← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
AI-Powered Search: Disruptive Risk or Strategic Advantage?
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- [00:00]
Jordan Cooney
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney AI powered search.
- [00:45]
Mike Walruth
Is shaking up the digital world Google's business model is under pressure. Advertisers are rethinking their strategies, publishers fear traffic loss, and competitors are racing to capitalize on the disruption. According to a 2025 report by Gitnux, 64% of marketers consider AI a critical component of their SEO strategy. Additionally, 73% of SEO experts believe AI will significantly change the SEO landscape within the next five years. That's not a prediction, it's a reality quickly coming true. And now Google faces a delicate balancing act. Innovate with AI or risk market share loss for businesses, the challenge is clear. How do you stay discoverable in a search landscape driven by AI innovation? This is the Voices of Search Podcast. I'm Jordan Cooney, and joining us today is Mike Walruth, CEO at yext, which helps businesses improve their digital presence through innovative search solutions. Today, Mike will share how companies can navigate AI powered search while maintaining discoverability.
- [01:54]
Jordan Cooney
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- [03:11]
Mike Walruth
AWT Mike, welcome to the Voice of Search podcast.
- [03:15]
Hey Jordan, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
- [03:17]
Yeah. So thrilled to have you on the show. For listeners that don't know much about yext, why don't you just share a little bit about the company, what you guys do, how you guys offer solutions in the market and then we can dive into some of our questions.
- [03:31]
Yeah, sure. Great. So yext, the best way to describe yext is we're a digital presence platform. We help companies maintain and optimize their digital presence using a suite of products that range from listings, data syndication, reputation management, website pages, landing pages, social media management, and increasingly one to one communications, primarily through today the financial services vertical. Although I think there's a lot of opportunity outside of that vertical. And, and look, we've been, you know, at. The best thing to know about yext is we've been at the forefront of helping businesses manage what happens when landscapes of digital presence fragment. Since the mobile device fragmented the digital experience layer very meaningfully in kind of the late 2008, 2009 time frame. We also have a lot of experience with what happens when markets defragment, which is kind of the situation we've had for the last, call it decade or 12 or so years. So we went from a highly fragmented environment to a highly monolithic environment where Google became sort of the center of everything. And I think what we're seeing now is a much more rapid than expected refragmentation being driven by generative AI and the promise of that as the search technology of the future.
- [04:47]
Well, that's a great segue to our first deep dive question which is around kind of the AI search evolution like and what's happening, right. And whether how YEX can help or just what's happening generally in the landscape. What risks and opportunities does this changing search landscape powered by AI bring to Google's business model? So how is Google's business model at the center of this whole AI change?
- [05:11]
Yeah, I mean so I have an interesting lens on this which I'm happy to share. So my first company was a company called Right Media. It was a digital ad exchange. It was the first sort of at scale digital ad exchange. I sold that company to Yahoo in 2007 and I joined Yahoo at that Time running initially the display Advertising Exchange and was quickly asked to take over oversight of the search advertising marketplace as well. So, you know, by the time I'd been there for about six months or a year, I was kind of overseeing all of the advertising marketplaces. And what that meant was that I was in charge of monetization across the Yahoo search page. And you know, we had an innovator's dilemma, or I don't know if we were considered an innovator then, but we had a dilemma. And that dilemma was we could extract a lot of money off that page. But every time we did that, we, you know, we lost customers to a Google experience that, you know, was frankly just better at providing the answer to the question and less monetized. So, you know, we, you know, 2008, 2009, Yahoo. I don't know what the market share was. 12%, 13% of the search market share, something like that. On those, I'll get the numbers not exactly right, but we had three or four ads above the fold, above the organic search results at that time. And if you look, if you, you know, at that same time you went to Google, often there was no ad, right? And sometimes there was just one. It was a single sponsored link at the top of the page. Right. And so I'm not sure we weren't going to win a relevance of the organic search results fight with Google, but we certainly weren't going to win that fight when we were over monetizing the page relative to their sort of. And so what that created was a magical experience for Google. It was basically like the consumer was like, okay, Google's like magic and Yahoo is like it was 10 years ago. And just like Altavista was and as Jeeves was and all these other things now, fair or unfair, that's what the sort of consumer perceived, right? And you know, Yahoo just didn't have the will at that time to say, look, the best thing we could do for our search share is take all these ads off the page and try to deliver a magical relevant experience. There were a lot of efforts to improve that search product. You fast forward to today and it's really interesting because what has happened is as Google took this 90, 90 plus percent, 92%, I think it peaked a couple years ago share. What happened was the, you know, the, the experience got a lot less magic, right? You know, and, and suddenly, you know, it's funny, I look at that Google SERP page today if I ask any kind of a commercially relevant query and it's much more heavily monetized than our Yahoo page was in 2008, 2009. And why? Because you know, they can. Right. And so that leads to a 200 plus billion dollar monopoly business. And I can only imagine, I don't know, but I can only imagine inside Google today the conversations that are being had around, hey, these AI search experiences are pretty magical to the consumer and they're not very monetized today. How are we going to compete with that when you know, the market expects us to deliver over $50 billion a quarter of search advertising revenue? And that is, that is a really interesting dilemma for them.
