Full Transcript for The New Rules of SEO, AEO & AI Search with Nathan Gotch

AI is not new and people have had AI to play with it for many, many years at this point. And still there are people that are not seeing better results. And despite having all the information in the world, literally at our fingertips, you can ask the AI literally anything. Yet the people that I talk to, including agencies that actually do this work for clients, they're all over the place.

They are all over the place. I'm using Claude here. I'm using this. And it's like they've unlocked all this capability, but they haven't really harnessed it in any type of repeatable process that can actually produce results. I've personally felt like there needed to be kind of a process that could be followed from end to end, knowing that this is all going to change basically all the time.

With that in mind, when I was working through like, how can I make this book not be out of date in a week from now? I was really thinking about like, what are the evergreen principles that likely won't change in this process? Not so much like, here's a little tactic that is working right now, but won't work in a year from now. Welcome to Marketing Speaks.

A series of interviews and monologues featuring thought leaders and industry practitioners in search engine optimization, e-commerce, and online marketing. Here's your host, Stefan Spencer, SEO expert, author, speaker, consultant, and internet entrepreneur.

Search is changing fast, but that doesn't mean everything marketers know about SEO belongs in the trash. The challenge is figuring out what's genuinely new, what still works, and where brands need to show up now. My guest on today's show is Nathan Gotch, an SEO entrepreneur, educator, and founder of Rankability. He's also the author of AI SEO for Dummies, a new book published by Wiley that's written around principles he believes will endure as AI platforms and search behavior change.

In our conversation, Nathan and I explore how AI actually changes SEO, where AEO or answer engine optimization fits into SEO, and why chasing every new tactic can be a distraction. We discuss how brands can earn visibility across Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Cloud, and other answer engines, and why citations and third-party mentions matter more than ever.

We also unpack AEO myths, from schema markup to LLMs.txt, and look at why traditional SEO remains the foundation for AI visibility. Nathan also shares how he uses AI agents to run marketing campaigns and automate work that once required hours of hands-on execution. If you want to know where search is headed without getting distracted by every shiny new acronym, this episode will help you focus on what actually moves the needle.

So without any further ado, on with the show. Nathan, it's so great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it. Excited to talk to you because I've been following your work for a long time, so it's going to be fun. Awesome. Yeah, yeah. So do you have a copy of the audio of SEO? I do. That's, that's, that's the thick one.

That's the big one. So yeah, that's that, that I would say like out of all the books I've actually read, um, I did a funny little case study where I purchased every single SEO book. So I ended up purchasing like 30 books on Amazon. So I, and I spent like whole week reading all of them. And that was like the one where I'm like, okay, I really got to sit down and like really digest this one.

Cause it was so intense. So yeah. Yeah, I actually use it as a textbook in universities. Yeah, like any of the ones that I recommend, that's always like the best foundational one for pretty much anyone getting started. Yeah. Awesome. Well, yeah, you're kind of a legend too in this space. You've been around for a long time. And I guess you might have a bit of a...

Maybe gray hat or even black hat reputation from the early days. Maybe you could kind of give us your hero's journey, superhero origin story. Yeah. I mean, I know a lot of SEOs, it seems like, at least a lot of ones that I know, did start more on, let's say, gray hat, black hat-ish in many ways. Not everyone, but a lot of people I talk to.

And I think it's just because... generally it feels easier when you're doing it, right? And so when I actually started, this was, I started SEO in 2011, which is just crazy to even think about. I was still in college when I started SEO. I was trying to grow a little baseball pitching blog and I'm like, how do I get traffic to this thing? And so I started looking into things.

I discovered SEO and all the tactics back then were just by today's standards, real nasty stuff. And so I was buying bot traffic and creating web 2.0s and building private blog networks. I did it all. And unfortunately, it worked. And that was the problem. So it worked a little too well. And then so I did that for a long time. And I got really obsessed with private blog networks.

And I had a whole network. And I had different web hosts. And I did the whole thing. I blocked Ahrefs and SEMrush from getting to my websites. And it was like this whole huge operation. But then in 2015, I had actually started to grow a pretty decently successful agency. And I had a good client roster, but I was doing all the same tactics with my clients.

And I made a couple of mistakes in my footprints with my private blog networks. And I was linking to a lot of the same clients on a lot of the same websites. And what ended up happening is I woke up one morning And it was manual action, manual action, manual action, manual action. All my whole inbox is just manual actions. And I'm like, yeah, this is not going to be a great day.

I was pretty concerned at that point. But fortunately, that was a really good turning point for me where I was like, okay, this is not the right thing to be doing if this is like the risk that I'm playing with, especially with like It's one thing if it's my own projects, but when I'm working with a client, it's not right that I'm jeopardizing their website over using crazy tactics.

So fortunately, I ended up getting all of those manual actions removed. And so that was super good. And it was a lot of fun. I had to go back. remove all the links and then submit a reconsideration request and go that whole process but yeah i fortunately did get it all resolved but it was more of like that was a turning point for me where i'm like all right no more i'm not i'm not playing this game anymore um and like i said i haven't i haven't played that game since 2015 so yeah

Yeah, it's the difficult challenges where we learn the most. And you can't outsmart Google, at least not for a long time. True, yeah. It'll eventually get you. That's why it's funny. You see even now, even these days, there's still people that are still playing these games. And they'll brag about how much growth they've gotten in such a short amount of time.

but then they disappear in like a year from now and you don't hear about it anymore because you can play the game for a short amount of time, but the longevity is really the problem with those strategies. Right, right. So now there's AI-generated content that is flooding the internet and might work for a time with Google or with ChatGPT or whatever, but then you pay the piper.

