this dramatically affects how the world is consuming paid ads. Now, of course, Google is trying to protect that $300 billion a year business. Yes. But we've been spoiled now for the better part of four years where we're not really seeing ads. And yes, there is debate as to are they going to inject ads into them or not. But my sense is, and I don't know how you feel about this, Mike, but my sense is that probably the one that wins is where you pay a subscription and you're not seeing any ads. And I think the majority of people are going to end up going that route because that's what they're going to want again, Faster, friction free, less fear.
- [10:23]
A
Okay, but to the question, if we do not show up in AI, you're screwed.
- [10:29]
B
You're in big trouble. You will have a major lead problem, which means you don't generate enough customers, you don't generate enough revenue, and you're left saying, I don't understand. We were so good 10 years ago.
- [10:40]
A
Folks, Marcus is issuing, and I am issuing a clarion call to you. If your business right now relies on the traditional search and paid acquisition on those channels, you have to come up with a plan because I believe it's true. And you know, at Social Media Marketing World a couple years ago, I asked people to raise their hands. I think it was actually within like a year and a couple of months and like half the audience was. No, a third of the audience was already choosing then to go to chat GPT over Google to get answers to questions. And tomorrow we don't know if it's going to be Gemini or it's going to be Claude or it's going to be chatgpt. It kind of doesn't matter. Or Grok. What matters is that consumer behavior is actually shifting. And when consumer behavior shifts, we as marketers need to pay attention. So Marcus, what in the world? Like, where do we even start? How do we prepare for this?
- [11:37]
B
The easiest way that you can look at AI Visibility. And how do I get AI to love me and to recommend me? Comes down to what we refer to as trust signals. And this goes back to why I started the company, aiitrustsignals.com what we have found is that there's very specific, again, signals that AI uses to say thumbs up or thumbs down. A trust signal is any piece of content ever produced online about your company by you or by someone else. So, for example, every single review ever written about your company by someone, positive or negative, is a trust signal. And if you look at your trust score, it's like a credit score, Mike. So there's things that ding your credit and there's things that build your credit in the world of finance, right? Well, it's the same thing with how AI is viewing your brand. So every piece of content you produce, every article on your website, all right, every video that's out there, the different tools that you have, and again, everything that is said about you, these become trust signals. And AI is getting much better at consuming all of them. So all the things, whether it's on social, whether it's on the YouTube, whether it's on your website, these are all becoming signals. But there are certain signals that matter more than others.
- [12:55]
A
Okay, so we're going to get into those signals, but before we do that, I want to set some foundation work. There are a lot of people out there claiming that they can get you ranked, quote, unquote, in AI. And I want you to talk about that a little bit. There's phrases like AI optimization. I mean, there's a bazillion of them, right?
- [13:09]
B
Listen, I don't think they're necessarily bad, but they're using the word ranked because that's what we're used to. But that's not how AI does it. AI is not ranking anyone. They. They see your brand as having an authority score on this particular subject matter or this particular area, and then you're likely to be mentioned there. Now, are there specific things that you can do that very much increase the likelihood that when somebody does a specific search that you are within the answer? Well, yes, there are ways that you can do that. The problem is it is going to become more difficult over the course of time for you alone to manipulate the way that AI perceives you? Because there's a lot of things that are going on here. This is why when people say SEO an AEO or whatever you want to call it, all right, I don't care what you call it. When there's this group of people that Say it's the exact same thing. I'm like, no, you're crazy. This is not SEO. This is different. And we could go on about that, but this is a different game than many people are used to.
- [14:18]
A
Well, and I want you to talk about how literally diverse the answers are with AI. Like just address that a little bit because it's not.
- [14:25]
B
Yeah, every account is different. Your account is different than me. So you and I could do the exact same search right now, Michael, online, we could say who is the best roofing company in Nashville, Tennessee. Right. You could get one answer and I could get a different answer. It's not going to be the same answer. And it's because you and I are different people. It's been trained. Your AI has been trained on you, mine has been trained on me. It understands us differently. So when somebody says you're going to rank first every single time in AI, that's actually not true. It's not works because it's going to depend very much on the person. Let me give you an example of this. It's going to get to the point where the AI knows very definitively. Let's say if you're a high end, very quality driven buyer versus if you're a budget minded buyer, your AI will learn that about you and therefore it's going to recommend roofers consistent with your buying history, the themes of the past. Google never did that. That's not what they did whatsoever. This is just one little example. So it changes from person to person. The results do.