- [08:23]
I mean, a follow up question on this because I'm curious. Last year, right around this time, Google put in a big shakeup around leadership with respect to search specifically, Liz Reed became the new head of search. How much do you think leadership and the way that those leaders are influencing the experience, the product, the expectations for consumers has an impact on the way a company of that size is doing business?
- [08:52]
I suspect significance. So I don't know those leaders. My experience inside Yahoo was not as the market leader, not as the dominant market leader, it was as the disrupted. Right. And Yahoo is very much disrupted by Google's magical experience back in the day. I think it's very clear that the potential here is for Google to be the disrupted. And the question is what do they do about it? Right, right. And I think there's this, I can only say from the outside it appears that you could imagine the conversation inside the company being about can we walk this tightrope where we can maintain a lot of this monetization but also bridge our way to the consumer experience that is going to monetize. So the funny thing is I think it's really easy to look at the current market and say, okay, I can see what's going on here. You know, ChatGPT has a subscription model and so they don't have to have ads. And you know, perplexity has ads but they're not overwhelming. And you can kind of go through Grok today doesn't have ads that I've seen. But you know, then we have this news this week with you know, sort of ChatGPT and Shopify and you know, sort of creating a commerce experience. Right. That appears to be a bridge to a monetized experience. Right. Whether it's ads or it's offers or it's sponsored offers or whatever it is. And so I think it's a really fascinating time. I don't think any of us know exactly how it's going to play out. But if I were betting, what I'd be betting on is that Google's going to try to find a bridge from their current monetization to a new form of monetization via their own efforts in AI. And that's going to be contested by ChatGPT and Grok and Perplexity and others and their willingness to basically under monetize the experience to win consumer share.
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Right.
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It's not a new game but you know, this time around what we have are really well funded players who are willing to be very, very aggressive about it. And the most likely outcome here is that, you know, there's not going to be one winner who owns all of this. And that creates the problem for the business which is Google monopoly. You might not have liked it, but it was a simple world for the marketer. Right?
- [11:01]
Yeah.
- [11:02]
If I can make myself visible on Google I win, if I can't, I lose. Right now it's, you know, I have to handicap who, who's going to win and how much fragmentation there's going to be and how many of these experiences am I going to have to manage.
- [11:14]
Right. I mean you brought up AI and I do want to talk about the experiences we have to manage but as a precursor to those questions I want to discuss the AI impact on search and where the opportunities are there. Arguably Google was maybe a little bit behind on how they were positioning AI as a consumer facing element of their experience. Let's all be frank. Like Google's been using AI for as long as it's existed. They are an innovator in this space, they are an investor in this space. So they were a part of it from the beginning. But from a consumer facing perspective, what's happening in search, they were slightly behind the eight ball, let's just say how much of a risk is that to where we are today in AI search and discoverability?
- [12:04]
Yeah, so my assumption is, is that, you know, Google's capability, Google's had more capability around delivering, you know, AI overviews, AI experiences, AI mode, you know, things like that than they have made public for quite some time. And I think, you know, I think they were fairly transparent about this when ChatGPT launched and you know, they were, it's kind of forced their hand into providing more of these AI overviews and experiences. And again, I have no inside information. I just am watching, you know, as, you know, a somewhat experienced person who' kind of been through these sort of shifts before.
- [12:35]
Sure.
