Latest / Content, Briefly / AI SEO with Gauge's Caelean Barnes

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AI SEO with Gauge's Caelean Barnes · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [on-hold music] All right. Hey, everybody. Super excited to have on Content Briefly today, Caelan Barnes. Caelan is the co-founder and CEO of Gauge.
• 0:18
  And if you have been hearing the ads over the past few weeks, you might know that I was really excited to bring on Gauge, and Caelan as our first monthly title sponsor of Superpath.
• 0:29
  I started working with Caelan just over a year ago at my previous company. We were seeing a lot of AI search leads coming in and wanted to really wrangle that process and get in front of that. And Gauge was not...
• 0:42
  You-- Actually, I don't know if you know this, Caelan, but Gauge was not the first company I talked to in this process.
• 0:47
  But I think what really stood out working with Caelan and the Gauge team early on is a lot of times you get, you know, folks that are like, "Hey, you know this AI, like, what can I apply this to?"
• 0:58
  Like marketers, SEO, and, you know, they start to build out cool dashboards, and they're like, "Hey, look what we built." And you're like, "Oh, this is great," but like, "Does this-- How do I build this into my workflow?
• 1:06
  How do I think about this as a marketer?" And they don't have answers to that a lot. And what... The reason I ended up bringing on Gauge and Caelan was just, like, the...
• 1:14
  I think you did a great job listening and really thinking about how-- where does this fit into the marketing world, and where is this headed.
• 1:23
  And I think the other thing, and that is just like a breath of fresh air, is when you're kind of like, we're learning real time, and you're just kind of like upfront and honest about that 'cause, like, we're so used to people, you know, jumping on LinkedIn and being like, "Hey, I've learned everything about this thing there is to know, and I'm the expert now."
• 1:38
  And so it's kind of like really felt like an awesome partner up front. So excited to jump in 'cause I think there's a lot of questions here.
• 1:44
  I've never gotten to talk quite this high level with you about some of these things.
• 1:48
  And so pumped to just jump into the conversation on where things stand right now, kind of, and especially just thinking about the marketing discipline.
• 1:55
  We're gonna get into that a little bit on where things are headed, and then how you're kind of approaching things with Gauge as well. So I wanna start off, you know, introducing Caelan here.
• 2:04
  Would love to hear just, like, in your words, like, what is Gauge as we jump into this. And maybe the icebreaker question that I have to ask is, have we settled on a name yet? Is it AEO, is it GEO, is it AI visibility?
• 2:15
  What is it gonna be? Yeah. Well, really appreciate the intro, Alex. Yeah, here at Gauge, we're helping brands both own and understand their presence in AI answers, ultimately with the goal of improving that, right?
• 2:27
  And so, yeah, in terms of namings, we're seeing a bunch of stuff kind of like fly around. We still typically actually just refer to it as AI SEO. So fundamentally, what we're optimizing for is AI search.
• 2:39
  Kind of what we found is that the shift has been, you know, of course, there's this massive shift towards generative engines and, and people utilizing these engines to discover products, make purchasing decisions, do research.
• 2:51
  Uh, and what we found is actually the trend has been with those tools to become less knowledgeable, but better at using tools, and with one of those tools being web search. So
• 3:02
  the kind of like common parallel that we're seeing is rather than your users going and searching the web to discover information, they're using these engines, who are then on their behalf searching the web.
• 3:14
  So there's a lot of parallels there. And yeah, that's where we've landed. Sweet. Okay, so let's kind of update. Obviously, things are changing very quickly.
• 3:22
  We were just chatting right before this about how things are so different than they were a year ago when we started working together. It is February 2026 right now as we're speaking.
• 3:32
  Give me your, like, ninety-second answer on what matters most in this space right now. One hundred percent.
• 3:38
  So first-party content remains the most important lever that you can pull with respect to capturing AI as a growth channel.
• 3:47
  Having content that directly and immediately answers the questions that users are asking is incredibly important.
