Ep 505: How Brands Win in AI Search

Topics Covered in This Episode:

1. AI Search's Impact on Brand Visibility
2. Strategies for Winning in AI Search
3. AI Search and Customer Journey Changes
4. Importance of AI Crawlers in SEO
5. Shifting SEO Tactics for AI Search
6. AI and Third-Party Content Influence
7. Small Brands Competing in AI Search
8. Future of All Search as AI Search

Keywords:

AI search, brand optimization, GPT, perplexity, customer journey, enterprise platform, AI crawlers, AI overview, Anthropic, Claude AI assistant, web research, deep research, Google Workspace, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, VO two, AI video generator, text prompts, OpenAI, social network, CEO Sam Altman, AI-powered sharing, AI referral traffic, brand reputation, persona mapping, buyer behavior, ChatGPT, integration, Claude's new features, beta features, content strategy, organic search, content creation, user intent, AI monitoring, third party content, brand perception, intent-based content, personalized content, buyer intent, search behavior, buyer journey, market adaptation, business strategies, AI consumer, content optimization.

Podcast Transcript

Jordan Wilson [00:00:17]:
Whether you're a super small local business or an enterprise company, so many brands have thrived by getting actual humans to visit their website. And then maybe they sign up for something, they purchase something, they get pixeled. Right? And then you can hit those people with, you you know, ads down the line. So what happens now in the age of AI when there's maybe fewer humans actually visiting your company's website, maybe fewer opportunities, to, you know, get more of those actual human eyeballs on. And instead, maybe they're seeing your brand a little bit more in AI search. It's a big shift. It's actually happening very quickly. So what do brands do and how can brands win in AI search? Well, we're gonna be talking about that today and a whole lot more on everyday AI.

Jordan Wilson [00:01:16]:
What's going on y'all? My name is Jordan Wilson, and I'm the host of everyday AI. This is your daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter, helping us all not just learn generative AI, but how we can actually leverage it to grow our companies and our careers. If that sounds like what you're trying to do, this is your home, the live stream and the podcast. But where are you actually gonna make it happen? That's on our website at youreverydayai.com. So there you can sign up for the free daily newsletter each day. We break down, the the daily, podcast for the day, bringing you more key insights, maybe things we didn't even have time to get to. So make sure you go read that from today's conversation, and we also give you, everything else you need to keep up with the world of AI news. Speaking of that, before we get started, let's quickly go over what is happening in the world of AI news because there's a lot.

Jordan Wilson [00:02:03]:
And, hey, livestream crew, Got a question for you at the bottom. Let me know, and we'll get to it, in today's conversation. So first, Anthropic has added speaking of AI search, Anthropic has added web research and Google Workspace integration to its Cloud AI assistant. So Cloud can now search the web and also, internal documents providing responses with source citations to support transparency and auditability. So, they now have integration with your Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and then they also did just release the, the web integration a couple of weeks ago, but they'll also be rolling out a version of Deep Research here in the coming weeks. So the new features are powered by yeah. That word is still around. Retrieval of meta generation in our design to meet strict enterprise privacy and security standards according to Anthropic.

Jordan Wilson [00:02:59]:
So these updates make Claude a more competitive option against Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and ChatGPT. The features are still in beta right now for select paid users, so you might not have it yet, in US, Japan, and Brazil. Obviously, this came out a couple of hours after I kind of, did my hot take Tuesday, you know, on Claude and how it's so far behind. Obviously, a couple, hours later, they, introduced these, these new features. I I tried them out and they're okay when they work, but it's in beta, so hopefully it gets better. Speaking of new features, Google is rolling out its new v VO two AI video generator inside of Gemini Advanced. So Google has started to roll out VO two. It's very impressive AI text to video tool for Gemini advanced users.

Jordan Wilson [00:03:49]:
So users can create eight seconds, seven seven twenty p videos from text prompts with a focus on realistic scenes and smooth character motion. So access does require that $20 a month Google One AI premium plan, which matches the price of OpenAI's, you know, ChatGPT plus plan, which gives you access to their AI video generator, Sora. But Google's plan also includes everything else, all the, you know, cloud storage and Gemini integration in Google apps like Gmail and DOS docs. Google also introduced WISK animate, very cool, letting users turn images into short videos, which is available in Google Apps. Alright. Last but not least, OpenAI. Yeah. Everyone else is getting in on the updates.

