AI Search (AI SEO or GEO) is transforming how people discover brands. PR agencies are perfectly placed to lead the charge.
In our recent webinar on the subject, Darryl Sparey, MD at Hard Numbers, and Cara Corbett, SUSO’s own, discussed how PR agencies can maximize the opportunity of AI Search.
➡ How AI Search is changing brand discovery
➡ PR’s unique positioning in AI Search
➡ What most PR agencies aren’t doing
➡ How PR agencies can sell AI Search to their clients
Scroll down to watch the recording.
Click here to access the presentation slides.
Webinar Transcript
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Let’s get started. Welcome to what PR agencies need to know about the AI search opportunity, which is the first webinar in a three part series on AI search.
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So today we’re going to explore the hot topic of AI search, how it’s transforming brand discovery and why PR agencies are perfectly placed to lead the charge in this new era. You’ll not only learn more about how your work is
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already influencing results on AI search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI mode, but you’ll leave this session with brand new perspectives and resources to help you take advantage of this golden opportunity even further.
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I’m your host, Cara Corbett. I’m the partner growth manager at SUSO Digital. I actually come from a traditional PR background like a lot of you, but I’ve been working in SEO for the last six years.
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And SUSO Digital is an SEO firm that specializes in agency partnerships, meaning we work with agencies of all sorts as their technical SEO partner. And my job as Partner Growth Manager is really to make
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sure that all of our agency partners are equipped with everything they need to understand and sell SEO and GEO services. And joining me today, we have Darryl Sparey, who’s the managing director at Hard Numbers,
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And he’s also an industry vet and a huge advocate for today’s topic of conversation. Darryl, you want to introduce yourself for everybody? Yeah, thanks very much, Cara. Thanks for the opportunity to join today’s webinar.
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I really don’t like people who have too much to say about themselves and have really long bios and I’ve gone and written quite a long bio, but hopefully it explains why
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People might get some value out of today’s session. So, yeah, I’m the MD and co-founder of Hard Numbers with PR Moments B2B PR agency of the year.
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To be honest, I consider my most important job to be daddy to Hudson and Halia, my kids. But in terms of why I might be worth listening to on this webinar, I started my career in the media intelligence industry,
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Eventually leading sales and marketing for private equity backed Precise, which we sold to WPP. It’s now Onclusive. Many of you folks might know them or use them. While I was there,
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It gave me a real understanding of building and commercializing SaaS based tools in the communication space and using intelligence data, media intelligence data to
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Deliver business insight. And then when we sold Precise to WPP, I ran the London office of a top one hundred digital agency specializing in SEO. And while I was there,
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I saw how similar the work of PR and SEO folks was. Which we’ll talk about later. But I also saw the power of brand. Every single brand that was
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Killing it online had great brand search. And the thing that most companies spend money on to build brands initially is PR. So that led me
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To PR, to working for four very, very happy years with Andy West, who is on this call at Hotwire. And then I set Hard Numbers
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Up five years ago to be a different kind of agency, one that’s committed to KPIs. We write them into our contracts for our clients and we have a clause in them that says we’ll hit them in any given quarter
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Or we’ll work at our costs until we do. One that’s committed to commercial outcomes and one that’s committed to best professional standards. All of our senior team are either chartered or
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Accredited practitioners. So I think that experience between like SaaS tool vendors and measurement, SEO and digital and PR puts me in a good spot to talk
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About AI search or generative engine optimization or whatever, whatever folks want to call it. Awesome. Thanks, Darryl. And just some housekeeping.
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We will have time for questions at the end. So feel free to pop them in the chat in the top right corner as we go. And then we will get to those at the end. Darryl will be given all of his responses.
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I’ll be chiming in there as well. So definitely leave your questions in the chat there. But first, let’s look at what we’re going to cover a little more deeply today. We’ll discuss how AI search
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Is changing everything from how we search for information to also how consumers discover brands. We’ll talk about why PR agencies are uniquely positioned to lead the charge in AI search and how
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The work you’re already doing is giving you an edge. We’ll also cover the areas that most PR agencies aren’t even paying attention to, which is a goldmine of an opportunity for those that want to tap into it.
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And finally, we’ll wrap up by giving you practical next steps to put into play right away so that you can start pitching your own AI search services to clients. So in 2025,
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Consumers are discovering brands and more channels than ever before. Not only are they finding out about brands through social platforms like Instagram, forums like Reddit, e-commerce marketplaces
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Like Amazon or traditional search engines like Google, they’re now going to AI search tools like ChatGPT. They’re having full conversations with these tools. And they’re getting direct recommendations for brands
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Sometimes without even intending to. Now traditionally PR teams have owned social influencer and editorial channels while SEO teams like ours have long focused on Google
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Search and own content. So essentially, we would take on website updates, whether that was through optimizing content or fixing technical things in the backend. And of course, we’d also build the odd backlink.
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But all of this was to ensure that our clients were showing up for the keywords that their audience was searching for. So up until now, those responsibilities used to sit in completely different silos.
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But now with AI search, everything is merging together. And that’s because large language models, they don’t work like Google does. They don’t just look at one channel like your website for their answers.
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Instead, they’re pulling signals from all across the internet to source their information. So that coverage in the respected publication, the content written on the website, even how a brand is talked
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About on social, all of these things can influence whether your client is mentioned or cited in an AI generated answer. So these tools offer a completely new opportunity
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For visibility. So of course our clients want a piece of it. You’ve probably already been asked by some of your clients, how do we get ChatGPT to recommend our brand? How do we show up when someone prompts an AI with
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A question that we have the solution to? And here’s the exciting part. The work that PR professionals are already doing, which is crafting powerful brand stories, building credibility and reputation through earned media coverage,
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And securing mentions on online media, all of this is playing a major role in AI search. And that’s because these models prioritize clear, structured, credible, and authoritative sources across
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The web when they’re deciding what to include in their answers. And that’s been corroborated by quite a few studies. You may have seen the Muckrack analysis, where they found that 85% of
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Generated search results cited are in media. Or maybe you’ve seen the HRF study that showed that brand mentions was the factor with the highest correlation to a brand showing up in Google’s AI overviews.
