Everyday AI Podcast – An AI and ChatGPT Podcast - EP 505: How Brands Win in AI Search

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Most brands are about to vanish from search. Yours doesn’t have to.AI search isn’t the future. It’s already rewriting the rules.And if you’re not adapting -- you’re disappearing.What’s changing? Who’s winning?And why are some brands thriving while others fade into the algorithmic abyss?Chris Andrew, CEO & Co-founder of Scrunch AI, joins us to break it all down.Newsletter: Sign up for our free daily newsletterMore on this Episode: Episode PageJoin the discussion: Thoughts on this? Join the convo.Upcoming Episodes: Check out the upcoming Everyday AI Livestream lineupWebsite: YourEverydayAI.comEmail The Show: [e-mail] with Jordan on LinkedInTopics Covered in This Episode:AI Search's Impact on Brand VisibilityStrategies for Winning in AI SearchAI Search and Customer Journey ChangesImportance of AI Crawlers in SEOShifting SEO Tactics for AI SearchAI and Third-Party Content InfluenceSmall Brands Competing in AI SearchFuture of All Search as AI SearchTimestamps:00:00 Brands in the age of AI search 01:55 Daily AI News09:50 Leveraging AI for Immediate Impact13:16 "Optimizing Content for AI Crawlers"15:55 "Unblocking AI Crawlers Essential"20:24 Rapid AI Developments Challenge Adaptation22:20 Optimizing Content for AI Retrieval24:31 AI Strategies for Online Brand Management28:22 ChatGPT Memory and AI Personalization31:35 AI as the New ConsumerKeywords:AI search, brand optimization, GPT, perplexity, customer journey, enterprise platform, AI crawlers, AI overview, Anthropic, Claude AI assistant, web research, deep research, Google Workspace, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, VO two, AI video generator, text prompts, OpenAI, social network, CEO Sam Altman, AI-powered sharing, AI referral traffic, brand reputation, persona mapping, buyer behavior, ChatGPT, integration, Claude's new features, beta features, content strategy, organic search, content creation, user intent, AI monitoring, third party content, brand perception, intent-based content, personalized content, buyer intent, search behavior, buyer journey, market adaptation, business strategies, AI consumer, content optimization.Send Everyday AI and Jordan a text message. (We can't reply back unless you leave contact info) Start Here ▶️Not sure where to start when it comes to AI? Start with our Start Here Series. You can listen to the first drop -- Episode 691 -- or get free access to our Inner Cricle community and all episodes: StartHereSeries.com Also, here's a link to the entire series on a Spotify playlist. 

This is the Everyday AI Show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business, and everyday life. Meet Firefly AI Assistant, now live and Adobe Firefly, the All In One Creative AI Studio. Just describe what you want to create and the assistant handles the rest, orchestrating multi-step workflows across Photoshop, Premiere Express, and more in one conversational interface. You direct the outcome. The assistant accelerates execution. Whether you're a super small local business or an enterprise company, so many brands have thrived

by getting actual humans to visit their website. And then maybe they sign up for something. They purchase something. They get pixeled, right? And then you can hit those people with, you know, ads down the line. And so what happens now in the age of AI when there's maybe fewer humans actually visiting your company's website, maybe fewer opportunities to get more of those actual human eyeballs on? And instead, maybe they're seeing your brand a little bit more in AI search. It's a big shift.

It's actually happening very quickly. So what do brands do and how can brands win in AI search? Well, we're going to be talking about that today and a whole lot more on Everyday AI. What's going on, y'all? My name's Jordan Wilson and I'm the host of Everyday AI. This is your daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter, helping us all not just learn generative AI, but how we can actually leverage it to grow our companies and our careers. If that sounds like what you're trying to do, this is your home, the live stream and the podcast,

but where are you actually going to make it happen? That's on our website at Your EverydayAI.com. So there you can sign up for the free daily news. newsletter each day. We break down the daily podcast for the day, bringing you more key insights, maybe things we didn't even have time to get to. So make sure you go read that from today's conversation. And we also give you everything else you need to keep up with the world of AI news. Speaking of that, before we get started, let's quickly go over what is happening in the world of AI news because there's a lot. And hey, live stream crew, got a question for you at the bottom.

