Google is building an Audience Loyalty ecosystem

Hi, this is, uh, Beers and SEO with, uh, Barry and Steve, and I'm Steve.

And I'm Barry.

And we're gonna talk about quite a few things, uh, for today's, uh, pod. Um, Barry, you've written, uh, an excellent and somewhat surprising article, I think, um, around Google's, uh, new way to engage, um, publishers and support them, which is, which is, I thought that came kind of left field, Barry. And, uh, so I think there's lots of things to talk about that I think people would be very interested. Um, we also, uh, attended in London, uh, a really good conference, uh, this week. Um, the Glide, uh, event in London. So there's lots to talk about there. And, uh, lastly, um, I wrote a piece around, uh, prompt tracking about what to do and what not to do, uh, which kind of like highlights a lot of, uh, challenges that people currently have with AI visibility. So I think, um, what we'll do though is that we'll always move to the most important parts of, uh, our conversation, which is really the beers. So, uh, what have you got today, Barry?

I went for a heavy hitter today. This is an Innis and Gunn single malt cask beer. This is a Scottish golden beer which has been matured in single malt whiskey casks. It's a whopping 6.6%. So, um, if I go increasingly incoherent as this podcast progresses, we know what the cause is. So let's just open this one up.

Nice.

That's nice. And, um, let's have a little bit of a taste, see what it does.

Live demo.

That is lovely. Dangerous. I like that.

Nice. I was in Glasgow with my cousin a couple of years ago. We went into a pub which sold mostly those kinds of beers, and it was really, really, really nice. Today, I don't know if you like do this, Barry, but sometimes I just buy beers because I like the title of them. And so I've picked up, Surrey Nirvana by Hogsback. And I've just discovered a lot today about this brewery. The Hogsback is a road that comes out of Guildford down in Surrey and goes past Farnham and beyond. And it— I went to Sixth Form College in that area. So, I was recently driving down the Hogsback, as they say, a couple of weeks ago, actually. I met a lot of... Old mates I hadn't seen for years, for about 25 years. And we had many beers, Barry, you'll be pleased to hear. And this is like a refreshing IPA. It's a session ale, so... Very nice. And yeah, it's a really funny thing about reunions because, like I said, I hadn't seen them for 30 years. It was awkward only for like 5 minutes. Then everyone had their beer and then it was just like old times again. I don't know if you've had that your side yet.

Yeah, well, we don't really do school reunions in the Netherlands. Also, I live in the wrong country now for my Dutch friends. But yeah, when I haven't seen somebody for years that I went to school with or went to uni with, the first 2 or 3 minutes are awkward and then you just pick up where you left off. You know, that's just the uncomplicated nature of male friendships.

Yeah. And with hangovers, the same hangovers the next day, maybe worse, I feel.

Worse, I would say worse. The older we get, the longer those hangovers tend to last as well.

And we don't learn. So, all right. So let's move to the piece that you wrote, Barry, which you entitled Google is Building an Audience Loyalty Ecosystem. So, you know, I think we, I think, you know, those that know you, Barry, we know that you're not afraid of criticizing Google. And there's been a lot of valid criticism of Google over many years, actually. And you do admit that you're far from Google's biggest fan, but that this is one occasion where you think Google is doing something right. So what changed your mind there?

I don't think there's any one particular single thing that changed my mind. I'm still not Google's ally. Let's be clear on that. I'm not their friend. I do think Google In various different ways has caused a lot of damage to the web ecosystem and doesn't take a lot of responsibility for the damage. However, I try to be quite even and balanced when I criticize Google, and when they do something that I think is admirable, I always want to highlight that as well. Google has announced many different things in the last, well, probably 2 or 3 years that individually, you know, may seem a bit disjointed, but in a broader context sort of point in a certain direction. And there's 3 things in particular that when you look at them in isolation, they look like, oh, that's nice. When you look at them together, you realize what Google is trying to accomplish. And those are publisher-specific features that they're building into search, into AI search, into Google Discover. The first is preferred sources. Now we're familiar with preferred sources in top stories where a user can set a preferred publisher, and then that publisher will get more visibility in that particular user's search results when they show up in top stories. Google has now also expanded that to a more prominent visibility in AI overviews and AI mode. So that's the first one. The second one was the following Google feature, which is search profiles, as Google now calls that, which means that in the Discover feed, you can click on a publisher's brand name. You go to the dedicated page in Discover, the search profile, as they call it. And it's always a bit confusing to me why they call it the search profile when it's on Discover, but you know, who knows. And then you can click the follow button, follow on Google, and that means you get more of that publisher's content in your Discover feed. And the last one, which I thought was really interesting, was subscription linking. That has been around for, I think, a year now, and that's part of Google's Reader Revenue Manager, which allows you with your paywalled website, either like an actual subscription paywall or just a registration paywall, to connect your user data to their Google accounts. And that means that Google knows when a user is subscribed to your content and your content will then show up in that user's top stories, in that user's discover feed, more prominently with a from your subscriptions box, basically.