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I know Darryl’s done some awesome research, which we are going to take you through as well. That corroborates this even further. But in any case, the work that PR folks are doing is building that
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Credibility and that trust that the machines rely on when making recommendations and their responses. And we can see that this space is growing quite rapidly. As of August,
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ChatGPT has 800 million users and they reached 365 billion annual searches 5.5 times faster than Google did. It took Google fifteen years to get to this number,
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Whereas it only took ChatGPT two years. And it’s not stopping there. OpenAI aims to reach one billion users by the end of 2025. So that’s just about one eighth of the world’s population,
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Which is insane to think about. And SEMrush actually predicts that AI search will fully overtake traditional Google search by 2028. This is completely changing what we’ve known about
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Search behavior forever. And if you look at the graph on the screen, we can see that search demand for the term AI SEO is at its peak, signalling that people are looking for ways to get their brands into these tools.
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So the time has never been better for PR agencies to get ahead of the market and be a solution to the demand. So we know that there’s demand and we know that we’re having an impact here, but there’s actually a
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Whole other important piece to earning AI visibility that a lot of PR agencies aren’t thinking about. And that’s the technical and the structural perspective, which actually aligns more closely with traditional SEO tactics.
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Some people are calling this GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), AISEO, I’ve heard AEO, LLMO, like the acronyms go on and on. Whatever you want to call it, the bottom line is you can actually,
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To an extent, engineer visibility with these machines through a variety of tactics beyond earned media coverage. And these tactics will mostly come down to making sure that the content that you have on your own
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Website and also across third-party sites is well-written and structured and presented in a way that’s easy for LLMs to access, understand, and hopefully use within their answers.
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It’s also important to note that on their own, neither PR nor SEO is enough to drive meaningful results in AI search. Because PR without the technical optimization risks going unseen by LLM machines,
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And then SEO without the authority and credibility risks being ignored as untrustworthy. So it’s really when you bring the two together you combine the authority of PR and the structure of SEO, that you unlock real AI visibility,
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And then even more value for your clients. So this is where agencies have the chance to lead the market. But don’t just take my word for it. I know Darryl has also some interesting thoughts on this as well.
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Yeah, thank you, Cara. So the reason I moved from PR measurement to SEO and digital in 2013 is that I saw from Google’s Penguin update that it
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Created a need for more high quality link building and that the SEO and PR industry would come closer together. At the time, I bet the SEO agencies would
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Be the one that would lead in this area. And to an extent, I was right. PR agencies had the opportunity to own SEO from 2012 to the 2020’s and
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Expand the scope of what they did for their clients. But the majority of them stayed in their lane and focused on the same kind of things that they felt comfortable with around
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Media relations and things like that without thinking of the broader SEO impact of the work that they were doing. While the SEO industry entered the PR space very
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Much and what kind of became fashionably known as digital PR led to a lot of budget that could otherwise
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Have gone to PR and communications agencies and in-house teams going to other disciplines and other agencies. And the other problem that
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Created was that very often there wasn’t the same level of brand relevance to the work that was being done or some quite sort of spammy approaches that you know might kind of work in
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You know, old school kind of link building, but definitely don’t work when you’re trying to pitch Chris Stoker Walker or Charles Arthur or some folks like them for, you know,
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For a media opportunity. So I think we have a really exciting opportunity now to have a do over in the PR industry. And I don’t want us to to miss it.
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With SEO, I saw that it basically, and I know wars have been fought for less contentious things than I’m about to say, but basically SEO boiled down to three key things. On-site technical, on-site content,
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And off-site link building and citations. And PR folks are already doing two out of those three buckets, writing onsite content or writing good quality content and securing third
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Party media outlets to cite that stuff and hopefully potentially backlink to it. Now, link building is less of a focus with GEO. So the PR industry has even
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More opportunity with GEO, I think, than it did with SEO. So if PR agencies can just get that technical bit right, then they can really go on and lead this discipline in
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A way that they didn’t with SEO previously. And that means more budget. That means more work. That means more opportunity for everyone on this call. And so, sorry.
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So, yeah. So toward the end of last year, we saw the increasing use of ChatGPT in particular, but LLMs more broadly to research companies, products and services.
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To better understand how AI determines brand reputation, we asked questions of ChatGPT about the world’s most significant companies. Focusing on key traits in relation to brand perception.
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We focused on ChatGPT for a number of reasons, but its market share was probably the most significant one, estimates of anything up to seventy nine percent of the AI chatbot market in May of this year.
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We developed a methodology. We had to start somewhere, so we selected the world’s hundred most valuable brands, according to Forbes. We then developed a framework focusing on four
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Brand reputation pillars or traits. So that’s quality, trust, innovation and value for money. We then queried ChatGPT with
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Specific prompts about each trait and asked the LLM to provide both an answer and a source for that answer. Basically, we asked ChatGPT what it knows about the quality of products,
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Trustworthiness, value for money and innovation at each of the world’s hundred most valuable companies. And then we asked it to cite the sources that it used to produce that content. Slightly more complicated than that,
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But not massively so. And then we categorize the content that ChatGPT used into category like own media, editorial media, analyst reports, academic studies, industry awards,
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And so on. So next slide is what we found. Thank you very much, Cara. That was far more professionally done by me that time round. So the good news for us PR
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Folks is that editorial content from earned media coverage drives, 61% of all LM responses that we looked at. This was particularly
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Noticeable when in relation to opinions around trust and value from the brands that we looked at. So editorial coverage was cited in 65% of the responses in
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Relation to trust and 72% of the responses in relation to value. The continued dominance of editorial media suggests that rather than being siloed or sidelined by
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Digital transformation, earned media is evolving to play a new and more important role in shaping both human and AI driven perception. Own media, though,
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Is of significant influence too. LLMs show a surprisingly high level of trust in own media and brand generated content such as blogs, press releases,
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Et cetera, was cited in 66% of the responses And in relation to innovation and in relation to quality, it was cited in 55%
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of the responses. And we can see that owned media was the second most referred to source after editorial media. So we’re very much not in the camp of folks that are going around saying
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Things like SEO is dead or anything like that. That is clearly nonsense. And that’s something that we think is important to pull out.
