Your SEO Is About to Run Itself (Autonomous Engine Optimization)

So the new AEO is autonomous engine optimization. So this tweet was from Nick Eubanks, who was at Semrush before. And so, you know, the whole idea with autonomous engine optimization, Neil, is like, you think about us doing this podcast right now, okay? You think about, you do your YouTube channel, you do your Reels as well. I did the same thing from my side too. So that's a lot of outward-facing content, but also internally, all the sales calls that you have.

Yeah.

all the customer calls that you have, all this stuff that you have internally, there are probably content spikes that should probably be created as pages for AEO SEO purposes, right?

Yes.

And so we were calling it autonomous engine optimization that actually sits inside of like ClickFlow, for example, right? Where it will create the content for you. And then it will still— the human in the loop will still draft it, and then publish it. But I think a lot of it's where it's going. And I talked to Tim Soulo yesterday from the CMO of Ahrefs. He's like, I hope that the world doesn't go in this direction. I'm like, I don't think it's going to go 100% in this direction, but I think people are lazy and people just want results. And so I think a good chunk of it's going to go in that direction. So maybe autonomous engine optimization is the new AEO.

Yeah, it could end up being. I think when it comes to all these vernaculars and terms, people are just going to stick to the basics that actually produce results. You can't get away from Facebook and Instagram ads. You can't get away from You can't get away from Google and ranking organically and paying for clicks on there. You can't get away from LLMs, both doing the paid and the organic. It just drives business. I was talking to Javi in the car before I drove here. I just did a podcast interview with someone in Beverly Hills. That's why I was early because he asked—

Oh, I'm like, why are you dressed? You're wearing a nice shirt today too.

No, the old white shirts that I had, they don't make them anymore. So I switched.

What brand is this?

Banana Republic, $17.

Oh.

$17.

It looks expensive because it's heavier.

$75. Then they had like a 40% off sale. And then I had some coupons and I got 10 of them. And then they ran another promotion again. And I was like, I got another 6. So now I have 16 of them.

How dare you not tell me about the sale?

Yeah. So, and then I put in my phone number to get extra, you know, like if you SMS and you know when it pops up, I'm like, let me put it in, get the discount.

See, that's a discount. But that's selfish. You didn't tell me about the discount.

You could have. I didn't know you wanted white shirts because you don't really wear white shirts.

I do. Well, now that I play tennis more frequently and they require you to wear white or black, I need to buy more white and black stuff.

Wait, when you play tennis, you can't, at a club, you can't wear a colored shirt?

It says you have to wear white or black. And so I joined this thing called Sunset Tennis Club about a week ago and I'm playing tonight again, right? And so it's like I needed more white. And then I saw, the funny thing is I played on Wednesday and the guy was wearing like a completely beat up Lululemon shirt. And I looked at mine and it's the exact same shirt and mine's completely beat up too. It's like torn and all that. So I'm like, I need nicer shirts.

But these are terrible for playing tennis. tennis, you want like athletic.

Yeah, I'll get like, but this is for normal wear, like what you would wear. Yeah, normal wear, yeah. Yeah, like you would wear this to speak at a conference now.

Correct.

Yeah, and that looks way nicer than the Vuori one.

Buck Mason, you mean.

Buck Mason, okay.

Vuori were my pants.

Yeah, Vuori's very nice by the way. But I wanna call out one thing over here. So I don't know if you saw this, Neil, but the era of the self-improving product has arrived. So this is Amplitude, right? So this is a product manager from Amplitude. He's like, hey, we have an agent now for self-improving products. So for the past few months, we've had it running on our own product. finds problems, ships fixes, and measures where they worked. Here are some highlights, right? So he goes through it over here. I'm just going to call out like 2 of these and we can react to it. Wave, which is the product, found that most people ignore the suggestion cards on our agent homepage. They were generic. Wave personalized them to each user's recent work and had a working PR open in about 15 minutes. It drove a 160% plus increase in suggestions accepted during the A/B test. Okay, so that's one, right? So that was 5 days, 15 minutes, 160% card-driven Okay, now the next one. Oh, this one, you like this one, Neil. So this search was one, this one was embarrassing. Okay, so this is, Wave noticed that when users search with only 1 to 2 characters, our docs gave zero results without explaining that it had a 3-character minimum. Wave rebuilt the search experience around this limitation, educating users to type 3 characters, and searches that surface results went from 92% to 97, 98% or so. I think, you know, talking about autonomous engine optimization or talking about the self-improving product, a lot of people are talking about loops the last few months.