Let me know and we'll get to it in today's conversation. So first, Anthropic has added, speaking of AI search, Enthropic has added web research and Google workspace integration to its Claude AI assistant. So Cloud can now search the web and also internal documents, providing responses with source citations to support transparency and auditability. So they now have integration with your Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, And then they also did just release the web integration a couple of weeks ago,

but they'll also be rolling out a version of deep research here in the coming weeks. So the new features are powered by, yeah, that word is still around. Retrieval of Metaggeneration and are designed to meet strict enterprise privacy and security standards, according to Anthropic. So these updates make Claude a more competitive option against Microsoft copilot, Google Gemini, and ChatGPT. The features are still in beta. right now for select paid users. So you might not have it yet in US, Japan, and Brazil.

Obviously, this came out a couple of hours after I kind of did my hot take Tuesday, you know, on Claude and how it's so far behind. Obviously a couple of hours later they introduced these new features. I tried them out. They're okay when they work, but it's in beta. So hopefully it gets better. All right. Speaking of new features, Google is rolling out its new V-O-2 AI video generator inside of of Gemini Advanced. So Google has started to roll out VO2. It's very impressive AI text to video tool

for Gemini Advanced Users. So users can create eight seconds, 720P videos from text prompts with a focus on realistic scenes and smooth character motion. So access does require that $20 a month, Google One AI Premium Plan, which matches the price of OpenAI's,

you know, ChatGBTGPT Plus plan, which gives you access to their AI video generator SORA. But Google's plan also includes everything else, all the cloud storage and Gemini integration in Google apps like Gmail and DOS docs. Google also introduced whisk anime, very cool, letting users turn images into short videos, which is available in Google Labs. All right. Last but not least, Open AI.

Yeah, everyone else is getting in on the updates, Open AI as well. So according to reports, OpenAI is building an early. age social network to with a real time feed signaling a push to compete directly with X, formerly Twitter and meta's upcoming social AI products. So the prototype social network from open AI centers on letting people share content, especially images generated with chat GPT, through a social feed aiming to make AI power sharing simpler and more engaging. So CEO Sam has been quietly seeking feedback, though it's unclear if the social network will be a new standalone app or part of chat GPT. The project comes as OpenAI looks to gather its own user data

for AI training, a key advantage held by X, which Grock can now tap into X's data and meta as Lama can tap into all of meta's social media data. So while still experimental, Open AI's move could appreciate how people use AI to create and share content with each other online. Yeah, a lot happening in the AI space and there's a lot more. So make sure you go check that out on our website. All right, enough chit chat, y'all. I'm ready to talk AI search. How can your company win?

Well, I have an expert here to help us figure that out. So please help me. Welcome to the Everyday AI show, Chris Andrew, the CEO and co-founder of Scrunch AI. Chris, thank you so much for joining the, day AI show. You're welcome. Thanks for having me, Jordan. All right. Let's let's let's let's talk about it. You know, well, first, Chris, tell us like what is scrunch AI? What is it that you all do? Yeah, so scrunch AI is an enterprise platform to help companies optimize for AI search. We started the company because we saw it impacting us first as consumers. Our customer journey was changing. I was

visiting fewer websites. I was shifting my search behavior to GPT and perplexity. And in return, I'm getting an answer instead of 10 websites. That's going to change the entire purchase journey for the typical customer, be it B2B or B2C. So our business helps enterprises optimize for that new customer journey by helping you understand if you're showing up an AI search, how you're showing up an AI search, and what you can do about it. So optimization platform to improve for this new AI customer journey. Yeah. And let's, you know, before we dive into the bigger topic, Chris, like, let me know what do companies, what's the one biggest problem that that they're usually facing when they come to you.

