Your Brand Is Invisible in AI Search (Here's the Fix)

Your brand is invisible in AI search.

So can ChatGPT find you when buyers ask? So this is interesting because I'm speaking at MozCon next week and I'm sure a lot of people are going to be talking about this. So what do you do about it? Because like I look at your Ahrefs traffic, my Ahrefs traffic. I think we had a mutual friend that was looking at both of our traffic. Mine has gone down a lot. I don't know about you, but some of our competitors, it looks like their traffic's going up. So. I just don't pay attention anymore to that.

Yeah, and I also look at traffic and revenue as 2 different things.

Exactly.

Our traffic has gone down some due to people click less from organic Google results. I would say even before all that AI stuff, our traffic started going down because we were ranking number 1 on Google for broad terms like digital marketing. We were ranking high up on page 1 for search engine optimization and SEO and terms like that, but it wasn't driving revenue from our ideal customer. And we found that doing some of the things I've talked about earlier on how we're marketing drive a lot more revenue for our business in the long run. And it's been super effective, but it's, you know, time-consuming. It's a longer play. And does it mean ranking on Google is bad? No, I think it's great. It's just going after very specific terms. The keyword that I got more traffic than anything else from on Google in my life for my own website was how to get more Instagram followers. Never—

Zero.

Yeah, zero revenue from that. I think at the peak from that one keyword, I believe I was getting somewhere like 600,000 visitors or, and it could be variations of that keyword, like how to get more Instagram followers. Bless you. How to get more followers on Instagram, right? So switching around, but it's the same thing. But I was getting somewhere around like 600,000 visitors a month from that keyword. Keep in mind, this is one blog post, guys. One blog post. And not even the total amount of visits to the blog post, just those kind of terms. And it didn't drive any revenue. And it's just like, it quickly taught me that more traffic doesn't mean more revenue. This was a long time ago that I learned that. So I switched the strategy to focus more on enterprise.

Yeah. You know, I think it's also important to understand whatever Neil and I are talking about right now, it depends on your business. Because even with Neil, he's talking about the nuances of what channels works for him. And I'm also talking about the nuances, But also we're like who he's selling to and then also like what we're selling is a little different at some times. And so for, it's really like for me, for example, what's going to work? Oh, LinkedIn's going to work.

Okay.

X is going to work. Doing webinars works, doing events works, doing dinners works as well. And then in a sense, doing these free pilots and outbound works for us too, right? Because we send a lot of these different offers and our outbound response rates are like, you know, they're decent, like 6 to 8% right now. Maybe even like 9%. So it's not bad.

It's not bad.

Yeah, when I used to send DMs in other ways, it was like 10%, 15%.

Yeah, yeah.

We'll leave it at that. You were just speaking about Google. I thought that was really interesting. Do you know who Kai-Fu Lee is? Of course you don't.

No.

I know you don't. Who is Kai-Fu Lee? Kai-Fu Lee was the ex-president of Google. So he said this, this guy over here, he looks exactly like me, right? Oh, you missed it.

Here, rewind.

Look, he looks exactly like me.

And now if they're all added human amplifier, namely— No, I don't know how you think he looks like you. He looks very different.

He doesn't. He doesn't. But okay, so let me give you a little background on this guy. So Kai-Fu Lee, this dude, he spoke at a TED conference I was at quite a while back, and he was just saying he had this prediction. He's like, you know, the one thing that AI can't can't replace creativity. He actually said in this video I was wrong. He's like, it can replace creativity in many ways. So he said that. So here's what he said. This is recent, right? And so this prediction might be wrong as well. But keep in mind, ex-president of Google China, he says, I predict 50% of companies will need new leadership because the old management style won't work in the era of AI. That's exactly why I'm seeing 95% of so-called AI transformation initiatives fail. Most are bolting on AI pilots for functional tasks, but never touching the business core. And this is something that we're seeing quite a bit as well. So we should react to this. 50% of companies will need new leadership because the old management style won't work in the era of AI.

50% of new companies will need new leadership, you said?

Will need new leadership because the old management style won't work in the era of AI.

I believe it. I think a lot of people will have to adapt and they're going to struggle to adapt. I also think it's business by business. Like some businesses, manufacturing, automating more of it, I don't think is as hard to adapt to. I don't know.

