Experts of Experience - From Google to GPT: How Search Actually Works in 2025

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

Discoverability isn’t “just SEO” anymore. It’s the entire customer journey.   VML’s Chief Discoverability Officer, Heather Physioc, joins host Lacey Peace to unpack how AI search, LLM overviews, social media channels, and agentic assistants are rewriting how customers find, trust, and choose brands. We cover: the rise of zero-click results and GEO (generative engine optimization), why trust + authority beat content volume, connecting your content supply chain, and where to invest next. Practical, human-centered—and way beyond keyword stuffing. Key Moments00:00 Meet Heather Physioc, VML’s Chief Discoverability Officer7:33 What Is a Chief Discoverability Officer?10:07 Discoverability’s Role in the Modern Customer Journey13:00 The Biggest Gaps in Marketing and CX Today17:00 From 10 Blue Links to AI Overviews: The Timeline of Discoverability22:00 How AI Overviews Are Changing Search Behavior23:45 Three Shifts Defining the AI Search Revolution27:45 Is This the Death of the Website?28:40 Can We Track What People Search on LLMs?30:53 Does SEO Still Matter in an AI-First World?33:17 What Platforms Actually Matter Most Right Now37:00 Building Trust and Authority in the Age of AI Content40:30 The Content Supply Chain: Why Brands Struggle to Connect the Dots43:33 The New Metrics That Actually Matter for Discoverability45:26 Ad Buying and Sponsored Content in LLM Search48:05 The Next Challenges Every Brand Should Prepare For50:00 AI Assistants and the Rise of the AI Buyer54:25 The One Fundamental Truth About Human Search Behavior –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their AI strategy with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Does SEO still matter? We've defaulted to Google for 20 years because they've enjoyed 91% of global share of search. It's also posing a lot of challenges to kind of break that old thinking of search is Google to searches all of these things. And we have to fundamentally rethink where and how we do that. People are asking, is this the death of the website? You know, because now everybody's getting their answers on chat, GPT. People often just think search is SEO. No, search is like human psychology.

The ways and the places and the reasons people search will evolve forever. But the thing that will not change is the human need to search. Yeah, like Pinterest, you've got Reddit, you've got Instagram, you got TikTok, like where people are finding content and searching things. It is an actual change to the human mind, human behavior that is happening right now. Marketers got better, the algorithm got better, and users got better. Strategy is not just choosing what you will do. it's choosing what you won't do.

Is there one or two fundamental customer behaviors, expectations, or just truths in how people search that you are still betting on, that you think was true before and will be true after this? That there is a human who is searching. Unfortunately, the ton of people just investing in a bunch of AI slop and garbage that they're pumping out in mass onto the internet, but it's starting to backfire. What the heck does that mean?

For me as a brand and for my customer. There's a fundamental shift in how people are discovering information, right? And when you think about brands and you think about companies, this means there's a shift in how people are discovering your brand and your company and how they're interacting and engaging with it. And this isn't just like a small change in user behavior or customer behavior. This is a massive overhaul. Like when I think about the executive. we've talked to on this show, who we've talked to across all of our different podcast, tech shows, marketing shows, et cetera, everyone is asking the same question of how is discoverability changing? And what the heck does that mean for me as a brand and for my customer? So this discoverability question, challenge, trend has been sitting in my head for months. And finally, I was scrolling through LinkedIn a couple weeks ago and I came across a post and I was like, whoever wrote this, I need to talk to because she's in on it. She knows what's going on

and she's got stuff to share. And that post was written by Heather Fizioch, who's the chief discoverability officer of VML and who we have had on our podcast today. What's really interesting to me about Heather is that she has this unique journalism background, which really informs the way that she thinks about how humans work. What does your human customer, human user, human searcher actually want from this engagement or this interaction whenever they go to search, where are they going to be searching for that information? It's not just going to be on Google. It's not just going to be on chat, TPT. There's a bunch of other different platforms, TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit that you need to be appearing on that people are searching on. So she really

takes this idea of SEO, you know, people often just think search is SEO, expands it and says, no, search is like human psychology. How do we understand what our customer is doing at every single point in the customer journey, what they're going to be searching for at those points, where they're going to be searching for that information? And then we come up with a plan of how we appear there and what's going to be most useful of them in those moments. But before we get into it, and if you're new here, I'm your host Lacey Peace. You're listening to experts of experience. And if you like what you hear today, you enjoy this conversation, go ahead and that like button, hit subscribe, drop a comment below about your favorite part or any questions that we didn't get

into that you would like answered. And of course, you can always find me on LinkedIn and DM me any recommendations you have for future guests or topics that you want to hear about. So with that, here's Heather Fizioch, the chief discoverability officer at VML. Heather, welcome to experts of experience. I'm so excited to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. Excite for a conversation today. Yeah. Before we get into all the goodness we're going to get into today, I have to sit with your job title quickly. You're the chief discoverability officer at VML. What does that mean?

