Most Companies Won't Survive AI Search – Here's What They Should Do

SEO to me has always been one of the best inbound marketing channels.

In this episode, I'm joined by one of the OGs in search engine optimization, or SEO, Nathan Gotch. He's the CEO of Rankability, and he's going to share how executives and their companies can earn a spot in AI Answers and turn that attention into measurable revenue growth.

Getting traffic from blue links is a dead concept, or at least it's on its way out. ChatGPT will go to your knowledge base, pull that information, and will respond based on your knowledge base, which is really important because if you don't have a knowledge base, ChatGPT is going to make it up.

A whole bunch of our knowledge-based questions were getting ranked, so we just doubled down on it and started creating more and more and more.

The good news is all engagement is good engagement, and a lot of people fear that. They're like, oh, that one troll that's going to come on and say something. I get trolls all the time. I keep those comments, but 99% of comments, I let them come in.

Why should they personally care about SEO? What's a good length of a post? What is a red flag that tells an executives that their marketing team is stuck in outdated SEO thinking. Welcome, Nathan.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm very excited to have this conversation with you because, uh, AI search is just the topic that so many CMOs, executives are thinking about. For executives who either aren't marketers themselves or who have a marketing team, why should they personally care about SEO?

Oh man. Well, I mean, even prior to, you know, AI coming into the spotlight here, you know, SEO to me has always been one of the best inbound marketing channels and just for the sole reason for search intent. Right. And so we all use social media and, you know, it's very hard to get people off of social media platforms. Yes. So even if you're running good content, even if you have a good strategy, it's really, really hard to interrupt someone and get them to buy your stuff. And because that intent just isn't there. Right. And so with ads, you can obviously target based on intent. But as far as organically, that's kind of what drew me to SEO initially is like, okay, I can rank for these keywords and then I can actually drive real revenue knowing, you know, how it's going to be attributed that way. YouTube's the same way. There's a lot of, a lot of heavy intent-driven content there as well. You know, this is the second biggest search engine. So when it comes to SEO, I mean, it's, it is actually a matter of math in many ways because the two biggest websites on the internet are Google and YouTube. Yeah. So So understanding how to drive visibility and awareness there is a kind of a no-brainer. And then if we throw in the rising star of ChatGPT, which is now the 5th largest website on the internet, this is a, that's where we're starting to introduce this new game of, you know, and it's, we've got 100 different acronyms at this point for what we're doing.

Yeah.

But it is, you know, I think the one that I personally think could stick is Search Everywhere Optimization.

And I like that one. That's a good one because it really nails it.

Yeah, it does, because that's really what we're doing now. You know, it used to be you could back in the day, even a couple of years ago, build an entire business just relying on Google alone. Like you could do that. Dangerous, but you could do it. And now I would not recommend most businesses doing that. That would be highly, highly dangerous in many ways. Also, I'm not even talking about how Google's, you know, algorithms can be quite volatile in many ways. Yeah. So we can, we can get into that. But at the end of the day, for me, like the reason I love search in general is because there's clear intent. And that always seems to me kind of much more valuable than just trying to interrupt people watching cat videos.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a lot better.

Let's, let's put a misconception to bed here. You've heard, and I've heard, people say SEO is dead. I don't think it's dead. I think it's just evolved. What are your thoughts on that? What do, what should executives know when they hear that phrase, SEO is dead?

Well, I, I don't, I don't disagree with that concept totally, right? I think there, I think a lot of the practices that we did in the past are certainly dead.

Yes.

Um, I don't, um, I view it though as, is search dead? And to me the answer is a clear no. Yeah, right. And it's just the way that people are searching has changed dramatically. We went from, you know, let's be honest here, like Google, now that, now like You know, hindsight's 20/20, right? But prior to AI coming in, prior to ChatGPT, which was November 2022, Google looking back was wildly inefficient. I feel like when you wanted to find something, I mean, I would have to open up 17 tabs, sift through all the information and try to figure out what's going on. And even if I wanted to create a piece of content for SEO purposes, it'd be the same thing. I'd have to dig through a bunch of content. It would take hours just to, you know, put it all together. And then finally I create a piece of content. And now, you know, we have this new experience that's dramatically different, and even the way that people are using it is wildly different as well. I mean, you couldn't— like, I have a, I have a video that I published on YouTube. This is about a couple weeks after ChatGPT, uh, came out. I published this video, and ironically, I said SEO's dead. Oh yeah, interesting. Okay, because—

from the MGM Hotel. Okay.

Yeah, because when I used ChatGPT for the first time, I was like, this is incredible. Like I was just blown away because I used a little example and this is, I used in my video, which was when I was in high school, I took a computer science class and the entire project for the whole year was to create a dancing Santa Claus. And this was like a really, at the time, very difficult to do. Like it took a lot of coding, like things were not what they are today. And so I used that same concept and I did it in ChatGPT. I'm like, make me this, you know, give me the code for a dancing Santa Claus. Did it in 2 seconds. I took that same exact prompt and I threw it into Google to demonstrate how different it would be. And Google's like, can't find any results. Interesting. So, so like, you know, and that was before Google launched Bard, which is now Gemini and, you know, AI and all the stuff. But, but it was, it was a demonstration of like why that old model is really gone. And so going back to kind of the, the core question here, which is SEO is dead. I definitely think that getting traffic from blue links is a dead concept, or at least it's on its way out. Um, you don't find many SEO case studies of people growing huge organic search traffic from Google anymore. Okay, they used to be— you'd go on LinkedIn any day, they'd be, oh, grow our traffic by 75%, grow our traffic by 400%. No one has those case studies today.

Not today. Not today.

Um, it doesn't exist. So the game has changed. It's not that, you know, search is dead. People— I mean, I search on ChatGPT all the time. It's just sometimes the way I search could be a whole dissertation. Exactly. One phrase. Yeah, exactly.

And I think the big thing is that with Google, you sort of went to and you typed in a couple of phrases, a couple of words for a phrase. But, but in, in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, you type in very detailed queries, uh, very detailed problems. So let's talk about that for a moment. So AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, a whole bunch of others, they're becoming the default tools. So what do leaders need to be telling their marketing teams to make sure that their company and even the executive's name in many cases is actually showing up in those AI answers? And the reason I include an executive's names in those or their thoughts is because executive-led growth is a rising and a very solid marketing strategy. So what should executives be telling their teams to make sure that they're showing up?