Yeah. Eventually it might last for a few months. Yeah. And I mean, I always know too when I'm looking at someone who doesn't have any battle scars and they haven't experienced what it's like to get hit by Google.

And so not only have I gotten manual actions, but at the time I had a lot of niche websites that would get just algorithmic actions, right? I'd just be getting hit by the algorithms. So once you've taken a lot of hits like that, you become a lot more careful with what you're doing. Because it's not fun. Yeah, I remember being pulled aside by Matt Cutts.

You know who Matt Cutts is. I mean, he's no longer at Google, but he was the Google guy. And I was at SMX Advanced speaking. And I kind of got in trouble with Google because, one, I was sharing all sorts of ninja hacks that are

maybe not there anymore. preferred strategies. Yeah. I mean, they're above board there may be cutting, uh, close to the line at that point in time, but, uh, not into the gray hat territory. But, uh, I remember Miley Oye came up to me at some point and said, you know, we were thinking of inviting you to be our, um, you know, MC or whatever, our speaker for a whole bunch of trainings on SEO for, you know, the world and no longer because of, uh, you know, what you shared at this conference.

I'm like, what? And then Matt cuts comes up to me at some point at the same conferences, like, you know, your client Zappos looks like you're doing some sort of cloaking thing and we don't like it. And I had to explain exactly what we're doing and be totally forthright and everything. And we had a technology platform that we were using to

create a search friendly version of the content because the CMS was a train wreck their e-commerce platform at the time was a train wreck in terms of SEO and yeah So narrowly escaped

with just a finger waving. That sounds like the current equivalent to that is having markdown files as a secondary option for your web pages, which a lot of people are playing with right now to play with agents. That's interesting. I know there's a lot of people that are very careful with the tactics they share because of a relationship they want to maintain with Google and the people who work at Google.

So there's definitely two different groups of people in this industry where there's the group where it's like they don't care about Google at all. There's others that try to be a little more diplomatic. I don't know. But yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, but one thing that stuck with me a long time ago, it was like probably 15 years ago I heard this, or maybe 18 or something.

uh google's not your friend yeah and and i remember different people who i respected at the time who would when they go up to matt and ask questions they'd turn their badge around so you couldn't see the name because they didn't want to be written down in his little book you know i was like oh we should look into this guy and or this uh this this website so yeah they have a lot of power a lot of power oh yeah anyways so let's talk about your book because this is a big uh

milestone for you. And I'd say for the industry too, because there aren't a lot of quality AEO or GEO or AI SEO, whatever you want to call it, books out there. And I don't know that people are really that motivated to write books in the way that they would have a few years ago because of how fast things are moving. Like why not? a book, why a physical printed book with a traditional publisher? Why now? And why you? Yeah.

Well, very good questions. So as far as why I wrote the book, I just got approached. So that was it. So they were just reaching out, I guess, because the funny... Actually, I'll go kind of rewind this story. I actually created a YouTube video that was called AI SEO for Dummies. So... So I actually created a YouTube video. And so like, I was ranking for everything related to AI SEO, like on YouTube and stuff.

So I think I was just in the mix when the research process happened and. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Talk about a fortuitous. Yeah. Yeah. And it wasn't like, I, I would just, I was just, it was just a funny title. Like I wasn't even thinking about the book and it just, it's weird how that happened. But anyway, yeah. So they ended up, we ended up coming to an agreement and, So it ended up being like a full year of writing this thing.

And it was intense. I wrote another book that was self-published called The SEO Entrepreneur. And that was intense too, writing that book, but not at this level. I mean, I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but it was very, very challenging. Because the way dummies, the way they do it, I don't know how the publisher that you worked with, but the way they do it is you have to write the entire manuscript up front.

So you write the whole manuscript without any edits. Then you submit the full manuscript. Then they give you the edits for the whole book. So as you can imagine, getting all those edits back is like, whoa, this is super intense. Yeah, that's intense. Very intense. And funny enough- Yeah, they don't do that at O'Reilly. Like you're doing a chapter at a time and they give you plenty

of time with the deadlines. You're not stressed out. Although- It is a lot of work. I mean, each edition, we've done four editions now, two years is the whole process for each edition. It's not, it's not for the faint of heart and it probably pays a minimum wage. I'm definitely not doing it for the financial side of it. Yeah. But yeah,

yeah so so that's how it kind of came about uh now the second part which is why a book at this time which is a very valid question when you can just go into chat gbt or any other platform and just kind of you know give you a course on basically anything you know it's funny i i talk to agency owners every single day i talk to seo professionals every single day in my training programs and communities and so on and so forth and obviously people use my software And it's, you know, ChatGPT has been here since 2022, or is that 2020, March, 2020? Yeah, November 2022, right? I think that's when it was, when it launched.

And so like AI is not new. And people have had AI to play with it for many, many years at this point. And still, there are people that are not seeing better results. And despite having all the information in the world, you have literally at our fingertips, you can ask the AI literally anything. Yet, the people that I talk to, including agencies that actually do this work for clients...

They're all over the place. They are all over the place. I'm using Claude here. I'm using this. And it's like, they've unlocked all this capability, but they haven't really harnessed it in any type of like repeatable process that can actually produce results. And so I've personally felt like there needed to be kind of a process that could be followed from end to end.

knowing that this is all going to change basically all the time. So with that in mind, when I was working through how can I make this book not be out of date in a week from now, I was really thinking about what are the evergreen principles that likely won't change in this process. So that's really what I focused on heavily in the book was thinking about that, not so much like here's a little tactic that is working right now, but won't work in a year from now.

