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Sit back, relax, and get ready for.
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Your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton.
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In 2025, researchers found that AI search referrals to the US retail sites surged 1,300% during the holiday season. The challenge is clear that SEO no longer ends with the SERP rankings and it now starts with AI powered doorways into your brand. So how must retailers evolve to stay ahead? You're listening to the Voice of Search Podcast. My name is Tyson and I'm joined today by Ajay Gurich, global vp@botify. AJ is going to be sharing for us how retail market is evolving with the new AI search. And with that. Welcome to the show, aj Excited to be here. Thanks. I am excited for this too. Like, I've, I've also spent a fair amount of time in the retail sector. I feel like also where we're at, it's like now being fully embraced how, like, that buyer's journey is like, totally kind of shifting and changing. So maybe like to lead into that, like, what's your perspective on these shifts and how is it impacting retail specifically?
A
Yeah, great question. It's kind of. That's where everything starts. Right. That's the genesis where if you break things down to the simplest components, you have a change in the interface. So we went from this kind of search interface where people were doing keyword search discovery, click conversion, to this more conversational interface, and it's simple. But that change from keywords to conversation has really changed the dynamic in discovery. It's done some, I don't want to say damage, but probably damage to the way people do attribution, and everyone's dealing with that as well. But, but if before we get into that, that black hole, I think just, just understanding that we went from keywords to conversation and how consumers are interacting with and discovering brands and products will never be the same is a, is a key thing to always keep in the back of your mind as we enter in these type of discussions.
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Yeah. And it's like, in a lot of ways, I feel like some of the fundamentals or approach is still intact, where you're still dealing with consumer behavior, you're still dealing with a discovery phase of more of decision making phase. So it's like, I think those more broader stroke elements are still intact. But I agree with you. It's like now we're playing on a slightly different field where it's a new board that we're playing on. But still, still those fundamentals of how a consumer will go through that buyer journey I think is intact. And that should give some comfort to SEOs out there that may be like kind of worried or panicked of how do I stay competitive in this new landscape. But at least from my perspective, like that to me at least is intact. You're just. Now we're operating in a new experience.
A
It's a great point. Yeah. So the interface has changed, but the consumer hasn't. Right, Right. I mean, did the whole world's consumer base radically change in the last three years? No, but the interfaces they use and how they use them dramatically shifted. So the good thing is we can fall back on good old reliable humanity doing humanity things. So people still think and act the same way. They make illogical decisions with their heart instead of their head and they tend to follow pretty predictable journeys. And so I think that's another good point. As you enter into these discussions, it's like, what's changed the interface? What hasn't actually changed? Your customer's still pretty much the same as they were a couple years ago.
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And maybe let's dive into that experience from the consumer because before, obviously it's like you had your more traditional keyword research. Where are you competing? How are you performing in that? But now so much of that experience, especially in that early stages of the buyer's journey, is taking place in ChatGPT, AI mode, whatever kind of emerging space it is. So how are you viewing that and its impact to us as SEOs?
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Yeah, so this one, you'll just stop me in case I go long here because there's a couple different parts here, but the first thing, like I mentioned the black hole earlier, the elephant in the room is a lot of people have a donut hole in their desk data. So they, they, they. There is no search console from ChatGPT and Perplexity AI mode is bundled in with just web traffic at Google. So when you look at your analytics, everyone sort of sees has a donut hole in their analytics. So it starts there. From a, from a brand and a marketer's perspective, you're like, well, wait A minute. How can I, how can I repackage this so I'm whole and like, see where this is gone from the consumer perspective. I mean, it's exactly how you laid out search was so interesting. I even think from a market research standpoint, because it was, it was thought to keystroke. So when you were mining search data, you were really mining intentionality. What I'm excited about though, with this change. So, yes, it has issues where you're like, oh, shoot, now I have to like, attribute revenue to copilot and like, how am I going to do that? You know, I was like, here we go. It's a mess, right? But think about what we gained. So before, you had to take keywords and divine intent. So you get your data scientist and your marketers and your statisticians, and you're like, okay, this keyword is this. And we did like the basics pretty well, like informational, transactional. But deeper than that, like two or three layers deeper was much harder. Took a lot more effort to get to true intent. Well, this has the ability for the consumer to give us the intent in the conversation, right in the context. And if we do our job right, brands have the ability to serve the consumer better. Whereas before we had to kind of guess. You buy all these keywords and paid media, or you do these certain articles and you're sort of inferring intent. You're guessing, pay for the ad, pay for the social place, your content update, your SEO update. Like, this could be a moment where it's better for the brand. It's more efficient because they're serving true intent. And it's better for the customer because they're not getting interrupted with things that actually don't map their intent. Now call me in three years and let's see how, how we do as an industry here. But like, I'm a, I'm glass half full. Like, like, look at what the opportunity is in front of us. It all comes down to intent. We had to infer it with keywords, and now we should be able to see it much more clearly with conversation. And it's up brands to now do the right thing with that data and serve the intent properly. And it should be a better consumer and customer experience and a more efficient brand experience, especially on the, on the spend side.