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, only 4% of the opinions that ChatGPT produces about value for money come from owned media. Which reflects that consumers are more likely
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To trust third parties when it comes to this. Also, the world’s hundred most valuable brands, the likes of Apple, the likes of Burberry, the likes of Chanel, et cetera,
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Don’t typically trade on price. So there’s not sections on their website talking about how cost effective their products or brands or services are. Also,
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There’s a rich ecosystem of earned media in relation to price comparison. So things like Money Saving Expert, MoneySupermarket. Com, Money Savvy Ravi were all sources that we saw cited in responses.
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Also, one other quick thing. Our research showed a limited impact of customer reviews only appearing meaningfully in queries in relation to the quality of product. Anyone who’s ever actually
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Read a lot of Trustpilot reviews might very well conclude that they’re not a rich source of insight into anything, particularly good grammar or spelling. And maybe ChatGPT concluded, like me,
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That it’s not a rich source of insight. So if you go to the next slide, I think another interesting thing we saw in the data is
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Where owned media, so a company’s website, wasn’t quoted about a company. Often it used, more often than not, it used earned media. And so we saw examples of
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This where numbers like turnover of the company, company size, et cetera, earned media was cited over owned media. And that’s often because earned media had more
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Up-to-date data or the data was better corroborated across other earned media outlets than it was on the company’s own website. Which I think is an
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Important insight about telling a consistent story across all of your channels and making sure that your own media, your own website,
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Which is the thing that you have most control over, is as up to date as it possibly can be to reflect the story that you’re telling in earned and shared media as well.
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These that successfully tell their stories across these channels in a consistent manner will do better in AI search and are more likely to have their viewpoint or their content included.
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And if we think about, you know, we were talking about that SEO, you know, consideration previously. With SEO, you basically had two interests.
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First was creating content that was engaging for the user. And then it was creating it in a way that would work well for Google and be beneficial in terms of ranking and visibility and things like that.
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I think what AI search or GEO or whatever we want to call it has added as a consideration is how will this perform and be surfaced on AI platforms?
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And just in the same way that it never made sense in a kind of traditional SEO platform, world to make content in isolation, as you were saying, Cara, either just for the user or
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Just because Google wants content in a particular format or of a particular length or in a particular way. Also, you know, we shouldn’t ignore the GEO benefits of impact of what we do.
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And we should think about things as kind of a triangle between those three considerations. Awesome. Yeah, the research is really telling us
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That earned AI visibility, it’s not just PR versus SEO versus content. It’s really the overlap of it all in a cohesive strategy. So thanks for sharing that. So yeah, based on that,
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We know PR agencies are actually in a really strong position to succeed in AI search, right? You’re already doing so much of what the AI models are looking for. You’re crafting compelling narratives across channels,
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Which is exactly the kind of clear and authoritative messaging that LLMs value when they’re deciding which sources to cite. And you also excel at building trust and reputation. You’re securing high quality
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Media coverage, establishing thought leadership, You’re getting your clients mentioned in respected publications. So these credibility signals are really gold for AI search. But the gap isn’t in what you’re doing.
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It’s what you’re not doing and also how you’re packaging GEO. Right now, most PR content isn’t technically optimized in a way that AI can easily find, interpret, and include in answers. And most PR agencies haven’t
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Necessarily ventured into the territory of working on client websites, flexing their development muscles. But the truth is, it’s going to be difficult to build an effective service for clients without this piece.
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And if PR agencies don’t take it on soon, I fear that SEO teams will take charge again, just like they did from 2012 to 2020. So we don’t want that to happen to you guys. That’s why we’re doing this
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Webinar series to really educate you folks. So you have all the tools necessary to dominate the space. So, today, I’m going to mention briefly some of the ways that we can technically optimize for AI
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Search beyond earned media. But just so everyone knows, our next webinar will be a deep dive entirely on the tactical piece. So we’ll go into way more depth on that one and stay tuned. I’ll talk a little bit about
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That in a bit. In a nutshell, LLMs have these robots that will visit websites when they don’t have all of the information that they need from their training data for a query. And if these robots can’t
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Access your website, you will effectively be invisible and there’s absolutely no way for you to appear. So this is what technical optimization is for. It’s really making sure that your website is set up in a
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Way that the robots can access your content. So this focuses on things like making sure you have a fast website, using proper coding language. You may have heard JavaScript. Yeah, these robots can’t read JavaScript,
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Just to name one of them. This fun thing called schema markup or structured data, which is actually a longtime tactic of SEO, but it really helps the bots connect the dots about your products and services.
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So how your content is structured is another important consideration here. Not only do AI platforms pull from the most authoritative source, they actually also choose the clearest one. And that’s because they
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Don’t think in full pages like Google does. They actually break content into chunks, and then they retrieve the most relevant pieces that directly answer the user’s query. So this means your content
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Needs to follow suit, be clearly structured and easy for AI to understand and extract. And so this looks like having a key takeaways section at the beginning of your content, using proper headings like
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H2s and H3s with semantic HTML, ensuring that each section of your content is standing completely on its own, addressing a single concept. And then these subheadings
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And concepts should ideally address the questions that your audience would ask AI about your brand and phrase exactly how they would ask them because these machines are trained on natural human language.
