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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.
According to clickstream research from iPull rank, 53% of users do not return to Google AI mode after the initial attempt. So while the industry keeps acting like AI search has already taken over, the real story is a lot messier. The hype is loud, the behavior is still evolving, and for marketers, the challenge is figuring out what actually matters before you waste budget chasing the wrong thing. I'm Joran Cooney, and joining me today is Garrett Sussman, Director of Marketing at Ipoll Rank. Today, Garrett and I are going to talk about what AI search behavior actually looks like, why conversational search is changing, how people discover information, and how marketers can separate real opportunity from industry noise. Garrett, welcome to the Voice of Search podcast.
Garrett Sussman
Jordan, what's up, dude? I am ready for this. You and I, killer, killer podcast, sir. Let's. Let's do this thing. I'm pumped.
Jordan Cooney
I'm so pumped for this in a lot of different ways because, well, first of all, we share a lot of positive energy together about not just the industry, but like, the ways of approaching the conversation. And I think more people in our industry need to hear the way that you are voicing and sharing your perspective. Also the information that you have access to, right? I mean, all of you at Ipoll Rank are producing great insights and educating as much as you are doing anything else. And I think that's what's, what's largely critical in, in this, in this time of transition. Before we dive into a bunch of these questions, tell our audience a little bit more about yourself. I really want to also hear your story, tell your story about how you got into this SEO, geo, aeo, whatever three letters you want to put together into this acronym. Industry.
Garrett Sussman
Dude. It is, it is. It is so weird. Everyone's story is so weird. I think if we learned anything from like Covid and the pandemic is like, you have no idea where people come from unless they share it with you, unless they're open about It, I grew up in Northeast. I'm a Jersey kid. Central Jersey. It exists big. After college, I was a teacher for like third graders in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna date myself here a little bit.
Jordan Cooney
I love that. I love that.
Garrett Sussman
Year two, Hurricane Katrina. So I'm living in New Orleans. I've got this like hideous purple leather couch and my guitar and a dog. And I'm teaching 45 minutes northwest in rural Louisiana. I head up there and my house gets flooded. The purple couch has like, you know, Joseph and the Technicolor dream code of mold. It is like disgusting. So I do, I do the teaching thing for a minute. Then I got into like live streaming because I'm like isolated. This is like 2005 and there was like a little live stream. Think of Twitch before Twitch. And so that's kind of where I got involved in everything digital. Did that for a minute. And next thing you know, I wanted to go out to San Francisco. I was like, startup world. There's so many cool things happening. So 2009, that's how I get into marketing because I went to school for like English and psychology. Like most marketers, right, we just need
Jordan Cooney
to do that survey and we'll, we'll, we'll confirm that fact.
Garrett Sussman
I guarantee. It's like the Marie Haynes. I was not a veterinarian. I was just your boring old, like English teacher. And so I end up, I do, I do these, the SAS thing. I work for a design marketplace in and do marketing for a design marketplace in San Francisco for like six years. And then I'm getting, I'm getting to the SEO part. But after that, I'm like, okay, I'm old. I'm ready to do the family thing. I'm not a big time CEO and founder who can settle down in San Francisco. I need to go be affordable somewhere. So I go back to Jersey. I start working for a local a reviews software company. So it's called Great Us. They help small businesses get online reviews. And the positioning was helping agencies actually, what do you call it? Helping agencies actually sell reputation management as a service. And I realized the value prop there was how reviews help your local SEO, right? So that's how I started getting into the local SEO business. Learning like Mike Blumenthal, Joy Hawkins, you know, Darren Shaw, all these really cool people. I was like, SEO's interesting. Did a podcast, started doing that for a minute for like 100 episodes of just everyone in our industry, all these really fascinating people. And that's How I met Mike King, who ultimately invited me to Join iPoll rank 2020 and have just been marketing with him ever since. What's been really cool is the last two years, he's been innovating, kind of the genetics of our agency, and you've done the same thing. Revisible. It's like AI Search saw it coming, saw our industry shifting, and so I have been along for the ride and just soaking up everything and innovating myself. And it's just been. It's really cool to see what we've been able to build as AI Search kind of takes over our thinking in the SEO industry. And, yeah, so much education.
