Session #14 - AEO Is a Technical Problem Before It’s a Content Problem

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome back to ten Speed Sessions. Today we're excited about talking again about aeo. We haven't been in studio for a while, but a lot of things that we've seen over time and at this time of year we're getting towards the end of the year. Thought this could be a bit more of a practical discussion around what we're seeing, what's working, but also some low hanging fruit, some things you could be tackling jeeps between now and the end of the year to set yourself up for a good start to 2027. So that includes essentially what we're going to talk about today is like just that what's emerged is the technical side of aeo, I think in many ways is more important than the content side of it. Some of the low hanging fruit, some of the quick fixes that I mentioned, we want to talk a little bit about prompt tracking today and then also some of the challenges that have come up over the last few months with Google Search Console. [00:01:04] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I'm excited to chat more about some of this stuff. I think we've been making a more aggressive push on our end to really practice what we preach and test and all that. And I think there's a lot of really great signal that we've gotten from the work we've been doing on our own marketing. So that's some of what we're bringing to the table here. [00:01:26] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I mean, I think, you know, this idea that AEO is a technical problem before it's a content problem is interesting and certainly something that we've seen a lot of. What are some of the kind of the big areas that you've seen that we want to cover today? [00:01:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I will also caveat too on that, that because I like the framing of a technical versus a content problem because it really makes it feel like, you know, you can control and improve things with like really focused effort versus like waiting on some content to like get indexed and all that. But I think it's really important for existing brands and products, you know, so like there is a content component. They just have lots. Right. So like if you are starting out and you don't have content, [00:02:19] Speaker A: sure, yeah, [00:02:20] Speaker B: that is a content problem still. But there, that's a really big uphill battle in this new world. So that's a whole other almost like discussion. So I think like to narrow it in, I'd say we're talking about like brands that have some, some presence and all that. But on the technical side, I mean there's tons especially Like, I think the thing that we've talked about throughout our time working together is almost like it used to be like technical SEO debt. Now I'd consider it kind of, it's the same thing, but it's like technical AEO debt if you want to umbrella that way. And it's anything from, you know, poor internal linking structure, poor just like general site structure and hierarchy, like having, you know, things that are buried where bots and crawlers can't reach things as effectively or efficiently as they, as you need them to, you know, page speed. All the things that we talk about when it comes to SEO. There's a lot there. I don't. I can go on. Is there anything specific? [00:03:22] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think there's. There's a lot there. And I know, you know, more than a year ago when this was really starting to take shape, you know, and there's even in some of the early episodes we did kind of of going back and forth on are people calling AEO or geo. And I think there's still some of that, but obviously I think people have kind of converged on AEO as probably the prevailing term. Anyway. We talked some about technical stuff, we talked about schema in there and I think that as things have advanced and we use peak and there's crawler insights and being able to just look at that and it's very eye opening when you do look at that to realize. Yeah, before you were really kind of just thinking about how Google was crawling your site and now you have a lot of different types of crawlers and the way that they're crawling the site and all that stuff has shifted dramatically to where, to your point, you know, how many layers deep the content is or the internal linking or any of those other aspects or how the content is formatted does feel like it just has a compounded impact because of the number of different types of crawlers. [00:04:51] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. And I mean I would bucket a lot of things under technical. I think what you're speaking to is connected to one of the things that I think is really important, like indexation. Indexation and search is a first step towards making sure that I think that everything is readable and crawlable and retrievable by LLMs. I think if that's something that you can use as a starting point to improve some of those things to make sure that the content is found at like at least the first touch point and then that kind of feeds into LLMs. So that's something we've seen as being very effective as Fixing that. [00:05:35] Speaker A: Yeah. And you know, in this case, you know, you mentioned a moment ago like it was considered technical SEO debt, and I think that that was something that was on my mind as well is that I think, you know, even five years ago, certainly more than that, you know, it was, you know, I think the content side of it was much, much more important, you know, and it was creating the content and creating the topic clusters and a lot of people were like, yeah, like technical SEO, like fixing that might help, you know, like some of that stuff. Like there was definitely people that