How to Get AI to Recommend Your Business

Quick question for you. Do you know your AI level? Not whether you're using AI, because I know pretty much you are, but how well you're actually using AI. We built a free quiz that tells you exactly where you stand across 5 different levels. You get a personalized results page that diagnoses your biggest gap, gives you a custom AI prompt matched to your level, and shows you the one move that will make the biggest difference right now. Take it for free at socialmediaexaminer.com/aiquiz26. That's socialmediaexaminer.com/aiquiz26. Welcome to the AI Explored podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner.

Hello, hello, hello.

Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzer, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators, and business owners who want to know how to put AI to work. Today we'll explore how to get AI to recommend your business. My special guest is an AI strategist who helps business owners create content that gets referred by AI. His YouTube channel is Liran Builds Systems. He's the founder of answercontentengine.com. Liran Segev, Welcome to this show for the first time. How you doing today?

Super excited to be here. This is going to be so much fun and so valuable. So we're going to have a good time.

Awesome. Well, let's start with your journey into AI. I know you weren't known for AI. So tell us a little bit about where you came from and where you're going now.

Yeah, this is good. Yeah, it's a story. You know, I've been doing YouTube strategy forever. I mean, like, you can see by the beard, 10+ years. This has been going back for a while. I've done it in South Africa, which is where I'm originally from. I've done it in England. I've been doing it in the US. And this process has been going on. And 2 common things that I've heard time and time again from the business owners that I work with, right? They say to me 2 things. Number one is, man, I just don't love making content. That's, that's so super, super common. And the second thing that they say to me is, I'm just busy, right? Like, I'm never going to give you 4 hours a week to go and shoot some videos or go create a YouTube channel. I have a business to run. So for me to have a successful YouTube strategy business, that was a real big challenge. How do I get these business owners and agency owners and individual creators to get excited about this process when they just have other stuff going on in their lives? So to get around that, I had to be really good at understanding processes, understanding strategy, understanding how to put these things together. I'll never forget the conversation I had with a really high-powered executive. They're a CEO of a company, really busy individual. The first thing that gets canceled, I promise you, is a content meeting, right? It goes very low priority on their radar. And we just finished wrapping up a shoot. It was 30 minutes from start to finish from the time that he walked in till the time that he left. And we got a month's worth of content out of that. And he turned to me and he said, you're not the YouTube strategist. You're the process strategist. And like, we laughed at that, like didn't really think too much about it. But when I went back and I thought, hold on a second. That is exactly what I do. And when AI started coming out like 2 years ago or so, I really started to take my processes, dump them into AI just to kind of get better at what I do. And as I started to develop more and more, I realized, hold on, I can actually solve for the 2 problems. The busy executive who really just wants to run their business. And the second is the person who really just wants to take content off their plate. They just don't want to deal with it. They know it's important. It's just not them. That's not what they want to do. And that's when I started building the Answer Content Engine to really understand that. So I've taken like the 10+ years of building processes and services for these huge executives and bringing them into the fold and saying, okay, here is a system you don't even have to be involved. And it's been a wild ride since then.

Well, it's great to have you on the show. And those that don't listen to my other show, the Social Media Marketing Podcast, Liron has been a regular with me and Jerry when we talk about YouTube. I feel like you've been on there like 4 or 5 times. So Liron's mostly known in our world as a YouTube guy, but it's been really fascinating because he's very technical, but he's also very good at communicating a lot of concepts. And he's really gone pretty deep down the AI rabbit hole. We're going to talk about that today when we begin to explore how is it that we can actually be discovered within these AI systems. But first, before we go there, I would like to ask you, Liron, What do you see as some of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to AI and content? Because we're really talking about content and we're talking about AI, right? Because we're talking about all this experience you have creating content and somehow it feeding into the AI system. So what's the lie or the misconception that you're hearing a lot that we want to set straight?

This is probably the hill I'll die on. What I'm hearing and what I'm seeing time and time again, which is a big failure in my mind, is that Today, as we're sitting here having this chat and recording this, we're still obsessed with writing and creating content for people. Here's what I mean by that. We are still creating a content piece of content, whether it's written or whether it's video or whether it's audio. And we're thinking that our audience is starting at the top and reading all the way down to the bottom. So we're still thinking YouTube videos, we push play. There is a beginning, there's a middle, there is an end, there's a story arc, there's the nemesis, there is points of tension, because we're expecting our audience to still consume content like they have consumed content in the past. That's how we, you and I, we've been writing online forever. Everybody else who's listening has been creating content forever. And that's how we've been trained. The biggest misconception that I'm seeing right now is that that is still the only way to create content. And it's very difficult for us to untrain our brain to say, no, it is no longer the way it is. Because right now, the biggest pull that's happening is machines are reading our content. Our content lives on our website, machines' content lives in the AI world, and they're talking to each other. They're not starting at the top and reading all the way down to the bottom. And we have to untrain our brain thinking that is the only way to create content.