- [15:23]
A
Yeah. And I want to kind of give my social media media folks some context. You can pull up Instagram or Facebook and you all know you're going to see a completely different feed than what I see because they've got algorithms that understand a lot about your behavior. They've been tracking every little thing you've ever done. Right. They've been reading it. They look at what you thumbs up what you thumbs down. Now when we go to AI, AI has its large language model which understands everything, right? It's scraped the whole darn world. But then as you start using all of these models, and these models have memory and that memory is teaching them about what it is you're interested or not interested in. And they're learning based on the queries that you do inside of this kind of who you are. And you know, hypothetically, somebody could create a new ChatGPT account and just start from scratch and see what kind of results come in. But nobody is starting there. Except for one time, the very first Time. And as AI learns about you, it's radically changing. Therefore, the answers, the way it positions that all those things are going to change.
- [16:27]
B
Well, to this, Mike, a lot of times I'll talk to companies about visibility and AI, and they're like, yeah, I'm showing up in AI right now. I'm like, really? Are you turning your search history off? Because what they're doing is they're using their existing account, and when they use their existing account, it's going to be biased towards, ideally for them mentioning their company. So if the roofer says, so who are the best roofers in Nashville? And they live in Nashville, the AI Nashville is going to say, well, you're included in this list and these other companies. But that's not what the rest of the world is going to see. If you want to get a general sense for your visibility out there, the easiest way to do this is either a, you have a separate account, ChatGPT account, or Gemini, whatever it is that you use that does not have any of your history. It's not been trained on you. So essentially naked, right? And so it's just using bare bones. Or there's a way that you can go within your ChatGPT account and you can change it to turn it off. You can just toggle it off when you're trying to do that search so that it's not biased towards you. It's not using your search history at that point, all the training, and then you can click it back so that it goes back to knowing you as soon as it's done that particular query.
- [17:36]
A
And the problem with that is it's only going to work for ChatGPT. And you got to remember that Gemini is a big deal. It's growing. You also have to remember that there's Microsoft Copilot, you know, just like you've got all these different AI models that everybody is using depending on what the rule is. Okay? So so far, here's what we know. We know that AI is going to shift the way people discover information. We also know that AI is going to either know your business or not know your business, recommend or not recommend your business. And you've introduced the concept of a trust signal. And a trust signal, according to what I heard you say, is information that the AI has accumulated about you, your business, based on everything that's out there on the Internet, every article you've ever written, sometimes the stuff you posted on social also reviews, right? YouTube videos, everything, probably podcast episodes. You've been on all these things, right? All that information these models have access to. And for the record, some of these models are multimodal. So some of these models, like Gemini, can watch and listen, which, by the.
- [18:40]
B
Way, they're all going to be multimodal if they're not today, which is really.
- [18:44]
A
Good news for those of us that are in the world of podcasting. Right. So, okay, so now we're at getting to the point where we're going to like, let's explore what the heck, like. All right, we've introduced the concept, concept of a trust signal. We kind of understand it conceptually because if I'm hearing you correctly, kind of the Internet has been built on these signals all along. Right. Like Google decides to show you or not show you, and it's a similar concept. Let's kind of talk a little bit about, like, these trust signals and let's dive in on them.
- [19:12]
B
Yeah, let's break them into categories. We're not going to name them all at AI trust signals, you can read about all of them there and get.
- [19:19]
A
To know how many are there.
- [19:21]
B
They're not all there, but many of them are there because the tool measures it. It's aitrustsignals.com is where you can find it. But there's three, three types of signals. The first one are technical signals that AI uses to either recommend or reject. The second are authority based signals. So trying to understand what your brand's authority is in the market. And then the third are specific brand based signals. And I can give you an example of each one. We can just do one. Michael.
- [19:53]
A
Yeah, let's start with technical and let's like unravel them.
- [19:56]
B
Yeah, this one's a little bit nerdy. But the frustrating thing for marketers, for technical is one of the biggest components of AI getting what it wants is through what's known as schema or advanced schema on websites. And this is a new world for many of us. I didn't know what schema was, I don't think like two years ago. Mike. I know, I don't know about you, but I've known.
