The AI Readiness Playbook: The New Rules of Search, Content, and Visibility

Transcription –
The AI Readiness Playbook: The New Rules of Search, Content, and Visibility

(0:00 – 0:21)

Welcome to the Proof Point Podcast, where we decode digital success one click at a time. We share key takeaways fueled by data and insights that your team can implement today to drive growth. Now, let’s get started.

(0:22 – 0:50)

Hi, it’s Stacie Porter-Bilger, your host for the Proof Point Podcast, where I feature B2B and D2C businesses and thought leaders sharing marketing data tactics and sales strategies to kickstart your growth in this rapidly changing digital space. This episode is brought to you by Proof Digital. Proof Digital is a strategic and creative performance and marketing agency partnering with companies to create data-fueled marketing campaigns and tactics that drive growth and deliver tangible ROI.

(0:51 – 1:14)

Today, I have a good friend of mine with me, Dr. Jeremy Weisz. Jeremy has actually, was with Rise25, a longtime partner of Proof Digital. He’s done thousands of interviews with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs. So I’m going to flip the script today and let him interview me. Jeremy, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me.

(1:15 – 1:52)

And when we were talking a couple of weeks ago, you were talking about all the innovative stuff you’re doing in AI. So I’m like, we must get on and talk about it. Yeah. Okay. And so you’re going to share kind of, at this point, you know, the AI readiness. I’m going to, like, I was looking at your site today. People are watching the video version. I’m on proofdigital.com. You can look at the AI and digital marketing and just a lot of the kind of disruption, the opportunity that’s there. But I wanted you to really share AI readiness, what you’re seeing and what people should be doing in AI.

(1:53 – 2:13)

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Jeremy. And I’ll share a few minutes after we kind of talk through a little bit of this, some sample reports and some sample pieces that are really changing the way businesses need to be thinking about online, you know, getting found online and across everywhere.

(2:14 – 2:36)

It’s actually, it’s no longer, you know, we don’t use old school SEO, but SEO still exists, but it’s really search everywhere. And part of that search everywhere means that you need to be found on these LLMs, these chatGBT, quad, perplexity, Gemini, others. Those are a lot of some big ones that are out there.

(2:37 – 3:00)

And so, one, you need to understand, are you there? Are you being cited and what are you being cited for? You need to look at these tools as a sales, I mean, an arm of your sales team or your sales team, to be truthful. It’s more about intent now, not necessarily an old school keyword, but basically people are looking for you and asking questions.

(3:01 – 3:32)

And those questions can be cited by you if you can have control and make these LLMs better about representing your business. But first you have to know where you stand and then you have to then do the dotting I’s and dotting cross and T’s to make sure that they can find you. And each one kind of is different. So there are different tactics to get found on Quad versus Grunt, for example. You need to think through that.

(3:33 – 3:55)

So we’ll talk about, because I know there’s a lot of stuff baked into your AI readiness. So why don’t you just start talking about what are some of the mistakes people are making that are not allowing them to be found in some of these LLMs? Sure. A few things. They’re not answering questions. So that’s what LLMs do.

(3:56 – 4:20)

They’re asking questions and people go in there and ask questions. When you’re looking at prompts, you can see on people’s behavior. So their content structure and their citability lessons when they’re not clear, when they’re not supporting the questions that people are asking. So you need to actually have a structure and a better structure of your content. There’s technical barriers too.

(4:21 – 4:47)

So in our world, we have schema and then also you need to have site maps for the LLMs. You used to have just a regular site map, but you need to have them for ChatGBT. So oftentimes when we do an audit of a site to see it or an SEO audit, are you allowing these bots to crawl your site? And a lot of times you’re not, you’re blocking them. So those are some really important pieces.

(4:48 – 5:18)

Another piece is, which is a good thing, is that they want authority. They want to understand your credibility in order to cite you. So are you, is your CEO or is your head of a department authoring blogs? Are they also going on podcasts, for example? Are they doing other things that demonstrate authority that you actually can answer this question? So, you know, that’s important.

(5:19 – 5:39)

They do want to make sure when they’re signing, you know, your expertise is that you’re real and that it’s good information. So those are some pieces, but I mean, similar to SEO, I mean, do you have schema? Do you have titles? Do you have those? You still have to do that. It’s just the basics now. Now the next thing is, are you authority on it?

(5:40 – 6:02)

So, you know, I know we’ll talk about the AI readiness, but I mean, you’ve been doing this since, you know, 2012, so you’ve seen the waves of different technologies, different things on the internet, different ways of ranking. Talk about the AI readiness a little bit and what’s baked in there, because you mentioned several things just in the mistakes. I’m sure you’ll talk about that.