Well, I think it's important to understand how the platforms work because that's kind of the key to, to, I hate to use this word, but manipulate. Okay. Because to a certain extent we are manipulating the answer, right? Other people will call it optimization, but the reality is we're trying to form and shape those answers that come through.

Yeah.

And they are formable. You can shape them. Here's what you can't shape with these platforms. This is what makes it very different than traditional SEO, the way that they're trained are closed models. So, you know, like GPT-5 just came out. Once that training, you know, cutoff is there, that's it. There's nothing else going into that model. It's completely closed. But ChatGPT and the other platforms have learned that the way to kind of make up this gap with like more relevant information, more timely information is they use what's called RAG, which is Retrieval Augmented Generation. And what it does is to eliminate the technical terms of this, all it is doing is they're going to search engines, finding the most current information, coming back and enhancing that answer. And the truth is like there's a lot of, you know, AI search tracking tools are popping up every single day. But the truth is like the best way to really track this is to track it as if it was a real user. So not through the APIs, not that way. The best way to do it is to force force it to go and retrieve information because that's going to give you the most, you know, like the, the most realistic answer. Um, and based on my early usage of ChatGPT-5, it retrieves a lot. It's really, it's like retrieving more than ever almost, it seems. Um, and I think they've just kind of found that they're not trying to be a search engine. They're using search engines, but they're not trying to be a search engine.

Yeah.

Um, and so I think that, so the reason I'm bringing this up is because if you want to influence the responses, You have to do traditional SEO, right?

It almost feels like a catch-22. You have to do SEO. That's the old way. Yet people are searching the new way and they're using the old way to get the answer. So how do you kind of like reconcile all that?

Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's important to mention, like I just published a video today that, um, just doing well on your website for SEO does not fully influence these platforms. There is a lot of evidence that, you know, first-party signals like your actual website can certainly rank for a lot of things in these platforms. It certainly can influence them a little bit, but they're much more sophisticated than traditional Google. And so the thing you want to be thinking about is not necessarily like you almost don't even want to think about how do I rank in ChatGPT or how do I rank in Perplexity? Like it's almost kind of just like wasted effort. What you really want to be thinking about are what are the signals that influence these platforms? And so a small example is like for a local business, the one I just did today, because it's fun on my mind. I was searching for how to improve a plumber in St. Louis. So want to show up for terms like best plumber in St. Louis, right? Or Chesterfield, actually. So what we did is we went and we ran queries across all the large language models. So ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, every single one. And then what we did is we looked at all the citations that were popping up, and then from there we extracted all the citations across all the platforms, and then we were able to prioritize based on their prominence. So come to find out, the number one most cited source was Yelp, which isn't much of a surprise on the local level, but that gave us intel and say, okay, we've got now 10 citations that we can go after. Now, what I have found is based on the industry, this changes quite dramatically. So like in the, in the context of local, you're going to see Yelp and Angie's List and Thumbtack and things like that, right? You're just naturally going to see those. You need to have a presence there, right? If you're a local business, obviously Google Business Profile is the leading thing. But aside from that, that's important. If you're a SaaS company, you need to be on G2 and Capterra and these other, you know, these are really like AI feeders and they are highly, highly influential. So it's kind of— I don't want to say it's it's, it's not easy, uh, but it's obvious what you need to do. Um, and so what you can do is you can run these, you can kind of reverse engineer the citations, and if you see gaps there, that's the first place to take action.

That's a really good— that's a really good action point right there, is, is executives should be telling their teams to look at citations on what— who's showing up, what are the sources of those citations, and go check if you're there, right? And just go try to be there, right? That's a— exactly. Is that how you become the source that AI trains on? Is that a good idea? Is that going to help you, uh, get, um, get your site ranked?

Yeah, so I think it's important to mention like the goal, the, the different goals of like SEO versus— if you want to call it GEO or a, you know, AI search optimization, whatever it is. Okay, so the old SEO strategy was you rank your blue link and you get traffic. That was the idea. Pretty simple. Uh, this is a little bit different because we're really trying to get in the generated response. So we want our brand to show up in the generated response in the, you know, if it says here the best, the 3 best plumbers in Chesterfield, Missouri, you want to be number 1, you want to show up. So if you're not even showing up, that's a problem. And then number 2, we want to influence so we can actually go higher up into the positions. And so that's important. And this is a very— this is what makes this whole process a little bit different is like they're not linking out to your website. Typically they're just mentioning your brand. And this might scare a lot of executives because it is— attribution is a real problem right now. And I will admit, I wish I had an answer to attribution right now. I don't have an answer to it. It is really, really tough because what's going on right now, and I've experienced just anecdotally, in ChatGPT, I've gone through a full sales cycle in one chat window. I mean, I've started from like, I have no clue what this thing is, to all the way to the end, I'm buying a product. Like, and all in one chat, right? So you'd like, the whole sales cycle can go through one chat window in 30 minutes. Um, but how do you track that?

Yeah, that's right. And to clarify, in case anyone's confused about what that sales cycle could look like, you would start the chat by trying to figure out what your problems are and how to solve some of those problems. And through ChatGPT's interactive nature, you would find, well, these are the types of things you should be considering, and so on, until you finally get to that point where you're ready to make a purchase. Is that what you mean by it?

Exactly. Basically following kind of the 5 stages of customer awareness, right? So, you know, have a topic where you're totally unaware, like, um, uh, how do I fix this coding problem that I'm— you know, I'm— let's say you're using one of the coding tools. How do I fix this coding problem? Then you go with ChatGPT and says you need to do these things, and then you finally get to the end. It's like, well, actually actually, it'd be easier if you just actually bought this little plugin. Yeah, it'd make your life a lot easier.

Yeah.

So, and I've, I've gone through this so many times. I've purchased so many things, direct recommendations from ChatGPT, um, and it's because I kind of sold myself.

Very interesting. Very interesting. Yeah, your prompt sort of guided you to, to the, to that purchase, and you, you made that decision. So let's talk about what, what a content plan could look like. So if a company wanted to design a plan that, that specifically enabled them to get surfaced inside the AI answers, what would that plan look like? What are the components?

