S E751: SEO in the AI Era: Stephan Bajaio on Digital Visibility

And in the world of AI, where we're about to go, you know, where synthetic content means less and people are starting to become desensitized to it, the humanity of there's a person, a real person behind this with something written by a real person with the wisdom of your 10,000 hours, that's going to cut through the noise. That's the thing that's going to make all the difference. That is the differentiating quality. That wins over the next 5 years versus trying to chase a chatbot that shouldn't be a chatbot.

Step into the world of success with Your Brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. 25 years in digital will either make you cynical or make you wise. My next guest chose wise. He's one of the original co-founders of Conductor, one of the world's leading enterprise SEO platforms, where he spent over a decade as chief evangelist, building a 65-person global team, working with Fortune 500 brands and watching the company navigate a WeWork acquisition on its way to a $500 million plus valuation. Today, he's the CEO of Vibelogic, a digital strategy firm built on a simple but uncomfortable truth. Most businesses are invisible to the very customers who need them most, and they don't even know it. He's also a husband, a girl dad to a 5-year-old who has absolutely zero respect for his calendar. So hopefully we'll get this done before she comes home from the park. And someone who openly admits he's still figuring out how to be a human being instead of a human doing. That last part is a big part of why I wanted him on the show. Stefan Bugaio. Welcome to the show.

Anika, thank you. That's, that's a very nice introduction. I'll do my best to live up to it.

How's that? Well, I, I wanna talk about the origin story, right, that nobody tells. The founding of Conductor is interesting, but it's not the most interesting part. What happened inside the run, the identity evolution and the cost is. You've described yourself as someone who wore a lot of hats at Conductor. But the chief evangelist title stuck. So what does it actually mean to evangelize something in your own hands without it becoming performative?

Oh, I'll step back for a second. Everything I ever built at Conductor, and you know, I was officially a co-founder in title, but like not in the same way as let's say somebody who gets to ride off into the sunset at the end of the thing or whatever, but nonetheless a shareholder and someone who had tremendous stake in it. And the reason I preempt all of that is my title became something I had to earn. So the co-founder aspect of my title was something I had to earn. When we reconstituted the company, which Conductor had many incantations or versions of, of itself throughout the 14+ years I was there. But when we first founded it, everyone who was left from the original company of Link Experts who was not sold off with the business, which was myself and about 20-some-odd other people, were all named co-founder in title and in shares to some degree more token than otherwise. We could say that was a way to keep people there. We could say a lot of things if you want to be cynical rather than wise. But I looked at it as an opportunity to say, okay, what if this was my business? Like, I do have shares and I was given more over time and I got percentages of the company. And, uh, ultimately it was, what am I doing to make this work? This is mine. How do I own it? Not to mention, most of my companies or my clients were Fortune 500, internet retailer 1000. So in order for me to walk into the room, which by the way, I still have imposter syndrome to this day, but in order for me to walk into the room, that title meant a lot. That title let the CMO of Logitech in, let me into the room or the CMO of Shutterstock or the entire C-suite at StubHub. Right. And let me tell them what I knew. Now, the interesting part about how we built things at Conductor, oftentimes Seth was the original co-founder, founder of the company, and I would always tell him, because I'm ADD and I am better at setting ships to sail than I am bringing them back to harbor, let's build this. We need to do this. There's a need. There's a need. There's a need. So the first need I saw, the people selling the product or the people, the account management group couldn't be the ones to upsell. Didn't make sense, wasn't working. It was a trust issue. It was an inability to like renew. And I said, Seth, let's do this. And of course Seth said what he always said to me, prove to me it can happen. Like, go do it. I said, okay, well, I currently have a job of managing this team, but I guess I'll do it as well. And that's every time I would go and do the job myself, prove that it worked, and then hand it off to someone else, right? Who could carry that ball, build out the teams, do a lot more stuff than I could. I'd say the biggest version of that was saying we don't have enough SEO power inside of an SEO product for enterprise where we're handing them the keys to, let's call this a fancy race car or a Ferrari. And these people on the other side of the phone, frankly, are like 16-year-old learner's permit kids. So like, they shouldn't really have the keys to a Ferrari, let alone should they be leasing one. So it became a thing where I said, okay, well, we really need to get the internal knowledge in place. Let's start from zero as usual. Seth goes, go start it. So me, two kids, one job out of school are doing keyword research until 87% of new businesses adopting that as part of their onboarding. They're buying it literally. So we're like, oh no, no, well, they shouldn't have to buy it. Let's make it part of onboarding here. You guys will get the credit for bringing that in. Okay. Then it's managed services. Then, then, then, but what was the reason why I've taken you down such a long path is not just because I'm long-winded, but it's because you need to understand that I grew up in a time, place, and space where I was doing an educational process with companies that were too big to understand what was at their disposal. So the SEO inside of every one of those companies was a lowly, hey, Jeff knows HTML, let's bring him in as the SEO, right? Jessica's been running our— they don't all start with J's, I promise. Jessica's been running our— she's a general marketer here, So she knows how to do paid. Let's bring her in on organic. And it was basically this like fill in the blank kind of situation. And I kept trying to speak truth to power in saying, guys, you're missing it. Like, there's so much more opportunity here. The search engine, no one lies to it. It's an engine of intention. And what they find is transformative to your business, not because you're just selling, but because you can solve, you can build relationship, you can do things in a digital way to can't otherwise do, and it's at your disposal if you choose to open your eyes to it. But unfortunately, they treated it very much like a channel. So that led to evangelism. It led to this idea of, okay, I've been doing this. By the time I became the evangelist, I think it was the last 5 years, let's say, of my time at Conductor, and I had had so much experience with all these companies fighting uphill, sithesis, like pushing the boulder, that I could point out all of their shortcomings, like very quickly. I could show them that the professional services team had given them recommendations for content or strategy or technical, and how few and far between were actually able to fulfill it, which really showed these large companies, you're a cruise ship and it takes 40 people to turn the boat and Right now your competitors are speedboats and they're able to disrupt you at any given moment. You're wondering why you're not successful. And even in the state we're in, we still can't get the 40 people to turn the boat. So like, that was a little bit of why I felt the need to be the one charged with field loyalty, brand marketing in that, and thought leadership marketing really. And I was given the right to speak on stages all over the world and paid to do it, which was nice. And I got to support the company I'd helped build for, you know, over a decade and try to influence the SEO industry in a way that allowed for them to see further than just the channel they were stuck in, maybe I made a little difference. Maybe.