- [20:19]
A
Yeah, I've known for a while.
- [20:20]
B
It just. Yeah, of course you're saying that you found out last week. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
- [20:24]
A
AUDIENCE well, schema is just, is basically some code that you inject on your website that describes it, labeling for the.
- [20:32]
B
Back end, so that I can very easily understand what it is that you're talking about, what it is that you're showing. So, for example, if you have. And we'll talk about this, like a cost page of your site, there should be schema behind that. Another example, a big signal that needs schema to do it right is content freshness. This has to do with your authority. But with content freshness, you know how you're starting to see more often, Michael, you have an article on the page and it says last updated on such and such. Well, that now needs to be required. So every piece of content you have is, needs to have a last updated on it. So if you go to the HubSpot site right now, you'll see this on every single article they have. But here's the thing, if you just do it on the front end, what the viewer's seeing and you don't do it with schema, it's not perceived the same way. So you actually need schema that shows when that particular article was last or a piece of content was last updated. So there's schema for FAQs, you should have that. There's schema for reviews, you should have that. And to make a long story short.
- [21:42]
A
Even for variations of products and stuff like that.
- [21:44]
B
Correct, correct. And so for those who are like, I don't even know where to get started on the schema, well, what you can always do is you can take a piece of content for your site and you can say, you can take all the code that created that page, you can put it into an LLM and you can say, act as an expert in schema for AI visibility. I want you to check this page to make sure it's fully optimized for AI. What schema am I missing, if any? And then it can tell you, oh, I found this. Here's the issue, here's what you want to fix.
- [22:11]
A
So wait, are you just putting the, are you copying the HTML into it or are you actually just putting the link?
- [22:15]
B
That's exactly what we'll do. We'll put it in there and then we'll tell you what scheme. That's a more sure bet than if you just do the front facing. It's harder for it.
- [22:24]
A
This is an interesting story. Since 2013, social media marketing world called San Diego home. It was beautiful. The weather, the sun, the energy. But last year something became very clear. We had outgrown our space. We needed room to properly host two world class conferences, Social Media Marketing World and AI Business World simultaneously under one roof. San Diego couldn't give us that, so we're moving to Anaheim, California. Here's what you gain. Two conferences in one modern location where you seamlessly can move between social marketing and AI sessions. Plus you get perfect weather with Southern California sunshine. And here's the bonus, it's literally walking distance to Disneyland. That means you can bring the entire family and make memories beyond the conference, maybe even with some of the friends that you meet at the event. Kristin Christian said, quote, I love social media marketing world. That re energizes me and my passion for the field I've chosen to work in, surrounding myself with others who, quote, get it and having the opportunity to learn. Plus, get sunshine is so valuable. Anaheim lets you be the marketer who invests in your career and creates magical family memories all in a single trip. We didn't just move locations, we upgraded the entire experience. Better facilities, easier access, more opportunities to connect, and yes, the magic of Disney literally right next door. Join us April 28th to 30th, 2026 in Anaheim. Visit social media marketingworld.info and get your tickets today. Explain why this is important. Like, I just want people to grok that part of it.
- [23:59]
B
Here's the problem. I actually don't think it should be important because I would like to think that the AI could do everything with what's front facing, but it can't yet. At least not the way that it wants to. Because AI, fundamentally what it does is par information. It's the master parser. Because if you're going to see like thousands and thousands of website in an instant, you're actually not reading every single word you're parsing. And that's the way that it works. And so in order for it to parse things very, very quickly, the key to that is schema is what allows it to see the label very clearly. Okay, we've got an FAQ here, we've got a costing here. And because it sees the label, it goes into it further and it grabs it during the parse. That's why this matters so much. I don't know though if it's going to matter in a year or two, Mike, but it matters a lot today. That's the thing about these trust signals. They are evolving, they're changing.
- [24:44]
A
Well, and I will say it is invisible data that you cannot get if you're just reading it. Okay? It's data that is designed to help bots when they crawl your website. So therefore it's important. I will throw one other thing out there. I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but a lot of people use cloudflare on the front end of their website and cloudflare has the Ability to block AI. I don't think that's wise because if AI can't ingest your stuff, you're in trouble. What's your thoughts on that?