Yeah, so I mean, I think it's important to mention that like you can split this process up into two broad buckets. So you have your first-party signals and your third-party signals. As of right now, third-party signals are way more powerful, just hands down. And I think that's probably going to be the way it is going forward, just because, of course, anyone can create content on their website. And this is, this is the way it's always been, even with, you know, SEO prior to this, which is I talked to hundreds and hundreds of businesses and they come to me and they say, we're doing all the SEO stuff right on our website. And then I throw their website into Ahrefs or Semrush and they have no backlinks. And I'm like, okay, you are doing 50% of it, but you forgot about the other half where you actually have to go and promote your website.

And this is for authority building, right?

Correct. Yeah. And that was just for pure SEO, right? Like that was just, you know, acquiring backlinks, growing your website authority. That was very important. Still important today. But when it comes to influencing these platforms, it's everything that we already do with SEO. And then there's like an extra 25% on top that's highly influential. And that's going to be like, as far as third-party signals, reviews, reviews on those platforms that I mentioned. Also review diversity, so having reviews across multiple relevant platforms that tend to feed into the AI platforms. Another one that's been really, really influential are listicles as well. So identifying any top lists of like, you know, best SEO tools, best plumbers in Chesterfield. Like if you're not prominent on those lists, you're not going to be fed into the AI very well.

How do you get on? So how do you get onto these lists, especially the ones that have influence?

Yeah. So this is, so there's some tricky things you can do and a lot of companies are doing this right now. So I'm just going to throw it out there. Okay. Number one, you can create your own list on your own, your own website. You create your own list. This is what we do on our own site. We say these are the best, you know, AI search tracking tools, right? And we list 21 of them. We just happen to be number one, right? And then so we publish on our own website. That's an area that we can control, right? It's one, you know, one variable. And then what we want to do is we can go to the existing listicles that are out there. So usually what we'll do is we'll just search, we'll search the query in Google, or in fact, if you want to get more advanced, you can actually use ChatGPT's new agent and they can actually go out there and find all these listicles for you and then you can pitch them. So usually we'll just reach out and say, hey, we noticed that you didn't mention our brand. I'm just wondering if there's any possible way we can get inclusion on here. We'd love to give you a free trial. We'll give them some sort of offer. And if that doesn't work, then the next logical step is, okay, can we possibly write a guest post on this website? And the reason is because we know that if that website is ranking well, it has a high probability of being used to enhance a response in the AI platform. So those are the ones that are really important is like reviews, listicles, and by the way, listicles have always been a good idea even for traditional link building, but now they're like really, really important, especially listicles that are ranking well.

What do you think about FAQs? Because that's also something that I'm hearing. You need to have more FAQs. Is that something you recommend too?

Yeah. So, so we'll switch over to first party and that's kind of on the first party side. So things that I've noticed that get pulled a lot, especially for, let's just say, SaaS, because I know that's kind of your, your field of expertise. Knowledge bases and highly indexable knowledge bases, crawlable and indexable knowledge bases get pulled a lot into the citations. Um, so like, for example, if you're, um, if people are searching about your brand, like they're, they're already brand aware and they're searching about various things, ChatGPT will go to your knowledge base, pull that information, and will respond based on your knowledge base, which is really important because if you don't have a knowledge base, ChatGPT is going to make it That's really it.

That's really it. Because I actually have a story behind that myself. That's— this is what got me into SEO many, many years ago. We had a knowledge base and we started seeing all this traffic coming in for people looking for what is RFC, which stands for Request for Comments. It's some nerdy internet thing. And so anyway, we're like, why do people look at this? And then they had— Google had found our knowledge base question and we noticed that, wow, a whole bunch of our knowledge base questions were getting ranked. So we just doubled down on it and started creating more and more And more, it just grew the search traffic. So if I hear you correctly, you're saying that strategy still works, but now it works inside AI engines, correct?

Yeah. And then they, they love anything that has like brand-specific queries. It loves to find a knowledge base because it wants— the ChatGPT wants to be accurate, right? It does not want to hallucinate. That's not their goal. They, they claim, right? They claim right now with GPT-5, they have less than 1% hallucination rate. I don't know if that's true. I've already seen a lot of hallucinations in the last week, but in general, they're trying to decrease it, which means that's why they're relying more on other sources to enhance. So this is why the first party signals are so critical. I think the best thing to do, and I've been talking about this even prior to ChatGPT, but I like to do a reverse process. So a lot of people, you know, like the traditional funnel, a lot of people used to focus on top of the funnel and then they eventually get to the bottom. I like to start at the bottom of the funnel. So, so in this case, bottom of the funnel would be all of the brand-aware queries like we're talking about here. I would start with all of those, anything related to our brand. I want to cover every single one of those queries on our website. So whether it's through a knowledge base or whether through an FAQ, whatever it may be, I want to tackle it. I want to blanket every single thing for those. If you're a brand new, you know, brand, for example, you're going to say, well, we don't have any queries, so we don't, I can't create anything. All you have to do is go find your biggest competitor, put them into Ahrefs or Semrush and extract their branded queries and then start building that content in anticipation of those queries that are going to come. So kind of a proactive approach. So that's, that's the first part. And then as I go up the funnel, now we're going to get into— and this will depend on the business. So I'm speaking in terms of SaaS here, but you would start to do like comparison queries. So, you know, rankability versus Surfer, right? Type of thing.

So like your brand or your competitor's brand alternatives, pages like that, right?

Yeah, exactly. So I usually for SaaS, there's kind of a few different models that you'll typically lean on. So it'd be competitor versus competitor, be competitor alternatives, and then we'll actually even go as far as doing a competitor review and it will be like a fair review, you know, give them 5 stars. But we'll say, by the way, here's an alternative to this. And the main reason is because you want to really go super deep on these topics. This is one, unfortunately, one mistake I see with a lot of websites. They go a centimeter deep on topics. They, they just kind of scratch the surface and they move on to the next one. Just to give some perspective on this, like we're working on a cluster right now for Rankability. We're starting to do a little bit of stuff. We've waited till we built some authority. Now we're starting to create some content. But the cluster we're working on is like 200 pieces of content just for one topic. So, and because there's so many, it's like a, it's like peeling an onion. There's layers and layers and layers and you can just keep unpacking them. So like what we do is we start with a pillar asset, which will be an asset that is, does not have any brands associated with it. So typically, like we mentioned a listicle, it would be like, The one we're using right now is 21 Best AI Search Tracking Tools. Okay, so that's our pillar asset. From there, we're going to build support around that pillar asset. So basically what we're going to do is we're going to take this kind of broader middle of the funnel kind of concept and start to build out the layers. So now we're going to have a, you know, review for Peak AI, right? So we have a review for them. Then we'll have Peak AI alternatives. And then, you know, Peak AI versus Rankability. We're going to build all those out for every single brand that exists, those are all going to internally link to each other as well.

