SEO vs AEO: What Every Business Needs to Know

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the, uh, impromptu Roland's having challenges with his computer, Ryan's having challenges with his computer podcast of Business Lunch.

It's special.

What is it? Special, uh, no AI agents fixing our stuff edition.

Yeah.

Like let's, let's have every single audiovisual setup that we have break at the same time in multiple locations. Um, but we're still here and we're still really freaking smart. At least we play smart people on TV.

Yeah. And I wanted to chat about, um, I think that, um, this, this is, so as we're recording this, ChatGPT just announced that ChatGPT ads are going to be available. And, um, that caused us to say, you know, that's definitely something we should get into and test. And then we got into, um, the, you know, the platform and, um, kind of looked at like, ads are supposed to be run a little bit differently that way. You're really building to, um, you know, to get the recommendation more than you are, like, you're building to get into the conversation more than you are just like, you know, buy my stuff right now. Um, we'll see how that ultimately works, but it caused us to dive into a different pit, um, uh, that was, uh, SEO versus AEO. And so for, you Those of you that don't know, SEO is search engine optimization and AEO is answer engine optimization, which is what they're, it doesn't flow to me as well as SEO, but it's, it seems to be the, would you say that's the accepted thing to call?

I hear that and I hear GEO. So generative engine optimization. I'm not really sure on the differences. And yeah, this, you know, this came up. We, I was on a, I was on a client call and the client asked like, you know, so should I be investing? I had an SEO agency come to me and, and, you know, pitch me on their services. Should I be investing in SEO? And I was kind of like, I don't know. I mean, if you're not doing SEO right now, now feels like kind of a strange time to dive in and to say, I'm really going to look to optimize for standard, you know, search engines when they seem to be, you know, the future seems to be AI. And she, you know, and she's like, well, what they said is that if you're optimizing for SEO, you're also optimizing for AEO and GEO. And I was like, ah, and I just, I kind of had to plead ignorance. Like, I don't know if that's right or not. And I, there were other people, smart people in the call and they didn't either. So I would love for you, since you are the smartest person about literally everything, you know more than everything, more than anybody about everything else for you just to tell us like what the heck it all is.

No pressure. I like that.

No pressure at all.

Yeah. So, so to me, like kind of diving down it, I think that it's not correct that it's the same thing. And I think that's a big challenge that people are going to face. And I think SEO agencies are going to be inclined to attack this the same way that they attacked before. And, you know, I heard somebody say, you know, oh, my SEO people told me I just need to get more reviews because they all draw on review engines. And I think that it's important to think about, um, what, What is this? How is it different from, uh, from traditional SEO? How do we get to go from invisible in these answer engines, which are replacing the search engines, I think, and ultimately will largely replace the search engines for queries. And they're not delivering, um, at least currently, they're not delivering a link to take you to their site, to, you know, to your site. They're delivering information about you and recommending you know, you as the person who's the authority and, and they're really, even the search engines themselves, I think are evolving into that as well.

And so I think, yeah, when was the last time, by the way, you just did a normal Google search?

You know, I still use it. It's, it's the question of, uh, because, because I think that's a good question, but for me, it's, I need to, I need to learn more about something directly from the source. So I will search for the direct source's site. But I'm not searching for an answer on Google. That's my difference, right? I'm, I don't use the search engines anymore for research. I don't use them for, um, finding, you know, lists of, of potential things. I use them after I've gotten the authority recommendation from the, uh, answer engine to go and check out the site. That's the direct source that I'm going to. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I mean, you use it for its original intended thing. I need to find something, you know, and that, that's, that's kind of what Google, but you know what you're looking for. And so I think that's interesting. It's almost always now, if you think about the levels of awareness, right? You've got unaware, you got problem aware, solution aware, category aware. And then last one is, you know, when we're product aware and most aware. And so it's now kind of, you know, search engines are less now about the top level, top of funnel discovery, and they're becoming more about, I need to find the brand that I'm looking for. I don't know exactly what their website is, or I don't want to go and—

That's it.

That's it. It's, it's, it's basically effectively direct type-in traffic, except you don't know what to type in.