- [25:09]
B
I actually have pretty strong opinions about this, you know. Do you remember when, like AI was getting trained on all those books and was trained on some of your books? It was trained on some of my books. Right, yeah, yeah, I know a lot of people were really bothered by that. I, I wasn't bothered at all. I wrote those books so that it would improve the world and I was pretty happy that AI was trained on.
- [25:28]
A
It also knows who the heck you are and added to your authority.
- [25:31]
B
That's correct. It helps. My trust is like a major trust signal for me. Right. And so point being is, I'm not trying to block AI for the most part with anything unless it's very, very private information. Right. Like company, customer specific. But otherwise I want my stuff to be consumed by AI no different than I wanted it to be consumed by Google back in the day. I want it to be consumed by AI today. I think that's going to be very important. I don't know why anybody would do that, frankly.
- [25:56]
A
Well, and specifically, if you believe what Marcus and I are hypothesizing from the top of the show that the future is going to be, people are going to start with AI to make decisions or do research. If you do not have that data, they don't have that data in their LLM because you blocked it. Well, then it's like you don't exist. Right. So on the trust signals thing, anything else we want to talk about, we.
- [26:17]
B
Gotta hit two more real quick. Okay, we got. Because these are the most important, the two most important. One falls under brand, one falls under authority. Okay. The biggest one for brand. And this is the number one trust signal. It's actually battling for number one with another one. I'm going to tell you here in a second.
- [26:31]
A
So wait, wait. If we're done with technical and we move down to brand, I just want to be clear.
- [26:34]
B
Yeah, let's, let's go to brand. All right, let's do one under brand. One of the most fundamental on a brand is reviews. But here's the thing about reviews. What's interesting about reviews and everybody keep in mind, like for years Google has said reviews was important, but guess what Google didn't do. Google didn't read the reviews to decide whether or not they recommended a company that wasn't part of the algorithm. It's not how it worked. Whereas what AI does It reads the review and that dictates who they recommend, who they reject. So in this context, there's four major factors that dictate how an AI sees a review. Number one, average rating. It's always been, always, probably will be. Number two, how many reviews you have. Review volume, they're looking at that. So if you don't have enough reviews, they're going to ding you. Number three, they're looking at review recency quite a bit. And so they really want to pay attention to things like, hey, have they got enough reviews recently? Has it fallen off? If it's fallen off, that's to ding against your trust score. Again, they're looking at it like you and I would as a human look at it. And finally, the fourth component of reviews, they're really obsessed with negative reviews. Google doesn't weigh negative reviews when they show a blue link in their legacy search. Whereas AI very much is looking at the whole spectrum of reviews. And because of that, they're building what could be essentially be known as a reputation graph of the brand. And before I said there's actually more than that. But as they look at that entire reputation graph now, they're able to say much better than traditionally we've been able to get. Because traditionally it's like, okay, this one had the most reviews, they must be the best. Whereas now they're giving you the full reputation graph and making a much more solid recommendation based on you individually.
- [28:24]
A
Marcus, where do you think they're pulling these reviews from?
- [28:27]
B
Well, here's what's interesting about it. Some of the reviews are blocked. Like for example, OpenAI ChatGPT doesn't have access to Google Reviews API. So what it can do is it can see some Surface level reviews on for like Google Reviews, but it can't see all your Google reviews, but it's going to every other platform where it can get it. Now, here's the hack behind this, and this is where you can help rank for visibility. Although it's not ranking, you can increase your visibility and your trust score. And the way you do this is you create a specific page of your website that shows reviews across different platforms. So assume for a second what happens if AI can't see all my Google reviews. Well, what you should do is you should put a handful of those Google reviews on your review page of your website. You should do it for your Facebook reviews, you should do it for your nextdoor reviews, you should do it for your Yelp reviews. Any place where your company has reviews, you want to take those and you want to put them on a very robust review page for your website. So this now helps the AI who couldn't see everything within your Google reviews because of that issue with the API. Now they can see it on your site and it makes a very big difference in terms of your trust score.