I originally started as the head of the SEO department here. But as the technology and landscape of search was changing, we sort of saw or anticipated down the road that the way we work and the things that we do to help brands get discovered, we're going to be changing to. And we saw that thinking only about Google, only about websites, and only through this lens of SEO,

we were greatly limiting our potential to adapt to changing technologies and changing customer needs. So somewhere around seven years ago, we changed the name of our department to be discoverability, to be more encompassing of the full breadth and depth of the things that we do. And it's rooted instead of in a single platform. It's rooted in real human behavior, which is that desire or that need to serve. It just feels right.

That's such an interesting reposition. And what I find even more intriguing is that you guys did this seven years ago. I think a lot of companies today are having that conversation and deciding, oh, we kind of need to rethink how we're naming our team members, what we're thinking about with their departments, how we actually think about what searches and discoverability. But to do that seven years ago, like, kudos to you all for kind of seeing the future there and making the pivot. That's really cool. Seems sport. I think as SEOs, you get tired of getting line itemized out.

And you're like, boy, we better really think about what the true value is of what we offer. So thank you. Yes. Yeah. That's great. Do you think this is a role, chief discoverability officer? Do you think that's a role more companies are going to start to have? Gosh, I don't know.

I secretly hope not because I selfishly love it and think it's very cool. But like at this. But at the same time, I do think that is the direction that things are going. I think that's popping up more and more in my LinkedIn feed that I'm seeing more people refer to this entire capability or practice as discoverability. It's just a more robust and holistic way of thinking about this part of a customer's journey. Yeah. And speaking of the customer journey, I mean, the whole point of our podcast is to talk everything,

customer journey, everything customer experience. Could you just speak to what role discoverability plays in that journey? Yeah, well, I mean, search is kind of interesting because there is a search mindset or a search function that happens literally at potentially every single step of a customer's journey. Yeah, for sure. At every point, this person is trying to find information or complete a task or go somewhere or do something. And so it's, if we only think about Google, we only think about the website, we're only thinking about this like conversion part of customers' experience, you're missing this massive. span of potential points where you can connect with these customers and serve their needs, anticipate and answer the things that they're telling us that they're looking for.

The search data tells us that they're looking for. And so where we have found that search and discoverability intersects most with our CX capabilities is journey mapping. And taking that classic search or, excuse me, customer journey, taking that full customer journey or personas and then translating that into how we connect with those people when they're in those moments of discovery. And the thing that we know for sure is that when people are in a search mindset, they're not staying in a single lane. They're not just going to Google. That's not always the best, most efficient, most effective way or place to find information. They're going to be

weaving in and out of different platforms. If they're in the beginning of the process and just recognizing their need, the way that they search and the things that they expect to find there are different from when they are hunting and gathering and decision-making and getting ready to make moves. They're going to search in different places. So yeah, zooming out to take a look at that broader customer journey and then drilling down to actually bring it to life. Yeah, I mean, I think this is such an important point that when we talk about discoverability, it's not just this is the first time they've discovered your brand and now we're done. Like, oh, they searched you, they found your brand. That's it. That's the only time they're ever going to look up

your logo or your company name again on search, right? It's not just awareness. It's the entire time from like maybe I've been with this company for, I don't know, five years and I love them and I love their products. But I need a replacement part. Now I'm back in search mode. I'm trying to figure out a solution, find something. So I think it's super intriguing and important to do this entire customer journey mapping that you're speaking about of like where, In what moments are people going to be searching? And not just in those moments, you know, what are they searching for? But where will they be looking for the answers?

Because it's not just Google anymore. Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So as we look into the future a little bit, I mean, we're going to dive deep into a lot of things, discoverability, search, Google, you know, is SEO dead, all those conversations.

But I want to start by just asking you a simple question that I think might be one that's very relevant to marketing and CX leaders right now. what are the most just urgent gaps in marketing and CX right now? Gosh, besides everything. It feels like everything is on fire. It's literally everything. And that's why I'm asking this, right? It's because when I look on LinkedIn, I'm like, there are so many different things that we could just like, it's that, it's this, it's that, it's this.

But like, really, if I am a marketing leader, CX leader, sales leader, even, like, and I'm thinking about this, what are the gaps I should just really be honing it on and focusing it on? It is a huge question. Obviously, it's going to depend by every brand. But I think you're right. Like, if we're getting hammered with it, it should do this. It should be the adage people. Yeah. It's kind of a yes and right now because I'm thinking about it from the perspective of a search person

who cares very much about how we show up in all different searchable platforms and AI search results. And so the thing I'm thinking about is how we, for a longer term, connect the pipes across all these different marketing channels. So if we're under the assumption, that we have done the research and the intelligence and strategy determine which channels our audiences are on and are relevant to what we are trying to accomplish as a brand, then what remains to improve that connected customer experience is not doing more stuff in individual channels.

I don't mean more LinkedIn. I don't need more video, even though that may be true. But in order to really succeed in this new and emerging text landscape, it's about how those things string together. so that no matter at what point that customer discovers you and enters that time, no matter from where they are having a consistent experience that moves them through the process where you need them to go. You're serving their needs.

You knew they were coming. You anticipated it. It feels like a great experience the whole week. So it's not necessarily some major, dramatic new thing that we have to do. We have to, I don't know, maybe this sounds crazy. We have to stop, like, piling more things on that we're going to do poorly. and instead do the hard work of finding those wins at those intersections between the different disciplines and channels and across that entire connected customer journey.