Interesting. So I think what I'm hearing you say is that we're not just creating content for humans anymore, we're creating content for algorithms and large language models and AI systems. And as a result of that, we need to kind of shift our thinking. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

We have to shift our thinking because the way we go about the creation process, the way we go about understanding the structure of the content Changes. And to be very clear, I'm not saying it's one or the other. I'm not saying that you've got to stop doing your Instagram, stop doing your YouTube, stop doing your LinkedIn, and shift 100% into creating for AI. They live side by side. Just the audience is very, very different. And you have to treat an audience differently, depending on where they're going to be consuming that content. And that's the important shift we all have to make.

It's interesting, because if I think about what you're saying, and I process it a little bit in my mind, You can create content for lots of humans, or you can create it for one extremely influential thing, which is not a person, which happens to be used by a lot more humans. And if you can figure out how to influence that thing, which we're calling AI, all of a sudden you can unlock a lot of cool stuff, right?

Absolutely.

So perfect transition to my next question. When we do this properly, when we figure out how to create content and somehow properly leverage AI in this discussion, what is waiting for us on the other side? What is the benefit?

Lots of gold and rewards and for the unicorn. What happens on the other side if we get this right? And by the way, I believe we have to get this right. What happens on the other side is we're going to get what all business owners want. And that's more customers, we're going to make more money. And it's as simple as that. And I'm going to throw it back to the olden days. Now, some of us are old enough to remember something called the Yellow Pages. Some of us are old enough to remember when restaurants used to print menus and to, they used to shove it under your door. And that used to live in your top drawer in your home. And whenever you wanted to order something, now I know this is wild, people just bear with me. Whenever we wanted to order from a restaurant, we had to phone them and speak to a person and place an order over the phone. Crazy days, I know. But that's where we come from. And at that stage, something called the internet was starting to come out, something called Google was starting to come out. And we went knocking on everybody's door and saying, hey, listen, heads up, the world is changing, right? We're no longer going to be AAA locksmith in the Yellow Pages, which guarantees you get the first call because you're number one in the Yellow Pages. Because people are going to be doing shopping very differently. They're going to be doing their research very differently. They're going to be using this thing called a website and a browser. And 2 things happened. There was this one camp who said, absolutely not. I am AAA locksmith, damn it. I am going to stick to that. And my colorful menu, all always will live in the top drawer. And then there were those who said, okay, the world is changing. What do I have to do to change with it? I believe we're at the exact same place right now, because I don't know about you. I don't know when the last time I saw a Yellow Pages, never mind used a Yellow Pages, because it's all online. And I believe we're at that world right now, which is a major global shift that is happening, where people are having conversations with their AI, and are no longer opening up 29 different tabs in their browser, trying to plan their next vacation. I saw an awesome stat from Google the other day, something like 80— 68% of questions don't result in a click to the website anymore. If that doesn't scare all of us who've been traditionally trained on SEO, number one ranking, keywords, all that good stuff, if that doesn't scare us, I don't know what is going to scare us into actually taking AI seriously for our businesses.

So we're here to talk about how to get recommended by AI. And what I'd love to ask is before we get into the actual, like, mechanics of this. Is there anything we should discuss before we get underway? Any important concepts that we should explain that we can build upon?