Yeah.

And if you take all of those 3 things combined, you sort of see what Google is trying to do. They're trying to build features into their search results that allow publishers that already have loyal audiences, and that really is the key, that already have a loyal audience, to be shown in Google's ecosystem more frequently to that loyal audience. So these things don't help you necessarily win more traffic because the kind of person that will add you as a preferred source, the kind of person that will click on that follow on Google button, the kind of person that subscribes to you is already sold on your output. They already know who you are, what you're for, what you're you stand for, what kind of content you produce. But what Google allows you to do is to make sure that that user, that loyal reader sees you more often in Google's own ecosystem. So they're basically helping you retain customer loyalty with those new features. And I found that a very interesting approach and I sort of see what Google is trying to do there. And I think it can be very helpful for publishers who have loyal audiences, who have that already established strong reader base that is at the moment probably a bit disconnected from those users' search experience. And what Google is now doing is connecting your loyal readers to their search experience so that, you know, your readers see more of you in Google's ecosystem as well as they do on your own website, of course.

I mean, I'm going to play the absolute cynic here. I mean, do you think, you know, obviously Google's now offering these lovely loyalty features. Some people might say, well, they're only doing that they've taken the traffic away. Do you think that's unfair?

Slightly unfair, maybe. If I'm entirely honest, Google has been proclaiming the death of cheap clicks for the better part of 2 decades. They've already been saying the same thing for a very long time. In fact, I was doing some research on this recently and I found a blog post from Matt Cutts. Do we remember Matt Cutts?

Oh, yes.

Yeah. He was the head of Google's web spam team back in the early mid-2000s. And I think he stayed at Google until 2016. I wrote, sorry, I read a blog post of his that he wrote in 2006, 2006, where he was basically giving advice about how to write SEO-optimized blog posts. And 2 key features that he pointed out there, which I find very interesting, is write something that you can add something new to, as in something that you have something interesting and worthwhile to say about and not just regurgitate what others are saying and try to focus on expertise on specific topics, specific areas. This is 2006 we're talking about. We're 20 years on now, and those 2 principles still apply. Write something that you can add something information-wise new to the conversation to, that it's more interesting, more valuable. You add something to the news rather than just report it and focus on topic authority signals. And Google has been pretty consistent in that advice for the better part of 2 decades. The thing is, of course, with AI, Google has been able to act on this for the first time, where they can replace cheap clicks and commodity content by just showing AI summaries, which narrows the opportunity window for publishers. You know, they are cutting out traffic, but is that really traffic we should be getting in the first place? Is that the sort of traffic we should have been chasing in the first place? Google has always said, you know, start with great content, build good experiences for your users and your readers, make sure that you become a destination website yourself. And now with AI summaries, they can actually enforce that to a certain extent. And yeah, it is painful. It's hard for publishers to make that adjustment. I find it one of the great ironies of the news and media industry that the news moves very fast, news companies move very slow. But, you know, we shouldn't really be surprised by this. The writing has been on the wall. AI just accelerated the process. But on the other hand, yeah, Google is taking some of our traffic. You know, AI mode, for example, isn't immune to news like classic searches where a top stories box generally means you don't see an AI summary, or at least not for a few hours. As in AI mode, you can just ask Google for summaries of the news and they will give very detailed summaries without the need to ever click through to websites. So there is, it is a bit of a double-edged sword there where I do think Google is partly causing the pain, but also partly finally fulfilling the promise it's been making for 25 years.

Okay. So for anyone that might not have installed, well, not installed or activated these kind of 3 mechanisms, have you got advice, any advice for activating them. I mean, I have seen some publishers with quite questionable sort of deployments of the preferred source badges. I'm not naming names, but one example I saw was basically a big red block underneath the headline, because obviously somebody in the organization wanted to say, this is really, really key, let's make it a priority. But that felt like it was really impacting the reader experiencing— experience there. So do you have any tips or advice there?