- [12:35]
You know what I think the question, if you want to Turn it into a math question. It ultimately comes down to how much of the 200 billion are we willing to forego in order to maintain the vast majority of our or a significant portion of our consumer share? And then how do you actually go about doing that? So one of the really interesting things that we've seen at yext that we have an interesting viewpoint is that over the last four or five quarters, you know, we tend to work with a lot of customers who are very focused on the local pack and they're very focused on, you know, kind of local oriented queries. And one of the things we saw was, you know, three or four or five quarters ago, the total number of local pack impressions that, that our customers were seeing across the board were dropping in the ranges of 20, 25, 30%. And there was this, this sort of very short moment where I think there was a lot of panic and it was, holy cow, like this must be chatgpt stealing a lot of the queries. Right. And then, you know, and then we quickly realized that like you would see that, right, that's not what was happening. What was happening was Google was serving AI overviews into queries that had historically delivered the sort of local SERP page. And it was really fascinating because we started digging in and what you realized was that no one's better at Google than understanding like, which is the unmonetizable query. Right, right. And so, you know, the example I always use is emergency plumber near me will always get the local pack, it will always get the monetized because it's a highly valuable high intent query. Do I need a plumber to unclog my toilet? We'll always get the AI overview that says, hey, why don't you try a plunger first? And then if that doesn't work, maybe you call a plumber. And so I think what we saw, the big shift we saw last year was like, you know, visibility in the local pack changed overnight almost because Google started serving AI overviews. Interestingly, clicks, conversions, website visits, driving directions, all the other metrics that we measure stayed the same.
- [14:34]
Yeah.
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So, you know, they did a really good job of carving off for their AI overviews the unmonetizable queries, the stuff that wasn't going to click on those driving directions or those websites anyway. And that was very clever. Right, Because I think what it allowed them to do is go out with a talk track that said, hey, look, you know, we're delivering AI reviews 20, 25% of the time and we see no monetization. Difference.
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Right, right.
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Of course, you know, if you select all the unmonetizable queries, you're not going to see a monetization difference. And so, you know, the question is now can you deliver an AI experience that feels much, you know, that doesn't have all the ads and monetization around it and not see, you know, on more on higher intent on shopping queries or these other more high intent localized queries and. And not see a. I think the answer is definitively no. Right. To me it comes down to a capital allocation question which is are you willing to invest in revenue loss to maintain the customer experience at the same time that you're plowing unbelievable amounts of money into capex to win the AI race? I think it's a fascinating landscape and it'll be really interesting to see how they adapt.
- [15:40]
I love that we've segued to local because that was really the next kind of deep dive. And you summarized your response in terms of the impact to local search. What's happening to revenue streams for these businesses? There isn't a material impact at conversion rate and signups or requests for services. The thing I want to dovetail though is that historically, especially for local players and especially for small businesses, SEO organic search has been a foundational way of building your business's brand and building awareness about your company. And it's been an incredibly cheap lever for doing that. As we see AI discoverability, as we see AI features and experiences become more and more prevalent within these search results, how do you create opportunities particular for local and small businesses to build brand awareness, to build top of funnel, let's call it opportunities in organic search.
- [16:39]
Yeah, so it's a big question and fortunately we've got some time to dig into it. I think the first thing is this notion of the clicks and the conversions and they're flat. And that's okay. This is a temporary phenomenon. Right. So if you believe that chatgpt and Perplexity and Grok and others are going to ultimately win kind of query share, question share from Google over time, then what's going to happen is there will be another shoe here, which is those clicks and conversions and traffic and awareness and all those things that come from the Google SERP page and the local pack and things like that, they will eventually decline if those other AI experiences take share. That's just a certainty. And so what I think marketers are really focused on and at the heart of your question is like, so how do you de risk the fact that your primary source of traffic and your primary source of discovery may disappear. And there's a lot of answers being given to this question right now and a lot of new three letter acronyms that are being coined around this. Right. So we've got, you got AIO and SGES and all the other agent optimization, all this other stuff and it's great, I think it's good, the conversations happening. We have a little bit different lens on this than I think a lot of the other folks in the space, which is it all starts with the data. So you're not ready for what's coming if your data is not ready for what's coming. Because the fundamental difference is that the way the agent and these AIs are all going to evolve towards agentic applications. I think that's very clear. The way that that agent wants to consume and discover content is very, very different than the way that human beings want to consume and discover content. And so until you've got your data structured and organized and you're constantly adding to it and you're constantly identifying where is my data more limited than my competitors? And this becomes a like, one of the things we like to say around here is like a data is content, a content is data. And so there's a lot of ways we could go with this, but I would at least I would sort of make a fairly strong statement here that we're going to have to rebuild the Internet for machines. We've had this amazing wave, 15 years of digital transformation and huge budgets going into. Everything has to be digitized and we built it for human beings. So we have these beautiful websites that are super image heavy and they have these navigation menus and dropdown boxes and you know, consumable content for human beings. And that's great and that has to exist. But we're going to have to replicate that, you know, as pure data.
