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How Conversational AI Is Changing Discovery for Brands and Media · Leading Local Insights

• 0:34
  Celine Matthiessen: Hello and welcome to BIA Advisory Services Leading and Local Insights podcast.
• 0:38
  Celine Matthiessen: My name is Celine Matthiessen and I'm the VP of Insights and Analysis here at BIA.
• 0:43
  Celine Matthiessen: Today we're talking about how AIs are shaping search and what that means for anyone who lives and dies by visibility, whether that's SEO media or marketing.
• 0:52
  Celine Matthiessen: The place where opinions are formed and shortlists are created is moving from search results page into AI-generated answers.
• 1:00
  Celine Matthiessen: For brands, the questions become less what's our ranking and more?
• 1:03
  Celine Matthiessen: Are we part of the answer mentioned, cited, recommended, or even sponsored?
• 1:07
  Celine Matthiessen: So to unpack what that means for SEO content and media strategy, I've invited my colleague Mike Boland, who's been deep in the future of search and AI driven discovery.
• 1:19
  Celine Matthiessen: I can't talk today.
• 1:20
  Celine Matthiessen: Uh to get us started, Mike.
• 1:22
  Celine Matthiessen: How are you today?
• 1:24
  Mike Boland: Hi, Celine.
• 1:24
  Mike Boland: Good to be with you.
• 1:26
  Celine Matthiessen: Great.
• 1:26
  Celine Matthiessen: So, Mike, when you look at how people search and research today compared to a few years ago, what feels fundamentally different to you?
• 1:34
  Mike Boland: Yeah, I think that that's really where it starts.
• 1:37
  Mike Boland: Uh, you mentioned a lot of things about how all of this impacts like the online visibility playbook.
• 1:42
  Mike Boland: But I think like before getting to that, it's all a function of like how the user behavior is changing.
• 1:47
  Mike Boland: And to answer that question, it seems that we're getting into more of a modality in in search that the industry has been driving towards like for a while and has really just like accelerated and gone into hyperdrive in the last like one or two years, which is natural language search.
• 2:05
  Mike Boland: We've been talking about this for years, and I think it's the onset of AI engines and LLMs like ChatGPT and others that have one made this possible, and then two, have started to condition the behavior and users that this is now possible.
• 2:20
  Mike Boland: So you see more and more people searching in more evolved ways.
• 2:25
  Mike Boland: And and evolved is the key word because the sort of like the joke always in search, and especially in local search, has been that we we talk like cavemen when we when we search.
• 2:35
  Mike Boland: It's like sushi near me, right?
• 2:38
  Mike Boland: And and now we're using full sentences, we're we're getting into more granularity and we get into that and what that means.
• 2:44
  Mike Boland: But I think that one data point that I think underscores a lot of this is that Sochi, um, a company that works on reputation management and a bunch of other things, a company you know, Celine, um, came out with their local visibility index recently.
• 2:58
  Mike Boland: And as just one of many data points in this report, they reported that um search queries, traditional search queries on Google average four words in length, right?
• 3:07
  Mike Boland: Can you guess the average word count of a typical AI query, whether it be Google AI mode or like ChatGPT?
• 3:14
  Mike Boland: Like guess guess what the the length, the average length in words?
• 3:19
  Celine Matthiessen: In words, maybe double or triple that?
• 3:21
  Celine Matthiessen: I don't, yeah.
• 3:23
  Mike Boland: So it's the according to their study of 23, which is almost six X.
• 3:26
  Mike Boland: That's almost six X, the four words of search.
• 3:30
  Mike Boland: So that that should quantify it.
• 3:31
  Mike Boland: But yeah, that's playing out in a lot of interesting ways.
• 3:35
  Celine Matthiessen: So yeah, so is there anything you can add to that?
• 3:38
  Celine Matthiessen: Uh that's a great observation, high-level observation on um the shift from searching and clicking to asking and getting answers.
• 3:45
  Celine Matthiessen: Any anything else that you can that you can observe or that you've observed that we need to keep in mind?
• 3:50
  Mike Boland: Yeah, yeah.
• 3:50
  Mike Boland: Let's let's like color that with an example, right?
• 3:53
  Mike Boland: Like the caveman search versus the new like natural language search, which makes a lot of sense because it's the way that we think naturally, it's the way humans think.
