Heads In Beds Show - SEO, AEO, GEO, Oh My! What's The New Search Trend In Vacation Rental Marketing?

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

In this episode of The Heads In Beds Show, we dive into the "new world" of AI Search trends and all of the new terms popping up. Is there a shift ongoing with your SEO efforts to nail down AI powered LLM searches? If so, listen in for all of the details. ⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101Rand Fishkin Podcast🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagram🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Meds show presented by BuildUp Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing, and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right, Paul, how's it going? What's cooking? Well, you know, I've been really working on my alphabet a lot with kids out of school, because I feel like that's just this is we're just going to talk about some letters today that I don't know, this is I feel like I'm getting dizzy right now from all the conversations

that we have about SEO and now we're going to throw some new letters into the game and I just, I feel, I feel dizzy today. I feel a little confused today. So I'm hoping we can provide some clarity. How are you feeling? Yeah, I'm not a big spaghetti O's fan. I feel like, you know, as a kid, I can remember having spaghetti O's, but it's not really like a, a comfort food or like anything that I really, you know, have any super fond memories of, I don't have negative memories of it. I just not like some childhood foods where you're just like, Oh, I can't

should I, could I eat that? And you're like, no, I shouldn't eat that. Spaghetti. I was have to fall into that, into that bucket as it were, but yeah, it's, you know, really interesting. So, all right. So we'll put a link in the show notes to the conversation that was had. By the way, I wanted to be very clear to the listener,

Paul, you and I talked about this. This podcast episode that we're referring to a little bit here between Ross Hudgens and Rand Fishkin came out the day that we did this outline. Now it's gonna release several weeks later, so you're gonna think we copied them. We really didn't. Like I have timestamps to prove the fact

that we were gonna do this topic. And then of course the next day or that same day, I opened my podcast player and then I see this podcast episode from Siege Media, which is day or that same day, I opened my podcast player and then I see this podcast episode from Siege Media, which is an agency that I have a lot of respect for. But stole it from us. Yeah, they stole it from us somehow telepathically, because

obviously they recorded ours before theirs. But let's be honest, that is not that unique of a topic. This is kind of what's happening right now. And it's so funny, because the timing of this is phenomenal. So during the same week, these last few days, I got an email from my client for the first time, client that I really like working with, who kind of said that question that I felt like was inevitable in this timeframe, which is, I just did a search on Gemini for XYZ term, and we weren't recommended. How can we fix

this? How can we get up in the top of this particular recommendation for this particular market and this particular keyword set? And I went, that is, again, just amazing timing, the name of the client, because we're just talking about this. So I think it's a good thing to dive into. So the premise of today's episode, for those of us probably who haven't understood it yet, and maybe the title will somewhat give it away, is there's an acronym superforming between SEO,

which is maybe the thing Paul and I got introduced to in the industry. And the first time I heard SEO was probably 2011, probably that would have been the first time I heard that terminology and understood what it is and started to focus on it. Here we are recording in 2025. So I like to think I've seen a thing or two at this point, but now we've got these new things popping up. Of course, we've got GEO, we've got AEO, we've got all these other new things, new things trying to,

you know, become the branding. Yeah, there are some other ones that I missed there. Anything else you picked up on? I'll just say, that was one that I saw. It's funny that I found some more looking through, like some more acronyms that we hadn't even considered. And it'll be interesting to see where all these kind of fall as time passes. But yeah, I think we're focusing on the primary ones that have now hit the headlines more recently of SEO, GEO and AEO and we'll spell those out and outside the search engine optimization. Obviously, GEO is generative, generative engine, engine, and then answer

engine optimization. Now, with Gen with GEO, I have seen some people trying to relate it back to like geographic. And that's, I think that that's something where, it's a local SEO play, but something that probably is not going to be part of that GEO conversation moving forward. It will, it's gonna be generative and answer engine optimization.

And that's what these LLMs are. That's what does chat GPT is. That's what Gemini, Grok, let's go down the line. Let's go down the list. Man, it's Claude. That's the other thing is it's not even the, the word super trying to put together. It's trying to match that match the optimizations that you're trying to make to the channel by which you're trying to attract that traffic.

