Julia Ahrens
Hi, Blake. Thank you for chatting today.
Blake Corrington
Always a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Julia
Absolutely. Well, you are in exceptionally high demand with your clients right now, as one would expect. So we’ll get right to it at first. Can you briefly share a bit about your role and responsibilities at Brado?
Blake
I’m the director of SEO here at Brado. So I lead the organic strategy for our clients. And I’m supported by a team of experts that really focus on technical SEO, on page and off page optimization. And now a large focus on generative engine optimization. We’re primarily identifying opportunities and educating our clients on SEO and Geo.
Blake
So where there’s moments to drive brand awareness and customer acquisition. During user search. And I say education because it’s a key aspect of my responsibility here at Brado, because search is ever evolving, and we’re at a huge technological shift with AI generative search.
Julia
And to that end. AI generative search is what we’re going to focus on for the next few minutes. So for those that may not know, can you briefly describe what that is?
Blake
AI generative search is really referring to the use of artificial intelligence to process search queries. And generate answers, instead of only providing links to users with relevant content. So generative search can offer users more direct answers to their questions. It can explain concepts in detail, and it can even create new information based on a search query. The intent of AI is search is really to provide users with a direct synthesized answer, one that answers users question immediately.
Julia
And the most common example of that is what we’re seeing in AI summaries. Would you agree?
Blake
Yeah. So some of these like, Google AI overviews are where we’re seeing that most frequently. And we’ve noticed the biggest impact is that more of our basic questions where we’re seeing kind of those AI overviews, what we call more like top of funnel marketing questions, that’s where users are really, in the information seeking process platforms like ChatGPT and Google AI o reviews really want to answer users questions right then and there. So we’ve seen a pretty big drop off in click through rate and traffic to our clients websites due to those, changes. Which tells us, too, that users are getting the answers they need without having to go to, a website to find it.
Julia
Yeah. So let’s let’s talk about that for a bit. What are what are the biggest benefits of AI generative search. And then we can also discuss its shortcomings.
Blake
Rather than traditional search where, like, a user submits a question to Google and tries to navigate to a website to find the best answer to their question, which requires a lot of skimming and reading. ChatGPT and Google have tried to eliminate that as much as possible to provide the best user experience. So the biggest benefit really is the efficiency of immediate delivered answers. At a high level, these generated answers are coming from ChatGPT and Google. Gemini they’re very good and they’re just getting better.
Julia
And so obviously this technology is still changing. Still evolving. What are its shortcomings? What are the things you see them trying to fix?
Blake
Yeah, there’s still some issues with quality of the generated responses. So I’ll give you a quick example. I was looking up an actor and a TV show I was watching, and the search was something like who plays Gabe in Silicon Valley? And so Google Gemini, which provided the Google AI o reviewed, got confused, responded that there wasn’t a character named Gabe in Silicon Valley, but then it also showed me an image of that exact character in the generated response. So it’s working really hard and identifying, context and intent. But sometimes it’s getting confused with the exact answer. We do think this is going to get better as time goes on, and there’s increases with questions and responses that, you know, inform each data set, as well as reinforcement learning from human feedback. So that’s where human trainers are evaluating different responses to similar queries. They’re ranking them and then helping that model, learn which type of answers are most helpful and accurate.
Julia
And so when we talk about search in general, and I know you deal with both of these things. One of the goals were always, I’ll say, in pursuit of as marketers is the interplay between the paid and organic side. So can you talk about how each side is affected by AI generative search and sort of what’s that? What are you seeing? Through traditional paid and organic performance.
Blake
Primarily we’re seeing over the last year that traffic is down for both, which is a bit scary. Most of that is coming from higher funnel information seeking search queries like we discussed. But there’s a quote from Danny Sullivan, who’s the public search liaison at Google, and he was doing an interview about all the changes to our algorithm and results. And he said something to the effect of, you can’t predict that every site will recover to exactly where they were in September. Talking about like September of 2024, because September doesn’t exist anymore. So I think it’s a hard truth for digital markers to accept. But, this change is going to be permanent. The one thing that we try to focus on here, though, is that there’s always a solution required for a customer on their digital journey. So the way they find that solution is definitely changing, but they will eventually need a place to find, you know, the product or service or solution to meet their need.