Yeah, so, um, sorry, like, you know, my brain's like a million miles an hour when it comes to these things. So when it comes to AI, the shift that I spoke about earlier about fundamentally changing who we're writing for, that's, that, that's very, very true. Where are we going? And what we have to understand about AI is that Right now, a lot of things happen in public, right? We have a stream of consciousness. We have YouTube, you scroll through. We have YouTube Shorts, a whole bunch of videos. We have Instagram, a whole bunch of content. We have LinkedIn, a timeline. Everything lives out in the open. Where AI comes in and flips the model is that a lot of that conversation actually happens in private. It's you and your private AI having a chat. And here is the big deal here. AI has become your trusted friend, your trusted advisor. AI knows you so well. It knows everything that you're up to, everything that you're doing. And when you ask it a question, it understands you better than you understand yourself. It has that ability. That's what makes AI so powerful. But it all happens privately. So, Mike, if I come to your, to your city or your town and I phone you up, well, I'm going to text you probably. And I want to say to you, hey, I'm looking for a restaurant. What do you recommend? You're going to give me 2 or 3 recommendations, and you're going to tell me where the hell to stay away from. It's not safe out there. You should definitely go to these these two places. Those are the two places I'm probably going to look up, right? Because a friend told me that this is where I should be going. AI is that friend. It take it's that gatekeeper. When we book a vacation and we open up 39 different tabs and TripAdvisor and you know everyone's blog and article and experience. We're copying and pasting, trying to create an itinerary. That's option 1. Or option 2, we go to our private AI who knows us and our family, and we say, hey, plan me a vacation for 3 days, road trip. Don't want to drive more than 3 hours. You know the kind of food I like. You know what my kids are into. Plan the itinerary for me. Those recommendations that it comes up are the ones we are going to start with. And if we are not in those recommendations as businesses, That's, that's a real, that's a real problem. And the important thing to remember is that AI isn't a smarter Google, right? A lot of people are still using AI just to do those searches. AI is much more than that, because AI has a term called fan-out query, right? I don't know if you're familiar with this.

I'm not. Yeah, I've never heard of it before. Tell me more.

Have you ever done some research in AI? And all of a sudden, it didn't just answer your question, But it gave you 29 different other things that you got like, oh man, that's really good. I never even thought of asking that. Oh, look, that's giving me much more a holistic picture. I just, I just want to do some research against my competitor, but it gave me the market research. It gave me the price points. It gave me the analytics. It gave me all this great information. Oh, AI is awesome. The reason that it does that, because AI doesn't just take your question and goes and finds you an answer. If it did that, that's Google. What AI does is says, okay, look, I know you're trying to find out about this competitor, but why? What are you really asking? You probably want to know about the market. So let me go research the market. But why do you want to know about the market? Maybe it's a price point thing. Let's go figure out what everybody else is charging. And it does that query as well. So it spiders out all these additional queries that you didn't even ask for in the first place because it wants to be super, super useful to you. Then it gives us all this information. Comes back to you with an answer and you go, hmm, that's damn good. That's the beauty of being able to work with AI. But it happens in private. We don't have the analytics. I'm a data nerd. Ones and zeros are my life. We no longer have that data, and that should scare us all. And it does.

Okay, that's really helpful. So now I guess my logical next question is, where do we start? Where's the foundation upon which we're going to ultimately do some things that are going to result in down the road AI hopefully revealing us in their responses?

Where AI is going to love you and recommend you and you're going to be AI's BFF, right? Look, Mike, there's only 2 platforms in the world that are not driven by an algorithm. It's your newsletter, number one, and your second one is your own website. This is like a full circle moment. So your newsletter, you're in charge of it. If you've got 10 subscribers to your newsletter or 100,000 subscribers, if you want to spam them with 10 emails a day, you can. Nobody's going to stop you. They'll unsubscribe, but nobody's going to stop you. Nothing external can stop that from happening because you're in charge of the push notification. You're in charge of getting that content out to your followers. That's the newsletter. You own it. You own the algorithmic of it because you— it's yours. The second one that is not driven by an algorithm is your own website. If you want to post anything you want on your own website, you can. I don't know if you've ever run any ads on something like Facebook or Google. They've got very strict terms and conditions of what you can post and what you can't. If you're doing a weight loss program, you're not allowed to show a before and after. You can't do tobacco as an, as an example. Alcohol is very restricted. So there's lots of rules because you've got to abide by their rules on their platform, their algorithm. If you have a weight loss company and you want to post before and after, nobody's going to stop you. It is your domain. And that's the key word here is owning your domain because you can control things that go onto your own website. And I've been screaming about this for the last 12 months. We've kind of forgotten about our own domain. Blogging is dead. They so, so they they told us, and those who carried on blogging and carried on writing content on their own website are doing fantastically well in AI because they've built authority. They have built trust, and AI understands who they are, what their business does, what services they offer, and to who. It understands the intent because you've got all this history. But a lot of marketers, a lot of executives have made the decision to go oh. Instagram's super sexy. Look how many likes we get. Look how many comments we get. And they've gone all in on social media. Again, nothing wrong with social media, but never ever neglect your own domain. And to me, that is the biggest lever you can pull right now, is going back to understand that your domain is your business, and that's the one you want to build the biggest authority on, supported by social media. That's where you start.

Okay. Well, let's dissect this a little bit. And if you have an example, which I think you do, I'd love to hear that. How in the world does a newsletter end up getting into AI?

