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- [00:00]
Andrew Worden
Foreign.
- [00:07]
John Evans
Gentlemen, welcome back to the uncensored cmo. Now, continuing our series with Semrush, we will be putting a spotlight on search. And somebody that knows all about search is SEMrush's own CMO, Andrew Worden. Now, they are experts in this area and it has transformed like you wouldn't believe with the advent of AI. And to tell us what it all means, Andrew unpacks it and how you as a brand can take advantage of what those changes. Here it is. Andrew, welcome to the show.
- [00:32]
Andrew Worden
Thanks so much, John, for having me.
- [00:33]
John Evans
It's funny this, this topic, as you say, is high on everyone's agenda at the moment. I think I first realized that something was happening about two years ago, slightly funny story with the podcast here, because when I first launched the podcast six years ago, I wanted to kind of cut through and I remember reading this book by a guy called Paul Arden and his book was called it's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be. But it was the subtitle that caught my eye. It said, the world's number one book by Paul Arden. And I thought, that's so clever. So when I launched the podcast, I said, the world's number one marketing podcast by John Evans. And it's a bit of a joke, but even then a few people messaged me, oh, congratulations, John, well done. You know, how do you.
- [01:11]
Andrew Worden
Perception. Perception is everything.
- [01:13]
John Evans
Exactly.
- [01:14]
Andrew Worden
Isn't that, isn't that just the truth of marketing?
- [01:15]
John Evans
I know, you just got to be ahead of yourself, right? Just, just, just, you know, plan what you wish happens. And then a couple of years ago, I had this YouTuber in America do a seven minute takedown video on the podcast. I mean, literally ripping into me, calling me tyrannically British bullshitter. This whole thing, right, it was a, it was a proper Larry takedown video. And you know, when you get that kind of criticism, you think, well, I can either laugh with it or I can get upset. You know, what am I going to do? Anyway, so I decided to just laugh at, you know, just end, you know, enjoy it. And I phoned him up and I said, dude, like, why pick on me, right? There are thousands of podcasts. Why mine? He said, I went to chat GPT. And what did I ask you?
- [01:56]
Andrew Worden
The number one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [01:59]
John Evans
And literally, yeah, sure. And suddenly I thought, oh, hang on a minute, you know, the world has changed a bit in where we get our information from and, you know, how we're feeding and that kind of thing. Yeah, but how disruptive do you think a moment we are in is.
- [02:12]
Andrew Worden
Yeah, Well, I think first of all, this is this exact moment. And actually you're referencing even a couple of years ago, I mean, really From May of 2022 to now, it seems, it's just wild to think that it's been over three years from ChatGPT going so viral. I would say that this is the most significant moment for marketers since Google started. That can either be very daunting for people or it can be tremendously exciting for people. And as I was saying before we started recording, you know, a lot of my conversations with CMOs at public companies right now, there are typically three different types of camps. And I think this also extends to practitioners really at any level. You know, there are the marketers or even the executives who are really on the sidelines kind of watching and waiting to see how AI will play out. Seems like every month there's some kind of new refresh or new models that are coming. All of these things make sense, especially in the context of search. And then on the complete opposite of the spectrum, you have people who are just all in experimenting, you know, which is for me as a marketer, amazing to see. And then unfortunately, right in the middle you have. People are frozen. They're terrified to make a move in either direction because maybe their organic traffic has fallen and they don't want to Divert Investments to LLMs and for online visibility, for AI search and for digital brand visibility. Yeah, I was just in New York a couple of weeks ago meeting with like household name, blood blue chip companies, CMOs, and it's amazing to hear. You know, the question is, you know, Andrew, how do we get started? Where should we begin? How should I think about budgeting for this? What about attribution? It's an enormous moment actually for marketers and in many ways it kind of makes me think back if I can, if I give myself permission to date myself. It really thinks about, it makes me think about, you know, the kind of dot com era. Like it's just this whole new chapter for technology and that's. And again, we're only talking here in the context of marketing, Marketing and search. I mean, what about in the creative industry? What about in any other industry you can think of? You know, it's, it's, it's a big moment.
- [04:19]
John Evans
It really is. Now where are you seeing the biggest kind of change in behavior happening when it comes to search?