- [19:18]
Right?
- [19:19]
And we're going to need to deliver that data to the endpoints, all of the endpoints. And we're going to have to constantly refresh that data because these things are not going to be satisfied building a static index of what the date, you know, they need to know which menu items are available right now.
- [19:33]
Right.
- [19:33]
Which, which sizes of the Air Jordan, you know, shoe you want or in stock. So, so, you know, I think digital transformation 2.0 is coming and it's coming really fast.
- [19:43]
I mean this is a great add on to the next question around advertiser adaptation and where the adaptation is going to happen. But just briefly, staying on this local theme, small business Theme I fully agree. Content is data and data is content. How are you guys supporting enterprises that may have local establishments, may have local businesses to bring that to light? How are you helping them bring data to the forefront of how they're building experiences on their site, how they're feeding information to Google? And now Obviously all these AI experiences and LLMs that are providing, you know, responses to prompts, how are you guys doing that?
- [20:23]
Yeah, so we've been at the, I mean we've been doing this for a really long time and you know, I think one of the sort of battles that's been fought in this space is like, you know, do citations matter or not? So our core product is really a citation building product in the sense that, you know, we distribute authoritative business information to hundreds of publishers and publishers and candidly, a lot of the publishers who we distribute to, you know, their traffic has just consistently declined over the last 10 or 15 years. And it becomes really easy to say, hey, like why does it matter if my, you know, address and phone number and website information are correct on MapQuest? Like, why do I care? Right. And you know, the reason why you care is that demonstrably Google cares. Right, right. And we have a lot of research showing that this matters a ton. You know, the other, the other thing that's happening is when you interface with these generative AI experiences, they're going to give you a list of citations, right? It's right there at the end of the answer. Like, here's where I got the information that's, that's summarized in this answer. And it's funny when you look at it, it's exactly the same thing that you see below the local pack on, you know, on the Google. It's, it's TripAdvisor and Yelp and MapQuest and all these other things that they're gathering the information from. So at least today, you know, it turns out that a lot of the things that you need to do when you think about creating and distributing content to service these AI, I'm sorry, to be visible within these AI experiences is a lot of the same things, but that will, I really fundamentally believe that will change. And so it's interesting at yext, we work with two types of customers. So we work with large enterprises who have a local footprint. So think of the large wealth management, large health care, and you know, what they really, you know, the way they run their businesses is in a lot of ways it's like a, you know, a vast number of small businesses that are sent where marketing and Digital experience is centrally managed. Yeah. And so for them, this is a huge opportunity to get their ducks in a row for what's going to turn into a, you know, a sort of exponentially larger data distribution problem. My listings data, my reputation management, my content, my pages schema page, you know, all that stuff has to be managed, you know, and there are going to be versions of that for all these different AI experiences. And so that's the scary thing about it is if you're the CMO or whoever's in charge of those kind of distributed digital experiences is you got to wake up every morning, you got to be like, how am I going to be ready for what's coming? And, you know, the other customer we sell to, interestingly, we don't sell a lot directly to small businesses. About 25% of our business, 20 to 25% of our business is through partnerships who do sell the small businesses. And they're typically bundling our products and services with other marketing products and services. And they have exactly the same problems that, you know, large financial services, large retail and hospitality have. They just have, you know, an aggregated group of small businesses instead of a sort of corporately controlled set of small businesses.