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So, now that we have a bit more insight into some of the technical pieces that go into AI search visibility, how should PR agencies fill this capability gap? Well, I think everyone is already taking a
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Great first step here, which is educating themselves further on the topic and understanding that it’s not just earned media that gets your clients mentioned or cited on ChatGPT. As I mentioned,
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We’ll be digging into the tactics much more deeply on the next webinar. But if you want to do some light homework, get in some reading in the meantime, Darryl has written a fantastic primer specifically for PR folks
00:22:47.799 –> 00:22:57.991
That goes into everything you need to know in more depth. Darryl, you want to talk a bit about the primer you wrote? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the shout out for it as well.
00:22:58.031 –> 00:23:08.774
I really appreciate it. So basically, the genus of it was, again, I just feel really strongly that I don’t want us to, as an industry, to miss this boat. And so, you know,
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We did the research report back in kind of November, December of last year. And so from the work that we were doing, going around and talking to companies our clients our
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Prospective clients you know other folks in the industry about about the research and about about the findings we then kind of poured everything we learned from that into the GEO for PR
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Primer so it really and hopefully one of our kind of things that we like to talk about as a business is that we talk in language that anyone could understand because
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I think that’s really important if you if you talk in words that folks don’t understand you probably don’t understand the topic well enough yourself right so hopefully it’s written in a way that is accessible for
00:23:55.361 –> 00:24:06.124
For everyone and it covers you know the basics of what is generative engine optimization, how do you go about doing it how do you go about optimizing content
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You know but in the ways that you were talking about in terms of both you know on site and then the kind of off-site considerations you know in in relation to this.
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It was very long. And so we listened to feedback that we had from folks, and we made an e-book version of it that’s even longer. And we added a section in it
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On how to make the business case for generative engine optimization. Again, and I shared some of the stats as you were talking about some
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Of the growth that we’re seeing in terms of traffic and interest in AI search. To help… whether you’re in-house or in agency to
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Make the business case for expending budget on on geo and then we also brought in some insights from some experts in the field so Anna Stolter from Onclusive
00:25:00.532 –> 00:25:12.054
Stephen Waddington, Professor Stephen Waddington and Ben Verinder who are both writing a book currently which is going to be published by Kogan next in may next year on AI in
00:25:12.094 –> 00:25:23.279
Public relations John Girlis from the CIPR and other folks as well. Samantha Deeks, formerly of PR Glue, have all contributed their
00:25:23.299 –> 00:25:33.624
Perspectives to the e-book version as well. So if you want to download it, we’ll share a link to it very shortly as part of this.
00:25:34.364 –> 00:25:45.782
Yeah. As you mentioned, I’ll give a QR code at the end of the webinar just so everybody can go right to the resource. Cool. But if you want to dive in and start offering the technical bits sooner rather than later,
00:25:45.822 –> 00:25:55.893
You do have a few options as well. You can either build this in-house, hire people, developers, content writers that are trained in SEO with that really good algorithmic understanding,
00:25:56.314 –> 00:26:07.747
Knowing how the machines work. Although this could take some time to build out a team, create all the processes, get the right tools in place to do the job well. You could also acquire an SEO agency looking to sell.
00:26:07.887 –> 00:26:17.678
There might be a lot of opportunity for that right now as PR is such a key piece in AI search. Definitely recommend looking into that. But on the flip side, this could also be costly and take a pretty long time
00:26:17.738 –> 00:26:26.866
To fully merge, right? Or you can partner with an agency that already specializes in this and can educate your team and help you piece together a more holistic service offering that covers all the
00:26:26.886 –> 00:26:36.174
Capabilities needed to excel in AI search. But whichever the three options that you decide to take, just be sure that your AI search offering incorporates all the capabilities that we talked about,
00:26:36.254 –> 00:26:46.441
That on-site, the off-site, and that really important technical piece. Because when you combine the technical power of SEO and the credibility of PR you now have a full offering that gets your clients more
00:26:46.481 –> 00:26:58.169
Mentions and citations and LLMs builds even more brand trust and visibility and you’ll also be able to speak to the actual results and the impact of your work to your clients which is super important because
00:26:58.249 –> 00:27:09.357
AI search is a lot easier to measure than traditional PR so really brings in that nice ROI piece that you can bring to the the c-suite right And for example, we can use tools to see how
00:27:09.537 –> 00:27:20.505
Often our client’s brand is being cited or sourced in LLMs. And we can also see what traffic and conversions are happening on their websites because of LLM visibility. But spoiler alert, that’s actually content for
00:27:20.525 –> 00:27:30.719
Our third webinar of this series where we’ll be talking all about measurement. So stay tuned for that. I just want to take a couple of minutes to mention a great way that you guys can
00:27:30.759 –> 00:27:41.427
Dip your toes into AI search or GEO without any investment at all. And that’s with our Partner Club, which is a free resource that gives agencies access to a few main things. So one,
00:27:41.467 –> 00:27:52.234
We do free workshops to train agencies and PR professionals on the foundations of SEO and AI search. So that you can understand and speak to the intricacies of search with your clients. I did one at 8am this morning.
00:27:52.274 –> 00:28:02.179
I’ve got another one at 3pm today. I do them all the time. I would love to do one for you as well. We also have a 24/7 Helpdesk that connects you directly with our SEO specialists.
00:28:02.220 –> 00:28:12.645
So if you have a client or you have a technical question about SEO or AI search that you don’t really know the answer to, or maybe you’re working on something and you don’t know how to best structure
00:28:12.685 –> 00:28:24.136
It for LLM visibility, you can use our help desk to get an answer to your question absolutely free within 24 hours. So there is an email or we also have a page on our site dedicated to the Helpdesk.
00:28:25.097 –> 00:28:36.228
We also do free SEO and visibility reports for our partners, which really give a good snapshot into how their clients are currently showing up. On traditional and AI search engines. And these are not automated reports.
