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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#633: Navigating the future of search with A.J. Ghergich, Botify
00:33:04
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- [00:00]
Greg Kilstrom
Your brand may be staying on top of current trends, but are you agile enough to stay relevant, resilient and successful as customers, competition and the world continues to change at a breakneck pace? I'm thrilled to share the newly revised version of my first book, the Agile Brand. I'm calling it the Agile Brand Revisited. It's been updated to reflect our continually changing world, and it provides seven principles that form the backbone of an agile brand, offering detailed insights and actionable steps for incorporating them into your business strategy. This is the book that started it all and I'm excited to share it with you. It's now available in print and digital formats and available everywhere. Learn more by going to the Agile Brand guide website at www.agilebrandguide.com.
- [00:46]
AJ Girgic
The Agile Brand.
- [00:55]
Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trend, trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show. With seismic shifts happening across the search landscape, is your brand ready to adapt to the next wave of disruption or will your competitors leave you in the dust? Today we're joined by AJ Girgic, Vice President of Consulting Services at Botify, a leading enterprise SEO platform. AJ is an expert in navigating the ever changing search and marketing landscape and he's here to break down the latest game changing developments in search engines and their impact on brands. From Google's AI overviews to Apple's integration of ChatGPT into Siri, AJ is going to share insights to help marketers stay ahead in a rapidly evolving digital ecosystem. Welcome to the show, aj.
- [02:30]
AJ Girgic
Thank you, thank you. Excited to be here and this is a great topic.
- [02:33]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. Looking forward to talking. I don't think we talk about this enough on the show, so looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in though, why don't we get started with you giving a little more about your background and your role at Botify?
- [02:47]
AJ Girgic
Yeah, yeah, sure. I've been in and around search since pretty much the early days around 2003, 2004. I'm actually just coming out of college, just intersected right. With the takeoff of Google. So my, my career is very entrepreneurial. So I've owned and operated my own e commerce businesses, my own agencies and had a previous exit at a consulting agency. I would say search, SEO consulting and content marketing have really been kind of that throughput throughout my career. I'm at SEO on X or Twitter if you're like me and still call it Twitter if that tells you how long I've been in that game. But yeah, I do a lot of consulting like I said, throughout my career with Fortune 100 brands and startups with no cash and a big dream. So the full gambit at Bodify my day is honestly I lead our global consulting team and my day is spent talking to the world's largest retailers and e commerce sites, even some of the world's largest publishers and those mid market and startups. About the discussions that we're having today, like everything that you've heard, we're going to talk about, those are the things that these brands need the answers to because everybody's facing the same disruption and that's what, that's what Botify is there to do, is help brands get visibility in this changing ecosystem.
- [04:11]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, yeah, let's dive in here. And like yourself, I remember early days of Google and you know, I optimized side sites for AltaVista and Lycos. It's been a ride. Right. So you know, and, and it continues. Right. There's, there's continually some major shifts in the search landscape. And so you know, I want to talk about, you know, one of those recent things, Google's AI overviews. Probably just about anyone if not everyone listening to this, familiar with Google search results now incorporating AI overviews. This is causing a pretty fundamental shift in some of those search results pages. How are you seeing these changes disrupting the traditional search landscape? And you know, what should brands be doing to adapt?
- [04:56]
AJ Girgic
Yeah, it's interesting. So like SEO is like back in vogue right now, organic search. So in the past you want to talk to a CEO and you say, what do you want to talk about? Well, we want to talk about SEO. Click. You know.
- [05:08]
Greg Kilstrom
Right, right.
- [05:09]
AJ Girgic
Because it's, it's a spoke on, not a, not a hub in their, in their Strategy. Now, if you say, I want to talk about SEO, the phones are answering and the CEOs are frankly demanding it. And AIOS are one of the reasons why. And so here, here's a basic conversation I have with the CMO almost Weekly now. Hey, A.J. our impressions are up, but our clicks are down. Our rankings are about the same, but our clicks are down. What's going on? And so we're starting to see this across and this is across sectors, whether that's somebody who sells, you know, sneakers or someone who publishes words for a living and sells advertising. What's happening is Google is more and more answering those questions themselves and you're seeing this rise in what we call zero click searches, where the person is informed, gets the answer and doesn't actually click through. And that has got everyone's attention. What do we do about it? But it's affecting all industries, some more than others, obviously. But it's affecting everyone I talk to and everybody. It's top of mind, you know, what's the strategy? How do you, how do you deal with this?
- [06:19]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. So from the, we'll talk about the brand perspective in a second. From the user experience, is this enhancing the user experience? Like I have, I have my own opinions but you know, are users getting what they need from this? Maybe the zero click search thing is an indicator there. But you know, curious your thoughts on that?