Is it like, oh, our traffic has gone nowhere? Or are people just like seeing this? And they're like, okay, maybe I don't know what's happening with our traffic, but I wanna be showing up. Like what is it companies actually come to you with? Yeah, it often starts from a very personal concern. Like somebody on the team, often at the sea level,

has been using GPT or perplexity. It's completely infiltrated their life. And they finally do a search for their own brand category. And they realize, wait a second, when I search for, you know, things my buyers, my persona search for, my company's not showing up the way I would have thought it would show up, right? Like if I ask a question about my direct product, maybe I'm represented. But if I ask a question about the category or kind of an earlier stage customer journey question, my competitors are showing up or my content's

not showing up. So it starts from a point of concern internally that these are the types of things we used to show up for in traditional organic Google search and we're not being represented in an AI overview or in GPT or perplexity. And so that's usually the starting point from a concern perspective. All right. And let's let's just skip straight to the end, Chris. So aside from, you know, checking out your product, how can brands win in AI search? It's the question everyone's trying to figure out. Yeah, I think my, I would encourage brands to, to monitor and to understand how they're showing up today. You can do this in your own solutions, right? Go look at your weblogs. See how frequently AI crawlers are accessing your content. You can work in your analytics platform to

deeply understand. Are you getting referral traffic from AI? Our customers are seeing that referral traffic from AI converts at 2 to 5x the rate of traditional organic traffic. Now, why? It's because people are making their decision in a platform like GPT. They're doing all their evaluation, all their comparison. By the time they visit my website, they are ready to buy. And so what I encourage brands to do is to pay attention to the actual data that's coming back from the platforms. And even if you're doing it manually, rather than leveraging a platform like ours, go in and start understanding how these models are representing you. What are they saying about your category, about you, what sources that are they using? Go to the starting point and understand that as

a consumer, we started to outsource browsing. Like the fact that we've browsed the internet for years, it was out of necessity. We didn't even realize it. But we browse. because we had to. Browsing is inefficient by the definition of the word. I actually want the answer to my question. I don't want 10 websites that I have to go poke around and build a spreadsheet to analyze the category myself. So I think that's the big shift that we're encouraging companies.

And yeah, hey, live stream audience, if you have any questions for Chris, make sure to get them in now because I think this is something, whether you realize it or not, it is something that's extremely impactful. So, you know, Chris, you kind of talked about this shift, but I want to tap into it a little bit more because, you know, companies, you know, maybe a year and a half ago when they're like, oh, where do I start with AI? You know, it was a tricky question. At least for me now, I like, especially for individuals, I say, hey, if you're actually on the flip side of the coin of how do brands win with AI search, on the flip side, how can you start leveraging AI immediately regardless of where you're at? Can you talk a little bit just about this? this concept of, yeah, now we're outsourcing our browsing to AI. And like, what does that mean?

Yeah, it means you need to rethink that customer journey, right? You mentioned it in your opener, but, you know, you've got your traditional marketing channels, you drive people to your website. You expect them to move around your website before they buy the product or request a meeting or click to download a white paper, whatever your conversion funnels may look like. We're looking at new conversion funnels where the primary consumer of content on your website is AI. Like go look, go look at your weblogs.

You will see that these AI crawlers are all over your web page trying to make sense of your brand. And if they can't find the answer on your website, they're going to go find the answer elsewhere, right? And so this idea that they are looking at everything externally on the internet about your brand is kind of the starting point for companies to pay attention to. And what that means from a shift perspective is your buyer is coming

much more educated to your website. That can be a scary thing because you're losing control of the brand journey, the customer journey, or you think of it as an opportunity. There's an opportunity right now to make sure that you're being represented the way you would like to in the AI search world. And a lot of companies are bringing more content online, right? They're making sure they have clear, concise information about their brand, their products, their services. They're adding new pages to their website. They're adding glossaries, FAQs, knowledge bases. think about it, large language models want language.

They've been gathering all of the language in the world. And so when they come to your site to learn about your brand, they're looking for unstructured data. They're looking for text that they can then bring back into the model to synthesize with other sources to ideally represent you to your buyer. And so I would rethink that customer journey. This is not about just a change in search. This is about an entire change to the buyer journey.