- [04:25]
Andrew Worden
Yeah, I think, you know, so it's interesting. I think search used to equal Google. Right? And as, as other Other avenues came out as other AI search engines came out, you started to see that, that share growing and what we observe through clickstream data through Datos, which is the Semrush company, they're not mutually exclusive. Actually. What we notice is that search behavior is expanding from Google to, to those that are impacted by LLMs. So for, for many months and you know, marketers love a good drama, you know, especially for 10 plus years, you know, market SEO is dead. You know, this is over, fuck this, we're done with this. You know, it's, it's completely not true. So what we've observed, and actually we know right now, I mean the latest data that we got was from October this month. You know, 94.3% of searches are happening on Google still. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't be as marketers worried about visibility in LLMs and the traceability and the citations there. We absolutely need to. In fact, you know, customers who are coming through AI search engines where you are referenced in AN LLM are 4.4 times as likely to convert. So you definitely need to care. But this is not, oh, it's such a big deal. We're going to stop doing our SEO and we're only going to focus on LLMs. This is like the worst decision that can be made. I went on a bit of a tangent there. I'm not sure if I understand.
- [05:50]
John Evans
No, well, I think that's really interesting because I think most people's perception would be we're all switching over, search is dead.
- [05:56]
Andrew Worden
It's now all, and I'm here to say concretely, absolutely not. I mean, I mean, I know especially at semrush, you know, 70% of our organic blogs for that program actually feed LLMs. And so if we were to start divesting from that ourselves, that would actually hamstring us when it comes to future proofing our own visibility. So I think what's different and what we're doing just to give people some kind of concrete steps of what, what, what maybe to think about, you know, expanding the organic program or the owned media, no matter what you call it, your own company, no matter the size, to beyond traditional SEO, but also to extend into YouTube, to Reddit, to Quora, to all of these different platforms, to user generated content. And I think if anything now there are tools again like SEMrush1 and AI visibility toolkit. More and more there are tools available to SEOs and to digital marketers that didn't exist three, six, nine months ago. And I'm already watching this play out within my team at Semrush, where I actually have very high expectations for this department. Because now all of a sudden you're armed with literally what should be published in what channel in order to elevate visibility in AI search. And that goes beyond the organic search team. It hits pr, it hits brand, it hits a lot of these channels that as CMOs we've, we've always cared about, but we've never really needed to prioritize necessarily. And also just for a fun fact, you know, pr, there's a quarter of the pool of journalists available that were available pre Covid. So PR is pretty tough game right now. But all that is to say that you know, really the role of, of an SEO or a classic SEO or someone who's a digital marketer, if you're up for it, you know, you've just kind of, whether you like it or not, you, you just negotiated an enormous seat at the table. And so I'm always encouraging marketers to, to embrace that because, and not be frozen by that, because that's a pretty big, big deal. And I don't really see that, that kind of incremental step change to what we're seeing right now. Like that kind of s. The expression I use a lot at work is like the, the earth is literally moving right now between our feet. Like, I don't always love such dramatic references, but, but the earth is shifting. You know, search is shifting as we speak, as we're standing. So we have to not only move with it, but get ahead of where, where the terrain is altering.
- [08:33]
John Evans
I'd love to get into your new report as well because you just published this big new report, AI Visibility, which is by the way, big, big plug for that. Super, super helpful.
- [08:41]
Andrew Worden
Yeah.
- [08:41]
John Evans
What were the biggest surprises that you think people would, would not be expecting from the data you collected?
- [08:47]
Andrew Worden
You know, I think a lot of people were surprised I mentioned just a moment ago about user generated content. I think a lot of people were surprised at just far reaching, how far reaching that is. Now, Organic has always been such a long tail game. We publish X number or refresh X number of posts over, you know, three, six, nine, 12 months and then we'll see residual value according on a cohort basis, year over year. With LLMs, it's almost like these channels are now behaving more like paid. And I think this is something that people aren't talking about a lot yet, which I want to talk about because it also puts a certain amount, again, if you're up for it. It gets a certain amount of pressure on the organic team to like, all right, it's time to move faster. So that was a big surprise that we heard from people. I don't think it was any surprise that some of our, like the most kind of household name brands that we all know and love, or maybe don't love, were in the top, you know, echelons, if you will. But I actually had just this week a call from someone who is a publicly traded company who was cited in this report saying they were going to mention it on their earnings call.