It's like, yeah, which is funny because if you're, if you're even close, I mean, one of the, I've always told people, if you're, you're, you're very first, if you've got a fixed budget for what you're going to spend on, on marketing and advertising, and basically everybody does to certain extent, you, the first bit that you spend should be branded search. Like go ahead and bid on your own search, on your own brand names and on the basic kind of stuff that, you know, people are looking for when they're looking for you just to make sure they find you. It's frustrating to feel like we have to pay for our own name in Google, but if not you, your competitor probably is and it's just not going to be that much money. And so it's kind of now at that, at that base level is, is yeah, where I see search, search is, and I love, I agree with you when you said, I don't, and In all seriousness, I think it's important that we do disclaim this. Neither of us are pretending to be absolute experts in this, in this area. But the other thing that we can say is we don't have a dog in this hunt. Neither of us are selling SEO services or AEOs or, you know, any of this stuff yet. And so we're just sharing what, what we believe to be true and what we figured out. And one of the things that I believe to be true is, yeah, the way that you optimize for the search engines. Is not gonna be the same way ultimately that you optimize for the answer engines.

Yeah. And I think it changes your paid strategy for paid search. So it's a lot of people miss the opportunity to bid on their own name. And, um, and that's interesting. And you can't bid generally, you know, my understanding is that you can't effectively bid on trademark names. But, um, but if you are trying to compete with a company, knowing, like if you have a competitor that's getting the recommendation on the answer engine, think about this. This is kind of a cool strategy. I think if you have a competitor that's getting the recommendation on the answer engine and somebody then wants to go and research that competitor to find their site, which I think is going to happen a lot, then they go to the search engine and search for that. If you can buy the top 1 or 2 rankings for paid search for the company, like the things they're going to search for to find that company's site, that's pretty cool because that traffic should cost way less than the terms they're searching for. So if you were searching for, uh, business operating system, and let's say that Scalable came up on, uh, Claude is what you were looking here. It's like, you know, who has a good business operating system? And we came back as the recommended number one choice, right? So it's like, hey, scalable has an operating system and it says blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it doesn't link you to that or anything. And you're like, oh, that's interesting. I'd like to go check out this scalable company. And so then you put in scalable.co. Well, if I can bid on scalable.co or the scalable company, then that's going to cost me a whole lot less than bidding for business operating system or other high-cost money words, right? And like, what, what would a better example be, Ryan? What's, what's a search term that costs a bunch of money? Financial advisor, right? Let's say it's financial advisor. If, if you were competing against Ryan Deiss's, Ryan Deiss Financial Advisory and Ryan Deiss Financial Advisory, when you searched, uh, ChatGPT came up as the recommended, you know, you should definitely check out when I'm like, who's a good financial advisor? And it says Ryan Ryan Deiss Financial Advisory is a good one. Then I'm going to go to the search engine and buy Ryan Deiss Financial Advisory, Ryan Deiss Financial Advisor, and it's going to cost way less than I would have to pay for a click on financial advisor. Does that make sense?

Yeah. So you're saying basically look at what the answer engines, what, what, you know, and by the answer engine, all we're basically referring to is the main, you know, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, look at what they're already talking about. And, um, and make sure that if they're not talking about you, knowing that the people who are looking for this, you know, they're probably gonna do what you're talking about, which is, okay, I'm gonna go back to Google, um, and, and I'm gonna do more research. Make sure that you at least show up when they search for it on the Google machine.

Yes.

Because you can still go and bid there, you know, on, on your competitor's terms and you can bid on, on competitor's terms. There's sometimes limitations on putting trademark names in the ads themselves, but you can bid on their terms all day long.

But, but But think about this though, that what's cool about it is, is because you will get answer engine traffic going to that site and to be a competitor to buy an ad for the keyword that's going to pull that site that somebody's searching for, that keyword's going to cost so much less. Like maybe it's $70 for a click for financial advisor, but it's $3 or 50 cents for a click to Ryan Deiss Financial Advisory, and you effectively pick up the people that are the traffic that's coming from the, um, the, uh, answer engines at 70, 80, 90% off. I think that's kind of a fun strategy.