So I don't know, it's going to be a fun conversation at the very least. I think what we first, you know, our first part of the discussion when we started outlining was I told a little bit of an anecdote that I was on a call with someone who said, oh yeah, we should be focused on AEO and GEO. And the first article that I went to to look for looking at GEO and AEO principles, they were all very much well within SEO best practices. It was write good content, write for answer, answer the question that people are looking for, kind of going down those things. So are we really talking about three different

things? Or are we just massaging the concept of SEO to include some more experts in our industry? I don't know. What are your thoughts? That's a big overview. But what are you thinking here? No, it's a good overview. I am and so this is actually something that Rand and who was on the podcast with them got Ross, sorry, Blayton, looking at our outline here, too many names and nobody topics flying around. New things in my brain takes me a second to process them. Which they talked about the fact that, for example, there's always been people in the traditional SEO field, let's say, who've been around for a long time, who specialize in a version of SEO. So for example,

there's people who only do SEO for news organizations. And news has its own kind of flavor of how people search on Google and find, you know, what was the score of the Pacers game last night as an example, you know, something as we record this that happened last night. And there's been people who are in those big media organizations and that's all they focus on. They couldn't tell you a thing maybe or they don't focus on how a hotel ranks in Google or a vacation rental company ranks in Google, which is obviously something that you and I touch on a daily basis. So there's always been, you know, to that you and I touch on a daily basis.

So there's always been, you know, to that, to Rand's point and Ross's point, this idea of specialization. So I can kind of say like we are specialists in a way in terms of we focus on a specific type like I don't know about you, I've know very little about shopping. I couldn't tell you much about shopping from an SEO perspective, not something that I have much knowledge in or just general product focused e-commerce. I would say I have a deep knowledge of property focused e-commerce, but product focused e-commerce couldn't tell you a thing about it. Shipping rules, how it impacts rankings and shopping couldn't tell you a clue. And those are of course different

tabs on Google. So in a way, I guess the way to think about it is that the AI mode tab, at least I'm in the beta. So I see that now when I do a Google search on my personal profile, it's just a new tab. So it's going to have its own kind of flavor. It's going to have its own kind of requirements for what it is. I'm in agreement with you a hundred percent, which is that much of the same best practices that existed for quote unquote, traditional SEO ranking in the 10 blue links scenario in Google seem to be extremely similar

to what we're talking about over here. And I guess this makes us a little contrarian by doing this Paul, because the most common sentiment that I see on LinkedIn is everything is changing and you need to be prepared for the new thing. And it's one of those things too, that I think on LinkedIn is everything is changing and you need to be prepared for the new thing. And it's one of those things too that I think is often used to and FOMO marketing is something that I dislike so strongly. Like I try my best to actually when something really matters

speak honestly about it, speak candidly about it, you know, put a little bit of emotion into our marketing. Of course I do that, but I never try to mislead people into the sense of, you know, if you don't do this, you're going to fall behind and you're going to get crushed by competition. And I think that's a lot of, you know, agency marketing out there is a lot of FOMO type stuff, a lot of I know everything, you know, nothing type stuff. And boy, do I dislike that route, you know, a lot. So hopefully the goal today is to talk about the practical differences between these because I do think there are some practical differences, just like I think there's a difference between the news tab and the local SEO tab and the regular Google search results, which is something that we could

obviously compare and contrast here. Things are changing. There's no doubt about that. But I also believe that the principles of what is, let's say, solid SEO or principles of good marketing also don't change as often as people make them out to be. I think platforms change. I think tactics and things that kind of work or little edge cases change a lot. But I think a lot of what works well, the pillars or the foundation that you can build

off of is actually very similar to any of these things like you've already alluded to. So anything you want to dive into there and then let's start by breaking down these pieces. No, I mean I think the theme that people are going to hear throughout this episode more than anything else is that there is there's so much parity between all of these three things and just really understanding what the important things to focus on are moving forward. We might shift your focus slightly, but I don't think you're going to completely overhaul your SEO or your CEO, your strategy, your overall content strategy, online content strategy

based on what we're talking about here. So here are some good things to know, but it's an important conversation. It really, I will say that, but is it going to be full of action items that people should immediately take on their websites? I kind of hope not, just because I think that's a little too immediate.

We really don't know, we don't know about this stuff. We're kind of learning, certainly trying to understand it as we go here. So I think we just kind of dive in. I was about to say, I was gonna say maybe a few caveats then, as we get started here, which is I think this is absolutely the case

when you talk about this topic, and this has been the case with Google for a long time, your results are not my results. If you go and quote unquote, do a query, and let's just use a chat GPT as an example, because that's kind of my tool or Gemini, whatever same concept. You do that same query and because if you're signed in

and it's using your account information, et cetera, it might genuinely present you with very different things. We offer similar type of services or we work with similar clients, but I'm more of a team, you're more of a sort of a lone ranger, as it were, at the moment. So if I were to ask for a system, let's say, for example, for project management, hey, I use Basecamp, but I'm considering replacing it. I'm just giving a fictional example here. What should

I use for project management? You know, Mr. Chat GBT, given that you know about me, it might recommend more of a team-based solution. Whereas for you, it might say, Paul, well, for you Trello may be fine, or maybe there's other solutions that make more sense for someone who's working with clients more independently and may recommend us different software because it knows more about us. So this idea that we're going to rank in an LLM like Gemini or Chat GBT for a specific query is almost like a fallacy. So this idea that we're gonna rank in an LLM, like Gemini or ChatGPT for a specific query is almost like a fallacy in and of itself because we're gonna get very different results.