Jordan Cooney
So I want to ask you two questions about this, because there's a core component of this that I think is super critical for all of our listeners and for anybody that's in or has been part of the SEO space and is now seeing this whole industry transform. And the first one is what and how your education background has played a role in where you are today and why that is so vital to the marketing job you have. The way you approach that, the fact that you wanted to do podcasts and the fact that you wanted to do video streaming, and what these technologies have unlocked in your desire to educate, inform, and transform this industry. So that's my first question. And then my second question is, why are you guys charting a new path? And why is it so critical for you guys to do things differently, not just at Ipoll Rank, but even in the work that you're doing collectively?
Garrett Sussman
So, great question with the education. So I think that it's so important to always have a growth mindset, to always learn and do like. I feel like education is kind of what life is about. That's been kind of in my genetics since I was little. I was also a geeky musical theater guy who likes performing. And so the combination, like teaching of being able to make education entertaining as a teacher came together, and it's really fun for me when it comes to what we've been seeing the last couple of years in AI Search, because I know, like, SEO can feel really boring. It has historically, where you're just doing the tasks. We got so kind of locked into, you know, the checkbox of it all. And so, like, now it's different. Now there's so much opportunity to learn, and nobody knows definitively how these things work. It requires an understanding of, like, not only just information retrieval, but the probabilistic nature of large language models, which are a black box, which even the people who build it don't know how they work. So, I mean, I don't know.
Jordan Cooney
I don't know. Sam just keeps threatening all of his investors, so I'm not entirely sure how that works, but that's a whole different conversation.
Garrett Sussman
But you guys are the same way. I mean, it's like, there's so much fun in the experimentation and trying to figure things out. And I think there's a lot of discomfort there. You know, like, we. We are all kind of uncomfortable where we can't say definitively this is how it is. You know, we've. We've gotten, like, shape with performance metrics of being able to, you know, attribute everything. And, like, that's yucky and gray. And so how do we navigate this? So I think that's where the education part is.
Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
Garrett Sussman
And I think we're aligned, too, with. With what we're doing at ipo, Rankin, and how things are changing and how it needs to be positioned. Because, you know, like, it's not just SEO anymore. Right?
Jordan Cooney
It's not that that SEO's gone. I mean, it's not dead. It's just gone in. In its. In its isolation or it's in its silo. Right. Like, it is. It is in transformation today. And like, I think we all, we all recognize that. I think pinpointing exactly where it is in that, in that transformation is super hard right now.
Garrett Sussman
It's, It's. It's evolving. And I think the big point that we, the way we think about it, IPO rank, the whole, the whole argument, the whole volatility of the conversation of, like, what do you call it? Isn't the point. No, like, the point is, and you and I have talked about this, like, for. For enterprises, for big businesses, for anyone who's thinking about marketing historically, advertising and brand get the budget. SEO, organic doesn't get the budget. And all of a sudden, with AI search and the direction that this is, all brand and. And reputation is tied to organic search, but it's also generating, you know, as much revenue as ads potentially are. So we can't just keep calling it SEO. If you're going to shift the value the channel brings and the important work that traditionally SEOs have done in our position to do in AI search going forward. So let's, let's have a different conversation, but let's, like, fund it appropriately. Let's invest in a channel that's going to deliver so much more value than I think businesses even anticipate. We'll get there, but we're in a really weird Stage right.
Jordan Cooney
Now, let's talk about this a little bit because over the past six to 12 months, there have been a tremendous amount of different hype cycles that I want to talk to you about. Right? And I think notably, like, one of them is like, to, to your point, about this channel becoming more brand focused is, is like Reddit and the whole concept of mentions and you know, how and where your website and content is seen by LLMs or, or search engines. You know, historically in the SEO space, we call this backlinks. I don't know what that is, but it sounds dirty,
Garrett Sussman
but not as bad as link juice.