Yeah, it could be definitely worth, definitely worth a test. So what, so pulling, going all the way back, um, you know, you weren't on that client call when, when this conversation came up, but how should business owners be thinking about, you know, AEO and, you know, GEO, generative engine and all this stuff? How should, like, What should the approach be right now? You know, if you're a business owner, 'cause there's gonna be, there's a lot of hype right now. There's only gonna be more based on what you've seen out there that's working and not working that, that we've tested. Um, kind of any dos and don'ts?

Well, let's, let's talk about what the differences are first, because they're not the same. The, the old game was, uh, search engine optimization. The game was rankings. What you're trying to do is get ranked in the search engine in those top spots. You were optimizing for position. Um, so, you know, first result, ideally your site, the second site would be competitor, third site would be another competitor, but the game has changed in the AEO era where we're not trying to get rankings. We're trying to get recommendations. So the, it's kind of like the, um, the, was it the buy box? The one box, um, that kind of evolved with Google was the, you know, was like a boxed this is kind of the, the place that you're going to go and everything else fell away. That's, that's kind of where we are now. I feel like, and so the game that is that we're optimizing for recommendations, not rankings, and we're optimizing for selection by the site, not position and the placement instead of number one, it's going to be in a list. It's going to be the recommendation chosen as the best answer., and then the second best answer is gonna be considered and the third one might be mentioned. But like, that's a big difference because search is gonna reward relevance and recommendation is gonna reward something new, which is to me, the big breakthrough is evidence. It's going to reward whoever can create the most evidence to show that they are the best answer. That's really. What we're trying to get.

Give me an example of what you mean by that evidence.

So, yeah, so the, the difference would be, um, we're, we're looking for proof. So before it was like proof came from page authority, um, you know, like how many links do you have? Um, and, and things like that. But what, what's much, much more important these days is going to be the actual evidence that shows that you are the right answer. And so what that means is we're going to be looking at, um, reviews are gonna be kind of third tier. The first most important things are going to be, um, data, results, testimonials, proof, third-party recommendations, that kind of stuff. The things that show that you've got Um, the authority, the distribution, the uniqueness, you know, the trust, you've been cited, referenced, and recommended by other people. You've got original proprietary content. Those are all to me the things that are creating the evidence that's gonna show that you are, are the best answer.

So how practically does a business think about, you know, optimizing for that right now? I mean, cuz in, in, in the past it used to be okay. Um, the, the old SEO playbook, and, and obviously this is an oversimplification, but it was basically like, all right, figure out the keywords that you wanna rank for, and then you're gonna create some content and write some articles that are optimized around those keywords. And then we're gonna try to get some links going into those keywords and then, you know, let the cake bake for a little bit. And eventually, if you can get more links and have higher quality content as determined by whatever the algorithm decides it is this month, then you're gonna rank if somebody searches for one of those keywords or its related cousin. Like that was the basic strategy. What is it now then for AEO? I mean, does it still start as original content on a website?

I think it's helpful, but it really is, is it to me, it's like our hypothesis is that having a better graph is going to get you better recommendations. And it's kind of like a neural network. That your business, like it used to be a blog network, right? So that, uh, like when I started in SEO, I built Private Blog Network and I had multiple servers that were on different, um, you know, different networks linking back to my site for the keywords that I wanted to be ranked for. And you know, that, that was, um, fairly effective in search engine optimization. And so the, the private blog network of today is that you really build your own and it can be on your site. It's not like it doesn't have to be, uh, the private blog network where you had the different server game and all that kind of stuff. It's really creating the ability for the AI to find out that you are in fact the person that has the greatest evidence, or you are the answer that has the greatest evidence that supports it being the best answer. And so on your site, you need to be it. And it doesn't really, you know, a lot of people are saying, well, it's all about schema and things like that. It doesn't have to be that because the AI is looking in a very similar way to how we look.

I mean, having good schema helps, you know, what is schema for those who don't know?

Basically just the, the, the way to present it in a way that the machine can understand it. So when a, when a, when a machine crawls your site, right? Yeah.

So, I mean, an extreme example would be if everything on your website was just one giant image, that would be bad schema.

Yes.

Because it, it's hard for, you know, bots and things like that to just read every little bit of an entire gigantic image. So making sure, and, and yeah, we're not going to get into schema on this episode. I'll, I will want to turn us off.

