- Speaker #0
There's almost like a holy war happening in our industry, but what I'm buying is directionally accurate metrics. Is it 37.3% or is it 45.1%? I don't care.
- Speaker #1
What should a marketing team actually do about AI search?
- Speaker #0
One objective way of how your brand is showing up in AI, I don't buy it. By measuring your AI visibility, you're looking at the past. What AI says about you is a reflection of what the internet has already said about you. And this is not even a made-up example. This is what we're suffering with our own product, because we messed up how we presented their pricing. People misunderstood it. You need to be one step ahead of AI. So you can even know who you promoted this thing to. And then if you know that you have a great piece of content that touches on all the people's problems and pain points that positions your product as the best solution, you know how many people saw it, but it isn't selling. There's no revenue. Then you can ask your management or whoever, so is this a marketing problem? Or maybe it's like product problem or like product market feed problem. Because that was also what can be happening. Like marketing is doing everything to pitch the product and raise awareness about it. But the product is too expensive for the market. So you have to fix pricing for people to sign up. That's basically the simple way to avoid specific attribution, but still show that your marketing efforts influence the revenue of the company.
- Speaker #1
Great. Now, let's move to the second chapter, SEO, GEO, and I think the transition is pretty good. Because I work with a lot of CMOs and VP marketings, etc. And they have a lot of pressure from management, investors, etc. to invest in the GEO space. For you, what should a marketing team actually do about this topic today, about AI search?
- Speaker #0
There are two things, two very important things that I always talk about when it comes to answer engine optimization. One of them is measuring and reporting. So first of all, you need to know what the situation is. You need to know if you are being mentioned by those chatbots and assistants. And there's a lot of, there's almost like a holy war. happening in our industry on what the right measurement and tracking should look like, how the metrics should be calculated, blah,
- Speaker #1
That's actually my next question, you know, so that's perfect.
- Speaker #0
Well, yeah, I can give you an answer right away because my approach to this is basically the same as with everything else. I try to simplify it to the best solution from the standpoint of common sense and how easy it is to implement and why it makes sense so the thing is people are saying oh like if you if you track a prompt once and then you ask it the next time it might not show the same brands so how many times do you need to ask it per day is it 10 times per day is it 20 times per day to get some statistical significance and then how do you generate those prompts do you get them from reddit do you get them from existing google searches you Do you get them from sales conversations that your sales team is having? Blah, blah, blah. There's so much conversation around it. But my perspective is that just think of how people interact with AI. It doesn't seem like everyone just uses ChatGPT all the time during the day from their desktop computer. If I look at my own interactions with AI, sometimes I would use ChatGPT. online. Sometimes I would use chat GPT in the app on my phone. Sometimes I'm lazy. I don't want to launch chat GPT app. I just in Safari, I do a Google search and then from Google search, it offers you to continue like using Gemini asking a questions. I do that. Sometimes I'm using cloud code in terminal. And whenever I have a question, I would ask cloud code in terminal, not from my web interface. Sometimes I would be using some kind of application, for example, like Notion or something that has a built-in assistant. And within that assistant, I can ask it. So my usage of AI is spread across devices. mobile devices, desktop devices is spread across native apps, like chat GPT, web app, chat GPT, iPhone app, etc, etc. And each of those things, whenever I'm using from mobile or from desktop, whenever I'm using from work IP or home IP, whenever like I'm using incognito or using from my existing account or like. There's ChatGPT, my personal account, and there's ChatGPT, my work account that is sponsored by the company. All of this creates a lot of variance. So to be able to say that, oh, we can give you one objective way of how your brand is showing up in AI, I don't buy it. But what I'm