Yeah. Well, I would argue that you made a, a pretty large difference, but you mentioned that you had imposter syndrome and that you still have it sometimes when you walk in a room. Talk to us about that.

Sure. I mean, I think if you don't have that, honestly, if you don't have that, I'm worried. And I mean that in the best way. Like, as soon as you start believing your own press, it's the beginning of the end, in essence, right? You've crescendoed. Like, it's done. And that's not to say confidence isn't possible, but it's just to say, like, are you coming at it with a sense of, I don't want to be the smartest one in the room. I shouldn't be the smartest one in the room. As they say, if I'm the smartest one in the room, I'm in the wrong room. Right? So of course I know walking in I've had a tremendous amount of experience, but I'm a, I'm never going to use it as a sword. So that's not my approach. And then b, I think you should come to the situation a bit humbled to be able to have the right kind of conversation you want. Now that doesn't mean you don't jump in, and God knows I've scared a few executives many a time jumping in. There are some WeWork stories and other cases where I probably scared Seth and others in, in my jumping in, but luckily they turned out well and in other cases fairly well. So I'd say, you know, being cognizant of that, I'd rather live it that way. Maybe that's not the healthiest way to be, but I'd rather be that way than thinking I have all the answers.

Yeah, that, that's fair. I, I don't know that I would call that imposter syndrome exactly, but I will say that that's very valid.

Let me put it to you this way. I have earned my spot in the room, but I never feel like I have. And that's just, that's the aspect of imposter syndrome. I will still, I will still get butterflies before I get on stage and then I will blank out, do my thing on autopilot in a weird way, not remember what I said, get off stage and people will come, not always, but mostly and say, that was awesome. I can't believe that. That was well said. I, this, this connected, that connected. I'm Do we have it on video? Because I don't remember a thing.

Right? Well, this could be a whole other conversation rabbit hole we go down.

Oh, for sure.

For another episode. But I completely get what you're saying because you can be, you can have knowledge and you can be at a great place in your career. You can have built a lot of things, helped people, but also know that you still have a lot to learn. And also, I think those butterflies are still important because that is the excitement. I still get excited and butterflies when I'm doing my podcast because I'm really excited about the people I get to speak to and now have a new friend, right? That I can—

I'm excited. I've been excited to come on here for a while, so I'm, I'm stoked.

So you mentioned WeWork. So let's talk about the WeWork chapter of the business. You survived an acquisition by a company that was also imploding. That's not a normal founder experience. It's not a normal acquisition experience. So talk to us a little bit about what that was like, what happened, and what you did after.