had positions that it wasn't nearly as important. I think we always held the position that it was, did have a bigger impact. We've also kind of always been indexation and crawl budget nerds. But that side of it, I think it really has flipped to your point and I think that there's a lot that does that. But I do want for you to clarify what, what we're seeing here and when you're talking about kind of like technical AEO and all that stuff, like, and AEO being a technical problem, is that it's not like it's separate from the stuff you would fix for SEO. [00:06:55] Speaker B: No, no. And like we're in this world now where we're gonna probably for some time still speak to both because obviously there still are search engines, right. And like the things that you do to optimize for that still apply, but that has this impact on the LLMs. Right. But overall, now that Google has AI overviews and there's AI answers everywhere, it's all servicing this bigger answer engine thing. Right? But yeah, I think the way to kind of simplify it is just like technical improvements on the website or on your website have always been really focused or the ones that are the most impactful to SEO have been like again, crawl ability. So meaning, like how do you clear paths and make it so efficient for crawlers to find everything that it needs to find and making it super clear what those things are when they find it. That is like the name of the game. Now it seems like with making an impact on answer engines because they want consistency across content, they want like one specific answer for one specific thing. That's where like query fan out comes back into it. So like we've always talked about having like a really clean, nice foundation, like home wise. It's so much the work we've been doing now and with clients too, it seems like it's even more important than it ever was to bolster that foundation and make sure that it is sturdy. And clear. Yeah. Not to get too like away from the literal, but like that's where I'm seeing the biggest impact. [00:08:34] Speaker A: Yeah, [00:08:36] Speaker B: yeah, I'll pause there. [00:08:37] Speaker A: Yeah. And you know, when we, when we think about technical, you're also. There becomes a point where I think the line gets blurred between when you say like it's technical problem more than a content problem. When you get into like some of the like very clear answer, clear takeaway, even like your structuring and H2S and that kind of stuff is still like, you know, on page. It's like you're starting to kind of get that into that gray area. But the thing that I think is, has been interesting as we've tested and learned is that with AEO in particular, it feels hyper sensitive. Like before we didn't want to have multiple pieces of content across your site talking about the same thing. We would do content consolidation and make sure there was one place for that. AEO side of it feels hypersensitive to that where it really wants there to be one clear place where you're talking about a specific thing. [00:09:53] Speaker B: Totally. Yeah. It's funny because like to your point about like on site and technical and them being like this like kind of blurry area. Like I've always kind of sometimes bucketed some of that like consolidation work that you do on the content side to fall into that kind of technical work. But yes, couldn't agree more. Like it seems like the one answer per thing is so important now. So like doing what you can to not only like make sure that there is one answer, one piece of content, but that it's findable, but then also that like, like the backend structure is all correct as well as the front end. Like there's, you know, hitting on all firing on all cylinders, I guess is the best way to put it. [00:10:30] Speaker A: Yep, yep. Yeah. So, you know, like I said, we wanted to talk about what you can do now. Um, because obviously certain things, you know, we won't even get. We. We did a great episode. I don't know the number off the top of my head, so I'm not going to say it in case I'm wrong with Erica, where we talked about site migrations and eat and all that, so we won't get into like site migrations and all that stuff. So. But you know, if the CMS you're on the time you have over the next few weeks, over the holidays, I've always been a huge fan of this time of year being like, let's go look for what's decaying that could be refreshed for the start of the year and just a good time of year to do cleanup. So we thought it'd be helpful to talk through. We obviously talk to a lot of companies. Even if we don't end up working with them, it's not a fit. Some of the things that we've found to still be the most common that we're coming across with companies that, you know, if for you that is the case and it's true of your site, then that's something that you could do in. In short order and kind of start the new year strong. So the first one being that like the author of content [00:12:05] Speaker B: fruit stuff. Yeah. [00:12:06] Speaker A: Yeah. So like the. It is still common across a lot of teams that like whatever. Let's use Dunder Mifflin as like the example. It like it would say the. The blog post was written by the Dunder Mifflin team, you know, or whatever, something like that. So the. That you know, that's obviously a big challenge on the eat side versus having actual authors with you know, bio pages and author pages and bio and link to credibility and all that stuff. So to me that, that's like a really clear one. If you have any. Anything like that or potentially your entire blog is written by the same person, you know, whatever. Like just going through and looking at some of that and how you could. I can make some of those improvements tends to be pretty easy. It's on your own site, it's with your own