And I think, too, it's not just about like what you feel comfortable with. Like it might feel comfortable to do more LinkedIn posts because you understand that and can do that and execute on that. But what might be uncomfortable is actually stepping back and saying like, oh, truthfully, my customers aren't searching this on LinkedIn. They're looking it up on Reddit. So like, I need to be there. I need to be present there.

But I'm uncomfortable as that because I've never actually decided to be on Reddit before. I don't know how to play that game. So I think there's a lot of like stepping into some discomfort and trying out new things and taking a little bit of risks that especially established brands may not be ready for. Yeah. And I think that's interesting because I actually see it from our perspective as practitioners too is we're so comfortable in Google. And we are so comfortable with the classic ways of measuring success in search that. And we've defaulted to Google for 20 years. because they've enjoyed 91% of global share of search.

So it's also posing a lot of challenges to kind of break that old thinking of search is Google to searches all of these things. And we have to fundamentally rethink where and how we do that. We have to accept that like it's not always going to be measured by conversions or eyeballs or traffic, like measures of customer experience success. I think we're going to be looking to your kind of expertise, actually, in the imminent future to better understand how we can measure the full scope and scale of search impact. So for those who are listening, we just pulled up on screen an actual graphic of what Heather just described of how Google has just dominated search for so, so long. So definitely pop over to YouTube or check it down on the Spotify video.

If you're listening in and you can see this graphic, we'll also drop the link to the slides in the show notes so you can check them out yourself. But Heather, I want you to guide us a little bit through the journey through time on search and discoverability. So, Rose, if you could go back two slides. I want this compare or contrast for sure. Tell me a little bit about what did it look like in the early Internet era of search. And then we can talk about what it looks like now. Yeah. So I got my start almost 20 years ago, Oregonian Search.

young whippersnapper coming off the heels of a career start in journalism. And then I was moving into online journalism. So it started in search. And so this is what it kind of looked like and what we've talked about since then, right? So a user needs to get a piece of information, complete a task, go somewhere, do something, make a decision, whatever it is. So back then they would go to their desktop computer. And they would go to a search engine like Yahoo or Ask Jeeps and then eventually Google. and they would type in their query in Netscape Navigator and they would get back to the blue links, right?

Back when I first got started, we talked about it as this super linear journey as someone goes in an orderly fashion through one gate and then another and another to get information. You know, they go to their desk on device, they go to a standard search engine, they get back 10 blue links. But when you fast forward about a decade and 10 years past from now on the next slide, it'll show you how complicated that got, right? There's still that truth that the human being needs to get a piece of information or complete a task. But now, instead of only happening on their desktop device, it's happening on their mobile devices, in their cars, voice search, internet of things. And they're not just going to standard search engines like Google. They're going to commerce engines like Amazon, video engines like YouTube, social engines. Facebook was the big one at the time.

And they weren't just getting back 10 blue links. They were getting back this huge swath of multimedia, right? It was links, videos, images, maps, products, sometimes interactive features to do some shopping. It just became way more complex and fragmented. Yep. So it created a lot of opportunity for us as marketers to take advantage of more real estate and features in Google in that traditional search space. You want to skip forward one to see how that pans out. It seems to be the first one.

There we go. There we go. Yep. I just get overwhelmed looking at this. Like, I'm like, whoa, where are we going? Yeah. This is wild. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And what I like about this too is, I mean, this is so realistic. This is true. Like, if I followed any one of these, like, choose you're an adventure style, like, if I do this, if I do that, like, this is exactly how I search or how I did search. Absolutely. And now it's a little bit different, right?

It's like, oh, I need this. I need that. And so you're trying to like kind of map how someone's brain is working. There's almost like a psychology game trying to figure out what are people thinking, what are they searching? Why would they use this phrase instead of that phrase? What does that mean? So why would I present this information, right? Like it gets very, very complicated as we move forward in time.

And a search gets better. And the expectations of customers change or the expectations of searchers change. You know, I think about when I was in high school and I was using Google to like write a paper or something. And I would actually go through page. page two, page three, page four, page five to like go find stuff, right? I was like genuinely going through, I might end up on page 15 to be like, oh, that's the link that I needed, right? And that was my process of search. And then you, I, you know, think about college. And I only needed to go page one because I think two things happened. I think I got better at

searching. So I knew what keywords to put in to find the information I needed. And two, Google got better at presenting things that were actually relevant to me. So I didn't need to go play the game of page 15, right? But then if you flip that and you think about, it from the marketer's perspective versus the user's perspective, that means making content that's way more relevant to what people are actually looking up. Yeah, we got better. Yeah, we've provided more value. Yes, marketers got better.