Yeah. And, and so I think it's, it's basically building the brain, right? So building a brain that can be accessed by AI. If you build the brain, you improve your odds. So the more connected, consistent, and trusted that your graph becomes, and your graph is going to, is this neural network that you can build on your site, right? So the nodes are your assets and the signals, like what you create and what exists. The connections are the relationships, how each thing connects, like Ryan Deiss built the scalable operating system, which is, installed and available by scalable.co, which has a mastermind called Founders Board. Those connections are really critical. And the more of those connections and the higher the quality they are, the more likely you are to be considered the right answer because those connections are the relationships of how it all connects and why it matters. And then strength would be the authority and trust. The stronger the connection, the higher odds. So to me, it's the nodes. Which are the assets and the signals themselves. It's the connections, the relationships between them, how clear that is, how many there are linking to that, and then, uh, the strength, the authority, and the trust. And the stronger brain that you create, the more associations, the more relevance, uh, the more recommendations. So you, you're kind of expanding your opportunities and winding more rec— winning more recommendations by getting more of those connections. For AI to be able to see that you are in fact qualified and the obvious best answer.

And so, so practically, how does that happen though? So, I mean, does it still come down to, I've got, I've got a webpage that has some stuff on it and then there's other things that are talking about that too. I mean, just what, gimme, gimme like kind of a, I'm doing this for the first time. Do I start with the keywords that I wanna rank for? Like what's kind of the starting point? Yeah.

Yeah. I think you start with, with say 30 questions. That you want to be the obvious answer for, and then you reverse engineer from there. And so, you know, if you've got 30 questions—

Okay, so stop, stop there. 'Cause that, that just, that right there was a big shift. You're not thinking about the keywords.

Yeah.

Right. That people would quote unquote search for. You're thinking about the questions that actual human beings out there are asking AI, because this is how we use AI. It's even how more and more people are using search engines now. Now that especially with like with Gemini being baked into Google, we're just going in there and asking full sentence questions to AI. You don't type in, you know, dog groomer, shaboigan, you know, we're, we're typing full-blown questions into it. So you said come up with a list of the 30 questions that I want to make sure I am the obvious answer to, or I have the obvious answer to. Um, love it. Then what do I do?

Yeah. So then I think that we, we get to, there's 7 things that I think are important. One is evidence I mentioned, so that's, well, prove it. So if you ask a question and now I want to be, I want to be the best answer for who is the best blinds installer in San Diego, California, you know, who's the best electric shade installer in California, then I need evidence to prove with data and results that I am that. So on my site, and let's say that we're using our site, you know, a single site to kind of put together this neural connectivity that the, that, uh, the answer engines are gonna look at and decide, uh, is the best answer. Well then I, I need, that's gonna be a lot of things, right? So if, is there data, uh, that says that I am like, is there, you know,, a best in, a best installer in San Diego, um, uh, ranking, you know, from some third party, um, credibility and reputation. That's gonna be good. You know, are my reviews available? Am I pointing to my reviews on the site, uh, for that particular thing? You know, do I have proprietary content that I have created? Have I created tools that help people figure that out, like configurers or things like that? Um,, you know, and do I have any other intellectual property? And is that, I think that's probably the connection on the search engine that, you know, is that, is, is this stuff also visible on the search engines is going to be evidence from a third party, the search engine that the things that I'm putting on my website are true. Cause I don't think you can just put a bunch of lies on your website and the answer engines are going to gobble it up. I think there's going to be, uh, credibility there. And I haven't seen any, like, answer engine say, this is exactly how we do it. So everything is anecdotal for us, right? Then it's going to be distribution. Like, you know, how do you get in front of the right audiences with that? If you can get in front of larger audiences, I think that's going to be helpful. How fresh is the data? What was the recency with which it was, you know, uploaded or updated? How unique is it? Is there a unique point of view? Is there something contrarian? Is it, You know, the same answer that everybody gives, like the terrible articles in Inc. Magazine and Forbes, uh, or is it, you know, something that actually has value? And then are you cited? Are you referenced? Are you recommended by other things that are getting, uh, by other sources that are considered credible in getting recommendations on the answer engine? So it's, to me, it's evidence, authority, uh, the assets you've got, distribution, freshness, uniqueness, and trust.