Jordan Cooney
So, yeah, now you're in a dark territory, Garrett, but like, let's, let's keep this PG13. All right? This is for all audiences here, but the reality is that like, we're seeing that SEO is shifting, or organic, excuse me, is shifting towards a brand channel, towards an awareness channel. And, and to your point, those are marketing channels that have always had big budgets. Brand has always had big budgets, paid has always had big budgets. SEO hasn't. And so how does that materially impact our perspective as product managers, as marketers, as agencies, as in House SEOs, how does that change the way we believe we should execute on the work we do? Knowing that this, this channel, this organic channel is shifting towards brand, it is
Garrett Sussman
scary in the lack of control that you potentially have. And we know brand has its own sort of kind of like momentum to it, its own energy that you can be doing all the right things and you could have one mistake that, you know, some executive does something they shouldn't have done, and all of a sudden that's your reputation. You know, you can be investing in brand all this time and then someone decides you want to go in a different direction and pivot. But there's artifacts all over the Internet. You know, you and I, we've been around for a while where like, we had a pre digital life, but like, you know, now you have entire generations growing up in a digital environment. And so when we start to see the direction of AI search and we start to see all these artifacts and all of this training data and all of these channels coalescing into where people are going to start definitively get their information from, get their searches from, where it's this combination, this holistic, integrated approach of like social and email and ads and video and text and multimodal omnichannel, all that, like, it becomes so important to navigate this because people's relationships with their devices is evolving very rapidly and AI is being woven into it and the genie's out of the bottle and there's no going back. And so as a marketer, you have to do the best you can where you are grasping at straws, but you are all of a sudden responsible for this probabilistic answer engine that can talk about you in a certain way based on everything that's happened on your brand in the history of your brand. Like what do you do? And that's a big question we're all dealing with.
Jordan Cooney
It is a big question. And as we think about this new, this organic channel evolving, it becomes more and more apparent that it is functionally an awareness channel as much as it is a performance channel. Right? Like SEO. And I want to talk to you about this. I think SEO has historically been pegged as a performance channel, but in reality that was just SEO being a chameleon. Like it, it, it, it never really was. It just, that's how executives and leaders and industry thought leaders like myself positioned it because it was the most sensible, logical, deductive reasoning approach to making SEO palatable to humanity. And now here we are and this whole AI revolution in terms of discovery has really changed that perception. And forcing is forcing us to reconsider our approaches to doing marketing work, content work, web work. And I want to, I want to hear from you as that is that transformation happens more and more towards awareness. What are the measurement sticks that we should use? How should we rationalize this thing that is AI discovery?
Garrett Sussman
So I think that, you know, going back to earlier in the discussion, like how people are ultimately using AI is in a nascent phase, right? Like the, I think the biggest reason we're talking about all of this right now is because Google activated AI overviews in a way that you can't avoid it. You know, like sure, people can put in a curse word into their search query bar or put in a not AI negative AI and not get an AI overview. But more and more this is, there's no way to really deactivate it in a non friction way. And so we're coming to terms with the fact that things are changing. And so we have to now think about how we are measuring this and what we're doing and where we're appearing and where we're not appearing and how, and we'll get into a little bit more like search behavior, like we've all been trained by the friction of the technology with keyword ease, where we use head terms, 1, 2, 3 word queries. And because things are more sophisticated with Bert and machine learning and now these LLMs, you can have these natural language conversations where the way that we measure things we're used to have keyword volume is rapidly changing, where the one keyword that I use, where it's a 30 word conversation with my AI search platform is only going to be used once and how, how do we pay attention to that? So now we need to start to look at measurement differently. We look at it in terms of, at I pull rank in three tiers, input metrics, like what are you doing, what are you trying to show up for? How are you mathematically relevant in the content you're creating, in the brand you're creating? What are the input metrics of, you know, the, the content on your site, how your bot activity, all those, all those kind of creation metrics. Then we look at like the channel metrics, the tier 2. So what is your share of voice on these AI search platforms? What are the mentions? Are you being recommended and then are you being cited? And I think that has different values depending. You know it's a classic SEO, but a media brand is going to look at citations differently than a informational service industry brand versus an E commerce brand. And then the performance metrics which still like that's what a lot of the C suite wants to be able to say.