team. [00:13:08] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:13:08] Speaker A: It's in your control to do that. [00:13:10] Speaker B: Yeah. And the. It is really important I will say too like also if it is the same, if it is one person just that's fine as long as they're the expert. Right. Like so like I, I've seen and read about this being like over. Over indexing on like trying to diversify authorship and we've talked where we want to diversify authorship, which makes sense. Like you want to represent like you know, different expertise across site, but it's just mapped to the topics that you're talking about. So. [00:13:39] Speaker A: But yeah, so don't artificially. [00:13:41] Speaker B: Don't artificially do it. And like. Yeah, and that's the. That's a bigger challenge I think with know businesses that are like, you know, either outsourcing content or you know, want to try to diversify that authorship. So if anything the. To focus on like the actual improvement of the eat or eat is not only assigning true expertise to that topic, but also like there's so much that can be done to improve those author pages and any of those signals like it goes for the brand as well when you're trying to bolster authority like displaying reviews or testimonials, any type of proof that can be connected to off page signals. So critical. Right. So on the authorship side obviously linking out to LinkedIn profiles and that. But if you can pull anything else in from you as an expert, like maybe you wrote for a third party website, add those links to that or like hey, verified author on these, you know, journals or journal whatever, [00:14:50] Speaker A: speaking, [00:14:51] Speaker B: speaking, appearances. Yeah, all that type of stuff. Like it's almost like you. I don't even think you can go too far as long as it's real. [00:14:58] Speaker A: Real. Yep. Yeah, that's a great point. And that that is the first of a couple things that we had. What's another kind of end of year common thing we're seeing that might be easy for people to take care of? [00:15:20] Speaker B: There's a few which we've alluded to but the messaging and positioning consistency I think is one of the most impactful things. There's a lot of really great knowledge out there around or education on there about like what people have learned from optimizing for LLMs which is basically like this new world in AEO we're getting away from like marketing fluff or marketing speak. So say quite literally what you do or what it is, you know. So like it's trying to find a balancing act of like good marketing but also at the same time you just need to put what you do literally on the page. I think that's a benefit to not only you as a business but also the people who are looking for you because then they can just self idente or they can identify very quickly what it is that you're doing and map it to what they need. [00:16:11] Speaker A: Yeah, [00:16:12] Speaker B: I think, yeah, the days of just kind of like elevating your positioning maybe might be a little bit muddied but. Or gone but. But yeah, that's what I would say. So like if you are for example the best X best in some category and it's like that nice media head term right, Like CRM software, I mean like we always go there then you know, make sure that like your own page says it sounds old school but like that that is what you are firmly positioned as and like that is represented consistently across like multiple assets on your website. So this is a content thing. But then the technical component I would say is like the schema markup also has to have that level of detail and consistency and I've seen it even in US because like you get that tech AEO debt now or tech SEO debt or like it just gets away from you. Right. You made some positioning updates a few years ago and then you ran with a content program and then you look back at the schema and maybe things have changed. Right. So like that is something that I think one is a really good low hanging fruit opportunity for people to go clean up and clarify for LLMs. [00:17:21] Speaker A: Yeah. So to clarify, when you say schema you mean organization, entity. [00:17:28] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, yeah, [00:17:30] Speaker A: yeah. And then I think yes, similarly, yeah, your homepage, the homepage title tag, what it says on your G2 profile, what it says on your LinkedIn company page, what it says on press release. To your point of like, we're project management software, we're a team productivity suite. We're those different things there. Yeah, just consolidating, making sure that's clear. That's a super easy one, I think audit in a quick fashion. I'll jump to, I'm going to leave indexation to you. We'll go last with that one. But internal links is another huge one. That's another one that tends to get away from people just because new stuff's being created, things are being consolidated. And so I know you'll talk about redirect chains as one of those, but that can happen as part of just being a living, breathing thing is like those redirect chains can develop, but just understanding where your internal links are going now, making sure that they are connected to what they need to be connected, and putting your high value pages at the core of a lot of what you're trying to do to make sure you have that influence flowing the way you want to. [00:19:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll add on too, just because some of the work we've done lately has been to again push on some of these fundamentals. Internal linking is not a foreign concept or a complicated one. But I can't emphasize enough how much of an impact it can have and how forgotten it gets. I think the big difference now is staying on top of it because to your point, like as you publish content, maybe it