And that's interesting, right? I've had this kind of, I don't know if it's a hot take for a while, but I think the traditional, you know, marketing funnel, so to speak, is kind of flat, right? And you kind of talked about it there because, you know, as more and more users are using these tools, right? As an example, deep research, right? Great tools from Google, chat GPT and others, right? But is it kind of the top of the funnel content that a lot of brands would generally spend a lot of time on? is that still even worth it because now customers are coming in so much more well researched and maybe more ready to buy. So yeah, how should companies be thinking about that, you know,

quote unquote traditional, you know, content strategy, the traditional funnel strategy that's been working great for decades. Yeah, I think that top of the funnel content is still absolutely critical because maybe you're not educating a human on the very first step, but there is an AI model that is trying to educate a human. And so that AI model still needs access to that top of the funnel content. It needs access to the type of content that is about education,

about your category more broadly. And so you absolutely should be creating that type of content. But think of the primary consumer of that content as an AI crawler. You know, we don't need to be optimizing your blog posts for 50 keywords and having all of the backlinks.

You need to be optimizing your blog post about the education. stage for an AI crawler trying to get concise, accurate data to represent you as an expert back to the ultimate buyer. So it's definitely changing because I think the primary consumer becomes an AI crawler making sense of that information. Down the road, it may become an AI agent or bot. I like to use a very kind of cheeky, playful example in this world, which is like, if you've Googled for a recipe in the last 10 years, you end up on a recipe site where you can't find the recipe. You can't find ingredients, right? You've got.

Somebody's life story. You've got three videos, two ads, a pop-up and email capture. You literally can't find the ingredients unless you scroll for five minutes. You ask that same question in chat GPT, and you just exhale. You breathe a sigh of relief. You get the ingredients. This is why everyone is moving to AI search. It is a better consumer experience.

Now, the model had to source that information from somewhere. So if you as a company start to think and cater to the AI crawlers as the key top of the funnel buyer, you're already winning against your competition. Shift your mindset internally to get ahead of this. And yeah, love the comments and questions coming in from the audience so far. So keep them coming and we'll get to some of these questions. But, you know, Chris, one thing I heard you say there or, you know, allude to is this concept of crawlers, right? Because I think a lot of companies before there was this huge surge in AI search, right? Before the deep research is, You know, before even Google had actually good integration with Gemini and search before

ChetGPT search. So many business leaders were blocking, you know, quote unquote, AI bots. But what they didn't know is in some instances like Google, you block Google's AI bot. That blocks you from Google as well. Not good, right? So what's the advice to companies that maybe made that decision a year or so ago or companies that are still up in the air like, hey, should we do that? Adobe just introduced an entirely new way to create, bringing the power and precision of its

creative suite into one conversational experience. Meet Firefly AI Assistant, now live in the Adobe Firefly app, the All In One Creative AI Studio. Powered by Adobe's Creative Agent, Firefly AI Assistant lets you start with your vision, just describe what you want, and shape the outcome as it takes form with the Assistant. The Assistant orchestrates multi-step workflows, drawing on 60-plus programs, and grade tools across Adobe Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom Express, and more to help bring your ideas to life. You can also get started with

creative skills, a growing library of pre-built workflows for common creative tasks, like batch editing photos, creating mood boards, portrait retouching, and creating social variations. Every step the assistant takes is visible, so you can refine, redirect, or take over at any time. You stay in the driver's seat as the creative director. Adobe Firefly AI assistant now in public beta. See it today at firefly.adopi.com. It's great question. I was on with a Fortune 500 firm just this week. And the very first thing we start with is a comprehensive site audit. Like what happens when an AI crawler tries to retrieve your content? And step one was, oh, you're blocking them. You're one of the few companies that is

still blocking the AI crawlers. Now, this was done out of fear for their data. But this is a company that sells product and service. If you're a media company, it's a little more complex, but if you're a media company with, you know, a need to build your audience, you're going to want these models to identify your content. I was even on with a media company that was like, you know, why is our podcast not showing up in AI search results? Why are our conferences not showing up in AI search results?