Jordan Wilson [00:04:33]:
OpenAI as well. So according to reports, OpenAI is building an early stage social network, to with a real time feed, signaling a push to compete directly with x, formerly Twitter, and Meta's upcoming social AI products. So the prototype social network from OpenAI centers on letting people share content, especially images generated with ChatGPT through a social feed aiming to make AI powered sharing simpler and more engaging. So, CEO Sam Altman has been quietly seeking feedback, though it's unclear if the social network will be a new standalone app or part of ChetGPT. The project comes as OpenAI looks to gather its own user data for AI training, a key advantage held by x, which Grok can now tap into x's data, and Meta, as Llama can tap into all of Meta's social media, data. So while still experimental, OpenAI's move could reshape how people use AI to create and share content with each other online. Yeah. A lot happening in the, AI space, and there's a lot more.

Jordan Wilson [00:05:44]:
So make sure you go check that out on our website. Alright. Enough chitchat y'all. I'm ready to talk AI search. How can your company win? Well, I have an expert here to help us figure that out. So please help me. Welcome to the Everyday AI Show, Chris Andrew, the CEO and cofounder of Scrunch AI. Chris, thank you so much for joining the Everyday AI Show.

Jordan Wilson [00:06:05]:
You're welcome. Thanks for having me, Jordan. Alright. Let's let's let's let's talk about it. You you know, well, first, Chris, tell us, like, what is Scrunch AI? What is it that you all do?

Chris Andrew [00:06:15]:
Yeah. So Scrunch AI is an enterprise platform to help companies optimize for AI search. We started the company because we saw it impacting us first as consumers. Our customer journey was changing. I was visiting fewer websites. I was shifting my search behavior to GPT and perplexity. And in return, I'm getting an answer instead of 10 websites. That's gonna change the entire purchase journey for the typical customer, be it b to b or b to c.

Chris Andrew [00:06:41]:
So our business helps enterprises optimize for that new customer journey by helping you understand if you're showing up in AI search, how you're showing up in AI search, and what you can do about it. So optimization platform to improve for this new AI customer journey.

Jordan Wilson [00:06:57]:
Yeah. And let's you know, before we dive into the bigger topic, Chris, like, let me know what do companies what's the one biggest problem that they're usually facing when they come to you? Is it like, oh, our our traffic is has gone nowhere, or are people just, like, seeing this and they're like, okay. Maybe I don't know what's happening with our traffic, but I, like, I wanna be showing up. Like, what is it companies actually come to you with?

Chris Andrew [00:07:19]:
Yeah. It it often starts from a very personal concern. Like, somebody on the team, often at the c level, has been using GPT or perplexity. It's completely infiltrated their life, and they finally do a search for their own brand category. And they realize, wait a second. When I search for, you know, things my buyers, my persona search for, my company is not showing up the way I would have thought it would show up. Right? Like, if I ask a question about my direct product, maybe I'm represented. But if I ask a question about the category or kind of an earlier stage customer journey question, my competitors are showing up or my content's not showing up.

Chris Andrew [00:07:53]:
So it starts from a point of concern internally that, hey, these are the types of things we used to show up for in traditional organic Google search, and we're not being represented in an AI overview or in GPT or perplexity. And so that's usually the starting point from a concern perspective. Alright. And and let's let's just skip straight to

Jordan Wilson [00:08:14]:
the end, Chris. So aside from, you you know, checking out your product, how can brands win in AI search is the question everyone's trying to figure out.

Chris Andrew [00:08:23]:
Yeah. I think my I would encourage brands to to monitor and to understand how they're showing up today. You can do this in your own solutions. Right? Go look at your web logs. See how frequently AI crawlers are accessing your content. You can, work in your analytics platform to deeply understand, are you getting referral traffic from AI? Or our customers are seeing that referral traffic from AI converts at two to five x the rate of traditional organic traffic. Now why? It's because people are making their decision in a platform like GPT. They're doing all their evaluation, all their comparison.