• 4:01
  Mike Boland: Like it's just it's a return to just you know something that's more intuitive for us.
• 4:04
  Mike Boland: So, anyway, let's take a local search example because that's our world, right?
• 4:08
  Mike Boland: The the sort of you know, coffee near me.
• 4:11
  Mike Boland: That's that's the traditional search.
• 4:13
  Mike Boland: That's three words.
• 4:14
  Mike Boland: Google, I mean, So she's average, they said before, but let's just take that typical search, coffee near me.
• 4:20
  Mike Boland: The way that that might translate today in the way that users are being conditioned and the engines are being capable of processing, is something that's more along the lines of I'm driving down the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, heading towards Los Angeles.
• 4:32
  Mike Boland: I'm looking for a place to get coffee that is less than one mile off the highway, and I prefer Pete's to Starbucks, and I want one that has a bathroom I could use.
• 4:41
  Mike Boland: Right.
• 4:42
  Mike Boland: It's like that's the new search, not the coffee near me.
• 4:45
  Mike Boland: Um and I think that again, that has a lot of implications for you know the the art of SEO or what's becoming known as AIO, AI engine optimization, that's based on just those new ways that people um are searching.
• 4:59
  Celine Matthiessen: That's crazy.
• 5:00
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah, um I could see I can see where that that makes a big difference.
• 5:03
  Celine Matthiessen: It's also very helpful because it's very personalized, right?
• 5:07
  Mike Boland: Yeah.
• 5:07
  Celine Matthiessen: Um when so when you look at the tools that consumers are using, like ChatGPT or Google's AI overviews, uh, what do you think they change most about the way people research products or make decisions?
• 5:18
  Mike Boland: So one, it's that natural language.
• 5:20
  Mike Boland: Um, and I think that that again is just more natural um to the way we think.
• 5:25
  Mike Boland: Um, and and that's sort of slowly, or actually I should say it's quickly assimilating.
• 5:29
  Mike Boland: Um, you know, it's gonna take a while to untrain the world on the way they used to search, but that's happening faster and faster.
• 5:35
  Mike Boland: So so it's that natural language, but also I think something interesting that's like another layer of advancement on top of that is something we talked about on our last podcast about um ChatGPT's ad program or developing ad program, which is that a lot of these AI engines, including Google AI mode and their overviews, sort of have a memory.
• 5:57
  Mike Boland: So you can have a dialogue that remembers, like the engine remembers that, you know, the conversation you had three weeks ago, or just basic stuff like the fact that you have two kids, a dog, and a nut allergy, right?
• 6:10
  Mike Boland: It'll incorporate those things.
• 6:12
  Mike Boland: And I think on top of that, the thing that's interesting is the capability to make it more like a dialogue.
• 6:18
  Mike Boland: Like if you picture the old search world, you're you're researching a product, right?
• 6:22
  Mike Boland: And you you ask a question, and then you sort of have another question, maybe a follow-up question.
• 6:28
  Mike Boland: You start a new search with that follow-up question.
• 6:30
  Mike Boland: In this way, it's just these these questions and answers build on each other just like a human dialogue.
• 6:35
  Mike Boland: So these multi-part questions.
• 6:36
  Mike Boland: That's that's sort of a hallmark of Google's AI mode, and Chat GBT can do it.
• 6:41
  Mike Boland: So it's sort of this more of a back and forth um that builds on itself as opposed to these isolated one-off queries that you might do 20 of them in the same process of researching like a new TV.
• 6:53
  Celine Matthiessen: So it solves the time consumption in queries, right?
• 6:56
  Celine Matthiessen: But like what other problems are AI solving um that search results never quite nailed?
• 7:01
  Celine Matthiessen: You know, because that's a good example.
• 7:03
  Celine Matthiessen: Is there other ones out there?
• 7:04
  Celine Matthiessen: Like what about like for visual or in the you said it conversations and the deep discovery?
• 7:10
  Mike Boland: Um I I think the uh visual is actually a great example.
• 7:14
  Mike Boland: So visual search is something that again is not new, like a lot of this isn't new, it's just really accelerating and um getting more capable, so it's getting a lot more attention.
• 7:21
  Mike Boland: But visual search, such as Google Lens, has always been something where you hold up your phone and you take a picture of something, and it's great with like if you're on a nature hike, right?
• 7:30
  Mike Boland: It's it's like plants and animals and pets.
