The Death of Keywords in the Age of AI

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agency, and now Ryan Harmon,

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This is agency forward.

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How is AI search rewriting the rules of SEO?

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Well, I think a lot of people are trying to figure that out right now. It's a moving target. It's it's like the days before Google published guidelines for SEO, it was

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try stuff, see what happens. And then Google, they released guidelines. They basically said, All right,

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if you want to rank on our search engine, here's what you should do, and that started to

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direct most of the SEO industry.

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Then on the fringes, there's still always people trying to find shortcuts. I think right now we have, we already have that. There are many,

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many folks trying to find shortcuts.

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And I the big reason is because there's not clear. There aren't. There's no guidebook for it. Quite yet, we do know that

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SEO tactics and SEO activity can have an impact on AI visibility,

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but there's a massive paradigm shift. So yeah, how is AI search rewriting the rules?

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I think it's in this, this paradigm shift where I mean

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the one of the really simple ways to illustrate the paradigm shift is that you can be ranked number one for a keyword and not show up in AI, not be mentioned by AI.

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You can be,

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you can be highly authoritative for a topic and not show up in AI for a prompt. So let's say you rank really well for

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agency.

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Let's see PPC, agency playbooks. I don't know how, how to start an agency podcast.

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Let's say you ranked really well for that, because you've done SEO stuff really well, but someone goes to chat GBT and asks, How do I get started creating a podcast for my web design agency, and you don't show up. You're on the first page. You're not showing up.

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There was a study by sem rush where they looked at

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10s of 1000s of AI responses and tracked the citations that were included in the responses. So everyday questions like

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best pizza recipe or best running shoes or

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longer form prompts stuff that you're pumping into chat, GPT, very long conversational prompts. They looked at gobs of these and tracked the citations, and then so the citations would be the agent responds, and it provides some references, like, here's the best pizza recipe and here.

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Is where I got this information and why? Why it's the best recipe.

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Those are the citations. So in this study, they collected

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a ton of these citations and went to find all right, where do these citations rank? Does they wanted to know, does SEO rank,

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predict AI visibility, and it doesn't in the way that we would expect it to AI will go to page 10 or page 20 to find the best information it can find to answer your question as best it can with authoritative references.

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It is. It is truth seeking.

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It will it will reflect with itself. It will go back and forth with itself about the answer it's going to give before it gives it to you.

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It will work very hard to give you a good answer.

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In SEO, it's a ranking game. You search, you use keywords, and you get listings.

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It's us. It's almost one dimensional

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with AI, it's it's just a completely different paradigm. So yeah, I'm, I'm stoked about it, because

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we have an opportunity to,

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we have an opportunity to get our brands and our products, our agencies, our software, in front of people who are using AI, which is already billions of people, we have an opportunity to get in front of them by positioning ourselves truthfully, honestly by by positioning ourselves in our strengths, not by fighting up the ranks of search engines, which is difficult in very noisy spaces,

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yeah, I'm wondering how, and I know you don't have this answer. No one does. Even, I'm assuming even the people who are writing the code behind like open AI and anthropic everything, don't understand how this works. But like, how do they determine what is a good post, right? Like, I know they're looking at results on on Reddit, on Quora as well, so suggest that, hey, this article that ranks on page 20 of Google happens to be referenced by multiple people on Reddit. So maybe that's actually, like, we have some social proof that says, hey, this is probably better information than just what the keyword rankings would say. Yeah, you have any insights on that? That's also tough. It's

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we know that

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that mentions are our mentions move the needle. So when, when we're measuring,

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we're measuring AI visibility for for our clients or for ourselves. And we're we look at, we'll look at who's being mentioned,

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especially when we're not being mentioned. Well, who is being mentioned and and then we'll dig deeper into why are they being mentioned?

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A lot of times we find that

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companies and brands are

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it's not about backlinks, and it's not necessarily. It's not ranks or backlinks, it's

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there's the term popularity that's been used. So backlinks are a little bit different than being mentioned. So being mentioned on you can be mentioned on Reddit

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or in a comment. There is no link, but you were mentioned. AI is picking up on that. We haven't done a lot of experimentation on

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getting mentions of our brand or our clients names out on the web. We've been focused on

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publishing content that we predict AI will like to reference in its responses, but we do know that

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popularity or

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like instances of mentions throughout the web, especially on websites like Reddit. For some reason, Reddit, AI, loves Reddit, but also blogs and other publications is is a driver. And so the way we know that is we're well, there are many platforms that help you measure your your visibility on a lot of what these platforms do is send prompts that are relevant to your company to the llms. 10s of them hunt, you know, hundreds.