That's very—

building this— yeah, that's very powerful cluster.

Okay, so let me just kind of like see if I get this right, summarizing it. 21 different tools, each one of those tools has its own page, and then from those you can create pages that are like comparing this tool to that tool. And what that does is it's, it's got this blanket effect of no matter what someone is typing in there's a strong chance that you will have covered it in your content. Is that the idea behind this?

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And in fact, this is actually how, um, I don't know how long this is going to last. I'm really enjoying it. But in ChatGPT, if you use their reasoning model, and this is actually before GPT, uh, GPT-5 came out, you would use O3. So O3, you could actually open it up and see how it reasons through a query. You can still do that in with the new thinking model for GPT-5. I would play it, play with that and look at what it does because what it will show you is the exact queries that it uses when it goes and searches and you can actually see it like exactly what it's searching. And there's this concept that you've probably seen floating around called query fanout. And that basically means that the, the AI will start with a very specific term. So it might be like best SEO tools. It will go and search that. Then from there it will say, okay, now I understand the top tools. Then it will start searching, I don't know, Ahrefs review or Ahrefs versus Semrush. It starts, it's like a late, it's like I said, it's like an onion. It just keeps layering, layering and layering. And so you need to target all those keywords because you're going to be able to influence the AI if you're showing up, right? And so this is why like your first party signals are critical because it's actually an area that you can control. You can third party, you can't control everything. But first party, it's completely within your control. So there's no reason not to do it.

Yeah.

And it's highly beneficial. So that's the way we like to do it. We start at the bottom of the funnel, work our way up and go like a mile deep on topics. What's it like to post?

Because, you know, going a mile deep means it's probably somewhat long. It's also very structured and probably includes lots of keywords that you want to get found on. In the right schema format. So you've got it in the head section, headings inside the body. If keyword density is still a thing, then you would want to be mentioned a certain number of times. Inbound links, outbound links, a bunch of other stuff that's block and tackle SEO. So how would you— how do you address all that?

The length. So yeah, I mean, shameless plug here, Rankability. This is, this is, this is what our tool does, right? Yeah. So our content optimizer, essentially what it does is it goes and it it extracts the word count from the top ranking competitors. So we're pulling it from Google specifically. So it's looking at the top 30 competitors and then assigning more weight to the top ranking results. Yeah. And so the reason why this is important is because there's a lot of like content optimization tools out there and a lot of them will give you an average word count, which this is a key reason why we— one of the key reasons we created our tools, because we got kind of tired of the average word count, because what would happen is we would create a 3,000-word piece of content on a keyword that didn't deserve 3,000 words. And as an, as an agency, you're, you know, you're cooking your budget by doing that when you didn't need to. All you needed was 700, but you, you've, because of the averages, you followed some outlier that made you juice your, you know, your numbers. So what we did is we basically made it so we eliminated the, uh, bottom 10 and, um, top 10% of word counts and got a true median word count. So you don't need to use Rankability to do this. You could use any tool or you could just do it manually, but basically you could take the top 3 to 10 and just find out what that true median word count, that true middle. And that's really the sweet spot we try to aim. So we have like a range. So it'd be like, you know, between 700 and 1,500 words. I always tell people go towards the low end because you can practice more brevity and focus more on quality instead of just juicing your numbers, which a lot of people tend to do.

Let me ask you about this one. So a lot of people are, because FAQs are starting to become You know, as we would discuss more relevant, uh, for AI answers, if you had an article and you had it, you know, I don't know, 1,500 words or something, is it advisable to put an FAQ at the end of it so that you try to get more impact out of it? Or should your entire article just be an FAQ, uh, and then have a separate article that's the article? What's the best approach here?

Yeah, my criteria for when to I house it in one asset versus splintering off to another is largely based on the depth and the intent of that topic. Okay. So if I feel that the topic is going to require much more depth, we're going to splinter off. But in some cases we may like answer, have a little snippet that slightly answers that question and then internally links to a deeper asset on that idea. So I don't think there's like a perfect rule for this necessarily. But one thing I'll say is like what not to do. Which I see a lot of brands do, is slapping some ridiculous FAQ on every single page that no one ever reads.

Yeah.

And that's, that's just SEO nonsense typically that people are trying to do because I, for me, an FAQ needs to have like a business intent, right? And so like if you have a commercial page, yeah, have an FAQ that helps sell the product. Like that's really important. But if you like an informational asset, you just like throw an FAQ on there. Just because you're trying to like juice your numbers, I don't know if that's necessarily beneficial. So, um, needs to have some good intent there is what I'm saying.

Is schema as important now? And, uh, just for anyone who's listening and doesn't fully understand the concept of schema inside pages, it's basically something that tells Google, here's the structure of my page. And this part is a head, this part is an article. This is something, this is a video page. And so it indexes a little bit differently. So schema is still relevant for AI SEO.

Yeah, I mean, it's highly debatable topic right now as far as like its influence in ChatGPT specifically. Mm-hmm. Um, obviously its influence in Google is quite clear.

Yeah.

Right? I mean, because of the rich results that occur in the SERPs, and that's largely driven by, by a lot of different schema types.

Mm-hmm.

Um, but as far as like, I think sometimes people think like, if I put schema on my page, my rankings get better. And that's not typically what happens. It's usually more of like an indirect approach, which is like, we'll just say in the context of Google, you put product review schema on a product page. Now it's going to show the star ratings in the SERPs. Well, that could increase organic CTR, which is likely a ranking factor, right? So it's not like that type of direct thing. In ChatGPT, you know, ChatGPT doesn't really have rich results right now. It's kind of just simple. There is, there is starting to be some more rich results for shopping related queries. So like e-com type of queries are starting to be more, and there is some influence, um, some evidence that schema is influencing that. Um, but the thing, the way I think about schema is like, it, it's easy to do and it doesn't hurt you. So there's just no really, there's no reason to not do it. Uh, it's just more of like ensuring, like, don't think that if you just put schema on your page, now you're you're gonna get better brand performance, which some people kind of put too much weight on it. Yeah.

