The core theme is the urgent need for businesses to adapt their strategies for AI-driven search engines, as traditional SEO is becoming less effective, and visibility in AI overviews and Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for future success.
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This is a can't miss episode. Today we
are breaking down the AI search engine
optimization playbook. Everything you
need to do to get visibility and
awareness and traffic from services like
Chat GPT. We've got an amazing SEO
expert Asia joining us today and we're
going to break down the playbook. We got
some amazing data to share with you all
and we're going to give you the
step-by-step approach at the very end.
So you want to watch this whole show.
Okay. So you are busy doing SEO. It's
where I started my career. It's where
Kip and Asia has spent a lot of time. We
used to get a ton of traffic from Google
search the blue links and all of that
traffic is disappearing into the AI
ether. It is appearing. It is
disappearing into AI search. And what we
are going to go through today is how to
do AI search optimization. That really
is the new thing you have to focus on if
you want to get visibility for your
brand. But the thing is it's so new it's
really hard to understand like what is
the playbooks? What should I do? How do
I make sure that my brand my product
appears in AI search? We're here to give
you the full playbook for AI search
optimization. We are lucky to be joined
by Asia Frost works at HubSpot one of
the best minds on this topic. Asia
welcome to the show. I wanted to kick
off with this. Uh, I was actually
looking at the growth in AI companies in
general, just how quickly they are
growing revenue. And I thought this was
a pretty amazing chart just to kind of
help people understand what's happening
because for the average business
sometimes I hear I hear like two types
of stories. I hear, wow, this is really
starting to impact us. We don't know
what we're we should do. We have decline
in organic search traffic. What do I do?
Do I do SEO? Do I optimize for Google
AIO views? Do I optimize for LLMs? And
then you have other businesses who say,
"No, I don't believe this. This is not
this is going to take forever to
actually impact us. It's going to happen
over a long, very long period of time."
And what this chart shows here is the
time to reach 1 billion users. Chat GBT
took two and a half years. Google took
13 years. So Chat GBT did it 10 years
earlier. And so it feels like this is
telling us that users are voting with
their thumbs and fingers and actually
going to actually type all of their
deepest darkest thoughts into chat
versus Google. Yeah, I I think that's
right. The more and more that I talk to
our customers, the more and more I'm
just eavesdropping in on people on the
street, I'm hearing them say, "I am
going to chat GBT." And my next question
is always, "And how much are you using
Google?" and they pause and they say,
you know, I'm using it a lot less. This
is the other one I really caught my
attention, which is the what I'm showing
here is a chart that shows the estimated
LLM versus organic search value. Like if
you had told people in 2025, not not
even 2025, I remember when we did the
first show, like I think around this in
2023 and and we were talking about the
fact that this is going to really
disrupt Google because it's a much
better experience. So even if you pull
this chart back to 2023,
how quickly traditional search has
become unbundled into these AI chat
LLMs, it's actually one of the wildest
disruptions that I can ever remember.
It's happened incredibly quickly,
probably more quickly than we had anticipated.
anticipated.
The other really interesting thing about
this chart that you're showing is the
total LLM value, which we can see is
more than just the traffic that's being
attributed to LLMs. In other words,
someone coming from an LLM is worth more
to us than someone coming from
traditional search. And why do we think
that is? It's because someone is
completing their entire buyer's journey
in AI search. They're going from I have
a problem to this is the solution very
quickly. And because people feel like
these LLMs are giving them very
objective, unbiased results, I think
they're also trusting those answers a
lot more than the answers than they
would have found on say Google. I think
that's right. And I think if you're
watching this show today and it means
you're pretty in the know and you kind
of have a sense of what's going on, but
you're probably working with a lot of
people who don't have this level of
context and you're trying to get them on
board. And the thing I would urge you to
kind of the the most simple explanation
is like Google and those 10 blue links
that was an answer engine. And if you
were a company, you could create some
articles that provide some answers and
get some traffic for it. LLMs and AI
overviews and all the ways AI is
changing search. That's an action
engine. People can go and take very
specific action. They can buy, they can
research, they can take the next step of
the problem they're trying to solve in a
much more actionable way and you have to
that's one more valuable to the in
business but also takes a very different
approach which we're going to talk about
in this show of what you need to do
differently. But that's like the
simplest heristic that I can provide if
you were just like talking to your CEO
to try to explain what is happening. But
I think Kieran and Asia the what Kieran
is showing here is the thing we have to
talk about is that the LLM visitor is
worth way more than a traditional search
visitor. And Asia, you've really dug
into this. So I want you to kind of like
break that down for us. But like one of
our early hypothesis is like, hey, we're
gonna get less traffic from LM, but that
traffic is going to be worth more. And
SCM Rush is saying it's worth four over
4x more, but like break that down for
us. Help us understand what that
actually means. Sure. When you have
traditionally captured someone from
organic search, you know, you're
capturing them at all different parts of
the buyer's journey. Maybe they are, to
use a HubSpot example, just trying to
learn what content marketing is. So,
they go to our blog, they read a content
marketing guide 101, maybe they download
a kit to help them start implementing
content marketing techniques. And we
hope that over, you know, two to three
weeks, maybe two to three months, maybe
two to three years, as we continue to
educate them about concepts related to
our product, they eventually decide to
talk to our sales team or become a free
customer. So, that entire journey takes
a very long time. And along the way, we
are giving them helpful resources to
help them understand that HubSpot is the
answer to their content marketing need.