Jordan Cooney
We all make our money. Yeah, exactly.
Garrett Sussman
Roi, traffic, leads, conversions, revenue. So now we have to like weave all that together in terms of a story that we feel comfortable with. Because to your point about SEO being a performance channel, you still had to define what attribution look like. The whole search journey has always been somewhat complicated. Now it's just so fractured.
Jordan Cooney
I want to, I want to talk about one more really important theme that you guys have kind of really pioneered in the industry at Ipoll rank, which is this concept of relevance engineering. Because relevance engineering really closely relates to this message that you just gave us around how we use these proxies, how we get from that to actual work and actual productivity to. So tell us about relevance engineering and then how that's going to help our listeners to perform better. Organic marketing.
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Garrett Sussman
That's why you're such a good host, Jordan, you led me there. But like it's true, it's so relevance engineering is I pull rank in my king's framework around these five core pillars, which is AI. You have to, you know, kind of work within the future of AI information retrieval. The content on your website or anyone else's website has to be discoverable by the AI search bots that are ultimately going to use it to generate the output. Digital PR is the third pillar which you need to kind of integrate with any of the channels that you don't own, but you can influence by participating in them. They that will ultimately be included in that selection, that selection opportunity, content strategy. So not only the content that you're doing on your own website that will give you the best chance to show up, but the content that you need to put out on all of those rented channels, everything from social media like YouTube I guess counts, the forums, the UGCs, the Reddit's, the Quoras, even your own owned email channels. As we talk about personal intelligence, the user experience, which we know from the antitrust DOJ trial in 2020, that Google goes to your site and are people finding what they're looking for when they, you know, are searching or do they bounce right back and are those signals sending the right message that whatever is on your site, that content is satisfying, it's providing a good user experience. So ultimately AI information retrieval, content strategy, digital digital PR and user experience is that framework for relevance engineering that can start to guide your strategic roadmap of how you're going to do your marketing and that will ultimately inform your Tactics based on the segments that you need to be visible for in the topics that matter to your business.
Jordan Cooney
And like on this concept, right? Like I think there's, there's two things I want to, want to focus in on. One of them is like, especially on our show and a lot of, a lot of industry folks, we're spending so much of our time talking about AI discovery and how consumers find information through LLMs like ChatGPT. Perplexity, Claude and the reality is that like, even by all accounts like Google is still the 800 pound gorilla here. Google has 16 billion searches per day. Even by, by all accounts like ChatGPT, who's the largest model, has 1 billion prompts per day. But even within that 1 billion prompts there's a huge misnomer, which is a huge portion of those prompts are discovery related, like people looking for information. But another huge portion of those are work related. To your point on how we should do work in this whole concept, the reality is that like if relevance engineering is, is, is, is this path forward, how do we prioritize between Google and AI? How do we take that into consideration in our approach to the relevance engineering model?
Garrett Sussman
So I will jump a little into the future, but some of my predictions are we need to accept the fact that we have our relationship with our devices, which I touched on earlier, and AI assistants are becoming more and more integrated with our devices and there is going to be more of an ecosystem that you're choosing. Like interoperability, the sharing data between different businesses and systems isn't always open. We know like Apple has very much a closed system, but Apple is partnering with Google. You know, we know anthropic exists, we know OpenAI exists in ChatGPT. Whatever you're interacting with, you are sharing your data. And so more and more, whichever system you choose, you're going to become more dependent on for your search. And so marketers are going to have to address how they're optimizing their visibility for a specific LLM system. And then it becomes a reverse engineering exercise to what we're talking about. Relevance engineering is what is being pulled in from whether we're talking Google's index or Microsoft's index, Bing or OpenAI might be building an index. And so all of those different pillars, those strategies of understanding your business, understanding your audience and understanding what the Internet thinks about your brand and having that kind of inform where you're going to spend your resources to as best you can, curate your brand narrative and be the authority. So that is relevance engineering. Is having that holistic approach, thinking about it in the context of when people are using AI to search, are you in all the places?