- [29:39]
A
Now this is interesting because obviously you've got different companies blocking, like Google is a major player in AI, and the good news is they got access to all these reviews and Amazon is a major investor inside of Claude, so they have access to everything on Amazon. Amazon's about to do a really big deal with OpenAI, so I'm sure that that's going to get into ChatGPT. Right? So this is going to be a little bit of a, you try to get reviews everywhere for everyone kind of a thing, Right? Because it's going to be such an important signal, right?
- [30:09]
B
That's correct. And this is why you don't want to just leave it in the hands of the AI to collect all your reviews for you. You want one hub on your site that highlights every platform and a bunch of the reviews from that platform. So that is the best trust signal you can use to improve brand signal right now. So that's a. That's a major one.
- [30:31]
A
Is there a tool that brings them together? That kind of. Because the AI is going to know that those reviews are on your website and they're not going to be as highly credible as if they were on an actual review site, presumably, right?
- [30:41]
B
Well, not necessarily, Mike, because if you show it the right way, if you show it with the right schema and you visually show it just like they did it, and you link back to the platform that you're talking about. So you want to link back to your Facebook page, you want to link back to. To your Google reviews by doing those things. It's seeing it like that. And we've tested this is very, very effective. It's quite powerful. And AI is dying to see all your reviews as much as possible to make a solid recommendation. Best thing you can do is create this very robust review page on your site.
- [31:15]
A
Okay, so so far we've talked about a technical side of things and we talked about schema and I threw in their cloudflare. Yeah, we've talked about brands and we've talked about reviews. Can you just expand a little bit more on what you mean by brand? Is it more than just reviews or is it just reviews? Because I would imagine it might also include the totality of all the content that you've produced. I don't know, what's your thoughts on that?
- [31:36]
B
Oh, yeah. I mean, and sometimes brand and authority overlap to a degree with this. But let me, let me just give you another one. That is a big one. Industry awards and recognition. Okay.
- [31:49]
A
Okay.
- [31:50]
B
So AI, if you notice when they're recommending a company, they will almost always cite an award or recognition that they have received before.
- [31:59]
A
Okay, there you go.
- [32:00]
B
This is a huge signal. So this is why, just like we want to now as marketers, create a review page, you want to create a very robust industry awards and recognition page. And what you want to do is you want to take every award that you've won, either you as a company or employees on your team. So team members. And I mean, you want to dig, Mike. I mean, you really want to, you want to dig deep, you want to show the award, you want to link back to the award, you want to explain the award and you want to explain also what that award means in terms of the customer, in terms of the buyer. And so if you do this quickly, you're going to start to notice, like, it happens fast too. This is what's so wild about this. Because whereas legacy Google indexes, AI is real time. This is not an indexing. This is a real time, like what's out there right now for me to recommend to this particular person. And so now as soon as you do this, all the, any changes that we're talking about today, it could impact people like the second that it's up on your site. Index not needed. That's so cool. That's what's possible. And so you want to create a really robust industry awards and recognition page as well.
- [33:14]
A
Okay. What I love about this is this reminds me of Robert Cialdini, who I've had on the show a couple times, author of Influence. He's got a concept called social proof Proof. And these things influence humans too. This is really important for people to get their mind around. Right. When you have reviews and you have industry authorities that grant a award to you, this is signaling to humans that this is someone important. Right. And AI has been built by humans. So AI is effectively modeling what human behavior is, which is looking for social proof. I don't know, that's just me throwing that out there.
- [33:49]
B
And if you took what AI cares about and you put it in a circle, let's say, and those are the, the things that AI cares most to trust you. And then you take what humans care about most and you put them in a circle. Those circles are absolutely merging together, Michael. I mean, that's definitively what we're seeing. In fact, this next one, the one that I want to land on here, this is becoming, along with reviews, this is becoming the number one signal. And this one falls under authority. Can I talk about it?
- [34:17]
A
Yeah, go for it.
- [34:18]
B
And people that know me are going to think this is biased, but no, this is what the record shows quickly. What has become the number 1 or 1A or 1B trust signal out there is pricing transparency online. There is a major development here. Perfect case in point. Something major happened in the last week. Mike. If you go online right now, let's say you living in Nashville and if you type in roofers near me now, immediately under the Google search bar you see a little call to action circle that says online estimate.
- [34:59]
A
Oh, so it's auto magically calculated.