I want to pivot now to how an executive can actually help influence the visibility of just getting found. And so a lot of executives are turning to LinkedIn. Is there a way that an executive can structure their LinkedIn post to have a better chance of being indexed by Google and surfaced in AI answers? Or does that part not matter?

Well, the— I guess it depends on what the goal would be. So if the goal is for reputation management, that's kind of a different goal than just maybe, uh, entity association with a particular subject matter expertise. So kind of two different things. Let's just assume it's for subject matter expertise kind of association. So like Nathan Gotch is associated with SEO, right? Those two entities are associated together. Um, the thing you want to focus on, if the goal is to influence the AI platforms, you want to focus on platforms that are highly indexable in Google. That's the key. Highly indexable actually in 3 search engines: Google, Bing, and Brave specifically. The reason for that is because, um, all Google products obviously use Google search index. So, you know, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, and Google Gemini all use Google. Obviously. What about YouTube?

Does YouTube also use it?

Uh, you, uh, in reverse, uh, YouTube AI products will use YouTube. Okay. Um, yeah, so that is true as well. Yeah.

Okay.

So, um, Google's always going to use Google products, just the nature of it.

Right.

Um, and then there's evidence that ChatGPT and Perplexity and a few others use Bing. Um, and then there's only one that There's some evidence that it used a different search engine, which is Claude. Claude tends to, it really matches Brave really well. No one knows really why that relationship is there, but that's one that seems to be the case. And then there's also an outlier like Deepseek that uses Baidu, which is the Chinese search engine. So the thing is we want to focus more on what are the platforms that index really well? So if you're an executive, let's say focus on your personal brand. I have a lot of experience here. I can help on this one. Yeah. The core platforms I would focus on, number one is your— you need to have a branded website. So like a personal brand website. So NathanGotsch.com, right? And you would treat this as your home base. This is really important because you're going to build the entity association from, you know, kind of like your central command, right? And you can use, going back to schema, in the schema, you can use same as schema and you can link out to your various social media profiles, various citations that you might have, and that can help train the large language models and train Google about who you are. Right. That's really important. So you want to start with your website, get that squared away. Then from there, wow, wow, wow, wow. The platforms that I think are most influential right now, LinkedIn is highly indexable. Like a lot of my, even just my regular posts get indexed in Google, like not even my article-based posts, just my regular posts. So typically what I do is I'll put, I'll try to plant a keyword in the hook and knowing that it's going to influence Google. So I'll try to plant it right in the hook naturally. But like an example is like the one I just did recently was AI search rank trackers are lying to you. Okay, so I planted that, I planted that keyword and I had a little hook knowing that Google is going to crawl that and likely probably surface that post. Yeah. And I've done that quite a bit. So LinkedIn is a really good place to start.

Yeah.

The reason I don't mention YouTube first is just because like I've been doing YouTube for almost 8 years now. It's really, really hard. It's like LinkedIn is much easier. You can write a post, you can be done with it in an hour. YouTube is like, for example, I just published a video, took me about a day and a half. So a lot of work. It's a lot more work. It's a lot more powerful. It's way more powerful as far as influencing the algorithms and even influencing people in general. Nothing beats video.

Are you seeing videos, video content show up as something that the AI engines are actually indexing as well?

Oh, majorly. Yeah, YouTube's a common source. And it's kind of interesting the way that, at least in my theory as to how it works, but basically the way that it works, and this is actually how YouTube works algorithmically, is when you publish a video, it doesn't, like YouTube doesn't watch your video and say, this is a great video, and then it shows it to a bunch of people. That's not what it does. It's just an algorithm. What it does is it extracts the transcript. So it pulls the transcript from the video, then it uses natural language processing to extract the entities to understand what it's about. So it starts there from that basis, which of course makes SEO very relevant in this case. And so it will understand what that video is about and it will push it to a very small audience first. And if that audience engages with it, then it'll push it out to a little bit more and a little bit more. And it progressively does that until it eventually hits a cap where it's like, okay, like, you're not going any further at this point, right? So, and that's kind of how the virality happens. But as far as the large language models, they do the same exact thing. They crawl YouTube, they extract, uh, they extract the transcript, and then it uses NLP to understand what it is. So, um, so it's very important if you can do it. And by the way, the other thing that helps too is what I've been talking about is more about your kind of first-party control-based assets that you have. So your website, YouTube channel, LinkedIn, X, whatever it may be. Um, but what is even more influential would be what we're doing right now, a podcast, discussion. Exactly. Getting interviewed, uh, signing up for featured.com and responding to queries on there.

Okay.

Uh, go— going to Quoted, uh, signing up for HARO. Like, that is the most influential because at the end of the day, these LLMs are really smart and they will always lean towards diversity. It wants to see a lot of diversity. So it, like, for example, my channel doesn't show up a lot in citations because I think it knows I'm associated with these brands pretty well. So I'm very biased. So if I say, like, on YouTube, hey, Rankability is the best content optimizer, right? Okay. Yeah, of course I'm going to say that, right? That's just naturally. But if But if 7 other influencers also say that, or, you know, they say that some executive is such a great person, that's much more influential.

So what you're talking about is, is PR in a way, because you're talking about how to influence other places to talk about you. Can you address that? Because I've also found PR to be one of the most effective ways to boost just your online visibility. I know in my prior companies, so one of them was called MailerMailer. It was an email marketing software tool and we were much smaller than the MailChimps of the world and the Constant Contact. But we were the first company back in— I don't remember what year it was— to create an email marketing metrics report. And we got ranked so fast that started bringing inbound not just links, but calls from Toyota, DuPont, and all these companies that found us through that. And I've since replicated that strategy in many of my other companies. So how does, uh, how do you advise a company to actually do PR that's going to complement all of the, um, the, let's call it search everywhere optimization work they're doing?