Jordan Cooney
Yeah. And I mean, I do want to get into the politics of this because that does matter. I have, I have one more really important question around relevance engineering and the connection to, like where you spend your time, because I do think this question comes up a lot for SEOs, because there's so many questions that are just purely focused on LLMs and purely. But it's less than 1% of our traffic. It is in. It is a very, very small aggregate amount of our overall revenue. But we're spending so much time and energy on it because it is the future. And it is the future in a variety of different ways, as you've alluded to in relevance engineering. I mean, I want to. You mentioned this already. So I want to connect these two things, which is audience and knowing your audience and how audience can play such a vital role irrespective of the Mode, mode being ChatGPT, mode being Google and you know, results or rankings or the like. How does audience play into this whole picture and how should we be taking that into account as we approach not only our strategy, but our conversations with executives, teammates, agencies about the AI conversation.
Garrett Sussman
Yeah, I mean, I think the, the audience part of things is very, very tricky because I do think user behavior is changing, but it goes to this idea of personalization, you know, and, and I feel like, you know, we have the AI overviews, training wheels. So like, to your earlier point about if it's only 1%, why does it matter now? Like you have, you have to pay attention to AI overviews because it is cannibalizing traffic. So you're already starting to see a different digital world that, you know, we're no longer playing in the old school temple links and we haven't been for a while. When it comes to audience, whether you're in ChatGPT or any of these, you, it is trying to give you, at least at this point in time, what you want. It's trying to satisfy your query based on what it thinks that you want, and that is based on the data that it has on you. And more and more we're seeing this context and you hear like these talks about context engineering being pulled into the results. So your search history, the way that you're searching, like the words that you're using, the phrasing that you're looking for different things, the type of, like, we already know this with local, like you would expect a different output Based on where you are in the world for a local related query and who is the person who searches. So to your point about marketers, I know you're, you're, you, you want me to get there is like using the type of segment, the type of Persona, because Personas are, are a weird thing. It's funny, we're working on a project right now and I'm not going to give away what we're working on immediately. But like the way everyone marketers think about Personas, whether you're thinking about jobs to be done, thinking about psychographics, firmographics, search behavior, all of it, it's very difficult to determine how granular of an audience you need to get versus like trying to appeal to, to everyone in which way. But I do think that you need to understand who this audience is within your target market, the different types of audiences, how they're searching, what words they're using, what phrases they're using to discover your brand, and then using that to inform your brand strategy, but also your content strategy for your actual site. So the practical tax tactics, if we're talking brass tacks, is like, what is the query? We just wrote about this, say on our blog. The whole idea of the query fan out. Like, if I put a query in AI mode or in ChatGPT and it generates 20 to 30 synthetic related searches, it's not going to be the same search that anyone else is getting. It's going to be more and more personalized to me. And do I have content on my website that satisfies all those synthetic related SE searches so that you're giving yourself as many chances to show up for that particular audience in both the generative output and the actual citation.
Jordan Cooney
So as an industry, I think we have a voice, right? And I think this is where it gets really fun for you and I, for Mike, and just, just really a lot of the folks that have visible clear voices in the organic space is, we can make some noise, right? We can make some noise because we can, we can rally our clients, our partners, our audiences to kind of carry the torch, carry the path in terms of how we should be doing things, not only for our own backyard, but for all the backyards of the people that we know. And so like, when it comes to that message, the message of, like, how do we go forward with the use of AI when it comes to us doing work, when it comes to us as SEOs, as content marketers doing work, are there any areas that we should be better defining as an SEO or organic marketing industry so that our work has the integrity and the outcomes that we would expect for the use on the Internet or just any model that would ingest or consume the outputs we provide.
Garrett Sussman
I think when going back to the editorial nature of these platforms and how biased they are, I think we need to accept the fact that they are not fair. They are not going to be fair.