- [35:02]
B
What it's doing is you, once you click on it, and I don't even know if you can do this on a separate window right now, Mike, but anybody's listening to this, I want you to do that. I want you to choose some type of home service near you and say roofer near me, window cleaner near me, whatever. You'll see this immediately. Left side, you'll see a little circle that says online estimate. You click on the online estimate, then it shows you another search results page. Now it's going to show you one of two things. It's either going to show you the companies that are using Google paid ads as a sponsor that have a calculator, an estimator on their website, or it's going to show you in the AI summary. It's going to tell you what contractors near you it thinks has an estimator on their site based on what it was able to see and read.
- [35:49]
A
Yeah, I don't see it yet, but I'm sure it's coming. It's probably rolling out.
- [35:52]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're searching this right now, like if you're searching, you're going to see this very quickly. Also many of you have already noticed because this one's a few weeks old you're seeing on your cell phones now when you do any type of service based search, you're seeing AI have AI check prices. Okay. Have AI check prices. As soon as you click on that, like if you do a search on your cell phone says have AI check prices, you click it, it asks you a series of questions and then the AI goes to the contractor and the AI gets that information from the contractor and comes back and you get a report. You never engage the contractor. So what's what's happening here? AI understands that the foremost question every single consumer buyer has is roughly first question of the buyer's journey, first question roughly what's this going to cost? And so now what we are seeing definitively is you need a robust pricing page that explains value in your industry. What drives cost up, what drives cost down. Talk about roi, things like that. You need a pricing page, you need a pricing video and you need a pricing estimator. And here's where it gets most interesting. In the near future you will be, especially if is starting with home improvement and it's moving, like I said, It's B2C Home Services, Home improvement and it's moving out right now what you're going to see is you're going to see that any company that's service based, that's not giving really solid, at a minimum ranges as to what people will spend. I'm not saying, by the way, I'm not saying give quote, exact quotes here. What I'm saying is you got to give estimates because if you don't do it, you will definitively be rejected by AI. You will not be the one that's recommended. Now it gets worse when it becomes very agentic the search. And you as a consumer are telling your AI agent, I want you to go find me three of the best contractors for my new roof. And then it's coming back to you. And it says, well I was only able to find two locally. That enabled me to get a real time estimate. Which one would you like me to reach out to to set up them coming to the house like that's our future. Right? And so because of this, it has quickly become the fundamental trust signal. And it's wild cause I didn't expect it. But we've run at this point 4000 trust signals, tests for different websites around the world. And pricing is just, it has become number one A, it's, that's it. I don't care if you're B2B. I don't care if B2C. Man is where we're all headed.
- [38:18]
A
Okay, so totally understand that. And it makes logical sense, right? Because the AI's objective is to try to help you make a decision and give an answer.
- [38:27]
B
It can't give an answer if you don't have an answer.
- [38:29]
A
Right.
- [38:30]
B
That's the big problem.
- [38:31]
A
Well, and it can't give an answer if it doesn't have your information. It can't recommend you. Right.
- [38:34]
B
Correct answerability is such a huge deal. So it's no different than in the past. People might have said, okay, I'm talking about cost and price, but I'm not giving ranges that might have worked before. From an SEO perspective, guess what? That does not work with AI. AI laughs at that and says, rejected. That's a ding on your trust score.
- [38:51]
A
Okay, so how does this speak to authority? Because, you know, we've talked about there's three trust signals.
- [38:58]
B
Yeah, Technical authority and brand.
- [38:59]
A
Technical authority and brand. We spent some time on technical, a lot on brand. How does this fall under authority? Like, help me understand that.
- [39:07]
B
Because what the AI wants to know, it wants to know you are who you say you are and you're an expert in those things. This is why. Also, not to digress, but if you have an article on your site right now, you have to have a byline that goes to the author page. Way more important than it used to be. Because if you have two pieces of content that are similar, one has an author byline that takes to the author page that shows the author and his or her, let's say training, certifications, expertise, et cetera, versus one that does not. Guess what the AI is going to recommend the company or it's going to source the piece of content that has the author page tied to to that particular piece of content. So once again, authority, it wants to know it's giving good, accurate, solid information. So this is why when you have a robust pricing page, when you talk about what drives costs up and down and why some companies are expensive, why some companies are cheap, it's like they're willing to talk about something that every buyer wants to know. But most of these companies don't want to talk about. Therefore I see them as an authority. And oh, by the way, the person that produced it, they've been in the industry for 20 years, they've got 10 certifications and they've won this and that award. I totally love this company. Boom. Give them the referral, give them the source, whatever it is.