Because we think of a newsletter as something that fits into an inbox only. And yes, it absolutely starts into a newsletter that goes into an inbox, but now we have content. What do we do with that content? Nothing. So it sits in a, some system, a ConvertKit, a, a kit.com, a whatever it is, HubSpot, wherever it may be, and it gets pushed out to your viewers. Viewers or your audience, and they consume that piece of material. That material is content, content that you spend time writing. And then it dies. Now they click on it, they go to your website, they buy your offer, go to your landing page. They do all of that stuff. But the content itself is dead. My question to everyone is, if you have a newsletter and you're getting click-throughs to your landing page, you're getting click-throughs, you're getting calls from that, that's good content. Why are we not making that content available on our website? If we do that, we're linking up good content, which your viewers have told you, your audience have told you we like it, and you're linking it up with your domain and you're putting the two together. What is that? Authority building. We know that it works. We know that our audience is engaged with it. It's a good piece of content. Why do we have to let it die in our system, in our email system, rather than reusing it Copy and paste it onto your website. Beautiful content. You should have that. Make it public.

Now, this is where you got to remember who you're doing it for, right? You're putting the newsletter on the website not for the humans. You're doing it for AI, right?

That's it. Audience shift. So yes, your newsletter, you're writing for a person to be super clear. You're never going to rewrite that content for a machine because its main intention is to go and attract and talk to my customer who's bothered to hit that subscribe button and hopefully consuming that content. At their convenience inside their mailbox. Perfect. Do not change that. However, once that's done, there is no reason why the exact same piece of content cannot be taken—not even rewritten—literal copy and paste onto your website because the content itself is valuable, and that's the one you want us to build your authority. You're saying, "Hey, I wrote this." That is unique content, which we'll hopefully get into as well. That is unique content. That is content AI doesn't have. Oh, where does it live? On my own website. Must make me trustworthy and authoritative figure. That's the magic here.

When we were prepping, I think you had an example of a consulting firm. Do you want to share that story?

Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to talk about it. So we have a consulting company, they were up against very stiff competition, they were fairly new kids on the block, so to speak. And they thought, look, we really are in trouble here. Right. We can't outspend them on ads and they're eating our lunch and breakfast and dinner. And, you know, we're really struggling to get in front of our customers and we're going to run out of money if we keep throwing money at ads. Ads are awesome, to be clear, but ads are renting attention. Second you stop paying, that attention disappears. So what we did with exactly the same kind of strategy is analyze their newsletter, find all this gold content within their subscription that they've already been sending to their customers. We've seen the replies. And we've taken that and we've said, okay, let's repurpose that. So let's write fresh content out of that for a machine audience. And let's take the newsletter exactly as it is and copy and paste it. Different audiences, different headings, different keywords, different strategies. But we're talking to 2 different people at the same time, all on their domain. The beautiful thing, within a couple of weeks, they were able to outstrip their competitors by 3 times. They're 72%. They own 72% of their category within 3 weeks. And I'm talking about companies that have been around forever, writing content forever, having massive online following. But when AI wants to ask a question, it pulls them as the answer. And that's the beauty of understanding audience writing, audience targeting, understanding what chunking means, which hopefully we'll jump into that as well, the technical side. But once you understand that, then you can understand that you're sitting on gold right now. You have sales calls, you have marketing materials, you have podcasts, you have all this golden information that's just dying on a flash drive or some hard drive somewhere. That is the stuff we want to be reusing.

Are you wondering how your fellow marketers are using AI? Well, we just dropped our 3rd annual AI Marketing Industry Report. For 3 years, we've been tracking all the trends, What are the platforms everybody's using? How are they actually leveraging AI? What do they plan to do in the future with AI? For example, today, 73% of your peers are using AI every single day. You can grab the report for free right now by heading over to socialmediaexaminer.com/airapport2026. Again, socialmediaexaminer.com/airapport2026. 2026. So we understand that we are going to be making some content that is not just for humans, and we've already talked about your website and we've already talked about your newsletter. But what other kinds of content? You know, let's talk about content because this is important, right? It sounds like without the content, you're not going to get recommended. So let's get into that a little bit.