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You made a couple of great points there. And it's like, yeah, with essentially like the queries having more context to them, like, we're able to get to those, you know, what's, what's the intent behind this? But I think you also hit on hey, we also have this kind of black hole or these blind spots in attribution. So do you have any tips or recommendations of how do you close the gap? And so from the query itself we can get more information but then where do we find that to then kind of lead our efforts from a web development perspective?
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Yeah, there's a couple things I'll say something that's actually very timely. So if you're deep in the search industry you pro you probably have seen and if not, I'll just explain it. There's this issue where Google eliminated the ability to see a hundred results at a time like the N100 parameter. So a lot of people think of Google like one to ten blue links. Traditional. Right. But there was a way obviously you could turn it to 1 to 100. Why would you do that? Well, if you were a rank tracking tool, I won't name the names and it's not like I'm shaming them but like every rank tracking tool on the planet was doing 100 results at a time. So you could say hey, you know, you're position 32, your position, you're right at the beginning of page two or three and like you know, content gap analysis and here's, here's, here's what you should rise to page one. So every ranking tool out there was using this. To my understanding they were using that version. Much more cheaper for them too because they're pulling 100 results in one poll versus 10 poles. So around Botify, you know we, we sit on all kinds of data from log files from the biggest companies, retail, e commerce on the planet. So we see their search data, we see their log data and there's a lot of interesting trends in there. So right around September 8th through the 12th, we started to see some anomalies show up in the data. Long story short, I've talked with our data science team. I pulled all the data and this will be like, if you're listening to this, this is going to show up in your data. So what we saw was around the exact moment Google nerfed the 100 at a time results, which by the way they did with no announcement. They didn't say this is being deprecated, they just turned it off one day. And they would argue, well you weren't supposed to be scraping anyhow so we didn't have to alert you was it a paid feature? So they turn it off. Right. And then something very interesting happens. Everyone's impressions tank. So what's been happening I've been at conferences all year and I've been putting up a graph and I say something like this, I don't have to know you, but I know this is true. Your impressions are way up through the roof this year and your clicks are flat or down. And everyone's like, yep, that's what's happening to me. And so year over year I did a like cohort analysis. Just like, let me look at several hundred, let's call it 3,400e commerce sites and these are some of the biggest in the world. And in retail all their impressions were up, let's call it 35 to 45% year over year. Soon as this came through, they all went to flatline to slightly negative year over year growth overnight. So what does that tell you? What it tells you is there's been a lot of noise in the signal. So the data that you've been collecting, we've been collecting, everyone's been collecting has been noisy as heck and it's only gotten more noise because of the rise of all the AI tools over the top. So it was like we kind of had this baked in for a long time, rank tracking tools, probably a small percentage, but it's gotten to this zenith moment. And so what I'm recommending everyone to do is go back and put a little bit of a thumb on the scale. Like if your impressions have been up in 20, 24, 2025, you know, riding that 30, 40% gain, a lot of that, you know, we can go industry by industry, but at least 10, 20% of that was noise, it wasn't actually real. So when you're looking at your end of Q3 data, everyone in the world is going to see drops and impressions, they're going to see average position rate improve. But it actually did it, it's just the same. But 100 results at a time aren't being shown. And then in click through rates probably will stay mostly in range because those tools, those bots in the scrapers weren't clicking anything, they were just searching. So it's an interesting moment. So I come coming back to your question, it's so tough right now because literally even the traditional, that's just impressions, average position, clicks, even that is already a lot of noise in it. Then you say, okay, what about AI mode? What about AI overviews? What about perplexity? What about Claude? What about ChatGPT? So what I'm advocating is actually something a little about, I don't know if it's radical or not, but don't Try to replicate traditional rank tracking and search positioning with AI search. Rank tracking was way more deterministic. LLMs are probabilistic and much more personalized. And so I see our industry, I'm kind of using broad brush here, making a mistake in my opinion. Everyone's rushing to go, okay, I have this donut hole in my data, right? Yes, we all see it and they're trying to fill it in the traditional way. Like it's a like for like replacement with rank trackers and positioning with Genai share a voice type thing. They're two completely different systems and you're not going to be able to fill it. And if you do, I would argue unfortunately you're going to fill it with dirty data. And so that's not the great answer anyone wants. But again, I can tell you in a second some things that I think are positive that you can get out of that that are quite good. But don't rush out and try to replace rank tracking with Genai data. You're going to get dirty data into the system and more noise than is necessary.