Again, it's with a lot of things. When there's a shiny new toy, some people will jump on it and try to optimize the shit out of it. Always keep in mind who that button is for. That button is for readers that hopefully are already sold on your output, that already want more of you. And you need to integrate that in a meaningful way into the user experience for those readers. If you make it a big red button right below the headline, I'm not sure that's a good option because A, people haven't consumed the content yet. And B, people probably just scroll past it because they interpret it as some sort of banner ad. Also, that's why I do think you probably should not use Google's own standard button that they give you for this, because it just looks a bit Googley and it might not fit with your website's design and user experience. I think you should design your own call to action, your own sort of button for it. And it just needs to be a link pointing to a very specific URL on Google. It's fairly simple. to implement, but you probably want to implement it after the first 2 or 3 paragraphs of an article in a quite natural way. Like, if you like us, if you like this content and want to see more of it, please add us as a preferred source in Google. I think if you do it too aggressively, people are just turned off by it. They see it as a spam signal, and that doesn't just hurt you, it hurts everybody else who wants to get that preferred source. So you're damaging the entire news ecosystem. And always keep in mind though, that the uptake is probably going to be a bit low. You know, we're not going to have huge numbers of people adding you as a preferred source. This is It's for your loyal audience.

Yeah.

And you might want to think about implementing it in areas outside of just your website. If you have a very strong newsletter audience, for example, you can add that as a call to action in your newsletter. If you like this newsletter, want more of our content, please add us as a preferred source, things like that. And you can add it on social media as well, where you have big engaged audiences. It's a good opportunity for you to build a call to action and again, tap into the power of that audience to increase your visibility to those people. In Google's ecosystem.

Yeah, I really like the idea of inserting it into a newsletter, particularly when it's editorially led newsletters where it feels like someone's written and curated the news stories or whatever they're surfacing there. It feels like a good place to be able to advertise the button, if you like, but also explain what it is. I mean, a lot of people won't know what preferred sources is, right? But if you You're in the mode when you're consuming that newsletter to read and to have someone explain to you what it is and why it's important. But obviously, it's not a magic button. We know that adoption is fairly low. But the idea being is that, you know, you're surfacing your content to your loyal users. So the theory goes that the click-through rate from them should be higher than before. So yeah, it's all good. And what about— I was curious about the About the subscription linking, is that fairly easy to deploy?

That's a bit more challenging. That's a bit more technical. You do that through Google Revenue Reader Manager, which is where, you know, publishers can manage their monetization of content in Google's ecosystem. And it needs to work through an API where you connect your own subscription data to Google accounts. And then there's a call to action for users when they land on your website to link your Google account to your subscription. So it's a bit more cumbersome. But you can make it part of like a subscription signup workflow so that it becomes a part of a user registering on your website. Hey, if you have a Google account, connect us because it helps us, helps you see more of our content. It will require some developer effort. It is, like I said, a bit of a technical thing as well with different APIs working together. But I do like it. You know, I do think it is a, for hard paywalled websites especially, quite a potent approach because again, if you're a hard paywalled website, you tend to get less visibility in Google's ecosystem anyway because of the low engagement signals, high bounce rates associated with hard paywalled websites. So if you then have the opportunity to make sure that when users are actually subscribers to get your content in front of them in Google's ecosystem, that's helpful. That's powerful stuff. If you have relevant content for a particular search that they're doing, then they can just use Google for that and don't have to go to your website and try and find it there, but they just—

Mm-hmm.

connected in Google's ecosystem. So it's probably worth jumping through those hoops and putting that developer effort in to link your paywall subscribers to their Google accounts and get that boosted visibility for those users in Google.

And lastly, the Google Discover element, obviously there's a lot of focus from publishers, which you can come to because that was a topic actually in Glide. But yeah, and the follow button in Google Discover.

Yeah, I don't think a lot of people will use that, to be honest. And there's no real way to encourage that signup at the moment yet. You know, it's just something that has to happen naturally to an extent when someone clicks on your brand name, taps on your brand name in Google Discover, when they click the follow button. I think the search profile thing is interesting. It sort of feels like a starting point for Google rather than the endpoint that they're trying to build like social-esque profiles for publishers and creators that allow people to follow them. And I suspect that might be become a bit more cross-domain or might be integrated with other presences in other areas. But yeah, the uptake will probably be quite low and Google might allow you to link directly to your profile pages and again, use similar to preferred sources, create call to actions to send people there and follow you there. But just in a bit of a wait-and-see mode on that particular feature.