00:28:36.268 –> 00:28:47.178
We have actual people on our team that do about two hours of analysis on the website. They look at competitors. They identify things actually on the website and across the web that might be holding the client back
00:28:47.198 –> 00:28:58.389
From a search perspective. So whether that’s technical, on page, or even off site. And we do white label these reports as well. And they don’t need to lead to any commercial opportunity. Sometimes it’s just a really
00:28:58.429 –> 00:29:08.340
Nice little value that you can bring to an existing client or maybe you’re going into a pitch for a client. So these are just some of the agencies that are part of our partner club. They use these free
00:29:08.360 –> 00:29:18.274
Resources to either get upskilled on SEO or get some insights about their clients. And we’ve even worked with some of these agencies on actual paid SEO projects as their back end technical delivery partner.
00:29:18.995 –> 00:29:29.825
And Darryl himself is also a member of the partner club. We’ve even done some free training for the Hard Numbers team there. I don’t know if you want to say anything. Yeah, a chap called Nick just asked in the
00:29:29.865 –> 00:29:40.267
Comments about where to get good training on GEO and SEO. And I have no skin in the game. I’m not on any kind of commission or anything like that from SUSO.
00:29:40.647 –> 00:29:51.551
But yeah, huge advocate for really, really good high quality training that Cara did for our team on SEO and particularly
00:29:51.571 –> 00:30:02.417
The kind of technical side of you know structuring things for for both a traditional search engine and AI search perspective, would very much encourage any agency that
00:30:02.457 –> 00:30:12.637
Wants to upskill you know members of their team to reach out to Cara and get one of those sessions in the diary because they’re very very much worthwhile. Love it.
00:30:12.657 –> 00:30:22.641
So yeah, there’s a link at the bottom of the slide there, but we’ll have a QR code at the end of the presentation with all of the resources that we’ve mentioned today. So before we jump into Q&A,
00:30:22.661 –> 00:30:32.565
I just want to give a quick glimpse into our next webinar where we’ll be breaking down the actual tactics that go into optimizing for AI search. So from that technical perspective, from that onsite perspective,
00:30:32.605 –> 00:30:43.190
I gave a bit of a teaser here, but we will be going into much more depth on this next webinar. Where I’ll be joined by Josh Blyskal from Profound. He’s an absolute top voice in AI search.
00:30:43.710 –> 00:30:53.474
And together we’re going to dig into how these machines work and how you can actually optimize your client’s own content for better AI discovery and visibility. The team at Profound is leading a lot of really
00:30:53.494 –> 00:31:01.141
Groundbreaking research in this field, so I definitely recommend checking them out. And we’re going to be digging into some of their findings on this webinar as well. So make sure you don’t miss
00:31:01.181 –> 00:31:12.172
This session next month, Thursday, October 2nd, 4pm. For our British friends and 11am For our Eastern North American friends like me.
00:31:12.233 –> 00:31:22.315
I’ve signed up. Love the support. All right. So yeah, we’ve got lots of time for some questions. We’ll jump into Q&A.
00:31:22.335 –> 00:31:34.019
Darryl and I are going to piggyback this. We’ll do this live. Lots of stuff going on in here. Love it. Darryl, I see you were really active in the chat too. Very fun. All right. Will there be a recording and deck shared?
00:31:34.139 –> 00:31:44.417
Yes, there will be. There will be both. So stay tuned for that. I see Nick also jumped on that. Clients siloed and they’re thinking and what
00:31:44.457 –> 00:31:55.109
Type of sources fall into the other category Darryl I think that is a question about your research, resource yeah yeah yeah so absolutely so basically the the buckets were own media
00:31:55.129 –> 00:32:05.536
Customer review and rating sites editorial media analyst reports academic studies, social media, industry awards
00:32:05.796 –> 00:32:17.419
Books. So basically Other was everything like low quality kind of you know um index sites you know that kind of but you know
00:32:17.459 –> 00:32:30.491
That kind of stuff really so anything that didn’t fit into that into those uh into those buckets okay. Does social media fall
00:32:30.631 –> 00:32:41.476
Under on media yeah sorry I was just going to ask in relation to the the research that we did just quickly because it’s one
00:32:41.497 –> 00:32:52.262
Thing that I think someone else asked about on the chat about Reddit so we did our research in November around about October November last year
00:32:52.282 –> 00:33:03.085
We put it out in November/December last year something like that OpenAI did its deal, reciprocal content deal, with Reddit around about May. And you can chart, like,
00:33:03.105 –> 00:33:13.488
If you chart the kind of presence of Reddit content in OpenAI responses, it’s gone up and up and up and up and up, like month on month on
00:33:13.508 –> 00:33:25.683
Month on month ever since. So we’re currently running this. . . This research again with our research partner, Onclusive, and already we’re seeing
00:33:25.724 –> 00:33:39.379
Reddit appear much more strongly in the search results than we had previously. The other thing that I think is, and I’ve talked about this, I did a presentation about this recently,
00:33:40.820 –> 00:33:52.398
Is It would make sense for ChatGPT, but for other LLMs as well, that have reciprocal copyright content deals in place,
00:33:52.938 –> 00:34:05.241
For them in some way to algorithmically bias the stuff that they’re paying money to acquire over other stuff. And I looked, there was some data that
00:34:06.904 –> 00:34:17.730
I saw recently that Search Engine Journal put out it was from 8000 searches a prompt in relation to
00:34:17.770 –> 00:34:27.844
What’s the best laptop what’s the best mobile phone what’s the best coffee shop you know etc And the FT for ChatGPT results appeared in more
00:34:27.864 –> 00:34:39.057
Than 5%of the responses. Well, the FT isn’t 5% of like the internet or like editorial content or whatever. And ChatGPT OpenAI has a
00:34:39.097 –> 00:34:49.427
Reciprocal content arrangement with ChatGpT. So I think that’s something that’s really worth keeping an eye on. And there’s some organizations like Fairly Trained,
00:34:49.627 –> 00:35:00.476
I think it’s fairlytrained.org, that are looking at what’s the training data and what is the data that is being ingested and used by AI platforms.