gets cannibalized or like you, you know, maybe hit on two different, similar intents over time just by naturally publishing topics. All right. And then you aggressively consolidate and bring those together, those redirects, all those things like they just stack up. They can stack up over if you have like a pretty high volume program over two months and then you have a ton of redirect chains, a ton of like internal Just like straightforward redirects. Anyway, it's really great to stay on top of that because I think it can have a big impact but then also just increasing the volume of internal links to the important pieces of content that you want. We did an aggressive push on some really important clusters for us and saw a pretty outsized impact within two months. I'd say the results on those things too can happen a lot quicker than I feel like they used to just based on the shift to LLM visibility. So I'd say that's big and we have been using. This is a great use case for AI to stay on top of it. Like we have our own tools that we've built internally to help monitor this stuff and like just stay on top of the weekly because like you will see a drastic change. Like even we fixed indexation a few months ago, got our scores really great and then within a few weeks like you could see it dips down for a variety of reasons, but you just need to. Those are like some really great areas to like keep up from a maintenance standpoint that will go a long way to improving performance. [00:21:03] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, the. Our internal tech has been super helpful with that. You know, I think that's something that to your point, like crawling the website, identifying stuff in the past was done maybe quarterly or more often for a larger site or a larger team running it or whatever, but being able to automatically crawl sites every week, identify what's going on, what's changed, kind of pinpoint where to go, do that and execute quickly definitely is a material impact and that's. I don't know if you want to go through any of the other kind of quick low hanging fruit stuff on indexation around. We already talked about redirect chains but [00:21:52] Speaker B: yeah, I mean I would say some key assets or areas like sitemap is still really critical. Like if you have. I've noticed a big impact if you have or negative impact and then positive impact by fixing like if you keep. This is a result of some of the consolidation work that you do. But if you keep unpublished pieces of content or sorry content or URLs live in your sitemap that are not actually live, that creates inefficiencies for not only what your site looks like, but also then influences other redirects and all these different things. So I'd say making sure that your sitemap is completely clean with like 200 status and like that's like the representation of everything that you want is really important. Obviously orphan pages. So that's like Building more internal links. Yeah, I, I like it's, you know, make sure everything is, is, is utilizing best practices in that regard and I think that you'll be headed in the right direction. Yeah, [00:23:00] Speaker A: yeah. And then I think the last I would add is just like going and run some pages even if you're not like technical and you just need to check it out and point your team in the right direction. Go check some pages and schema markup tools and understand where you do or don't have all that set up correctly. Some of that stuff I think can be again, pretty easy to do at the template level, you know, in your CMS or, you know, whatever it might be. But that would be another one that I would, would recommend towards being. And just, you know, again, these are a lot of the things that we just continue to see with companies coming in and chatting with us that a lot of these are still very common across a lot of sites. So that's why we wanted to bring them up. [00:23:54] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah. And I'll add just one thing that like, speed is of the utmost importance. Like again, pointing out that there's these tools available now, everybody has access to. Like, you need to constantly think about that as it relates to competitors. So get what you can get done as fast as possible and then stay on top of it because there's going to be teams out there that are using tools or building tools or whatever to stay on top of it and changing things to beat you. Everyone is monitoring these things in similar ways, especially if you're in a competitive space, especially if you're going after high intent stuff. Like you can see it ebb and flow a lot more, a lot faster, I think than you did when it was just purely like ranking for content. [00:24:40] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think the third thing we wanted to talk about was prompt tracking that's continued to be, I know, just kind of [00:24:54] Speaker B: black box. [00:24:56] Speaker A: Black box very much in its infancy, confusing for a lot of people in terms of how it works. What do you, what do you make of the data kind of all that stuff? Not that we're here to solve all of that right now because that's just the developing space. You know, there's word that ChatGPT is going to finally give some sort of console access. So, you know, I think this space will continue to evolve, but you know, like, we've been doing this for quite a while now and evolving our own prompt tracking for, for our brand and our site as well as across a lot of clients and so thought that was something we could kind of revisit and share some of our learnings that could be helpful for people as well. [00:25:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I think like today and now I would say that it feels pretty. Not. Yeah, I want to say pointless is