Like, to an extent, yes. But I saw a video today. You saw OpenAI released their 5.6 SOL, right? And I saw a video of a Japanese farmer that was— he was initially like rolling up the greenhouse, like rolling up the things for the plants to air out. And then he used 5.6 to come up with the machinery to plug everything in, and it just rolls it up in the morning and rolls it down, or like depending on the weather in the area.

That's cool.

That's cool, right? And that's manufacturing. But I do think there's less disruption when it comes to manufacturing or like building the Amman that's being built over here, right?

Yeah, I think that's harder.

I think it's going to take longer for that to happen. But I think if we're talking about like truck driving and like, you know, drive like stuff like that, maybe faster. But I do think when we talk to— there's certain clients that we have right now, and I'm sure you're seeing this, like on the— we have Single Brain and Single Grain right now. So I can see 2 different things, right? So I'll just ask about our Gong calls so we can see what's happening with Single Grain. And it's like, Yeah, you know, they don't want us to do anything AI. Some clients, nothing AI, right? Because they're scared. I'm like, guys, why do you think that is? They're like, oh, they're scared of it. Versus single brain, more, more, more, more, more, right? And so I would say it's like, I can see it moving up to like 50/50. And even within the company right now, which when we were sitting here last week, I was like, I have 2 cultures right now. 30, 40, 50% is kind of like they don't want to adapt. The other 50% is flying.

Yeah. Yeah, dude, you never saw my Vegas house that I built, right?

I saw it in a video and then you left.

Yeah, I sold it.

Yeah. Neil built this house for 2 years. It was a beautiful house and he left in a month.

Go ahead. That house, we hired a company that showed me a video of how in a factory they use technology to build the frame of your house and then it just plugs and plays and they bring it over in truckloads so that way your construction happens much faster. We did it. And it was like this new age technology. Like imagine doing framing of a house, but it's done by computer and machines and it's just done really quickly. And then they just bring over wall by wall and then people just connect them together like a Lego set. We paid for that. It works so well that it took double the length to do the framing than if we did it all manual.

Yeah.

Now it doesn't mean that technology sucks. It just means with certain things, like Eric was saying with construction, Things will just take quite a bit longer to adapt.

I'd rather go with proven at that point.

Yeah.

Versus like trying something brand new unless it's like, oh, we're going to save you 90%, then maybe I'll try the brand new thing. What did they promise you?

They promised me they would build me a home in less than a year. All right.

So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies They're a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. What is it usually, 2 years, 3 years?

2 to 3. Yeah.

Yeah.

It depends if it's a cookie cutter home, you can do it pretty quickly, but if it's custom, let's call it 2 years.

Yeah. You know what's funny? You're just talking about the mindset people and like, do you have a mindset person that works with you right now?

I do? Uh-huh.

I'll just leave it at that. Oh yeah.

Oh, oh, not an employee. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're just saying not a contractor.

Not an employee.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The same mindset person, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Same mindset person. Yeah. By the way, speaking of which, so we're recording in my conference room. Usually we're recording in Neil's. I've been getting good comments about how much nicer this room is, by the way, in the clips.

Bigger.

Well, you have sunlight, you know, I have a nice background here and all that. But, um, so One thing I've noticed is that when we use Overlap to make like little clips, 2-minute clips, 3-minute clips, like honestly, you should, your team should do the same thing. They should just use Overlap and make 2, 3-minute clips because this is where we have our conversational takes, spicy takes sometimes. They do well on X. Some of them will get, you know, tens of thousands of views, some of them even 100,000 plus. And that's, I think it's a nice way to play the game.

I think we've cracked X.

We haven't cracked LinkedIn. Like, do you even look at your LinkedIn?

Do I look at any of my social media?

Probably not.

No, not too often.

Yeah, you don't check it. You don't check anything. You only check your revenue dashboards though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I do log into X to check news, but I don't actually check my own stats.

Yeah. So all that to say is like, I think this is our, if you guys are thinking about how we're thinking about it from a B2B services standpoint, it's, this is our pillar content. Our pillar content is either this Or a YouTube video, like a YouTube long form. You record Shorts natively. I went back to doing that. You know what's been helping? Doing the little, we have a little skill now that where we have a resource, comment to get this, right? That's working really well for us too. And so we're going to push it more aggressively.

Some people have been getting banned for that. Just as a heads up.

Really?

Uh-huh.

It's okay.

Depending on the software suite you use, you know, your whole profile.

Really?