Yeah, I mean, I think we're definitely— I think you mentioned this in the beginning of our conversation, that we're definitely in like a founder-led type of environment. Yeah, I think most companies— and it's really challenging because like I've worked on the agency side most— actually most of my career was on the agency side. Now I'm in SaaS, but mostly it was doing— working with clients. And I can tell you it's like pulling teeth trying to get a founder to do something because they're running their business, right? They're running their business, they're busy, they, they're dealing with putting out fires all day. Like they don't have the time or the energy to sit down and record a YouTube video.

Correct.

Right. It's, it's really, really hard. So that's the biggest hurdle that I think most businesses face is like, how do we actually get them to do what we need them to do? Now, there are a lot of smart things are happening right now. And one thing that a lot of people have been experiencing, including myself, is if you're an agency and you're working with the business, and this could also be if you're working in-house and you're trying to get your CEO to like create content, just get them to book a day, just one day, and just interview them all day on everything so you can build a database of their knowledge. Yeah, build that knowledge database. And then you've got the AI platforms that can help you kind of amplify that more. That's kind of a good place to start because you need, you need something to work with. Um, now there's kind of two things that I would be thinking as far as like founder-led stuff. I think number one, the reason why founders, I think personally, are best, and like you can see this actually with Sam Altman, uh, with OpenAI. He's like one of their biggest— and even Elon Musk. I mean, they're, they're their biggest marketers, right? Um, but I think the reason why it's so important for the founder to be involved is because they typically are subject matter experts, right? And, and I think a lot of the time there's been this old idea the CEO would just, you know, find someone to do that stuff, right? But that person doing that stuff is not an expert. Yeah. And so it just doesn't come off as well. And, you know, so, so I think just my totally my opinion, I just think if you're going to have people create content in your business, the founder needs to be involved somehow, some way, somehow needs to be involved. And number 2, if you've got subject matter experts specifically in the business, those are also really good content creators within certain guidelines. So but that's That's, I just think that's the way to do it. I think if you just wanna hire an intern to do your social media, you're, you're gonna get wrecked. Yeah.

And, and I'm so glad you said all this and I know I didn't pay you to say it, but that's exactly the reason we built Make Media is because it helps people do interviews right from their phones and, uh, and it captures it and helps convert conversations into very authentic content.

Welcome. You've got a good solution.

Oh, we are getting some pretty good feedback about it. Thanks for that.

Yeah.

Now there's a couple things that our audience might not know. You have over 70,000 LinkedIn followers. You have over 120,000 YouTube followers. You grew that. You're a founder. You grew that. And I mean, it was a lot of work to get you— does that, does that channel work? Does YouTube work as a channel for you, as a growth channel driving the business?

Oh, it's the best. Yeah, hands down. Not even close. And I'm— this is coming from an SEO guy, right? And so I'm telling you, YouTube— I started my channel in 2017, and I was I was deathly afraid to do video. I had like a horrifying experience when I first started my business. I like signed up for the Yelp Partner Program and they like came to my, my office, my apartment at the time. They came and they're like, okay, we've got this video for you. Okay, tell us about your business. And I'm like deer in the headlights. I'm like, I don't, I don't know what to say. I'd never been on video my entire life. So I like was horrified of video for a really long time. But then in 2017, I just decided, I'm like, you know, this video is the It is the future. Like, I like, and I was just looking anecdotally, like, I love YouTube. Like, why would I not do video? Clearly this is what the medium that people are going to gravitate towards. So I just, I just did it. I started recording. Um, and I didn't see a lot of great results initially. I mean, like, I love looking back at my old charts, my old, like, analytics. I had, like, I had days where I had, like, 2 views. I mean, like, pretty sad stuff going on for a while. And this is like a year and a half of just like like brutal view counts. Um, but I just kept going, and come to find out, I didn't— I actually didn't even realize it's gonna happen— ended up being my number one lead generation channel. Wow. Um, even, even beyond Google. And going back to earlier in our conversation, I think the reason why is because YouTube— nothing gets someone to know, like, and trust you faster than YouTube. Nothing. It does— it doesn't even matter if you're the most skilled copywriter on the planet, you're like Frank Kern or David Ogilvy, you could have those skills, nothing will beat someone watching an hour of your video.

And I've heard, I've heard so many people who are doing, uh, who are very active on YouTube will go to a conference and people will just approach them and start talking to them like they have known them for years. Did that happen to you too?

And you're like, it did. Yeah, it did actually happen. I went to a conference recently. Look, I'm just a normal guy. Yeah. So, um, but yeah, but it's, but it is like it's more of just if you do it the right way, it's just so powerful because you forget if you're helping people, that's the goal, right? YouTube, there's only two goals on YouTube for a business. Number one, you're either going to entertain or you're going to educate. Most businesses are better off educating. Like, don't try to be funny if you're not funny. Don't try to be entertaining if you're not entertaining. Like, YouTube's a really good place because you don't have to be charismatic. There's some of the top YouTubers are not wildly charismatic.

That's a good— that's very interesting because that's almost a contrarian view viewpoint. A lot of people think that, oh, I can't be on YouTube, I'm not that animated, I'm not all that. So you're saying that you don't have to be?

Good. Not at all.

Yeah, interesting. Um, no, let me double-click on this a little bit because I find this fascinating, and I know it's one of the biggest fears people have of getting on camera and saying something that they know, but then they do retakes. I take tons of retakes. I don't do a great job with doing my videos But you're right, they are effective. So what advice would you give to executives who want to make YouTube a growth channel for visibility? Something happened between you getting 2 views on a video to now you publish a video and you'll have 10,000 views in a week. And so what, what was the difference that made that type of impact?

I mean, I— it's really just kind of a psychology thing, and I just think about like What do people want when they come to YouTube, right? Like, I'd make it less about myself and more about them. And so when I do a video, I'm thinking about, is this actually helpful? And I just think about that. Now, of course, I don't know the answer, by the way. I don't know whether the video is helpful until I publish. Okay, so it is always somewhat of a guessing game, but as you do more videos, you start to go, okay, this format tends to do a little bit better than this format. And so typically when I publish, I'm usually using a proven format that I know is going to work. I've got my other 20% that are my more experimental stuff that I know could totally flop. Okay. So, and of that 20%, maybe 1% of it doesn't flop, but it does really, really well. So, but I think the most important thing is you don't want to treat YouTube like you're going to sell stuff.