• 7:33
  Mike Boland: Like, what kind of dog is that?
• 7:34
  Mike Boland: But I think that it's being incorporated in in ways on the desktop more where it's like shopping-related searches, and like I'm looking for something and you see visual results, and you're saying you can say something like, I like that, but does it come in blue?
• 7:47
  Mike Boland: Like it's it's it's multimodal in that it's both text or voice input, but also visual.
• 7:52
  Mike Boland: So I think that multimodal capability just opens up new dimension, right?
• 7:56
  Mike Boland: In the way that we search.
• 7:57
  Mike Boland: So we're not always describing things.
• 7:59
  Mike Boland: And for certain types of searches, the ability to search with visuals as opposed to words makes sense, like um, you know, fashion, right?
• 8:08
  Mike Boland: Fashion's a good example, or probably a lot of other examples.
• 8:10
  Mike Boland: Yeah, totally.
• 8:12
  Celine Matthiessen: I mean, for local, I mean thinking auto is one of the top categories and spend for auto, um, um for local, sorry.
• 8:19
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:20
  Celine Matthiessen: Okay, cool.
• 8:21
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah.
• 8:21
  Celine Matthiessen: So do you think this just changes how people?
• 8:23
  Celine Matthiessen: I mean, we talked a lot about how people have changed their behavior um with search.
• 8:28
  Celine Matthiessen: Um, but does it also change how quickly they move from that uh discovery research to decision?
• 8:35
  Mike Boland: Uh totally.
• 8:36
  Mike Boland: I think that that that we talked about this last last week too, or at least alluded to it.
• 8:40
  Mike Boland: The that that convoluted path to purchase that we've always looked at in in local search and local media, where like people are weaving in and out of different devices and screens.
• 8:50
  Mike Boland: And you know, there are some ways that that could be compressed in AI search in in terms of like there's again, it's that conversational just back and forth, and you just arrive upon an answer sooner with less steps and less you know things.
• 9:04
  Mike Boland: But also the fact that there's less of a click stream where the old model, the Google search engine result page SERP model, was all about links and surfacing links, and then you go to that link and oh, that didn't have what I want.
• 9:17
  Mike Boland: We start over, and you're now it's just it's all in that same UX, that same answer.
• 9:23
  Mike Boland: It's all right there.
• 9:24
  Mike Boland: And that's a good thing and a bad thing.
• 9:25
  Mike Boland: We talked about last week how the performance-based, click-based model of online advertising that we've come to know and love is sort of eroding because there's less click-throughs, right?
• 9:35
  Mike Boland: The answer is right there.
• 9:37
  Mike Boland: So I think that there's a lot of implications for marketing.
• 9:40
  Mike Boland: But to answer your question, yeah, I think it could make a more compressed purchase funnel in a lot of cases.
• 9:46
  Celine Matthiessen: Didn't we also talk that there'd be we were talking, I think we were brainstorming last time about new measurability for that too, for that behavior, right?
• 9:53
  Mike Boland: Totally.
• 9:53
  Mike Boland: Like how do you measure it when there's no click?
• 9:55
  Mike Boland: That's an open question.
• 9:56
  Celine Matthiessen: Right, exactly.
• 9:58
  Celine Matthiessen: So when you talk about AI search and AI overviews, how do you define those in in practical terms for an SEO team?
• 10:05
  Celine Matthiessen: So getting into the SEO side of this.
• 10:07
  Mike Boland: Yeah, let's transition into that, like what this all means for the point of marketers and SEO people, totally.
• 10:13
  Mike Boland: So, as you can guess from everything we just talked about, the online visibility playbook has changed.
• 10:18
  Mike Boland: So the the art of SEO has always been about reverse engineering the algorithms, Google's page rank algorithm.
• 10:25
  Mike Boland: What are their ranking factors?
• 10:26
  Mike Boland: How is that changing?
• 10:27
  Mike Boland: It was always a moving target.
• 10:29
  Mike Boland: Now, like that's still there, that hasn't gone away.
• 10:31
  Mike Boland: But now there's also this like this sort of new entity out there that's providing answers, and that's all the stuff we're talking about.
• 10:38
  Mike Boland: And similarly, it's going to be about reverse engineering the ways that it finds information, the way that it surfaces answers.
• 10:45
  Mike Boland: And unfortunately for marketers, there's only some degree of overlap between the two.