00:35:00.496 –> 00:35:10.809
So very much worth keeping an eye on that kind of thing. Interesting. Also to add on what Darryl was saying, so Profound,
00:35:10.989 –> 00:35:21.291
Whom we’re going to have on our next webinar, they also do a ton of, they run a ton of tests and data and they’re always analyzing the top sources and citations of even by
00:35:21.371 –> 00:35:31.433
Industry and things like that. So we’ll dig into a lot more of that. But I also agree, Darryl, I’m seeing a lot of Reddit come up recently, which is, I mean, it makes sense because
00:35:31.553 –> 00:35:43.124
People are having real conversations on Reddit. They are real communities. Where people are just speaking naturally about their real thoughts. So that makes a lot of sense. Nicole had a question about
00:35:43.224 –> 00:35:54.216
Social media falling under owned media. I know Fanola said no, because the social site is owned by the company hosting. So it’s yes and no so Finola yes you’re right we
00:35:54.236 –> 00:36:04.964
Don’t really have a lot of access into the crawlability of those platforms and how it’s structured but I will say Instagram recently allowed their content to be indexed
00:36:05.044 –> 00:36:17.734
By Google and probably other AI platforms depending on what kind of relationships they have, if they’ve allowed these AI tools to access to their content. So with proper keyword
00:36:17.754 –> 00:36:28.943
Research and how you optimize captions on Instagram, for example, I know LinkedIn is definitely indexable on the Google search engine as well. A lot of this stuff is still
00:36:29.083 –> 00:36:39.167
Considered owned content and you can still use it to show up in these search engine results pages. And I’ve seen if you want a top SEO voice that corroborates this.
00:36:39.467 –> 00:36:50.652
Her name is Lily Ray. She does a lot about this kind of thing. So definitely recommend checking her out. Finola has a question. Can you go into schema some more please,
00:36:50.692 –> 00:37:00.735
Structuring content with schema markup, and is this relevant for press releases? So schema is, like I said, a piece of code that you can generate on a website
00:37:00.775 –> 00:37:11.778
Called schema.org. And there’s hundreds of different schemas, HowTo, product schema, even author schema, FAQ, HowTo, the list goes on, review schema.
00:37:11.838 –> 00:37:22.146
So it really depends on the kind of content that you’re writing I’m not entirely sure off the top of my head if there’s a schema for press releases, but we can definitely
00:37:22.166 –> 00:37:33.215
Get back to you, I can have my technical team look up or you can go to schema.org and see if there is there is a schema.org/newsarticle I think okay i think someone might even have mentioned that in
00:37:33.235 –> 00:37:46.487
The chat let me have a quick look oh sorry i’m reading whatever Yeah, yeah, Lauren San Gregory. Yeah, so she’s recommended using, yeah,
00:37:46.547 –> 00:37:57.016
News article markup. Nice. Awesome. Yeah, and like I said, you can go to schema.org and see all of the different types. You’ll probably even ask ChatGPT which one they recommend if you want to make it easier.
00:37:58.337 –> 00:38:09.285
But yeah, and just so you know, we’re going to go a lot more into depth on schema markup on our next webinar with Josh later, from Profound. Interesting if SEO wins the rock, paper, scissors over PR.
00:38:09.505 –> 00:38:18.950
Authenticity and storytelling is key for editors as this is the human touch POV, something that a technical starting point often struggles with. Totally, they really need to learn to work together.
00:38:19.310 –> 00:38:30.230
It’s a great point there. I thought own content, sorry, I’m just reading these for the first time. I thought owned media as a
00:38:30.290 –> 00:38:41.158
Concept is not defined by a hosting platform. With that thinking, websites are also not owned as they sit. Yeah, so this just ties back into when we say owned content, it’s the things that you have control over what is
00:38:41.198 –> 00:38:52.585
Written on the page. But from the technical and accessibility standpoint, sometimes you don’t have control over some of those things, right? I see that the primer link was shared.
00:38:52.625 –> 00:39:03.061
It’s also in the QR code on the screen. We also have the QR code for our next webinar if you want to register for that and also to sign up for our free partner club. What are some good trainings
00:39:03.081 –> 00:39:13.465
We can do on our own for GEO? Yeah, Darryl already gave SUSO a plug. I’d love to give you a training. There’s another person that you can follow. Her name is Aleda Solis.
00:39:13.545 –> 00:39:27.420
She’s another big SEO figure who talks a lot about AI search. I’ve learned a lot from her. I’ve attended some of her trainings and they’re fantastic. Darryl, do you have any other. . . Yeah,
00:39:27.440 –> 00:39:38.605
Nicole raised a really good point there, Nicole Mezesama, I’m sorry if I pronounced your name wrong, about LLMs having live access,
00:39:38.645 –> 00:39:50.291
The RAG stuff, the live access, live internet search stuff. It’s really important, right? So if you think, and again, I’m oversimplifying and I’m sure someone is going to disagree with me,
00:39:50.311 –> 00:40:01.499
But basically there’s. . . Four sources of information for an LLM. And if you’re doing like what you define as like a
00:40:01.599 –> 00:40:11.928
Hard data question, what is the capital of France? The LLM only has to look at training data,
00:40:12.288 –> 00:40:24.598
Model data, basically, to answer that question. Because it will have that data already. So it doesn’t have to do the live internet search to go off and do that. So it will save compute and
00:40:24.658 –> 00:40:35.823
Save energy and resources and all the rest of it by not having to do that. But if you ask it a fuzzier question like, what is the best football team in France? Or who did Paris
00:40:35.843 –> 00:40:49.567
Saint-Germain play last night? It’s got to then go and do that internet search. And we see anywhere between. . . I’ve seen as many as different twenty different sources you know um be gone
00:40:49.587 –> 00:41:01.030
Through to kind of formulate a response I’ve seen some data that says the median somewhere between three and five I think sources that will be cited in a response to a prompt based on length
00:41:01.270 –> 00:41:11.833
Topic you know you know a number of different factors. Then the other the other two areas are obviously chat history so what have you previously asked you know, before you get to, you know,
00:41:11.873 –> 00:41:23.295
To the specific prompt. And then is that then there’s any other information that you’ve given the LLM in terms of like additional data and upload of a document, you know, whatever.