Chris Andrew [00:08:59]:
By the time they visit my website, they are ready to buy. And so what I encourage brands to do is to to pay attention to the the actual data that's coming back from the platforms. And even if you're doing it manually, rather than leveraging a platform like ours, go in and start understanding how these models are representing you. What are they saying about your category, about you? What sources are they using? Go to the starting point and understand that as a consumer, we've started to outsource browsing. Like, the fact that we've browsed the Internet for years, it was out of necessity. We didn't even realize it, but we browsed because we had to. Browsing is inefficient by the definition of the word. I actually want the answer to my question.

Chris Andrew [00:09:40]:
I don't want 10 websites that I have to go poke around and build a spreadsheet to analyze the category myself. So I think that's the big shift that we're encouraging companies.

Jordan Wilson [00:09:50]:
And, yeah, hey. Live stream audience, if you have any questions for Chris, make sure to get them in now because I think this is something whether you realize it or not, it is something that's extremely, impactful. So, you know, Chris, you you kind of talked about this this shift, but I wanna tap into it, a little bit more, because, you know, companies, you know, maybe a year and a half ago when they're like, oh, where do I start with AI? You you know, it was a tricky question. At least for me now, I like, especially for individuals, I say, hey. If you're actually on the flip side of the coin of how do brands win with AI search, on the flip side, how can you start leveraging AI immediately regardless of where you're at? Can you talk a little bit just about this this concept of, yeah, now we're outsourcing our browsing to AI and, like, what does that mean?

Chris Andrew [00:10:37]:
Yeah. It means you need to rethink that customer journey. Right? You mentioned it in your opener, but, you know, you've got your traditional marketing channels. You drive people to your website. You expect them to move around your website before they buy the product or request a meeting or click to download a white paper, whatever your conversion funnels may look like. We're looking at new conversion funnels where the primary consumer of content on your website is AI. Like, go look go look at your web logs. You will see that these AI crawlers are all over your web page trying to make sense of your brand.

Chris Andrew [00:11:10]:
And if they can't find the answer on your website, they're gonna go find the answer elsewhere. Right? And so this idea that they are looking at everything externally on the Internet about your brand is kind of the starting point for companies to pay attention to. Now what that means from a shift perspective is your buyer is coming much more educated to your website. That can be a scary thing because you're losing control of the brand journey, the customer journey, or you think of it as an opportunity. There's an opportunity right now to make sure that you're being represented the way you would like to in the AI search world. And a lot of companies are bringing more content online. Right? They're making sure they have clear, concise information about their brand, their products, their services. They're adding new pages to their website.

Chris Andrew [00:11:56]:
They're adding glossaries, FAQs, knowledge bases. Think about it. Large language models want language. They've been gathering all of the language in the world. And so when they come to your site to learn about your brand, they're looking for unstructured data. They're looking for text that they can then bring back into the model to synthesize with other sources to ideally represent you to your buyer. And so I would rethink that customer journey. This is not about just a change in search.

Chris Andrew [00:12:22]:
This is about an entire change to the buyer journey.

Jordan Wilson [00:12:25]:
And that's interesting. Right? I've I've I've had this kind of, I don't know if it's a hot take for a while, but, you know, I think the traditional, you know, marketing funnel, so to speak, is kind of flat. Right? And you you kind of talked about it there because, you know, as more and more users are using these tools, right, as an example, deep research. Right, great tools from from Google, ChatGPT, and others. Right? But is is is that kind of the top of the funnel, content that a lot of brands would generally spend a lot of time on? Is that still even worth it? Because now customers are coming in so much more well researched and maybe more ready to buy. So, yeah, how should companies be thinking about that, you know, quote, unquote traditional, you know, content strategy, the traditional funnel strategy that's been working great for decades?

Chris Andrew [00:13:16]:
Yeah. I think that top of the funnel content is still absolutely critical because maybe you're not educating a human on the very first step, but there is an AI model that is trying to educate a human. And so that AI model still needs access to that top of the funnel content. It needs access to the type of content that is about education, about your category more broadly. And so you absolutely should be creating that type of content, but think of the primary consumer of that content as an AI crawler. You know, we don't need to be optimizing your blog post for 50 keywords and having all of the backlinks. You need to be optimizing your blog post about the education stage for an AI crawler trying to get concise accurate data to represent you as an expert back to the ultimate buyer. So it's definitely changing because I think the primary consumer becomes an AI crawler making sense of that information.