And again, I say this a second ago, but that's been the case on Google now for a decade, right? If you're signed in or you're clicking on certain sites, the rankings have always been a little bit different. And even if you and I search simultaneously, signed out, you know, different cookies, different machines. Yeah, we'll see slightly different results,

of course, on Google. So that's not a new concept, obviously. But it is something that I think is worth mentioning because what the client searches, let's say the client keeps looking at their own business, they may actually start to see them ranking in more places than they actually realistically are, quote unquote, these LLM tools.

So I think that is an important caveat to think about. But the goal, if we go back to that piece of it, is that we want visibility on these search platforms, let's say, any sort of answer or engine platform, we want visibility. And I would say more than visibility, we want influence, right? Because one thing that's very clear to me, obviously, in chat GBT, when you're not using the search-based functions or you're not using the web-based functions, is that you don't get credit for any sort of content that's scraped out of your site very regularly or very often. So in NGEM, and it's kind of the same way, if you're not too

using these search or web-based tools, a lot of this credit has very often. So in Gemini it's kind of the same way, you know, if you're not too easy in these like search or web-based tools, a lot of this credit has gone away. So for example, if you had a blog post that ChatGBT was trained on, or Gemini was trained on, and it was the 10 most unique hiking trails in Blue Ridge, Georgia, and you actually went and did original, you know, research, and you went and found these 10 unique hiking trails

that were not the popular ones, they were off the beaten path, not to be due to much of a bad pun there, and you found these really cool things, and then ChatGBT trained in that article, and then they're now recommending that to people who go into ChatGBT or Gemini and ask, where can I go hiking in Blue Ridge, Georgia, you kind of just got cut out of the loop there. Your influence is gone in many cases from these tools, which does bring maybe a broader discussion up of like, if that's the case, what is the incentive to create new content?

I don't know if we can solve that in the next 10 minutes or so, probably not. But, you know, in most situations, I think you got to realize that like, very general and very generic information is kind of already commoditized. It was already commoditized. That's only going to get worse as we go on here. So what's kind of your read on that, you know, side of it of just like, you're not going to get credit for work that you've done previously as frustrating as that is. It kind of goes into what we've talked about with blog writing. I mean, that's the benefit of blog writing is that you get more people to your website.

Well, they may not be at the bottom of the funnel where they're ready to book or do anything like that, but that's the inspiration we talked about that. I think that's where I probably have the most fear for our industry specifically is that that inspiration phase that trip doesn't necessarily need to go outside of Google in order to find the old the top 10 things that's that's the scary part is that we should have been beating the drum for years and years and years to get blog writing and do blog writing and

and write all this great content and now I'm not gonna say that it's working against us, but it's not working in our favor anymore as much if this is the case. The value eroded. That's the word I've been using eroded. It's not gone. Like, you know, the beach erosion happens here all the time and what they do is kind of put the sand back

in the beach eventually. But like, you know, if you are doing that, the beach would be gone. That's the scary part is that as Google takes more of the top of the funnel, I mean, Google has has had a place at the bottom of the funnel for the last 10 years. Like that's, I mean, you know, not as much in the vacation rental space. That's the last eight, seven years, but it's had a spot. It's had a marketplace where people can do the search, adding in the AI portion of it, the AI, whether it's AI mode, AI overviews, anything like that,

and getting more of those questions answered before people are actually getting to a website. And then again, the kind of the second prong of that two-pronged effect is that not only are you getting your content used, stolen, however you wanna define that, but then more often than not, what I'm seeing in AI mode and some of these other things is that Airbnb is showing up more. And like

the OTAs are showing up more as a next result. So not only are you losing the top of funnel inspiration, but now if someone's doing a trip planning process, now Airbnb is showing up more frequently in that AI overview than the individual property managers and the professional property managers and all that stuff. So I think that's the slippery slope right now where being ahead of this and trying to figure out ways to either guard your content or make sure that at least there's a clear path back to you as opposed to just getting sucked into those zero-click searches. I mean, that's something that we've often talked about that, but we've both seen examples in the last weeks, months,

where that gap is starting to widen and seeing the impressions continue to rise. That's great. And Google's been saying, oh no, the clicks, once they get there, are gonna be much more valuable and they're gonna be higher quality and this and that. Well, yeah, if they drop by 50% though, that is not something I'm nearly worried about as much as, as just getting the traffic there. So

you know, I, I don't know, that's, it's really concerning. Yeah. I think we're mostly in agreement. I think it's one of these pieces where it's just like, again, this has been happening for some time and this is just like a, a very strong gut punch, you know, right in the right in the middle of your stomach, as you were as you were kind of going down this process. And maybe it maybe it's exacerbated in our little world right now by the fact that like, demand is down in general bookings are down in general, and many markets, not all markets, but in many markets. There's sort of this OTA, obviously, you know, love affair that's going

on for a lot of people, you know, Airbnb does these flashy releases, even though there's not really much behind them. Kind of get excited about that. Yeah, and it feels like, you know, right now is not the moment of, you know, Airbnb does these flashy releases, even though there's not really much behind them, people can kind of get excited about that. Yeah, and it feels like, you know, right now is not the moment of, you know, seeing a lot more awareness for the local property manager, the local, you know, the local company, I think there's some truth in what you're saying there.