Well, you've blocked them from your entire website. And I understand you have a paid content strategy where you're protecting your content, but at least unblock the other pages about your free, podcast and your conference events. And so, you know, I understand the fear in the marketplace, but this has already gone mainstream, right? GPT was adding a million users an hour a couple weeks ago during the image creation phase. We're coming up on well over, you know, one and a half billion unique monthly users of AI search across the leading platforms. Google is moving to AI search, right? If you do a Google search, you get an AI search result. So my message is

you need to think that if you're in the business of getting your product and service in front of your buyer, your new broker to the buyer is the AI crawler. So if you're blocking your content, they're probably going to misrepresent you because they have to piece together truth about your business from third party websites. So think and cater to AI crawlers not as a foe, but as a partner in getting your message to your end buyer. Yeah, exactly. Like the Google example is huge, Chris, because right, they've dominated, you know, 90 to 97% of the search market for decades. I was obviously at the Google Cloud Next conference and got to speak with a lot of Google execs. So if you think that this is some experiment, right, if you've seen the new AI mode, right,

yeah, we've all seen the AI search overviews, but, you know, now there's their AI mode. And Google's, you know, deep research tools now with the 2.5, it's freaking fantastic. So if you think this is some phase or some, you know, beta program from Google, it's not. This is the new way that the Internet works. So a question, a good one here from the audience. Chris, I was hoping you could tackle. It's a simple one, but I think a lot of people are having this question that Madonna had said here, saying, will SEO become irrelevant or at least maybe traditional SEO, right?

Where people are doing the more technical side, right? They're doing their age tags and their alt image, right? Will that traditional SEO become irrelevant? No, I don't think SEO is irrelevant, right? Nor do I think it will become completely irrelevant. And I think SEO is the foundation for how AI models determine what websites to look at. They need some way to understand what websites to evaluate when answering a question. That's how it's working today.

And so I think some of the darker tactics in SEO may go away. But I think what you need to think about in the shift is like once AI has identified your page, it's looking at your content in a completely different way. Right. Oftentimes our conversations start with, I do a Google search, a Gemini search, and a GPT search, and I get three completely different answers. Why? The models work differently than the traditional Google bot, right? They're looking for the most relevant content to the intent of the buyer and the structure of a prompt looks really different than a Google search, right? So Google search is often deeply keyword based. It's one word questions. It's two word questions. Prompts are human questions, right? And so I think SEO is the foundation. It is evolving, but the customer journey has permanently changed. And so in no way would I say get rid of your current SEO strategy. It's critical for ranking.

It's critical for showing up to be considered. But it's changing rapidly. And underneath the hood, OpenAI has introduced its own search index. For the first few, you know, the first kind of six months plus in the AI search space, you know, Bing was the index that GPT was returning to. You'd ask a question in GPT. it would use the Bing search index. They've now got their own rival search index,

which is indexing and making sense of websites in a different way. So we need to keep paying very much attention to the shift in the space, but SEO is still the foundation. Yeah, that's a good point. And, you know, I think it's one of those things. It is moving very quickly, right?

Like, I just gave the, you know, I gave the example of, you know, this morning or, you know, yesterday I did a show on Claude. And by the time, like, we got it up on our website. They had already introduced like a bunch of new features as it comes to accessing the internet with their tools. So yeah, I think it's hard to keep up, but important to as well. So maybe one thing, you know, Chris, that we've kind of talked about, you know, this concept of AI crawlers and having clear and concise language, right? I think for a lot of people when they've thought of, you know, writing content for the web, because for decades, right, I've technically been.

doing SEO for, you know, like 20 plus years. For decades, you mentioned the recipe thing, right? You've gotten rewarded for, you know, keyword stuffing and, and throwing in, you know, dozens of, you know, semantic related keywords, like, regardless of if it actually solved the user query. So how can big brands, especially if they're maybe hurting for website traffic, how can they go about making that shift, right? When they've stuck to a game plan for a long time, and maybe it's always worked, and maybe it's not working anymore. Yeah, I love that you mention kind of the old tactics that worked because that's what the incentives led search engine optimization folks to do, right? That's what the incentives were aligned for.

What I'm so excited about with the AI search space, it's fundamentally better for humans, right? It's like it's cutting through all of the noise to get me the answer, to find me the website that has the knowledge for the depth of my question. And again, this is why persona mapping is so critical. It's like you need to understand the intent of the buyer, right? Someone asking from one worldview, from one vantage point, one location is completely different than another. So I think, you know, when you think about how you optimize for this, it's really going to be a question of creating content that is optimized for AI retrieval. You need to think away from keyword stuffing and more towards intent. And that's what we see kind of the largest businesses doing.