(6:03 – 6:27)

Yeah. I mean, similar to what I was saying, it’s just that people still don’t, I mean, people who went online, whether you’re talking about just an old school Google or, and these LLMs, it’s the details do matter. And so these are bots crawling your site. And if you don’t have those details set up, then you’re less likely to be cited.

(6:28 – 7:00)

That’s the same thing, which now is how you structure that data and that content on a page has changed and shifted a little bit. You know, summaries at the top a little bit more. You’re giving that information and those bots the information quicker. And I definitely think, you know, old school SEO backlinks were a big thing, but, you know, SEO got smart over the years and they don’t like that, that black hack stuff. You don’t, you know, it’s more valid authority. So that’s, that’s still carries over to, you know, where we are today.

(7:01 – 7:31)

In the authority pieces, you personally being out there, I mean, you are the author and I think expertise will be a part of who they cite because you’re answering questions and they’re and they want that information to be accurate. So I think it’s just kind of elevating the game. The challenge is there are multiple, it’s going to be changing daily and the horse race of which one of these are going to be more prominent will continue to shift.

(7:32 – 8:03)

So you just still have to do the, I would continue to do the details and then think about, okay. Okay. We always use Gronk as an example. Well, guess what? Impact’s Gronk. Twitter. So, I mean, so, you know, there are certain things that you might want to do if your target market is on certain platforms more than others and, and understanding that a little bit better. So there’s some additional tactics that might come into play depending on where you want to be found, but the basics still apply.

(8:04 – 8:30)

Yeah. I mean, user behavior is, is changing. For some people it’s just, it’s changed myself included. Oh, I know a lot. I mean, it’s, and it’s changing every day. What we’ve built with AI, Jeremy, I’m sure the same things for you is just incredible. I mean, really, it’s just, I am shocked in the last, even last month what’s changed. And it’s, it’s magical to some degree and yes, scary at the same time.

(8:31 – 9:00)

We are, we have a AI scanner we’ve built, we have, we’re doing competitive intelligence a whole different way by scraping the internet and leveraging AI. Some of our, and, and also we’re dotting the I’s and crossing T’s to help our team, our clients beat the sales. I mean, for these LMs, we’ve had some clients land big, big deals by being cited and, and Gemini or ChatGPT. I mean, so it’s, you have to think about it from a sales perspective.

(9:01 – 9:27)

It kind of starts with the, you know, analysis and the AI readiness. Do you want to show that? Sure. Yeah. I’ll give it, I’ll give it a show here. Yeah. We, we start with, I’ll just kind of share my screen here a little bit here. We built this, this kind of citation engine to, to see where brands are being found and how you align with your competitor.

(9:28 – 9:53)

And so that certain pieces I’m going to come scroll up. So this is, I don’t want to go into too much of this from a client standpoint, but we’re able to see, understand, you know, how, how much are you cited within certain queries that you want to be bound for? So let’s say 25 queries here. You said you wanted to be found for, you know, these 25 queries, you’re there for 19. That’s actually, it’s a pretty good number.

(9:54 – 10:17)

But you know, is it in your voice? You know, is it, is it the right message you want? And so there’s lots of pieces in this audit about cited and how we can, and where you are by, by platform. And you know, I think in this particular case, we’re like, okay, we really need to work on these three.

(10:18 – 10:42)

Cause these are the, I mean, the truth is these are the big guys, right? So right now I think Claude is, is, is the one that that’s leading the way, but you know, you can’t count out Google at all ever. And also I think when you’re looking at AIO and Gemini, those are behavioral things when actually somebody is looking for something too. So that’s an important piece to look at that, those, those platforms.

(10:43 – 11:04)

You know, looking at visibility and then we can do your competitors too, when we’re doing competitive analysis across where you kind of measure each and all the way from where you, you know, is your brand cited? Is it the intent of, of this, that this particular query? So we’re looking at what we’re missing, what we’re being incited on.

(11:05 – 11:31)

And then from that standpoint, we, we build out and what prompts if you, if you missed the prompt as well. So we went by prompt and can tell you where you’re being missed and I’m like, okay, let’s work on that one. So this is a citation audit. We also have an, this is the AI SEO audit or GEO or whatever, AIEO, I mean, I mean, whatever it’s called these days, we say search everywhere.