But I guess the only thing I guess I will say or my reaction is just like everyone's in the same playing field. So it's not that, you know, it's not that it's gotten harder for you, yeah, but it's gotten harder for everybody else too as well. And it almost makes me realize just like, I feel like it's a skill at this point that I've had to develop over some period of time, maybe doing this for 10 plus years I've developed it is like, when something's working well, you've got to really take advantage

of it. But also in the back of your mind, know that it's not going to be there forever. Like SEO for a long time in our space, I think for these top companies was such a huge benefit. I mean, really a big, you know, from a cost perspective versus the traffic they were getting out of it versus the conversions they were getting out of it. You know, for, for a while there, I think it was, it was really favorable, you know, to the property manager in many situations, especially specifically ones with some size and some scale to them, you know, I'm talking 200 plus, 300 plus, 500 plus, you know, properties.

And there was always competition. I mean, there's never not been competition in SEO since I've entered it. Maybe there was no competition circa 1997 in Google, but you know, properties. And there was always competition. I mean, there's never not been competition in SEO since I've entered it. Maybe there was no competition circa 1997 in Google, but you know, I wasn't really around then to do it. But since I've been doing this kind of stuff, there's always been competition that has not changed even with these new tools.

There's just as much competition, if not more. But the standard for ranking is probably gonna be a little bit muddy for a little while. We're not gonna know exactly what it is that causes it to rank well. To your point, I think we know generally speaking what it is. So to give you some specific examples here,

I wrote this from Atlanta probably seven years ago at this point, and I stand by today. TLCK, this was my SEO framework. They made me come up with a simple framework of how to explain SEO to someone. And I said, your website has to be in what I now call GE, or good enough technical shape, which means Google can process the, index it, crawl it.

So what am I saying there now about that same thing? OpenAI needs to be able to process it, index it, crawl it, right? That's nothing new. Link building or mentions. I think that although it's hard to know exactly at this moment in time if services like ChatGPT are actually technically using links,

or if they're ingesting all the content on the web and they don't even need the links to actually go about it. Again, ChatGPT is crawlers, and Perplexity is crawlers. And obviously Google is working mostly in the same way, which is that we're ingesting content, we're going from site to site to site, and we're trying to index and be aware of all the content out there on the web. So I still feel the same about link building as I do before. The one difference maybe I would mention is that very traditionally before Google was actually following the link. And I don't know how you felt, but sometimes I get a client who would like get a mention

in a certain publication or in a certain website, and they wouldn't get a link. And I'd be like very adamant that we need to get that link if we can. Right? It's not good enough that it mentions, you know, this fictional example, Conrad Skolkavin, I want the link. I want the actual clickable HTTP link. Even better, I want to make sure it's followed. You know, I do wonder if maybe that's gone down a little bit in prominence.

Like if someone's mentioning a topic over and over again, does it really matter if they're linking to that specific thing or not? I would say maybe that's a down a little bit in prominence. Like if someone's mentioning a topic over and over again, does it really matter if they're linking to that specific thing or not? I would say maybe that's a little bit less important. I still want it obviously from a track standpoint. I wouldn't want to give it up, but that's it. Keyword research, how are people searching? I think the way people search on an LLM

is massively different from how they search on quote unquote traditional Google, but the terms, the ideas, the topics are gonna conceptually be the same, right? If people are searching a lot of the time for things to do and they're searching for the best restaurants and they're searching for the best hiking trails and they're searching for the best golf courses

in a given area, that's still gonna happen in the LLM tools. Maybe just the prompt itself is gonna look a little bit different. So that hasn't changed. And then concentration, like we just talked about, right? So TLCK, it's like, what's changed? Nothing really, in a way,

at least nothing significantly has changed in a way as far as like your website needs to be in good shape, you need to understand what your target audience is searching for keyword research or prompting for. Maybe I should say that too now. Say this is what I might have to tweak a little bit. You should make content that's actually unique, novel, and interesting about that topic. And then you should try to build awareness for your brand, whether that's your mentions, whether that's your links, or some combination of the two. What's different about that for quote unquote traditional SEO versus one of these new things, I don't see much of a difference personally.