And of course, naturally, there's going to be things that are going to just go out. Like a small little detail is right now, ChatGPT, based on the last benchmark, has like 50% of the AI search market, right? Just by total usage and so on and so forth.

that could change, right? ChatGPT could, maybe Claude becomes the top or maybe Google comes back roaring back and all of a sudden takes it over again with Gemini and AI mode. Who knows, right? So things like that, platform changes, I don't know where that's going to go. But as far as like the general principles of doing this work, there are some evergreen things.

So that was kind of the basis for it. Yeah, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop with regards to ChatGPT or with OpenAI specifically, because they pulled out of their IPO. And that wasn't for altruistic reasons. I mean, they could see the writing on the wall. Yeah, there's weird stuff happening right now with those companies. So if they keep postponing it, they'll eventually run out of cash.

If they go public and it goes poorly, then there goes the AI bubble. And OpenAI will be first to go, and who knows who else they'll take down with them. Oracle, probably, and...

Who knows who else? But regardless, I mean, you don't operate out of fear. You just diversify and you use multiple platforms and you

work with open source and all that so that you can manage the potential downside. Yeah. Yeah. My thing is I just try to go wherever the attention is. I don't care what platform it is. I don't become romantic. You know how some people are like hardcore, just Google or hardcore. Wherever the attention is, that's where I'm going to go to try to win the visibility.

But it is interesting. It is definitely interesting right now because ChatGBT and Claude and Grok even...

it's not like a one-size-fits-all strategy works across every platform now. It's even getting to the point where you have to actually be thinking about each individual AI platform now. Even like, for example, Amazon. Amazon has its own AI platform as well, and that's a whole separate game. So SEO has just become so

wide-ranging at this point where... a part of me kind of misses the old days with Google where it was a lot more simple, you know, like it was a pretty simple process, you know, you just rank and get traffic and make sales, but yeah, that's not really the way it is anymore. So. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about what are the strategies and where does your software rankability come into play with regards to these strategies and these tactics? Yeah.

I mean, this is always the great debate of how much has actually changed compared to SEO versus this new environment. And I would say that there's a few areas that are definitely different. The one area is tracking and attribution, which I think is dramatically different. You know, when we were just doing SEO, at least the way I was doing it, it was like, you know, you had your bucket of tracking tools.

You had, you know, Google Search Console, Google Analytics. You'd have probably some sort of rank tracker. If you're doing local, you'd maybe do some grid tracking. And then, you know, you'd probably put that into Looker Studio or some sort of dashboard tool. And then maybe throw in Bing Webmaster Tools if you want to be fancy. But there wasn't a whole lot to do there.

And it was pretty easy to track for the most part. But now the tracking is very different. And traffic, I'll give you an example. I just finished an audit for a media website. And they had a very weird situation. They lost... 46% of their traffic since 2000, uh, 2023. And the weirdest part is when I did the audit, they're ranking number one for everything.

Every, every one of their keywords that they cared about, they're ranking number one in Google traffic just keeps plummeting. And so this is a situation now where it's like, there are websites that are doing technically all the right stuff, but still getting destroyed because the AI is just, just eating up all of those clicks. Zero click, right? As Rand Fishkin talks a lot about.

Yeah. And it's definitely a reality when you're going after topics that have informational intent, which they were. A lot of the stuff they were going after was very top of the funnel, very informational intent. And unfortunately, the AI just destroys for those types of queries. Yeah. So, you know, that's the first element of this is like traffic is becoming a difficult metric to ultimately determine success in this new environment.

It's kind of hard to report to clients like, hey, your traffic's dropped by 40% over the last two years. So do you still want to work with us? You know, it's kind of a hard thing in that regard.

But the counter example to this is HubSpot, which very famously recently lost a lot of their traffic, organic traffic, but their revenue went up. And that's because they had a bunch of content on their blog that was basically just designed to juice their traffic numbers, but not really designed to drive any conversions. So when they lost all that traffic, it didn't do anything to their bottom line at all.

So, so this is like, and this is even before AI, I was telling a lot of companies like you don't need to create that top of the funnel informational content. It is actually a massive waste of time. But the problem is they like seeing the little graph go up back. It mattered more than like, Oh, well, why don't we just focus on the bottom of the funnel where the actual money is made? Um, and so that's kind of like, we're seeing the effects of all that now.

And, um, So that's kind of the first part. The second part is like the new thing that has to be tracked is, is the brand being mentioned for commercial queries across these AI platforms? And so the way that we do it is like, we'll take a standard seed. So like if it was, um, a plastic surgeon in New York City. That would be the seed that we would build our prompts based off of.

And a lot of people, there's a lot of debate on prompt tracking and prompts in general, because obviously a lot of these prompts don't have any quantifiable data.

There's just no data. We just don't know if people search that exact query inside these platforms. Yeah, so like Ahrefs is tracking 300, 400 million prompts and their outputs every month across what six or seven different LLMs and They're all synthetic. They're all synthetic prompts. No humans are coming up with those prompts. So who knows if a single human is actually prompting for what they're tracking for and reporting on.

Yeah. And the thing is for me, the way that I'm approaching is I'm not even looking at it from the perspective of we need to show up for this specific prompt. The way that I'm approaching is I'm running the prompts to see where we have gaps in a particular category. So that's the way that I'm approaching. It's not necessarily like, oh, I want to make sure we have visibility for this one synthetic prompt that we made up.