Just be careful with it.

ManyChat? ManyChat should be okay.

It should be okay, but I've seen some people get in trouble with it and their profiles Yeah.

Having issues.

Yeah.

So FYI, yeah, we use ManyChat for it. I mean, they've, they seem like they have a good, good relationship with Meta for a while. But anyway, there's a, speaking of Meta, there's always a Meta way of doing things when it comes to growing.

So. Yeah, dude, I just think that all this stuff that's happening with marketing now that when I go to events, people are starting to come to the realization that they need to start looking at more bottom of funnel. And you just mentioned it, you're just like, hey, do you look at your social media? They're like, I bet you look at revenue reports. You're like, Neil looks at revenue reports, which is very accurate. And I look at them quite frequently and I get them pretty much daily, or at least bank balances I get daily. And I can quickly see pipeline and all that kind of stuff and deals closed. And I get email alerts on a lot of this kind of stuff. What we found is, or what I found when I go to conferences now, before people used to be like, oh, how do I get more traffic? What's the best traffic source? What's the best hack? Now people are slowly starting to shift to, hey, I really need to grow my revenue. I need to increase the LTV of my customers. I need to reduce churn. They're still talking about marketing, but they're starting to think in the right quote unquote mindset because they're starting to optimize for the numbers that really matter. And for the longest time, when you talk to marketers, even though finance people and executives Working at organizations still optimized for the bottom line numbers, marketers still mainly focus on top of funnel.

You know why? Partly because we're in a zero interest rate environment for so long where money was free. Just go, go, go, go, go. So you hear from the finance people, just go, go, go. And then the marketers assumed it's supposed to be like that forever, but it's no longer, it hasn't been like that for a while.

You know, they may increase interest rates in the US, right? Some of the other countries, I think Australia increased their rates.

Yeah, we'll see. But hey, Warsh has a new strategy, so we'll see what happens.

Yeah, work with Marc Andreessen.

My good friend Marc Andreessen's there now. So anyway, but this other piece over here, 95% of AI transformation is failing. And you know what, in this AI executive group where it's, again, we're talking multi-billion dollar companies are in there, I don't see a lot when they're talking about AI transformation. It's like these people have like, not these people exactly, but chief AI officer or head of AI transformation or whatever. And then when I talk to them, it's like, oh yeah, 12 people out of 8,000 people are AI-pilled in the company. So it's going to happen a lot slower. But here's the good thing. These companies are all more than happy to hire outside people to help them with this. And it's just going to drag out for a long time to this implementation. That's one piece of it. The other piece I want to show you, Neil, is this. So these charts over here, there's this engineering survey. Okay, so this surveyed 1,000 engineers. Okay, so 1,000 engineers, and now here's what it says. Agents are getting— agent teams using agents, 89% are giving them write permissions now, up from 52% a year. Do you know what that means?

No.

Okay, so what level of tool permissions do you give your agents? So imagine you have like a Hermes or something like that.

So write permissions in which they can go and actually make changes on the code.

They can execute, correct. Yeah, so write humans with human in the loop, it's like 61%, and then write access independently without human approval, 24%, read-only, cannot make changes, and then we don't use agents internally. So 89%, this is up from 52% last year.

Wow.

It's only gonna get up, which means this, people are gonna have to invest more in security, more in governance.

Yes.

More in permissioning. I think that's a very good service to have, Neil.

Well, this is also why all the security stocks are crushing it right now. I don't know if you've seen that.

Mm-hmm. My tennis coach was like, I bought CrowdStrike. I was like, hold onto it.

Yeah, but let's look at CrowdStrike. Okay. I have a few friends who own CrowdStrike. I haven't owned, I don't own CrowdStrike stock. And I'm not saying you should or should not, but if you look at their 1 year, they're up 54.54%. All right. That's a pretty big number. You agree with that, right?

Mm-hmm.

If you look at their quarterly revenue, they're growing at 25%. So yeah, their growth has actually accelerated.

Okay.

But when I still, I look at their numbers, like you look at CrowdStrike annually, it's called $4.8 billion in revenue. They're worth $205 billion.

What's the multiple?

On revenue?

Yeah.

The multiple on revenue is 40 times roughly.

And it's not multiple on revenue. It's not even earnings. It's on revenue.

Yeah. Call it like 35 or something like that.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

So anyway, that's it for today. We'll talk to you later. Goodbye.