pretty aggressive but like it's not valuable to track what would be considered top of funnel prompts and try to improve or push the needle on that. Like if you think about it from [00:26:12] Speaker A: give an example, [00:26:14] Speaker B: you know, it's just like for like what we're talking about, it's like what is technical SEO, right. Like an LLM could give you a really detailed answer on that and most likely not cite or mention a brand. Obviously there's controversy around that potentially if there's proprietary information in there. But let's just consider it a broad subject that like the Internet should know about. Right. And you're not providing any unique differentiation in that. If you track that you're probably wasting money because you're tracking prompts and all that stuff still expensive and you're just not going to see the improvements and it's going to skew what is your, your visibility scores. So we're, we are leaning and learning to be more effective attracting tracking is like that narrow space of like high intent non brand prompts. So what will. Actually it's pretty logical when you think about like what would. What would. What kind of prompt would get your brand mentioned. Right. It's a short like especially in the software space or B2B space like just someone looking for products. Right. Like give me the best you can invent a ton of long tail things. Give me the best, you know, B2B software marketing agency. Right. That type of thing. Give me the best running shoes. I think that gets used in lots of our industry podcasts. I'm probably pulling it from someone but that type of thing like that's going to then pull together a list of brands that the Internet for a variety of reasons we've kind of already talked about expertise, maybe brand notoriety, reviews, all that already knows about and is going to inform that response. [00:27:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:27:50] Speaker B: So you need to be tracking all the ones that you do believe directionally should be pulling your brand into it and that you want to be in. Right. And you can use some really basic common sense on what those would be to narrow them in. I'll stop there. I sent you wanting to get in on this. [00:28:08] Speaker A: Well I wanted to clarify. You said high intent non brand [00:28:14] Speaker B: prompts [00:28:15] Speaker A: and so I think it's just quickly explain why non brand as well [00:28:21] Speaker B: because that's the discovery aspect. Right. Like if someone is searching for, like I said, like best X software or whatever, that means they don't necessarily have a brand in mind and there's an opportunity to introduce your brand to them. Right. They probably already know of a few and they're probably expecting to see a few. So if you can influence yourself into those responses then like that's gonna be great. And then within that, because these responses are getting so dynamic and we're learning so much by the tracking we have in peak, but then also how AI overviews are changing and evolving, sometimes they'll make a recommendation, right? Like this, this brand is best for this and this brand's best for that. Sometimes it'll even go, I'd go with this if it asks you a question. So like there's a lot of personalization that happens in there, but you need to have a lot of the things that we've talked about to make sure that your brand is, is capable of being in influenced into that response. [00:29:20] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's also going, I mean like the tools allow you to kind of filter between brand and non brand, but like brand does 10 speed do XYZ. Of course we're going to be mentioned in that and therefore the visibility stats then shift quite a bit to make it like we're much more visible because we're tracking prompts that already include our name. So I think that that's probably the second side of that too is just there's opportunity, like you said in the non brand, high intent. But also it gives you, I think, a much more realistic look at where you're coming up in terms of visibility and share voice and that kind of [00:30:10] Speaker B: stuff. Right? Yeah. And to even give it a more literal example based on us, just for transparency. So we've been known, we have positioned ourselves around organic growth for a long time and that's something we still believe in and that's what this all drives. And that has been what we have like for the six, seven years we now have been in business. We have put all over our website, we've had articles that have mentioned us in that. Right. So like we actually have really good visibility in the prompts that we're tracking around organic growth agencies and stuff. Because it's not like an unknown term, there are others in our space and competitors and all that. [00:30:46] Speaker A: Yep. [00:30:46] Speaker B: So we have decent visibility there. It's in this. And this ties back to some of the stuff we were talking about, consistency of messaging. We work with enterprise brands that want to solve for these things that we're talking about. But maybe we didn't mention enterprise as much or talk about that as much or push that as much on the website. But we do want to be known or be influenced into those prompts. So that would be another one that we want to track and try to get into to get visibility for that based on the work that we're doing. [00:31:17] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:17] Speaker B: So like that's like a comparison of like or just an example of like what you are already known for. You're probably going to have pretty good visibility for. There are things that you want to be known for that you need to like. That's where there is a content component but also a technical component that will help influence those prompts. And