It's more of like, I want to see what's our total brand visibility across this whole category. So like an example would be, I just did an audit for a plastic surgeon. That's why I'm bringing it up in New York City. And I picked one category that they wanted to do well in. So it was liposuction. So I create a bunch of prompts related to liposuction, New York City, all these different really granular types of liposuction.

Like there's something called banana roll. I don't even know what a banana roll is, right? But there's like all kinds of weird stuff. And so I built a bucket of like 25 prompts within the liposuction category, ran those all through and then looked at like, okay, what is his overall coverage in this category across all the AI platforms? And it's useful because you can start to see like, okay, he does really well in banana roll, but really bad in this type of liposuction.

And you can start to see those gaps. And if you run enough of these, you really start to see there is some trends you'll start to see like, okay, the same plastic surgeon shows up. every single time. It's always recommended, number one, across every single prompt. I'm going to go and see what they're up to. And that's the way that I try to approach it.

I'm looking at the prompt tracking more as intelligence, not so much keyword tracking like we did for traditional SEO. So that's the way that I approach it on that front. Then I'm also looking at the citations. And I'm not looking at the citations from the perspective that we need to win a citation with our website. Obviously, I will take that.

That's a good thing. But I'm really looking at, is our brand being covered in those citations, excluding competitors? So that's what I'm looking at as the key thing. We've actually found at RankAbility, we analyze thousands and thousands of of AI answers and citations. And we found there is a direct correlation between if the brand is actually mentioned in those AI citations and their visibility in the actual answers.

So we spend like a lot of our time on those citations. Like that's what I call the work because that's like, that's what we do. We just extract those citations and we start just going to work on those citations. And it's simple, like for example, for my book launch, build a whole list of citations, just start sending outreach emails. That's it.

Nothing complicated. So that's kind of the first part. And then obviously we can talk, there's a lot more to this that's different than traditional SEO, but that's kind of the first piece is tracking. Yeah. Yeah. So by the time this episode airs, the book will be out. September 22nd is the launch date for the book. And yeah. So how many you're doing a whole podcast tour? How many podcasts are you doing and what other media activities, what kind of launch activities are you doing to get this book out into the world? Quite a few.

So I have a launch event that's occurring on the 22nd. So it's going to be a webinar. I'm going to be going kind of like the full process that's kind of in the book, but I've kind of brought a little higher level. It's got almost 500 slides, so it's going to be really intense. But I've got almost 500 people registered for that. So I'm hoping to get to like a thousand before the launch happens.

So that's the big thing. Aside from that, I've been doing a lot of other things like using YouTube. So using my channel, I use something. So one of my favorite techniques for content creation is using the five stages of customer awareness. And so when I think about trying to promote something, I think about, okay, what are the pieces of content I need to build at each stage of the awareness process? So are you using the acronym UPSIDE? I think that's from...

Gosh, what's his name? Yep. Oh, gosh, I forgot his name. But anyways, he was on this podcast a few years ago. Unaware, problem aware, solution aware, your solution aware, and then decision.

Yep, yep, yep, exactly. So basically what I do is I start at the very bottom. And the reason why you have to do this on YouTube is because on YouTube, what you want to do is create a string of videos across that whole cycle. So you actually have to start with the last video first. So that way in the next video, you can say, go and watch my AI SEO for Dummies summary.

It's going to be right here. Click on that. So you have to basically do it in reverse for it to work on YouTube to create that chain. So that's what I'm doing right now. I've already published AI SEO for Dummies review and summary. That's the first one. Second one is, I think it's like top eight best AI SEO books for 2026. So I'm going further up the funnel.

And then the next one's going to be something like, you know, my complete AI SEO system for 2026. And then go further up the funnel and be like, hey, If I was starting today, here's how I would learn AI SEO. So just keep going further and further up that funnel. And that's the way I like to approach it. And it works pretty well for many reasons.

Number one, for YouTube specifically, it increases watch time, which is a big ranking factor on YouTube. And then secondly, YouTube is a very, very common source of retrieval for AI. So, um, we've actually, we've been able to influence a lot of answers just using YouTube. Um, so I always really like to, you know, double down there. So, um, focusing on the owned assets.

So obviously our website, YouTube, LinkedIn, uh, LinkedIn's another one. We're already, we're creating the same type of content on LinkedIn as well, because it gets picked up a lot by AI content on X. So a

The one part before we started recording, I was telling you about how really heavily using agents in a lot of the work that we're doing. And man, I have a really good example of this. So we're running meta ads. So we're running meta ads for the webinar. Basically, all it is just running ads directly to a webinar landing page. And it's a Zoom webinar.

That's it. Simple as that. But the part that's really funny about it is I haven't even logged into Meta. So I have run this entire campaign and we're getting about $4 per registrant, which is really good. And it's all US-based traffic too. So $4 per registrant. I have not left my Codex chat for that entire thing. I've just been in my Codex chat the whole time, letting Codex just run...

Opening up my browser, creating the ads. It did literally everything from strategy, developing the strategy for the campaign, to fixing all attribution to make sure that we can actually track it well. And then actually creating the ads, the copy, the ad creative, the visuals, everything. then going into meta and actually building out the ads and then launching the ad set.

And then I have a scheduled task where every morning it goes and reviews the ads, sees if there's anything that needs to be optimized, does that, and then just sends me a quick little report to tell me what's going down. That's impressive. Yeah. It's pretty, it's pretty insane. Like it, it's really disturbing when I walk. Cause I have like my laptop over here for like a lot of advertising stuff.

I'll just look over at my laptop. There's just windows opening up on my laptop. And I'm like, this is really something else. I mean, it is. Oh, there's my bank account. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's my, yeah. My sole security number. There we go. Yeah. So I like, and this is why I tell people like, I'm really way too trusting of the agents, like way too much.