All right. Can we allow to get a bit nerdier now? Because we've been holding back. Let's, let's. Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's nerd out a little bit. All right. So let's walk through a journey. So let's think of what happens. Let's just say we have somebody who's sitting at home, and they have their AI open. And they're having a conversation, right? They're saying, hey, it's the end of the year, my financial broker has just sent me this wad of documents for me to sign. I need to make a decision. I like, what do I do? Where do I invest my money? Where do I save? Is it this? Is it that? I don't know this, so I'm gonna ask my AI to kind of help me, help me out. That's the conversation that typically happens, something that I don't know about, and then I need to get some clarity on. Very rarely do we go into AI and say, tell me about this, right? Tell me about this company. We start much higher up the food chain. We start much higher up by having that chat, and eventually we get down, okay, now that I understand it, who do I use to give me that product or service? So we're having that conversation. Somebody writes a question, AI goes out and finds the information, goes, looks for the exact question, and then all those fan-out queries we spoke about before. Once the AI is out there in the wild, AI has a bazillion— that's a technical term— a bazillion choices, right, to choose from. There's a bazillion pages online answering the exact same question. Why is it going to pull you? As the answer, well, AI looks at those content and says, number one, is this AI slough? Like I mean, AI just does it itself because if I AI is thinking, if I created this content, there's no additional value that this business added. I'm just going to skip over it. I'm going to find somebody who's added some value. So if you look at, I don't know, ten things to do to improve your home before you sell it, there's millions of people have said that, right? And the way that you tell is that if you read that article. And you simply swap out that company's name and you put a different company's name in there and it still makes sense. AI does the same. There's no additional value. There's nothing personal, nothing unique. And that is what AI really, really wants. It wants to add value to the person asking the question. And it does that by finding that unique content, that those data points it doesn't have, those stats, that personal stories, something that you've experienced yourself and you shared in your content. That is the beauty of being able to write that kind of content because now AI has something unique. So I mean, it's going to add value to the person that's writing that and it goes out and finds all those pieces of content and then evaluates what's going to be useful. And the stuff that has that uniqueness goes right to the top because that is the stuff that's going to feed back to the person asking the question. That is kind of the way that the way that the process works. So for us as business owners, how do we get ourselves recommended is good old-fashioned marketing is number one, is really understanding the audience. Who is our avatar?

Wait, before we go there, I want to talk about this concept. When we were prepping, you talked about how AI really wants fresh data also, and this extraction layer thing, because I think it's important for people to like get into that before we keep going down this rabbit trail a little bit.

Perfect. So remember what I said, that AI doesn't consume the content like we do. Like, it doesn't start at the top and it doesn't get excited about the setup and the hook, and then it's looking for the payoff. It doesn't do that. AI looks— question, it wants an answer. The extraction layer, it's called chunking. And essentially the idea is that it's going to find a piece of content within your content that simply answers that question. And it's going to chunk it out. It's going to extract that out. And that is the piece that it's going to use when it's going to give back that answer to the person asking that question. So if we go back to our financial advisor situation, when they write these long articles and you're expecting AI to go read the whole thing, figure out what's important, extract the 2 or 3 lines that they mean something and bring it back to that audience. That's too hard when there's loads of other choices to go through where AI has to do less compute, less thinking, much faster. And that's what brings in that information. So when we're thinking about our content, because we understand our audience, when we're writing that piece of material, we have to think with that in mind. Is AI going to like this piece and it's going to extract that piece? And does this piece make sense By itself without the before and without the after.

Okay. So I think a lot of people are probably wanting me to ask the question I'm about to ask here about this is, okay, if I'm giving AI the best answer or a really helpful answer, how's that going to help me? It seems like I'm just feeding the beast. You know, that's probably what I think people are thinking about, right?

Yeah. And you are feeding the beast, but you're feeding the beast as the source. So you're feeding the beast as the person that gets cited. And the person that gets mentioned and the articles that gets linked. So what I mean by that, when you look at your AI and you're asking the questions, it gives you the answer. And sometimes those answers are linked to where the source material is. That's where you want to be. You want to be the person, the answer that comes in. And as they're going through and it says, and Michael Stasner says this and this and this and this and this, because now it's quoted you, it's cited you because you're the authority in that particular field. That is the game. The game is to be cited, to be mentioned, and to be linked to. And that's how we have to understand our content. So that little chunking piece, you have to include the bits that you want, not just answering the question, but answering the question in a valuable way that AI deems as credible, and then writing it in such a way that you're still mentioned. So they know where it came from, even if it's not linked directly to you.

So does that mean that if I produce content in my domain expertise that AI finds valuable and it keeps going back to my source of content, that somehow, some way, when people ask for an expert or a company that specializes in this, AI will, for lack of a better word, say, I've already sourced all this stuff from these guys. These are the ones that I'm going to recommend. Is that kind of what we're implying here?