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Of them. What we do is we take those responses and we analyze them. We use AI to analyze them. It's sort of,

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it's funny, but we use AI to analyze the responses of AI to ask the AI, why are this set of companies showing up? But we're not. And focusing in on why they show up, it's

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the reasons you get back are really interesting. One of them is, yeah, this company is just mentioned a lot, that could be by people in comments or reviews, testimonials or other publications are just mentioning this company in relation to this topic, the topic being the prompt. And so then you ask the AI, when you're analyzing these responses, what should I do? What's the one thing I should do to start showing up for this prompt? Well, then naturally it's going to say, well, you should go get mentioned. And here are publications, and here are some blogs, or here's a subreddit where others have been mentioned. If you go get mentioned there, that would move the needle.

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So, yeah, mentions, not backlinks. And that's an important distinction. Not that, not that backlinks don't help with AI visibility. That hasn't been the recommendation we're getting when analyzing responses. It's it's mentions.

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Yes, you should have the maximize for that. I think one of the interesting variables is also that AI, like, especially your instance, when you, when you're using, like, your chat, GBT, that's been trained on you, like, has a memory of everything you like, yeah, if, if I go in and say, Hey, who are the top agency coaches to follow, it's going to serve up, you know, dynamic agency OS as one of the top results, because it knows me so well, seeing a lot of people on social media are bragging about themselves showing up, but then when everyone else goes to look for it, it's like, it doesn't pop up. And it's like, so I wonder, even the like, there wasn't a ton of variability with Google, even though, at some point, like it, it started getting better at kind of understanding your terms and stuff. But like, generally, if an article ranked first, it was probably going to be on the first page regardless of who searched for that keyword. But like, now that's gone right, like, that's Yeah, yeah. And so I think it's incredibly interesting. Yeah, I think there's a whole side of

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AI that we're not thinking about as marketers, which is,

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it's multiple there's multiple dimensions. So I think what a lot of folks are experiencing is they go to their open AI account which knows them and maintains a memory of a memory of context about them, and so, yeah, it can be a little bit self serving. I guess if, if you're asking a question related to yourself, it is sort of urged to include you or fold your context into its response, so you're not getting an accurate representation of what that same response would look like for a stranger.

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There's

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so there's this dimension of personalization, basically in context, and

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as these agents become more and more

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people's everyday assistant,

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I think the response has changed, and so it becomes more difficult to game the system as a as a marketer, as an SEO expert, looking for tactics, basically, instead of being targeting a set of a handful of keywords,

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I think soon we'll, we'll be thinking about, how do I target hundreds of prompts,

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and then really it's, how do I target a conversation? This is what I'm trying to get to

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folks people are having conversations with AI, and then our products, our services, our agencies, are showing up at some point in that conversation.

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I don't know how you game a conversation. I don't think you can.

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You just have to you just have to be there at the right time for the AI,

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yeah, it

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reminds me of the, like, Snow White kind of Mirror, mirror on the wall. People are looking for their own requests, until eventually it's like, oh, actually, you're not. Like, I.

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But yeah, so I guess shifting gears a bit with we want to maximize the number of people who are finding us via AI. But just like with Google, it's like AI is kind of zero click, right? Like, if I can find the answers by AI, just giving me the answer, what incentive do I have to go check into your brand? Does that change how you're thinking about like, what type of content we should be creating, or anything like that?

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No,

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hopefully we'll figure out attribution down the road. But attribution right now is difficult. Attribution being how do I know who's coming from? AI to my website.

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Yeah, a lot of folks will will see an answer if the AI doesn't provide a link, or even if the AI does provide a link in its response, it says, Hey, Chris knows a thing or two about this. Here's a blog post he wrote, or here's his website. So even in in cases like that, where there is a link in the AI response, folks may not visit it, or they'll open another tab and go check you out other ways.

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Yeah, measurement is tough right now. There are in Google Analytics, you can get to the information. You can see folks coming from open AI or perplexity, and the numbers, by the way, for anyone who has looked at that

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January of this year, it just bumped up. For all of our clients, when we look at that January, it's bumped up.

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It's not a ton, but it's going to keep going up. This is traffic coming from agents to your website.