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That's such a great point that you brought up too. Just because, yeah, I'd come across the same thing and pretty much every SEO I feel like is going to have some sort of explaining to do on the executive level.
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Yes.
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And so I mean, I guess like call out to everyone. It's like, yeah, be proactive on this. Like don't wait until upper management, whatever says it because if you're proactive in communicating it, it's ultimately going to make your life easier. And so we know that this is happening. The magnitude of impact obviously will vary between websites and things like that. But I think it is a fair point that's just like make the note, look into how this has impacted your site but then also be proactive in the stakeholder management to set expectations from it. But even with that, it kind of leads us to, well how like as an industry we've kind of gotten into this like, I mean for better or worse, but it's like, you know, for the longest time we've just tried to be like pushing you know, keyword position, these like leading variables instead of it's.
A
Almost, it's we went from like fighting the fight to like no, everyone's bought in and everyone's whole health of business metrics are now those metrics. So it's like in a way our industry won, but now how do we do act? 2. Right.
C
And any advice or like any like how, how are you thinking about that? Then as far as like, what do you fill that void with? Like, how do you champion and like kind of push SEO awareness across the organization with other KPIs.
A
Every, every conversation I'm having with CMOs across the globe is like this conversation, right? You know, it starts with like, what is the changing in behaviors to like, oh my gosh, I have a hole in my data and then what the heck do we do about it, right? And it's just the same arc over and over. And while, you know, I don't have all the answers, anybody tells you they do, you should run away. But I think of this as like a three horizon measurement strategy. So horizon one is now, Horizon two is near. Horizon three is far. Right. You should run those as simultaneous clocks. Not linear. Now near, far. They should be three clocks running at the same time, three horizons. So in the now I really think folks should use this moment like what I said a second ago. If you need to rewind it and listen again, your data has, is dirty right now. Those impression spikes. Go look at your impression spikes and then just do you think all of a sudden you have wildly all these impressions and you weren't getting the clicks and you couldn't figure it out. Like you're like, why what is this? And everyone kind of blamed it on ChatGPT. They were like, well it's AI mode, AI overview. Like it's, it's ChatGPT effect. We'll say obviously because Gemini. But they blamed it on AI. They were sort of right, but sort of wrong. A lot of this was the noise in this machine itself, like AI checking, surfacing, searching tools checking, surfacing, searching, exploded. And so what I'm telling you so horizon one the near like this should be in the next 60 days fix. Put your thumb on the scale now that you know you, you can see it in your data. You'll see your impressions going along and they're. When they're going to cliff dive, they'll cliff dive. It's right in your search console. Go look at it. It'll. It'll cliff dive. You got a glimpse of reality before all these tools recover and figure out how to. That's the truth. So my first thought would be go back and look at 2024, 2025 with a more realistic viewpoint. Your impressions like you'll be able to see your individual shift. But I wouldn't be shocked if they're 20 to 40% inflated for most folks. Like put your thumb on the scale and now re. Look at your numbers, relook at your click through rate, like you may be making some bad assumptions, like, oh, we're getting all these impressions, not getting a lot of clicks and I should change the hat. Like, what if you make bad decisions on dirty data? So that's number one. Horizon two is dip your toe in AI waters. For attribution and visibility. Start simple, like AI share of voice citations. You should know, you know if a keyword, a traditional keyword shows an AI overview or it doesn't, you should know. If you show up in that AI overview or if you don't, you could probably go on and insert here four or five. Like put four or five of those things on the board and say I have directional visibility in that. That should be your near horizon and that should be over the next two to six months. Like lock that in. Get that straight. The third horizon is frankly where this is all headed and it's going to be a unified AI native measurement system. The problem is you shouldn't get, I guess it's a problem or not problem, shouldn't get too worked up about it because there's not much you can do about it yet. This is the same thing that happened with social media. Remember when everyone's like, hey, like we really want to get more of those thumbs ups, like we like those likes. And then like people are like, well what's the value of a like? And like, does that actually bring us a customer? And then like, but now we don't even really think about that. Like no one's saying social media is not valuable. No one's saying they can't attribute it. So these things will like take care of themselves. Like there's too much money at stake. I'm not that worried about the long horizon. It will be AI native. We will be able to be able to attribute from a conversation. I mean you saw yesterday ChatGPT integrated with one click checkout, you know, for Etsy and a few of the others, right? Like this will come. So what I would focus on is horizon one and two. Like the things that you could do in the next 30, 60 days, in the next six months. And those things that I just laid out are the baby steps. But you'll feel you'll be way ahead of your peers if you just do those now and then. Wait, stop. Don't go crazy and try to make it perfect because the ecosystem is building itself, the infra structure play is building itself. So don't go ballistic, spend all this time and money trying to make it perfect, have a visibility model and leave it there and then let's circle back to that in 12 months and see where we're at. And I think we'll be in a lot better place.