Chris Andrew [00:14:11]:
Down the road, it may become an AI agent or bot. I like to use a very kind of cheeky playful example in this world, which is, like, if you've Googled for a recipe in the last ten years, you end up on a recipe site where you can't find the recipe.

Jordan Wilson [00:14:24]:
Mhmm. You can't

Chris Andrew [00:14:24]:
find the ingredients. Right? You've got somebody's life story. You've got three videos, two ads, a pop up, an email capture. You literally can't find the ingredients unless you scroll for five minutes. You ask that same question in ChatGPT, and you just you you exhale. You breathe a sigh of relief. You get the ingredients. Like, this is why everyone is moving to AI search.

Chris Andrew [00:14:45]:
It is a better consumer experience. Now the model had to source that information from somewhere. So if you as a company start to think and cater to the AI crawlers as the key top of the funnel buyer, you're already winning against your competition. Shift your mindset internally to get ahead of this.

Jordan Wilson [00:15:03]:
Mhmm. And and yeah. Love love the comments and questions coming in from the audience so far. So so keep them coming, and we'll get to some of these questions. But, you know, Chris, one thing I I I heard you say there or, you you know, allude to is this concept of of crawlers. Right? Because I think a lot of companies before there was this huge surge in AI search, right, before the deep researches, you you know, before even Google had actually good integration with Gemini and search before ChatGPT search. So many business leaders were blocking, you you know, quote, unquote, AI bots. But what they didn't know is in some instances like Google, you block Google's AI bot that blocks you from Google as well.

Jordan Wilson [00:15:43]:
Not good. Right? So what's the advice to to companies that maybe made that decision a year or so ago or companies that are still up in the air, like, hey, should we do that? It's a great question.

Chris Andrew [00:15:55]:
I was I was on with a Fortune 500 firm just this week, and at the very the very first thing we start with is a comprehensive site audit. Like, what happens when an AI crawler tries to retrieve your content? And step one was, oh, you're blocking them. You're one of the few companies that is still blocking the AI crawlers. Now this was done out of fear for their data, but this is a company that sells product and service. If you're a media company, it's a little more complex. But if you're a media company with, you know, a need to build your audience, you're gonna want these models to identify your content. I was even on with a media company that was like, you know, why is our podcast not showing up in AI search results? Why are our conferences not showing up in AI search results? Well, you've blocked them from your entire website. And I understand you have a paid content strategy where you're protecting your content, but at least unblock the other pages about your free podcast and your conference events.

Chris Andrew [00:16:46]:
And so, you know, I understand the fear in the marketplace, but this has already gone mainstream. Right? GPT was adding a million users an hour a couple weeks ago during the image creation phase. We're coming up on well over, you know, one and a half billion unique monthly users of AI search across the leading platforms. Google is moving to AI search. Right? If you do a Google search, you get an AI search result. So my message is you need to think that if you're in the business of getting your product and service in front of your buyer, your new broker to the buyer is the AI crawler. So if you're blocking your content, they're gonna rep they're probably gonna misrepresent you because they have to piece together truth about your business from third party websites. So think and cater to AI crawlers not as a foe, but as a partner in getting your message to your end buyer.

Jordan Wilson [00:17:34]:
Yeah. Exact like, the Google example is huge, Chris, because, right, they've they've dominated, you know, 90 to 97% of the search market for decades. I was obviously at the, Google Cloud Next conference and got to speak with a lot of Google execs. So if you think that this is some experiment, right, if you've seen the the the new AI mode. Right? Yeah. We've all seen the AI search overviews, but, you know, now there's their AI mode. And and Google's, you know, deep research tools now with the 2.5. It's freaking fantastic.

Jordan Wilson [00:18:03]:
So if you think this is some phase or some, you know, beta program from Google, it's not. This is the new way that the Internet works. So a a a question a a good one here from the audience, Chris. I was I was hoping, you could tackle. It's a, you know, it's a simple one, but I think a lot of people are having this question, that, Madonna had said here saying, will SEO become irrelevant or at least maybe traditional SEO, right, where people are are doing the more technical side. Right? They're they're, you know, doing their h tags and their alt image. Right? Will that traditional SEO become irrelevant?