Now, the foundation for how is it working begins with comprehensive monitoring. If you don't know the type of content that is showing up in AI search results, you don't know what to be modeling it after. If you don't know what websites are being frequently cited by AI sources for your category, for your buyer, you may be missing on a very simple way of increasing your presence by collaborating with those third-party content sources. Because one of the biggest shifts that I think brands are accepting is, you know, for a non-branded search, It's 80% plus of the websites that are cited by models are third-party content websites. So if they're not asking about your brand, the models are trying to deeply rely on unbiased content.

They'll look at your website and competitive content, but the world of third-party content becomes even more critical because AI is leaning on it to get a rounded view of the category and answering the question. And so as an organization, I'd want to understand what content is working, what websites are relevant, and what are the... the gaps and strategies that I can deploy to make sure that my organization is showing up the way I wanted to. Chris, can you talk a little bit more for our audience that isn't familiar? What are those third party websites, right? And how can people, you know, control what's being said there? How can

they improve their, you know, perceived reputation on those sites? Yeah. So, you know, there's no mystery here. I mean, when I say third party sites, I mean everything that is not you on the internet, right? So So let's say you're a beauty brand, right? You've got your website describing your products and services. Well, there's probably dozens of review platforms out there that talk about your products and services. There's probably hundreds of bloggers and influencers that talk about your products and services and your category. There's probably, you know, dozens of industry sites talking about the products that are going, the ingredients going into your products. All of those websites are being used by AI.

to represent you in the category. And so whether this is a paid strategy, in some cases, where you're going to go work with them and pay for placement on their website, or it's an organic strategy where you're saying, hey, I'm listed on your site, but the product description is wrong, the pricing is wrong, can you update it, more affiliate?

You've got opportunities to make sure that your brand is accurately and positively represented on the influential third-party sites that are influencing AI answers. But again, the starting point is you need, to know what websites are being used by these AI models in the AI answers. And they're different across GPT, perplexity, Claude, as you said, just introduce web search. The space is moving very, very quickly. Google AI overviews has its own, you know, powered system to identify what sites are

relevant. Tracking that at scale is the opportunity and the need that most companies are starting. So, you know, on that, we actually have two related questions on that exact topic from our audience both from Jackie and Cecilia. So I'll kind of sum these up in one. But, you know, Jackie and Cecilia are both essentially asking, right, are big brands kind of at an advantage here, right? Because they have way more customers, right? So how do smaller and medium-sized businesses, how can they still compete, right? When maybe not as many people know about them and maybe traditional SEO might have been a little kinder to those smaller brands who really invested in SEO at a high level and put out great human content for many years. So how can, you know,

smaller brands kind of reconcile or still compete because of this, you know, kind of third party website priority? Yeah. It's a great question. I think, I mean, brand is critical in this phase because brand is the models are going to have a deeper understanding of bigger brands. There's more information out there. There's more opportunity to influence the way AI think. at scale because they have coverage, right? You're going to be present in a lot of places. Now, what's really interesting about this shift is the long tail of content is becoming more relevant because the models are trying to match intent to the right source.

And so we've seen a lot of instances where, you know, content from the first couple pages of Google or Bing or Brave or whatever browser you're using doesn't even show up in an AI search result, it's the long tail of content where you might find a niche article from some blog or local business because they understand the intent of their persona and buyer. So again, we really start with comprehensive persona mapping because everyone's getting different answers in AI search. Now, as memory gets incorporated even more deeply, OpenAI announced just last week, I believe, that they're incorporating memory capabilities for all paid users now into AI search results. And so it's looking at your location, your information you've shared with it to get the right result to you.