- [23:22]
This is a great segue to this concept of advertiser adaptation and how advertising is shifting. You talked about it like, for the last 20 years, there's been these big amount of money that's just been plowed into digital advertising. And what shifts are you seeing in how advertisers are approaching search marketing as this AI transformation takes flight, as this change happens to traditional surgery? Are you seeing that these brands and businesses are just continuing to push more and more budget to digital forms of, and search forms of advertising, or are you seeing a pullback? What expectations should we be thinking about when it comes to the advertiser landscape?
- [24:01]
Yeah, so specifically to advertising. So we don't today provide any advertising products to our customers. That's not to say we won't, but we today, that's, you know, we are. Every product that we have is designed to create organic visibility and organic digital presence and discoverability. But what's really interesting over the last couple of quarters is marketers are wanting to have a lot of conversations about, okay, I, I don't know that I should be allocating as much of my budget to, you know, for example, paid search on Google, if at the end of the day that is going to be a less important channel. I think, I think the other thing that we consistently hear is I spend a lot of money on Google because I feel like I have to. But I know that some of that money is being wasted and a great example.
- [24:49]
Jordan Cooney
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- [26:17]
Mike Walruth
This is they lack granular sort of, you know, call it, you know, zip code or DMA level information on. A lot of marketers buy their own branded search queries and they do it to avoid being conquested by competition. They don't have granular information and insight today into where there is no competition. And so you have this situation where like XYZ brand is actually buying a lot of search advertising in market areas where there is no competitor and the whole purpose, you know. And so a huge focus of ours at yext, even though we're not in the paid search world, is to provide, you know, far more in depth and far more granular understanding of where are you winning without paid so that you can not necessarily reduce your paid budget, but so that you can start reallocating that paid budget to areas where there's much more competition. And for every business that has a national footprint, the competitive landscape in New York City and Manhattan is very different than the competitive landscape in Wichita, Kansas.
- [27:16]
Yeah, no doubt. I want to move to this competitive component. And what are the competitive dynamics that we're seeing in specifically in search. How are Google's competitors, especially the most recent competitors that are now in the market OpenAI Cloud and the like, how are they leveraging AI search capabilities to challenge Google's market dominance?
- [27:39]
Yeah, well, I think this, it's funny, we, you know, Yext in 2018, you know, kind of as, you know, right after Google open source, their, some of the search stuff and you know, we ran a campaign around our, we have our internal search product which is primarily used by customers to create, you know, kind of find a doctor, find an advisor, store locators and things like that. And so we ran this campaign that was, you know, answers, not ads. Right. And it was all about like your customers that they're not looking to see ads, they're not looking to see links, they don't want links to documents. What they want is the answer to the question. Right. And this is in 2018. Really interesting.
- [28:19]
Yeah.
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You know, it turns out that I think we're a little ahead of ourselves with that, with that product. But this is the, this is the fundamental difference is that, you know, and I'm watching it with my, you know, I've, I have one child who's still a teenager and I'm watching her, you know, sort of interface with ChatGPT and, and these new, you know, that's her default, that's where she goes first and she likes it because they give her an answer. Yeah, right. Not a link. She doesn't have to click around. And obviously Google has the capability and that puts us back into the whole innovator's dilemma discussion, which I think we've covered pretty well.
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Right.
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I think what businesses and marketers, whether you're a single location small business, whether you're a purely online business, whether you're a giant kind of brand like a Nike or a Coca Cola or a scaled local retail hospitality financial services business who we do a lot of work with. You have to start asking this question and it's the most fundamental question. How am I going to be the answer to the question? How do I make sure that when the consumer asks a question and instead of a bunch of links and a bunch of options, they get an answer that I'm the answer. And that goes back to content and data, clearly. And it goes back to a very, very broad definition of content where everything I do as a marketer is ultimately content. Social media posts or content review responses or content. Every local, you know, my, my vegan menu pages, my, my provider pages, my, it's all content. And all that content is data. And we're going to feed it to these AI machines as data, not as pictures and words. I mean, words are data. But yeah, that's, that's where we're headed. Yeah, it's a huge risk and a huge opportunity for marketers who want to get ahead of the curve on this.
- [30:01]
I'm curious to get your perspective. How are you talking to other leaders leaders about this? Because I find this to be one of the most exciting and motivating conversations, which is, hey, the landscape is changing. Hey, Google's not the only player in town. Hey, a year from now you could be more relevant here, here or here. And YEX has been doing this for a long time. You guys have been doing it with other channels like Amazon and TripAdvisor and other places where businesses need to be present in order to be competitive. So how are you having that conversation and how can you help our listeners better communicate with leaders about the shifting competitive landscape and where you should be investing?