So that's kind of where you and I think are more, you know, on that same page of, here's what you should be doing, it's no different. But has it gotten harder? Probably, you know, but that's like every marketing channel gets a little bit harder over time. Like I'm sure when the decline of the newspaper started, there was like, the ads were probably getting more expensive

for a little while there, because it's like the newspaper's trying to save the relevance. I wanna save my subscriptions, I wanna save my cost. And then eventually the newspaper gets hollowed out little while there because it's like the newspaper is trying to save the relevance. I want to save my subscriptions. I want to save my cost. And then eventually the newspaper gets hollowed out and spit out and it's gone. But you know, there was a period there where it's going through change and that's, that's,

that's no longer a thing anymore. And that's, you have to adapt and pivot. That's always how it is. And I think there's a difference between, and this is, this is the drum we have beat incredibly hard. There's a difference between like change and decline. People are not doing fewer searches. That is quite clear. And they're not doing fewer searches on search engines.

They're doing, it is creating more. So yeah, I truly think part of it is that people don't like just the time consuming clunky nature of SEO and what it takes to actually do it. And they, and when you see AI be quicker and faster and not taking into necessarily what we can see behind the scenes, but not taking into consideration the same factors, people want to have a different solution than SEO. They want it to be different. They want it to be a quick fix. They want it to be this, they want it to be that. But again, all of the concepts that are important to answer engines, to generative engine, whatever it

is, it's the same stuff. So even though, you know, we're trying, we're getting away from SEO, no, we're not getting away from SEO, we're just calling it something different. So I think that's the other side of it is that everybody's saying, oh, we have to be worried about this. We have to be worried. No, you still have to be worried about SEO because that is where we look. I mean, billion, 17 billion, 16 billion searches still happen there every day. The numbers do not lie. You still need to be in front of where people are doing the searches. Are more people doing the searches here? Yes, more, more than the zero that we're doing them a year ago, more than the two million that we're doing them six months ago, whatever that is. That's where I really don't land.

That was straight from Rand too. He beats the drum even harder than we do, that SEO is not done. SEO is not dead. SEO is evolving just like it has so many times before since 1996. This is not, it's not the same concept. So we have to evolve with it and this is what we do. This is, unfortunately, this is the lot in life we've chosen that we have to keep on learning, keep on growing, keep on iterating, and we can't just rest on our laurels and say, Well, yeah, that works six years ago. So we're going to keep doing that. It didn't work. If it works six months ago, it might not work anymore. So I do I think that people don't want to have to deal with SEO. So they like a yo, they like GEO.

Yeah. Well, imagine that this is just more of an observation than I have to imagine you haven't been doing right SEO wise, or you haven't been getting well SEO wise, or you haven't been getting much organic traffic, or you're not getting a lot of organic bookings, it feels like something new, or it's like, I'm early this time, like, I'm going to be able to figure this out, or I'm going to be able to, you know, do something well here, and I'm going to be ahead of my

competition, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna beat them to the punch as it were, I think there's a little bit of element of that that I've seen before, amongst these people who are, you know, considering these types of, you know, initiatives of, oh, we're gonna focus our whole strategy around this. And yeah, I think if you do that, you're kind of ignoring the thing. And maybe we've done killed by Google before. We've kind of featured that website as things that come and go. And Google is this massive company. How did they launch so many things that fail? By the way, I think it's probably a good thing if you're a Google

shareholder that they're willing to trial these things and fail because it means that they're not just conservatively sitting on their laurels, that kind of thing. But we need to do the same thing for marketing. I mean, in the, in the podcast, we'll link the podcast, by the way, I'll share it with you, you can go listen to it if you want to, but Rand very correctly called out the voice search trend that supposedly was going to be a thing where everyone was going to search with voice all the time. And, you know, with LLMs now, I

feel like there's a voice mode that people use to be clear, but all these long prompts, they're the opposite of voice. I mean, excuse me, these are very, very, very long, you know, sometimes seven, 800 word prompts that we're using text for to get the responses we want out of these LLM tools. So that prediction was very wrong. I mean, I remember watching CES one year, watching articles come out about CES, and I was convinced that every TV was going to be a 3D TV. This would have been when I was in college, maybe, like 2012, 13, 14, that era. And that would have been the discussion point back then. It was like, hey, you got to era. And it would have been, that would have been the discussion point back then was like, hey, you gotta make sure,

like if we had been making this podcast back then, there would have been someone banging the drum saying, you need to be filming all your vacation rentals in 3D. Cause when you run a commercial, you know, in the future, when you run, you know, people are gonna interact with, you know, an iPhone using 3D glasses and that's how they're gonna interact with the world now. You gotta, you're foolish

if you're only producing content in 2D. What are you doing? Come on, 3D is the future. Google Glass being another example of something that kind of died, came back. I guess it kind of got reinvigorated now with these Meta Ray-Ban glasses. So whatever. We'll give that one half a credit point there. But you get my point, right? We could do it with a dozen of these more ideas where something that we thought was going to take off, like the HomePod in my house is used to play music for my daughter. It wasn't this revolution in voice search.