So I actually think small and medium-sized businesses have a huge opportunity to continue to produce targeted content for your relevant buyer and understand that AI is going to do the work and find it. And so I think that's a huge level of encouragement to say you're not massively disadvantaged in this shift. Continue to produce thoughtful content for a human. One of the beautiful things is you don't need to write for humans and robots. These robots read like humans. Like I like to joke, large language models are like babies. What you tell it, it regurgitates. It spits the information back to you. So the more information you give it about your brand, the more it's going to do your best, do its best to represent you. So continue to produce that content for a human reader and know that the

crawlers are going to access it and give you an opportunity to be present. It's a great, a great well-thought-out response and a good a good point too on the you know the open a i update that now you know they've they've had the memory for you know eight eight or nine months but yeah they just rolled out the ability for chat chpt to use your entire chat history not just those you know saved nuggets of memory so you know a great a great call out there chris in terms of personalization localization yeah large language models aren't deterministic uh you know which is important uh so one one other question that I had. And you know, you've mentioned a lot, you know, things like, you know,

AI search, you know, companies and brands in order to win, you to focus more on things like brand reputation, you know, the consumer journey, understanding user intent, which sounds hard, right? Like, I know a lot of people in my head personally when they hear that. They're probably like, all right, let's get the whole team together and let's start, you know, doing focus groups and meetings and meetings. But like, isn't AI, Chris, really good for that? It is. You know, I think AI does a really good job of understanding at scale. I mean, it is it's the ultimate analyst, right?

It's the ultimate, it has the ultimate ability to do that research for you. I mean, one of the things that's been surprising and starting the company has been that the B2B decision making process has moved into these channels arguably faster than the consumer making process because sophisticated users living in AI as a tool starting to ask all their questions in it. And so as you're doing to like pull the whole company together to evaluate, well, the more context AI has about your business problem, your company, and the more you enrich the prompt with that context,

the more of a thoughtful response you're going to get back. These things are great thought partners. Now, they do still hallucinate sometimes. They will sometimes make up answers if they don't have data to base it on. So you need to bring a judicious lens, you know, to the ultimate advice that it's providing you. You know your customer well. You know your market well. But as you said, it's a good thought partner in kind of distilling what you need to do as part of this ship.

All right. So, Chris, we've covered a ton in today's conversation that I think is really going to help a lot of business leaders who are grappling with this new challenge of winning in the era of AI search. But as we wrap up today's conversation, what is your one most important piece of advice? Like what should a business leader go do today in order to start this winning on this uphill battle? Yeah. I would say stop ignoring it and go participate. And I think that's what's happening with your peers, right? My simple advice, and I don't think this is as controversial to take now 18 months in, all of search is going to be AI search.

Google is cannibalizing itself with AI overviews, powered by their own large length. models. They invented the space. They're not going to give up the space, but they are going to allow AI search results to infiltrate the search experience. We see organizations who are seeing their AI referral traffic nearly double month over month. And this has been sustained now for going on six months. This has the attention of the executive team. The largest companies in the world are shifting their marketing strategies to think about AI as an ICP as a primary consumer of content. And so get a team together, start paying attention, start with some basic monitoring when you're ready for optimization and infrastructure to manage these crawlers and agents. Obviously, platforms like ours

exist to do that, but it exists in a place that needs to start with a foundation of understanding if you're showing up, how are you showing up, and why? So come to the starting line. Your consumers are already there. That's why I started the company. I realized that I as a consumer had already changed my behavior. I'm not waiting for companies to adapt. Great, great advice. And I think, you know, whether you're someone that's in, you know, SEO content marketing or not, it doesn't matter because what Chris just laid out there is the truth. All search is going to become AI search. So if you want your company to remain relevant in the future online, you have to pay attention to it.

So Chris, this was a great conversation. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to join the everyday AI show. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Jordan. Great to see you. All right, as a reminder, you all, we covered a lot there, some fantastic insights. And there will be a whole lot more in our newsletter. So if you haven't already, please make sure to go to your everyday AI.com.

Sign it for the free daily newsletter. If this was helpful, tell someone about it. Chris just gave a ton of great advice putting a ton of value out there in the world for free. So thank you for tuning in. Hope to see you back tomorrow and every day for more everyday AI. Thanks, y'all. Meet Firefly AI Assistant. Now live in Adobe Firefly, the Olman,

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