- [06:39]
AJ Girgic
Yeah, it really depends on the intent of the query. Like we've all had the experience where you're like, hey, what time is this? So and so game or show and you have to like click into an article and read this whole synopsis just to figure out it's on NBC or it's streaming on Netflix. So, so annoying, right? And so from the user perspective, in those moments like, hey, what time is it in Singapore? Okay, just give me the answer. Those make sense. However, I think the issues arrive when the AI is kind of regurgitating back your content without giving much attribution and gobbling up the attention and keeping them away from your site. I think therein lies the, the problem, but I don't think they're going to go away. The team that really worked first on Google's AI overviews was the team that did featured snippets. If you don't know what featured snippets are, you do, you just don't know the term. It's what we're talking about when you Google something and Google just gives the answer. But this is a little different. When featured snippets came out. We actually did. I did tons of studies on this with large amounts of data, like hundreds of millions of up to hundreds of millions of keywords analyzed. And it was a net positive. The brand that was featured in a featured snippet actually got more clicks than not. Why? Because you were in a pack of one to ten. Well, a featured snippet is position zero. Really. It puts you above everybody else.
- [08:11]
Greg Kilstrom
Right.
- [08:12]
AJ Girgic
But usually you were the only one there. Now with AI overviews, you might be one of 10 jammed into a package and they may have taken some of your information and repackaged it in ways you might not like. And so, yeah, it has, it has everybody's attention.
- [08:29]
Greg Kilstrom
So how does a brand get noticed? Yeah, I mean, it sounds like with featured snippets, definitely. You know, it's still, it required optimization, of course, but like if you were optimized, you benefited. How does a brand get noticed in this kind of new way of working?
- [08:46]
AJ Girgic
Yeah, there's a few things obviously we can do and we may go into a little more detail, but a lot of it's back to basics. For instance, I mean, obviously AI overviews are coming from Google, so they're Google side of the house. But we're telling folks, don't sleep on Bing, which is funny. I remember, I think I was speaking at Dreamforce maybe five, six years ago, maybe seven years ago, and someone asked me a question about Bing and I was kind of a jerk and I was like, what's a Bing? So now I'm telling people, hey, don't sleep on Bing. Well, why? It's because they have a. Microsoft owns what, 49% or whatever of OpenAI. And so when a lot of AIs use search, they actually use Bing, not Google. So AI overviews for Google. Yes, that's going from Google. And obviously you need to rank. We just did a study at Bodify on it. We have a white paper up on this with data. You basically need to be in those top five positions. If you're not in the top five positions, you're not going to get seen. When they first came out, they were pulling all data from the top 100 positions. It was all over the map, it's consolidated. So the basics are still there. If you're not visible, if you're not in the top five, you're very likely not showing up in the AI overview. And the second thing is, it's not just Google, which we'll get to in a minute. Bing is powering many of these experience, AI overview type experiences on other platforms and you need to pay attention to it because I know you weren't before. Neither was I.
- [10:18]
Greg Kilstrom
Right, right. Yeah. So changing topics a little bit here. The want to, want to touch on the, the Google antitrust ruling as well, just a little bit. Some, some may not be quite as familiar with that, but you know, recent antitrust ruling against Google and potentially opening up the search market a bit. So, you know, what opportunities and challenges do you foresee for brands that are, you know, as new players potentially to enter the space? You know, for instance, OpenAI search GPT is a thing. You know, I've used Perplexity, Apple's move to incorporate chat GPT into Siri. There's a lot of, there's, there's a lot of move. I mean it does remind me of, of earlier days in some ways. There's actual movement in the search market right now.
- [11:08]
AJ Girgic
Hey, there's a little bit of choice.
- [11:09]
Greg Kilstrom
Right? Right, exactly. So you know what? I don't, there's a few questions in there. But like, I guess, I guess the one that comes to mind is, you know, how does this challenge Google's dominance? It's still the dominant player and you know, what does this mean for brands?
- [11:24]
AJ Girgic
Yeah, I mean, you're hitting, you're hitting the nail on the head. It's before all you needed was a Google strategy and everything else would just fall, fall onto line. They have so much of the market share and they still do the overwhelming amount of searches. But we've never seen things take off like AI is taking off. We've never seen a company take off like OpenAI has taken off and we're not seeing. I've never seen adoption happen this fast. It's anecdotal, but about a year and a half ago, right when it came out, I taught my mom to use perplexity. Right. And this is severely cut down on the amount of text I get asking me questions, by the way. So any pro tip to anyone out there, teach your parents to use Perplexity and they'll stop asking you questions that you used to Google. But, but honestly, she doesn't use Google that much anymore.