Yeah. And one step further, you as the person who's reading all these answers, if you keep on seeing Michael, Michael, Michael coming up all the time, you're going to click on that link. You're going to figure out, say, well, AI keeps mentioning him. AI has all the knowledge in the world, and yet they chose to give this business the— as the answer. There's got to be a reason. That's the whole trusted friend concept that we were talking about earlier. We trust AI to source us the best information. When it says, hey, this is the website, these are the people, that's the one we want to go with.

Okay, so where we're at so far is, hey, we got to start creating content that's just not for humans, okay? It's also for AI because humans are using AI and AI is giving answers. And ideally, the answers and the links and all that stuff they give is sourced from you, okay? That's where we're at with this right now. So I guess the next logical question is, if we are answering questions, what kinds of questions should we answer? Because that's a big old can of worms. What do we want to— let's talk about that.

You know, I think it's a container full of worms, not a can of worms. But yes, again, going back to our avatar, right? Traditional marketing, the world of storytelling and engaging with an audience hasn't changed. Just the platform has changed. So we've got to think to ourselves, okay, we understand our audience. We understand their demographics for sure, but we all know as marketers where we should be spending a lot of our focus is understanding the psychographics. What is keeping them up at night? That is the biggest question. And if we know that they're asking certain questions, that is what we focus our entire attention on. So if you think about things like your support ticketing system within your office, What are those? Those are problems and questions. That's a great source of material. When you're on customer calls, what do you get? A whole bunch of questions. Well, we know the rule. You know, you ever— if you've ever been to college or university, wherever in the world you're listening to this from, you know the situation. Somebody asks— lecturer, you know, has a whole talk and he says, are there any questions? And nobody puts up their hand. And eventually somebody asks the question. You go, oh yeah, thank you for asking that because that confused me as well. We know that a simple question that gets asked within our business is probably being asked by loads of other people at the same time. Let's answer that question. If we understand the top 10, 20, 30, 50 questions that your audience is asking, and we repeatedly answering those questions on our domain, on our website, in a way that AI loves to understand, that is what we want. That is the golden game. That is exactly what we're after. But, and this is the big but, You have to add your personal touch. You have to add value. You have to add your uniqueness to this. So if somebody asks, should I get— should I invest in a 401 or a self-directed Roth? What is that even? Okay, financial advisors gonna get excited about this. Number one, I don't even know what that is, right? So you start basics. So well, what is the difference? What is X versus Y, right? What is one versus another? That is a good question because that's where it starts. Remember I said about the journey? Does it— doesn't start at the very end when they're asking the actual question that they want to know. They ask about from a confused state. I just got a stack of financial documents from my financial broker. They want to understand what's in there before they sign on the dotted line. So we've got to start at the top. We've got to meet them where they're at. And right now they're super confused. Well, we have answers. We want to give them those answers right at the top. And hold their hand as they're getting further and further down so that by the time it gets to the end, we've answered so many of their questions that they actually want to work with us because now they feel like we're their teacher. We've educated them. We've helped them come along for the ride. So understand your customer journey doesn't change. We've always had to understand the customer journey. It's how we give that information across now that that's what has changed, and that's what we have to really focus on.

Okay, so you said something really important, which is that you need to have personalized stories and examples. My first thought that goes through my brain is, well, someone could go use Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini to create the answers to these questions. And then, as you said earlier, going to know that that came from them and they're not going to query it. So how in the world do we customize this stuff in a way that is valuable? Because, you know, I'm generally curious.

It's the stories that only you know. So what I mean by that is that you have run loads of conferences. For many, many years, you have your stories, you know, what your, your guests are going to go through, you know, that when they land, from the time that they land at the airport to the time they get to your venue, and to your events, you know that they are going to go in, they're going to want to do things, they, you know, they're there for a day before because they want to get settled, they're going to want to do some activities. So a piece of content could be, well, what should you do before the conference starts? And you would answer that not just by having, hey, here are the 3 things you should do. You would answer it in a way that says, hey, like, you know, last year we all had loads of fun at point A. We then moved to point B. And then, you know, so-and-so had a funny story there. You're really personalizing the experience. But when AI reads that piece of content and somebody says, I'm going down to Anaheim and I'm going to be there a day before, what should I do? And it finds that personal story. That is where it becomes, oh, hold on, I understand that. Because remember those fan art queries? It's not asking— the person is not asking, what should I do? They're saying, I've got some time to kill. I want to have a bit of fun before an event starts. I'm new to the area. That's the kind of stuff that AI is really looking for. So when you bring in your personal touch to this and you have data and stats— 2025, we did this. 2023, we did this. We hung out with 7 people who be specific and it makes it unique. Yes, that is, that is exactly the kind of content that AI wants. Now, I just want to just clarify, when I say AI wrote it, therefore it doesn't need to cite it, I do not mean that AI shouldn't help you write your content. But we want to make that distinction very clear. Absolutely use AI to create your content. For heaven's sakes, don't just drop in a prompt into AI because you saw a cool thing on LinkedIn and say, hey, write me an article about 7 things to do in Anaheim, because you're gonna get 7 things to do. You'll get it. But it's never going to be as good as an AI system that really knows you, really understands you, and you're able to inject your personal stories in there and your personal touch, your personal data, your company's experience, and inject that into that content. That is exactly what AI is looking for. So use AI as the tool, But you're still a marketer, you're still an executive, you're still somebody who's trying to grow their business. You still got to bring you into this. It cannot just be copy paste, copy paste because of a skill.