- [09:49]
John Evans
Wow.
- [09:50]
Andrew Worden
And they wanted to double check that we weren't going to release new research in a month or two that might counter it. And I said, I'm not aware of any research, but if I were you, I would cite it.
- [10:00]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [10:00]
Andrew Worden
So there. So, you know, it had. The report has gotten a lot of traction, I think, I think that what people are reacting to is actually how practical it is in that report. Like it's not just a here's the kind of the best of the best. It's actually here's how these companies did this. And I can tell you, hand on heart, I mean, I brought that research with someone, Andreas and our brand team and someone in our product marketing team put together, which I'm very proud of. And I actually, I kind of, you know, virtually walk that over to our own organic search team. And I said, hey, how come we're not experimenting with, you know, a thousand UGC pieces here? Like, where's, where's this program? And they said, no, no, we're investing in that. I said, oh, okay, when do I get to see the results?
- [10:40]
John Evans
I was going to ask you.
- [10:42]
Andrew Worden
I'm very open, I'm very transparent guy. And so it's one thing, you know, not to be in the report, but again, it was very specific, it was very tailored to some of these industries. And of course, in the end of the day, it's meant to educate, it's meant to help others understand how to improve. But it's also meant to be a demand generation asset. I mean, we're marketers, you know, so that's, that's part of the.
- [11:04]
John Evans
Yeah, I was interested how. Because you looked at ChatGPT and Google AI.
- [11:09]
Andrew Worden
Yep.
- [11:09]
John Evans
Actually how they operate quite differently. And we need to remember that we. That not every AI operates in the same way. So the results that came out of both are quite different.
- [11:16]
Andrew Worden
Yes.
- [11:17]
John Evans
And then I also thought it was interesting how different industries were. That was a surprise actually to me because I kind of would have assumed AI treats all industries the same.
- [11:26]
Andrew Worden
No, actually no. And this for me this came up. I gave a talk at Disney earlier this year. It's always amazing when you. It was a Semrush enterprise client and they had, it was called Disney Digital Days. It was so cool. They had 1200 marketers globally and they had never had someone come to talk about search and digital and like you know, cert an organic vis a vis PPC and like other channels. And to your question about you know, you or your statement that you would have thought that industries would be kind of agnostic for any GPTs or for any AI, the reality is it's not actually. It's, you know, you see more and more AI overviews show up for, for non transactional so for like, like purely informational queries. The more and more, if you, if, let me put it this way, if you're, if you're, if you're prompting or if you're searching for I want to buy X, you're not going to get an overview. Right. And so E commerce is largely out of that picture. I think when it comes to tourism, you know, if you're like what are the top 10 hotels that I can visit around Disney? You're going to get a big laundry list like that's much more research oriented. And so now still it really wildly varies. I mean on average it can be 23%. We see right now with the latest data 23% on Google you're going to get an AI overview response. But in some verticals it goes up to 80% and some verticals it shrinks to three. I don't have the answer on why or how maybe I'll get it soon. But I'm also very curious. When Google releases paid search within AI overviews, this is also going to be a very interesting moment for marketers too, which I know is coming up.
- [13:06]
John Evans
Another thing I thought was interesting is the distinction between mentions and sources as well. Because you kind of think it's all about getting mentioned a lot, getting lots of reviews. But actually AI treats different sources quite differently and there are some very highly, you know, high levels of authority from some sources versus the other. How important is it to kind of understand where you're being sourced?