Right. Like I let them loose. I really let them loose. Um, I have a separate Mac mini too. So like when I first started really getting into this, when open claw first came out, um, I, I got a separate Mac mini and I was like super concerned about security. So I was like, I'm going to isolate this thing on just the Mac mini. Uh, and then now I'm just like, it's all over my computers.

I don't even know what's going on. They're just, yeah. Yeah. So not recommended personally for security reasons, but yeah, it's interesting how I've loosened that a lot in my behavior. So for better or for worse. Hopefully not for worse. Yeah. I guess we'll find out. Yeah. So are you still using OpenClaw? You've switched to Hermes? Are you Grokbot? What are you using? I'm a, you know, I'm a hundred percent codex.

I just use the codex sub agents. So, um, and I, I just, I just love codex. I mean, I really do. I was using cloud for, I used open claw for a while, man, talk about a nightmare. I mean, open claw is as capable as it was the amount of time I spent debugging everything. I was like, okay, this is just not, this just isn't, this isn't it yet.

Right. Yeah. That's a lot to maintain. It is. And so then I started experimenting with using Claude and then eventually, um, you know, Codex has really strong sub agent systems that are actually really easy to spawn these sub agents. Um, you literally just ask it, like, I'll just ask Codex. I'll be like, do you think this is a good task for sub agents? It'll be like, yeah, I think it's a pretty good one.

And then you'll watch it spawn the sub agents for whatever that thing is you're doing. Um, so yeah, I think it's a matter of preference. It's just my, I just like using Codex. So. Yeah. But you're not concerned about putting all your eggs in one basket there? As we discussed earlier, what if they run out of cash? What if the IPO doesn't go well? Yeah.

No, so I'm actually not concerned for the reason that

I've thought about this deeply. And what I do is I put everything in a source of truth, which is GitHub. So that way, no matter what, so like, for example, this is actually, we had to do this because I have my partner who uses Claude. So what we had to do is figure out, okay, how do we continue to work together if we're using two different agentic platforms? So what we did is we just basically, everything goes into GitHub, everything.

And so then we just, whatever agent I'm using, I can just link up GitHub and get started, right? So I've created independence. And so let's say Codex, you know, OpenAI goes out of business tomorrow. I'll just go to Anthropic or Crock-Bot. I don't really care, right? So yeah, it's just a matter of preference at this point, nothing more than that.

Yeah, okay. So why GitHub? Why not, let's say, I don't know, a bunch of markdown files in a Obsidian vault? Just because it's easier to access on the cloud with the team that's working on it. Obviously, I guess I'm not, I have Obsidian on my computer, but I don't, I don't use it much. I don't know if it has that same capability of bringing in cloud-based stuff where you can bring your team in to actually get into that vault.

I'm not entirely familiar with that. So it's just because I'm used to GitHub, especially because when we're developing the app side of rankability, like I'm just used to using GitHub and I know it just works, right? So, and I... I don't foresee GitHub going out of business anytime soon, but of course, I guess that's certainly possible. Anything's possible, I guess.

So, but yeah, that's just a matter of preference. Yep. Yeah, yeah. And how much stuff are you putting out there in GitHub public and how much are you keeping private to your team? All private. Yeah, all private. All private, okay. Yeah, exactly. So why not have a strategy like Eric Hsu, a single grain where he's putting a bunch of cloud skills for marketing and for SEO and so forth out on his public GitHub, getting all these stars, getting a lot of links and mentions and notoriety for sharing all these great cloud skills.

Any plans for that? I think maybe because he's probably got a different objective than I do, probably. So I would imagine his goal of doing that is probably to drive awareness maybe for his agency. I would imagine that's probably his more strategy on that front. For me, yeah. I'm more focused. So skills are a funny thing because I feel like it's really easy to make skills at this point, but it's actually really hard to test those skills or find those skills and make those skills better over time.

And you need a lot of testing with these agents to make sure they're doing a good job. So any skill that I put out, it's gone through heavy, heavy testing.

I've been beating it up. Let's just say that much. And so for me, any skills that I share, I just share them with my, my community. And I'd like to keep it private because they're paying for it. So, so that's the main reason. Yeah. I see the utility of using as a marketing play though, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so let's talk about more about markdown files and why not just put everything out there as HTML.

I mean, 99% of the web is, is html yeah why a new format why why uh strip it down to something that the ai could get the content either way you know it's like it's smart enough it's soon be smart enough to run circles around it around us uh why not just let it figure out the HTML. I actually agree with that, to be honest. I think it's at this point majoring in the minors because the agents can easily extract HTML.

And I mean, even traditional crawlers can easily extract HTML. So So I actually don't think there needs to be like, let's build a separate page just for the agents to have this markdown environment. Like maybe there's a slight efficiency gain, like tiny, tiny efficiency gain by just stripping out all the code and just having the raw text, maybe.

But we're talking like tiny, tiny little probably efficiency gains that probably not even worth it. So just my opinion. I think what matters more is that your website is just HTML in general, which that's a bigger discussion where we just did a full study. We took a whole set of citations and traditional search results. And it was overwhelmingly that HTML is the correct format that your website needs to be in.