buying is directionally accurate metrics. And I think that pretty much any... tool that you can use if you are smart about how you're setting up your prompts because this is something you you can control you can control which prompts exactly you choose to track and there's also like a methodology there that is very important that people understand so once you use like any tool even like if you use uh just a tool that gives you chat gpt and i know perplexity you're already getting directionally am i showing up Am I not showing up? And a month from now, with the same number of prompts and with the same two or three AI assistants that I'm tracking, is my visibility going up or is my visibility going down? Basically, what I'm advising people is to look at the trends. Is your AI visibility improving over time or is it declining? What is the actual metric? Is it 37.3%? Or is it 45.1%? I don't care. Tell me if it went up since last month or tell me if it is going down. Tell me if I'm ahead of my competitors or tell me am I behind. Because I don't care if I'm like behind my competitor by 5% or 7%. What I want to know is the gap closing. If last month it has been 7% between us, is it 6% this month? Would it be like 5%? This is what I care about. I'm caring about like where this all is going. What's the trend? I don't care about specific metrics because those specific metrics depend a lot on how exactly you measure it. And like no two people would set up their measurement the same way. So you have to know your methodology and then stick to it. So this is the first thing, like how to approach measurement. So basically don't try to overcomplicate because you'll just shoot yourself in the foot. Stick with Amazon. methodology and look at the trends. And the second thing is that by measuring your AI visibility, you're looking at the past. You're looking at what has already happened. Because basically, what AI says about you is a reflection of what the internet has already said about you. So AI is picking up all the existing articles that were recently created. If you really want to be proactive you need to be one step ahead of AI. You need to catch everything that the internet is saying about you before AI does, and you need to fix that the moment it happens. So the moment you see someone publishes an article and they talk about the pricing of your product and they are making wrong statements, for example, for some reason they misunderstood your pricing. And this is not even a made up example. This is what we're suffering with our own product, because as we released some products in Ahrefs, we messed up how we presented their pricing. People misunderstood it. And a lot of content is being created with misleading claims about our pricing. So what we're doing right now, we're trying to catch all of that, reach out and say, you're making a wrong statement about our pricing. Please fix it. So this is where Speaking of business potential, we're getting into the business potential three area for Ahrefs because we have our own web crawler and we continuously crawl the web and discover new pages and only we can do it. So if you want to track your web mentions and you want to catch pages that talk about you and you want to instantly reach out to them and ask them to fix something or clarify something. This is only Ahrefs can do. Yeah, there are like a bunch of web mentioned trackers, but most of them are based on scraping Google search results, which doesn't give you enough coverage. So because Ahrefs crawls the entire web with our own crawlers, we have a much better coverage than most of these tools do. And we are right now building some pretty awesome products that with the help of AI, of course. help you extract meaningful information. For example, if you're launching a new product and you want to track the sentiment or the narrative, what are people saying about your new launch? What you can do with the help of Ahrefs, you can catch all the pages that mention your new product. And then with the help of AI, you can analyze every page and get a report like here are three pages that you need fixing. All the other pages are fine. So you don't need to visit them yourself and read what they're talking about you. AI would do this for you. And I guess the next step is AI would proactively reach out to the owners of these pages and tell them, hey, you wrote about this product, but your information is actually incorrect. And here are five other pages that have correct information to kind of prove you that you're wrong. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to us finishing building this product.