The algorithm got better and users got better. I think we just got used to it, right? So there's like three things at play. And now I go Google something, and I'm not even scrolling down page one. I'm looking at the AI overview, right? So like in just, what, 10 years, Heather? the experience I have two years even yeah like the experience I had on Google has changed dramatically and that doesn't even account for all the other search for so long search tools yeah

that I use thank you for walking us through the sort of like what it looked like what it looks like now well that that was even like two years ago like yeah right society what do we do all those lines right all those lines on that graph it looks like or when you're doing that big paper you had to do you would Yeah. Do the search. You could write something down or copy and paste some information or try to cram it in your brain. And then you would go back in the search and you would find some more things and you would back out. Do it again. In, out, and out. Now we're entering this era where we can ask multiple things at once. And those compound queries are going to get answered in a single synthesized answer in your overview. And like you said, a lot of the time you don't even

have to go past that. Nope. Yeah. I don't even have to scroll down anymore. more. It's crazy. It's crazy. And that's secretly what people always want it. Yeah. And I think the trust is being built too, right? Because I know like when AI overviews initially came out, I was skeptical. I was like, I don't trust you. I don't trust this like answer. So I'd go click the links and like actually still go look and reference that. But now I don't do that. So there is a change in behavior even in the last six months that I've seen with people where it's like, I don't trust this. And now I do trust it. That I think is really important. The citations, the sourcing. Yeah. I mean, again, I come from a background of journalism.

So, like, that was incredibly important to me, trust and accuracy. But also that is something that for 20 years I've been trained is something that is important to Google. That stress factor and having the higher quality search results, delivering better information in a better way, that better satisfies people is what kept them coming back to Google and what allowed them to have that giant blue 91% of global market share. It was a superior experience. And so now AI is taking what I think Google is always aiming toward being that answer engine and has just flows the gap between wanting to do it and we're doing it, guys. We're doing it a lot.

The competition is what made that happen. You know, and I know we've talked a lot about Google here, but you also mentioned all these other platforms. You know, you got Pinterest, you've got Reddit, you've got Instagram, you got TikTok, like where people are finding content. and searching things and like learning and new information is definitely changing, growing, expanding. So it's not just Google anymore. And we haven't even said the keyword here, the clickbait word here, Heather, of chat GPT, right, or Claude or perplexity, right? We haven't even touched those LLMs. How is search changing now that people have access to those kinds of tools? Yeah, I think that's the really, really exciting stuff. And we're seeing Google, of course,

keep pace with it to try to stay competitive. But, I mean, we're seeing... Three big changes that I would argue are stemming from this AI search revolution. The first is obviously the way the search results look. You talked about how they improved what they delivered. The algorithms got better, more better information was showing up. That just took a big leap forward. There's just a different shape of the search results and different real estate and opportunities we can take advantage of now, but that are also threats, as we talked about, AI overview.

are driving us down to the zero clip world. Now, part two is how those results are getting synthesized. We talked about that back and forth of having to do a query yourself and then try to remember that yourself. And now it's just taking, it's taking a huge amount of that lift out between interest and action. It just synthesizes so much so quickly. And then the last part is that human behavior. And I don't think we're talking about it enough. It's, it is an actual. change to the human mind, human behavior that is happening right now. Just like in the early days of when we got mobile phones and we would look for hamburgers near me on our way home for work.

Yeah. And originally we would put in hamburgers, Kansas, state, Missouri. Then we learned we could go near me because the phone knew where we were. Then we learned we didn't even have to say near me. It just assumed because I was on my phone. I was asking for hamburgers at 5 p.m. that I might want some, and it pulled local results. And we learned that, and we changed and we adapted, just like you learned to search better, and as the algorithms learn to return better information. And so that behavior now is changing in how we ask these longer, more complex queries, but also what we as searchers and customers expect when we do.

that standard is rising we need more better information out there we need those pipes connected in order for them to be good sources and citations that can be trusted in those synthesized AI search answers it is sort of context now right like I'm not just Googling average vitamin D dose for you know adult woman right I'm also Googling you know average vitamin D dose for someone who lives in Alaska that, you know, just gave birth and is, you know, X number of years old and da-da-da-da-da, right? Like, I'm looking up very specific things and I want contextual answers back to me. I don't want to connect the dots anymore like we used to. Like you were saying where you go, open one thing, okay, this is the average amount you need. Oh, this is how your body changes

after pregnancy. Oh, this is how this happens. Oh, here, here's this. And then you on your own kind of decide this is what I will do based off all this information. I now expect the AI overview or chat GPT or whatever I'm interacting with to give me the context and decide for me like, oh, here's the solution that I propose, right? And I'm not saying go to your local chat GPT and ask for health advice, but it is what we're doing, like, being realistic about how people are using these tools. So I think just like the expectation on like, I want to give it context and I expected to understand what I mean, what I mean. But then you have to, you have to have good content for that. I mean, going back to what you're saying, right? There has to be actually something in the

back-end that's connecting those dots in a way that we can trust. I think that's absolutely true. I mean, people are kind of asking, is this the death of the website? You know, because now everybody's getting their answers on chat, GPT. Yeah. Well, I don't know if the website is going to be the medium forever, but I do know that that information is coming from somewhere. And so if we want to increase the odds that it shows up in an accurate way that