Right. Okay, thanks, Barry. So yeah, so as I mentioned before, we had the event in London this week at Glide, which was a great chance to meet peers. And we discussed everything from SEO and AI visibility in the morning with Harry, with Harry Clarkson Bennett as well joining the panel. And, and then we discussed as a group, you know, various engagement methods and subscription methods, etc. So it's a really good, it's a really good event. And I believe they're going to be organizing another one in the next 6 months, if not a year. And I thought we'd just sort of like just discuss a couple of questions that we got from the audience there, because it's, it was a reflection really of what many people might be thinking. And one of the questions raised was effectively, is Google or is SEO dead as a channel really to drive new audience? And that came in the context because we were talking very much about middle and bottom of the funnel approaches to engaging your audience, which publishers should be doing obviously anyway, because driving new audience is— publishers need to work harder. So, you know, once they arrive, make sure you're doing everything you can to make that experience as compelling as possible. But I thought that was an interesting question because I think many newsrooms may be thinking that SEO is dead as a channel because of the top of funnel queries may not be as rewarding as before. What do you think about that, Barry?

I think SEO is one of the few remaining channels to build new audiences with because most of the other channels we have at our disposal are for already engaged audiences. Social media and newsletter, for example, people who already buy into you to a certain extent. Now you can use social media's own algorithms to grow a bit of an audience, but it's very hit and miss and you're very algorithm dependent. Whereas search is still seen as sort of semi-independent and not really personalized in a meaningful way, this classic search. So I think search is still probably the single most important channel to win new audiences. However, it is a less powerful channel, absolutely, than it was before. And that actually puts a lot of tension on your conversion funnels in that you have less traffic to try and convert into loyal readers, subscribers, whatever it is, which means your conversion rate needs to be very high. And that means you need to be much sharper on your conversion funnel, on the user journeys and optimize the crap out of that. And I think too many publishers probably aren't optimizing that one enough. They're sort of playing the numbers game. When we get X amount of visitors to the website, Y amount of those will become engaged readers. And they're quite low with quite happy with low single-digit percentages of that. And I don't think you you should be content with those sort of numbers anymore. You need to try and maximize subscriber numbers as much as possible. And that also means you need to make sure that that initial impression that the user gets when they land on your website is as good as you can possibly make it. Because you only get the one chance. You know, you get a very short opportunity window to convert an occasional visitor into a loyal reader, which means your content needs to be shit hot. Every single article you write needs to be bloody good. Your usability needs to be very, very good, very frictionless, easy to use, pleasant to use website. And the offer that you present to the user needs to be a very enticing offer in the context of what you're offering. And I think, you know, publishers have been probably used to almost endless heaps of traffic arriving on their website by using SEO tactics and discover tactics. That's now drying up and they're suddenly panicking like, oh crap, we suddenly have to build an actual worthwhile product other than just feed that machine and the constant churn with a constant new form of traffic. No, now you have to actually focus on High conversion, low churn, and that means you have to have a product that people will want to pay for and will be happy to subscribe to and stay subscribed to. And that becomes a challenge for publishers who are not used to that. Publishers who have been going down that route for a while, they generally are doing fine. You hear quite a lot of positive case studies from websites that publish less but get more traffic, more engagement, more subscribers, hitting new heights in terms of revenue because they've went off the volume bandwagon and started focusing on the quality bandwagon.

Right. Because a lot of, you know, some publishers may sort of announce that they're seeing like a 30% decrease in traffic, right? But it's, you know, it may not be a 30% decrease in revenue, right? So it may indicate that there were, that some of the audience were not engaged when they were coming through, right? So it's kind of like top of funnel, covering news stories that are not relevant to the brand. So the audience skips in, skips out. There's nothing for them really to— they're not like, they're not your, they're not your conversion audience, right?

Exactly. Exactly.

And I think it sort of like also points to the fact that people, I mean, you kind of like illustrated, you had this great first slide at the Glide event, which kind of like indicated that even though there may be a percentage in a decrease in, in audience going to publisher sites, actually, it's still a bloody huge volume of traffic, right? Do you want to just take us through that? Because I thought that was really on point.