Sure. So I think like it's even more interesting in that Seth and Adam had a relationship, right? They both were at Baruch in, uh, I think it was, they were both getting their MBAs. They were both told that their ideas would not amount to anything at the time. Seth was trying to push online therapy in a time and place where there was no, like, I don't even know if high-speed internet existed at that point, so he might have been way too early. And Adam was, was like selling onesies with knee pads for kids because he'd had— I mean, he ended up having 5 kids, but like where he felt like that would be valuable, right? Neither of which ended up being successful. So I guess Baruch wasn't wrong in that respect, but both of them would be prolific entrepreneurs. So whatever. What ends up happening is Seth randomly goes downstairs to go cash a check or put a check into the bank. I don't know what the story really is, but ultimately he bumps into Adam. Adam's looking at space for WeWork in 2 Park Avenue where Conductor was based. They bump into each other in the lobby. Oh, your office is here, so on and so forth. Seth brings him upstairs. Our place was always startupy. 2 different brews on kegs, Razor scooters throughout the office, beanbag chairs everywhere. Adam, 6-foot-4 Israeli dude with long hair who comes in, I don't even know who Adam Neumann is. He's, "I love the feeling, your place is amazing, it's the vibe," you know? And so the story is he asks Seth, "Take me to your smartest marketer." And so he somehow takes him to me and like, I'm like, "Oh," Adam's showing me the app on his phone, which is the app for WeWork, and how like you can find people in your building that can like be a designer or this or that. And he's like showing me Community and Essence Digital. And so I'm like, that's great, but don't you have multiple buildings? He's like, yeah. And I'm like, so what if I want a designer from like another building? Or like, and he's like, oh, well, we don't have it. And I'm like, I'm like, well, you know, I just do what I do, which is essentially connect dots and look at systems that I think are unoptimized and go like, how could we do this better? Or what's a different way of looking at it? Because I don't tend to look at things from like A to Z. It's just my nature. So I see this and I just saw, and the next thing you know, he's like, okay, okay, you're going to sell us. And I'm like, what? He's like, I'm like, there are 4 days until like Thanksgiving. So I'm like, oh shit. And so later he leaves and they're like, do you know who that was? And he's a billion-dollar CEO. And I'm like starting to understand what WeWork is.. And the next thing you know, it's like we're putting together a pitch for them to become our client, not for any acquisition. So I end up sleeping at the office, which has never happened otherwise. I think I lived at the time in Stanford, Connecticut. There's no way at 4:00 AM when I was done with the pitch, yeah, could go back home and come back. So I had to pick up Seth at his apartment at 8:00 AM to make it to the meeting. We ended up going and we sat there on the floor in one of the main WeWork offices while we watched Adam give a, a town hall. Hmm. Whole company. For context, at this point, they might've been 3,000 employees. For context, when we leave the organization, there's 13,000. That's about 2.5 years later. So if that gives you a sense of the rocket ship, which also leads to the demise in my mind., right? So essentially we get them as a client, we build an SEO team for them, we build a content team for them, we build out like 13, 14 people that are on my professional services team but serving specifically WeWork. And I'm having arguments with Adam about the term coworking and that yes, we have to use it, and I don't care. Like, this is where I will die on this hill. Like, We're not doing it any other way. This is the vernacular that's used. You can tell me you want to change it, that's fine, but I'll need millions of dollars of budget to convince the rest of the world to use other terms. Right now, this is what they're looking for. This is what we need to be. And going through that process, Seth and I got to experience WeWork, drank from the fire hose. Seth much more than me in being close with Adam, but I, I was involved in a whole bunch of stuff. And then ultimately the purchase. Which I think was well-intentioned, and we definitely got in there and got our hands dirty in whatever ways, shapes, and forms we could. But I don't think the vision was clear as to what we would do within the company. I think there were a lot of ideas, but again, ideas weren't lacking, and even the ability to fulfill them wasn't necessarily lacking at WeWork. I think the ultimate cohesion of the direction was missing. But I will tell you this, to this day, Adam was, he vibrated on another level. He's unlike any other human I think I've ever met. I safely say that with no offense to you or any other human for that matter. It was just, um, after the first meeting with him at their office, he, you vibrated, you felt a different sense of things. You really believed his belief in the ability to change the world. His intention seemed crystal clear. And I think a, a false bill of goods has been thrown in this whole situation in the way it's been portrayed in the news and in media and all that stuff. Because I really do think Adam felt he could change the world, and I think he was trying to. I think it's very hard to grow any company at that speed, to do it effectively. I mean, every meeting I went into, there was the VP of the VP of something or other from Amazon or PayPal or eBay, or you name the big company of note. And these are all the new X that we work with, the new Y that we work, and nobody has tribal knowledge because no one's been there. The people that have been there long enough, there aren't enough of them to be in all the meetings. So you're walking in and every single meeting I'm meeting a new executive who's now charged with a new thing, who's like— and I'm like, this is not possible. Like, this, this isn't— how is this going to work, right? I've seen scale before. I saw it during the dot-com boom and bust, but I'd never seen it. I'd never seen scale at this scale. And so it was so massive and so appealing in many ways, but it also, it also was just difficult to understand, like the magnitude of it, the capability of it, their ability to open locations and more and try and do. And I mean, every good intention, really every good intention. So I have no ill will whatsoever. You know, I'm sure everyone's had different experiences in their careers and we work and so forth, but from where I sat, it was a very unique, interesting experience. I wouldn't trade for anything. And while financially it didn't end up being the best thing for me at the time, you know, our ability to buy back the company before the S-1, which is what happened, was a little bit of kismet. It was a little bit of like, strategy on Seth's part. It was a little bit of like, I'd say, you know, dumb luck. And ultimately it put us in a much better position. You know, we were able to grow the business again at a better valuation, at more ownership, and take that on to a nice half a billion dollar mark, at which point it was, I was a bit long in the tooth and it was time for me to move on. And I said, let's go see how the other half lives and became a CMO at a software company just to see how that was for a hot second.