Now, someone is going to chatbt. They're
saying, "ChatBT, tell me everything I
need to know about content marketing."
And Chat GBT is doing that in an
incredibly personalized, helpful way.
They are reaching the understanding that
they need a content marketing solution a
lot more quickly. And they are also
learning about all the potential options
for content marketing solutions much
more quickly. By the time they decide
that HubSpot is the content marketing
solution for them and go to our website,
all of that earlier nurturing has
already happened and they want to talk
to sales really quickly. And we see this
actually in our gone calls. I have a
habit of looking at our sales call
transcripts every week and I see over
and over and over again. Yeah, chatbt
said you were the best, so I came to
you. ChatBT is my best friend. They said
HubSpot is the CRM I need to use. And
there was a pretty uh incredible stat
recently uh well not incredible stat but
because I think we know this is
happening which is 80% of the B2B buyer
journey has typically started with
Google and over time that's going to
become LLMs. They believe it's going to
reach around 95% will start their
journey with an LLM. But I think what
you're talking to is it's not just they
start their journey with an LLM. It's
like they don't really end it. Like it
it's all self-contained within the LLM.
And so there's just a harder it gets
much much harder to actually reach that
consumer because they do all of their
research. They can do so much more in
the LLM and they trust LLM. They believe
it can give them the right answers. It's
unbiased. the other, you know, I think
part of that is, and we're going to get
into giving you some actual actionable
things you can do, but I think uh this
was the other one I think is related to
that, which is like troubling a
challenge for brands, which is they're
in the LLM. They're doing a bunch of
that research. And what this is showing
us is what the LLM's reference are not
really vendor websites. They're all of
these kind of thirdparty websites that
aggregate together different vendors.
And so like when they did this study, so
shout out to Jason Tablin, he uh looked
at a bunch of data and he said that the
brand brand's actual website was only
mentioned 9% of the time. So only 9% of
the times for these queries was a brand
website mentioned in the links. That's
pretty that's pretty incredible. Like
when you look at what they're citing and
the sources they're citing, it's not
really like vendor websites. I'm not
sure. Have you seen that Asia in your
analysis or has that kind of been one
thing that has stood out? Yeah, I think
that this is really interesting data
because I think what we don't know yet
is whether LLMs prefer third-party
websites because they consider them less
biased than vendor websites or if they
prefer that content because that content
is inherently more ingestable for an
LLM. So when we transition to how do you
optimize for AI search, a lot of the AI
search emerging best practices are
things that these third-party websites
have already been doing. It's just how
their content is set up and displayed.
So I think that there's a real advantage
if you are a vendor to start applying
these AI search best practices and
become a much more cited domain in your space.
space.
Hey, if you are enjoying our
conversation with Asia, you're going to
want to listen up. AI is completely
rewriting the search game. ChatGpt,
Gemini, Perplexity, that's where people
are searching now. Those are becoming
the modern search engines. But for most
businesses, they're completely invisible
on those sites. That's why we put
together the AI search domination kit.
This kit's incredible. You're going to
get a full checklist of how you get more
visible in these large language models,
how you actually create and track your
content for these LLMs, and proven
prompts for creating and auditing your
content for AI SEO. This is going to
completely change the game for how you
show up in ChatGpt, Gemini, and
Perplexity. You can get it right now.