reflects how we want our brands to be reflected or that serves customers in the way that we want them to be served, then I think it's incredibly important that we consider what content and assets we have in the mix, how they're optimized, how accurate, how fast they are, all the things that we knew we should be doing, and that take a lot of human effort to do. It just got way more important. To your point of connecting, I'm just really obsessed with this idea of connecting the dots, connecting the pipes as you framed it, like the more that we track what people are searching, because they have the opportunity to do more of these like long form, more complicated searches. Are you guys seeing just more interest or maybe developing tools on just tracking

what's actually being searched? Because then that will more greatly inform. Like, oh, this thing about, I'm going to stick with this example of like vitamin D for this age. Like that's something that's coming up frequently. So we should make content for that. Are you guys able to track like what people are searching on, let's say, a chat GPT or definitely on Google and kind of map that to the content that you recommend brands make? The capability to tell specifically what is being searched and at what volume is greatly limited right now. We're starting to see more platforms start to kind of model the information, but I'll be honest, I don't totally trust those scenes so far.

So we're sort of monitoring, testing, learning, but we're still heavily reliant on Google search data, but we're also looking at Amazon search data. We have some access like TikTok and Instagram, like search data, Walmart, some different ones that we can kind of piece together a whole story, but there's a lot of areas, including AI search, some social search, and other areas where we still quite manually have to interpret through things like hashtags and auto-suggest bars to manually piece together that whole search journey. I do think that is changing and will change with time, like Google Search Console says that they do have AI mode or AI overviews or whatever. They have some.

AI-related keyword data in there, but it's all blended with everything else. So we can't really expect anything useful yet. So there's a lot of live testing, annual testing and learning and talking to people to figure out how they're using it in different industries. Yeah. And I think it's Google AI mode because I was just messing with it. Is that where you're talking about like the actual And it's like if you type something into there, is it going to show up in our Google's search console query data? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. So I'm going to I'm going to ask you something that is just like, this is my clickbait question.

Okay. Are you ready? Ready. Does SEO still matter? I think, yes, I just hate the word SEO. Yeah. I tell me more about that. I mean, going back to that idea of like SEO is just, it's been around as long as I

have so I know it's old. You know what I mean? It's like it's got a reputation for kind of being slimy in a lot of corners of the web. And like even without that, it feels like a lowest common denominator seat version of what we do. It feels like 1% of 1% of what we actually do in discoverability. So it's a great gateway. It's a door or a way to bring people in who do know about SEO as a concept and we can bring them along on that journey and pull them forward into this new world of discoverability. But yeah, I don't think that search is ever going to die, right? Like the ways and the places and the reasons people search will evolve forever. But the thing that will not change is the human need to search. So it's our job to stop putting all of our eggs

into a platform or a technology and instead take ourselves back to that human need, that core thing that drove the search to begin with, and we will be much better able to assert customers' needs no matter what the technology of the day is. Yeah, I think that's so true. And I just have a bone to pick with the SEO phrase. I know that we've started to say GEO, which I think is like what generated engine optimization, which doesn't make sense why we would need a new term because it's still search. It's still an engine for search. So could we not stick with search engine optimization as the term that we're using? We just understand that this is a moving thing. It's just unfortunately that phrase has been so tainted

as you just shared and kind of like only in our mind now SEO equals keyword stuffing, right? Like that's just what we believe whenever we hear the word SEO. So I just had to say that like I'm kind of past the GEO phrase and I'm hoping that we can come up with something better. it's not a practice it's that sounds like a deliverable you know what I mean yeah that's really hard to optimize for try optimizing for geo yeah that's so true so as we move into the next I don't know six months to a year I'm not going to ask you to pick too far out because I just think that's purely impossible Godspeed and good luck right but I do wonder about like what platforms matter most right now and this might be different I'm sure you're going to have different

answers for different industries, like B2BBC, there might be just different things to be looking at. But in general, when you're talking to someone and they're like, hey, where do I need to double down? What advice are you giving them? Yeah, absolutely. And this is a conversation I'm having easily five or six times a week right now. Clearly, the word is out that AI searches a thing. And more and more clients are asking, what do we do? How do we adapt? How do we evolve and get ahead of this? And should we be pivoting our entire SEO program? to this or taking money from this and jumping it on to that. And our advice is generally, yes, we should be investing in this and we should be proactive

in testing and learning, but don't just drop everything and go over there. Be really intentional. Carve out a piece of your budget, say 5, 10, 15% of your search budget dedicated to testing and learning and optimizing for these LLMs and AI search engines, AI search platforms, right? test and learn, test and learn, test and learn. That is all we can do right now, which is reminiscent of when I first got started and we were all trying to reverse into your Google and understand how they range things number one, right? Yep, yep.