Chris Andrew [00:18:38]:
No. I I I don't think SEO is irrelevant. Right? Nor do I think it will become completely irrelevant. I think SEO is the foundation for how AI models determine determine what websites to look at. Right? They need some way to understand what websites to evaluate when answering a question. That's the that's how it's working today. Right? And so, you know, I think some of the some of the darker tactics in SEO may go away. But I think what you need to think about in the shift is, like, once AI has identified your page, it's looking at your content in a completely different way.

Chris Andrew [00:19:11]:
Right? Oftentimes, our conversations start with, I do a Google search, a Gemini search, and a GPT search, and I get three completely different answers. Why? The models work differently than the traditional Google bot. Right? They're they're looking for the most relevant content to the intent of the buyer, and the structure of a prompt looks really different than a Google search. Right? So Google search is often deeply keyword based. It's one word questions. It's two word questions. Prompts are human questions. Right? And so I think SEO is the foundation.

Chris Andrew [00:19:43]:
It is evolving, but the customer journey has permanently changed. And so in no way would I say get rid of your current SEO strategy. It's critical for ranking. It's critical for showing up to be considered, but it's changing rapidly. And underneath the hood, OpenAI has introduced its own search index. For the first few, you know, the first kind of six months plus in the AI search space, you know, Bing was the index that GPT was returning to. You'd ask a question in GPT, it would use the Bing search index. They've now got their own rival search index, which is indexing and making sense of websites in a different way.

Chris Andrew [00:20:18]:
So we need to keep very much paying very much attention to the shift in the space, but SEO is still the foundation.

Jordan Wilson [00:20:24]:
Yeah. It's it's a good point. And, you you know, I think it's one of those things. It is moving very quickly. Right? Like, I just gave the you know, I gave the example of, you know, this morning or, you know, yesterday, I did a show on Claude. And by the time, like, we got it up on our website, they had already introduced, like, a bunch of new features as it comes to accessing the Internet with their tools. So, yeah, I think it's hard, to to keep up, but important to as well. So, you you know, maybe one thing, you know, Chris, that that we've kind of talked about, you know, this this concept of AI crawlers and and having clear and concise language.

Jordan Wilson [00:20:59]:
Right? I think for a lot of people when they thought of, you know, writing content for the web because for decades, right, I've I've technically been doing SEO for, you know, like, twenty plus years. For decades, you mentioned the the the recipe thing. Right? You've gotten rewarded for, you know, keyword stuffing and and throwing in, you know, dozens of, you you know, semantic related keywords, like, regardless of if it actually solve the user query. So how can big brands, especially if they're maybe hurting for website traffic, how can they go about making that shift, right, when they've stopped to a game plan for a long time and maybe it's always worked and maybe it's not working anymore.

Chris Andrew [00:21:39]:
Yeah. You know, I I I love that you mentioned kind of the old tactics that worked because that's what the incentives led search engine, optimization folks to do. Right? That's what the incentives were aligned for. What I'm so excited about with the AI search space, it's fundamentally better for humans. Right? It's like, it it's cutting through all of the noise to get me the answer, to find me the website that has the knowledge for the depth of my question. And and, again, this is why persona mapping is so critical. It's like you need to understand the intent of the buyer. Right? Someone asking from one world view, from one vantage point, one location is completely different than another.

Chris Andrew [00:22:20]:
So I think, you know, when you think about how you optimize for this, it's really gonna be a question of creating content that is optimized for AI retrieval. Right? You need to think away from keyword stuffing and more towards intent. And that's what we see kind of the largest businesses doing. Now the foundation for how is it working begins with comprehensive monitoring. Right? If you don't know the type of content that is showing up in AI search results, you don't know what to be modeling it after. If you don't know what websites are being frequently cited by AI sources for your category, for your buyer, you may be missing on a very simple way of increasing your presence by collaborating with those third party content sources. Because one of the biggest shifts that I think brands are accepting is, you know, for a non branded search, it's 80% plus of the websites that are cited by models are third party content websites. Right? So if they're not asking about your brand, the models are trying to deeply rely on unbiased content.