In fact, even rendered HTML didn't perform as well as just straight raw HTML. Yeah. So if you're using a lot of client-side JavaScript, that's just asking for trouble. 100%. I'm very opposed to it, for sure. I just think it's dangerous. I mean, why take the risk when there's already a proven language that works? Yeah. And there are a lot of myths and...

mistaken misperceptions around AI, SEO, or AEO, like LLMs.txt. I still hear that being talked about. That was never a thing. It was never a standard. It was never implemented by the LLMs. So what are some of the myths that you hear besides LLMs.txt? That's definitely one of the top ones. It's funny. I was telling you I have 500 slides in this webinar I'm doing, and I don't even mention that once in 500 slides because it doesn't do anything.

I would say one that definitely I feel like some people have been talking about a lot is schema markup. And I found no evidence that schema markup influences your ability to be mentioned by the AI at all. I haven't seen any proof of that. I don't know if that works at all. And I mean, we've tested, we don't see any uplift on it at all. And in fact, pages that don't have any schema do just as fine in citations and being extracted by the AI anyway.

So I just don't think that's the way the systems really work. There's a lot. There's one thing that I think this is actually kind of the opposite, which is people that are trying to treat AEO as a completely separate discipline as SEO. So basically they've kind of like rebranded some things that are basically the same. So like an example is I've seen some people talk about AEO content.

So instead of saying SEO content, they say AEO content.

But the funny thing is, But it's funny when you look at what they're talking about, they're like, okay, this is what you do. You put your keyword in the URL, you put it in the title and the meta description, you put it in the H1, you put it in the first hundred words. And I'm like, we've been talking about that for a decade. That's like, that is not- It was more than a decade too, I think.

Yeah, so, but it's just funny. It's like a slight rebrand for stuff that still has always been the same. Another one is on technical SEO. I've seen technical AEO and like, it's all the same stuff. Use HTML, have a fast loading website, make sure it's mobile friendly, make sure it's crawlable, make sure it's indexable. This is all stuff that is the same.

Here's another one that makes my eyes roll. Whenever I see on LinkedIn, somebody post an infographic of the differences between AEO and GEO. Yeah. Oh yeah. Tell me more. I know that. I just wish there was like, I wish we could settle on what it really, like what we're going to call it. Like if I had my, if I had my preference, I would definitely pick search everywhere optimization.

I think that's like definitely encapsulates what we're doing, but I just don't think it flows well for most people. It's confusing. The problem with that. is you have this longstanding term search engine optimization and, you know, that's synonymous with SEO and trying to replace,

use the same acronym and replace the words that it means. Uh, you're just going to confuse people, especially a lot of, uh, kind of not savvy, but kind of early entry people, early in their learning journey. So yeah, I don't think that one's going to fly. But yeah, just for the record, for our listener who isn't aware of what we were saying about the differences between AEO and GEO, there are none.

They are the same thing. They're just different ways of referring to it. And it seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong, but that AEO is kind of taking the lead here. GEO was kind of an early contender. It sounds a little, I don't know, awkward sounding. Answer engine optimization kind of rolls off the tongue a little more than generative engine optimization.

So I think maybe that had something to do with the greater uptick of AEO these days. But yeah, they're exactly the same thing. I definitely like answer engine optimization because I think it describes what we're doing better because we are trying to influence the answer. So I feel like it has better alignment. I don't know if it will be the thing.

I don't think anyone knows at this point. I think AISCO is a good transitionary, let's call it terminology, but it's just a lot of acronyms. Yeah. By the way, one of my favorite acronyms of all time. is pebcac. Do you know what that stands for? No, no, I don't know that one. This comes from tech support, the tech support world, where they were making fun of users calling in or whatever.

Problem exists between keyboard and chair. No. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about

a hypothetical situation. Somebody wants to show up, be visible as a recommended person, Tool service or whatever in the answer engines in the LLMs and they have research studies. So they've commissioned research studies and these are published, let's say, as PDFs. So if the PDFs are published on a site that has. no mentions, no links, very poor DR, domain rating score, et cetera.

It's very unlikely that the LLMs, let alone Google, of course, will cite and refer to these studies, right? Or to the great information in those PDF reports, right? So what do you do if that's the case and you want to build up your reputation with the LLMs, especially when it comes to the

research, the hard data, the scientific analysis of whatever their thing is. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, if your stuff has no visibility whatsoever across the internet, there's no way the LLMs are going to pick it up at all. So that's the first part. The second part is if it's a PDF, the first thing I do is I turn it into a webpage. So that'd be the second part is let's get that squared away.

The other piece of this too is also the goals. So I'm assuming you're talking first party data, I would imagine. Yeah. So, you know, the goal here is different than a goal for, let's say, a business that's trying to get their brand mentioned for a commercial query. More than likely, if you're trying to get visibility for some sort of study or first party data, you're probably trying to get cited in the AI.

That's probably the thing you would want.

You know, the AI is, it will reference where that source came from in the answer. It will certainly notice, you know, it came from, you know, came from rankability, right? And so there can be some awareness benefits of that. But I think the big thing would have to be thinking about how do we actually get the AI to find us in retrieval so then we can have a very good chance of being actually cited in that AI answer, right? Now, as far as finding it in retrieval, well, search is a good place to start because we know that the number one source of retrieval is traditional search.

So you would want to work hard to just do standard SEO to get that study to get visibility in search. But your website is only one piece of that retrieval process. So then you'd want to start to expand. The way I would treat it is like, okay, we take this study. How can we break it down into micro little mini studies? So then we can distribute that, let's call it the mother asset, using all this micro content across all of our other owned assets and kind of build out a full strategy to attack it in that way.

And then aside from that, then I'd be looking at trying to get other people to talk about the study, right? That's the next thing. Because, you know, so then I just kind of keep layers, keep adding layers and layers. So basically, funny enough, I'm just doing digital marketing around this study. Yeah, you're doing SEO, exactly. That's the thing.