Yeah. Well, you, you just said a lot about culture. You said a lot about scaling quickly without that institutional knowledge. And one thing you've talked about in that time was also building teams that outlast you.

Yes.

Can you talk a little bit about that and what that means to you and why that's so important?

Well, I mean, I think it's great that you could claim that people who were at these big companies chose to go to a WeWork, for example, in my case with Conductor, I was far more proud and not to take this the wrong way, but I was far more proud of the number of clients that ended up coming to work for us. So like, not that we ever poached them, we never did, but so many people that worked adjacent to us wanted to come work with us. And that was like the best award. We got lots of people, lots of awards for best places to work and so on and so forth. But to me, that was the clearest testament. And where they went afterwards was also the clearest testament. So I never held any sense that this was to be your 14 years. For me, it was. For other people, it could be their 3 years, it could be their 5 years, it could be their 1 year, right? But as long as the time in which they invested gave them more than what they put in— and I don't mean that in dollars, I mean that in growth— then it was 1,000% worth it. That was all I ever really wanted. That's not to say I don't care about the KPIs. It's not to say I don't care about the business. It's not to say any of that, but it's only to say, like, those things are fleeting. The change an individual has, right? It literally is. Time is the only asset we have that's irreplenishable. So even though you can get paid, and I knew we wouldn't pay the most, we wouldn't pay the least, but like, I knew someone could always get, and I used to say this to people in interviews, you can probably get more for your hour somewhere else. The question is whether or not you will get the value of that hour in a different way. So oftentimes I would sit with teams, whether it was, and I don't even like skip level, that concept bothers me. There's no level. I like to flatten things and just say, we're all a team now. Let's talk. But when I would go and look and get in conversations with people, especially at the beginning of them coming on board. I not only wanted— I tried, broke 1,000 HR rules by doing this, so earmuffs any of my old head of the people— but I, I would say, hey, listen, a year from now we're going to be talking about X, Y, or Z, and it's going to be you were able to accomplish this in the business, that in the business. You don't even know what you want to accomplish yet, you're too new to know that. But as a person, personally, what do you want to grow? How do you want to be different? And you get really interesting answers, especially if someone had a lack of self-esteem, which often happened. Get into that and say, okay, I don't feel comfortable speaking in public. Okay, well, that's great. So how about we do this? How about we say that by the time the years come from now, you will have presented in front of at least 50 people or more, and we will work our way towards that. We're not going to put you— I'm not going to dropship you onto a stage and be like, do this. Doesn't even have to be a stage. Could even be just to our team plus, right? But we're going to get to a place where you're going to feel more confident in that. And I used to also draw on a whiteboard, a circle, and I would say to the team, this is your comfort zone. I expect failure. If you live within this comfort zone, no failure will happen. And you can very much live the rest of your year in this zone. The problem with that is there's zero growth there. If you don't move one foot outside, and I'm not saying run 50 meters outside your comfort zone, I'm saying one step outside the comfort zone, go back in. One step outside the comfort zone, go back in. And if you keep doing that across the diameter of your circle, your circle just grew by one foot. Your confidence just grew by one foot. Your capability just grew by one foot. So can you do that over and over again? And can we memorialize those things? Oftentimes, I think executives look at these situations I actually told people I wanted them to quote unquote update their resumes, different way of saying it, on a monthly if not quarterly basis. And I didn't mean that as in like the bullet points that literally go on your resume. I want to have a lot more written there. But after 14 years, and I wish I did this myself way earlier, if you ask me what happened in Q3 of 2017, how am I going to tell you? But I might have given travelers a great strategy at that point as to how to execute their content. Or I might have gone to Uber and saved the relationship based on a pitch. Or I might have had a really meaningful conversation with the CMO at Logitech about how product naming conventions needed to consider search in them. All of those things have happened, right? But I'm not gonna remember where, when, and how. And because I haven't commemorated them, now with AI being even more important, I wish I had. Because that knowledge— and I like to say this in the most humble way— I've gotten to this gray-haired moment in my career at 47. Maybe I shouldn't have as many gray hairs, but it was the stress— where I've forgotten more than other people have learned in marketing. And that's not a— that's not like a brag. It's going to happen to all of you in your careers, and it's a weird thing. It's kind of like getting older, right? But the question is, do you have that written down? Is it anywhere as expertise? Is that wisdom just exist in your brain, or can you actually put it into something that a GPT could work off of, or something that you could actually use from an AI wisdom perspective that's unique to you? That's really where I like to go with companies and think about what they have that's unique in this new world, is do you have that? So asking my folks along the way to do that, I think, was hopefully fundamental to them in saying, I'm not worried about you getting poached. I'm worried about you not reaching your potential.