The next thing that I'm advising people to double down on is authority and trust, and I really look to a lot of my CX experts and everybody that's working in different disciplines where we can connect with customers to communicate signals of trust, credibility, authority, reality, humanity, credentials, anything that these AI search engines can trust and source them site to yield real accurate, helpful answers. I think the next big competitive front of this AI search war is which of those will deliver the best, most trustworthy results. They are going to be biasing toward those signals for their own reputations, for their own ability to survive. And so we need to start working in that way. Unfortunately, what we see instead is a ton of

people just investing in a bunch of AI slop and garbage that they're pumping out in mass onto the internet. But it's starting to backfire. We're seeing evidence that's starting to backfire on those people. I would rather my brands invests in less but better and realer any day the And the last thing that I am sort of putting some chips on is, like, structured data, I think the ability to retrieve information and synthesize it into answers and complex solutions, it's going to require tagging and organizing information out on the web and tying streams to things, like never before. It's just going to require way more parsing through a lot more information to achieve

results. And so I think structured data will become more important. It hasn't really shown that it's like a bombshell today, but I think it makes absolute sense that that is a production especially knowing what we've seen in Google in the past years and why they did what they did. I think it's just the way to prepare. I mean, it's like if you want the content that you're creating right now to be relevant in a year or two years, be accessible to these new technologies as they continue to evolve, cleaning up how it's being delivered, how it's connected, can be bred is table sakes. You absolutely need to be doing that now.

Yeah. The thing you mentioned about trustworthiness and that kind of like authoritiveness that comes with content that is credible, trustworthy, and from people that, you know, in the industry, you might trust them. Like, what do you, when you think about that, what kind of content are you actually recommending? So we, you know, we obviously make a lot of content for executive leaders at our company. So I think about this a lot with like, how do we continue to just build great trust

with our audiences. And, you know, and I think bringing on great leaders onto our shows like you who can bring in, like, these knowledge drops that helps us, you know, connect with our audiences. But I'm wondering for, like, bigger brands, what recommendations you're giving them of, like, how you actually build this sort of trust and authority. Because I don't, again, I don't think it's just like, oh, here's a new blog post and, you know, it's SEO optimized. Like, I just don't think that's the future. That's a great point. And I think working with these big multinational Fortune 500 enterprise brands. There is sort of a luxury of their well-known

established brands, some of whom who've been around for 100 years or more, right away, you get some extra trust signals. But if you're not that, you know, it's going to take a lot more work to establish that. But even if you are that, I think executive content is a great example of it. You're putting real names, real faces, real points of view

that have been thoughtfully crafted and curated. And so there's an inherent trust baked into the content to begin with. And then how that's presented out in the world for search benefit is certainly a win-win. I think executive content is great. For retail and commerce content, we're advising just providing more. Fill out the maximum field. Use all the available product tags that you can. provide the information, because as you talked about with your highly personalized queries,

people could ask for any combination based on any context. So we need to be able to field almost any kind of context. So those types of content are great. I think we come back to the connecting the pipes as well on content. I think the content world is hyper fragmented and kind of right for disruption in general, the entire content supply chain is chaotic. It's chaotic. So honestly, connecting the different kinds of content you are creating, maybe you're creating owned website content for a brand and you're doing e-commerce content for a brand or you're doing a ton of social and video content and website content. Sinking those things up so they connect and validate and play off of one another will feed into more ownership of those synthesized

answers and just capturing more of those citations and sources. And I do feel like that's actually really hard to do. Like that way you're describing where you're connecting the dots between what's happening on social with over there. Like all these things, especially in larger brands, are owned by different people in different departments. So getting people out of their silos to have those conversations of what are you doing on LinkedIn?

What are you doing on TikTok? what are you doing on, you know, on your website? What podcast did our CEO appear on this past month, right? Like how can we connect the dots on all of these things? That's actually very, very difficult. Do you have any advice for teams on how to do that? Yeah. So I actually did a whole study. Gosh, it would have been eight years now. I bet if I did it now, it'd be even more chaotic. But if you ask 100 people what content is, and I did as part of that exercise, you will get 100 differentances. Now, I bet it's 1,000.

And everybody thinks they own content and no one has the same definition of it. What is probably true is that everybody is a part of a larger content supply chain that, just like our searcherning, anybody can enter it any part of this content supply chain. But this content supply chain is required to produce a true,

omnichannel, holistic, end-to-end content system, or content pool, right? It is incredibly hard. And competitive advantage is doing the things that your competitors can't or don't do. So that, to me, feels like the thing that's worth investing in, but it does require a lot of listening and learning and figuring out what other people's definitions of content or their role in the content supply chain is or the value that their piece of it provides to the client. So you know which pieces of it to tap into for which needs. But you first need to kind of zoom out and look at all the different moving pieces of content and figure out who's out there.

What do we have? What do we need? What do we agree on? What do we not agree on? Okay. Yeah. Which might actually be the hardest first step of all. all this is to say, hey, pause, pause everything we're doing. Let's actually take the time. And I don't know that you should pause. I don't know that you should pause, but at least like, like, it's so much, it's so easy to be like, let me just keep doing more, right? Like, let's just keep piling on more initiatives. So maybe keep the initiatives you're doing, keep them going. But like, let's also step back and take a look. So how do we do these things simultaneously? And how do we keep double checking that, right?

How do we keep having opportunities checking with each other with leadership? Because we are so far from a set it and forget it marketing or content strategy like that is not a luxury we have no no that does not happen but it takes me back to like newsroom thinking where you have like um editor-in-chief who kind of knows how all of the pieces fit together who knows how all of the different sections play all the different content plays together who can make those editorial decisions and somebody has to have that master view in order to be able to tweak the process and you may not have all of it once, but start somewhere and then build on that scaffolding of what you know and you'll be able to save a better content system.