Yeah, it's, uh, it was, I think it was last week or in the course of this week that SparkToro published some latest research on the amount of zero-click searches that happened. And they published for the US first. It's what they based the numbers on. And then they also recently published European numbers. I think we can take the US as a representative example because when I looked at the European numbers, most of the zero-click searches there are Comparable to the US. Some have fewer, some have more. I think it sort of averages out to roughly equivalent of what the US experiences as Google's biggest market. So in that research, Spocktober showed that 68% of searches that happen on Google, searches that happen on Google result in no click at all. So no click, either nothing happens, the search session ends, or people refine the search and type something else into the search bar, which means we have 32% of searches that result in a click. Of those 32%, 27% of those go to Google properties, as in they go to YouTube, they go to AI mode, they go to Maps, they go to the news vertical, whatever it is. 6% go to an ad. This means we have about 66% of those clicks that end up on the free and open web traffic that we as websites get, which means out of 100 searches that happen on Google, only 21. go to the free and open web. So we get 32% have a click and 2/3 of those go to the open web. So we end up with 21%, 21 out of 100 that go to the open web. And that doesn't sound like a lot until you start doing the math a little bit and realize Google does at the last number, which is 2024, they probably do more than that now, 5 trillion searches a year. 5 trillion. That's a number we can't wrap our heads around. So I've broke that down. 5 trillion searches a year is 87 billion clicks a month. 2.8 billion clicks per day, 119 million clicks an hour, and roughly 33,000 clicks every single second. 33,000 clicks per second on average that Google sends to the free and open web. And that's just search. That's not even counting Discover. That's just search. If you want to abandon that, if you want to throw in the towel on that front, I'm pretty sure your competitors are going to be absolutely fucking delighted about that. that. We cannot deny Google, especially if you combine search and discover, is still and will continue to be the single largest source of traffic to the free and open web. And yes, there are all kinds of constraints on that, new hurdles, barriers to entry now. But if you want traffic in whatever form that takes, you have to be active on Google. And there's just no way around that. There is no other strategy. that applies. There is no other platform that is going to supplant Google's place as a traffic driver. There might be platforms that replace Google in terms of user behavior, but not in terms of traffic. So if you want traffic, whatever form that takes, you need to focus on Google in both search and discover.

Perfect. And I think a lot of people may not be aware that even with the rise of sort of AI services, etc. And with the narrative of less traffic coming back to publisher sites or any site for that matter, they may not be aware that actually in the kind of path to conversion audiences that, you know, the services, there may be more services than ever before. But audiences are coming back into Google to get the kind of the information they need in order to make that final conversion. So quite often they'll be evaluating a brand, um, which they've discovered on TikTok, but before they'll go through to any kind of like major sort of like purchasing decision, they'll check the information first in Google. Uh, it could also be, you know, where they're looking to, um, you might have high-intent sort of, um, searches, uh, out there on other platforms, but you know, they'll want to compare buy, um, book, or look a bit more detail into what a specialist is saying, their background, etc. All these searches or this information gathering is conducted in Google, right?

Absolutely.

So yeah, and typically also we'll come to like AI visibility, uh, as well. But, um, obviously we know that a lot of AI visibility, um, is generated from Google searches. But often, if you were to, if you were to observe what the majority of people currently do, particularly when making a purchase decision, they will find the information in ChatGPT or Perplexity, etc. And they will then go out into to validate it within Google and then go out into, into the, into the actual, the website, basically. Although, you know, that although that will change as we'll be able to have more ability to purchase directly in AI visibility. It's just an indication that people trust the information that's in Google and they're going to it. And that's obviously why Google needs us as publishers, right?

Yeah, yeah. Trust in AI is quite low. Trust in Google search results is quite high. And that's a reputation Google, of course, has built over nearly 30 years now. So, you know, we can't underestimate that. And like you said, the audience over overlap between chatbots and Google is immense. And the last data I saw is that 95% of ChatGPT users also use Google. And if you look at the traffic graph, that's an interesting similar update on how often people go to google.com. It's growing. It's not diminishing. Google is getting more visits than ever before.

Right.

So it's an additive effect. You know, ChatGPT isn't replacing Google. AI search bots aren't replacing Google. They're adding to Google searches.