• 3:54
  And what that actually means is that, you know, among first-party content, we actually see things like thought leadership or white papers do really terribly in AI search, and so a lot of kind of, you know, marketing approaches that are very high level or very abstract do quite poorly.
• 4:09
  Whereas content that's upfront, kind of like directly answers, you know, that your users' questions, quite literally, like in the title, in the intro, in the meta description, is what we see perform the best and what really needs to exist for your brand in order to kind of, you know, be visible.
• 4:23
  Awesome. And then could you break down... And I'm actually curious also right now, I know you get a lot of ratios thrown around of, like, what percent does first-party content matter versus a third party?
• 4:32
  Like, do you have a going ratio, or do you think it really differs? And then would love to hear just, like, what about third-party content as well? Yeah. What, what matters most right now in that space?
• 4:41
  So it is super industry dependent in terms of those ratios. You know, broadly, we'll see for most kind of B2B spaces, first-party content garner kind of the majority of the share of voice or citations that AI references.
• 4:54
  For consumer spaces, you know, e-commerce spaces, especially industries where there's, you know, kind of like a lot of publications or magazines, like good examples of this would be like cars or car brands.
• 5:06
  Music is another industry where we've been taking a look recently and, you know, there's a huge amount of kind of like publisher narrative control that's owned by third party.
• 5:14
  But most commonly, we'll actually see first-party content drive, drive a lot of value. And in those areas where it's third-party content, we still actually see first-party content be a really viable strategy as well.
• 5:24
  Interesting. And when it comes to the third-party content, like, what are kind of the major third-party places that you see are the most impactful? Yeah.
• 5:32
  So in aggregate, across all of the spaces, the ones you hear about, so like Wikipedia and Reddit, LinkedIn and YouTube tend to perform very well.
• 5:41
  We do see G2, Gartner, Capterra, SourceForge, all of those, you know, kind of sites play a role as well.
• 5:46
  I actually think for all of those sources, so I can kind of talk about social sources a little bit separately than, you know, some of the other, like, large third-party providers.Like Gartner and G2 as an example, you know, they've kind of...
• 5:56
  And this is true for a lot of people in the space as I think we'll talk about, they've moved their branding towards AI search and, and being kind of a source of value there.
• 6:04
  What we tend to see is that they are in aggregate a really high source of value across many industries, but within an individual industry, they're actually like relatively low on the list in terms of the impact that they hold.
• 6:14
  And so, you know, if you look at 10 industries, you know, G2 will be very, very high, but within an individual industry, for the most case it's not.
• 6:21
  Again, universally true, like we're looking at a compliance industry recently where they were very, very important. We're seeing them be less impactful.
• 6:27
  And so there's often actually quite a few kind of boutique or niche publishers that target a specific space where we'll see a lot of value. Got it.
• 6:36
  And I'm kinda curious, kind of shifting gears a little bit, but from this third party question. I know...
• 6:42
  So when we worked together, one of our biggest things we were working on was some third parties that had lists of basically like software in our space, not necessarily G2, but like some of those industry specific ones, and kind of like building relationships, making sure we're showing up on those lists.
• 6:57
  I think something we identified back then was that it really mattered like how you were being compared and, and read against your competitors so that it...
• 7:05
  Like, that helps you determine like, "Oh, is this like a really analytical platform or very custom platform?"
• 7:10
  I know then that kinda turned to like, "Oh, we can also do that first party and build our own kind of self-promotional listicles that like list us beside competitors."
• 7:18
  And I think folks in the content marketing space know some of these tactics really well, is like the second you land on something that's like- Yeah...
• 7:25
  it seems like it's working, everybody just like absolutely like crushes that. And over time, at least in the SEO world, like Google would make updates and, you know, that thing would be de-emphasized.
• 7:37
  Now I think in the world of algorithms that get updated, you know, weekly, some of these things can go from like working to not.
• 7:43
  How do you build a strategy when, like, these tactics are constantly changing, the algorithms are constantly updating, and the second you try to exploit something, you know, maybe that's getting totally taken off.