- [12:11]
Greg Kilstrom
She, she.
- [12:12]
AJ Girgic
All of her questions or medical questions and different things. She, she's using Perplexity and she likes the experience. Again, that's anecdotal. It's one person, but we're seeing high adoption rates. I just was speaking with, with Forrester for an upcoming wave and you know, without giving anything away that they're doing, you know, and this won't be a real Shock to anybody. But we're, what we're seeing is it's a shift in consumer behavior at the research phase. So discovery is still the land of social and awareness and video. Right. You find things out on TikTok and YouTube and all that. But what's happening is people are more and more changing the behavior to go to a perplexity, to go to OpenAI to do research. And so that's what's interesting because that doesn't show up a lot right now in analytics. So what does all that mean? It means diversification. It means you can't have a Google only monolithic strategy anymore. You need to start thinking about that fracturing ecosystem and being prepared for it and not just thinking Google's all. The only thing that matters is the only game in town because we're literally watching it not be the only game in town right in front of our face.
- [13:25]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, I mean literally today. And I, I usually don't like Google stuff and check my email while I'm doing an interview, but I double checked just to make sure I was speaking accurately. This morning I saw a headline and I just wanted to double check. Google dipped below 90%.
- [13:41]
AJ Girgic
Yes.
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Greg Kilstrom
You know, market share for the first time.
- [13:43]
AJ Girgic
First time ever.
- [13:44]
Greg Kilstrom
Quite a while since 2015, I guess, according to the headline I'm seeing here. So like to both points, I mean one 90% is still pretty dominant, but it's falling and, and who knows how much it may fall. But it's still, you know, it's, it, it's still, there's a trend. Right.
- [14:02]
AJ Girgic
And it's also what part of the market's doing it. Like the people that are shifting are the people marketers want. It's that 18 to, you know, 34 demographic. It's, it's the consumer that with purchasing power. Like it's not just the eyeballs, it's, you know, who's behind those eyeballs that are shifting and it's, it's the market you want, so you have to pay attention.
- [14:24]
Greg Kilstrom
So what should marketers do that, I mean they, you know, it's, it's clear diversification is going to be beneficial. But what does that mean? You know, what do marketers do about it?
- [14:34]
AJ Girgic
Right now I'm, it's not, there's two things that I'm preaching that aren't very sexy. Like me, you know, I don't have this, like, here's what you do is silver bullet strategy. Unfortunately, I don't have that. Maybe somebody else does. But the two things that I'm talking To brands about the one is very boring, but it's essential. It's. It's governance. So every brand I talk to doesn't. They have no real governance when it comes to AI. So I talk to again. I'll use the CMO as a proxy example. I talked to a CMO and I ask her some basic questions like, do you have control over what data is trained by an LLM? I get a shaky response like man, somewhat, but not really like, are you confident you have control? Are you confident that the data that they have on you is accurate and represents your brand and isn't a hallucination and isn't filled with things that aren't factually true? The conversation starts getting shakier and shakier and what, what come. Then lastly, I'll ask, do you win at Live retrieval? And do you have a strategy for winning at live retrieval? So what a lot of people Forget is an ll is old information. Meaning, you know, ChatGPT is locked in time from a year ago or eight months ago. So if you're an E Commerce brand, it doesn't know that your shoes are in stock. It doesn't know that you just change your mission statement at your brand has no clue, right? And so a lot of the game for brands is around Live retrieval. If you want to buy something or you just check something, right? Like that's all Live retrieval. And so it's the LLM being augmented by Live retrieval. So you need a governance strategy. On the basics, what are we going to allow them for to train? What are we going to block from training? Are we measuring and looking? Is the information on us even correct? Is it accurate? And then lastly, do we have a plan for what we allow them to retrieve live and what we don't? Are our feeds set up for AI? Because usually they're not. They're set up for ads, bots and other types of bots, but then no one has them set up yet for perplexity for those types of things. So it's not a fun answer. But governance is definitely the way you should be. Like, tackle that first. You can't control what you can't govern, right? So tackle that first up would be my advice.
- [16:57]
Greg Kilstrom
Let's talk a little bit more about perplexity, the traceability. So they faced a little backlash for avoiding some traceability in server logs. Maybe if you could give a little, a little more context there. But like, what lessons can brands learn from this incident and the importance of transparency and search and data handling.