How important do you think it is that, I mean, you know, it's one of those things where AI is pretty good at telling when content was created by AI, you know, by itself. How important do you think it is that if you're going to build credibility, if you're going to be showing up in the answer engines, that what you have to say is actually a unique take, contrarian, original, not necessarily AI generated? Because it seems like there's a lot of people out there just producing AI slop in the hopes of AI finding it. And I just don't know that that's necessarily what AI is looking for because wait for it, it already has it.

Yeah, I agree with you. I think that Brian Deiss, is it Brian Deiss that has the skyscraper strategy for SEO? I think it's, I think that's a very good model for what we're talking about here is like his skyscraper strategy is basically find somebody that's already the top source that the search engines like. And then just make a 5 times more in-depth article with 5 times more value than they've gotten. Ultimately, you're likely to overtake them. I think that it's similar here in, in that, that, that basically whoever's getting the answer recommendation right now, why are they getting that? What is the evidence that they've got? What's the authority they've got? You know, what kind of distribution do they have? What are the unique assets they've got? How fresh, you know, is their content? How unique is it? And then we need to trump in as many of those categories as we can.

And, um, you know, that what you just said there, I think is, is the ultimate key and it's how all this stuff is gonna get figured out and it's how it's gonna get refigured out when it ultimately changes 15 billion times.

Yeah.

It's just looking at, uh, you know, play customer, come up with those 30 questions, go into ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and ask questions and see the kinds of things that get recommended and ask it, what are the sources for this? If it's not clear, and then do the kind of reverse engineering of saying, okay, what do they have that I don't have? What are they doing that I'm not doing? And play around with that. Because one of the best places to start is in any time, this has always been the thing with search engine optimization is what's the person doing who's winning and can we do it a little bit better? It, it really is as simple as that.

Yep.

Yeah.

And I think that, uh, one thing that's another hypothesis that I have as to how you would kind of hack, um, into this and, and I think SEO as a supplemental amplifier of your odds of getting recommended is the way to look at SEO now. In terms of kind of everything. So, um, the, my, what my hypothesis is that if you look at, if you search for something, you know, uh, who's the best landscaping service in Austin, Texas? Um, and you see that AI is giving, um, Richard's Landscaping the, you know, the primary recommendation. Then I would look, because it shows you the sources that are cited, right? So I would look at the sources that it shows that are supporting its recommendation, and then I would go to each of those and find out how can I penetrate and become the number one answer on those sources. So if it's looking at Austin Garden Times and, uh, Austin Magazine and, um,, and, you know, an article, uh, that, that, that group published on, uh, Garden Times and things like that, I would be looking to go in and replace those people as the number one source in each of the cited sources. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it, it goes back to the reverse engineering and just looking at what they're doing. And, and, and I think also at that point then deciding, is this something you want to do? And, and, you know, if you've got more to say about the, on the AEO front, um, tactical-wise. We can defer this, but I guess a lot of this just kind of comes down to, is this something that the average business owner should be focused on right now? Or are there other things that are more worthy of their time and attention?

That's the same decision you're always making, right? I mean, if your business is falling apart, if you are working so much that you have no time, if you're unable to fulfill the customers that you've got, if you've got an F rating from the extortive BBB, You know, if you've got that kind of stuff as challenges, I would say that you probably have more important things to do than AEO. Um, but I think AEO is, is going to be absolutely increasing in importance. And if you are or were dependent on SEO, everyone that I know that was dependent on SEO is half or worse in terms of traffic because that's gone away and it's only going to get worse. So I think. I definitely think I would take my SEO budget and move it over to AEO. If nothing else, if you don't have one and you haven't started at all, I'd probably start with AEO because it's much easier to build the assets and know that they're going to be helpful with AEO than it is with SEO. And I definitely think that it's, it should be a significant part of your budget. I, I, I'd love to get your take. Cause I know you talk about embedded influencer and, uh, you know, in content marketing, uh, if you were choosing between AEO and content marketing, like I'm gonna write ads and, you know, I'm gonna create reels for, uh, for Instagram and I'm gonna do stories for, you know, Snap or whatever. Um, what, where would you say people should put their efforts?