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And I like that you're advocating like, hey, don't make this the cornerstone of your work. Yes, because at the end of the day, if you're only focused on performance tracking you, you're not actually making any significant business value. It's like you're not driving value to your business if you're just knowing how you're performing or where you're performing. At the end of the day, that's just a tool to then guide your strategy, guide your activities. And I think that's been something, at least I've been trying to really like push people on is like, yes, you need to like be aware of these performance pieces, but at the end of the day, what actions are you taking from it? And I think that's such a significant piece.
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You nailed it. I keep saying a similar kind of drumbeat is 2025. When we look back, there were moments where you're like, that ended up, we kind of falsely heralded it, but eventually we were like, that was the year of mobile. I Think it was coming for many years and then finally it was like, yeah, mobile 2025 is in my opinion the year of visibility. Everyone was like, am I visible on all of these emergent interfaces and am I vis. It's a visibility 2026. Everyone will shift to action. Just what you just said, like, what the hell do we do about it, right? Like even, like even, okay, I'm visible, okay, I'm invisible. Now what right now what am I doing? Like am I doubling down? Am I panicking? Like what do I do? And that's the conversations that, that I think are more important because they're more customer centric versus versus brand centric and they're much more proactive versus reactive. Now again, it's scary to be in a dark room. So yes, turn on some flashlights, get some data, understand your visibility, but don't go so crazy thinking that that's the end state is to solve for how visible or invisible am I, you're going to have to move to action and I think you really should be either doing that now or very, you know, by in January, like action minded. Because that's the true game. What you just stated was spot on.
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And how would you suggest people look into that? So basically we've carved out obviously these changes how we're looking at it. Essentially performance tracking you're using for either stakeholder management or guiding strategy within this kind of new space, how would you be maybe let's ground within E commerce. Like how would you advise people to be thinking about how they compete in this new space?