I'm thinking about those that are super niche focused could really benefit from this. So for example, let's say you're a financial advisor for entrepreneurs. Okay, that's super nichey, right? Not just anyone, but for entrepreneurs, right? Then you could write about financial investments from a perspective of the business, the small business and all that kind of stuff. And that's the kind of stuff that maybe, you know, the AI systems don't naturally have in their database and they would just be connecting dots together. Right. So the more narrow your focus, the more likely your content is going to be something that is ingested and delivered to someone who happens to be an entrepreneur that's looking for financial advice. Am I right or am I wrong on this?

Absolutely. You can't get more niche than a real estate professional who specializes in a specific area, right? That is geographically linked as well, right? They are absolutely crushing this because they own their space. So they're a— they're a real estate advisor who is looking to help first-time family homebuyers move into Arizona. Very, very, very, very specific.

And Phoenix, to be even more specific, right?

Even more specific. Yeah. Now, the mistake— here's the mistake— the mistake that they do is they write about real estate. That's not what the person is searching for. They know they're going to move to Phoenix. They know that this is what they want to do. They're a first-time homebuyer. They know all this. What they're looking for is really, is it safe? What are the school systems like? You know, is the council good or bad? Is there an HOA? Like, what's the rule around that? What are the taxes on the property? Okay, so it starts out wide because in their mind, that's what the mom and the dad are thinking about as they're moving their kids to Phoenix, Arizona. And they're getting narrower and narrower and narrower until eventually they go, okay, who's going to help me find my perfect home? A lot of people start at the bottom. Come and buy your home from me. I am the specialist in this area. And that's one layer of the cake. But now if you layer all the additional parts of that journey as they're at the top going, I'm not sure I even want to move to Phoenix, Arizona. Well, then the content that you write are all about the positive parts of moving to Phoenix, Arizona, without even mentioning buy a home from me, buy a home from me. But wait, there is more. If you read it, I'll sell you a home. Like, you don't do any of that. You're just adding value because that is what the person wants. The advisor wants value. You're just going to give it to them.

Okay, love it. Now let's get into the techie side of this because There is a way to do this that you recommend that might be not super counterintuitive to people. So let's, let's talk about some of the technical side of this that people need to understand.

Make it simple for AI. Like, AI has got all the information in the world, it's got access to absolutely everything. Don't make it difficult for AI to pick you. And what I mean by that is your website, your content needs to be set up in such a way where there's questions and answers, a Q&A. You've got to have the right stuff, but answer the question very, very quickly without the fluff. There is none of this warming up the audience because the audience is not reading from top to bottom. So get into it, give the answer ideally in the first 100 words or so. That is critical because that's the question, there's the answer, there's the question, there's the answer.

Should we answer each question with the target audience in mind? Completely. Does that make sense? For sure. Okay, so every answer See, because a human's not reading this because, you know, it's just going to chunk out what it wants, right?

Exactly. But you see, if you read it with the audience in mind and you know your avatar, and if the question is, why should I even move to Phoenix, Arizona? And you start off with, well, Phoenix has been rated as one of the best— that's boring. Everybody else has that information. But if you start that answer with, great question, I asked myself the same thing when I moved here 10 years ago. All of a sudden it's very— it becomes more personal and then you go, And you give the actual answer, that is a way that AI's predictive algorithm starts to figure out that there's value here. Oh, 10 years ago you moved your— it's got content, it's got stuff that the viewers—

Yeah. And you say, look, for anyone who is a new family looking to move for blah, blah, blah, for a new career, maybe you're moving to one of the local businesses, blah, blah, blah. Okay.