Either scan the QR code or click the
link in the description below. Now,
let's get back to today's show. Before
we get into the how, I want there's a
couple things I want to talk about. Part
of the topic that you you're talking
about, which is like who is showing up
in LLMs. I think it's important for us
to give everybody the context is that
Google has been on a decade plus long
journey and fight to do two things. one
deliver a personalized search experience
and things like chat GPT with memory
have kind of trumped that experience and
I think have been able to deliver a
personalized search experience in the
way that Google always wanted to. The
second thing is that Google laid this
road map where it was totally embroiled
in all these lawsuits with publishers
like Google stealing our traffic, Google
stealing our revenue. And I think we can
it's safe to say that OpenAI has seen
that and wants to avoid those problems,
right? And they're going to likely make
decisions and I think are making
decisions in terms of content
partnerships and things to avoid those
problems. And so as you're thinking
about your strategy, I I' I'd encourage
us all to have those two factors
involved, which is one, search has
gotten way more personal, and two, if
OpenAI has a partnership or has a lower
risk with a site or a service that that
is probably going to have some
likelihood it's going to be included in
results versus something that they have
a higher risk for. Is that right?
Yeah, I think we've seen that in the
data about which LLM's prefer which
sources. If you map those preferences by
the media and content sites that each
LLM has partnered with, you can see
clear relationships. Like for example,
both Google and OpenAI have partnerships
with Reddit and Reddit shows up very
frequently for both. Reddit and Quora
are the two biggest sites. Like who
would have thought Kora would be such a
lynch pin of well I guess it is because
if you look at the data what they're
really relying on is user generated
content. Corora was never able to make a
real business out of its actual
business. They probably are making a
pretty good business out of selling
training data but they're the two
biggest sites that appear in these LLMs.
And then as you're saying so like the
example there would be if you go to
CatchBT you're likely not going to find
anything from the New York Times because
they have an upcoming court case. And
not sure if like I do agree with you
Keep I'm not sure if OpenAI are doing
that good of a job of at avoiding
copyright they're incentivized to do
that is what I'm saying and more often
or not are probably going to at least
try to do that is what I'm saying. The
the follow-up question I have to both of
you is can you have an effective AI
search optimization strategy without
engaging on communities like Reddit and
having a strategy on communities like
Reddit? I think it's a good question,
but I think the setup here for Asia is
okay, I'm a business. I can spend my
time on the blue links, which I have
always, which I just want to say, even
though I said from the outset the blue
links are going to die, the best times
in my marketing career were messing
around with the blue links. Everyone,
that was like a good time. Hold on. Are
you link are you Blue Link nostalgic?
Have you reached the nostalgia part of
Blue Links? I think we're going to miss
the times where you could really scale
an engine that was predictable. You
could generate a ton of revenue and uh
you could do it in a way that actually
you could have like limited amount of
resources but pretty good knowledge and
actually make some real impact. And I
think that's going to be a a tough uh I
think you're being a little I think
you're being a little Kier and negative
on this one. Go ahead. I'm not being I'm
not being negative. Let me let me finish
the setup. Right. So like I think I
think that the blue links go away for
informationational content. We can talk
about that. But like you can spend your
time optimizing for blue links and we
should talk about what what if anything
the person should do there. Then they
can optimize for Google AI overviews. So
we're going to talk about this. AI
overviews are becoming the prevalent way
for uh Google to start to surface up
search. They said that AI mode is going
to be the default mode in very soon and
lots of lots of SEO people went on X and
LinkedIn and cried themselves. uh I
cried cried a lot because that is a
tough thing to navigate as well. when an
AI when I when I've seen an when an AI
overview apparently appears for a search
result that's number one click the
number one blue link gets around 33%
less traffic so like there's some real
lower lowering of the traffic and then
you could optimize for LLMs right so you
have your search traditional blue links
you have your AIO view which is Google
and you have your LLM and so what are
you telling people why do you think I'm
overly negative around the blue links
and what are you telling people to do
Asia I understand the nostalgia for the
blue links. I spent some time in the
grief period as well. Here's what I'll
say. I think that I I used to daydream
and this probably gives you a peak into
my psyche about what it would be like to
go back to the early days of SEO and
just have an open field of
experimentation. I will be totally
honest. In the past couple years, SEO
had gotten pretty stale. We knew what
worked and we just did what worked and
it was really predictable and it was
really boring. And now we have a brand
new open field again. And as everyone is
starting to figure things out, that
means that no matter where you're
starting from, you could be a startup,
you could be a big company like HubSpot,
no one has a big edge right now. The
edge goes to the people who figure out
the new tactics the most quickly. And I
think a lot of it is going to rely on AI
powered content systems, which as y'all
have talked about on this podcast pretty
much every time you talk means you don't
need a ton of people. You don't need a
huge team or a lot of money to get these
systems going. And so I I really think
it I think that people in 20 years are
going to be nostalgic for this period.