• 10:51
  Mike Boland: Like, there's been this sort of uh uh ongoing question of like, if I was on top of my SEO game, does that automatically put me on like a head start or higher footing in getting surfaced in AI engines?
• 11:05
  Mike Boland: And the answer is like sort of.
• 11:06
  Mike Boland: Um, I'll mention that SOShi study again, their local visibility index.
• 11:11
  Mike Boland: They they basically measured a bunch of multi-location brands, right?
• 11:15
  Mike Boland: And their search engine visibility and who was like performing best, and then their AI engine visibility, excuse me, and who was performing best.
• 11:25
  Mike Boland: There was a 45% overlap in brands in the top 10 of each of those two respective lists.
• 11:32
  Mike Boland: So that sort of quantifies that like those who are doing well at SEO, some of them are also doing the right things with AIO, as we're talking calling it AI optimization.
• 11:44
  Mike Boland: So you sort of have to do the same things you were already doing with with search and SEO, but also this new set of rules.
• 11:51
  Mike Boland: We can get into what those are, but that's just like an overview on like what these marketers are now faced with in having to sort of like serve two masters and appease the gods of Google and now also the LLM gods.
• 12:04
  Celine Matthiessen: Well, yeah, I mean, because like Google, you know, there's everybody, there's people have built careers off of good SEO, right?
• 12:10
  Celine Matthiessen: And it's not it's the keywords, it's the it's the content, you know, and all those things have rankings, it's reviews, it's new content, original, and AI, AI is that, but more, right?
• 12:22
  Celine Matthiessen: I mean, because they're it's you know, so what what you know what sources are they pulling from that's different?
• 12:30
  Mike Boland: Yeah.
• 12:30
  Celine Matthiessen: Do you know?
• 12:31
  Celine Matthiessen: I mean totally, yeah, yeah.
• 12:32
  Mike Boland: Let's let's get into a few of the different I don't.
• 12:34
  Celine Matthiessen: I I I kind of know.
• 12:35
  Celine Matthiessen: I think we talked about like I know that they're pulling from um, you know, more from video because it's easier.
• 12:40
  Celine Matthiessen: Um, that that's an easy one.
• 12:42
  Celine Matthiessen: Um, so because they because Google does the transcripts and they could they look at that, um, they don't actually watch the videos for those out there, but no, no, those those transcripts are gold mined for for L.
• 12:54
  Mike Boland: Goldmine for training sources.
• 12:56
  Celine Matthiessen: And there's also, I think there was just a lawsuit too.
• 12:58
  Celine Matthiessen: There's a bunch of educators that are suing Google and YouTube because they scraped for educational purposes their YouTube videos and they're going after them to train their model.
• 13:08
  Celine Matthiessen: And I think we're gonna see a lot more of that, but that's how I know that.
• 13:11
  Celine Matthiessen: So I'm sorry, I digress.
• 13:12
  Mike Boland: But no, no, let's let's go over, let's go over some of those authoritative sources of AI engines.
• 13:18
  Mike Boland: But before we do that, just a really quick, quick note.
• 13:20
  Mike Boland: You mentioned that there are a lot of folks that have like built a career around being SEO experts and consulting brands on how to you know surface higher in Google.
• 13:29
  Mike Boland: I think those folks are actually or the smart ones are actually gonna be elevated in this new world as opposed to like disrupted in a negative sense, because the all the brands out there now have so many more questions than they had before.
• 13:41
  Mike Boland: And I think those SEO folks, the smart ones, are really jumping onto these new ranking factors and how they optimize and all that stuff like that.
• 13:49
  Mike Boland: So, uh, and they're they're gonna be more needed than ever because there's more question marks and confusion than ever.
• 13:55
  Mike Boland: But anyway, this is all a moving target, and it's all about reverse engineering and extrapolation, just like SEO was.
• 14:01
  Mike Boland: So I'll go over a few of them that we sort of know so far, and then I just I preface it that way because this is a quickly moving target.
• 14:07
  Mike Boland: But anyway, let's go back to the example we gave in like the longer, more nuanced local search query.
• 14:15
  Mike Boland: The driving down the highway, looking for coffee, it's somewhere off, you know, within a mile off the highway.
• 14:20
  Mike Boland: Just the granularity in those queries means that these AI engines have to like dig deeper, right?