Yeah. And on the topic of trust, one of the items or one of the things that we were discussing was really how to— obviously everyone's looking at how do you continually attract younger audiences that are operating now in a clickless environment. And yeah, so I think one of the key things there about how One of the positive signs that came out of the recent Reuters digital news report, which was released this week, I mean, it was quite a grim report because it shows that overall trust is down across the globe on news brands. And it's harder to encourage people to pay for subscriptions. And what else? Oh, yes. Everyone's becoming a little bit more partisan in their news So the thing about the news report is that it's kind of things that we know already. We know it's getting tougher out there, but there are glimmers of hope in it. And talking about younger audiences, one of the things which I saw and actually wrote about on my Substack was when When the Reuters team sort of surveyed the younger audiences, even though that they consume their information outside of news apps and news websites now, social media is obviously the key place where they are exposed and subscribe and follow people and brands that are communicating news, predominantly creators. There are still Trust and impartiality are still core to what they, what they, that they still see as core values, which I thought was particularly important. So even though they are exposed to more different ways of accessing news than ever before, they are still wanting to verify the information that they're receiving. And again, we'll come into Google in order to to do that part of that verification process. So I think that's a hope, there's a glimmer of hope there because one of the challenges is why should news brands still bang the drum for trust and impartiality and the values of verification if other brands and other individuals out there are not doing that and they're super serving their audience and the audience are confused and they've got so much coming at them. So I thought that was very strong in that report, which, yeah, it just means that brands just need, particularly news brands, absolutely do the work around trust and brand values, but it needs to be disseminated and communicated in the way that the younger audiences consume their information, right? So it's an interesting one, right? And it's, you need to communicate the value of your brand as a news publisher without disrupting the actual experience of receiving the news. So you wouldn't kind of like block the first paragraph of a news paragraph with, you know, and we are so-and-so and, you know, subscribe to us, et cetera. It needs to be done It needs to be self-evident that you are a place for verifiable information and quality editorial, right?

Absolutely. And this comes back to a point I made several times before is that publishers need to get better at marketing themselves. Marketing is a bit of a dirty word in news and publishing. It's always been associated with the commercial aspect of the business, with like making money and selling ads. But marketing as a discipline is not just about bloody advertising. Marketing is about product-market fit, about understanding what your audience or your product target market wants and delivering that. And it's not a discipline that's been particularly well cultivated within publishers generally. How frequently do publishers actually talk to their readers? I'd say almost never. At most, you get maybe an annual survey that's being done that asks people some very leading questions about the publication in question. And it's one of those areas that, you know, is just underappreciated and undervalued in publishing. And they probably need to pick up the slack on that one a little bit and hire some actual proper product marketers and say, let's go and understand what our readers actually like and what they don't like and make sure that we deliver what they like in spades. And not necessarily to use it as guiding principles for your strategy, but to serve as strong inspiration points, have a bit of a clearer idea. I think publishers often have a concept in their head of what they think their readers think about them, but I'm not sure that actually aligns with what readers actually think about them. And there's a bit of a risk there that publishers just become this insular echo chambers. They often already are, where they think they know what they are and what they stand for, but it doesn't necessarily align with what their readers think they are and stand for. And you can break out of that fairly easily by just asking your readers, asking people. Face-to-face in sessions, invite people into your offices, go on roadshows and talk to people at events and things like that. It doesn't have to be particularly difficult to do, but just having that feedback from your readers directly, what they like, what they don't like, and feeding that into your editorial strategies can absolutely give you a much better handle on what your product, your news output looks like in the future.

Yeah, right. And I think there's loads of examples of that in the Reuters news report, but, you know, in the kind of like community-driven journalism area, obviously our Scandinavian friends always excel in that area, particularly Zetland. And there's lots of initiatives happening in Spain for that. So yeah, we could all learn. And also it's an opportunity to learn from B2B, right? I mean, I mean, B2B operate in sometimes, well, nearly always specialist areas. So how do they captivate that audience and keep them coming back for more and charge for it as well? So this is where I think a lot of, if we're not already doing it, we need to go to loads more events where B2B Publications are standing up and presenting to the light, to newsrooms, basically. Okay, so moving on is really moving on to me, Barry. Prompt tracking.

Yes, you wrote a brilliant piece about AI visibility and prompt tracking and what the main problems are around it and the challenges that are around it. So by all means, Steve, kick it off.