• 7:53
  Like, how do you even think about building a strategy there? Yeah, I mean, I think the reality is that whatever strategy you build has to be iterative.
• 8:01
  It's very, very hard, or I would even say kind of like a fool's errand in the world of AI search to build, you know, something that's like a multi-quarter or multi-year strategy at this stage, given how fast things are changing.
• 8:11
  You know, one great example there is with Reddit specifically, we saw OpenAI actually like specifically broker deals with Reddit and the citation rates swing massively.
• 8:20
  I think we saw a swing from roughly 6% up to 60% down to 6%, again, in terms of the percentage of answers that we were running and capturing that were citing Reddit through, through ChatGPT.
• 8:31
  For reference, I think we're now into like the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of answers captured across a variety of industries.
• 8:37
  And so, I mean, specific to listicles as well, as another strategy, you know, we saw that be really, really successful kind of across the board, and then Google kind of took action against that in, in one of the recent updates, I think the December update.
• 8:49
  But one of the things that we've seen is that it's not working as well for Google, but it's still actually working really well for some of the other AI engines. And there's a bit of a
• 8:59
  y- you know, kind of like circular thing when, when we're talking with a lot of SEOs about the space and, and content writers and folks who have been around for a while, where there are all these interesting strategies that, you know, kind of worked and then went through this cycle where Google identified and, you know, kind of down ranked those strategies.
• 9:14
  AI search is actually quite naive in a lot of ways, and so we're seeing a lot, like kind of like a renaissance of these, you know, quote unquote, like gray market strategies come up again.
• 9:22
  But I think really when it comes to developing a strategy, it needs to be iterative and it, it needs to be data driven as well.
• 9:28
  So with Gauge, we're collecting data on this, you know, kind of every day, and we'll see shifts within 24 hours very, very frequently.
• 9:36
  So we're kind of identifying these model updates that are happening when we see these big swings across the kind of like answer space that we're measuring, and it's... Yeah, it happens all the time.
• 9:46
  And so kind of like, you know, setting out a strategy, you really need to have something that can react very, very quickly to those changes and make sure you're staying on top of it. Yeah.
• 9:54
  And, and along those lines, I think y- something you mentioned up front there that is just, like, such a big challenge to marketers here, especially ones that have been working in the SEO space for 10 to 15 years, is that, you know, you said it's hard to set a strategy like a year out, and I think that's what a lot of folks are used...
• 10:10
  It's like we kinda got used to this kind of process where, okay, you know, here's the one or two major updates that happened. Like, we incorporate that into our strategy. Here's our year-long strategy.
• 10:19
  Here's, like, what to expect. You got... You know, it was a lot easier to talk to leadership about it. You see that, like, line going up of, like, website traffic.
• 10:28
  You make adjustments real time, but, like, you can s- forecast what to expect.
• 10:32
  You can communicate that, and then you can see, you know, uh, in terms of attribution, like trickle down of, like, we got this many website visitors. Yeah.
• 10:39
  And, like, we increase, double that, then we're gonna get, you know, this many more leads from it.
• 10:43
  And so I think it's been one of the biggest challenges that I know folks in our community are talking about is just like, how do we get out of this, like, okay, great, I've got high level 10 tactics right now.
• 10:55
  Like, I'm gonna go out and build FAQ pages. I'm gonna go work with these third parties. Like, get that, but, like, especially with leadership teams that are, you know, also like, "What's going on here?"
• 11:03
  Like, and asking- Yeah... our marketers and, and just, like, how do you wrangle this into, like, a real true discipline with, like, the right things behind it? And so maybe I start out with, like, what are...
• 11:16
  If you were to say, like, look at measurement of, like, what does success look like, and we gotta, like, let's say we're picking two to three top line metrics that we're gonna say, "Hey, leadership team, these are our metrics that matter.
• 11:27
  We're not gonna change these on you in the next, like, two to three years. Like, these are the ones that you need to look at."
• 11:32
  'Cause, like, also leadership teams, like, when marketers are like, "No, you should be looking at this metric this month. You should be looking at this metric," you get really skeptical. What would you say?