That's what it comes down to. Most people are,

I think, confused about where SEO stands in this process. It's the foundation of it all. If you're doing AEO, then by definition, by default, you are doing SEO. If you are not doing SEO or if your SEO is a train wreck, there is no AEO. There's no possibility. You cannot game the system. Maybe for a little while, maybe a year ago, you could pay a bunch of people to add your brand to a bunch of listicles, and that might work for a short time.

But those days are gone. Yeah. Yeah. And I think one important distinction too is like, and going back to earlier in this conversation with like, what is the key differences? And I think for, at least for me, for many years, it was a lot of thought about the website. Like let's work on the website. Let's get the website right. Let's promote the website.

Like that was the thing that we wanted to do. For the intent to make the website appear in traditional search, that was the whole idea. But I think when you think about ranking in general, it should be like, how do we take as many spots on the first page as we possibly can? Because the more spots that we can take there, the greater likelihood we have to be retrieved.

That's kind of the way that I'm thinking about it these days. Yeah. Yeah, so like highly cited sites such as medium.com and linkedin.com are great places to seed your content out there and not just on your company blog. Yeah, it's actually, it's funny. It's sometimes easier to rank with a third-party website than it is your own website. Like even on YouTube, like I think I'm ranking now for best AI SEO books on the first page of Google with my YouTube video that I published yesterday.

That would have taken me to rank on my website. I would write the article, would have had to do some link building, you know, it would have been a lot. So it's just, I just think it's important that like we're looking at it as like our owned assets and your website's one piece of the owned asset pie. Right. And I think that's the way to kind of think about it these days personally.

Yeah, totally. And so in this hypothetical scenario, if you've got this PDF research study, you need to get another home or an alternative home than your own website that has no link authority, no citations, like, for example, researchgate.net or whatever, you know, someplace that has a lot of authority. A lot of trust, a lot of history to it, and it's credible.

So that's where you'd publish at least a copy of that research. So, yeah, let's move to another hypothetical scenario. Let's talk about a local business. Okay.

plastic surgeon or cosmetic surgeon. What about like the local landscaper or dry cleaner or plumber? What does he or she need to do in terms of getting cited, recommended in chat GPT and so forth? I know earlier we talked just briefly that there are solutions for things like grid tracking. Local Falcon is one example that we use. It's like, Do you need to use a tool like this? What sort of tools or techniques are specific to a local business that you would want to employ in such a hypothetical scenario? Yeah.

Well, I think the first thing is prioritizing platforms based on the vertical that you're going after. So in the case of local, Google's still king for local right now. And the thing is, this is... been pretty well known for a while, that AI mode in particular, when you're searching for local keywords that have commercial intent, something like, who are the best plumbers in Chesterfield, Missouri? My toilet just exploded.

Something like that. AI mode will... Nine times out of 10, we'll just pull local businesses and show the actual local businesses in that area. And if you go and cross-check the local businesses that it's showing, it almost always directly maps to their performance in the local pack in the traditional search. So you can almost find like it's almost a one-to-one match almost every time.

Like if you're doing well in the local pack, you're going to show up in AI mode typically. Yeah. So in other words, for someone who's not familiar with that terminology, if you do a Google search, the local results, that section there, that's the local pack. And it's going to mirror the first set of results in maps.google.com. Yeah, exactly.

And they're pretty closely linked. And same thing, you will often... So AI overviews don't always pop up for a lot of local queries, especially when they're much shorter queries, they won't always pop up. So you got to kind of extend the query to force that AI overview to pop up. But even then, you'll often see local businesses that are just popping up in the AI overviews.

And this is total my speculation, but just kind of based on where I feel like things are going. It seems like AI mode will be the default experience on Google. That seems like the direction that things are going more than likely. I think Google's just kind of slowly making that transition. But the big thing is your local pack is everything.

And so for local specifically. And so the way that I talk to local businesses is like, I'll give you an example. I actually talked to an agency recently and they were having some issues with getting results for their clients. Let's just say that much. Okay. And they were like, Our success rate's not where it should be. We want to improve it.

And so then I started to work through their process and I was like, okay, well tell me about like a campaign that didn't work. Let's focus on that. So then they start telling me like, oh yeah, we brought in this HVAC company in Phoenix, brand new HVAC company in Phoenix. And I'm like, you brought on a brand new HVAC company that wanted to rank in the local pack in Phoenix.

So that's your first problem because it doesn't matter how good you are at SEO, you will never catch up to the people that are in Phoenix right now. Like the top guy probably has 20,000 reviews.

So there are certain areas in the United States where there are certain moats that you can't break them. There's an example, Four Seasons Heating and Cooling in Chicago. And I think they have... I think it's like 30,000 reviews or something, some enormous amount of reviews. How do you as a local business compete with that? I mean, you're just never going to catch up because not only would you have to try to catch up, but you'd have to actually have a surplus and review velocity to beat them.

Yeah. It reminds me of the analogy of you don't show up at a gunfight with a pocket knife. Yeah, exactly. So there's ways to chip away at a big dominant player like that, but you can't go directly at them in a major metro, right? You got to go after a suburb where they're not paying attention and try to win over there. So, so, you know, the, and the reason I'm bringing that up is because one of the biggest things obviously in the local pack is, is first of all, the address that you have, that's the number one thing.

Number two is obviously the, the business name itself, which still to this day, it just works. I mean, keyword rich business names, they still work in the local pack really, really well. And then the third is reviews. That's like 95% of the equation in the local pack. And so when you have these businesses coming in, it's like, okay, your job is to get more reviews.