- [13:26]
Andrew Worden
It is crucial to understand where you're being sourced because if, first of all, if you don't understand where you're being sourced, you can't make any kind of improvement or not. Right. And I think the trust factor between being a mention and being a source is also Critical. And I might be wrong, but I believe that, that sources are the only, that's really where the only blue links live. Right. So any, for any, any hope to kind of escape a zero click reality is to be a source. And I could be wrong on that, but that's the last time I checked, you know, so it could change overnight sometimes. But I think this is a huge part of what will drive ultimate trust. And I think, you know, the way I start to think about it as well, you know, the era that we're in right now, this is inning number one. This is foundational. Again, in that conversation I mentioned I had in New York a week or so ago, someone asked me a question. They said, well, you know, if AI is so disruptive right now, where do you think it would be in 12 or 18 months, especially for buyers, you know, and we already know that there are major companies like United, you know, United Airlines, like testing fully agentic paths to purchase. You know, I think that in a year, a year and a half from now, you and I will have our own. I mean, you probably already have your own, but you'll have a more sophisticated GPT yourself where it knows that you're on a fitness journey, just like me. It knows that you might like a particular brand of cycling shoes or running shoes or training gloves, whatever they are. It knows the average shelf life of that product, how long you're going to go through it, it's going to propose and it might even automatically purchase it for you and send it to your door. And the reason why I bring these examples up is, and this is really on, Even on a B2C side, we could also talk about B2B. If brands are not investing in digital brand visibility now, to lay that foundation, to lay the many layers of that foundation. Right now, imagine in 12 or 18 months if you're not being considered as a source or a mention or you're completely on the sideline, you're not even part of the conversation. And this is what kind of reminds me back to dot com days. It's kind of like you don't have a domain. And that is a very intentional dramatic pause.
- [15:38]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [15:38]
Andrew Worden
Because it's like for me, that's a big deal.
- [15:41]
John Evans
It makes sense. I mean, another kind of comparison to the old days I was thinking is the rules. Used to be what does a brand want to say about itself.
- [15:48]
Andrew Worden
Correct.
- [15:49]
John Evans
These days it's what do other people say about the brand?
- [15:52]
Andrew Worden
That's right.
- [15:52]
John Evans
That matters more, doesn't it? Use generated content.
- [15:54]
Andrew Worden
That's right.
- [15:55]
John Evans
You know, working with other people. This is why I think content creator strategy is so key, isn't it?
- [16:00]
Andrew Worden
Content creators, influencers as well. And I'll try my best not to reveal the brand. But it was really interesting from one of, from one of those CMOs the other night where that audience, it was basically healthcare or life sciences brand where the audience is actually folks who are maybe 75 to 85 years old. And one of the first questions from their CMO is like, well Andrew, how do I get them to generate ugc? Like how, how is, how would that be possible? Like these people. I was like, I don't know. My, my mom's 82, 83, she's, she's addicted to her phone more than I am. But, but seriously, I said, well, how about, you know, sending like a, again, this is a very us focused audience. So sorry for the US reference. But you know, most people I know that age, you know, love a good Dunkin Donut. This, you know, send them a gift card if and only if their, their grandson or, or whatever some family member makes a write up and, and, and starts creating that. Once you get that to scale and like her eyes just kind of open so widely like, oh, that's all it would take to get started here. It's very interesting for me and this is what I mean about this kind of frozen camp. People don't know where to begin. And this is the biggest challenge I see. But you just have to start.
- [17:11]
John Evans
It's funny, I mentioned the, the comedy review that I got as well. The, the other moment where I suddenly went, I get how this is working. I got to invite a speaker conference last year and I, I went to conference organizer said aventures. Why, why pick me? And they said, oh well. We were originally searching for Mark Ritson and your video with him came up top of the search. Then we were looking for Les Burnett and his video with you came up top of the search. Every speaker we looked at linked to content you had made with them. And effectively you were, you were coming out top organically because of that sort of thing. I went, ah, that's interesting that you know, putting stuff out in the world, collaborating, making content that's just for other people is, is key to this.
- [17:52]
Andrew Worden
And there's also the, but there's also the, the freshness of the content that matters because again, big shift from the way we used to think about organic. You know, you write a post, it's technically very accurate. It checks all the boxes, it has all the authority, all the eat every all these things and you kind of set it for six months and forget about it. Absolutely not. Like now your publishing schedule needs to pull forward at least 3 or 4x. I mean it is not enough to have that. Rather, I mean you still need a static program in that way. I will call that static or traditional SEO model. But there has to be this whole other new muscle that's being trained. No one expects it, no one, including me, expects it to be perfect. And I don't, I have a high standard for my team of course at Semrush. I don't expect it to be perfect, but I expect this to be failing every day on these things to try to figure it out. And we're being, you know, really aggressive with that right now. So.
- [18:49]
John Evans
Yeah, it's a big, that's a very different mindset, isn't it? Compared to when, you know, you and I were cutting our teeth on marketing, you know, a few years ago where it'd all be about.
- [18:57]
Andrew Worden
You're very generous of that. A few years ago.