It's such a good point you make there, but I do have a follow-up question to that because you did have a podcast when you were a conductor, correct?

Yep.

So that, and I, I'm— 2. Okay. So you had 2 podcasts. So that is information that is memorialized. Oh yeah.

Like you, if actually, you know what's, what's amazing to your point, and I have more than that. I have recordings.

Yeah, I'm sure you have.

I have recordings of, of, of all the, the stage speeches and whatever else. Now we don't pay for transcription. So that's even greater, but I feel really bad for every company that was in the transcription business. No one mentions that, by the way. They're the ones that silently died in this whole process. But you know what's really funny is you can actually go back to my Search From Home podcasts and you will see, and again, one of my, if we're going to call them superpowers, we used to use that term a lot at WeWork, one of my superpowers would probably be seeing around corners. Doesn't mean I'm clairvoyant. It doesn't mean I have a crystal ball. I just tend to see dots a little differently. And one of the things I was saying during that time, because Seth said, start a radio station. I'm like, a radio station? Like, everyone's at home. Everyone's like, when COVID happened. Oh, like, okay, I guess I'll get a guest every single day, which I did for 2 months straight, almost every single day. Maybe I missed like 4 days out of 2 months. And those were all like head of SEO at this or, you know, person who's charged with search there, right? Big companies. But they were all at home too and they were friends and clients and others. What was most interesting is that I call, you'll see the conversations of COVID which are literally, we're talking 6 years ago, right? And you'll hear me say like, no, I don't think we're going back to the office for like 3 years.. And you'll see my number 2 at the company, who is a really good friend of mine, one of my best friends, Pat, say, you're nuts. Like, we'll be back in 3 weeks. You're being cynical, right? Like, I was being told I was being cynical because I wasn't seeing that primrose path, but I was also seeing like South Koreans on the street in full PPE spraying down the sidewalks. And I'm like, they've had SARS and they didn't do this. So like, this is another level. You gotta look at the bigger picture. I know what we want, but what's reality is a different thing. And I think we let our emotions sometimes lead the perception of what we wanna have happen versus what is happening.

And that example is, it really applies to SEO and AI search. Nice.

Look at the pivot, folks.

Look at the pivot.

Yeah.

Which we, well, we will get there, but I also wanted to talk about You started at Yahoo, you moved on to these companies, you then went and decided, I'm, I'm ready for something new. So, you became CMO at Turno, now you're CEO of VibeLogic. What were those transition points like for you? What was that decision-making process like for you? And then, you know, we will get into the AI conversation. Yeah, of course, of course, of course.

Listen, the Yahoo thing was easy in that I was tired of yelling into the void where I literally had enterprise companies asking to pay for a solution. I'd come up with that wouldn't have required a lot of dev and/or design work for Yahoo. I literally just wanted— I was at Hot Jobs. I wanted to make branded job board listings. I taught myself how to do HTML to do it and was like, here, look, these are all branded with their logos. When you click on the logo, it takes you to the website. We have code that'll track everything they do. These will be a lot more worth it. Hey, Siemens, and Marriott and all these other companies have already told me they would buy it from us for more. And God forbid I try to get a meeting with my director, my director's director, VP, whatever. It's just, again, the largest companies in the world are echo chambers and you could invent fire in them.