- [30:42]
Yeah, so it's really interesting and particularly when it comes to sort of whatever the next evolution of SEO is, Yext has always had what I believe is sort of an unnecessarily complicated relationship with the SEO community. It's funny because I think the perception has always been that we believe that there's a way to automate away the practice of SEO and it's just fundamentally not the case. We believe that there are fundamental data things that you need to do and then there's sort of fundamental insights and actions that need to be derived from that data. And what we're really best at is gathering these huge sets of data and figuring out kind of where's the kernel of insight in that data. So our newest product is a Agentix superintelligence platform for gathering competitive intelligence around at the very, very granular level. So we recently bought a company called Places Scout, which is a brilliant small company that I think has kind of best in class understanding of like what's going on on the Google SERP page and what are the sort of non performance metrics that are helping to drive that. We put that together with an internal project that, that was very focused on AI visibility, AI sentiment analysis at that same granular kind of localized level. And we're investing really aggressively into gathering more forms of data sentiment reputation. At the end of the day, the way to envision this is that for every single location or product or service that I may have as a marketer, I can look at, you know, 40 competitors on search result pages on AI experiences and I can measure across metrics like sentiment and rank and things like that. And I can find the little kernels of hey, like I'm winning here or not winning here because of X. Right. And X might be I don't have enough reviews. X might be my reviews aren't good enough. It might be my page loads too slowly. It might be my page doesn't have schema. Right. It might be, you know, we currently collecting over 150 and in some cases as many as 250 non performance metrics on this data and you know, it becomes this impossibly large sort of, you know, data file for a human being to parse. But you know, in an AI world we can find the, it's the needle in the haystack. We can find the answer to the question which is all too often the marketer says, well you know, I need to do reputation management more effectively across my entire, you know, world, across 40,000 fast casual restaurants. And it turns out that's not remotely true. They might, in 40,000 restaurants they might have, you know, 10% or 15% that actually need better reputation. And so I think the thing that we're so excited about here and the huge opportunity is that we spent 15 years building best in class utilities to take action around what you need to do to improve your digital presence. And now with the advancements in AI and data science and this ability for us to bring this super intelligence layer to bear, we can actually start getting really fine grained about like this is the thing you need to do to influence ChatGPT and this is the thing and you might have to do something different to influence perplexity. All of it coming back to like I gotta be the answer.
- [33:55]
I want to jump into a follow up question on this because this is so critical to how marketing leaders, business leaders are thinking today. The ability to focus in a portfolio, say that has 40,000 local businesses and knowing which ones need reputation management, amazing. That is a data and a science effort that you guys have been able to solve. But there's a whole world of unknowns when it comes to or marketing or becoming prevalent in say chatgpt or how we're going to become prevalent. I'll give you a really specific use case in TripAdvisor's AI experiences. Yeah, right now we're even becoming hyper specific about an AI model that's proprietary to a, to a brand. But it's, it's a search engine just like Google. It just serves a very specific audience. Yeah, where are you helping those business leaders understand those opportunities or even explore them and prioritize them when you have limited budgets, limited resources and limited time?