• 14:27
  Mike Boland: To answer that level of granularity than traditional search ever has.
• 14:32
  Mike Boland: So, where do they find that long tail of granularity?
• 14:36
  Mike Boland: A few places.
• 14:37
  Mike Boland: One is reviews.
• 14:38
  Mike Boland: Reviews are more important now than ever.
• 14:39
  Mike Boland: Yelp reviews, because you have just like these endless scrolling pages of like people talking about these things.
• 14:46
  Mike Boland: So that's where the LLMs are going to train themselves to get these answers and synthesize the answers to these questions.
• 14:52
  Mike Boland: So reviews is more important than ever.
• 14:54
  Mike Boland: So the implication for marketers is it's always been pretty important to work on your reputation management and manage your reviews and respond to them and cultivate them and all that good stuff.
• 15:03
  Mike Boland: That's now more important than ever.
• 15:05
  Mike Boland: Another one for a very similar reason of that long tail content with all that granularity is Reddit.
• 15:11
  Mike Boland: Reddit is the new golden goose of LLM, you know, this AIO, this developing art of AIO.
• 15:18
  Mike Boland: Be on Reddit.
• 15:19
  Mike Boland: Make sure you're there, make sure you have an account and cultivate your brand and mention your brand and monitor it and all that good stuff.
• 15:26
  Mike Boland: Um, another one, again, based on the ways that people are searching because they're they're asking questions instead of just typing in keywords, is FAQs on your website.
• 15:35
  Mike Boland: This is a low-hanging fruit one.
• 15:36
  Mike Boland: It's harder to like get people to write good reviews and get people to talk about you on Reddit.
• 15:40
  Mike Boland: Low-hanging fruit, just put an FAQ on your website.
• 15:44
  Mike Boland: And that sort of helps um the engines like see, oh, there's a question and an answer.
• 15:49
  Mike Boland: We can we can work with that because that's the same way people are searching.
• 15:53
  Mike Boland: Um, and then another one I'll mention is citations or back.
• 15:56
  Mike Boland: Citations used to be a very um you know prominent Google ranking factor.
• 16:01
  Mike Boland: And then there were a number of years where all the SEOs and Google was saying, like, you know, that's not as important anymore.
• 16:06
  Mike Boland: And what I mean by citations is like, make sure you're mentioned by the trade press or make sure you're on like the local chamber of commerce membership website.
• 16:15
  Mike Boland: Like Google used to treat that as authority, and now they they sort of pull back from now.
• 16:20
  Mike Boland: That's now more important than ever.
• 16:22
  Mike Boland: Um, and and one like tactical takeaway I heard recently is like go back to issuing press releases, issue press releases, you know, on like free wire services like PR log or other or just on your website.
• 16:33
  Mike Boland: Um, so that's another one.
• 16:35
  Mike Boland: Um, press releases, and and then I'll I'll mention something that is actually that LMs are not paying attention to that that Google has more importantly.
• 16:45
  Mike Boland: So go uh Celine, you know this in in the past I don't know, five years or so, Google's been paying much more attention to technical SEO.
• 16:53
  Mike Boland: So there's on-page SEO, which is the words you're saying, the keywords, the FAQs, all that.
• 16:58
  Mike Boland: And then technical SEO is the stuff in the background that's like, do you have the proper schema markup?
• 17:03
  Mike Boland: And are you utilizing your canonical tags strategically and page meta descriptions and core web vitals?
• 17:09
  Mike Boland: That's another one that's really accelerated in the last five years.
• 17:12
  Mike Boland: How fast is your page load?
• 17:14
  Mike Boland: Properly sized images that load fast.
• 17:16
  Mike Boland: Um, LMs don't care about any of that.
• 17:18
  Mike Boland: So technical SEO is out.
• 17:21
  Mike Boland: And I shouldn't say out because Google's still there, right operating as Google does.
• 17:26
  Mike Boland: But for this half of the searches that are happening on not half, I don't know what the breakdown is, but for the portion happening on AI engines, technical SEO is out, but all those other things that I mentioned are reviews, Reddit, FAQ, citations, and and that list just keeps growing.
• 17:43
  Celine Matthiessen: That's crazy.
• 17:43
  Celine Matthiessen: Well, I mean, it kind of makes sense because the technical is really there to kind of check off the boxes to say that this is an actual, you know, live working, breathing, current, you know, business farming product, not content farm.