- [40:27]
A
Okay, let's talk about companies that are not local service based companies. I know that's a big area that your focus is.
- [40:34]
B
It's just easy for people to understand, as I said.
- [40:36]
A
No, I totally understand. But let's talk about some other authority signals for those that maybe don't do estimates. You know what I mean?
- [40:40]
B
Show me somebody that doesn't do estimates.
- [40:42]
A
Okay, well, maybe they sell a physical product. That's one option.
- [40:46]
B
Okay, well, but if it's a physical product, once again, there's different degrees of physical products, right? And so within those there's ranges. So Therefore somebody you know might say, you know, how much does it cost for a new pair of tennis shoes? It's like once again, it actually becomes a similar process.
- [41:02]
A
Let me pick a different example. Then let me pick a better one. Let's say that you're a coach or consultant. Yes, you're probably going to need to scope out the project. But how can we establish that authority? Because, you know, there's a lot of people that are selling their time, they're selling their knowledge. How can they establish authority? I know that they could obviously have an estimator. Makes total sense. They might already have packages that are on their website and revealing the pricing makes total sense. I think you've covered that extensively in your book. They ask, you answer. But I'm just curious if there's other authority signals that the AI cares about outside of pricing.
- [41:35]
B
Oh, of course.
- [41:36]
A
And I'm curious if we could explore those. Because in a world where there's millions of coaches or thousands of this or that, how can those of us that maybe are selling experiences or like, you know, events or whatever, like how. What are the other authority signals that we could use? You know what I'm saying?
- [41:54]
B
Yeah. And sometimes this depends on the LLM. Some of these are, let's call them helpful, some are less helpful. For example, one big trust signal right now that helps measure your authority is are you on Google page one for that particular thing? But that's not like, oh, I can't just go fix that right now. I can't necessarily do anything about that per se. Another that affects authority is, and this is a big trust signal is what's what we refer to as accuracy of claims. So in other words, AI is really funny about if you say, you know, I am the most successful coach for stay at home moms that are coming back into the workforce. That's my thing and I'm one of the most successful in the world. AI doesn't really like that unless it comes with proof. Right. So it will ding you if you have a claim that is not backed by some type of proof that would help the customer. Whereas if you say, in 2023, I won this particular award for top 10 coaches in the world for this particular niche and then you source back to it, that is an authoritative outbound citation which is a major trust signal that helps prove the accuracy of the claim. So as you're going about the way you do your messaging today, you have to say, well, I just can't necessarily just bloviate and expect for it to believe me. Because it will actually verify the things that you're saying about yourself or about your company. So what you can do there is say, how many verifications can I put on my site to make sure that it's abundantly clear that I'm an expert at this thing? And this is why we said things like the industry awards and recognition. Also, any training that you've ever had, you should have a page on, like, specific types of, like, training that you've had and how that applies. But you always want to bring it back to the customer and what it means to them. Now, does a human appreciate this? Yes, But AI is the thing that really, really likes it because you're mitigating its risk every time you have that additional citation, every time you show that additional recognition and say why that thing you're saying was true. So be very aware of accuracy of claims.
- [44:13]
A
Marcus, you and I are both writers. We used to call ourselves bloggers. And there are people out there that are YouTube creators, video creators that are consistently showing up, up and writing content that's designed to establish their authority. Does that information matter to AI?
- [44:34]
B
Yes.
- [44:35]
A
Should we continue to do it, if for nothing more than to train the LLM that you are the authority?
- [44:39]
B
We've absolutely seen that to be the case. We call that. One of the trust signals that we measure is what's called content surface area, Mike. So content surface area, it's like, okay, do they just talk about this one subject like one time on their website, or do they talk about it 20 different times on their site? And oh, they've got 15 videos on YouTube about it. And, oh, they're, you know, they've got this medium account, if that still exists. And, oh, they're over here at this other platform, whatever that thing might be.
- [45:09]
A
LinkedIn.