- [35:00]
Yeah, you know, that is where, you know, all of our R and D is focused in those areas. Right. So it's really interesting, right. To the extent TripAdvisor builds a very travel specific AI agentic application, what you're going to figure out very quickly is that in order to influence that engine, you're going to need to create content that is sort of grounding and interesting to that specific experience. Right. And you may or may not have the opportunity to do that. Right. If you're Nike, it's not totally clear what you're going to do or that you should be trying to influence the AI travel engine, maybe on very specific queries like I'm going to be in Los Angeles and I want to get a new pair of shoes, but that's going to be most likely asked somewhere else. And so it turns out that what we're going to need to build are extraordinary data warehouses and constant refreshment of. It's not just the data, it's the data relative to all the competition. This is the enormous problem and the enormous opportunity. And then localizing that data down to the most granular possible level across all these different vectors is the challenge. And right now we have customers who are way ahead of the curve on that because they've been structuring and organizing their data in order to distribute it through our various. You know, at the core of our system is this knowledge graph database that allows you to have an unlimited amount of structured data. Where that will become really, really powerful is when, yeah, I'll give you a, I'll give you a search example, but it could, could apply to any of the AIs. It could say, hey, look like we, we've been monitoring on a daily or weekly basis what, you know, how ChatGPT answers the question in every zip code that you operate, where's the best healthy lunch near me? And it turns out that we're monitoring that and we're seeing how often does your restaurant show up for that query. But we're also monitoring all your competition, everyone else who is showing up on that search result page or that chatgpt or in the answer. And what will happen is we'll be able to identify trends. So you're going to be able to say, hey, you've been kind of consistently ranking number one or top three for this. Where's a great healthy lunch near me? And in the Last two weeks, you know, something has changed. And now this competitor who's down the street, who, you know is starting to take more of that ranking, you know, you then get into the granular. Well, why, like, why is that happening? And you'll find a lot of things like, well, okay, like what did they do? Well, they actually just launched a whole set of intent pages, content pages or data pages around their keto menu and their vegan menu and their healthy menu. And they just flooded the. They sort of flooded the zone with new content. And lo and behold, what happened is like the answer. Agents love that content. Like, okay, now I had a name, an address, a phone number, and I had some meta tags or whatever that said healthy lunch. But now what I've got are these full vegan pages and these full menu pages and things like that. And so you then have to respond, right? So you're going to have to be able to respond to that. And you can do that at the brand level, and you can also do that at the location level. And so part of what's so exciting is this is such an enormous data problem that you have to have a certain scale in order to be able to solve it. And that's what we are really excited about, being in a position to do that.
- [38:26]
You brought this up earlier. There's this complicated relationship for yext when it comes to the SEO community. I actually think that that's universal for all SEO platforms and technologies, whether it's rank tracker and content tools and all these. All these tools. And being a former leader of a platform, I know this very well, just like you do. These complicated relationships with the SEO community are necessary to innovate. And my big question for you, Mike, is how is YEXT innovating to support that SEO community? And more importantly, how are you enabling that SEO community to. To move at a pace that is unprecedented in a time where innovation and change is happening faster than ever before in Discoverability.
- [39:17]
Yeah, it's a super insightful question, and thanks for asking it, because this is probably the most important message that I could deliver to that community. And the example we were just talking about, every SEO practitioner has a client who's going to have to figure out what we were just talking about. Why is my rank dropping? Why am I not showing up on ChatGPT? Why does perplexity say my brand's no good? It's a lot of whys, right? And, you know, answering that question again, we've, you know, for 15 years, you know, all of these questions have been about Google. Right. And so it's a. It's an entirely new, you know, world. The products we're building today, like, yes, for large, you know, massive local brands, most of them have their own internal SEO departments and they're managing these things, but for the vast majority of brands, they're going to work with a practitioner. What we're building are tools that that practitioner should be using to identify exactly the answers to the type of questions that we just. And so our new product is called Scout. It's in beta today. It'll launch in June. My team will always be happy if I put a product plug in, although I don't like to be too commercial about these things. But a huge part of our vision is that what we're building is a tool set for any practitioner who wants to broaden their expertise around the why. And then what happens is broadening the expertise around the why leads you to make much better recommendations and ultimately take much better action on behalf of your customers. And so we want to have a really robust and really strong relationship with the SEO community by providing tools and insights and research that's really relevant to their job. No part of me believes that this AI wave is going to make the value of SEO go down. It's going to make it go up. Being an expert in this is going to be more important than ever, and having the right tools to support your practice, more important than ever. And so, regardless of whatever complicated relationship has existed in the past, we're actively reaching out to members of that community to make sure that we're providing tools of value to them, not tools of destruction.
- [41:25]
Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you for sharing that. And that wraps up this episode of the Voices Search podcast.
- [41:31]
Jordan Cooney
And a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore, thanks to Ahrefs, because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product, which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's Ahrefs A H R E F S.comAWT.
- [42:04]
Mike Walruth
A huge thank you to Mike Walruth from Yext for joining us. If you'd like to contact Mike, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or at the voicesofsearch.com for more information about Yext, please visit yext.com if you haven't subscribed yet and want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll bring you back to our feed. Okay, that's all for today and until next time. Remember, the answers are always in the data.