Perfect. The technical bits, it's make it easy. Number 2 is you could be blocking AI without even knowing it. So, you know, in the olden days we had these crawlers and who used to go onto the web and try to get that information. Some of that legacy stuff could still be around and you've got to look at something like your robots.txt file and make sure you haven't disallowed AI from even finding you. So that's a good place to start. I've had several businesses who said we tried everything, we just can't get traction. That was why there was a gatekeeper at the door saying all AI out. If you're using Cloudflare, Cloudflare has an AI blocker. I believe it's off by default. I'd also seen a lot of people saying that they've never touched it and it's on. So that's probably a good place to check. Another place to check is things like, do you use a lot of JavaScript? Do pages form based on the user's action? And it's like a bit of a— there was this stage in our lives in websites.

Oh, like forever scroll thing or whatever.

Yeah, well, depending on what you clicked on, different things rendered. And it was great for a human experience, very hard for an AI to figure it out. Although I will say AI is really getting better at understanding how code works. But again, make it super simple. Do you have a sitemap? Is it active? Like, is it constantly being updated? Are you checking that out? I also like that the sitemap is typically an XML file because it's machine readable. I also like to have a sitemap that's HTML. Why not have 2 stabs at the same pie? So things like your structures and your schemas, your FAQs, your lists, all the SEO stuff still applies. SEO is not dead. It's just got a different feel to it. And depending on how we structure it, we just want to make sure we get all the right techie stuff really wrapped up.

Well, and this is a question that I think some people are probably wondering. Okay, well, I power my site on WordPress. I do. Still one of the biggest platforms in the world. You don't have to technically have this listed on your blog, right? You can have it on a page, not a post, so that it's not technically easy for humans to find, but it's easy for AI to find because you've got like a— what'd you call it?

Your sitemap.

Yeah, your sitemap. What's your thoughts on that?

Yeah, if you have certain pages that are not linked from your menu, essentially doesn't mean that they're dead. Because if you've told your sitemap, say, hey, I've got all this information that's sitting over here, You should still be able to crawl it and still be able to index it. Great. The fact that a person can't click to it easily because you haven't linked it from your menu doesn't mean there's no value of having it still listed on your site. So remember we spoke about that newsletter? I have plenty of clients who've actually dumped their whole newsletter set on their website, just haven't linked it from their main menu system. But the information is there. It's crawlable, it's indexable. That's what we're talking about.

Okay. Liron, I know that this is kind of something that people have to process a little bit here, right? The whole idea that we're actually making something for a different customer technically. Well, let me rephrase. We're formatting and structuring this content for AI so that it will ultimately get delivered to our customers when they're using AI. It's kind of a big, you got to wrap your brain around it kind of thing. Where can people find out more about the stuff you've got going on? And if they want to connect with you online, socially or whatever, where do you want to send them?

Firstly, I absolutely agree. We have to unlearn a lot of stuff that we've learned. I'm a numbers guy, right? The ones and the zeros. I've done YouTube strategy forever. The hook, you know, the 5 seconds. Like, we know all of that. That's the world that we grew up in. You have to unlearn a lot of that in order to understand how AI works. And that's, I acknowledge, a very, very big ask. But unfortunately, it's a very necessary ask that we have to do. So this has been super fun. And thank you for allowing me to share that. To see what I've got going on, it's the answercontentengine.com. I've also got a tool there in case anybody wants to audit their own sites so you can see if you're technically fine. What's the sentiment of your site? Who's coming up when people are asking questions? Are you coming up or your competitors? And if your competitors are coming up, well, it even lists the kind of content you should be making to close that gap. Completely free. You can go check that out on the answercontentengine.com. And I'm happy to answer any question. I'm pretty active on Twitter, so at Liron_Segav on— I'm on LinkedIn as well, because we haven't lost social media, to be clear. We're just having a different arms to our content, one that talks to machines. That's all we're talking about.

Liron Segav, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today.

Appreciate you being here. Thank you.

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com/a122. Be sure to follow this show on your favorite podcasting app. And if you've been a listener for a while, I'd love a review and on whatever platform you're listening on. And also do let your friends know about this show. You can tag me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and/or X. That shouldn't be hard to find. And do check out my other show, the Social Media Marketing Podcast. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may AI help you become more successful. The AI Explored podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner. Do you want to go deeper in your understanding of AI? You've been listening to this podcast for a while, but did you know that we have a membership with lots and lots of marketers, entrepreneurs, and creators who learn every single month? Every single month we do live meetups. We have professionals coming on who teach training. And this is exclusive content only available in our AI Business Society. If you're ready to begin committing to ongoing development, join the AI Business Society right now by visiting socialmediaexaminer.com/ai.