• 11:40
  Like, I wanna start in that spot, but I think we got several questions here on, like, you're shifting this into, like, a real discipline. Yeah. What are the metrics that, that you'd start with? 100%.
• 11:50
  So specific to AI, I think there's kind of two core metrics that we can kind of track on a continuous basis with a platform like Gauge, and then there are external metrics that you should kind of already be tracking and continue to be very, very important, but there are some tweaks that you can take to those.
• 12:06
  So, you know-Two kind of top line metrics are basically like visibility and citation rate. So visibility is, you know, for a set of questions, what percentage of those do I show up in?
• 12:19
  Uh, and that's something that we wanna grow over time, right? So, and the goal there, there's kind of a couple different pieces that come to play.
• 12:26
  There with those questions and what those questions are, you really wanna make sure you have a diverse, broad kind of set or library of questions that you're tracking that do a good job kind of marking out your space or industry.
• 12:37
  And then that's something that we want to kind of grow our, you know, almost share a voice in over time. And so we refer to that as visibility.
• 12:44
  The second piece there is, so wh- when I say citation rate, it's within those answers, how often is our content cited? And this can be content from our website.
• 12:54
  It can also be content from, you know, our LinkedIn or YouTube or kind of engagement with Reddit and other things. But the key there is that we really wanna be owning and driving that narrative.
• 13:04
  And a lot of times we actually see, even for companies with kind of great visibility, if their website's not cited very well or their content's not cited very well, a lot of that narrative is actually getting driven by competitors in a way that can be damaging to the brand.
• 13:17
  And so making sure that your content is capturing as high of a kind of citation rate as possible, getting cited in the sources by the AI as much as possible is incredibly important.
• 13:29
  We actually just did a, a study with Kevin Indig from Growth Memo, which we launched yesterday, around how the content is actually getting cited, like what part of that content's getting cited.
• 13:39
  And, you know, kind of back to what I was saying about like providing that answer up front, you know, we somewhat expected, we kind of found like, you know, the intro, the top portion of that content is the actual text that's getting pulled into the answer like by far the most.
• 13:51
  And so by capturing those citations, you have the opportunity to kind of place your content into the answer for those users.
• 13:57
  So visibility and citation rate, kind of the two most important direct things we can track with respect to AI search right now.
• 14:02
  Other signals that are very, very important, just looking at referral traffic, so how much traffic is AI kind of referring to your properties and sources.
• 14:10
  This is something that is likely kind of a very small indicator compared to the total amount of sessions that you're influencing, just because AI is kind of fundamentally a zero-click experience.
• 14:21
  It's not a very common user behavior for people to actually click on sources and continue to investigate. And so, you know, I think we saw some research that said roughly like 98% of sessions have, have zero click outs.
• 14:32
  And so, you know, if you're seeing some traffic, you can kind of make a rough estimate that that's representing kind of 2% of maybe the total number of sessions that you're influencing. You said 2%? Yeah. Interesting.
• 14:43
  Yeah.
• 14:43
  So, you know, kind of like click outs happening about 2% of the time in terms of that number that you're looking at, which is gonna be a very small number typically compared to the total impact that you're having in those sessions.
• 14:52
  And then the last and best thing, which I think we'll talk about attribution a little more in detail as well, but if you can do any kind of self-reported attribution or just ask your users where they found you, adding AI as a source, I almost guarantee that there's already people finding you through AI if you have any kind of brand presence already.
• 15:07
  And so capturing and collecting that information provides a lot of validation or verification to leadership that like this is a real channel that's driving real revenue. Yeah. I'd echo that too.
• 15:17
  I mean, that's even, you know, going back to 2024, that's what we were seeing and, and why we were like we wanna double down on this is, you know, we weren't seeing a lot of traffic in Google Analytics that was saying...
• 15:28
  You know, we saw it, you know, increasing, but it was... It wasn't nothing, but it wasn't like that much. And we decided to just like add a drop down or a form fill about like, "Where did you find us?"