• 17:59
  Celine Matthiessen: That was to fight the content farms.
• 18:00
  Celine Matthiessen: And yeah, so that's very interesting.
• 18:04
  Celine Matthiessen: So speaking of like FAQs, uh, are there particular query types?
• 18:08
  Celine Matthiessen: We talked about one, you know, getting coffee and being driving query types or verticals, um, where you're seeing that AI style answers take over faster, like or you know, because of consumer behavior or just because of the nature of what um of AI and what um what it's being used for, populari, you know, popularity.
• 18:26
  Mike Boland: Yeah, I think popularity is the the right word because it sort of mirrors everything that's out there.
• 18:30
  Mike Boland: Like, you know, LLMs train themselves on what's they're only as good as what's out there.
• 18:34
  Mike Boland: So if you look at the different types of content out there that are more prevalent than others, I think that sort of answers your question in terms of like what they're doing a better job answering, what people are asking more.
• 18:47
  Mike Boland: So you can think like, you know, sports, news, stocks, politics, um, they're all going to be rich sources of information.
• 18:53
  Mike Boland: And I think that's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the more people ask those questions, the more answers are surfaced, the better the engines get because they learn, obviously.
• 19:03
  Mike Boland: So I think that that that's the case.
• 19:05
  Mike Boland: And then on another level, I think that there's, you know, that's just more of like a passive reality, like that's just inherent.
• 19:11
  Mike Boland: But I think there's also some ways that these engines are sort of trying to manufacture some competency and specialization in different verticals.
• 19:20
  Mike Boland: And we talked about them on the last podcast, which is um healthcare.
• 19:23
  Mike Boland: Um, OpenII sees healthcare as like an area that is so rich in terms of specialized knowledge, uh, but also a very high value vertical.
• 19:33
  Mike Boland: Another one is legal.
• 19:35
  Mike Boland: Um, I read the other day that um Anthropic is building a sort of variant of Claude that's all about the legal vertical.
• 19:42
  Mike Boland: And that one makes a lot of sense because like you picture law firms, you know, half their staff has like all these paralegals running around and looking up stuff and all that, and then a lot of that can be automated.
• 19:51
  Mike Boland: They see a huge opportunity there.
• 19:53
  Mike Boland: So I think it's a combination of just like the inherent share of topics on on the broader web, like that's gonna sort of mirror what what's happening in these LLMs.
• 20:04
  Mike Boland: But um on another level, there's some deliberate maneuvering by some of these AI giants to sort of cultivate some of these high value verticals.
• 20:13
  Celine Matthiessen: Right.
• 20:13
  Celine Matthiessen: So retail, of course.
• 20:14
  Celine Matthiessen: I mean, we're seeing that all over the place.
• 20:16
  Celine Matthiessen: Totally.
• 20:16
  Celine Matthiessen: That's a big one.
• 20:17
  Mike Boland: Shopping, I think, yeah, absolutely.
• 20:19
  Celine Matthiessen: Shopping is huge.
• 20:19
  Celine Matthiessen: Yes.
• 20:20
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah.
• 20:20
  Mike Boland: And also these ones we're talking about, I think I mentioned this for for healthcare, but these are all high vol, these are all monetizable verticals.
• 20:26
  Mike Boland: So they're they're they're like salivating, not just in the they're big, but they're also high value because the commercial intent on a on a shopping search is gonna be greater than like the type of research you're doing for like a research paper or you know, stuff like that.
• 20:40
  Mike Boland: You're not necessarily gonna buy something, you're just looking for knowledge.
• 20:44
  Celine Matthiessen: Right.
• 20:45
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah.
• 20:45
  Celine Matthiessen: So from an advertiser's point of view, uh what's just what is the strategic appeal of answer adjacent placements, you know, and should you know, do they offer anything like it anything?
• 20:59
  Celine Matthiessen: What's the value for them to kind of really invest in this?
• 21:03
  Mike Boland: Yeah.
• 21:03
  Mike Boland: So um there are some signs, some evidence that the traffic is actually converting better, like traffic that comes from an AI agent um as opposed to traditional search.
• 21:15
  Mike Boland: Um, and it's sort of a double-edged sword.