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But no, a lot of folks are having these conversations that maybe it just becomes an impression in their mind. Chris was mentioned. The Conversation keeps going. I

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don't think that should I

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it. I think, AI, it's not going

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the change to search, this disruption to the web, really is, isn't going anywhere. So whether we can track it or not, whether people are clicking or not. I think, I think, I think we should take this seriously, because it's not going anywhere. This is really

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I've been in I've been doing marketing and web development for about 15 years now. This is the biggest thing to happen in my career, and I don't think it's going anywhere, but no tracking is is difficult, is tough to see

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what, what's how much traffic we're getting. But there are studies. I don't know if this is an SEM rush study,

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but

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we do know that the traffic that does come from Ai conversations is very high value. So folks that do come to you from a conversation with AI

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are much higher intent than someone coming from a search engine or even even elsewhere, because we we're using our AI every day. And we trust, like folks really trust chat GPT, and when you have a conversation with it, and then it, it sends you over to a brand or a product that's a really high intent visit and high value visit. Yeah, so we do know that.

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Yeah, I'm wondering too. So I know there's probably a way to do this in Google Analytics, but I'm not an expert in that, that realm. But in HubSpot, I think just added another source for like, AI rocket,

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awesome. Now I'm wondering too. It would be interesting to just look at single web pages filter by the source look. So you're looking only at AI, and just look at the bounce rate in order to see, like, how much warmer is the traffic that's coming to me?

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Are they going deeper into the site? That would be pretty interesting numbers just to look at. Yeah, apparently they are across the board as a whole. So I think for anyone listening, if, if the if you use HubSpot, that's awesome, you can just get to it. Google Analytics hasn't made it that easy yet, but I bet for anyone listening who uses HubSpot, if you logged in, you would see a lower a lower bounce rate, or at least a longer time on site. For folks coming from Ai, yeah, and we just need someone with enough AI traffic right now to validate these

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hypothesis for us. If you're listening, please report in, yeah,

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what? Uh, see, a measurement is going to be a challenge until, until we have enough, I guess.

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Data to measure, because, like, I'm not even sure, like, I don't know that I've seen any AI traffic yet, but granted, my site is probably one of the younger ones I don't like, even my business is pretty young compared to a lot of the other agencies and coaches that are out there and so, so I'm sure that has an impact, right? Like, I've just been around less to be mentioned for AI, but I'm sure that'll pick up at some point, but just based on what we know. So what are the things that companies should be doing today so that they are prepared to, you know, take it or to acquire more of that? AI based traffic? Yeah, well, there are, there are loads of tools for helping you track your AI visibility. And the way these tools work is you just want to you first, you start by figuring out what questions you want to show up for. So you probably already have some keywords in mind

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for one of my businesses. We do website design for credit unions and banks. And one of the top keywords

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we we need to rank for in search engines is credit union web design, or web design for credit unions.

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And so if we wanted to track our AI visibility, we'd start with that keyword and come up with

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prompt equivalence for that keyword. You can use AI to help you do this. So for me, I would take credit union web design and drop it into chat GPT and just ask chat GPT to give me

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five prompts that folks would likely be asking AI in relation to my keyword.

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So if, if one of these platforms like sem rush, I think they do AI visibility tracking,

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there's a bunch of them, if they don't help you generate those prompts. That's how you could generate your prompts. Those are the prompts you'd then be tracking, and you want to look at them on at least a weekly basis by

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having those prompts sent to AI, you know, 510, 20 times a week or or 10 times a day, the responses vary, so you want to get lots of data over time, but those prompts that you hope to show up in, they'll go to AI and be recorded in The system over time, and hopefully you show up

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sometimes, our our customers, have no visibility. Sometimes they have some visibility. They are mentioned some of the time, and for some of their prompts, they're, you know, they're kicking butt. For whatever reason, they have 100% visibility. But once you have that you'd want to find, find a prompt where you are not being mentioned, and the next step is to

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analyze and find the reasons why

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those who are mentioned are being mentioned. So

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if your tool, hopefully, the tool you're using does this, but or you can export the response data. What you're doing is you're you're exporting those hundreds of responses that AI gave to that prompt, and then you're going to use AI to analyze it, and by analyzing it, it's going to say, well, you know, you searched the prompt was

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best, most popular truck in the US. Who do you think is going to show it's going to be f1 50 and it's going to be Tacoma? So they're mentioned 100% of the time.

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You'd ask AI,

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why are these trucks being mentioned? There's, there'll be a couple of other trucks. It's going to look at. It's going to consider

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popularity. It's going to consider the types of information that it's cited, and say it seems like these,

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these YouTube truck reviews, are being cited a lot, or it'll,

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it might, what's one of the big this, this big car and car publication,

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it's gonna say this type of content, so it's going to go through and basically like reverse engineer, the winners. That's, that's what, that's what you want to do in SEO, I'm not, I'm not a big SEO expert, but in SEO, you can do you can.