Whenever you're working with clients or when you're just like looking at this, what you've called the content supply chain and you're trying to identify where there are gaps in where you're maybe showing up or you're trying to understand like what's actually happening here, our customers actually like this thing that we did, like what metrics are you actually looking at? Because I know that we can get bogged down with like the 50 slide. deck of all the different metrics that we could be looking at. But what are you saying, you know, these are the maybe three or five. And I'm not saying all the other ones don't matter, but like what are the metrics that you guys are actually looking at to say like, oh, this is doing

well or, hey, there's a gap here that we get to fill. Yeah. Yeah. And that's changing in real time. We're actually fundamentally rethinking how to measure search. But I think traditionally search folks have measured their impact or value in the supply chain around eyeballs. clicks, conversions. That was the entire economy of the web for the last 20 years, and so that is how we measured success. I work in a creative agency where we're doing every different kind of content from every different angle at every part of the supply chain. And so from a search lens, I'm looking at all those different people, departments, capabilities, services, and going, how can search augment and add value do those things? So I don't have ownership over the whole

thing to optimize all the things, but I have authority over the parts that affect the discoverability of that content, of that brand. And it's my role to tweak those bets. As far as what we're going to be measuring in the future, though, I think that's the part that's up in the year. One thing that's always true is, like, whatever the brand is, whatever the client is, whatever keeps them in business, that is the core metric of success, period, end of day. Yeah. Our job is search or content marketers should go, okay, what metrics or KPIs will specifically signify success against that or proxy has some indication that we're moving in the right direction toward that thing. That's not always going to be clicks. It's not always going to be

conversions. It's not always going to be impressions and search results anymore. There's something that has been kind of like fluttered around in my head as we've been talking. And I mentioned this to a gentleman. We talked to a couple months ago about sponsors. sponsorships and ad buying in this new future with AI. Do you have any thoughts about, like, will people be able to sort of sponsor this content? Because like when I look at AI overviews now, a lot of it doesn't include sponsored content. Like the ads that you would normally pay for at the top of Google, this AI overview is appearing before that. And it's really hit or miss whether or not they actually get incorporated into the answers.

It just feels like there's no real playbook yet for this. Do you have any perspective on, like, how search plus, you know, ad buying might change in the future? Yeah, we've always thought about discoverability as like an integrated search offering, which includes paid search as part of that. And what we've been talking about with our paid search colleagues is very much around how these things will blend eventually. Right now, they're testing AI and they're not ready to blend those two things. But I feel like it is imminent and inevitable that paid and sponsored place. will eventually be folded into AI search results. And I think we've even seen some evidence of it being tested in small pockets here or there.

But nothing that we've seen rolled out widely. You're betting like it will be, it will be integrated. Okay. What about like on LLMs? Like do you think on chat, GBT, there's going to start to be sponsored content? That's a tough one. I don't know. I don't know.

I think it's plausible. I think it is absolutely plausible. but they don't have a search head network pre-built, ready to plug into new technologies that I know of. And they've got other better mechanisms for earning right now. I just don't know that that would be their number one priority. Totally hypothetical speculation here. No, I know. I'm just curious.

Like, right now doesn't make sense to me because they've got other models to support, you know, how they make money. But it does seem like it could be a possibility, whether it's the platforms that exist right now that we talk about, like JadGPDClaude, et cetera, or it's a, platforms that are built in the future that have paid sponsorships built into them. I don't know. I feel like it's an interesting. Definitely nothing I can predict at this point. I feel like there's never been a space created where we did not figure out how to monetize. I was just going to say, like, I don't think there's so much of a space that we haven't figured out where to put ads. I mean, I was driving through like the middle of Canada and there was nothing for miles and then there was a billboard. And I'm like, we figured out how to put ads in some of the.

the craziest places, that's for sure. I agree. Heather, we talked a lot about different challenges that brands are going to be facing in the next several months. What other challenges that we have not yet hit on do you think people need to be prepared for? And it could be outside of discoverability. It could just be something that you looking in on industries and working with businesses closely that you're like, this is something that's interesting. And maybe you don't have a full, like, fledged opinion on it yet, but just something that you've been seeing that you're like, I think people need to pay attention here. I mean, obviously, A. AI is the thing and AI search is the hotness right now, but we are also starting to turn

her attention toward agentic AI and how agents may be able to interact with one another and what that means for hyper-personalized discoverability. So we're looking ahead to that. That's what's next for us. We've talked a lot about agentic AI on our show. We talk a lot from the business perspective, like how businesses are using it to augment their systems and their tools. And of course, how it's affecting the customer experience directly. Like if I can interact with a chat bot that has agentic AI capabilities, it can actually go do things. And I don't need to ever talk to humans. So there's like a lot of really cool ways. But so much of that's based off content, right? So we get back to this content conversation of like the way that we're training these tools is through this

content. So it needs to be trustworthy content. Needs to be good content. It needs to be up to day. And it needs to be structured in a way that they can actually understand and interact with. Right. So it kind of goes back to all those key points that you've already been making. in this conversation. The other thing about AI that I think I know I'm particularly interested in, and I'm curious to see if you also think this will be true, is AI assistants. Like me as an individual, having my own AI personal assistant that goes and does like all my shopping for me, right?