• 15:37
  Which I'm just like a big fan of that generally. Like marketers have always had at- attribution problems, like stories of how they got there are always complex, and I just like...
• 15:46
  It's not perfect, but like I love the source of truth that's just like, where do you think you found us from? Even if that might not be exactly right and there's multiple influences, but that's what we saw is like our...
• 15:57
  The number of people that were reporting AI search was just like through the roof compared to like what we were seeing- Yeah...
• 16:03
  in, in Google Analytics, and we're like, "Oh, this is a really, really, really big deal for us." So yeah, I wanna echo that as well.
• 16:09
  And, and, you know, obviously just kind of moving to attribution a little bit more here is marketer is very familiar with this problem generally.
• 16:15
  I think in the past, like looking to the world of former SEO days, it's kind of like, okay, you're looking at organic traffic and direct traffic. Direct is this like big, like you don't exactly know what that is.
• 16:25
  Organic's not perfect either. But you could generally say like, "Okay, we got, you know, 15,000 visits to the website from organic and direct, and we saw, you know, maybe 30 of those converted into leads.
• 16:36
  If we increase to 30,000, we know we'll get 60 leads out of that." And it's not perfect and it's not exactly there, but you could show some degree of correlation and it was, you know, somewhat correct there.
• 16:47
  I'm curious, like as we go kinda deeper down the funnel from these metrics that you're talking about, like how would you...
• 16:53
  Like if you're a marketer trying to communicate this like new discipline of content marketing, how would you think about kind of the attribution question and the trickle down from those like metrics that you're talking about to like real business outcomes that you're like, "Great, our goal is to get this many more deals, which means this many more leads, which means like-" Yeah "...
• 17:16
  this impact on our top level metrics"? Yeah.
• 17:20
  Something that's kind of really interesting with AI, right, is the entire user journey or user funnel is compressed and hidden from you within kind of an AI chat or AI model, right?
• 17:30
  So it used to be, or it still is very common for users to kind of go through from an informational stage or research stage into kind of like more commercial, you know, research into kind of like finally making a purchase decision or becoming an MQL.
• 17:42
  And we're seeing kind of all of those questions happen kind of in this, in this walled garden, right? Mm-hmm. That is ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini. And so
• 17:54
  right now it's very, very tough to, to draw a through line from that. I think taking those metrics, we can start to correlate a lot of those metrics to those outcomes.
• 18:03
  So once you have some measurement in place, one of the things we can do is actually like look at, okay, which pages are getting-Traffic from AI search, let's make sure that we're tracking questions that relate to kind of the answers that this page represents, and kind of reinforcing that loop to kind of double down on the areas where we do see things working.
• 18:23
  And ultimately, like what does it mean to see it working? It means that you have a lead that was qualified that is attributed to AI, it comes from that page.
• 18:30
  And so if you can close that loop out, that's really, really valuable.
• 18:33
  Another actually great source of data that we see is kind of going outside of the marketing org, looking at your sales teams or your customer success teams, what are the common questions, sales objections, you know, customer support questions, pain points, and use cases that people are asking?
• 18:49
  Because that's a wealth of data that you have access to, while this kind of walled garden, you know, stays walled.
• 18:55
  The good news is we're also seeing actually like a lot of early movement on kind of more insight into what's happening there.
• 19:01
  So Bing Webmaster actually beat Google to the punch here and launched effectively like an AI search console- Mm-hmm... where you can see... I forget exactly what they called it.
• 19:10
  I can pull this up real quick, but just 'cause it's quite interesting. You can see your AI performance.
• 19:14
  Unfortunately, it's only for Copilot, which does not have nearly the volume of something like a ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Google AI, or Reviews.
• 19:21
  But Microsoft will actually share grounding queries, is, is what they call them, which are, you know, quite similar to kind of, you know, the search terms you'd see in Google Search Console or keywords that you'll see, but from AI.
• 19:33
  So for example, for us, you know, kind of our top grounding query is AI optimization for brand performance.