Oh, and we use it as a kitchen timer as well. Those are the two main use cases for a smart speaker in our house. They set in kitchen timers when we're cooking food and playing a song from my daughter wants to play when she gets home from, you know, whatever she's doing that day. So it's like, was that a paradigm shift in how we deal with the Internet or interact with computers and voice mode and this kind of stuff? Not really. Like, you know, was there some,

we were told that Alexa voice actions were gonna be the way that someone booked a vacation rental. They were gonna go to Alexa and they were gonna go say, book me a vacation rental for me and my family. I want a four bedroom, the two bath, and they're giving these Alexa actions to do so. Again, has that ever taken off? Of course not.

So point is, people are wrong a lot about this kind of stuff. Everyone wants to be the first one, we said this before, to kind of call out the new marketing thing. And this, you know, GEO, AEO, whatever you want to call it thing, might have some slight differences,

but I don't think there are enough where you should be abandoning the principles of creating the content, you know, making sure your website's in the right technical SEO shape to be crawled by these crawlers. And then, yeah, you should be checking and reviewing these things. That's perfectly fine.

I don't mind the client going, you know, the story earlier, going and checking and saying, how am I doing in Gemini? Is there something that I know we can do right away that's going to influence it? No, but that's the fun part for me a little bit. I'm kind of fun. I'm looking forward to figuring out.

Let's see what we need to do. How are people going to drain differently on this or behave differently on this platform? Can we learn something from it? Are we going to get some traffic from it? See our podcast episode from a few months back where we learned that in our client data set, not really anybody's getting many meaningful traffic

from the search engine or at these LLM tools right now. Does that mean it's going to be that way forever? Of course not. But the idea that I saw a post on LinkedIn today where someone said like 13, 14% of their traffic is coming from LLM tools, they must have a very different audience than our audience, because that is not what we're seeing with traditional need-of-vacation rental managers. But yeah, any other pieces to add in there before I give some other recommendations on this? No, I mean, I think that is the key is that, I mean, again, we can throw headlines out there do all that stuff. But when it comes down to the raw numbers and we've got some numbers, it's just not there. It doesn't pan itself out. Even the best performance I've

seen on the chat GPT side of things produces maybe two or three bookings a month. That's good. I'm not going to say that that's not that's not effective, but that's two or three bookings a month. That's good. I'm not gonna say that that's not effective, but that's two or three bookings on like 15, 20 sessions. And it's just, we can't extrapolate that out and say, well, this is exactly what we're doing to get those things. Right now, it's a good story. It's anecdotal and how can we take all of these anecdotes and try to put together a strategy?

Okay, that's fine. But yeah, I think there's nobody out there. If there is somebody out there saying, yeah, we have the solution for SEO for AI, I would tread ever so lightly with anybody who's saying that now and test, do what you want to do. Try some things like that. But for sure, for to have someone say, we're going to make you show up here. We're going to make sure anybody who's making that promise on the SEO side right now is just silly. But again, if you're going to make you show up here. We're going to make sure anybody who's making that promise on the SEO side right now is just silly. But if you're going to try to do that on the AI side of things with the LLMs, show me some results. Show me some proof. Show me how you know what's happening behind the scenes. Because I mean,

I can't think of any kind of smoke you could throw that would say, oh yeah, we know all of this and this is the 10 things that you have to do to opt, okay, well those are the 10 things we have to do to optimize for SEO, so what is the difference right now? So I think that's the biggest thing is that nobody has the solution. We all are learning this on the fly and anybody who claims to have it, I would assume is probably gonna end up upside down

in six months, because something changed again. The algorithm changed, the something else was released, something else fundamentally, you know, maybe something macro level changed and then we're talking about something completely different. So it's I've heard the comparison before that like a lot of diet marketing is like this when I say diet. I mean, like, you know, we have to come up with names for something that is obviously very obvious to anyone who studies, you know, human physiology, which is like, okay, basically, here's the premise, guys, we're going to eat less and move more. You know, so it's like, all right, sound good, sound good. Like everything else is some fad, you know, trend layered on top of that. But that's like the bulk of it. And if you did that, then you would get further than 80% of people. So if we were to do one on SEO versus all these other things, we'd be like, all right, guys, we're going to make our brand more well-known by promoting it in as many places as possible. We're going to create information

on a website that's useful and valuable to people actually visiting the area. And we're going to make sure that the website can be seen by as many different resources as possible. And then we're going to get some killer properties that guests really want to stay in. It's like, cool, we've gotten 80% of the way there, and we don't have to worry about a word like perplexity