Jordan Cooney
What a point. Okay. Yes.
Garrett Sussman
Like I think about AJ Cohns lives rent free in my head is like Google article from a few years ago before we were really like focusing on LLMs and the idea that you know, that the results for Google were just were solid. You saw a lot of copycat content. You saw you know, the site reputation abuse where like a Forbes or US News like would rank for affiliate, you know, queries and other small sites never stood a chance. And there's something to be said of like why a big brand and you know, we at IPO ranking, I know you guys are pre visible like we, we service enterprise brands and there's a reason they're so successful and there's a reason that you know, the winners win and it's this virtual cycle. Same with all these listicles is that. Well I think, I think for anyone depending like and there's a classic SEO, it depends, you know, conversation of like right, you could be doing everything right. Right. And not earn visibility for your brand. And that's why it's such a personal conversation, a personal decision. Because I think there are ways to be subversive for these tools. That doesn't make you a bad person without integrity either. There are short term horizons and there are long term horizons. Like are you building like we're talking about these long term horizons. But how many businesses and brands live 100 years like it's, it's or. But you know, you also have the people who are like the whole mount AI concept of like okay, if I generate a ton of AI slop and I make a quick buck over two months because I generate enough visibility and traffic and sales but then my I'm totally done. And that's a choice. Like that's a whole vibe, that's a whole mood if you will. So it's really tricky right now I think for SEOs, for businesses, for marketers, for CEOs, for founders to make these decisions, living in an unfair digital economy that is shifting beneath our feet and where there's opportunities where if you do subversive tactics and there are reasons that you know, goliaths win or underdogs win. And so I think it's everyone has to have their very personal, like, you know, sit down with yourself, sit in front of your mirror, talk to hit up Jordan and just talk to Jordan. No, but like to have those conversations of like, knowing what your North Star is, knowing what your business goals are, knowing what impact you want to have on the planet. You know, like there's a lot of deep decisions or, you know, a lot of us marketers can just go on and be like, cool AI is doing cool things. I'm going to do cool things. I'm going to try to make some money here and there.
Jordan Cooney
They keep calling it slop, but who knows?
Garrett Sussman
I mean, it's caught on. Spam was a thing, slop was a thing. And I mean, I, I'm, I'm not, not a tech bro, but it's like I'm so bullish on the capabilities of this technology and how it democratizes are not going anywhere. It's so, and there's so much cool potential. Like, I don't want to be a stick in the mud.
Jordan Cooney
Agreed. All right, well, we're going to transition to my favorite part of our episode, which is the lightning round. I'm going to try off the cuff, ask you five different questions from our episode today. You gave me a quick, short response in terms of your perspective on that. So I'm going to start off with out of all the theories and principles and practices that we discussed today, what's the one that our listeners should take away and use?
Garrett Sussman
Think about the biases, do reverse engineering and look at the results of what your audience is searching for.
Jordan Cooney
We talked about politics on the show, which is always a tricky conversation. But if there were one policy that you'd love to see, what would it be?
Garrett Sussman
There should be regulations on. I'm a fan of regulation for AI deployment and interoperability. I think that here's my big one and I read this from Cory Doctor's initiatification book is we should remove some of the DMCA IPs around the Internet of Things and tech, where we are so like stuck within, like, we could get sued if we jailbreak some of our devices. But that's a whole other political conversation.
Jordan Cooney
One of the concepts that we dove into is rag grounding, fan out queries. Is this transformation of models, LLM models using search and search terms going to expand or decline over the next year?
Garrett Sussman
I think it's going to expand in that it's going to be additive and we're going to be able to search more things than we ever had. Before, but I think it's going to decline at the same time because it's going to be a secondary function of your AI assistant and it's just going to blend into how you interact with the tech.
Jordan Cooney
As we think about measurement, we talked about visibility. Will visibility continue to be a North Star of measuring AI performance?