Hmm.

No one would notice. So, uh, the dismay I'd felt around that at large enterprise corporations put a chip on my shoulder and said, Not doing this. And I went, followed some really smart people to a company called Link Experts that later would become Conductor. So that was really that transition. The transition from Conductor out was incredibly difficult. That was, to this day, it's still kind of a thing on my psyche, even though that was in 2022. And by that, I mean, when you invest yourself in a way, shape, and form where you become the evangelist, right? The differential between the company and me at the time in the industry and everything, synonymous. People thought I ran the company even though I wasn't the one. Seth ran the company, but I was the one on stages all over the world having those conversations, meeting people, doing those things, coming in, teaching Brother or HP or others or why search mattered and all that stuff. So letting that all go, it honestly, it becomes a question of ego. Like people don't want to say that, but that's what it is, right? Who am I if I'm not the co-founder or chief evangelist at Conductor? And again, it comes in with that imposter syndrome, right? Have I earned the right as Stefan Bugaio to walk into the room irrespective? And how much do I need to lean on my past? In order to define my, my present or my future. Right. And I think that's something that really was pushing me towards ultimately becoming an entrepreneur on my own, meaning like I would start a company like Five Logic myself and own that narrative more simply because trying to be the co-founder I was given in title was not the same as being the co-founder.

Exactly.

And I had to come to terms with that. It was very cool to do this CMO thing for a little bit. Ultimately, it was a good experience. I think it allowed me to directly impact things in a more effective way. There were downsides to it as well. I won't get into, but I think ultimately it all led to here. Where's here? I think we're still figuring that out. We're 2 years in. We're growing at a decent pace. My intention was never to build an agency. Ultimately, I wanted to build more software. Even that, to some degree, I'm not 100% sure of with AI and everything else happening the way it is. I think the world is in a very uncertain state, and I think it's okay for a business to be that way as well until we define really where we want to be. Right now, web presence intelligence is one of the most important things in my mind, and it's so funny. This is a concept in different name that I've been talking about since 2012. And again, talk about seeing around corners. Literally the moment and the medium are meeting each other at this AI inflection point where the supply side of search results and what comes back in AI that I've been talking about trying to influence this whole time is finally meeting and I've created reporting and other things that give marketers a sense of what that looks like without trying to day trade it, which a lot of other people are trying to do. And I think that's a really cool thing. So I think playing with that a little more, but I also think thought leadership is a very big portion that right now I'm thinking about throwing a lot more effort against. It is shocking to me, Anika Jackson, how many companies I will look at their about us and we've got a piss-poor leadership page. It might have multiple leaders. They don't even have their own bios. When they do have their own bios, it's just like slop. They don't have video, they don't have articles, they don't have authorship, they don't have EAT, as we call it in search. And it's like, hold on a second, I literally have a client who's got the CIO of a major airline on their board and they don't have a full profile for them. Now I'm gonna change that, by the way, shortly. I'm, I'm working on that, right? But it's like, Gods, like it's an embarrassment of riches what some of these companies have in terms of wisdom and leadership and knowledge. Or if you're a service company, like a consultancy and your people don't even, you're not even showing off the product in essence. Like it's, and in the world of AI where we're about to go, you know, where synthetic content means less and people are starting to become Desensitized to it. The humanity of there's a person, a real person behind this with something written by a real person with the wisdom of your 10,000 hours. That's going to cut through the noise. That's the thing that's going to make all the difference. That is the differentiating quality that wins over the next 5 years versus trying to chase a chatbot that shouldn't be a chatbot.

Interesting. One of the things you mentioned was thought leadership. You've been on a thought leadership journey yourself, even though you have this entire pedigree, two decades of experience. You mentioned before we jumped on that you're on a little bit of a podcast tour right now.

Yeah.

And I'm your maybe 30-something interview.

Way to make it seem like, uh, you, well, I'm dating all the podcasts now.

No, no, no. But I think it's, it's a really great strategy. It's what helped me get the .com for Your Brand Amplified, which I've talked about before. Because my podcast, somebody else had it who had, you know, it was a redirect to a branding company in Australia. So they weren't really using the name. I had it trademarked in the US and my podcast was in the search. And so people are probably going to that person and not getting the right results. And he was getting a lot of inbound requests to be on a podcast that wasn't his. So it worked out really well, but I also acknowledge that I still have to look for articles that I can put, be quoted in. I still go on podcasts myself. I still go speak at conferences, whether it's about AI, about podcasting. You still have to do these things to be relevant. And I do have an algorithm that I use, like a, a model that I created to make sure that my guests are truly prepared. And the number of executives who are pitched to be on the show, and I can't find any interviews they've done, I can't find the proof that I need to make sure that they're really gonna provide the value. To my list.