Right. So I wanted to write this piece because I've been working for a client with AI visibility and You know, I've been using various different prompt tracking tools. So what, why do you need a prompt tracker? Well, well, that's, that's a huge, that's a podcast in there in itself, Barry. But obviously, at the very basic level, you're trying to track the, the impact of the work that you're doing. And as I was looking at the various different tools, I realized very much like SEO rank tracking tools, that really, you need to kind of answer some very basic questions to begin with before touching any kind of performance tool. And so I wrote this piece basically saying that before you log in and open up a prompt tracking tool, and quite often these tools will have AI-driven, you kind of get this in rank tracking tools as well, AI-driven prompts. So which you can generate. And if you're not careful, you can suddenly be tracking, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of prompts. And the problem with that is what you're tracking is maybe some, maybe related, hopefully it's related to your business, but it's not really strictly relevant to your business goals. So say for instance, if it's a B2B publisher that, let's say, it does media business news, there may be prompts that talk about B2B, you know, who are the best B2B videos? Where can I access B2B information for media publishers in the UK on YouTube, etc., or in video format, etc.? And some of these prompts can be very abstract. And you might think that you might need, well, yeah, you know, I'm a B2B publisher. I also want, I do some videos. I would like to have some visibility in that area. But really what you need to kind of like look at is how the prompts basically need to answer your business objective. And if they are doing that, then it's what the insights that they give you should be actionable because it's speaking very much to your core business objective. So I think there's a, there's a core thing in there around prompt tracking is that you don't need to be tracking hundreds and thousands, very much like SEO tracking tools. You really need to kind of look at what it is that you're tracking. If that data changed in a significant way from week to week, how would that impact the actions that you want to take. If it's, well, it wouldn't really affect us, that's probably an indication that what you're tracking is not really important, right? And so, yeah, so adding on to that, you know, the action there is really to make sure that you're having those conversations internally, talking to everyone so everyone's clear about what those business objectives are. And So that, and the idea being is that once you have the correct prompt tracking, when you see the results, if you have to present those to C-suite or circulate a report, everyone can clearly see, well, that's of value to know if we've increased citations or mentions in this area, because that's important to us, or if a competitor has filled a space that we're not in, or if there's incorrect information there, kind of like use the prompt tracking to help Help visualize yourself in the C-suite presenting that information and make sure that every if you're asked that you can justify what it is every every prompt that you're tracking. The other the other part of it is obviously to make sure that you're considering the persona of the the user who who's using AI where they are in in the funnel or from discovery. To consideration to kind of like conversion. They're all going to be asking different things in that area. Also, there are various different ways that you can generate your prompt tracking. Obviously, you've got your, your, your own ideas. You can use AI to generate prompts. You can also kind of, you know, it's really important. Again, coming back to classic SEO ranking is, you know, what is the language that your different audiences are using. So, you know, you can either do it manually yourself, going to Reddit. People have, you know, they might have transcriptions generated from phone calls that are coming into your customer services department. So what is the language that the audience is talking about, not just your brand, but the product or the problem that is that they're trying to solve? So it's like real-world data that you're feeding in. And, you know, that, and then, then you've got a good base there to track. So it's a really, really basic point. But I see a lot of people kind of like, they're all excited to begin the process with these new services that are appearing. Then they look to prompt tracking and then they may become a bit confused or they just don't see the value of these dashboards. But really it's because it's the basics of what it is that you're tracking. I think Will from Seer Interactive, I think any practitioners in this space that are revealing their methods and being really transparent about what worked and what didn't work in this space, I think though, these are all kind of like valuable sources because we're all learning and there is no kind of like, there is no perfect checklist for this process at the moment. It's very much a learning curve for us all. So that was just my way of just saying, well, just go through this preliminary process before you open a at all.

Yeah, absolutely. The prompt tracking is one of those hypes at the moment that pervades the industry because, hey, we got new surfaces, AI search, and new shiny toys to play around with that in the form of prompt tracking and GEO. I can barely get the acronym out of my mouth without vomiting. And you jump on that bandwagon and think, oh, let's see what we can do with this. And there's no business case behind it at the moment. And I think the challenge for publishers especially is that visibility in AI doesn't necessarily mean anything in terms of business goals being achieved. I think in the B2B space, it probably does have value, but in the B2C space, you know, it's a very different business case if there's any business case at all to build on AI visibility. And the probabilistic nature of AI-generated answers doesn't help either. You know, it's even more unstable than classic search rankings would be. So you always have to sort of build that business case and have a very clear idea, like you said, what's the actions that you can do with this data? Because if you're just gathering the data and not doing anything with it, you're just wasting time and money on that data. It doesn't do anything for your business. You need to have an action that comes out of that. You need to have a way to make it into something that does add business value.