Yeah. Yeah.

If you treat it as a sales channel, you're going to get destroyed. That's like, that's not what you want to— you want to go on there and just be— you're a person who's just there to share your expertise and help people. And going back to the thing that helped me a lot with like the takes and like kind of being overly critical of yourself, this is a common thing for people on video. Like people, a lot of people are afraid of video. It's a huge fear-related thing. And it's so funny because like I have my I have my video set up right here and it's like my light, my camera, and a chair. And like, you think about how funny it is that people are afraid of video when you're literally in a room by yourself. Yeah, you're just— you're talking to a camera that has no emotion and people are like insanely afraid of it. Yeah. But of course they're not. They're not fearful of that. They're fearful of what people are going to say about that. Right. Right. And the good news is all engagement is good engagement. So, and a lot of people fear that. They like, oh, that one troll that's going to come on and say something. I get trolls all the time.

Yeah.

But, but I, I, I keep those comments unless it's something like totally crazy, then yeah, I might get rid of it. But 99% of comments, I let them come in. Yeah, I let them come. And that's important. But the thing that helped me with kind of overcoming the fear, treat it as if you were going to go speak on stage. So when you do your topic and you get your video right and you're about to turn on that record, it's one take. You don't get another chance. This is it. You get one take all the way through and whatever happens, happens. Yeah. And that's one— that's the way I kind of program myself. It's like, all right, I'm doing— I'm speaking on stage here. Here I go. I don't get another chance. I'm going all the way through. Whatever mistakes I make is what I make. Yeah. And it's not to say I won't cut out real, real mess. Sometimes my kids run in the room and there's stuff that goes on, right? But, but in general, like, it's just helpful kind of mindset shifts. Like, okay, this is like one take. I'm going to do this. And funny thing is, on YouTube, perfection is actually not rewarded.

You know, I'm so glad you said that because when you were talking about, oh, your kids might run in the room and I'll, you know, I'll have something similar happen as well. And when I watch a video that's got that going on in the background, it just makes it so much more authentic. I feel like I can relate to this person, whereas when it's so polished, I feel like they're not really talking to me. Yeah, that's something you see also.

Yeah, exactly. And you can see both sides of the equation. There's some people that go highly polished, Christopher Nolan type of style, like, okay, that can work. But I think for most people, just being more authentic is probably a better move. Yeah, that's why, like, I've kind of gone away from, like, pure scripting. I used to script everything to the fullest extent. Now I do kind of a rough script where it's like I've got my outline in place, but it's then more just kind of riffing in between. And I found that's more— you usually the only thing I'll script is the intro, and then everything else is just outlined. Okay, that's it.

Before we get to our rapid-fire round of questions, I have one other thought here for you. How do you future-proof, uh, what you're doing? So what is something that an executive could tell their team or, or some action that they can take this quarter to future-proof their search visibility as, uh, the AI search movement grows?

I think it's a good one. Yeah, that's a tough one. Yeah, because I, I, the future, I try not to, I try not to think too much in the future about where this is going to go, right? Because it is just kind it can send you down a dangerous, dark path. Yes. And so I try to stay right in the middle of like, all right, let's just live in today.

Yeah.

And what I try to do is I try to think about, okay, we've got all this beautiful technology here right now. How do we use it? And that's what I think about. How do we use it more to become more efficient, more effective, produce better outcomes? And what you'll find is like, I use these tools a lot. Like I build landing pages with AI. I like every possible use case you could do. Too. When you get deeper into using AI, you realize how close we are to it not taking people's jobs. So, and there's— because like, people, it's easy to read the headlines and see it, but I'm telling you, there's— yeah, there is. Like, for example, I'll give you a small example. I use Replit, which is an AI, you know, you can build apps and landing pages. I've been using it religiously Occasionally though, I'll open it up one day and I'm like, I'm going to create some landing pages, you know, get my stuff going, deletes my whole website, you know, like, okay. So it's like, okay, that wasn't exactly what I was hoping for today, but that's where it went. So there's just a lot— we— there's a lot of progress that needs to be made. And I can assure you, most people's jobs, if you're using the tools, your job will just evolve. Yeah. And, and I think the people that are in danger are people that are still have their head in the sand. And they don't want to spend 4 hours playing with a tool when you should. You should be playing with these tools, you should be learning them, you should be seeing the opportunity that exists. And if you're still like, "Ah, AI is not going to change, isn't it not a big deal?" Or you're on the extreme side like, "Everyone's going to lose their job and we're all going to be on food stamps." Yeah. I mean, you can't be on either side there. I think you just got to be kind of in the middle, and I think that's the key. But I think as far as stability, you know, I wish I had an answer to that. But I think at the end of the day, if you're a business, a business or a business executive, it always goes like the core principles don't change. And if a business needs more customers, there's a place to get them and you've got to figure out where they are. As far as I know, people are still buying stuff. Last time I checked, like, I just bought, I just bought a new car yesterday. Yeah. So still buying stuff, you know, and that has not gone away. So I think it's just kind of where are the customers and how do we influence them? And I think right now, I think a lot of people just been kind of complacent. I think a lot of people have just been sitting a lot of the same channels and it's been kind of cool. I'll do email marketing and SEO and a little bit of social media and and, you know, it's all cool, but AI kind of disrupted things. Now people are kind of scrambling, and I think that's making people feel a little uneasy. Yeah.

Um, oh, I like what you're doing in terms of what, what you might call channel stacking, where you're using, uh, blogging, you're using podcasts, you're using, uh, LinkedIn, and of course YouTube. And when you stack all of them together, which they're all very related, you could actually create numerous assets from one starting point, which, you know, to me, I look at it as a podcast. Generates so much in terms of content assets. And so, uh, that's a great point. I'm going to move into a rapid-fire round. Thank you so much for this so far. What is a red flag that a marketing— that, that tells an executive that their marketing team is stuck in outdated SEO thinking?