- [18:59]
John Evans
Exactly. But you know, you know, you go through all the approval processes and you spend lots on production, you get all the sign offs.
- [19:05]
Andrew Worden
Sure.
- [19:05]
John Evans
You'd spend a lot of time getting it right.
- [19:07]
Andrew Worden
Yeah.
- [19:08]
John Evans
Now you're putting stuff out there quickly, seeing, you know, what works and then deciding.
- [19:12]
Andrew Worden
And I think this also depends on like the, the viewpoint and the appetite for risk, frankly from CMOs and what, what their boards will let them get away with. I've always been in the camp of I will ship at 80% and clean it up after. That applies to pretty much my every single day. Because especially in marketing, we're so conditioned, you know, to be perfectionists and for it to be, you know, I think right now with LLMs, I mean there's so much hallucinating that happens, so many wrong answers. I mean I, I still think I, I, I have a reference about how an AI overview, you know, said it was okay for pregnant women to smoke at some point. Like this is all kinds of, you know, just, I'm just, I'm being hyperbolic on purpose and obviously don't support that. But it's interesting. Like I would much rather us push to be aggressive and then if there's a mistake we can also clean it up. But you know, right now, even in the past couple, I think in the past six weeks we had a sprint with, with our now what we've called our online visibility team or our digital brand visibility team. You know, we've seen like a 3x result in the number of AI overview, mentions, ends and citations, even when compared to, like, our biggest competitors. And so that means, like, you know, we're, we're making really good progress there. My next challenge, which I don't care as much about right now, but I know everybody else does, is attribution given a zero click reality, you know, does that just dump into the direct channel? Maybe? Is that good enough for me? No. You know, so there's a lot of, a lot of unanswered questions still. But, but for me, this is also the part where, you know, again, a lot of people get really spooked by. They get nervous. They get nervous about being able to show results. And, you know, and I think this is the moment where marketers just need to lean in, hold on. I always call it the hold onto the table moment. Just hold on, hold tight, you know, steady course, but get moving.
- [21:00]
John Evans
You know, speed is key, isn't it? Because, like, when you get a structural change like this, the winners are often not the best. They're the ones that move quickest into the gaps.
- [21:08]
Andrew Worden
Yeah.
- [21:09]
John Evans
And take advantage of them. Something else actually that popped out of me when I read your report was the brands that came out top. So brands like Patagonia or Garmin, Gucci, for example, were all brands with very strong stories to tell, very powerful brands. So you might be tempted to think in the AI world, brand matters less. If anything, your report suggesting brand matters more.
- [21:31]
Andrew Worden
No, it's absolutely brand matters five times more. I personally love Patagonia as a brand, as a company. I mean, they have been, they're probably one of the best winners in all of this that I can think of, probably purely by accident. And that's great, great for them. But for years they've been storytelling about, you know, everything's about being outdoors, care and sustainability for the planet, which is square in the audience of those who are outdoors all the time, preserving, you know, the planet for the future. They even change their products to make sure that they're. They're aligning with that vision. And they've been telling that story for at least five to seven years. And then you have all of this brand fandom around them. So everyone is posting constantly. Gucci, I think, is a little bit more obvious because it's kind of this kind of, you know, yolo, you know, very sexy brand. You know, Patagonia, I think, you know, it's a bit different where it's this kind of long and steady consistent storytelling, consistent brand building, and that really connects exactly to what I mentioned before about SEOs. And digital marketers, you know, now have the tools, especially with SEMrush1 and other, other tools to actually feed into the brand teams to be like, you should be talking more about X, Y and Z, because that is where actually our competitors are eating our lunch on LLM visibility, you know, and so that's where we are really, you know, summers for many years we've always thought about what we do and how we help customers is really about boosting online visibility. From now on, at least for the foreseeable future, it's about digital brand visibility. For those who are at Spotlight today, I was really pleased. James McCormick, who's a super senior analyst at IDC, gave a 30 minute talk all about digital brand visibility and he talks to a lot of very senior clients, Fortune 100. This is what is keeping CMOs and CEOs up at night. And so I think this is where it kind of connects to me on what we saw with AI visibility. And maybe, maybe, right, maybe that was a bit surprising even for me to see that a lot of these channels where we've always kind of classified with softer metrics like impressions or share of voice, all of a sudden now I can tell you I'm reporting to my board about our share of voice vis a vis our competitors and vis a vis those who are like similar enough or you know, larger companies like HubSpot, which we don't consider a competitor, but like think, you know, brands we want to look like or sound like or feel like. Share a voice A year ago, Come on, are you kidding me? Impressions a year ago? People laugh at you. You know, it's only about registrations, trials, payments, you know, and high quality traffic. So yeah, it's, it's really interesting to see that the, the kind of channel mix is almost flipped on its head. I don't know if you agree or if you.