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Do rank analysis. You can do gap analysis. If you want to show up on the first page for a term, you analyze every single page on page one, and you analyze every word on those pages. What type of content is it? How long is the content? What's the tone of voice of the content? What are the keywords,

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what are the citations? Did the content have a bibliography? Did it have comments on it? Is it? Is it a forum? Was it a video on Vimeo? Is it a Wikipedia? I mean, there are endless forms of content, lengths, formats, and so that's what, that's what, that's what we've seen work really well is basically reverse engineer, the winners,

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copycat, who's being mentioned.

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Now, got to be careful. AI is truth seeking. It will see through. It'll see through the junk and skip you if you're not being authentic. So the trick is to leverage your truths. What are you good at? What do you do? Well, what's your

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specialty? What do you have case studies for evidence, for a proven track record, for and copy the winners, leveraging that information to get it into the same format and distribute it in the same way.

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So that's really the hardest part, but we have AI to help analyze past responses to figure out what the winners do and why they show up. What we're what we're seeing. We've, we've helped a number of companies improve their visibility, mostly banks and credit unions,

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but we've helped a number of them go from zero to 100% on something like,

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who's got a good savings account in insert, you know, town in Oregon, or best auto loan in

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insert town in Texas.

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Pretty simple prompts, but where they were doing pretty well in SEO, they just weren't showing up at all with AI,

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the strategy we're seeing that works the best is publishing long form content,

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so

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that's been a really common theme in the recommendations that we're getting from Ai when analyzing response data, it's you know, comes back with a number of recommendations, such as, Go, get mentioned here, here, there, or there,

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get your reviews up on Google, or get your reviews up over here. But one of the most common recommendations is, hey, publish a deep dive on

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all of the auto loan options in that area, with the you know, with the interest rate for each one of them, basically like a comparison article, a deep dive comparison,

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which are some of our clients are like, wait, you want us to publish content on our website that talks about our competitors? And the answer in those cases is, yeah, because that's what the LLM that runs this whole thing is telling us what to do, basically.

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So if you think about it, it makes sense,

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if you do a deep dive like then we're talking

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3000 5000 word, 678, 1000 word deep dives where you're going into excruciating detail on that topic, the AI loves it. It can chew through that in milliseconds. It wants to know the best information

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to serve its human and its response. So that's been the that's what's been moving the needle for us, in cases where

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that's the the cause of visibility that we're seeing from analyzing the information,

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that really has been moving the needle. Again, that is long form, deep research based content that we're publishing that directly answers the prompting question, like best, best auto loan in insert town.

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Just.

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Going really deep on it.

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Awesome. All right. As we wind down here, I got two more questions for you. The first being, what book do you recommend every agency owner should read?

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I read a lot.

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I love to listen to books on audible. My most recent favorite is never enough

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by Andrew Wilkinson.

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He

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it

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just his. The so many so many books that you run across as an agency owner are

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very prescriptive, and

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this is more of a story, so you pull out the lessons by going, Going along the journey, Andrew's journey, and so I'm not sure. I'm trying to remember, like, how appropriated there's like,

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for

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how many curse words were in that book. I don't remember.

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I seem to recall,

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yeah, it's a good one. Maybe there's like,

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maybe there's like, a version that's safe for young ears. I don't know if you can get that on Audible. Is there like a vid angel for books, right?

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Yeah, that's a good one. That's my that's my favorite one as of late.

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Last question, Where can people find you?

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Yeah, my agency is metrify with a with an eye at the end. But unless you are a bank or credit union, that's not, that's not relevant, but that's my agency. We do websites, but also conversion rate optimization for financial institutions. But we also built a tool called para loom. Para loom.ai

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and it's an AI visibility tool.

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You can I mean, check me out through that. I would say, check out that product. I happen to be the engineer behind it. So yeah, check me out through my work and use it for free. You can also email me, send me an email. Ryan dot, Harmon, H, A R, m o n, at, let's do para loom.ai. For the email and send me your questions. I'd also be happy to help anyone for free, take some kind of action for a prompt that relates to their their business, and just basically guide you through that process of taking an action that could be getting a mention out on the web or publishing some content, and just help you get a win under your belt. So send me an email if you want to get some help for free. Awesome. All right. Well, thanks for joining. Man, yeah, thank you, Chris, this was fun. I hope the Listen is is useful. I could, I may have gone all over the place, but yeah,

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any follow up questions, shoot me an email, because I could talk your ear off. But thanks, Chris, thanks for doing this.

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