I mean, that's a tough one. I mean, I think if they're, if they're still really focused on like individual keyword rankings in traditional search, I would be a little concerned. Okay. If you don't hear them talking about how do we drive better brand performance and visibility in ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude, if they're not, if they're not even mentioning the LLMs, I would be scared of what they're doing because they're behind. I'm telling you now, they are behind. They're the, the, the highest smartest people in this industry right now are on it already. And I, you know, I think personally I'm very biased, but I think like SEO professionals are the best positioned for this new kind of AI search just because the foundational layers are still very applicable. So, but I think, yeah, I mean, if they're not talking about using AI and talking about how to drive visibility in AI, I think that would be a real problem. I think another thing that would be important too though is like, I've been on the other side of that equation where I'm an agency trying to talk to business owners to, you know, sell them on what we're doing. Right. And I can tell you, business owners need to be much more open to automation and letting, letting the agencies use AI without being kind of romantic about things. I've noticed a lot of businesses get really romantic about this stuff, like, oh, we're, we're too good for AI or we're not going to use AI content or It's all this kind of like ego-based stuff and I, I don't think it's particularly useful.

Yeah.

So yeah.

Good to know. Uh, what's one budget item that you'd fight to protect in a downturn to keep your visibility growing?

Oh, oh man, that's a good one. I mean, I think any resources that are focused on driving reviews is are resources that should never go away.

Interesting.

Okay. Yeah, I think because like if I can think of any one variable that's the most influential, it's probably that. Do you think? Yes, it's so critical because you look across and I've looked across basically every large market. So local, SaaS, e-com, the kind of the big three there. Actually, you can even say agency as well, as well, because you have like Clutch and these other kind of directories. The thing that seems to be the most prevalent across all of them is the quantity and quality and diversity of reviews. I mean, that seems to be a really, really big one, which makes sense, right? I mean, that just makes a lot of sense. So I would be— I think most like local businesses, like there's some local businesses do this really well, like the HVAC industry. They are incredible at getting reviews, like so, so good. But I think more local businesses take it way more seriously. Like, and not just Google reviews, but also diversifying across the other platforms, uh, is really important. So I think if I had to keep one thing, I'd say let's keep the review engine rolling. Like, that's something that's really, really important.

That's a very good takeaway. Um, if a competitor starts showing up in AI Answers more than your company, what's the first move that you direct your team to make?

Well, if they're showing them, uh, higher positioned and have more prominence than us, then there's clearly a signal gap that exists. It's simple as that. There's no other possible way that they could be ahead of you unless we have a gap somewhere. So trying to uncover where that gap is, is the first place I would start to do my detective work. And the cool thing is you can use deep research across a lot of these platforms and have it do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. So you could literally, you could do a competitor analysis with ChatGPT, just do deep research and say, analyze this competitor, create a report about this competitor and find everywhere they have reviews, everywhere that they have brand placements, like everything about them essentially. And then you cross-check yours first that and you say, okay, oh yeah, we have gaps here, here, here, and here and here. Now we need to fill those. Now, one thing that's important is like, I think the first step is to just narrow the gap, but you need to get in the surplus too. And this is something a lot of people don't think about is like, oh, well, our competitors have 1,000 reviews. So if we get 1,000 reviews, reviews were good, but the problem is they're not going to stop doing business. They're gonna keep, they're gonna keep acquiring reviews. So you have to actually outpace them if you want to beat them. And this happens along the local level of Google Business Profiles. I mean, there'll be like a huge gap. They're like, okay, let's get 1,000 reviews and we'll be good to go. And I'll be like, well, in 6 months from now they're gonna have 1,500. So we gotta like double, triple what they're doing.

Yeah, so that is a great takeaway. Use the AI engines to figure out what other people are getting ranked on and then maybe even use that to figure out where your gaps are. It can actually do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. That's pretty, pretty good takeaway. Um, got one last question here for you. Aside from revenue growth, what's the one deliverable that every marketing team should produce monthly to show that they're making progress in AI search?

Yeah, well, it's definitely not traffic. Um, so I would not say traffic.

Okay.

I, I would certainly focus more— so there's a few metrics, and this is, like I said, this is an area that that's growing right now, trying to get this squared away because I think right now is a lot of volatility with attribution. So we're trying like, hope, like my dream is that ChatGPT launches their own like Google Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console. Like that would be amazing, but I'm not going to hold my breath. So, but in the meantime, I think there's a few metrics we should focus on. Number one, aside from revenue, we're going to be looking at depending on the business. If it's SaaS, it's going to be free trials, right? If it's a local business, we're going to be focusing on leads. And if it's e-com, obviously we'd be focusing, I guess, you know, if we can't use revenue, I guess sales don't matter. Can't use that one.

But that is probably the most important metric.

Yeah, but, but, but I would say aside, aside from like the obvious metrics, the one that's— I look at a few different things. Number one is quantity of brand mentions and referring domains that we're acquiring over time. Time to our, you know, to the— for the brand and for the domain. So you can track that in Ahrefs, just your referring domain growth over time. That should constantly be growing. Every single month you should see growth there. Um, at the same speed, we want to see new indexed pages appearing in Google. So that just means more SEO-driven content. Those should be growing in parallel together every single month. Um, and it's really, really important. And that will help a lot. Just doing that alone will help significantly. Um, the other thing too is brand mentions. And this is— there's, there's tools out there that can track this, but it's— they're not super accurate. But it is something to be tracking as well because there is evidence that just straight unlinked brand mentions tend to also influence the LLMs as well. Uh, so that could be like, you know, on Reddit and Quora and other forums. Having brand mentions there is really important. And then aside from that, kind of one lagging metric that you'd want to focus on as well to kind of see that the brand is growing, branded search volume. So you can track branded search volume inside of Google Search Console and see that there's growth happening there. Yeah, because that's, that's kind of an indirect way of determining that like our marketing is doing well. And unfortunately, you know, you can't really track anything from ChatGPT. You can track referral traffic from ChatGPT, but it inside of Google Analytics 4. But, you know, I, I— that goes without saying you should do that. But I'm just saying the other stuff that's kind of more indirect, I think brand branded searches are probably the best signal that you're doing well. Um, and then of course there's the AI search trackers as well. So you can use AI search tracking tools to actually see how your brand is being represented in the AI platforms.

So yeah, excellent. Uh, Nathan, thank you so much for joining us today. What a, what a playbook. I mean, I think you dropped so many golden nuggets that people should listen to this episode a couple of times to make sure that they got it all down. So thank you very much. I really appreciate your time.

Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

All right, everybody, we'll see you next time on Executive Signal.