This is—

these are loops that are actually working now in the wild. And I'm glad that Amplitude is talking about this, but I think this is the future of doing— but by the way, I'm going to give one more because, you know, Neil's occupied right now. So Wave identified that when new users landed on a setup checklist with 5 next steps and no obvious first move, most of them stalled. Wave swapped it for one guided first step. The experiment is projected to move onboarding completion from 6% to 9%. That's huge.

That's huge.

That's huge.

That's huge.

It's huge.

People don't talk about these gains in efficiency. Like those kinds of things change a business, not overnight, but it changes over time. It's all about the marginal gains, dude. In marketing right now, everyone's talking about this new thing and they think it's going to get them some more efficiencies. What is it called? I got the link. I should actually text it to you so you can pull it up and see it yourself. I'll text you right now. This post is so good. I realized I didn't share this with my team.

I just shared it with my team because I'm like, why don't we just have this for our products? In fact, why don't you have this for Ubersuggest? Why don't you have this for AnswerThePublic?

Yeah, that's true.

Obviously, right?

Yeah, that's a good idea.

Yeah.

You see these guys, I texted it to you. They're advertising a tier 2 platinum Meta ad account free. Fund it with credit card and pay zero processing fee because WAP covers it. If your account ever goes down, We get it reinstated by default. It's just like, I look at this and I'm like, are these people just pitching like shady marketers and just people who are doing a lot of gray hat stuff and just being like, spam the crap out of Meta and Facebook? I'm like, I do not know how long this is going to last.

Yeah, Wapp is, Wapp is just have the marketplace where they sell like courses and they sell these types of services out there. And I don't know how they're valued at multiple billions and how they're doing all their revenue. I don't have a clue.

Well, they must be getting a kickback with their volume. That's the only way I know.

Mainly affiliate revenue, is that what you're saying?

No, kickbacks. If you drive enough money to some of these platforms, ad platforms, some of them actually give you kickbacks. They disguise it in different things. Some of them kick you back the money in like Ireland and places like that instead of in the US, but, or they'll count it, they'll call it marketing. But yeah, that's how some of them make the economics work. Yep.

So anyway, the self-improving product, we just talked about that, but let's go back to OpenAI for a second. So you saw yesterday on, you probably check X every now and then, but okay, OpenAI comes out with GPT-6, right? So I think the way OpenAI handled their GPT-6 Astra launch was very boneheaded. Do you know why? Why? Because all of a sudden, all of these AI influencers and YouTube creators, they got access. They all made videos. They came out yesterday. Guess what? Do you have GPT-6 access today? You don't. I'll tell you, you don't. I don't have it either, right? And so what it does is imagine this. Let's say you pay a lot of money for enterprise. Okay, let's say GPT. I'm making it up, right?

I have GPT-7 access.

No, you don't. You don't have anything. So you have the same thing I have. So my point is we pay We pay legit money for this. And how is it that these influencers get access, right? And how is it that we create this stuff and we don't get it first? But anyway, point is we're left out.

I haven't checked.

It's— I'm just saying that I think it's boneheaded to go with influencers. Smart move, right? But to not release it to the public at the same time if the influencers are releasing it that day, because it frustrates people that are paying good money for OpenAI's newest model.

What I would've done is released it. I don't know if they ever— they won't release that model for free. It's paid, right? Is Ollie paid?

I don't know.

Or do they have a free version? So if they released it, what I would've wanted to do is I would've only released it on the paid models and been like, if you want the new model, upgrade to paid, and all at the same time when all the influencers are out there, I think that would've helped. The company that did a really good launch with their product, amazing marketing recently was Dyson with their toothbrush. Did you see the toothbrush launch?

Yeah, I saw that, but like the challenge with that toothbrush, Neil's talking about this AI toothbrush that has cameras, right? My challenge with that one is you can't use your own toothpaste. You have to use their lather toothpaste.

It's sold out everywhere. You can't find it. Did you buy it? It's sold out. It's too hard to buy.

I was going to buy it the day of, and then I looked at the toothpaste and I was like, I'm not going to do that yet. I'm going to wait for the next wave. Because what if they explode in your mouth?

No, it doesn't. But the reviews—

You don't know that yet. It just came out.