I scored okay.

Oh, you were very high. I can actually tell you.

Is there an actual scoring model? Because I would love to know.

There is an actual scoring model. Yes.

Oh, here we go. Now we're playing my game. Let's go.

Yeah. Well, yeah. So I, we won't get into all of it right now, but because that would take too long, but I do. Yeah. I'll, that's the point. And, and you are, and I can, yeah, I'll definitely follow up with you, but you were A strong yes. Book immediately.

Ah, nice. Okay.

Yes.

I got past the AI, uh, overlords, but yes, you did.

Yes, you did. But, but let's talk about AI SEO.

Let's do it.

I've spoken to people who say you, SEO's not important, it's dead, but I've seen the other side where it really is that, well, what do you think? Where is generative AI getting the cert— the information from?

Exactly. Right. So, I say it's dead with a tremendous amount of sarcasm. In fact, I put the most amount of New York sarcasm to that statement that I possibly could bring. Okay. So please spare me. I've heard this more times than anyone. Okay. It's so dead that voice search will kill search because yeah, how those Alexa recipes working out for you guys? Enterprise companies who built them, who couldn't get as many marketers in their own companies to use them as I think they had. Okay, so how about mobile? That was supposed to kill us, right? Like, mDots were lost. And how about every black and white algorithm? Panda, Penguin, you name it. Like, each one of those algos was supposed to kill off SEO. Google+ should have killed SEO. Like, it's so long in the tooth that it's a joke. Honestly, it's a joke when, when people try to approach this with a dead. And you know why? Because the O is the only thing that exists. The rest of it is questionable. So search engine, dumb name for it. Okay. A search engine originally was just supposed to be an engine you search in. It happened to become Google by synonymous nature, right? Just like Kleenex and so forth. But the reality is like anywhere you search is a place that you can optimize for. And, but you can only optimize for it if you have the data. If you don't have the data, if you don't have the information, you don't have the wisdom, you don't have the capability to express that you have that knowledge, then it's impossible for something else to recognize that and take it and synthesize it in whatever way it's going to. So this concept of like— and I use this on almost every podcast, so forgive me if you've heard me speak before on this— but the only people winning right now in this LLM chase are the people selling you the pans and the picks in the gold rush. Okay? They're the only ones who made money during the gold rush for real, and it's the only ones making money now. You can go and try and stake your claim on something that won't even look like this in 5 to 6 months from now, let alone 2 years from now, and you're gonna devote hundreds of thousands of dollars to do that. Congratulations. I'm gonna tell my customers, clients, people I consult with to go spend their time focused on what sits within the walls of their website, their ability to be consumed by whatever comes next, because whatever comes next shouldn't be a chatbot. It's a very rudimentary and kind of dumb mechanism when you think about it, right? Like, yeah, it's kind of a chatbot, but it's not really a chatbot, these LLMs. And like, it's not very visual, let's be honest. There's agents that play a whole other factor in this that are a bit confusing in that like, I think Apple was probably the smartest ones in this whole story. We don't care about the agents. The agents are a means to an end. The data matters more than anyone, and the people who have access to the data and control the moat are the ones who win. Apple said, we're not gonna be in the agent mode. We're gonna be, we will with Siri, but our agent will have access to all the data points you need to connect to make the experience that you're looking to have. So when Anika and I are supposed to have dinner, where are you based out of?

Los Angeles.

Los Angeles. Oh, even more reason for this one. So Anika and I are supposed to have dinner. Are you into sushi?

Yes.