Like I don't even need to go in DoorDash anymore and click on the things I want. I just say, hey, I need these items and it goes and brings them to my door, right? Or I'm even if I'm a business and I'm looking for a new. new CRM tool. I'm tasking that to my AI assistant that's going to go evaluate all the solutions for me, maybe even go through some demo processes, and then decide for me which ones I should be looking at, right? So what do you think about that future? Like, do you think that's something that's true? Like, that's going to be happening here in the coming years? A thousand percent. Yes. Okay. So talk to me about that.

A thousand percent, yes. Well, we already hear tell of customers, especially in like B2B or complicated long sales cycle, high tech, SaaS, anything that's a long complicated decision making cycle where there is a lot of information required and a lot of criteria that are contextually relevant to you. I think that's like one of the best use cases for this technology, more so than buying shoes, more so even than buying groceries, although I think those are great use cases. Which shoes? Can you just buy the products I already buy? week when I say I eat out of cheese. Can you get that one, please? Yeah. So yeah, I actually totally think that's plausible. I think that's absolutely what we're working toward. Compound

queries have long been the desire and they've long been the desire because it closes the gap between idea and action. It's creating a smoother, more frictionless path. And we need our time back. We're so fragmented. It requires so much. And in part, it was the mess created by the way. Now we're being offered this potential hope of being able to do less and get the same value. Yeah. Yeah. Do less, not do more with less, right? Right.

Maybe this is my chance to do less. We're always doing more. With that, too, I wonder about how discoverability will be affected by these AI systems. Right. So if I do have my own AI system, it's going to go evaluate all these things for me. It's still going to have some mechanism discoverability. So it kind of comes back to all these things that we've been talking about where it's like if you want to be prepared for a human buyer,

these are the things you need to understand. But if you want to be prepared for the AI buyer, it's pretty much all the same things that you would need to understand. Mm-hmm. They're going to, hopefully we will start to get more information about what those criteria are that people are baking into those compound queries. We can still discern a lot of that from standard Google organic queries. and it's broken into more bite-sized chunks because it's keywords, not compound queries,

but very, very interested to see some of the use cases. I expect that they will be very action-oriented, task-oriented, and again, synthesizing things that normally would have taken us 20, 30, 50 steps to do. They can do in one or two. Absolutely. Oh, and then they can play together too. Like I think about with these complex like SaaS buys, right? It's not just one stakeholder.

You've got like 10 people that are like, I need to convince that this is going to be able to do the thing that we need done. And if all 10 of them have their personalized AI assistant, they can all collaborate to figure out the solution for you. I mean, like, I don't know. I think that's a great future. I think so, too. That sounds like a lot less work. Yeah, no kidding. It's also kind of scary in a lot of ways, but use responsibly.

Use responsibly. Yes, yes, yes. I know. I was talking to someone who was telling me the story where they had been. been, they thought they were talking to a person on the phone for like preparing for a podcast interview. Like she was asked to come onto a podcast interview. And she thought she was doing the prep with a person. And then she realized it was an AI assistant. Yeah. And she was like, okay, I'm not doing the podcast with you because like if you can't take the time to human to human

with me. But I joke all the time on the show that like someday I'm going to be interviewing the AI version of Heather. Right. I don't actually need to talk to Heather because you've got your AI copy, right? And I always joke like just because I actually don't think that's like I would never do that and that's, you know, not the future that I desire when it comes to content creation. But it's so startling to me that like that massive of a media company was actually doing their prep calls with an AI assistant. It's wild. That's bananas. I have not heard of that, but that blows my mind. No, it is wild. It is wild. And it wasn't good enough yet. So it was just like failures all around here.

Launching some half-baked stuff. That'll do it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I want to end with one question for you about fundamental truths. So we have talked a lot about things that are changing, challenges that are ahead. But is there one or two fundamental customer behaviors, expectations or just truths in how people search that you are still betting on that you think was true before and will be true after this? I come back to it again and again and again, and I have throughout my career, and change is scary when things are changing at such a rate that it feels like you're going to drown. I just keep coming back to the idea that there is a human who is searching. It's so simple.

There's a human who is searching, and they are in a search mindset. it no matter when, where, why, or how they serve, those things will always change. The reasons, the places, the ways people search will always change. But that human desire to search does not go away. Their need to search has existed since the dawn of time, and it will exist indefinitely into the future. And this digital realm is here to stay. People will search there. Somebody has to help them find those things.

And that's what I think we do. Awesome. Well, Heather, this has been so amazing. Thank you for taking the time to go through all of this with us. And I think I'll have like probably 100 more questions for you in the near future. So I'll hit you up probably in a year, maybe six months and be like, hey, Heather, we need you back. Things are changing. Come back on and explain it to us. But yeah, this has been fantastic. And Heather, where can people find you, follow you, stay in touch with you if they're, you know, interested and want to learn more about discoverability? Yeah, I am at Heather Physioch on all the things. You'll probably find me most on LinkedIn and blue sky. Awesome. All right. Well, thanks, Heather. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.