The Death of Keywords in the Age of AI

Chris DuBois1:36

How is AI search rewriting the rules of SEO?

Ryan Harmon1:41

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

Chris DuBois1:56

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

Ryan Harmon2:06

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

Chris DuBois2:14

direct most of the SEO industry.

Ryan Harmon2:20

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,

Chris DuBois2:33

many folks trying to find shortcuts.

Ryan Harmon2:36

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

Chris DuBois2:46

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

Ryan Harmon2:54

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

Chris DuBois3:04

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

Ryan Harmon3:09

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.

Chris DuBois3:25

You can be,

Ryan Harmon3:27

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

Chris DuBois3:41

agency.

Ryan Harmon3:44

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

Chris DuBois3:53

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.

Ryan Harmon4:13

There was a study by sem rush where they looked at

Chris DuBois4:19

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

Ryan Harmon4:32

best pizza recipe or best running shoes or

Chris DuBois4:38

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.

Ryan Harmon5:00

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

Chris DuBois5:05

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

Ryan Harmon5:11

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

Chris DuBois5:22

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.

Ryan Harmon5:47

It is. It is truth seeking.

Chris DuBois5:51

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.

Ryan Harmon6:02

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

Chris DuBois6:06

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

Ryan Harmon6:14

It's us. It's almost one dimensional

Chris DuBois6:18

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

Ryan Harmon6:28

we have an opportunity to,

Chris DuBois6:31

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,

Ryan Harmon7:06

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

Chris DuBois7:51

we know that

Ryan Harmon7:54

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

Chris DuBois8:01

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,

Ryan Harmon8:13

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?

Chris DuBois8:24

A lot of times we find that

Ryan Harmon8:27

companies and brands are

Chris DuBois8:31

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

Ryan Harmon8:38

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

Chris DuBois8:51

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

Ryan Harmon9:01

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

Chris DuBois9:10

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

Ryan Harmon9:21

popularity or

Chris DuBois9:24

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.

Ryan Harmon10:00

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

Chris DuBois10:11

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

Ryan Harmon10:30

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.

Chris DuBois11:19

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.

Ryan Harmon11:39

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

Chris DuBois12:45

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

Ryan Harmon12:51

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.

Chris DuBois13:30

There's

Ryan Harmon13:31

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

Chris DuBois13:37

as these agents become more and more

Ryan Harmon13:43

people's everyday assistant,

Chris DuBois13:46

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,

Ryan Harmon14:04

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

Chris DuBois14:13

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

Ryan Harmon14:20

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

Chris DuBois14:34

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

Ryan Harmon14:39

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

Chris DuBois14:46

yeah, it

Ryan Harmon14:49

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.

Chris DuBois15:00

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?

Ryan Harmon15:26

No,

Chris DuBois15:29

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.

Ryan Harmon15:43

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.

Chris DuBois16:14

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

Ryan Harmon16:31

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

Chris DuBois16:39

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

Ryan Harmon16:47

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

Chris DuBois16:59

don't think that should I

Ryan Harmon17:03

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

Chris DuBois17:07

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

Ryan Harmon17:31

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

Chris DuBois17:46

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

Ryan Harmon17:56

but

Chris DuBois17:57

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

Ryan Harmon18:12

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.

Chris DuBois18:42

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,

Ryan Harmon18:56

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?

Chris DuBois19:11

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

Ryan Harmon19:48

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

Chris DuBois19:54

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

Ryan Harmon20:00

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

Chris DuBois20:57

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

Ryan Harmon21:09

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

Chris DuBois21:19

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

Ryan Harmon21:27

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

Chris DuBois21:44

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

Ryan Harmon21:53

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

Chris DuBois22:00

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

Ryan Harmon22:17

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

Chris DuBois22:42

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

Ryan Harmon23:10

analyze and find the reasons why

Chris DuBois23:15

those who are mentioned are being mentioned. So

Ryan Harmon23:19

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

Chris DuBois23:47

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.

Ryan Harmon24:00

You'd ask AI,

Chris DuBois24:03

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

Ryan Harmon24:13

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

Chris DuBois24:23

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

Ryan Harmon24:32

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

Chris DuBois24:39

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.

Ryan Harmon25:00

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,

Chris DuBois25:24

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,

Ryan Harmon25:54

copycat, who's being mentioned.

Chris DuBois25:58

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

Ryan Harmon26:20

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.

Chris DuBois26:36

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,

Ryan Harmon26:58

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

Chris DuBois27:04

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

Ryan Harmon27:16

insert town in Texas.

Chris DuBois27:19

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

Ryan Harmon27:29

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

Chris DuBois27:34

so

Ryan Harmon27:36

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,

Chris DuBois27:53

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

Ryan Harmon28:07

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,

Chris DuBois28:23

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.

Ryan Harmon28:46

So if you think about it, it makes sense,

Chris DuBois28:51

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

Ryan Harmon28:54

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

Chris DuBois29:18

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

Ryan Harmon29:30

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

Chris DuBois29:37

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.

Ryan Harmon29:59

Just.

Chris DuBois30:00

Going really deep on it.

Ryan Harmon30:02

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?

Chris DuBois30:14

I read a lot.

Ryan Harmon30:17

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

Chris DuBois30:26

by Andrew Wilkinson.

Ryan Harmon30:29

He

Chris DuBois30:32

it

Ryan Harmon30:33

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

Chris DuBois30:42

very prescriptive, and

Ryan Harmon30:48

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,

Chris DuBois31:10

for

Ryan Harmon31:11

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

Chris DuBois31:15

I seem to recall,

Ryan Harmon31:18

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

Chris DuBois31:21

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?

Ryan Harmon31:33

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

Chris DuBois31:39

Last question, Where can people find you?

Ryan Harmon31:42

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

Chris DuBois32:09

and it's an AI visibility tool.

Ryan Harmon32:13

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,

Chris DuBois33:28

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