or LLM vector embeddings, which is not really It's like, cool, we've gotten 80% of the way there. I mean, don't worry about a word like perplexity or, you know, LLM vector, you know, embeddings, which is not really an expertise of any single property manager. So that's the thing, right? So if you go look right now and like, let's do an industry that I think anyone can relate to, but they may not be involved in. Go do a search in there. What's the best car insurance company? You know, it's going to give you a general answer about like, well,

there's lots of good recommendations or lots of good companies out there. But it's just going to go and list the five most popular car insurance companies that pretty much have all the market share today, it's going to go list your state farms and your, you know, all states or whatever, you know, type car insurance companies, the same ones that you see advertised on TV endlessly, the same ones that sponsor football games and golf tournaments and all the stuff that you and I watch, it's like,

okay, there really isn't anything there that, you know, makes it stand out. You know, it's that's just the way that it's going to be is, you know, for the most part, is it's going to recommend what's, what's somewhat obvious in that respect there. So if there were some things, I think from a content strategy that would make sense, maybe it would be the volume of content that you're producing. Like in theory, that is easier now. And this idea that content is a bit of a commodity, I do think that's true. Content is somewhat commoditized, easier to create content now than it was before. But not everyone has your unique stack of brand awareness plus content creation skills.

So if I go start a blog tomorrow and it's a destination that I've never visited or know nothing about and it's called sandiegotraveler.com and I go write 100 articles about San Diego, that's not going to do as well if I put that out there in an LLM or any sort of other search based environment. That if I put that on a site that has a 10 or 20 yearyear history of ranking and writing information about San Diego, and they host people going to San Diego, that's just like an obvious thing. So there is still this brand trust that exists that I think the delta on maybe in theory might become more powerful.

It's more important when I have 10,000 articles that kind of say the same thing, I'm going to go towards the site, I'm going to go towards the brand that appears more trustworthy and that has a little bit more of a history versus trying to start something from scratch or do something from scratch with a site that I've never seen before. So the brand awareness piece may be, again, more important now than it was before when you're going and putting this content on the website, not less important. So at least that's my take on it. Time will tell, but what's your perspective on that side of it? Ben Felix What I have seen just from

the content that's bubbling up is, I think it's that. You have to be more dedicated. You have to be more, I would say, there's got to be some purpose behind using your brand and making sure you're kind of telling that. It is. More of it is storytelling. I think there's certainly a brand aspect to it, but it's storytelling. And I think it's got to be much more clear of a question and answer. And a lot of it like it really is don't like the QA, the QA, the saloon. I mean, I think we started trending in that direction with structured snippets of that's how it was easier for Google to read that. So we're going to read this information. But I think that that's that is how it's trending more than anything else. Yes, the brand exposure is really important and getting somehow your brand to be understood, but how do we do that?

How do we create that content? And I think you've hit the nail on the head there, but it really is about those answers. And to, I mean, every time I run something through AI, make sure this is AIO optimizer, GEO optimizer, something like that. That's the format I'm getting more often than not is H1 is a question, H2 is a question. The content below it is just supporting that answer. So if that's the blueprint, it's okay.

But that's not the way I liked to write. I don't think that's the way people like to naturally read. So we're getting into kind of that natural language, how are people talking? How are people searching? How are people doing those things? That's that gray area for me right now is not really being able to say for certain that if we tell the story in this way,

if we put the brand out here in this way, what's going to happen? So yeah, I mean, I think that is definitely fundamentally where we should be working on the content out here in this way, what's going to happen? So yeah, I think that is definitely fundamentally where we should be working on the content and putting that type of anecdote out there, because that's what we're getting in as a response more times than not. Yeah, yeah, I agree. So let's change gears maybe slightly. And I think talk a little bit about kind of like, what are the actual, you know, so some practical things that come to mind. So

if there isn't this massive shift in terms of like how the content should be produced, it's more about the volume, it's more about what we're doing. I think honestly, what people need to consider is just like being more consistent with your content, producing it more regularly, getting feedback from, you know, your audience that your boots on the ground, people that are staying, hey, is this valuable information for you? You know, what are you looking for? Why are you coming here? That kind of stuff. Like the best source of data for blog posts might be using a tool like Ahrefs or something and finding the content that people are searching for,

or the next best source might be your own data. Why are people coming to your area? What do they want to do? And then going and creating content around that is probably a much better way to get quote unquote optimized in these tools as opposed to trying to go into to reinvent the wheel. So yeah, I mean, it goes back to this this idea again of like simplicity, you know, I think is the is the goal that we all have here. And that's what people need to be focused on. But it's easy to get lost in the shuffle, isn't it? You know, when there's 1000 things flying about, you know, you want to go back and make something really complicated when it's just like, let me just go back to like the last 20 guests at a book to just ask, you know, them why they traveled here, and then just go start making topics about that.

