With seismic shifts happening across the search landscape, is your brand ready to adapt to the next wave of disruption—or will your competitors leave you in the dust?
Today, we’re joined by A.J. Ghergich, Vice President of Consulting Services at Botify, a leading enterprise SEO platform. A.J. is an expert in navigating the ever-changing search and marketing landscape, and he’s here to break down the latest game-changing developments in search engines and their impact on brands. From Google’s AI overviews to Apple’s integration of ChatGPT into Siri, A.J. will share insights to help marketers stay ahead in a rapidly evolving digital ecosystem.
Resources
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Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Greg Kihlstrom:
With seismic shifts happening across the search landscape, is your brand ready to adapt to the next wave of disruption, or will your competitors leave you in the dust? Today, we’re joined by AJ Gergich, Vice President of Consulting Services at Botify, a leading enterprise SEO platform. AJ is an expert in navigating the ever-changing search and marketing landscape, and he’s here to break down the latest game-changing developments in search engines and their impact on brands. From Google’s AI overviews to Apple’s integration of chat GPT into Siri, AJ is going to share insights to help marketers stay ahead in a rapidly evolving digital ecosystem. Welcome to the show, AJ. Thank you. Thank you. Excited to be here. And this is a great topic. Yeah. Yeah. Looking forward to talking. I don’t think we talk about this enough on the show. So looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in, though, why don’t we get started with you giving a little more about your background and your role at Botify.
A.J. Ghergich: Yeah, yeah, sure. I’ve, uh, I’ve been in and around search since, um, pretty much the early days around 2003, 2004. I’m actually just coming out of college, uh, just intersected right with the takeoff of Google. So my, my career is very entrepreneurial. So I’ve owned and operated my own e-commerce businesses, my own agencies, and had a previous exit at a consulting agency. I would say search, SEO, consulting, and content marketing have really been kind of that throughput throughout my career. I’m at SEO on X or Twitter, if you’re like me and still call it Twitter. If that tells you how long I’ve been in that game. But yeah, I do a lot of consulting, like I said, throughout my career with Fortune 100 brands and startups with no cash and a big dream. So the full gambit. At Botify, my day is honestly, I lead our global consulting team. And my day is spent talking to the world’s largest retailers and e-commerce sites, even some of the world’s largest publishers and those mid-market and startups about the discussions that we’re having today. Like everything that we’re going to talk about, those are the things that these brands need the answers to because everybody’s facing the same disruption. And that’s what Modify is there to do is help brands get visibility in this changing ecosystem.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, yeah, let’s let’s dive in here. And like yourself, I remember early days of Google and, you know, I optimized sites for Alta Vista and Lycos. It’s been a ride, right? So, you know, and it continues, right? There’s there’s continually some major shifts in the search landscape. And so, you know, I want to talk about, you know, one of those recent things, Google’s AI overviews. probably just about anyone, if not everyone listening to this familiar with Google search results now incorporating AI overviews. This is causing a pretty fundamental shift in some of those search results pages. How are you seeing these changes disrupting the traditional search landscape and what should brands be doing to adapt?
A.J. Ghergich: Yeah, it’s interesting. So like SEO is like back in vogue right now, organic search. So in the past, you want to talk to a CEO and you say, what do you want to talk about? Well, we want to talk about SEO. Click, you know? Right, right. Because it’s a spoke, not a hub in their strategy. Now, if you say, I want to talk about SEO, the phones are answering and the CEOs are frankly demanding it. And AIOs are one of the reasons why. And so here is a basic conversation I have with the CMO almost weekly now. Hey, AJ, our impressions are up, but our clicks are down. Our rankings are about the same, but our clicks are down. What’s going on? And so we’re starting to see this across, and this is across sectors, whether that’s somebody who sells sneakers or someone who publishes words for a living and sells advertising. What’s happening is, Google is more and more answering those questions themselves, and you’re seeing this rise in what we call zero-click searches, where the person is informed, gets the answer, and doesn’t actually click through, and that has got everyone’s attention. What do we do about it? But it’s affecting all industries, some more than others, obviously, but it’s affecting everyone I talk to, and everybody, it’s top of mind. What’s the strategy?