- [17:20]
AJ Girgic
We need to modernize our protocol. So most of what you can do with a traditional, let's call them dumb bots, just that's the dumb bot that in the past it comes and it crawls your site and crawls the web and takes your information. What's interesting and people don't realize is you can't tell the dumb bot what to do. People think you can, but you can't. You can only tell it what not to do. And all of that is in one simple file. It's a Text file. TXTRobots TXT. So if you go to any website right now, walmart.com or just anything and you say/robots TXT you'll see their rules for the robot. Look at it, it looks like it's from 1982. Like it's that dumbed down. And so Perplexity and others have now reminded the world, you know what, that's not a legally binding contract, buddy. Those are suggestions of what our bot should do. So we really botify and myself and others have been talking with partnerships. We actually have our partner with Bing and some other search engines. Like these protocols have to be updated. You have to give brands more optionality because the new bots that are coming are smart bots. They can actually have bidirectional conversations. But the, the infrastructure itself is got, has to change it's old infrastructure with old rules that don't work today. And so it makes it a really complicated question to, to answer. But it's an infrastructure problem first and foremost, in my opinion.
- [18:54]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. So let's get back a little bit to the landscape and the competition aspect here. And Reddit recently blocked Bing search engines. It's kind of indicative of this growing tension and just overall. But how could moves like this impact the broader search ecosystem? I mean Reddit may have been an early one, but is this, is this the way it's going to be? You know, how does this impact things and the way that brands use platforms like Reddit or if there's other ones in the future that do similar things, you know, how do they, how should they use them for engagement and visibility?
- [19:36]
AJ Girgic
Yeah, I mean this is where I start to kind of, I don't know, maybe I'll give you some hot takes here. Yeah, it's good and it's bad, you know, but you're going to see these walled gardens where these ecosystems kind of exist outside of the open web. And what's my now, this is now squarely my opinion, the open web will be the domain of bots. So the person who uses the open web the most will be bots, not humans. And that will happen rapidly. Think about it this way. So you talked about Apple intelligence, which by the way, let's go ahead and say that has to be the most disappointing launch of 2024 by far. I was so hyped and telling everyone it was going to be great. It looked like an idiot. Like it was so bad. Hopefully it gets better.
- [20:26]
Greg Kilstrom
Underwhelming, you know, underwhelming is the word.
- [20:28]
AJ Girgic
Underwhelming is the word. So. But, but imagine this though, if, if you have the whole planet and we all have these AI enabled lives and search is a very quick. It's one of the first things to change, right? So like instead of you doing all the activity, like you have to go, you want to buy a new pair of running shoes, you have to go think of what to search, you have to click, you have to read, you have to read reviews, you have to scout. All that's going to get outsourced to your assistant, to your AI assistant. So think it through though. What happens when everybody has an AI assistant researching sneakers and where their kids should go to school and how much money should I save for that? And it's just assistance, assistance, assistance. The entire web is going. The open web will be flooded with bots talking to bots. It's really interesting. So botify. We sit on tons of data from the world's biggest websites. I won't say the name of the publication, but one of the largest news organizations in the world on election night for the first time, the majority of traffic that they got from search traffic from AI bots. For the first we watched it tip over and it was literally on election night in the U.S. wow. And so yeah, what you're going to see is lots of these deals. Google will make a deal with, you know, Reddit, Amazon will counter and make a deal with an Apple and it's going to create lots of little walled gardens and the open web is going to be primarily traversed by bots that are acting on behalf of as agents and assistants for people. Which then if you're a leader, you're like, okay, what do I do with that again? Think about your website. Your website is written in HTML and JavaScript to talk to dumb bots. These new bots can talk back. So what does your infrastructure need to look like? What would you communicate to a smart bot that you wouldn't to a dumb bot? And there tells you a lot about how you should retool and reimagine your messaging for AI. And it also tells you an infrastructure play where you need to be ready for a lot more bot traffic than you currently are. Right now you think you get a lot of bot traffic. You don't wait till that swarm of agents come and your infrastructure has to be ready for it.
- [22:40]
Greg Kilstrom
So then how do you measure in a world where the majority of traffic is search, traffic is bots. What's measurements of success in search?
- [22:51]
AJ Girgic
Yeah, right now we're frankly looking at a lot more on visibility over rankings. It used to be you get a call from the CEO, hey, we no longer rank number one for picking up the classic. Those days are gone. Ranking number one doesn't mean anything with personalization. Number one for you is different for me. Your AI is going to start getting tuned to your likes and dislikes and your result is going to be different than mine. So it's really about visibility. So a lot of what we're focusing on are so like SEO, you know, I'm like I said I'm at SEO on Twitter. I've been in SEO game forever. So I've watched it evolve and like, here's the current state. The old way of SEO was all conversation. A lot of conversations on keywords and rankings. Keywords, rankings, revenue. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. What I'm telling folks to do is look at the left side of that graph, if you will, or that flow, if you will. So the left side of keywords rankings, revenue is raw render index. So if the AI can't crawl, render and index your content, you never get to keywords ranking and conversions. But in throw out keywords and rankings, you never get to visibility. So you have to. That information has to be accessible. Again, it's not the great sexy answer. The truth, you have to be able to be accessible to these AIs or you're never going to be visible, you'll never show up. And so visibility is much more the metric, not rankings. And we are going to need all new metrics as well. None of the analytics tools have caught up yet. And so a lot of folks are blind right now.