Chris Andrew [00:23:19]:
They'll look at your website and competitive content, but the world of third party content becomes even more critical because AI is leaning on it to get a rounded view of the category and answering the question. And so Mhmm. As an organization, I'd wanna understand what content is working, what websites are relevant, and what are the gaps and strategies that I can deploy to make sure that my organization is showing up the way I want it to.

Jordan Wilson [00:23:43]:
Chris, can you talk a little bit more for our audience that isn't familiar? What are those third party websites? Right? And and how can people, you know, control what's being said there? How can they improve their, you know, perceived reputation on those sites?

Chris Andrew [00:23:57]:
Yeah. So, you know, there's no mystery here. I mean, when I say third party sites, I mean, everything that is not you on the Internet. Right? So let's let's say you're a beauty brand. Right? You've got your website describing your products and services. Well, there's probably dozens of review platforms out there that talk about your products and services. There's probably hundreds of bloggers and influencers that talk about your products and services in your category. There's probably, you know, dozens of, industry sites talking about the products that are going the the, you know, the ingredients going into your products.

Chris Andrew [00:24:31]:
All of those websites are being used by AI to represent you in the category. And so whether this is a paid strategy, in some cases, where you're gonna go work with them and pay for placement on their website, or it's an organic strategy where you're saying, hey, I'm listed on your site, but the product description is wrong, the pricing is wrong, can you update it more affiliate? You've got opportunities to make sure that your brand is accurately and positively represented on the influential third party sites that are influencing AI answers. But again, the starting point is you need to know what websites are being used by these AI models in the AI answers. And they're different across GPT, perplexity, Claude. As you said, just introduce web search. The space is moving very, very quickly. Google AI overviews has its own, you know, powered system to identify what sites are relevant. Tracking that at scale is the opportunity and the need that most companies are starting with.

Jordan Wilson [00:25:28]:
So, you you know, on that, we actually have two related questions on that exact topic from our audience, both from Jackie, and Cecilia. So, I'll kind of sum these up in one. But, you know, Jackie and Cecilia are both, essentially asking. Right? Are big brands kind of at an advantage here, right, because they have way more customers. Right? So how do smaller and medium sized businesses, how can they still compete, right, when maybe not as many people know about them and maybe traditional c traditional SEO might have been a little kinder to those smaller brands who really invested in SEO at a high level and and put out great human, content for for many years. So how can, you you know, smaller brands, kind of reconcile or still compete, because of this, you know, kind of third party, website priority? Yeah. It's a

Chris Andrew [00:26:20]:
great question. I think I mean, brand is is critical in this phase because brand is the models are gonna have a deeper understanding of bigger brands. There's more information out there. There's more opportunity to influence the way AI thinks at scale because they have coverage. Right? You're gonna be present in a lot of places. Now what's really interesting about this shift is the long tail of content is becoming more relevant, because the models are trying to match intent to the right source. And so we've seen a lot of instances where, you know, content from the first couple pages of Google or Bing or Brave or whatever browser you're using doesn't even show up in an AI search result. It's the long tail of content where you might find a niche article from some blog or local business because they understand the intent of their persona and buyer.

Chris Andrew [00:27:09]:
So, again, we really start with comprehensive persona mapping because everyone's getting different answers in AI search. Now as memory gets incorporated even more deeply, OpenAI announced just last week, I believe, that they're incorporating memory capabilities for all paid users now into AI search results. And so it's looking at your location, your information you shared with it to get the right result to you. So I actually think small and medium sized businesses have a huge opportunity to continue to produce targeted content for your relevant buyer and understand that AI is gonna do the work and find it. And so I think that's a huge level of encouragement to say, you're not massively disadvantaged in this shift. Continue to produce thoughtful content for a human. Right? One of the beautiful things is you don't need to write for humans and robots. These robots read like humans.

Chris Andrew [00:28:01]:
Like, I like to joke large language models are like babies. Like, you what you tell it, it regurgitates. Alright? It it it tell it spits the information back to you. So the more information you give it about your brand, the more it's gonna do your best do its best to represent you. So continue to produce that content for a human reader and know that the crawlers are gonna access it and give you an opportunity to be present.