Yeah, I mean, it's hard. I'm biased because this isn't something that, you know, we're always thinking about this through like an, you know, I score impact, confidence, and ease. And like, so AEO could have this massive impact, but my confidence level of being able to pull it off is very, very low because we're not experts in it. And the ease of which we would do it is, you know, it's not very easy because again, we haven't done it. We don't have the playbooks for it yet. I 100% agree with you. If you've been reliant upon SEO and if, you know, SEO or local search or review-based kind of things, if that's prime, your primary driver, then yeah, this is where you like, you need to make this your focus. This is your, this is your future and you're losing those eyeballs, you know, incredibly fast. And so 1000%, you have no choice. You need to go all in on this. I'm thinking back to our client who, um, she's strong in paid search, she sells a niche product, stronger in paid search, has some distributors, retailers that distribute her products. Amazon isn't a huge part of what she does because she's primarily working through distributors. She's more on the manufacturing side and she was kind of dabbling and thinking about SEO. I don't know that I would say, yeah, go nuts there. I think in that case, I would say for any brand, where you should probably start is with just a base level of paid advertising. And paid advertising is, is not, you know, the, the be-all end-all. Paid advertising is going to cap out. Um, paid advertising is one of the channels that only gets, uh, worse at scale. Like it only gets more expensive at scale, but it's one of those things that you can flip on, optimize, get it working to a certain degree. And it's, I'm not saying it's set and forget it, but it's, it's pretty low maintenance, pretty, pretty low touch once you get some campaigns that are rolling. So that's where I would say start. And the, and the, the tip of that spear again is bidding on your own branded search terms in Google. Because if somebody's looking for you in Google, make sure you show up first and not a competitor. Beyond that though, man, I don't know if I'm trying to decide between like AEO, Or going with more of an organic embedded influencer type strategy. I think still today I'm gonna go and just, if you don't know what embedded influencer is, that's where, you know, the founder, CEO, um, executives are acting as the influencer for the business. So you're just out there being the best spokesperson for your brand on all the channels that matter, which are the ones where your people are hanging out at. I was chatting with another one of our clients, Gary. Gary sells, has a, people think about influencer stuff and paid, like that only applies to you if you're selling, you know, consumer items and stuff like that. Gary's got an environmental construction business. They dig gigantic holes in the ground and put gigantic fuel storage tanks in them. You know, this is not a consumer-based business at all. And yet Gary's number one source of new leads and sales is him posting videos of him walking around job sites and stuff like that on LinkedIn. I mean, so he's got an embedded influencer strategy. His total follower base, his total like subscriber, it's nothing like it's tiny compared to these people. You know, he'll, he'll do a post and get like 6 comments, right? It's not like he's getting massive engagement, but every one of those is a pretty big deal. So for him, would I say, hey, stop doing that? And focus on AEO instead? Hell no. Um, now as he gets that dialed in, is AEO where I would go next? Absolutely.

So I think that's kind of the way I think about it. If you're SEO, he'll have built an asset that's critically helpful in AEO by having, because that creates authority, trust, et cetera, et cetera. So like, I think you're right. If you're already doing that and it is producing any kind of success for you, You want to at least continue that. It shouldn't be, I'm gonna stop there and I'm gonna focus over here. Um, but I would say branded paid search, um, for your competitors and yourself is going to be very helpful to you for money generally. And it's gonna be very helpful to you also for this neural network that you're building, what we're calling the authority graph. And, um, and then the content that you're already doing where you have traction and credibility will only amplify, uh, your ability to get into the answer engine as well. And that it would make sense to me if you've got those things going for you, like for Gary, I think it would make sense to start building the graph, to start creating the connections and making the, and making those connections obvious in the way that the answer engines like to see connections because it's not likely that they would go and say, okay, Gary's got a website. Um, okay, there's this article over here. Okay, Gary's got an Instagram. All right, Gary's got a YouTube. Whereas if you actually said anybody that's installing, you know, Gary installs, uh, let's say, let's do it, uh, even broader. People install underground tanks. People want those tanks to be smart tanks and be monitored so that they can blank, blank, blank, blank, you know, regulatory and, you know, compliance and, uh, uh, purpose and otherwise. One of the things that you need to think about with that is the, uh, installation process. One of the people that has installation process down is Gary, who's got 7,000 followers, which is 3 times more than anybody else that does this job on third-party site, TikTok.