• 19:38
  And so that's a question where we're seeing, you know, volume in Copilot specifically, and then that starts to close up that loop.
• 19:46
  And so we absolutely expect, I don't think it's a controversial prediction, that, you know, Google, ChatGPT, OpenAI, Claude, all of these tools will likely build and launch effectively like a search console experience as they shift more towards, you know, kind of becoming a full mainstream marketing channel.
• 20:05
  The other kind of like core piece here, right, especially with performance marketing, is we're seeing kind of the advent of ads start to happen. And so- Mm-hmm... ChatGPT is launching ads.
• 20:13
  Any ad platform will absolutely have to come with some sense of volume attribution built in. So, you know, that's gonna be an incredibly helpful source of data to kind of merge into the things we're talking about here.
• 20:26
  Cool. Well, I think even like let's jump a little bit deeper into that and speak to like where Gauge sits. So it's interesting, you know, these platforms coming out with their own analytics studios.
• 20:36
  One of the hardest things to sort through right now is just the different... You have all these different players come of...
• 20:41
  kind of coming into the space and being like, "Okay, who is it that I need to be partnering with?" You've got, you know, your traditional SEO agencies that are now AEO agencies.
• 20:49
  You've got your traditional, like SEO software tools that everybody's been familiar with for a decade that now all of a sudden have AI search to different degrees built into their bigger platform.
• 21:00
  We've got folks like you that are coming relatively new to the scene with like a complete AI first approach. And now we've got, you know, Bing and Google and all these platforms themselves being analytics.
• 21:12
  How do you sort through this, and how would you differentiate like where Gauge sits and like how you understand which even bucket of tools or services that you might need to support your operation? Great. Great question.
• 21:24
  So, you know, I'd say a couple different things. One, we're definitely seeing a lot of snake oil out there.
• 21:29
  I would say kind of to your earlier point, like anyone who claims to have kind of solved this or, you know, figured it all out and has a strategy that's a winning strategy that's gonna work every time is likely not telling the truth at this stage because things are changing so fast.
• 21:42
  And so, you know, what that means is that measurement becomes much, much more important.
• 21:47
  So if we're building an iterative strategy, we need to be able to measure very, very quickly on a very, very tight turnaround, and data also becomes very, very important.
• 21:54
  And so what we've seen with a lot of traditional SEO tooling that's kind of bolted on a lot of the AI pieces is that really this new modality does warrant a new approach, both to data collection and kind of the insights that data drives.
• 22:09
  And we're seeing a lot of kind of the existing platforms really just build on top of kind of a lot of very traditional SEO metrics, and that's great because it's very understandable, but it doesn't necessarily do a good job of representing what's actually happening within that world.
• 22:23
  And so we don't really see ourselves actually that directly competitive with a lot of the traditional SEO tools. I'd say pretty much 100% of our customers are using us alongside those tools.
• 22:32
  We have gone, you know, head to head with a lot of the AI modules that have been launched in those places, and I think we do stack up very, very well there.
• 22:39
  And then across just kind of like, you know, there's just a ton of tools popping up, right?
• 22:42
  So having a really good understanding of how those tools are collecting, building data, and making those recommendations is actually really, really important.
• 22:51
  We're seeing kind of a lot of shortcuts that result in, you know, kind of not accurate or not correct recommendations.
• 22:58
  So, you know, if you're starting with flawed data, then you do end up with, with flawed recommendations.
• 23:02
  And really making sure that you're actually not only just looking at like the prompts and the answers, but also real external signals, data from the sources that we do have from, you know, things like Bing Webmaster, Google Analytics, Google Search Console.
• 23:15
  Correlating all of those together really starts to build, build a complete picture.
• 23:19
  And so I think that's something where we're not necessarily seeing people take, you know, kind of that holistic view, and that ends up resulting in kind of, you know, asymmetrically optimizing for, for the wrong thing.
• 23:30
  Gotcha. Kind of talking about Gauge a, a little bit more here. One of my favorite things about working with you all is that you're shipping really, really fast.