(11:32 – 11:59)

So GEO is, you know, what are the blockers? And then here’s, and then what’s missing signals that you have? And so basically this audit gives you exactly today, what do you need to work on? And so write down, these are critical work on these from a standpoint, the crawlers, for example, and this case that the chat, they can’t crawl the site, which is oftentimes the bots are being blocked. So, okay, fix this first.

(12:00 – 12:21)

So we’re doing these audits from a standpoint of helping, okay, where you are on the citation standpoint. Here’s some technical pieces that we need to work on in addition to content consistency. And so that’s really what our, our, our, our, our tool is putting out there. Where are you at? And what do you need to do to get there?

(12:22 – 12:48)

And so just for, for clarity sake, Stacie, this is not fun. People can’t go to this. They need to contact you to have you run the, run the discovery in the back end, right? We built this. Yes. And we’re scraping these, these tools, leveraging multiple different tools together.

(12:49 – 13:11)

So we built this. Yeah. So people can contact and they can go to Proofdigital, contact you if they’re interested in getting one of these AI readiness. How does it work? If someone wants one. If somebody wants to work, we, you know, we’ll just do a kind of one time feed to run it and they’ll have this, this dashboard, just this dashboard that we, I just showed you.

(13:12 – 13:40)

It’s a one. And then if they want us to do some of the work, that’s another discussion. But just to basically a one time, one time fee and we’ll, we’ll run these, these tools so they can see where they’re at. What’s one thing, and you mentioned some, obviously correcting it. What’s, has anything surprised you as like, wow, this really moved the needle to help people for rankings?

(13:41 – 14:03)

Well, what’s really, I mean, move the needle, needle are two things. One, you’ve got to make sure they can crawl your site. So that’s the bottom line. You got to, you got to make sure some of those things, those blockers are removed. But content and answering those questions themselves, I mean, understand what your customers are asking and answer it.

(14:04 – 14:33)

And, and that’s what I gave an example of our client who not only, and once I got that one big client and big lead, a lot followed from it. And it was because they answered the question and that content was structured on, on a pillar page or a blog, both, I think that was structured in a way that these platforms like it.

(14:34 – 15:08)

So if you, if you, if you make sure you’re not blocking everybody and you have all those things from a technical standpoint in good place, that’s, that’s step one. Step two is answering the questions that you think people ask when they’re looking for you. And, and you have to level different types of intent. I mean, sometimes it’s, it’s always, you have, I mean, it’s always different people in a different phase of a funnel. That might be a question that you know you might get, but maybe they’re not ready to buy yet, but it’s still a good kind of a customer that you want, or it’s somebody who’s more down the, further the funnel that they’re ready to buy now.

(15:09 – 15:38)

So understand, you know, as a salesperson or within your SEO, if you’re already doing that, that you should already know a lot of that already. So but it’s key, I mean, keywords, you know, play a role when you get below those, those platforms still and local as well, maps still play a role, but the biggest thing is making sure that you’re making these platforms better by answering these questions.

(15:39 – 16:03)

I mean, what sticks out to me, Stacie, with your advice is because, you know, when you’re answering the questions, you don’t have to go really, really crazy on the keywords because if you’re answering the questions people are asking, you’re going to hit the keywords that you want. Right. And so that’s kind of baked into your advice and the AI readiness.

(16:04 – 16:27)

And I just want to, you know, share with people, they can go to proof, you know, digital.com to learn more. And I do want to, before we wrap it up, you know, they, she files her own advice, right? They have content on AI search in chatbot discoverability. So I’m on the proof digital. If you go to learn, they have a blog page.

(16:28 – 16:46)

They also have a podcast that you can check out and smarter SEO strategy, paid optimization, you know, so there’s a lot of information here, but obviously if you want to just go direct to the source, you can talk to them and have them run it directly, but they have a lot of great information right on the site here.

(16:47 – 17:10)

Before we end Stacie, what are some of the fan favorite podcast episodes that we could point people to? Ah, there’s some really good ones in there. And since we’re talking AI, you can basically, there’s a couple of small business ones right there on AI trends. There’s also, yeah, that was a great one. Nicole Donnelly, she’s sharp.

(17:11 – 17:32)

She’s really at the forefront and some working with small to medium sized businesses on AI. So if you click on that, as well as Ken, Ken McLeod, he is actually building custom solutions and workflows for companies. And so, and that’s a, he’s just a lot of things to think about from an AI standpoint. We have everything kind of sorted that way.

(17:33 – 17:49)

Love it. So check out Proof Digital. You can check out the podcast, you can check out the blog and again, you know, Stacie, thanks for having me. Awesome. Thanks, Jeremy. Always great to see you. Thanks for listening to the Proof Point podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.