Yeah. Right.

You know, so, so like that, but to me, that's the thing is like, it's, it's showing those connections because it will probably, AI, it, AI will probably get it eventually. But if you make it easy for it by saying, oh, this is all connected and this is the guy, that's my recommendation.

Yeah. It's, yeah. I mean, that's, that's all of this stuff is evolutionary, you know, in that it's going to. Take the path of least resistance. And so if you can offer it the path of least resistance, you're going to win. And so I, I love that. And, you know, I love the way that you positioned it there, that, that it's all of these things are going to amplify the other, right? Like, as you're building assets for some type of, you know, organic social content strategy, you're also building the assets that are going to help you on the AEO front. And so That's the nice thing is there's no wasted effort. It's just a question of what do you prioritize first?

I, I, I think that's it. So what was the question that your person was asking? The, the founders board person was asking?

She was basically saying, should she, um, should she lean into SEO slash AEO right now, or should she put more effort into, an embedded influencer strategy where, where she gets a little more, you know, active and, and puts more investment into getting the support to, to be active on organic social.

So after what we've talked about here, is your recommendation any different than it was before?

It's not, which, which makes me feel better. Um, because what I, what I said is let's make sure that you've got, um, your, paid search dialed in, starting with branded search, which she did. Then we can expand paid search. I'm sorry. Then we can expand paid advertising out to, you know, other more search-driven stuff that's obvious that, you know, is kind of category-specific, but that you can afford. We can also amplify some paid social that's working. But then what you should do is you should do an organic social strategy. With an embedded influencer, because people like to follow people, not brands. So let's get an embedded influencer out there. That's you, you know, and she's a, she's a great face for it. If not you, then who? Uh, but you want to do an organic, uh, social strategy because ultimately the paid social that performs the best based on all of our tests has been repurposing the organic posts that worked the best. So if, if we got a, Instagram reel that does really well, or we've got a Facebook post that just is an outlier. If we take that and we turn it into an ad in the exact— what do you know? It works really well. It converts well, gets a lot of traction. Then I would say, um, you know, after you do that, after you have those engines built, then go into the AEO search front. And the only change I would make is I would flip it. If somebody is— I would still start with organic, I'm sorry, I would still start with paid branded search number one and your obvious paid, um, paid channels. Then if you were more search driven and if SEO has been a big part, I would, I would probably put AEO up there as an initial point of optimization and then backfill with the organic, um, social, but do that as a secondary thing for the purposes of, you know, your AEO efforts. Knowing that you're going to get some good, solid organic social, um, oomph from it too. I love it.

Cool.

Well, there you have it. Um, the completely made up by ourselves from our anecdotal evidence of observation and, uh, guesses that are hopefully somewhat intelligent definitive guide to AEO.

Our non-definitive guide. The difference is we're at least willing to freaking admit it. Um, and, and I hope, and I hope if nothing else what people hear is Not everybody has this figured out. In fact, I would argue with this, nobody has it figured out. It's, it's way too new. And even in the SEO days, which you and I were early, early, early, I was doing search engine optimization in 1999. And at no point was I like, I got it all figured out because it's always changing. And so don't, um, we want to talk about this because we want to acknowledge like, we don't know everything and that's okay. You don't either, but Don't let somebody pretend like convince you that because they know everything, you need to just follow them blindly. You know, use your, you got a brain too. And so this idea of like, let me just go and look and see what's coming up and let me go and reverse engineer and just see if what they're saying aligns with what you're seeing out there in the real world. There's going to be a lot of hype and a lot of nonsense out there in this space. And do what we're doing.