- [45:09]
B
Yeah, certainly LinkedIn is, is one that, you know, they're, they're looking at. So content surface area, major trust signal. And, and you, as a brand, individually or collectively, as a company, want to increase your content surface area. You shouldn't have all your eggs in one single basket because that's actually a ding against your trust score. Because now you're good on LinkedIn, but you kind of like, I can't find you anywhere else. So that hurts me. Whereas I have these three other people I could recommend, but I'm seeing them across five different platforms. I'm going to recommend them instead of you because of it. You are now rejected, unfortunately. Doesn't mean you're not great. It's just means your constant surface area is not where it needs to be. That's a major authority signal right there.
- [45:50]
A
Okay, so I want you to wrap this up by explaining what is possible down the road. If people can grasp this concept and they can take this seriously. Right now, as we're recording this in very late 2025, publishing this in early 2026, what is the opportunity for everyone who's listening right now?
- [46:09]
B
The opportunity right now is that many companies and certainly many marketers are still shockingly just neglecting AI visibility. They're saying Google's not really going to change. It's always going to be here just like it is today. They're not thinking like AI is thinking. They're not seeing the hundreds of thousands of people that are transitioning every day from what is legacy search to modern AI based search. You have a window whereby the majority of your competitors are not sitting here thinking about things like schema. They're not thinking about or worried about pricing estimator because they're like, you know, nobody really has that in my industry so why should I worry about that? They're not paying attention to having a review page on their website because they can get the reviews by going to Google. See, they're not thinking that way. You can think that way. Therefore you win the trust of the human, you win the trust of the AI. You get recommended a lot more, you get rejected a lot less and you're way ahead of the game when 100% of the world has shifted over to a new way of finding the things they want online.
- [47:17]
A
I'm going to say it's even bigger than this. Because if AI continuously recommends you and the whole world is using AI to seek experts, businesses that do this thing, this is way better than showing up number one on Google search. I mean it could be literally this, this is a business opportunity that is huge. This is huge. This transcend this, this is so big. This literally is going to make or break businesses down the road. I feel like it's that big.
- [47:48]
B
There's no question. And the problem is a lot you say that and people are like, ah, you're just, you know, you're, you're kind of like just doom scrolling or whatever they call. I don't know what it is.
- [47:56]
A
I'm talking about the opportunities.
- [47:58]
B
I know, I know, I know. But I'm saying it's like people will say, well you're just saying if I don't do this, I'm going to be left behind. It's like, would you rather me be dishonest? Yeah, and say, you're going to be just fine when. And we don't truly believe you're going to be just fine. Because what we do understand is it's taking over the entire experience of learning and buying and shopping online. And it's going to do so many more actions than we have ever done before. AI for us. And so we can't even fathom it right now because eventually it's going to be returning back to the person with a full quote, a full estimate, everything's going to be done, and it's even going to be carrying out the contract with the company. And the human was just very, very slightly involved, just like an assistant would do for you today. That's what we're all going to have access to. There's no way that I just can't stress the importance of being aware of this and leaning into it and not saying, ah, geez, I don't like AI. I think it's the end of the world. Because the fact of the matter is, if this is worst case and if this is like the Matrix, I at least want my business to be successful between now and the time the Terminator comes. And the way that you're going to be successful is by leaning into this and not saying, oh gee, I'm going to be ostrich with my head in the sand. I just don't believe that's the way.
- [49:15]
A
Marcus Sheridan, the Terminator is not coming if I have anything to do with it. Thank you so much for bringing your insights and wisdom. AITrustsignals.com is where you can check out his resource. And Marcus, if people are interested in learning more about you and all the great things you got going on, where do you want to send them?
- [49:30]
B
Yeah, I'm great on LinkedIn. Connect with me there. Would love to be your friend there. And Marcus sheridan.com or email me marcusarcasso.com.
- [49:40]
A
Marcus, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.
- [49:43]
B
Yeah, my pleasure.
- [49:45]
A
If you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com 702. If you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a listener for a while, we'd love a review. And do check out my other show, the AI Explored podcast, where we go deep into AI. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing.
- [50:10]
B
Keep evolving the social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.
- [50:20]
A
What if you could get year round AI training? That's exactly what's waiting for you with our AI Business Society. To learn more, visit social media examiner.com AI.