And it's crazy how many businesses are so resistant to building review generation systems. I mean, it is like sometimes pulling teeth. I get so frustrated sometimes. I'm like, am I going to have to come to your office and ask people for reviews? Is that what this has come to? So it's just very, very difficult. And so that's like the first piece is like, if you want to influence Google's AI products, the local pack is your best friend.

So that's the first one. But aside from that, when you start going into chat GBT or quad, the whole game changes completely. especially in ChatGPT because ChatGPT now is a partnership with Yelp. So you can do well on Google and not show up in ChatGPT. That is entirely possible. And we see that happen a lot now where we have businesses that are doing really well on Google.

They've got a great reputation there. And for whatever reason in ChatGPT, they're not actually showing up for those same exact queries. And it's because oftentimes when we go and look, they don't have visibility on Yelp, which is number one. Number two is they don't have visibility on the third-party platforms that are being pulled in retrieval.

So like an example would be like a plumber. We'll stick with the plumber example. Yeah. you might see when you run who's the best plumber in Chesterfield, Missouri, you might see that Angie's popping up, Thumbtack, these kind of other directories that are not associated with Google. And those are what ChatGPT is pulling from to build that answer.

So if you don't have a presence there, you're out of luck. right yeah so it's a that's why i'm saying like that we're these platforms like every platform's a little bit different um so and even claude for example uses there's a lot of evidence he uses brave as its core search engine so like if you're not visible on brave you're not gonna have much visibility on claude which is a weird really weird thing but yeah yeah you ever use the brave browser I do just to track performance, but I don't actually use it.

No. Yeah. So I know we're getting close to time. Is there a way to pay to play with the LLMs? Like if you're a local business, get your brand out there with... some sort of kind of local service ad equivalent, or if you have an e-commerce store,

putting your e-commerce shop online and pay per click or whatever, however the business model is with each LLM, is that a thing yet? Well, I mean, there's ChatGPT ads now, so there's obviously a formal way that you can pay for visibility, but it won't give you visibility in the actual answer itself. It just gives you in a separate ad block.

below the answer. There are ways to pay to play and it's happening all the time right now. And I can just tell you what they are. Right now, there are businesses paying for influencers to recommend them. There are people paying right now for websites and blogs to inject them into lists.

I could go keep going. It's happening all the time. I mean, it's pay to play is these days. I mean, I'll just tell you, we do a lot of outreach and we almost always lead every outreach campaign with either paid collaboration, sponsored posts, something like that, because we already know what's going to happen as soon as they respond. Right.

like it, I'm sure you, you know, this better than I do, but like at one point you could do like broken link outreach, right. And you could actually score some links just by helping people, right. That used to be a thing. Or guest posts that are really well-written. Yeah. Like that used to be, that used to happen, like give value and then get a link in return that used to work.

Not anymore, unfortunately. I mean, everyone asks for money. Especially now that we're in a zero-click world and publishers are not getting rewarded by Google. Yeah. And this is why a lot of, at least in the SaaS space, you'll see a lot of software companies growing really fast that are venture-backed because they just pay for visibility everywhere.

And you'll see it on LinkedIn. I won't name names, but you'll see certain SEO tools getting promoted a lot on LinkedIn. It's not an accident. You know, so it's that that didn't happen organically. That's for sure. Right, right, right. Yeah. All right. So I know we're out of time. Where do we send our listener or viewer to go to get your amazing new book and also to maybe get a replay of your webinar if you're going to put that up later? Yeah.

you know, by the time they listen to this, that will have already aired. So yeah. Yeah. So I would just go to nathangotch.com slash dummies. And if, depending on when this will air, you'll be able to join the webinar and then, you know, we'll see what the timing is. But anyway, that will redirect to a page that will show where you can buy the book.

You can buy a book, buy the book on Amazon, Target, Walmart, Barnes and Noble. So pretty much anywhere. Awesome. Yep. And Rankability, if they wanted to sign up with that software? Yeah, just rankability.com. We do, we do require a call. So, you know, we're, we have a different style of things. So you just book a call and if it's a good fit, we just work with agencies.

So, so that's, that's our focus. But yeah, you just go there and book a call and see if there's a good fit. Awesome. All right, Nathan, it was a pleasure. Thanks for coming. Thank you so much. Thanks for sharing your wisdom. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. And thank you, listener. Go out in the world, make a better place through SEO, AEO, marketing, or just being you.

We'll catch you in the next episode. I'm your host, Stefan Spencer, signing off. If you want to hear more conversations like this about adapting your SEO strategy to AI search, then I recommend episode 525 with my co-author, Eric Enge, episode 536 with me, Stefan Spencer, and episode 550 with David Hensel. Also, I invite you to check out the show notes, transcript, action-based checklist, and all the URLs mentioned in this interview with Nathan Gotch at marketingspeak.com slash 552.

If you enjoyed this conversation, please share this episode and more importantly, the entire show marketing speak with a friend. It'll really help this podcast grow and reach an impact. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Marketing Speak podcast. This is your host, Stefan Spencer. I'm the founder of the SEO agency, NetConcepts, co-author of The Art of SEO and author of Google Power Search.

In addition to this podcast, I also host Get Yourself Optimized, which is about up-leveling your life, relationships, peer group, career, business, and spirituality. If you want more traffic and you want to work with me and my team, visit www.netconcepts.com. The site also contains a wealth of resources that include online courses, screencasts, webinars, white papers, articles, and more.

To reach me directly, email stuffin at stuffinspenser.com or visit my personal website at www.stuffinspenser.com. Until next time.