Run your own tests. Like we're running lots and lots of tests in this now to see, you know, we've picked our 30 terms and we benchmarked how many times did we show up for those. And, um, the answer was basically the only thing that showed up for us was scalable showed up for 2 of the, uh, of the 30 kind of like as the honorable mention, not as the definitive thing. So now that's our benchmark. Now, if we can get any of those up to an actual recommendation and we can increase the number, that's a big win. And we'll be able to show that some of the things that we have done, uh, are going to work. And what we'll do eventually is like, I, I'm trying to accelerate using what I call non-scientific controlled tests, which is basically give me a group rather than saying there's one control and there's one variable. I, I wanna actually say, because of speed, we're gonna test 8 things and we're gonna see if, if one of those 8 things or a combination of those 8 things is helping, then we'll at least know that something in that group works as opposed to taking, like, if it's a 2-week test and we can test 8 things and then we've got something that's working, that's better to me than spending 16 weeks testing things and maybe the 8th thing is right and everything else didn't work.

Right. So, yeah, well, because it's very possible, just to your point, you could go and test 8 things and none of them work.

Right.

So glad we, good thing we didn't take, you know, 8 weeks to test these 8 things that wouldn't have worked. Whereas at least if you like found that something worked, you could start pulling them away one at a time.

Exactly. And so that's our thing is that like we have this hypothesis that, you know, the 7 things that I mentioned will be helpful. Feel like they've got to be. And some of them, I think 2 or 3 of them have actually been mentioned by the answer engines that, you know, like recency is something that they're looking at. And, um, you know, if we find, when we find what works or we find that things are working, we will start pulling away, but we'll be in the answer engines. We'll have gotten the thing we want, we'll become recommended, and then we'll figure out why. And then that'll allow us to double down on the things that are working and use that to inform all of our additional AEO. So I think it's a really exciting time, but we're running those experiments ourselves and you should too. And, um, and let's all share, right?

Yeah, we'll share. We're doing it. We're doing it as recently as just now. Cool.

Um, do you feel like we covered that pretty well? Yeah.

I mean, I think, I think if nothing else, we've given people confidence to say, yeah, I'm going to go and, um, start looking into this, or I'm, I'm going to hold on it right now. And I'll tell you, just if it makes anybody feel better out there. I was not the first to Facebook ads when they first came out. I wasn't the first to any like social ads. Good. Like we've never been the first to any of this stuff. Uh, and so don't feel like, oh my gosh, if I don't get in early on this new platform, whether it's AEO or, you know, ChatGPT introducing ads, like that's okay. There's something to be said for being the first second and letting everybody else, you know, go out there and, and, and make the mistakes. Um, and so we are doing that. We're going first for the sake of our clients. Like we've got the budget to do it and, you know, we can benefit our clients by being like, we tried this and it failed miserably, so don't do that. Um, but if that's not where you are right now, don't feel like your business is going to fail because you weren't first on this.

Yeah.

It's just not gonna happen.

And then just to tie a bow on where this affects what we called the sca— you know, the successful scalable company. We have leveraged sales, bankable profits, and transferable value. And this, like many things, arguably can help all of that, but this is really targeted at leveraging your sales. How, how can I get more sales with less effort? How can I get disproportionately more sales than the effort that I have to expend to get it? I think this is a good place to put some effort, um, in finding out what's gonna work because this is the future. It's a gold rush right now., the first people in are likely to become the incumbents that are harder to dislodge, just like that, you know, worked with basically SEO. So I, I think it's, if you're looking towards bumping your leverage sales, I think this is a good thing to think about. Agree. Awesome.

All right.

Well, if you guys enjoyed that, please let us know. If you didn't, let us know. All the things that we were wrong on, and there probably were a few, um, let us know that too so that we don't make that mistake and give people bad advice, but Bring the data and evidence, not just your freaking opinion. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

That's a really good point. Um, and, uh, and because our stuff is, like I said, based on anecdotal evidence right now. So, um, but it, but it could be wrong, right? The anecdotes could be wrong. So anyway, that's it. We'll see you next time on Business Lunch.

Hey, business owners. I've got a quick question for you. Do you feel like you're missing the data you need to make strong business decisions? If so, it's probably time to build a CEO dashboard. It's an easy way to get everyone in your company literally on the same page, focusing on the numbers that matter. So The Scalable Company put together a free spreadsheet template that will give you everything you need to deploy your own dashboard. And to make it even easier, Ryan Deiss recorded a short training on how to use it. If you want to get your hands on the template, go to businesslunchpodcast.com/dashboard. That's businesslunchpodcast.com/dashboard, and you can download it for free.