- [24:23]
John Evans
I really love your framing actually because like, we're obviously, you know, trained in what's your share of voice across your media mix. And you take all traditional channels and go, I've got this share of voice versus my competitor and therefore I think I'm going to outperform, etc. Etc. But the thing with this is because so much of it is earned rather than paid, you have to find a different way of measuring it. And because obviously LLMs are putting different priorities on different sources, then what you need to see is, you know, what's the net of all that and what's your share of voice once all that's taken in consideration. So digital Visibility, I think, is a really neat way of looking at it.
- [24:56]
Andrew Worden
Yeah, it's digital brand. And for me, that's why we put brand in the center, the digital brand visibility, because now it's not only about, like getting blog posts up and redirecting traffic to your site and getting payments, but like, how, how well is your brand showing up? Yeah, period. That's been a discussion we've been having as an exec team for a couple of months about what's really, what are, what's really the heart of what we're delivering for customers, the value that we're delivering, both for our subscription customers, but also for Semrush enterprise customers who have even. I mean, everybody has big marketing challenges, you know, but I think it's even more tricky when you have, you know, multinational companies with hundreds and hundreds of team members working, you know, in different countries on very similar problems. But yeah, I think it's. It is, it is this kind of total shift in how even marketing is seen. So it's like you kind of, you know, you start with this kind of seismic shift of, you know, it's no longer traditional SEO, now it's that plus combined with AI search, but now that it's impacting other channels that are usually well beyond the station of the organic search teams, and then when, when other executives are seeing certain declines or certain inclines, and then it's like, well, what's the pr? How come the PR team isn't delivering this? How come the brand team isn't more visible? Like, where are our activations? Like, how come we don't have more impressions? These are not the questions that we've been having for the last five or 10 years. So I don't know, personally, for me, I think it's really exciting.
- [26:28]
John Evans
I know. I like that a lot. So taking that on a step, then, if you were to advise, I mean, you talk to a lot of CMOs, don't you? And you mentioned a few earlier. What would be your advice then to a CMOS listing going, okay, I need to get on top of this? Because you're right, it changes the structure, organization, doesn't it? So it's not like a bottom of the org thing that's done at the last click. It's now, how do we tell our story?
- [26:50]
Andrew Worden
Yeah, I think the way that I'm advising folks right now is that I think there's two things. Number one, the expansion of the role of the SEO department or the digital marketing, that whatever you call it internally, it can be organic or whatever. That combined with brand and product marketing really as a center of gravity is a big element that will retool and will actually redesign marketing functions. I think the first thing that I ask folks is who's running your program and how legacy minded are they? And that's not a popular question and I'm not sorry for asking it. Look, I'm a human too. I get stuck in my ways, I have my rhythms. This is not the moment for conservatism. This is not the moment for. We've done it this way for three or four years. Like this is where CMOs need to ask very hard questions of do we have the right talent leading these teams? So that's number one, right? Is there, is there enough elasticity in that person and can you upskill them or are they already training their own models? And I'll get, I'll give you like real example here in our team. Gosh, it was maybe three or four months ago, I was, I was actually struggling to find some really good product messaging on a very particular product that I just wasn't really happy with. And I'm, you know, I can be quite vocal at times. So, so, so, so a couple of people heard about that. There were two people in a team that had no responsibility for that whatsoever, not in product marketing. And within three hours they use Claude and they came up with some of the best messaging that I had seen since my time at Semrush. And my point is these are the people you want to find and also celebrate them and show them off to the rest of your team. Because it's not only about, it's not my job, I did it anyway. But it's the, I'm experimenting, I'm trying, maybe it's shit now. It's not, you know, like, and, and I just find that with organic because there has been this sort of 15 year long swell or slog or cycle time, whatever you want to call it, you know, it's changed overnight. And the question is, is that person ready for that change? And so if they're not, you have to do something about it. And the good news is there are plenty of people who are very interested in this right now. So I think that's, that's kind of point number two. And I think thirdly, the biggest risk is to over rotate on LLMs. They're absolutely important, crucial, got to do it. No question. But again, it's the combination of traditional SEO and AI search, which will equal digital brand visibility. And that's the equation that when I say it that way, at least the CMOs that it seems to make sense then, right? So it's like, I understand traditional SEO. I get it. I don't really understand AI search just yet, but now I'm starting to understand what's feeding LLMs. And overall that digital brand visibility is about this. The. The increasingly complementary nature of channels that they've always been intertwined, but now you can measure it in ways you never could. So that's where I think these are the majority of my conversations with CMOs right now.