the other thing I'll say within that too is like the more you track these, the more of these non brand high intent prompts that you track and I don't want to put a number on it because that's like a debate at this point still. The higher signal you'll better signal you'll get about like what your visibility is. So like if you stack rank those things you could be higher up on one or lower on one depending on how much we've been talked about or talk about that thing. [00:32:00] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:02] Speaker B: Which is really. Yeah, that's the most effective probably way to track it. [00:32:06] Speaker A: Yeah. So yeah, maybe from here we could go into a little bit about how we're like the prompt tracking is what it is. We're not here to solve an industry in its infant stages. It will evolve. But there are other aspects. Mentions versus backlinks, the referral traffic from. From AI. Like there are other things you can and do look at to understand kind of the influence of this beyond just prompt tracking [00:32:48] Speaker B: for visibility. [00:32:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So I don't know if you want to talk about like excuse me, the AI referral traffic. And there's some. Initially maybe a little over a year ago, a couple studies that came out there were you know, talking about oh this converts at such a high, high percentage compared to all your other traffic. I think, you know, some of those were kind of flawed from the start in kind of the numerator denominator aspect of what they were really looking at. But there is something to be learned and said for what the, you know, the prompts are and how people are going through that process before they do potentially come to your site via referral link from there versus direct, you know, kind of all that stuff. So [00:33:41] Speaker B: yeah, I mean those are like the just kind of continue on with that high intensity. I mean those are you're gonna likely more likely get Referral traffic from LLMs from those high intent prompts. But the thing that we've been you know, seeing and then also educating on, which I know there are some studies out there in the past few weeks that are trying to like, not they're trying to find the correlation a lot stronger, like a stronger correlation. And it's not like necessarily always there in the data they're looking at, but that if you get seen in those prompts, there's likely going to be a brand lift through not only like you'll see it in some brand traffic within like a search console because people see you, then they Google you and then maybe they click on your website because that's not going to be like buried in like an AI overview necessarily or it is, it's going to be all you in that AI overview or you're gonna get direct traffic. The other component of that too, which I need to clarify is, which is known, a lot of these LLMs don't send, they don't track, you don't get the referral traffic tracked. It comes in as direct. They're not actually, they're stripping it somehow and it's not the referrer. So if you see that direct traffic lift from some heavy push on influencing that high intent stuff, you're likely winning on that. At the end of the day, we don't have any data yet on the efficiency, conversion efficiency of LLM referral traffic, but it's safe to assume that if you are pushing on things that are high intent, you're likely going to get higher quality traffic that should be more engaged, that should have a higher likelihood to convert. [00:35:30] Speaker A: Yeah, [00:35:31] Speaker B: so there is like, like justification or logic in like that idea. [00:35:35] Speaker A: Yeah, [00:35:36] Speaker B: I know that though. Like it varies from business to business, industry to industry. [00:35:41] Speaker A: My issue was just like comparing that like the amount of traffic being referred from, from AI tools is so small compared to total organic or total direct traffic on a site that it's like you're, you're not comparing the same things. Was, was typically my issue with that, but I [00:36:01] Speaker B: totally [00:36:01] Speaker A: agree with what you're saying. [00:36:02] Speaker B: And, and the thing though just to like kind of continue on that still is like, I don't think a lot of those studies are really considering that direct traffic and the fact that it gets stripped. Right. Like, and the majority of stuff that's going to come from LLMs is going to go to your homepage. Like unless you do which we have, we've created a, we're creating, we've created a research study and we're doing more of those. Like the unique data point thing is like real like that we've seen get retrieved by LLMs a lot. But like it doesn't necessarily send like a ton of like referral traffic all the time to it. If anything are still our home. Like that gets mentioned alongside a link to our homepage and or maybe a relevant capabilities or services page. And I just don't think people are really considering that. Like I think if you're looking for, if you are looking for referral traffic to like all the content you've created or all these things, it's just not. I don't think that's gonna happen. I don't think it's gonna happen anytime soon. I don't know if that's gonna shift. I think if anything you need to be just looking at like the growth of your homepage and your core pages. [00:37:06] Speaker A: Yeah, [00:37:07] Speaker B: mostly the homepage, [00:37:09] Speaker A: the plug. I'll make again an open field. How did you hear about us in your lead form, demo request form, whatever it is to allow for self attribution and not a dropdown that says, you know, Google whatever like is tremendously helpful because that's like everyone's just trying to triangulate signal right now. And we look at what HubSpot says the