Garrett Sussman
It has to be. I think that people don't want the friction of having to do the research themselves. I think people are unfortunately kind of lazy. And as the output gets better, it just matters that you are recommended and then ultimately searched for because you're recommended.
Jordan Cooney
Okay, and last question for you. If any of our listeners could get out to an industry event, go and learn something, be educated, where should they go?
Garrett Sussman
Don't go to SEO Week, the event that we're throwing at the end of April. Don't go there.
Jordan Cooney
No, no. I wish I had the tickets.
Garrett Sussman
I wish I had tickets.
Jordan Cooney
I'm out of town. You have the tickets?
Garrett Sussman
I've got like two left. I guess you could try to go buy the last two tickets@seoweek.org no, we're in year two of the event. It's in New York. It's amazing. Last last year was so cool. It was like this mind blowing innovation of practitioners, but it was also very intimate. I think it's the best of our industry in the sense of, like the conversations I got to have with the people there. It's four days and it's just fun. It's like being able to geek out over all this stuff with everybody.
Jordan Cooney
So come, hey, community man, we need it. And I love that part about SEO Week. You guys are building, building a strong one there. And congratulations on, on the second year of it. So. All right, Garrett, I think that concludes our episode for today. Thank you to Garrett Sussman, director of marketing at Ipull Rank, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Garrett, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes or on the voice of search.com or you can also visit his company website, iPoll rank.com if you haven't subscribed yet or 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 be in your feed every week. Okay, that's all for today, but until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.
Sa.
Voices of Search Podcast Summary
Episode: The Impact of AI Search on Search Behavior
Host: Jordan Cooney
Guest: Garrett Sussman, Director of Marketing at iPull Rank
Date: April 27, 2026
This episode dives into the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-powered search and its profound impact on search behavior, information discovery, and digital marketing strategies. Host Jordan Cooney and guest Garrett Sussman tackle how conversational AI, particularly Google’s AI overviews, is reshaping the field. Together, they explore changing user habits, the blurring boundaries of SEO and brand marketing, and practical tactics for marketers to remain effective amid uncertainty.
[02:35-06:08] Garrett’s Story:
[00:51-01:35, 15:52-18:21]
[09:08-14:29]
[15:52-18:43]
[20:42-23:48]
[22:37-25:55]
[27:10-30:21]
[31:38-35:05]
On AI Search Uncertainty:
“Nobody knows definitively how these things work. It requires an understanding of, like, not only just information retrieval, but the probabilistic nature of large language models, which are a black box...” — Garrett Sussman [07:07]
On Brand as SEO’s New Frontier:
“SEO hasn’t [had big budgets]. And so how does that materially impact our perspective...knowing this channel is shifting towards brand?” — Jordan Cooney [11:30]
On the Challenge of Measurement:
“Now we need to start to look at measurement differently. [...] What is your share of voice on these AI search platforms? What are the mentions? Are you being recommended and then are you being cited?” — Garrett Sussman [17:35]
On Fairness in Digital Marketing:
“You could be doing everything right. Right. And not earn visibility for your brand. And that’s why it’s such a personal conversation, a personal decision.” — Garrett Sussman [33:11]
[35:24-38:48]
Most Important Takeaway:
– “Think about the biases, do reverse engineering and look at the results of what your audience is searching for.” [35:50]
Policy Preference:
– Supports AI regulation & interoperability; would change restrictive digital copyright laws. [36:09]
Transformation of Search Models:
– Predicts “query fan out” and complex, blended search will expand and blend into daily interactions. [37:04]
Visibility as North Star:
– Yes, because users value convenience and rely on AI-driven recommendations. [37:34]
Industry Event Recommendation:
– SEO Week in New York: described as intimate, innovative, and essential for networking with practitioners. [38:07]
The episode underscores the need for marketers and SEOs to embrace uncertainty, refocus on brand, adapt new metrics, and engage in continual learning and ethical self-reflection. As AI search blurs the lines between channels and shifts traditional paradigms, those who are proactive, strategic, and audience-focused will thrive.
“The answers are always in the data.” — Jordan Cooney [39:40]