- [30:06]
John Evans
Intrigues me actually talking about this, because there is a flip side I wanted to come onto. This is that we're obviously been talking about how, you know, as marketers, we can train the LLMs effectively to make sure that the right content's out there and people discovering us and we're. Our brand is very visible. But with what AI is doing, do you think that as a consumer, if you put yourself on the other side of it, that actually more and more and more your choice is effectively being made for you?
- [30:33]
Andrew Worden
Oh, you must have seen the TED Talk.
- [30:35]
John Evans
I did see a TED talk.
- [30:36]
Andrew Worden
You must have seen the TED Talk. Yeah.
- [30:38]
John Evans
Because you leaned into this question, didn't you?
- [30:39]
Andrew Worden
Which I thought was fascinating. I think that. I think it is a very interesting question, and I think it's possible. I think that just as I referenced this, you know, you might have your own agent in a couple of years that makes decisions for you based on your previous purchasing behavior, based off of your browser data, based off your mobile data, the microphone that listens to you whether you like it or not. I think it is very real and very possible, and I don't necessarily think it's a negative thing, but I do think it's something to be aware of that the very systems that we design, of course, are inherently political. It's not. I'm not the first person to think about this. I think it was langdon in the 80s, as a philosopher, who published that piece around, you know, literally every object. This chair, this rather deep chair that I hope I'm not slouching too much in, has some kind of politics that are embedded in it, right? There's a certain height, there's a certain width, you know, tables or, you know, wheelchair accessibility, everything, right? Bridges in New York, you know, in the 40s and 50s, were designed at a certain height so that buses couldn't go underneath them, which meant that people who couldn't afford to drive private vehicles couldn't enter. So objects have politics. And I think that also the systems we're designing right now. Absolutely have politics, but that's, you know, that's very esoteric. We could have our own session just on that. But to get right to your question, I think that the more that can be done now because as a marketer, I want that outcome actually. I actually want you to not realize that you need something, you know, you just need it. And more, more importantly, I want your credit card to be saved. And I would rather run the risk that you might return something which is probably a 1 in 6, that you would return it again going back to the fitness example or one of these things. So I think, I think that, you know, that future is not that far off. But the question of who's creating demand is very interesting to me as a marketer. And if I was, if I were to go back to LSE and do some more research, I might query those things, right? Where it's like, what does demand look like for both B2B and B2C in the future? Is it generated by the consumer? Is it generated, you know, purely by the perception of what you might need and how far ahead is AI thinking for you and predicting? Because when you see what's possible with Gen AI right now, just imagine what's going to be in five years. It's. I mean, for me, it's fascinating. Yeah, it's. Yeah. So, so yeah, that's a bit of the, a bit of the extrapolation of the, the Kuff Notes from the, the TED talk.
- [33:20]
John Evans
But I mean, the point you rounded on, which I, I think is, I mean, it's ironic because I work at a company called System One, which is all about instinct and emotion.
- [33:27]
Andrew Worden
Yeah.
- [33:28]
John Evans
Is that's going to become even more important. And this is the sort of juxtaposition, I think people are not realizing that the more we automate things and the system predicts and all that.
- [33:38]
Andrew Worden
Yeah, yeah.
- [33:39]
John Evans
The more important human emotion and humanity will become to those, those brands that want to win.