Yeah. So I I actually agree with I think
Kip and I agree with this. I agree. I I
would swap out SEO with marketing. I
thought marketing was really boring
actually. I was so bored. I got driving
me crazy. I was going to go and open a
coffee shop. I used to tell kids about
that. I was like, "This is boring." We
did have a lot of conversations about
like, "Oh, maybe we should just like do
something different. It's a little
boring." I I I agree. I'm all back in
now because it's all being rebuilt.
Yeah. So, so back to the core question
of all right, well, I have a bunch of
different audiences or platforms.
What do I optimize for? If I was a
business starting with very little
organic traffic, I would be all in on
LLMs because I think the amount of time
that it would take you to establish an
SEO strategy that works by that time all
your personas are using chat GBT as or
Google's AI mode as their core way of
getting information. If you have an
existing SEO infrastructure and you have
a lot of traffic to protect, then this
is not a flip switch scenario, I think
you need to protect what you've got
while investing and scaling your AI
search optimization tactics over time.
And the best AI search tactics will not
be bad for Google. And I think that
that's a little counterintuitive, but if
you are doing AI search, well, it will
not hurt your Google rankings and
hopefully it will even help. I think
that is one of the most important points
of the entire show is that these are not
mutually exclusive things is what you're
telling everybody, right? It's like if
you really focus on AI SEO, you are
going to get LLM and AI overview
traffic, but you're also going to get
some traditional blue link traffic from
those efforts. Exactly. My the one thing
I want to tee up before we get into the
deep how-to on everything because I want
to hear from both of you because I have
a controversial take because we're we're
talking about how how this is a new era
and there's a bunch of new
opportunities. And I think what stops
people from taking advantage of new new
marketing eras, opportunities, arbitrage
is because they look at the world in the
old way versus the new way. And one of
the things about the old way is that
visits were highly correlated
to customers and revenue because what
would happen is you could you had much
more control of your visits through
advertising through traditional Google
search and your conversion of those
visits to customers would stay pretty
flat, pretty consistent, right? You
didn't have as much control of the
conversion rate and so it's like, oh, I
know that 1% of my visits are going to
convert into customers. I just got to go
get some more visits was kind of the old
way of thinking of it. We and I think
everybody watching the show and I get
emails from founders, financial
analysts, all these people like, "Oh,
what are the visits doing here?" And I'm
I want to come out and be like, I think
visits are fundamentally less important
and in some ways
in some ways unimportant. And that's
like the hottest take I've had in a
while because of the new ways people are
discovering sites and brands. And I want
to see if you all agree or disagree with
me there. I want to hear from Asia given
that she has spent a lot of her career
Talk about something I'm nostalgic for.
Uh no,
I'm I completely agree and not just
because, you know, that would be easier
for me if uh we all felt that way over
the next few years. Here's the thing. If
we go back to what we were talking about
earlier, how someone was going to visit
HubSpot many times over the course of a
few weeks to a few years before they
eventually convert. If we say all of
those interactions are now happening in
LLMs, but they're still eventually
coming to HubSpot and buying, then yeah,
the value of an individual visit matters
a lot less. What we care about is that
ultimate visit, that visit where they
decide to become a user or a customer.
And what we what HubSpot's growth team
is increasingly shifting to is
visibility in LLMs. How often are we
showing up as the recommended solution
for the questions for the challenges
that our personas have? And I I think
this is a great segue into a couple of
things. Why you should listen to the
next segment of the show because Asia
and her team have done a pretty great
job of You're kicking everybody's ass.
Let's be let's let's be real. It's not
really visible. So, what are we looking
at here? We're looking at one of the
metrics from the tool we use to measure
our awareness in these LLMs. And I think
one of the things that will jump out of
you straight away is share of voice.