Julia
So the big question and. And when you likely spend hours talking about right now, is what advice do you have for clients navigating this? And how are you recommending they pivot?
Blake
I think my primary piece of advice to clients is to just use these platforms as much as they can. The best way to understand these types of responses, users are getting what answers like ChatGPT and Google are providing, can help marketers better understand the types of content generative AI values. You can see how your brand and how your competitors brands are talked about by generative AI. And really to see that you just ask them questions specifically about those brands. So we’re identifying gaps in the AI models knowledge. Those can provide helpful areas of opportunity that might need to be addressed by a client’s website content, or maybe patterns in how the brand is talked about on other websites. There’s a phrase going around called search everywhere optimization. So this goes beyond traditional SEO. We know that like these LMS are parsing information across the entirety of the web. So it’s going to be vastly important that brands optimize their visibility across all platforms where people search for information. So that includes social media, e-commerce platforms, video platforms, forums, discussion boards. There might be some missing digital signals or brand reputation issues that need to be addressed. So we’ve started and covers for some of our clients a lot of examples of these gaps between brand equity and markets compared to the digital equity that these platforms are identifying and using in their responses. Some of these brands are missing out on some key areas where others are winning right now because they’re not quite focused on optimizing their site or their online reputation, which is really vital. This new generation of search.
Julia
And so what are. What are some examples of things that marketers can do? Is it all about writing stronger content? Is it doing more detailed analysis on where the opportunities to win are? What are some of the things you guys are talking about right now?
Blake
What we’re seeing right now is huge seismic shifts and where the, landscape is currently affecting the user journey. So we just need to make sure that we’re future proofing our content. Our website, technical capabilities. That way we make, sure that the large language models are parsing and understanding the brand equity in key markets, but also not losing sight of the fact of digital PR and kind of areas of opportunity where it’s not only your site content, but how people are talking about your brand across the web that needs to be, more frequently monitored. And we need strategies to try and update some of the way that, these large language models are seeing people talk, talk about your brand. And some of that comes to customer experience, like I mentioned, PR but, renewed focus on your brand equity in the digital market.
Julia
So what are your thoughts about what’s next for AI generated search? Or what do you have your eyes on?
Blake
Okay. So one we know that I generate search is going to continue to evolve. So AI generative search platforms are constantly working to try and make their answers a bit better. Whether that’s being more useful for users, more conversational or more personalized. They’re integrating multimodal search. So ,combining things like text and image and voice all within the search results. These type of results, that we get in the next few years will really be interesting. We might see an image result that’s AI generated or a video based on a search. We’re also really paying attention to usage rates with these platforms and what types of searches are done. So people are using things like ChatGPT, Google Perplexity and Claude a bit differently. And it’s a bit of an arms race between these platforms. They’re competing to see who can provide the best answers and user experience. One thing we think that we’ll probably see is more of like a brand splintering, with the market due to demographics, use cases, individual taste. It’s similar to what we saw, in the last ten years with social media. So platforms like Facebook that are still heavily used, but depending on like demographics and interests, they may be supplement or switched with platforms like TikTok, Instagram X and threads. It’s going to be very similar on the the AI market.
Julia
In this pretty intense competition. Is obviously something that we can appreciate. We are developing our own conversational AI platform. Right now. And I know you sit sort of adjacent to that team, but what you know, here at Brado, what are you sort of, you know, telling them about, you know, search and how how can they continue to use that to optimize the product and make sure that we’re giving, you know, customers, a worthy experience and, and engagement tool as well when it comes to, to health journey.
Blake
Yeah. So I think previously in SEO we we only focused on Google. Google is king in terms of the search impression. Share that they took from the search market. We do think that there will be someone likely to win for general search, but there’s going to be a ton of different search channels that brands are going to have to identify in order to best capture key customer retention. So identifying your customer base, what their preferences are, what potential channels they’ll be using, and then creating content that speaks to those channels best is going to help brands win in the future.
Julia
Well, never a dull moment, that’s for sure. Thanks, Blake. Have a great rest of your day.
Blake
Yeah. Thank you.