Awesome. So am I. So we're going to go to Nobu, let's say. Wow. We're going, we're going for the nice sushi place. It's probably better, but whatever. I don't know LA well enough for sushi. We're going to go meet there. Here's the problem. I'm driving from one end of LA and she's driving from the other. And if you've ever been to LA, you understand that that could mean hours of difference. Now my Waze is on and her Waze are on, right? She's using Waze. I'm using Waze. Google has the fact that we have this dinner set up. So it knows that we're both going to be in the same place at this restaurant. OpenTable has the reservation booked by her, and we're supposed to meet at the restaurant, except I'm going to be half an hour late. So now, by the way, also a New York thing, not— you guys all do valet out there, but in New York we actually have to book like a garage, right? So you're like frantically at 60 miles an hour trying to find SpotHero, which doesn't know where you're going and doesn't know where to book it and so forth. But now think ahead. Predictive AI is where it goes. It's the layer you don't need to work with because it's intuitive. It's not asking it to go be the agent. It's letting it do what it should do based on the needs and then getting confirmation from you along the way. So it's the fact that I'm going to be late. The place that we're going to, Nobu, doesn't have a reservation holding past a half an hour because it's fancy enough. So it's giving us an alternate same-level restaurant with same price point and or reviews, offers that to Anika Jackson, saying it's within a 5 to 10 minute radius of there. Are you good with that? By the way, we're booking a discount for you and Stéphane at the garage that you're gonna park at because you're both coming to it. And as long as you guys are good with it, just press a button, it'll all be taken care of. My Waze switches, her Waze switches, and we're both driving where we need to be. That is where AI needs to be.

Not— That's such a good use case. Love that.

That's the thing, right? Oh, and by the way, it knew that it was raining and it knew that when I'm driving towards the evening on a Thursday night for a business dinner that I enjoy listening to a certain music because Spotify has tracked that over time, knew the weather, knew the distance, knew what my calendar said, and it pulls up EDM driving music because it knows that that's what I enjoy listening to while I drive. Like, that is the stuff that we're going— you don't need more decision fatigue. All of the agents right now, to some degree, are creating more decisions. They are. They come back with the, oh, do you need to do that? And you still need to, and you've got to craft it and you've got to— all right. That's not to say AI doesn't have its place. That's not to say don't mess with agents, but let me just flip the script for you for a hot second. I've lived in a world where I'm trying to convince execs to listen to SEO tech and the translation didn't exist naturally. So what did I just do? I literally am launching this By the time y'all are hearing this, it already exists. I can't tell you the URL because I don't know. You can look it up and you'll find SEO Tech to Exec Translator. What did I do? Well, I made it so that if SEOs go to this calculator, which all based on a glossary and other things I already had as data, and I said, okay, Claude, let's build a self-contained set of code where if you enter Words like canonical, which raise more wristwatches than eyebrows. Okay. And you're gonna lose your execs in the room when you do this. You type in canonical, this is the way to say it in layman's terms so an exec will understand. So it allows them to do that. Now on the flip side, oh, it even lets you like add them to a list and then download it. So you have this list that like tells you all the stuff. Another one is the exec on the other side gets this email from their SEO and They're kind of like, I don't want to say embarrassed, but they're probably not prone to asking, like, what did you mean when you said crawl, crawlability? What did you mean when you said crawl budget? What did you mean when you said canonical? What's a 404? What's a 301 redirect? So they just take the text from the email, they dump it in, and it finds those words and it shows them in layman's terms what they are. Now, why do that? Because I have an interactive piece of content now. That isn't about ranking, it's about providing value. I am now able to provide value to an SEO and an SMO with a piece of content that I could have written and have written as an article that will not be read. But now I give it to you in an interactive format. Second coming of the internet, right?

Whoa.

But the reality is there is probably 1,000 pieces of data that are sitting languishing in the content format of written on your website right now, and you have not tried to convert them into interactive content to make an additional piece of content, right? We do it with podcasts. Anika Jackson's got like 700 ways she's going to repurpose hopefully this podcast into social snips and blog posts and other things she can do with it, right? Why in the world would we just like let this flat text live there? And not think that AI could actually be a way to make it better, a better user experience rather than just trying to hunt down if someone searches this product, I gotta be the one that gets named.

We are going to do a to be continued. So, but I have way too many more questions to ask you. Sorry. No, this is fantastic. I love this. But just for my audience to know, because we, I really wanna get into more about what you're doing now. And a whole bunch of other questions that I didn't even get to. So, Stefan, thank you.

My pleasure.

For this episode. And this has been really fantastic. I love talking about business strategy, digital truth, humanity. I wanna get more into that conversation. We are gonna talk about, you know, chasing the right tools, not just chasing AI tools, making sure that we're not just treating our websites like digital brochures. So for those of you who are waiting for part 2, in the meantime, you can visit with Stéphane at vibelogic.com, find him on LinkedIn and the YouTube channel @vibelogic. Links are all gonna be in the show notes. And if this episode moved you, share it with one founder who needs to hear it. That's how we grow. I'm Anika Jackson. You're gonna hear me back with Stéphane very shortly, and thank you for being here and tuning in. Thanks for listening or watching to with this episode of Your Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.