Greg Kihlstrom: How do you deal with this? Yeah, yeah. So from the we’ll talk about the brand perspective in a second from the user experience. Is this enhancing the user experience? Like I have I have my own opinions, but you know, is our users getting what they need from this? Maybe the zero click search thing is an indicator there. But you know, curious your thoughts on that.
A.J. Ghergich: Yeah, it really depends on the intent of the query. We’ve all had the experience where you’re like, hey, what time is this so-and-so game or show? And you have to click into an article and read this whole synopsis just to figure out it’s on NBC or it’s streaming on Netflix. It’s so annoying, right? And so from the user perspective in those moments, like, hey, what time is it in Singapore? Okay, just give me the answer. Those make sense. However, I think the issues arrive when the AI is kind of regurgitating back your content without giving much attribution and gobbling up the attention and keeping them away from your site. I think therein lies the problem, but I don’t think they’re going to go away. The team that really worked first on Google’s AI overviews was the team that did featured snippets. And if you don’t know what featured snippets are, you do, you just don’t know the term. It’s what we’re talking about when you Google something and Google just gives the answer. But this is a little different. When featured snippets came out, we actually did, I did tons of studies on this with large amounts of data, like hundreds of millions of, up to hundreds of millions of keywords analyzed. And it was a net positive. The brand that was featured in a featured snippet actually got more clicks than not. Why? Because you were in a pack of 1 to 10. Well, a feature snippet is position zero, really. It puts you above everybody else. But usually, you were the only one there. Now, with AI overviews, you might be one of 10 jammed into a pack, and they may have taken some of your information and repackaged it in ways you might not like. And so, yeah, it has everybody’s attention.
Greg Kihlstrom: So how does a brand get noticed? Yeah, I mean, it sounds like with featured snippets, definitely, you know, it’s still, it required optimization, of course, but like, if you were optimized, you benefited. How does a brand get noticed in this kind of new way of working?
A.J. Ghergich: Yeah, I, you know, there, there’s, there’s a few things obviously we can do and we may go into a little more detail, but a lot of it’s backed back to basics. Um, for, for instance, right. I mean, obviously AI overviews are coming from, from Google, so they’re Google side of the house, but we’re telling folks, you know, don’t sleep on Bing, which. It’s funny, I remember, I think I was speaking at Dreamforce maybe five, six years ago, maybe seven years ago, and someone asked me a question about Bing, and I was kind of a jerk, and I was like, what’s a Bing? So now I’m telling people, hey, don’t sleep on Bing. Well, why? It’s because they have a, Microsoft owns, what, 49% or whatever of open AI, and so when a lot of AIs use search, they actually use Bing, not Google. So AI overviews for Google, yes, that’s going from Google. And obviously you need to rank. We just did a study at Botify on it. We have a white paper up on this with data. You basically need to be in those top five positions. If you’re not in the top five positions, you’re not going to get seen. When they first came out, they were pulling all data from the top 100 positions. It was all over the map. It’s consolidated. So the basics are still there. If you’re not visible, if you’re not in the top five, you’re very likely not showing up in the AI overview. And the second thing is, it’s not just Google, which we’ll get to in a minute. Bing is powering many of these experience AI overview type experiences on other platforms. And you need to pay attention to it because I know you weren’t before. Neither was I. Right, right.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, so Changing topics a little bit here, the one I want to touch on the Google antitrust ruling as well, just a little bit. Some some may not be quite as familiar with that, but, you know, recent antitrust ruling against Google and potentially opening up the search market a bit. So, you know, what opportunities and challenges do you foresee for brands that are, you know, as new players potentially to enter the space. For instance, OpenAI search GPT is a thing. I’ve used Perplexity, Apple’s move to incorporate chat GPT into Siri. There’s a lot of, I mean, it does remind me of earlier days in some ways. There’s actual movement in the search market right now. Hey, there’s a little bit of choice. Right, right, exactly. So, you know, I don’t know, there’s a few questions in there. But like, I guess, I guess the one that comes to mind is, you know, how does this challenge Google’s dominance, it’s still the dominant player. And you know, what does this mean for brands?