- Speaker #1
Okay, great. The thing is, how... So I understand like the whole philosophy, I think, around it. But now that I need to work on the topic. So for SEO, we know the playbook. Okay, there is kind of a roadmap to follow, like searching for your keywords and having like the volume, etc, etc. What do you need to change about the way you work your SEO to improve your GEO? Because I think, you know... It's like what you just mentioned is SEO without clear data. And so because you don't have the clear data like ChatGPT and co, they don't give you the specific logs and the volumes, et cetera, et cetera. It's like I'm dancing in the dark, but still the philosophy behind the GEO from what you mentioned is roughly exactly the same as SEO, but without the numbers. Would you say that's correct?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, it's very similar. It's very similar. And for example, the way that we advise our customers to, for example, create a list of prompts that they want to track, we advise them to take inspiration from popular Google searches. Because if a certain topic in your industry is popular in Google, if that's something that people ask in Google, there's a high likelihood that people are asking similar things in ChatGPT. Another source of how to know what to track in terms of prompts is the content that you have created on your website. If your marketing team is smart, then you have created your content with a certain purpose because someone wants to have answers to this question. So you didn't create content out of thin air. You created content because someone is searching for this information. So you can just feed your content. You can just plug your blog into ChatGPT and say it, visit every article I have and tell me what kind of three, four prompts people would use to find information in this article, what kind of prompts people would be asking. So yeah, in terms of how SEO transitions into GEO, well, the first step is your website. Right now, more than ever, you need to have... ample and exhaustive information on your website. Like I said, we suffered from making this mistake when we released the new product and we kind of messed up the pricing a little bit. So it was a bit hard to figure out. It backfired at us because when other people started creating content and right now it is so easy to create content. Anyone can ask Claude, like visit these five tools. get information about their pricing and create an article like with the from cheapest to most expensive ones so it's not even a person visiting your landing page trying to figure out your pricing it's ai visiting your page and if ai won't be able to figure out what you're saying on this page if it's hidden in some like fancy interfaces or if you're trying to be too clever in how you position yourself and explain things. If things have double meaning, you can expect that people who would be creating content about you and would be using AI for this, they're going to create a lot of misinformation. So like I said, it starts from your website. Now, more than ever, you have to be very, very careful about the information that you put out on your website because it can get picked up by AI-generated content created by other people. And the next step is… Like when you do marketing, when you promote your stuff and you want other people to talk about you, when you want people to create reviews of your service, comparison of your service, tutorials about your service. You want to be aware of what is happening. Because like I said, our mistake with how we positioned our pricing created a lot of misinformation. And now we need to be catching all this and fixing it. Because the thing is, yeah, we could look at our citations in ChatGPT so we can set up all those prompts. Prompts specifically about pricing, like what is the pricing of SEO tools? What is the pricing of marketing tools? What are they like? cheapest marketing tools or like most expensive marketing tools so we can in theory we can create a lot of prompts about pricing we can find all the citations that chat gpt perplexity gemini are using to pull information about pricing and we can go to these pages and say oh like you have a mistake please fix it but the thing is the citations that we see in chat gpt gemini cloud etc today are not necessarily the citations that they would be using tomorrow because web is kind of like a living and breathing and evolving organism so you have to proactively catch the narrative what are people talking about you on the web and you have to be fixing it before ai would start pulling these pages and god forbid if ai would like train on these pages because then wrong information would be ingrained in the model this is why it is so in
- Speaker #1
important to catch and fix those things as soon as possible yeah i think again we're going back to common sense like yeah again it's it's like of course you can speak about all the tactics and all the numbers and all the blah blah blah but as you mentioned like uh internet is a moving organism and especially ai and so with seo you've got I don't know, like 30 years of experience. So you know that in terms of infrastructure and ground is, I can stick in the time, but with AI, everything is changing and moving so fast that all the tactics from today will probably change next week, if not next day. So yeah, you really need to step back and think about why are we doing all this? like How do people search online? And at the end of the day, maybe the numbers will not be 45.1, as you mentioned, but is the direction correct? Like, I mean, again, it's common sense.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, exactly. I've been in the SEO industry for more than 15 years and I've seen many Google algorithm updates. I've seen many platforms come and go, but the fundamentals, if we're talking about common sense And if we... boil down all those like fancy tactics to their fundamental level, to the fundamental mechanisms of how they, how we create information, how people consume information, how people find information, how people become your customers. The fundamentals are the same. And as today, you as a business are responsible for sharing information about yourself. that is easy to consume so previously your job was to create information that any average person visiting your website they they won't have to think twice as like the name of the book don't make me think i like this concept do it just
- Speaker #2
do it don't let your dreams be dreams yesterday you said tomorrow so just do it Make your dreams come true Just do it