This is in quote unquote a AI search
optimization tool. And that is a brand
metric. And I think that's one of the
things to wrap your head around is that
you have to kind of think much more like
a traditional marketeer, brand
marketeer. You're looking for
impressions. You're looking for
visibility. you're looking to make sure
that your brand is more visible than
other brands in these LLMs. Why don't I
pass it back to you, Asia, you can kind
of jump into the tool and maybe talk a
little bit about how we use it. So, this
is Xfunnel. There are a bunch of tools
out there that will uh show you LLM
visibility and which websites are being
cited in LLMs. We chose Xfunnel because
uh the the founder and his team, they're
really experimentation centric and I
think that this era is all about
experimenting as quickly as possible,
learning as quickly as possible, and
then feeding those learnings back into
your playbook. Asia, on the on the tool
selection, because you and I have had a
little bit of conversation on this
because we're going to get questions
about it. There's a bunch of people
doing it. Xfunnel Hall, like there's
literally like 10 companies doing this.
Yeah, the different Yeah, the the
differentiation I have been told from
you is that is that it's pretty low and
like you should pick the one that like
you just kind of like the best and you
think is going to evolve at a fast rate,
which is one of the reasons you picked
XFunnel, but like they're all using kind
of the same approach and kind of the
same data. So, it's not like that
there's one that is far and way better
than everything else at this moment.
There's no moat in this space at this
moment. I think if someone can figure
out how to really simulate all the
context that an LLM has about a person
or a user when they're talking, that
would be a real competitive advantage if
someone can nail the volume piece.
Thinking about, you know, what what we
were saying around it's getting a lot
harder to measure. We have a lot less um
direct visibility between what made
someone convert. If someone can figure
out, okay, here are the the number of
times that a question is being asked in
LLMs, that would be a huge competitive
advantage. Yeah, I think the tool that
will win here uh and I think it's only
doable if they if if OpenAI or these
kind of models decide to have a
partnership is the tool that can
actually log in with your chatbt and
integrate your memory because then they
can mimic the memory in the tool. And I
think that's the big thing is like
because memory is just drastically changes
changes
what our results are going to be. But I
do wonder, I don't think it's a business
model that they're going to particularly
want to get into. Unless the only the
only kind of wrinkle here is if they do
a premium tier and they have a paid
platform, then they will give
optimization tools. And I don't know if
they get when they give those optimiz
optimization tools to to businesses,
will there be something there that would
help you better track visibility across
that premium tier? Look, I would bet my
house that they're going to do ads and
there's going to be some analytics
around ads is what I think you're
saying, Kieran. Right. And that will
probably be a next important step of the
journey of understanding of what needs
to happen. I am very much looking
forward to getting some data. Google has
started introducing ads into AI mode and
we are a Google advertiser and so we
should start getting some data from from
A mode which I'm I'm excited to dive
into. Yeah, I think the the memory piece
is really hard and what Berry and the
team at Xfunnel have done to try to
simulate that as much as possible is
forcing the LLM to think as a persona.
So, as a VP of sales, as an enterprise
AE, we have about 10 personas that we've
loaded into here across our core
products. It's a very crude solution,
but Kieran, I think it it gets to what
you're talking about. So over here you
can see our visibility across all the
LLMs that Xfunnel tracks. I would say
we're really focusing on search GBT,
chat GBT, and Gemini right now because
that's where we see the majority of
usage happening. tell people about
what's search GPT just so that people
because I I think that's not a common
moniker and so I'm just trying to
represent the view viewers here. Sure.
Search GBT is the searching system that
chat GBT uses. So you can have regular
Chat GBT responses where the web is not
actively being searched and then you can
layer in search. Now I think as these
models get more and more sophisticated
or I should say as the LMS get more and
more sophisticated you probably won't
have a choice. So this we will probably
at some point just see as chat GBT this
will probably just be Google. Does
Gemini include AI overviews in Google or
is that actually just like I need to be
in the Gemini experience? Fantastic
question just in the Gemini experience.
So, we actually use a completely
separate tool. This is what I'm getting
at. Yeah. We use a separate tool to
track AI overviews, which are those AI
generated summaries at the top of a SER.
You don't have to be logged into any
special experience or really do anything
to opt into that. You're getting it by
default. And the third Google experience
is AI mode, which users in the US are
now seeing as a tab on their Google
experience. At some point, AI mode will
become the primary Google experience.
That's going to be like a 7.7 earthquake
on the uh the marketing RTOR scale.
Yeah, you're probably underelling it in actuality.
actuality.
How how far up does it go? Like are we
talking about it goes to 10? It goes to
10. Yeah. All right. We'll say it's a 10 earthquake.