source was, we look at what Google Analytics says the source was and we look at self attribution and everything that comes in with self attribution from saying ChatGPT or Claude or AI search is organic or direct in those other two tools. [00:38:05] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:38:06] Speaker A: And so there is an overwhelming, you know, dissonance I guess in, in like the self reported versus that. And that's been true even before AI search like self reported would you know, a lot of times be like oh I heard about you from a friend but it came through as direct or whatever. Like [00:38:26] Speaker B: yeah, [00:38:28] Speaker A: that, that's fine. Like it's never going to be perfect. But at this point what we're saying is prompt tracking is extremely early and it's not 100% accurate or actionable. There's essentially no way currently to reliably at scale, say this work or this stuff done to improve visibility on AI led to this much revenue. [00:38:56] Speaker B: Right. [00:38:57] Speaker A: Confidently, you know, there's just like it is very up in the air. I don't, it's hard for us, you know, with clients. I don't envy any marketing leader trying to explain that to a board at the moment. But that is, that is the reality. And I think anyone that's claiming that they do have all those answers is a charlatan. [00:39:21] Speaker B: I thought you were go a little more crass with that. [00:39:23] Speaker A: But [00:39:24] Speaker B: yeah, I agree. [00:39:25] Speaker A: Yeah. So I, I think it just benefits everyone to just be realistic about what this means and kind of what some of your best, best ways to get some signal and you know, understanding and like the directional aspect of it. [00:39:42] Speaker B: Yes. [00:39:43] Speaker A: Is, is helpful. [00:39:44] Speaker B: The practical advice takeaway I think is which we have oriented ourselves around is if you look at organic plus Direct plus LLM referral, that will give you a good, good directional sense of like what the lift you're getting from all these efforts are. [00:40:03] Speaker A: Yep. [00:40:04] Speaker B: You should look at each individually because you will see variance like sometimes like you'll see probably if you put a heavy push on optimizing all the things we're talking about, you'll see direct go up. I know it. You'll see LLM referral go up. Organic will probably be up and down. It won't be as much as it used to be. It's not always all going to be. Each three is going up at the same time. But I think that variance in some of them but lumped together will give you a really nice realistic number of what that growth is over time. And then yeah, looking at your homepage traffic and branded and stuff like that, if anything we should be refreshed that this is the I think output that comes from or the impact that comes from the work that we're doing. But you know, forever we've just seen lots of teams and businesses discount that like the content marketing or the SEO or now the AEO is like actually influencing those things. It is. If you've heavily invested in those things and then that stuff starts to go up. That's it. And you're not doing paid. [00:41:03] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:41:04] Speaker B: Which [00:41:04] Speaker A: most people are doing paid, but. [00:41:07] Speaker B: Right. You can filter that out. [00:41:08] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And I'll use this as an opportunity to kind of segue into the last part. Yes, we, we have oriented around Organic Direct and AI referral and we've also oriented those around engaged sessions with GA4. Because the last thing we talked about is like Search Console, even just this past week, I think very recently a lot of people including us, saw big spikes in clicks in Search Console which was sort of identified as LLM bots effectively [00:41:58] Speaker B: or agents. Yeah, [00:41:59] Speaker A: yeah. And then so I was able to pretty squarely align our traffic with. When I looked at the crawler insights, it came from meta's web indexer. [00:42:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:42:15] Speaker A: So I have random thoughts on why that one and why that Did. I don't know if that's what everyone else experienced was that or if anyone has that set up to even know which one it was. But point being, those clicks are now muddied and there is an increased presence of bots crawling sites, hitting things. And so when you're not looking, when you're looking at total sessions, it has the potential to be inflated by all that bot traffic. And anymore it's harder and harder to filter all that out proactively. So that's where I think the engaged sessions kind of already controls for that a little bit, but just generally wanted to maybe almost like a footnote on the episode, like touch on GSC and how that's kind of always been the source of truth. Gold standard in a lot of ways for search has definitely had a lot of challenges recently. [00:43:18] Speaker B: I think it's interesting because I know you and I have been talking about it, but like, it seems like GSC and the value or use of it is going to shift or is shifting based on how these alarms and then prompt tracking tools work. And it's not that it's not going to provide value. I think it's just going to tell you a little bit of a different story than it used to. It's not just, you know, your rankings, your average position, your clicks and all that. And yeah, because of those weird things, the weird behavior we've seen, I mean, it goes back like maybe a month or a couple months where we started to see there's like search engine land and journal articles on this that you started to see in your query data, like the AI mode prompts or like the things that people were prompting into or adding or saying to AI