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So I think it starts and ends in a way the same place it always did was with intent mapping. Like I really want folks to go, do not accept that. So go look at your data or ask someone, do we have, let me see our intent mapping. And if your intent mapping ends at transactional, commercial, navigational, I would argue you don't have intent mapping. Like what are you going to do with that? So like okay, your insert big box retailer here I have 1.2 million commercial keywords. Like what's the, what are you going to do? What's, what's the action behind that? There is no action behind that. Right. And so I would be focusing like you need all these things. You need, you know, your share of voice, your citations, you need to know that so that you can take what action? Map the intent. Map the intent to what? To my content, to my paid ads, to my social ads, to my influencer outreach. Map the intent at a deep level. It's so possible now and so at your fingertips. But all the tooling is yesterday's tooling and it's giving you very basic clustering. And even if it was giving you better intent, it's not going to get, it's not going to map to your journey map. So you already know your journey map. That's baked like, unless you're a startup, right? Like, you know, everyone has customer Persona data, they have journey maps. Go back and map the intent. Once you do that and you use this type of layer, this AI layer to layer over your journey map with deep intent, everything becomes so much more clear. Where are my gaps? Where am I not meeting? And here's what I love about it is it's so customer centric. Where am I not meeting the customer? Where she is. Where am I not speaking her language? Literally, like, what passage on this page? Because then you can score it, you can score it at a page level, you could score it at an ad campaign level. It's intense for me. There are. I will say so that, that's a macro, like CMO type thought, right? If you dip down, there's an infra play here that we have to deal with. If you remember back in the day, I was, I was talking to somebody. Remember when we used to have like worry about design for like Firefox, you know, and you're like, well, it breaks in Firefox. I don't know if I'm old. So like everybody is like, the button would move and like, like you're like, ah, that's what's happening with LLMs. Sit next to somebody technical. If you're not technical, sit next to them and say, show me what ChatGPT's training bot sees. Well, actually first answer this. Do we have any way of telling if it's a bot that's stealing our content, training on our content, or if it's a bot that's buying something or if it's about like, do we have any way of tracking these, understanding what bot it is? Right? That, that there's. So that's an infrastructure play. So you need to know that. So you can, you can't govern it. If you, if it's wild wild west, you have no idea which bot is which. Then once you do that, sit next to somebody and say, show me what ChatGPT. I'll use them as a proxy. Show me what ChatGPT sees when they visit my category page. Show me what Chat GPT sees when it visits my pdp. And you'll be very surprised in many cases. So Right now, while they have incredible technology like, oh my gosh, like is this going to take over the world? They're really not good at the basics of like crawling the web and indexing it. So most LLMs can't render even JavaScript right now. Very few. Or they do it very poorly. And so you'll be surprised. A lot of times you have these beautiful product carousels and information and tabs and you look at it and you go, oh shoot, our website is broken in Firefox. It's the same, you know what I mean? It's the same, same thing. It's like Claude is not having a good time. So there's an infra play where you need to make sure that you literally are able to have be crawled, rendered and indexed by these LLM bots. It's a pain in the butt, but you have to do it. And the fixes are there, but many people are just unaware that they. We don't know if we have render issues for perplexity until you know, So I would do that and then the third thing I would be focused on are feeds. So all of the world's content needs to get updated for the new dominant consumer, which is AI itself. AI itself will consume most of your content on behalf of a consumer or a customer and summarize it back to her. Right. So AI is kind of your gate. It's your AI decides if it's a bridge or a barrier between you and the customer. So it's, it's, in a way it's your most dominant customer. And so feeds are really great because you can augment the feeds with more enriched data for the AI to make more intent based reasoning. And that helps everything. Like if you enhance your feeds that your paid media team is going to give you a high five. If you enhance your feeds like your SEO team is going to give you high five. Like it's good for everyone to enhance this data and it's much more scalable to start at feed. So if I go into a big box retailer and I say you need to change all of your content, shoot, right, like that's not very scalable. But if I say let's focus on your feeds and enhancing them for intent, much more scalable. You can roll out a global land, global multilingual, like it's much more scalable activity. So I would focus there. If I were just like, where do I start? I would start there.
C
That's such good advice. And I mean maybe just to regurgitate back some of that just because I want to make sure that people walk away with some of those kind of key takeaways. And at least from what I'm hearing in that is it still starts with indexation, health and what these systems are actually seen, what they're able to render. And so you're understanding, am I even in the game from it?
A
Yep.
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Then we're looking at how can we make it easier for them, whether it's through product feeds, schema markup, whatever type of structured data that's going to make that then more digestible. And then of course you have then all the other bells and whistles and things that you can add on where you know, you're bridging into overlap with UX on conversion rates. You're looking at your content structure of how easy it is to pick up that information.
A
Exactly. And those are, those are like the things you just described. Like, like those are bend down, pick up a dollar activities. Right. Like those are, those are much easier. It's harder. Like at Botify, we, like, once we get done with a client doing the basics, like, we start talking like, like, wait a minute, what if we served flat HTML content to this bot in this structure? And like, yes, but that's not conversation a. Right, that's like this other stuff you can just do now. And it's very, very scalable. And then once you've checked those boxes, obviously you can move to the more advanced stuff where you're serving certain bots or eventually a lot of sites are going to serve agents very different than they would a human. An agent doesn't really need a web interface the same way a human does. There's a lot of that that's coming. But for now, it's like, before you get too wound up, just do those basic blocking and tackling and it'll set you up. And the beautiful thing is everything you just described, everything we just talked about is good for traditional. So it's still. Which is, still drives the most of your traffic. So it's a win. It's a win win. But it is, it is a win win.