- [33:45]
Andrew Worden
Well, well, the authentic, the authenticity part is what's going to matter because I think the, especially as things become more and more automated, or let's just say, you know, the next pair of running, you know, trainers show up at your door. Like, it's not really, that's not like a delightful touch point for you. It's just purely transactional. So I think that also means that brands are going to have to do even more, you know, to stand out to, to make you feel something. So it's interesting when you bring that up in terms of the emotional part. So Yeah, I think that that was also part of that narrative of. Okay, so as things get increasingly more prescriptive, like marketers not only have this greater technical challenge, but there's also this like, greater challenge on the art side where how do you make people feel things when, you know, people are constantly just scrolling and desensitized to what they see on their reels and on talk and on everything. Like, you know, at a certain point your brain is so saturated, like, what, what feelings do you have left to give? So that's why I think the work that you're doing is also very interesting. Yeah, that's really interesting.
- [34:44]
John Evans
I think it changes behavior because, I mean, we go back to Covid days we suddenly adopted to having meetings online. Really that was the positive thing. But then we all went to concerts because we're desperate afterwards. We're desperate to kind of meet people and places like this, you know, going to conferences as well. Yeah, you know, we crave that human, that human interaction.
- [35:02]
Andrew Worden
And I mean, I certainly hope that doesn't go away. Yeah, I think that's the part where I think that's the, that's the biggest existential question about, you know, any kind of synergistic moment when, you know, there's parity with AI and all of these things. I still think at the end of the day that that part is still very overblown. I think that, you know, buyers still feel things. And whether you're B2B or B2C, especially on the B2B side, you know, people buy from people, they trust brands, they trust track records. And yeah, you, AI will get you part of the way. I'm talking about generative AI, you know, but having that foundation in traditional SEO and AI search, like for me it's just this table stakes that didn't exist before. You know, SEO is always kind of, it's important for CMOs, important for companies. But it's so amazing now how, you know, the attention is like almost well above paid. And then some companies, you know, where you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on paid and you're spending a fraction of that on organic, you know, and now CMOs are saying, what are we doing about this? How come this isn't as well funded? You know, we need, we need to fix this. It's just like a wild moment for, for marketers and also for Semrush, like, it's a great, great time.
- [36:13]
John Evans
Yeah, it is indeed. And then just lastly, you mentioned SEMrush1, which I think you announced today, didn't you? So what will that enable people to do?
- [36:22]
Andrew Worden
Great question. So we've been responding to customers. You know, it was about, it was in January of this year we released something called the AI Visibility Toolkit. And this was a $99 monthly subscription that helped you understand how your brand shows up and why, and also some teasers of how to make improvements. And over time we realized that because actually it wasn't really clear to us even I would say, and again, I'm not a product guy but, but I am a cmo. So I'll tell you, at least from my perspective, it wasn't immediately clear. Should we be going all in on LLMs? Should we be maybe thinking about slowing some of our SEO spend all these things? And actually after, after the balance of the year of research, we knew that it needs to be the combination of both so that we know for sure that one I would be willing to die on the hill as the expression goes, you know, to prove it and to advocate for it. So the new subscriptions include. So there's basically new tiers, there's starter for those who are starting out like you know, maybe brand new or a smaller company, Pro plus, which is, which is more sophisticated. And then there's this kind of advanced or ultimate, not ultra ultimate advanced solution which includes like API access, like all the bells and whistles. And of course then there's enterprise which is for, for very large companies. And the biggest net new or incremental improvement is that these subscriptions now will not only have better limits, but they also include de facto all of the AI visibility components baked into them. So Pavel was just up on stage showing demos where it's this expansion of what was offered earlier in the year. And AI Visibility Toolkit was our fastest growing product that we ever made at Semrush. So in the span of, and by the way, it only took us about a month to make which is even more impressive. So what we're really doing now is saying, okay, here are net new and more more valuable traditional SEO tools combined with AI search and AI visibility tools all in one subscription. You know, and that's something that is pretty unique at the moment.
- [38:27]
John Evans
So fantastic. Well, Andrew, thank you so much. Congratulations on the launch and on Spotlight, which another success.
- [38:35]
Andrew Worden
Yeah, great to see you.
- [38:36]
John Evans
Yeah, appreciate all your advice and wisdom.
- [38:38]
Andrew Worden
Thanks for having me.
- [38:39]
John Evans
Amazing. Thank you.
- [38:40]
Andrew Worden
Cheers.
- [38:40]
John Evans
Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored cmo. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show, so please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast. If you want to contact me, you can to I'm over on X censoredCMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.