• 21:17
  Mike Boland: Like you've probably heard all of the publishers and brands and anyone with a website sort of lamenting over the last year or more about the fact that their traffic has gone down because of the AI answer.
• 21:28
  Mike Boland: You know, like we talked about earlier, there's less clicks happening because the answer, the question's answered right there.
• 21:33
  Mike Boland: And so um, they're getting less clicks, but there is some evidence that the clicks they're getting are higher intent and better in terms of converting better.
• 21:41
  Mike Boland: So I think this study came from Adobe, Adobe Shopping.
• 21:45
  Mike Boland: Um they they found that their AI traffic or AI traffic in the sites that they were monitoring converted 42% better um than non non-AI traffic.
• 21:57
  Mike Boland: And interestingly, a year ago they did that same study and it was 38% worse.
• 22:03
  Mike Boland: Oh so it's it's like a massive difference in, I guess, just like the the way that people are starting to utilize these engines for shopping and for things that are converting.
• 22:13
  Mike Boland: So I guess that's good news to answer your question about like how should brands think about prioritize like putting themselves there, um and and like paying attention to the everything we just mentioned, the AIO playbook.
• 22:25
  Mike Boland: Like, not only is it important, but to underscore that it's high stakes and it's a missed opportunity, maybe if you don't go after it.
• 22:33
  Celine Matthiessen: Right.
• 22:33
  Celine Matthiessen: I mean.
• 22:33
  Celine Matthiessen: your c competition could be right.
• 22:35
  Celine Matthiessen: So it's it's like yeah yeah.
• 22:38
  Celine Matthiessen: So you know we talked about um a couple changes.
• 22:43
  Celine Matthiessen: Is there anything else that a brand um or marketer should prioritize in the next six to twelve six to twelve months for SEO strategy against AI answers.
• 22:51
  Celine Matthiessen: Anything can you predict the future?
• 22:53
  Celine Matthiessen: Anything well I would say or make a gas a good educated based on all your knowledge and experience?
• 23:00
  Mike Boland: Yeah I would answer it this way.
• 23:02
  Mike Boland: The the stakes I just I think I just said high stakes, right?
• 23:06
  Mike Boland: The the the degree to which all the stuff we're talking about, how how heavy it is, how much gravity it actually has is only going to grow because it is a direct function of the number of searches that people are doing on like they're turning to chat GPT instead of a Google traditional search.
• 23:23
  Mike Boland: The more that happens the more market share that AI engines gain in terms of like query volume, the more important it's going to be to pay attention to all this stuff.
• 23:33
  Mike Boland: And I think that's only going to grow.
• 23:35
  Mike Boland: So I think like in terms of the how and something more concrete or tactical, I would say that marketing teams need to learn this stuff, become experts in AIO, play with it, learn by doing I think that um you know that should be just an extension of the things you're already doing and and don't ignore it.
• 23:54
  Mike Boland: You know, don't let it uh catch up with you.
• 23:57
  Mike Boland: I think that's very important because it's happening so fast.
• 24:00
  Celine Matthiessen: Right.
• 24:01
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah.
• 24:01
  Celine Matthiessen: Well and talk to your SEO consultants too because they're on top of it apparently right they are yeah so well Mike thank you so much for being here today and sharing your thoughts and insights we always appreciate I you know I do we always appreciate your value and time with us right um so anything any other parting knowledge are we good um no no this was fun thank you thank you for having me and what I'll say is like to echo what I just said which is this is moving so fast like we could do another episode in two weeks on the same exact topic and probably have like a new list of you know ranking factors.
• 24:34
  Mike Boland: So so this is going to be moving quickly and we're gonna stay on top of it.
• 24:37
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah I think I you know I would love to have you back.
• 24:40
  Celine Matthiessen: I think we should you know circle back on this in a couple um in a couple weeks or a month or so and see what's changed.
• 24:46
  Celine Matthiessen: That would be a great follow-up to this and for everyone out there listening thank you for joining us and we might have another one coming soon.
• 24:54
  Celine Matthiessen: Um we hope you're enjoying our podcast this year.
• 24:56
  Celine Matthiessen: And if you have any topics or you want to see us talk more about this to suggest or you want to come on in as a guest, reach out to us at podcast@bia.com.
• 25:05
  Celine Matthiessen: We look forward to bringing you more insightful conversations on local media throughout the year ahead.
• 25:10
  Celine Matthiessen: Thanks