- [24:34]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, definitely. It definitely sounds like. Well, on a lot of fronts. But yeah, definitely that measurement front. There's probably going to be some significant changes in the years ahead. Right?
- [24:44]
AJ Girgic
Exactly. Like the same thing I was talking about with a CMO. If I ask her, do you know your Gen AI share of voice? I talked to, you know, Fortune 100 company, I've never had a single person say yes, yeah, yeah, right. Because they don't have the tooling, they can't yet. And so there's a lot that has to happen with the tooling to even see if you're showing up. One, and then two, when you show up, is it true and factual and not. Not a hallucinated false answer.
- [25:12]
Greg Kilstrom
Right.
- [25:12]
AJ Girgic
But all of that starts with visibility and indexation. Can that, does that AI have the information? Do you have governance in place that gave it the information you want it to have and kept it from the information that you don't want it to have? And can you win it live retrieval so when it goes to see if those, those Nikes or Adidas or, you know, a hoodie is in stock, it knows your information.
- [25:36]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, I guess. One, one last question for you here. Looking out, you know, months, maybe a couple of years ahead even. I know we talked about a lot here and some of this was, you know, kind of forward, forward reaching. But you know, what, what would your, maybe one or two pieces of advice for marketers to be doing now to prepare for all the stuff that we've been talking about, all these changes.
- [26:00]
AJ Girgic
Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to take a bold move here. I'm going to stick with Bing.
- [26:04]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
- [26:05]
AJ Girgic
So what I really like about what Bing is doing is they have this feature called index now. So a lot of content is waiting on things to crawl your website and it's very passive and then they get my information. So with Bing you can actually push your information directly into the index. So, and it's free. So like every brand could go and set this up right now. And then again, why Bing? Because Bing is OpenAI being is chatgpt. So do you want to direct inject your information at live speeds into these AIs? Which one would you do it with? OpenAI. It's there, it's free, the protocol's right in front of you, you just gotta go implement it. So that to me that's like, if you take one thing away from that, go tell your folks to do that or you go do that and thank me later because that's your first step into what I'm saying. Again, you want the visibility and the rankings and the conversions, but you got to do the infrastructure plays first or you never get visibility.
- [27:08]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, Love it, Love it. Well, before we wrap up here, one last question I like to ask everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [27:19]
AJ Girgic
So what I almost did, I did not do. I thought I was like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go download all of your podcasts, I'm going to feed it to OpenAI Pro 01 mode and be like, what's. No one ever said. And then I was just too lazy. But that idea, though. Yeah, yeah, that would have been cool. Maybe somebody else more, more, more entrepreneur will do it. I was actually thinking about this question because it's that time of year, right? It's the beginning of the year. And for me, I think the, that it comes down to avoiding filling spaces in time. And I'll give you what I, I'll give you a quicker answer to that. Orbit immune system attacks empty space. So if you have room on your calendar, if you have space for projects, they magically get filled with projects. And so for me, especially this time of year, it's not about what you're going to start doing, it's about what you're going to stop doing. What are we going to stop doing? So that we can maniacally focus on these things, which is going to leave these voids of time that the corporate immune system will want to fill. And you have to say no. If you say no to that, you actually have the time to go deep on the things you've decided on. It's more of a message to myself. I don't always do well at that, but you gotta, that's, that's how I try to stay agile. Don't always, don't always do it. But it's maniacally focusing on that and realizing when, hey, this is just the immune system trying to fill the time void. That time void is actually what you need to focus.
- [28:53]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, I love it. And for what it's worth, no one has said that before. So that's, that's amazing. That's. It's amazing advice anyway, but it's, it's. You accomplish what you set out to do without doing all the work isn't.
- [29:07]
AJ Girgic
Taking over just yet.
- [29:08]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, right, right. Again, I'd like to thank AJ Girgic, Vice President of Consulting Services at Bodify, for joining the show. You can learn more about AJ and Bodify by following the links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening to the Agile brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me if you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.crgreggkillstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
- [30:15]
AJ Girgic
The Agile brand.