Yeah. And it doesn't have to be expensive. There are expensive tools out there. But I think, you know, there are affordable— there is tools out there. There's even open source prompt tracking platforms that you can set up with, you'll simply need to pay a small fee for what it is that you're actually tracking. But there's ways of doing it on, on, you know, fairly low budgets. But if nothing else, the convenience of some of these tools are just give you another easier access into your competitive landscape. You can do this without those tools, but as you know, when certain tools come onto the market and they make things, certain things easier, they become like the norm. Tools that make your life easier get adopted, and one of the reasons why they get adopted and people pay a lot of money for prompt tracking tools or prompt visibility tools is they do make that competitive analysis kind of like easier to do. But yeah, should you? I'm not sure if you need to pay the huge amounts of money that are out there, but it's certainly valuable to see how other people are writing about you. And I think something that I even spotted when like ChatGPT was released, which was almost like 3 years ago now, and preliminary searches in there is, you know, you can't as an SEO or a geo, or maybe you're a marketing person or somebody in the organization that's been given that kind of responsibility to look into that area. You can't achieve your goals alone. Very much like an SEO, you need to be talking to everyone in the different departments, explaining why you need to make these changes. And you will come across challenges such as AI wants to see verification of what it is that you might be claiming, verifiable claims. And there's a lot of brands out there that will have a traditional marketing copy there, which will say, we're the best in market because of, well, we're the best in market. Our audience says, and there is some information there, but AI is kind of like pushing back on that and wants to have, okay, where's your sources of information? So it's Just kind of like that, that in itself will lead to, you know, challenging conversations internally because you may have, they might have gone through a situation where the copy has been, has gone through many iterations before being approved. You've had to deal with senior leaders and owners of companies to get that copy signed off. And so, you know, some management layers may be apprehensive about revisiting that.

Yeah.

But these are, you know, these are the things that they'll need to do. And as I said, your soft skills are really going to be as important as the kind of like data analysis that you can do in that area. But yes.

Yeah, I think that's how we end up with that bland corporate copy on websites because it uses a lot of words without saying anything because it has passed through 17 layers of corporate approval. And that's just a recipe for being a mediocre background noise company that nobody ever actually pays any attention to. You have to have something worth saying, stand for something, be outspoken, be visible. And that also means you have to take a risk now and again. And it pays off on search, on social, on AI, on all the other surfaces that people use to discover products and services.

Absolutely. And that, you know, that is the danger of using AI to generate your copyright because it will give you something, but it won't give you original. It won't give you witticisms.

Mediocre by default.

Yeah. Okay. Right. So that's our 3 topics for this session. And I guess, did you want to talk a bit about NEST, Barry? That's coming up.

Yes, we are now out of the super early bird stage and into the early bird stage of tickets. It's still dirt cheap, $299. News and Editorial SEO Summer 2026. We're taking it across 3 days this time, 13th, 14th, and 15th of October 2026. Day 1 is about SEO for news and publishing. Day 2 is broader SEO and AI. And day 3 is audience growth beyond search. We're talking about podcasts, newsletters, videos, and all those fun topics. We had another awesome roster of speakers every year. I think we knock it out of the park in terms of the quality of the speakers that we get. I can't really say that we managed to surpass every year because every year it's been good so far and we've been maintaining levels really in terms of the quality. And I'm really excited for this one. As well. So if you go to newsseo.io, you look at the full schedule, all the speakers and panelists, and buy your tickets. The price goes up again at the end of July. So get your early bird ticket while you can, and you get access to all the session recordings as well while you're at it. So it's not just the live virtual event. You can also watch back all of the sessions later on video as long as you want.

Yeah. And as an advocate for that, I can really vouch for the kind of information from there. So it's kind of like a mixture of Great case studies, which are always important for anyone in this space, and a mixture of strategy, but also practical elements that you can take back and action immediately. So the videos are useful to refer to. There's a lot to learn from those sessions. So we look forward to it again. So just to remind everyone that, you know, we'd love you to review and rate our podcast. I think, I forget what number this is now, Barry. I think we're in the—

7.

Can I say 6, 7? My kids—

6, 7, 8, yeah, something like that.

So, you know, hit that like button and subscribe. We are turning into YouTubers, Barry.

Uh-oh.

So yes, and yeah, and we will, you know, it's a fast-moving world happening out there. So Barry and I will keep abreast of all the latest updates and we'll have another session like this in the not too distant future to try and unpack it Until that time, that's it from me.

That's it from me. Have a great one and we'll hear you at the next one.