mode or like when you get the AI overview and then you say like say more or tell me more. Those little phrases are in your data. So you can like see some of that weird behavior that like skews it a bit. [00:44:21] Speaker A: Yeah, [00:44:22] Speaker B: because that's not valuable. And then we've been seeing also not only some of that spike from potential bots and stuff, if you like filter it. If you're tracking, I would say if you're tracking prompts or anything like that, you might be able to see that like those tools are creating these, like they send an agent that asks like a really like normalized query to get and collect data over time. You can see that it's sometimes like in brackets and stuff like that. It's really wild. Like I don't know fully what to make of it yet. You're going to have to Filter a lot of this stuff out if you want a better sense of it. But the thing you and I have talked about, which I think still is of value is that outside of the prompt tracking one the agents or LLMs potentially hitting your GSC data is not a reflection of like potent, like it's not invisible or not real demand. Like [00:45:17] Speaker A: sure [00:45:17] Speaker B: it's, it's anything. I'd put it as like the work you're doing is now hitting this new discovery layer that sits on top of like this of search [00:45:28] Speaker A: outside of prompt tracking tools. [00:45:31] Speaker B: Right. [00:45:32] Speaker A: Hitting your site. [00:45:33] Speaker B: Well yeah, like [00:45:33] Speaker A: the basis. [00:45:34] Speaker B: Yeah. And some of the stuff you can see in like more longer tail queries that would be clearly a prompt. Like more dynamic ones that aren't like fully repeatable, repeated. Right. That in one of the tells is like if you're getting clicks in like the average position is like super high. Right. Which I don't think is super conclusive because it's the median. Right. So like and since things change so much, you could have ranked it first in [00:46:03] Speaker A: someone [00:46:03] Speaker B: briefly. So I think there's like a lot that we need to learn from all this but I do think that it is representation directionally that we need to get more confidence in that. LLMs are the thing we were talking about earlier. People are searching high intent non brand prompts to get you find products and brands that they are in need of. And then an LLM went, pulled you in based off of a query fan out that triggered. That's where you got your click, that's where you got your impression, that's where like that data comes from. So if anything it is representation of someone finding you via another tool. It's just not search necessarily. [00:46:45] Speaker A: Correct. Yeah. And I think that I would assume that Google would figure out the easiest and first thing to figure out would be the repeated stuff coming from prompt tracking tools and them being able to filter that out on their end which then would leave messy looking queries and that kind of stuff. But to your point, a fragmented but real look at intent and demand from people, it's just coming [00:47:22] Speaker B: totally [00:47:23] Speaker A: different. But yeah again in terms of in house marketers, leaders, all that stuff, that is unfortunately a very real thing. Been a number of things over the past six to 12 months that have made GSC less rock solid than it had been. [00:47:49] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:47:50] Speaker A: Prior. So [00:47:52] Speaker B: yeah pro tip, which people have also talked about too which we're starting to look at a bit more. But like Bing Webmaster Tools has a bit better AI reporting in it that will give you like Grounding queries. They try to like categorize actually what people are like, you know, searching through AI tools and all that and in their own capabilities there. So [00:48:11] Speaker A: that's [00:48:11] Speaker B: something to look into to just need to look at more data. [00:48:15] Speaker A: Yep. Cool. Well, the. I don't know if we'll have it done by the next time we record, but hopefully we'll have time to chat through our next data report as that comes together and be able to share more of the data like we did. You can look at the previous episode on the data set we did on High Intent or what was it? [00:48:44] Speaker B: What LLM site down for B2B brands. [00:48:47] Speaker A: Yeah, it was [00:48:49] Speaker B: lower funnel content. [00:48:50] Speaker A: Yes, sure. Yeah, there was something about like High Intent something in there, but awesome plug on my part that, yeah, we would like to do more of that and talking through a lot of the data, but I think this was hopefully helpful in less of a pontificating on where things are headed. And a lot of what we're seeing on the ground obviously have more alpha than a lot of in house folks, just because we're working across a lot of different companies and see a lot of trends and things we can test that way. But yeah, there's. There's a lot that can be done to kind of get some, some quick fixes, things you own. You don't have to go try to like, you know, get press coverage or, you know, run big campaigns. It's just kind of getting your own house in order that can have a quick impact and get you started on the right foot for next year. But anything else you want to mention to close it out, [00:49:51] Speaker B: I double down on that. There's. I. There's a lot going on that you could push on internally to get results. And I think it's a really exciting time because the more we learn, have learned from all these things, like, the more I think it becomes like realistic and understandable of what you can do to again drive results. So just dig in. [00:50:14] Speaker A: Yeah, awesome. All right, we'll wrap up then and continue next time. [00:50:20] Speaker B: Yeah, sweet. Thanks.