Yeah, but some people had it earlier, like earlier access, and they critiqued it while they were actually brushing, but the reviews are amazing. And the first time I watched a video, I did not buy it. And then I got shown the video a lot more by other influencers, and I'm like, oh, I should go and buy it. Went to Amazon, not there. Went to Dyson then, sold out. And then I'm like, all right, forget this. I'm like, I'll just wait till someone has it.

Yeah. And then we'll wait for them to see, we'll see what they say, a real person, and then we can come back to it. But see, that's a good example of a launch, right? They gave it to a bunch of influencers and the product was available and then it sold out. But for ChatGPT, the influencers announced it and then it wasn't available. And then guess what? That actually wastes their mindshare for the day because they put all that, all the firepower into it. And then now it's the next day and you and I would probably be talking about how amazing it is. At least I would be. But nope, not happening right now. In fact, someone like me would probably be making a video on it today. So yes, it's their loss.

I agree with you, but I know this thing's coming out soon. I think for the websites like Best Buy, it's all saying like 9/8, but there was a moment where I was able to—

You're talking about the toothpaste?

No, the toothbrush.

Yeah.

I was able to buy it and then it ended up turning to, instead of buying it, like notify me.

Yeah. I almost bought it too, but there was only a pink version available.

Yes. Yeah. Same. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

I didn't want the pink version.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I want the blue version.

So I was close to getting it and I was like, okay, worst case I can just get it for the girlfriend. Right. But then it's like, you know, and then see how she likes it. If she doesn't like it, then I won't buy it. But yeah.

That's a good idea. You should go get the pink version for your girlfriend.

No, you get it first. You get it for your daughter and so you can get 2 customers out of it.

My kids are too young for it.

Okay. Well, get it for your wife.

No, she won't care for this. Half the time she has electric toothbrush, half the time she just uses the handheld. She'll be like, you use it first and then let me know what you think.

The problem with the handheld is I brush really hard, right? It causes your gums to recede and then you have to like repair it.

I thought you got that fixed.

I did get it fixed. That was 5 years ago. And then I brushed so hard again and started receding again. 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 or global organizations. 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.

Mine tells me don't brush too long. So the problem that I have is—

You're OCD.

They're like, don't keep brushing. They asked me how long I brush. I said, on average, I brush 4 minutes, 3 times a day. They're like, that's too long. Slow down how many minutes you brush.

4 minutes, 3 times a day? That's crazy. All you need is 2 minutes.

Oh, I can't. There's not enough time to clean teeth fully in 2 minutes.

That's why his teeth are so white. It's almost like you have veneers, but you don't.

No, my teeth are crooked.

Veneers are really expensive. I learned that veneers are like $60 grand and people get loans for that.

People get veneers in Asia.

Yeah, but like, I don't understand.

It's not $60 grand. It's really affordable.

I, well, I've heard here around here is $60 grand.

Yeah, because this is Beverly Hills.

Yeah.

Go somewhere else and it's half the price.

Yeah, but also that's a permanent thing too.

Well, veneers, they shave down your teeth and they put fake teeth over it.

I'm saying, so it's permanent. You can't undo that.

No, you can't undo it.

Yeah. Anyway, I saw something interesting post from Andrew Warner recently because you and I have been working, you know, I believe that we're putting a little more effort into our YouTube channels, at least I am. So it's interesting to me because—

Andrew Warner, MixerG?

Yeah, MixerG, because he started a new YouTube channel, right? And so he has 50,000 subs. Okay, so you have like 1.6 million or something like that. I have about 200,000. Something like that, right? But the subs don't really matter because in the last month he posted the numbers here. He got 937,000 views, right? This is, you know, in aggregate and then 58,000 watch time and then 12,000 subscribers added, right? I think these are great numbers.

Let me guess. He's talking about the next new hot thing and that's why it's doing well.

Exactly. So that's the first takeaway in terms of how he's grown his YouTube, right? Exactly. And we've talked about this on the podcast. If you hit a trending topic, like you're going to win, like my GrokBot, my last few videos, It's like, it's not bad, right? If I get over 10,000 for a video, I'm like happy with it for long form.

Yeah.

So my Grok bot for business won 14,000 views. The other one's like 12,000. So he said, 5 things that helped my new YouTube channel take off. 1, info calls. Jesse Pujji taught me how to have frequent informational calls with people who do YouTube well. In one, I learned to turn on ads. That's a big one. So whenever you don't turn on ads, like they're not incentivized to show you as much. Okay. And he learned how vidIQ can be a good thought partner.