• 23:37
  Like [chuckles] we were meeting weekly, and it seemed like you always had something new that you're rolling out. Curious to the extent that you're able to share- Yeah... um, what are you working on right now?
• 23:46
  Like what are you excited about?
• 23:48
  Obviously, you've got a lot of like great foundational pieces of the platform in place, but like curious about like what your current customers are asking for and what you have your eyes to for the rest of 2026. Yeah.
• 23:59
  I'll kind of share like short term what we're thinking about and then also long term what we're seeing.
• 24:02
  So, uh, short term, a big blind spot that we're seeing kind of across the market is actually understanding branded questions. So when someone asks a question about Superpath, you know, is Superpath worth the money?
• 24:17
  Or, you know, kind of like what benefits can I expect to see from joining Superpath? You know, why shouldn't I join Superpath?
• 24:22
  What actually shows up in those answers is something that a lot of tools don't really do a good job of capturing or understanding because, you know, back to our kind of core metrics that leadership can understandIf we think about visibility, is Superpath gonna show up in those answers?
• 24:36
  Absolutely. You're asking a question about Superpath, but that's not what's actually interesting in terms of that answer.
• 24:41
  And so being able to evaluate that answer alongside different metrics, you know, in some cases maybe sentiment, but also even more kind of complex or deeper things.
• 24:50
  We're seeing a lot of utilization of what's called kind of like LLM as a judge, where you can actually, you know, create a way to score and track that answer over time. Mm-hmm.
• 24:59
  Maybe one example is, like, Superpath's pricing. If you make a change there, are LLMs able to actually represent that data correctly? And if they're not, where are they going?
• 25:09
  Where are they finding this kind of like misinformation almost, right? Mm-hmm.
• 25:11
  So being able to track and trace that down is a big blind spot for kind of like the branded question that a lot of platforms today have that we're, we're looking to solve kind of in the near term.
• 25:21
  You know, kind of, I'd say medium term, another thing we're seeing with specific to content writing is that six months ago, writing content and utilizing AI in writing that content was both, like, not a good experience and also extremely risky.
• 25:33
  We're seeing kind of like that content not do well, get down ranked. What we've seen since kind of like especially Claude Opus four five and Gemini three Pro is that AI can now serve as a good content writing partner.
• 25:45
  The key thing there is as a partner, not as a replacement.
• 25:49
  And so using AI in content generation to generate both like briefs or drafts, outlines, as long as we have like a really, really good human seed kind of, you know, input that we're utilizing there, and that humans are staying in the loop throughout that process, we're actually seeing really effective kind of content creation partnerships where we can marry in the data that we have with, you know, someone who's a great content writer and kind of like enable them to write at a much higher capacity.
• 26:15
  And so that's another area where we're investing in.
• 26:18
  And really last but not least, we're seeing a kind of like the kind of Venn diagram of all these different data sources, whether it's, you know, again, like AI search, prompts and answers, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster.
• 26:33
  I think, like, what we kind of see long term is by pulling all those data sources in and actually exposing an interface for you to be able to kind of operate a command center on top of that, we're seeing kind of massive speed ups to a lot of our customers' workflows.
• 26:47
  So a lot of the manual marketing work goes away, I think long term, and really that enables folks to really focus on the strategy, focus on the content, the calendar, and spend a lot less time digging through, you know, GA four reports, digging through citation data to kind of like figure out what's most impactful and most valuable.
• 27:06
  And so we've actually built this kind of agentic marketing agent. Right now it's just called Ask Gage within the platform.
• 27:12
  And we've seen just like skyrocketing adoption of that across our user base, where we have all the data and the data's really valuable, but digging through all that data can, you know, kind of be pretty overwhelming.
• 27:22
  And when we just have an agent that can do that digging for you, as well as pull in other data sources, we've seen some like really, really powerful outcomes get powered by that. Yeah. That's awesome.
• 27:32
  And obviously there's a number of analytics platforms out there that everybody knows are very difficult to navigate, so it's a very obvious use of an AI chat is to be able to draw into that data.