Jordan Wilson [00:28:22]:
It's a great, a great well thought out response and a good a good point too on the, you know, the OpenAI update that now, you know, they've they've had the memory for, you know, eight eight or nine months. But, yeah, they just rolled out the, ability for ChatGPT to use your entire chat history, not just those, you know, saved nuggets of memory. So, you know, a great a great call out there, Chris, in terms of personalization, localization. Yeah. Large language models aren't deterministic, you know, which is important. So so one one other question, that I had and, you know, you've mentioned a lot, you know, things like, you know, AI search, you know, companies and brands in order to win need to focus more on things like brand reputation, you know, the consumer journey, understanding user intent, which sounds hard. Right? Like like, I know a lot of people in my head personally when they hear that, they're probably like, alright. Let's get the whole team together and let's start, you know, doing focus groups and meetings and meetings.

Jordan Wilson [00:29:17]:
But, like, isn't AI, Chris, really good for that?

Chris Andrew [00:29:22]:
It is. You know, I think AI does a really good job of understanding at scale. I mean, it is it's the ultimate analyst. Right? It's the ultimate, it has the ultimate ability to do that research for you. I mean, one of the things that's been surprising in starting the company has been that the b to b decision making process has moved into these channels arguably faster than the consumer making process, because sophisticated users living in AI as a tool starting to ask all their questions in it. And so as you're doing the, like, pull the whole company together to evaluate, well, the more context AI has about your business problem, your company, and the more you enrich the prompt with that context, the more of a thoughtful response you're gonna get back. These things are great thought partners. Now they do still hallucinate sometimes.

Chris Andrew [00:30:09]:
They will sometimes make up answers if they don't have data to base it on. So you need to bring a judicious lens, you know, to the ultimate advice that it's providing you. You know your customer well. You know your market well. But as you said, it's a good thought partner in kind of distilling what you need to do as part of this shift.

Jordan Wilson [00:30:27]:
Alright. So, Chris, we've covered a ton in today's conversation that I think is really going to help, a lot of business leaders who are grappling, with this new challenge of winning in the era of AI search. But as we wrap up today's conversation, what is your one most important piece of advice? Like, what should a business leader go do today, in order to start this winning on this uphill battle?

Chris Andrew [00:30:56]:
Yeah. I would say stop ignoring it and go participate. And I think that's, what's happening with your peers. Right? My my simple advice, and I don't think this is as controversial to take now eighteen months in, all of search is going to be AI search. Google is cannibalizing itself with AI overviews powered by their own large language models. They invented the space. They're not going to give up the space, but they are going to allow AI search results to infiltrate the search experience. We see organizations who are seeing their AI referral traffic nearly double month over month, and this has been sustained now for going on six months.

Chris Andrew [00:31:35]:
This has the attention of the executive team. The largest companies in the world are shifting their marketing strategies to think about AI as a as an ICP, as a primary consumer of content. And so get a team together, start paying attention, start with some basic monitoring when you're ready for optimization and infrastructure to manage these crawlers and agents. Obviously, platforms like ours exist to do that, but it exists in a place that needs to start with a foundation of understanding. If you're showing up, how are you showing up and why? So come to the starting line. Your consumers are already there. That's why I started the company. I realized that I, as a consumer, had already changed my behavior.

Chris Andrew [00:32:13]:
I'm not waiting for companies to adapt.

Jordan Wilson [00:32:17]:
Great great advice and I think, you know, whether you're someone that said, you know, SEO, content marketing or not, it doesn't matter because what Chris just laid out there is the truth. All search is going to become AI search. So if you want your company, to remain relevant in the future online, you have to pay attention to it. So, Chris, this was a great conversation. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to join the Everyday AI Show. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Jordan.

Chris Andrew [00:32:45]:
Great to

Jordan Wilson [00:32:45]:
see you. Alright. As a reminder, y'all, we covered a lot there. Some fantastic insights, and there will be a whole lot more in our newsletter. So if you haven't already, please make sure to go to youreverydayai.com. Sign up for the free free daily newsletter. If this was helpful, tell someone about it. Chris just gave a ton of great advice putting, a ton of value out there, in the world for free.

Jordan Wilson [00:33:05]:
So thank you for tuning in. Hope to see you back tomorrow and every day for more everyday AI. Thanks, y'all.