Okay.

The second piece, So is around data. So choose rich, show me how to look at the minute-by-minute view data that YouTube gives to help me cut fluff off. So you just look at retention metrics like 30-second retention or 3-second retention for short form. And then X, he says X is the best indicator of what the world will talk about. So whenever you see what people are talking about, like open call agents, you attack it quickly, right? If you're attacking trending topics. And then 4, you lean into not knowing. So just like learning from other people, bringing them on. And then 5, PR, having other people promote it. And he says, you know, what didn't work is talking about YouTube on X. That doesn't work that well. So, but like you and I have been doing YouTube for a little bit and I will just say, I'll share my learnings first and then Neil can share his learnings. Yes, if you're talking about trending topics, like whenever I talked about NFTs when they're hot, oh my God, 100,000 views, right? If I talk about dating and finance, oh my God, 600,000 views, right? Right. And so you can talk about wide TAM topics or you can talk about trending topics, but they might not necessarily drive views, leads for you.

Okay.

So you have to keep that in mind. And then the second thing I'll say around this is that people are like, oh, okay, the packaging does matter, like your YouTube and your thumbnail and your headline. But honestly, if it's a trending topic, it doesn't even matter. You can have the crappiest thumbnail in the world, you're still going to get like an 8%, 9% click-through rate.

Yep. You know, when I look at social media, I bet you Eric actually knows more of my social stats.

Bless you.

Thank you. Eric knows more about my social stats than I do. And I know this because last time we did a recording here, or was it the time before, you were talking about one of my videos. I didn't know the views. He knew the views. He even told me what my average views are on the other videos. And I looked and I'm like, oh, he's actually right.

Yeah.

That's how little I check on views. I look at all this stuff when it comes to social media, I think markers have it off. Thinking about the views is just a waste of time. We measure internally revenue from all the social content we create and what actually drove the revenue. We also look at leads that come from all the social content and how much revenue that generated. So the leads for us is more top of funnel. The bottom of the funnel is revenue. And then we map it out to which topics produce the best results. And we just double down on those. And we don't care if it creates 1,000 views or 50,000 views, it's all about the end result. And we found our business to grow faster operating that way than just focusing on views. And I think that's a big thing. Even with clients, we try to take them from, stop looking at your total search traffic, look how much revenue your search traffic drives. And we have case studies, no joke, like real case studies of large companies worth billions of dollars where we show half the traffic, more revenue, double the traffic, less revenue because you got the wrong type of traffic. And it's really hard to get marketers to get away from top-of-funnel traffic and shares and view metrics instead of just looking at things like what is actually producing results. Because your CEO doesn't care if you have 1/10 the search traffic, he'd rather have 1/10 the search traffic and double the revenue from that channel, especially if it is profitable.

You know, I was interviewing someone this week for like an SEO role, right? So I was like saying, and this guy worked at like Smartsheet, for example, or like Drata, right? Like these are, you know, good enterprise companies, right? And I was like, so what's your biggest SEO win? He's like, he couldn't give me a number, right? And he's like, oh yeah, you know, the share of voice went up, blah, blah. But like, what, how did that affect revenue? How did it affect pipeline? Oh, you know, I just don't know. But I'm like, but this is your most impressive SEO win, right? He's like, yeah. I'm like, Well then how do you not know these numbers, right? And so, but my point with that conversation is like, this is the majority of most marketers. They think about the vanity metrics up top because it absolves them from the responsibility of having to go deeper in terms of driving pipeline and leads and revenue.