• 27:42
  I think if you kind of wrap your mind around like Superpath and like maybe the biggest question out there for our community, it's like the question is what does content marketing look like two to three years from now, right?
• 27:53
  A lot of changes happening right now, and I like to ask this question especially when we have somebody like you in the room who, like, comes at it from a very different angle. So I'd love to hear kind of what you think.
• 28:04
  I know you mentioned kind of the idea of the agentic marketer.
• 28:07
  What do you think a content marketing person's day-to-day looks like two years from now, and what are the skills that they're gonna be needing to develop in that, that time period? Yeah.
• 28:18
  Again, I'd say kind of like all the manual work goes away and your focus is entirely on strategy and execution.
• 28:24
  And even within the execution pieces, you're likely serving a lot more as kind of an editor than a content writer within kind of that marketing domain.
• 28:33
  You know, something we're seeing an early trend on which the, the world's like so crazy right now, right?
• 28:39
  Like two years out, it's hard to say, but we're seeing traffic from humans just massively fall off to websites, and kind of the impressions and visits from these agents really, really pick up.
• 28:49
  And so as more people move into these kind of generative experiences, we're also seeing kind of agentic commerce really start to kind of like form a beachhead, especially for B2C use cases.
• 29:00
  There's increasingly a chance that users actually never directly land on your content or your website, and instead that information is kind of like, you know, intermediated by AI fundamentally.
• 29:13
  And so this kind of shift in the consumer of your content is like just one of the biggest shifts I think, you know, we've ever seen for the content marketing space.
• 29:24
  And then your capability with the tools that exist today, I think will just be massively multiplied.
• 29:29
  And so yeah, moving kind of away from a lot of the manual work into a lot of the strategic work is gonna be something that becomes really, really important for sure. Awesome.
• 29:38
  And then I wanna close out with one question, especially just meant for our community.
• 29:42
  We have a lot of folks that have been in content marketing for a long time, maybe been at their companies for a long time, built up, you know, a really, really deep content library, right? That was focused around SEO.
• 29:54
  What are some of the things... And I know, you know, companies, actually Superpath is a perfect example, like Jimmy has always been very focused on SEO fundamentals.
• 30:02
  That set Superpath up really, really well for the AI world.
• 30:06
  What are some of the things that folks should be doing to kind of mold like this awesome content library, these things they've been doing over a decade for their companies to kind of meet the future? Yeah, 100%.
• 30:18
  Great, great question. So one of the really big kind of changes in focuses is making sure that you are kind of representing the meat of your content upfront.
• 30:30
  Making sure that it's readily available, readily accessible, and it's not kind of buried behind hooks is something that's probably one of the larger differences we see in terms of content that performs well for AI versus content that performs well for SEO.
• 30:42
  Outside of that, like from a technical perspective, it's actually like highly correlated. So, you know, there are a lot of people out there saying like, "Oh, SEO is dead. You need this like entirely new strategy."
• 30:51
  And what we've seen in the data is actually no, like if you're doing a great job of SEO, you're gonna show up really, really well in AI search, and the, the correlation is very, very strong there.
• 30:59
  So, you know, I'd say from a structural perspective, making sure that your content isn't obfuscating things is very, very important. You know, you mentioned previously things like FAQs.
• 31:11
  We do see those perform very, very well kind of alongside other things, and we also do see a huge bias in AI towards net new content rather than existing content, so there's also a huge recency bias across the models currently.
• 31:23
  And so yeah, kind of making sure you're refreshing or updating your content as well can actually have like a really, really massive uplift, especially if you have kind of existing content that's performing very strongly.
• 31:33
  Awesome. Well, I think that about wraps it up today. Thanks so much for coming on to Content Briefly, Caelen. Where can people find you? Yeah. You can shoot me an email at caelen@withgage.com.
• 31:44
  That's C-A-E-L-E-N @withgage.com, or just go to our website, again withgage.com. Awesome. Thanks for coming on, Caelen. All right. Talk to you soon. Thanks, man. All right. Take care.
• 31:59
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