00:41:23.815 –> 00:41:35.898
So those are the different ways, you know, that an LLM will answer a question. So again, it’s important thinking about that like hard data question versus like fuzzier
00:41:36.998 –> 00:41:49.466
Question as well. And that is the opportunity both for us to influence the results through on-site and off-site content. And that’s why SEO is still
00:41:49.506 –> 00:41:59.512
Important because, you know, ChatGPT uses Bing, although I’ve seen a lot of people speculate that it uses Google as well. And there’s a lot of discussion about that,
00:41:59.553 –> 00:42:09.572
That Google search results and ChatGPT correlate incredibly strongly, you know, with one another. Claude uses Brave, obviously Gemini uses
00:42:09.592 –> 00:42:20.339
Google so you know that they all use different search engines to go and get that that content and formulate a response as well so that’s why traditional SEO is
00:42:20.379 –> 00:42:31.386
Still really important as well so that can’t be ignored but that’s also why that is our opportunity that that that’s our window I think as PR and communications professionals.
00:42:32.232 –> 00:42:41.924
Yeah, totally. And just to add on that piece about the training data that you’re talking about, it’s interesting because some of the training data for some of the models, they aren’t even up to date.
00:42:41.964 –> 00:42:53.577
So I remember our managing director, Andrew, did like a search for who is the president of the United States on one of the old models, and it was saying Joe Biden. So that’s why you really
00:42:53.617 –> 00:43:03.927
Need to also have that own piece where if the model may recognize that it might be out of date, they need to go to a proper site to corroborate that. But obviously,
00:43:04.568 –> 00:43:16.473
Donald Trump and Joe Biden is probably something that you wouldn’t be writing your content about for your clients. Or maybe you would. I don’t know. Maybe some of you have the pleasure of. . . Having Joe Biden and Donald
00:43:16.493 –> 00:43:27.006
Trump as a client. Joanna, thanks for joining. I appreciate that. Will this presentation be emailed? It absolutely will. Thank you, Nick, for answering all of my questions.
00:43:27.186 –> 00:43:38.925
Stella, love the SUSO Club. We love you. Awesome. All right. ChatGPT is definitely using Google. I agree. I agree. I’ve seen actual tests being
00:43:38.965 –> 00:43:51.152
Done by both of those people that I mentioned, Lily Ray and Aleda Solis, where they corroborate this. And they’ve literally created test environments on Google versus Bing
00:43:52.532 –> 00:44:03.678
Within 24 hours. And then they’ll ask and they’ll see that the bots aren’t even visiting the Bing content and they’ll surface the exact featured snippet or something from Google. So it’s definitely,
00:44:03.738 –> 00:44:14.902
They’re definitely using Google’s index in one way or another, even though they list bang as a partner. Um, all right. Any last questions? Yeah. Luke, what would be the best way to
00:44:14.922 –> 00:44:26.887
Help convince clients with limited budgets to invest in GEO Darryl? Yeah, go on then. Um, so, um, a few things, uh, oh, thanks Luke. Um, so yeah, uh,
00:44:27.954 –> 00:44:39.678
But first, so there’s a whole section in the primer on how you make a business case for this, right? But what I would do is, number one,
00:44:40.258 –> 00:44:51.402
Start with benchmarking, right? So set up, and there’s, again, I’m sure the guys at SUSO can help, or I can share a YouTube video on this. Set up a channel in your
00:44:51.442 –> 00:45:01.749
Google Analytics to track how much of your traffic at the moment is coming from the different AI platforms. You will be surprised there is of course global data
00:45:01.769 –> 00:45:12.451
That says it’s a vanishingly small number in comparison to Google search that Google traffic that’s true however I had a client the other day
00:45:12.612 –> 00:45:23.115
That estimated when I asked them, they said, oh, less than 1% of our traffic comes from platforms. We created the category in
00:45:23.335 –> 00:45:34.122
Google Analytics. We looked at it, 27% of their traffic was coming from platforms. So. Sorry, I did not mean to pin that. I was just trying to hands up that.
00:45:34.302 –> 00:45:44.352
I’m going to screenshot that and that’s going to be what I share on good looking for smarty pants.
00:45:45.953 –> 00:45:57.351
Right. There we go. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah, Lauren, you’re citing, that’s actually data from SEMrush rather than Ahrefs
00:45:57.371 –> 00:46:09.140
You’re citing there. I will put a link to that data in the chat for you. But you’re a 100% right. Sorry, was that close to mansplaining? Sorry. Sorry Lauren if you felt I would but
00:46:09.200 –> 00:46:21.943
It’s it’s dated from SEMrush I’ll put a link to it for everyone in the chat but you’re a 100% right so but it’s interesting the client I was talking about high um highly considered
00:46:22.003 –> 00:46:35.607
Purchase six figure B2B like you’re platforming your business on their software kind of for the next three to five years and I think that for those
00:46:35.647 –> 00:46:46.214
Kinds of businesses, AI search becomes rather a lot like analyst reports and things like that.
00:46:47.295 –> 00:46:57.462
Increasingly you’re going there to get that kind of depth and that kind of deep research on a potential provider of that kind of service.
00:46:58.879 –> 00:47:09.247
Set up the category, so first off, set up the category in Google Analytics, start benchmarking and seeing how much traffic you’ve got. There are also lots of, you know, again,
00:47:09.287 –> 00:47:19.675
Look at this stuff on Twitter/X, you know, whatever. There are people sharing free to air versions or there’s GPT for Sheets or there’s things like that where you can basically set up your own prompts
00:47:20.375 –> 00:47:32.904
And then pull the the data in for incredibly low cost I mean you’re literally paying very very small amount for the compute I mean tiny, buttons. So you
00:47:32.944 –> 00:47:43.132
Can do that so you can then again start benchmarking and seeing Well, how are we appearing in these platforms and how are our competitors showing up?