That's probably a much better starting point. I think that's where I do. I want to start seeing more traffic come through because I would like to see what type of queries it is, what type of, you know, going back into search console. That's very Schwartz kind of put out the rejects, doing searches by rejects and being able to find multi-word searches and trying to do some more things like that. I'm seeing more multi-word searches and things like that, but again, we can't quite tie it

back to the LLMs, the AI, anything like that. So I think that's maybe where, in a lot of cases in our space, we are falling behind, but we don't have the exposure that's coming through. We don't have the traffic coming through to be able to analyze and say, this is what's causing this. And we're having to kind of work anecdotally through other verticals, through other industries, and hope that we can kind of catch up.

But we've kind of outlined why that's difficult too, is that we're not shopping, you know, we're not a true e-commerce, we're not in a lot of these same realms. So that's why a lot of this is still a little wait and see, certainly use the best practices, certainly, you know, follow the experts and hope that you can find the right experts there, but kind of wait and see until some of this data comes in. And then let's, as you know, collectively try to figure out what are the five things, what are the three things, what are the 10 things? If it's a list of 10, cool.

But right now, I think that's a lot of what we don't know is that by sheer volume, we're not getting a lot of it. So we can't assess it and make some real strategic determinations of what's going to improve it. So until we have more of that, until we can, again, it might be more of a cycle because how can you get more of it if you don't know what to do to get more of it? We can go up and down that rabbit hole as much as we want. I guess that I don't know comment, you know, we're somewhat joking about it, but it's like, I think that's very true as well, which is that if anyone be suspicious, someone that claims they have the

answer right now, if they do have the answer, then like ask them, I mean, so for some proof, like that's one thing I think that's always lacking a LinkedIn, to be honest with you, is people kind of make these claims about a, you know, we saw the situation pop up, we went and did ABC, and that's what fixed it. And I'm always curious of just like, you know, the proof of that, like, okay, like, that's one example. In marketing, though, there's so many things changing all at once, where one example doesn't always mean much of anything. Really, the crux of anything is can you repeat it? You know, can you do it over and over again? That's really where the main value comes from. And if you can't do that, awesome. That's, you know, then that's something that you can build off of and actually

build a strategy around. So with all things right now, you know, AI optimization or where Ross landed on, I think, was this idea idea of just saying AI SEO or SEO for AI, I think is what they were describing there. It's like still search, it's still a search based function or we can call it a prompt now, but it's prompt SEO and people are going and getting results from that. If you can influence that and you can figure out what's working the best and you can,

maybe there is a little small techniques, tactics, best practices that are gonna emerge over the next six months, eight months, year, that sort of thing to get ranking in there. And more people are going to use them. Awesome. Let's do that. And let's figure out the way to to make it work. And you know, Paul, you and I will be the first one to kind of try to study those things, figure out what's working well, and build off of it. But um, but you know, just don't feel like you're being left behind. Don't feel like what you're doing needs to have some massive, you know, change the strategy. I think people, you know, if marketing is not a key part of what you're doing, this is just going to probably be a lot of noise and not really a lot of signal to be honest with you right now. So we can end on that. And I think that, you know, that's a decent spot for us to be like, you know, more so just promoting finding the right mindset, the bright mindset is probably where it starts, having leadership be involved in all things marketing, because marketing is the key differentiator

of what's gonna make your property and your brand and book direct perform better. And then I think from there, it's all about, execution on what's working best and keeping, maybe 10, 20% of your budget out looking for the future, but then keeping what's working well today, kind of in your main view mirror and not stop what you're doing today,

because maybe five years from now, things are gonna be different. That would kind of be how I would advocate things. So yeah, that's it. Anything else, Paul? You want to put a ball on this one and jet folks off into their AI future as you will. Hi, I hope I wish them the best in their future. But no, I think we covered this pretty well. Phenomenal. Well, that is all things, you know, new algorithms or new, you know, acronyms, I should say, excuse me. Although I mean, there's new algorithms

too. You know, one thing that's a really simple algorithm, Paul, is just how many reviews we get. Very static number. It doesn't change as much as we'd like it to. So made all the way to the end, we want to review. Go to your podcast app of choice. iTunes, Spotify is where we get the most downloads. Therefore, statistically speaking, you're most likely listening on iTunes or Spotify. If not, go to those respective stores of choice. Go ahead, click leave as a five-star review. If you want to email us, you can reach out to Paul on LinkedIn. That's a good way to get respective stores of choice, go ahead, click leave as a five-star review. If you want to email us, you can reach out to Paul on LinkedIn. That's a good way to get ahold of him. He's also linked in the chat or in the show notes here.

If you want to reach out to him that way, you can email me, conrad at buildupbookings.com. I get too many emails, but I will respond to you. Might just not be right away. That's why I put a promise there. And we hope you have an awesome rest of your day. Thanks so much.