C
Yeah. And I mean, I'm glad that you called that out too because obviously anytime you have big movements in the industry, you have some people that are going to be like, ah, the sky's falling, what do I do? And then other people, it's like, great. This is why I'm in the industry. I want to have this challenge, this variability. But a lot of the ways that I'm looking at it is like most of these things that then we're talking about. These aren't entirely new concepts to us. And so I think the levers and the plays you have, like, yeah, there's some nuance and difference, but it's more of like, how do you prioritize? Like, how does this shift your prioritization and strategy? Rather than do I have to learn entirely net new tactics? And I think that's something that SEO should have a little more confidence, a little more comfort in, is you've been playing this game, it's still the same game that you're playing.
A
And SEOs have proven that. We could, you know, if I, if I'm talking to A group of SEOs, I tell them, you've already done this. You demystified the first black box, which was Google itself. It didn't. It came in disruptive technology with no user manual. And we, you know, demystified it and made a playbook for brands to follow. And now it's pretty known and widely followed. We're going to do the same thing with AI search. And the good news is as many of the same behaviors will be beneficial for both. And the key, like, if you're like, there's a lot of like argument. Like, well, is it different? Like, is it AI aeo Geo SEO? Like, I don't care about any of that conversation, frankly. Right. Like, it's missing, it's missing the point entirely, in my opinion. So. But that's like industry speak for, for us. But at the same time, it doesn't matter what you call it. Everything that we've just talked about would help whatever acronym you use. Right. And that's, that's the point. Like, people just want to get down to, like, what would move the needle? What should I do now? What should I ignore and not do? Like, just straight, actionable advice is what I hear people kind of yearning for without all the hype and the noise, 100%.
C
And it's end of the day, it's like, that's, that's what we've signed up for.
A
Yeah.
C
Well, with that, that's going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to AJ Girgic from Bodify for joining us. If you'd like to contact AJ, you can find his LinkedIn profile in the show notes or, or you can go on over and check out his company's website@bodify.com if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing knowledge, hit that subscribe button in your podcast. App or on YouTube, and we'll be back in your feed soon. So with that, thanks for stopping by and we'll see you in the next episode. Sa.
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Host: Tyson Stockton
Guest: AJ Girgic (Global VP at Botify)
Date: October 13, 2025
This episode explores the transformative impact of conversational AI on retail search and SEO. Host Tyson Stockton and guest AJ Girgic delve into the new realities of the buyer journey, the shift from traditional keyword search to AI-driven conversational interfaces, and how retailers and SEOs must adapt strategies in the face of measurement challenges and attribution "black holes" created by AI search engines. The discussion provides actionable takeaways for staying competitive amid noise and data disruptions, emphasizing the importance of intent mapping, infrastructure readiness, and a pragmatic, phased measurement approach.
On AI Search Strategy:
“Don’t try to replicate traditional rank tracking and search positioning with AI search. Rank tracking was way more deterministic. LLMs are probabilistic and much more personalized.” – AJ (13:34)
On Industry Readiness:
“Anyone tells you they have all the answers, you should run away.” – AJ (15:54)
On Measurement:
“Run those as simultaneous clocks. Not linear. Now, near, far. They should be three clocks running at the same time, three horizons.” – AJ (15:58)
On the Nature of the Shift:
“AI itself will consume most of your content on behalf of a consumer…AI decides if it’s a bridge or a barrier between you and the customer.” – AJ (29:29)
Revisit impression/click metrics for the past year; calibrate for noise and be ready to explain anomalies to stakeholders.
[14:15]
Adopt a horizon strategy—fix dirty data now, establish directional AI visibility tracking, and monitor industry movement for AI-native attribution advances.
[15:54–20:38]
Don’t settle for basic intent segmentation; map granular, actionable intent to specific touchpoints in the customer journey.
[24:45–27:23]
Audit web assets for crawlability and render-ability by AI bots, starting with product feeds and schema.
[27:23–30:17]
Despite noisy data and shifting tools, most foundational SEO tactics remain relevant. Prioritize for evolving interfaces rather than reinventing strategy from scratch.
[32:23–34:25]
The retail search landscape is changing fast as AI turns the traditional SEO journey upside down. SEOs must embrace new approaches to measurement and intent while keeping basic technical and content fundamentals strong. Pragmatism, adaptability, and a customer-centric approach to intent are the keys to maintaining visibility—and ultimately, winning—in this new era.