00:47:43.693 –> 00:47:54.542
And then, you know, making the business case for this stuff, you know, for anyone with a low budget will always be based on, well, are we seeing the sort of
00:47:54.582 –> 00:48:06.684
Wind is at the back of this particular channel in comparison to other channels? We’re seeing declines elsewhere. We’re seeing growth here. Well, you always invest in growth. You know, over a declining area.
00:48:07.966 –> 00:48:19.136
And are we seeing. . . Are we seeing basically competitively we’re losing ground to someone else? Those are ways that can help make the business case
00:48:19.657 –> 00:48:31.124
Ultimately for investing in this stuff. And then there was some great stats shared by Cara up front. I’ll share a couple of others in here as well. I’ve shared one from Forrester earlier.
00:48:31.144 –> 00:48:44.232
I’ll share the SEMrush research in here. All of those hopefully help make the case for, and we cite some others in the primer as well. This is, you know, this is a real opportunity.
00:48:44.292 –> 00:48:56.836
And getting in on the ground floor kind of now is definitely the opportunity to start then, you know, building from here. Awesome. I just want to add as well, because SUSO does offer free tools.
00:48:57.216 –> 00:49:07.673
You guys don’t have to spend money to get sort of insights into how your clients are doing compared to competitors. You just reach out to me and we’ll whip up an action report. That shares all of these
00:49:07.713 –> 00:49:19.830
Insights within a couple of days. So feel free to reach out to me if you want any free AI visibility so that you can go to the clients and actually show them how they’re currently doing. All right.
00:49:19.970 –> 00:49:32.681
We’ve got, thank you Ettienne for sharing. Yeah, we have an article there that we’ve written that tells you how to actually track AI traffic in GA4, as they’re all mentioned. And Liza, I don’t know which one that is.
00:49:33.261 –> 00:49:42.169
But with more people relying on AI for search, some of our press contacts are expressing concerns about these LLMs pulling information from their outlets. Without giving their outlets the clicks.
00:49:42.449 –> 00:49:53.835
Totally, such a shame. With these tools affecting the revenue of the media outlets, how have you seen their content strategies changing? What should we be keeping an eye on as PR pros?
00:49:53.995 –> 00:50:04.521
Well, I do know that some of the LLMs are creating partnerships with some of the media. So I know that some PR agencies might be
00:50:04.581 –> 00:50:17.127
Prioritizing those partnerships or those media outlets that they have. Darryl, do you have any insight from the PR perspective how these things are changing that you can provide?
00:50:18.228 –> 00:50:33.175
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m going to try and find it before we wrap up. Lily Ray shared what is as a definitive list as possible on X recently of companies
00:50:33.215 –> 00:50:45.819
Where there are reciprocal content deals done with ChatGPT. And I would. . . I would keep an eye on that like a hawk. Right. To see are there channels which are more,
00:50:46.359 –> 00:50:57.182
As I said earlier, I think it would make sense that there’s an algorithmic bias towards sources where they’re paying for content over. And we see some instances of that.
00:50:57.202 –> 00:51:07.933
Keep an eye on that. And track that and see if the data shows that. And if it does, then obviously focus on those channels that
00:51:08.554 –> 00:51:19.420
Potentially have an algorithmic bias. The other thing is, without getting on my hobby horse, I think we know that less traffic is
00:51:19.480 –> 00:51:31.687
Referred by these platforms than traditional Google search. Right. As the point is made, it converts it for four point four X greater, but less traffic is referred.
00:51:31.787 –> 00:51:43.220
Right. So if we as PR and communications professionals are serious about the opportunity, it has to come hand in glove with continuing to help
00:51:43.300 –> 00:51:53.888
Support the media ecosystem that we rely on. Because if you’ve got outlets that are very much reliant on traffic for monetization, they’re gonna have to look
00:51:53.908 –> 00:52:03.776
For other sources of revenue. That is sponsored content, that is awards, that is events, that is all that kind of stuff. And so you need to be investing in that stuff yourself and you need to be
00:52:03.836 –> 00:52:15.169
Recommending to your clients to invest in that stuff too. Because otherwise, It will have a very short term benefit of media performing really well, but then the media outlets will go away.
00:52:15.449 –> 00:52:25.551
And we’ve seen TechCrunch closing down a lot of their European operations. We’ve seen the same with other outlets. We’ve seen Digital Frontier recently go pop,
00:52:25.591 –> 00:52:36.374
Which is a brilliant new innovative media outlet. We have to support the media ecosystem that we rely on and we have to support it with money, not nice words.
00:52:37.220 –> 00:52:48.527
Hard Numbers, not soft words. So, yeah. There you go. I’ll get off my hobby horse now. I love listening to you speak, Darryl. All right.
00:52:48.947 –> 00:52:59.014
Any possibly relevant for Liza’s question, Cloudflare’s new pay-per-crawl feature. Yes, yes. Something interesting about Cloudflare as well that
00:52:59.034 –> 00:53:09.242
I’ll mention sort of But in terms of accessibility, check with your hosting provider if they’re even allowing AI bots to access your website content.
00:53:10.042 –> 00:53:21.131
A lot of them have automatically turned bot access off. So that’s a huge, obviously, inhibitor of your clients showing up in AI search. But we’ll talk about that more on the next webinar.
00:53:21.291 –> 00:53:33.295
Definitely recommend you check on that, though, in the meantime. Um, okay. We’ve got about six minutes left. I’ll let any final questions. I’ll give about thirty seconds, put them in the chat and then, uh, if not,
00:53:33.335 –> 00:53:43.305
We’ll wrap up and you’ll receive a recap of everything very soon after.