Yes. A new thing that I learned, so all of our executives in all the countries need to know how our ideal customer found us. Example of this is Javi who runs LATAM for us. Got a lead, one of the biggest companies in Latin America, and he asked them how they found us because it's required for internally, we track it all. And he said they found us from Claude. And then he follows up with, what did you ask? And then it was specifically around paid ads on Google and SEO. And Claude recommended us for that as well as if they wanted GEO, we can do all 3 with them and do it combined. And they talked about— the efforts and the results because we have some data on this, but it also mentioned other agencies. This is helpful for a few reasons. One, you can ask these engines these questions too, and they told us, yeah, we hit up you and the other agencies that recommended for this RFP. So, if Eric asks the same question, he may get different results from Claude, but there's usually some overlap. We now kind of have an understanding of the other agencies that are competing with us in the pitch. So that was really helpful. 2, we've noticed a trend from a lot of our executives. 6 months ago, when they asked, where are you finding us? Most of them would say ChatGPT or Gemini when it came to these LLMs or AI overviews or Google, right? So a Google version or ChatGPT. We're starting to see companies are starting to say Claude more frequently. It's not that Claude has a massive market share of people using Claude to just do searches or ask questions like they do with ChatGPT. It's that a lot of businesses have been buying Claude for their employees, and their employees are now also using it to answer questions related to things that are not related to execution. Because a lot of the people that I know who use Claude use it to be more efficient in execution within their job. But because the company's already paying for corporate accounts, people are starting to also use it to search or ask questions even though they also have ChatGPT subscriptions. So we're starting to see an uptick in B2B, I'm sorry, not B2B, we are both, you and I are B2B, but businesses finding other businesses through Claude where we did not see that as frequently 6 months ago.

Yeah.

We've seen a big change in that for us.

It changes. I mean, it's interesting because Claude took the mindshare the last few months or so, and then everyone kind of moved over to that. And what's to say they won't in the future, right? So it might go back to OpenAI, it might go back and forth. That's just like a side thing. I think when it comes to sales in general, what you mentioned around how did you first find us, right? How did you first hear about us? That should be one of the first sales questions you ask, in fact, because when you're starting out, it's like, hey, cool, nice to meet you, right? By the way, how'd you hear about us, right?

Oh, cool.

Well, you heard from Claude. Okay, well, what prompt did you use exactly? What did you see exactly? And then by the way, like you can even ask like, would you like us to do it for you, right? But by the way, recently, I've been talking to my sales team about this, but I think the way to get larger deals is actually having that extended sales conversations now where you're just being curious about how all their work goes. Like, what are your priorities overall? What are you trying to do exactly? But because if you just try to—

You're talking about with potential With potential customers.

Because if you're just trying to force one solution down, you're actually losing the fact that maybe they're looking for multiple things. If you just try to force like the one thing that you know, versus having a conversation.

But you already know this, dude, you've been doing sales for years. It doesn't matter what you're selling. I know you're selling more AI stuff now. The first thing you would have all your people do, including you, is you hear them out and understand all the problems because then you can discover where you can help them. Versus just going in and selling a solution.

And that's most salespeople. That's the lesson for everyone here. Most, like most salespeople like to force their solution down. Like remember you met one of the salespeople from like another agency last year at the, maybe 2, yeah, a year ago at the Global Marketing Summit, the YPO one, remember that?

Okay.

That person only knew how to sell her solution and didn't try to learn the other solutions that we had. And thus didn't ask good questions and learn the entire problem set. So I think in sales you have to be more like a doctor. You have to understand all the things that are happening within their business and then have a, have an extended conversation. And so I think the patient salesperson actually ends up winning more.

Patient—

Patient conversation, not, not patient with like—

It's all problem solution selling, right?

Exactly.

So you're trying to understand someone's problem and then you end up selling them a solution that works for them and is customized for them. But the really cool part about Listening is, is sometimes people tell you that they have a problem A, but really A isn't the problem. The root cause of it is B. If you solve B, you'll solve A as well. If you solve A, it doesn't solve B and it creates other problems that you didn't think about.

Right.

But so understanding is super important. Like I had someone hit me up the other day who's like, I want to work with you and we have We are in the kitchen space. So they deal with like Moen or Kohin, I don't know all the faucet names. And they work with them to get into other architects and other designers and builders to recommend their products. So their job is to get other people who sell the products to recommend them over the competition. And he was showing me all the stuff that he was trying to do. And he's like, yeah, I'm struggling with GEO and I'm struggling with Facebook ads and it's not working. And I was like, you should just go to account-based marketing. And he's like, oh, would you help us with account-based marketing? I'm like, no, but this is what you should end up doing. I'm like, the other channels are a waste. You're trying to figure out these channels that don't really matter too much for you, but account-based marketing will be much more effective.

Yep.

And then they shifted focus. They thought how they're actually leveraging these channels, like ChatGPT is off. Instead, it's the channels aren't the right fit for his business.

Yep, totally. So that's the lesson. Keep being consistent. That's how you win at marketing.

Yep.

All right. Goodbye.