A.J. Ghergich: Yeah. I mean, you’re hitting, you’re hitting the nail on the head. It’s before all you needed was a Google strategy and everything else would just fall, fall onto line. They, they have so much of the market share and they still do the overwhelming search amount of searches, but we’ve never seen things take off. Like AI is taking off. We’d never seen a company take off like open AI. has taken off and we’re not seeing, I’ve never seen adoption happen this fast. It’s anecdotal, but about a year and a half ago, right when it came out, I, I taught my mom to use perplexity, right? And this is, this is severely cut down on the amount of texts I get asking me questions, by the way. Um, so any pro tip to anyone out there? Teach your parents to use perplexity and they’ll stop asking you questions that you used to Google. But honestly, she doesn’t use Google that much anymore. All of her questions are medical questions and different things. She’s using perplexity and she likes the experience. Again, that’s anecdotal. It’s one person, but we’re seeing high adoption rates. I just was speaking with, uh, with Forrester for an upcoming wave and, you know, without giving anything away that they’re doing, you know, and this won’t be a real shock to anybody, but what we’re seeing is it’s a shift in consumer behavior at the research phase. So discovery is still the land of social and awareness and video, right? Um, you’d find things out on Tik TOK and YouTube and all that. But what’s happening is people are more and more changing the behavior to go to a perplexity, to go to open AI, to do research. And so that’s what’s interesting because that doesn’t show up a lot right now in analytics. So what does all that mean? It means diversification. It means you can’t have a Google only monolithic strategy anymore. You need to start thinking about that fracturing ecosystem and being prepared for it. And not just thinking Google’s all the only thing that matters is the only game in town. Cause we’re literally watching it not be the only game in town right in front of her face.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean, literally today, and I usually don’t like Google stuff and check my email while I’m doing an interview, but I double checked just to make sure I was speaking accurately. This morning, I saw a headline and I just wanted to double check. Google dipped below 90% market share for the first time. First time ever. Quite a while, since 2015, I guess, according to the headline I’m seeing here. To both points. I mean, one, 90% is still pretty dominant, but it’s falling and who knows how much it may fall, but it’s still, you know, it’s, it’s still, there’s a trend, right?
A.J. Ghergich: And it’s also what part of the market’s doing it. Like the people that are shifting are the people marketers want. It’s that 18 to, you know, 34 demographic. It’s, it’s the consumer that with purchasing power, like, It’s not just the eyeballs. It’s, you know, who’s behind those eyeballs that are shifting and it’s, it’s the market you want.
Greg Kihlstrom: So you have to pay attention. So what should marketers do that? I mean, they, you know, it’s, it’s clear diversification is going to be beneficial, but what does that mean? You know, what, what do marketers do about it?
A.J. Ghergich: Right now I’m, it’s not, there’s two things that I’m preaching that aren’t very sexy. Like I may, you know, I don’t have this, like, here’s what you do is a silver bullet strategy. It, unfortunately I don’t have that. Maybe somebody else does, but the two things that I’m talking to brands about, the one is very boring, but it’s essential. It’s, it’s governance. So every brand I talk to doesn’t, they have no real governance when it comes to AI. So I talked to, again, I’ll use the CMO as a proxy example. I talked to a CMO and I ask her some basic questions like, do you have control over what data is trained by an LLM? I get a shaky response like, man, somewhat, but not really. Like, are you confident you have control? Are you confident that the data that they have on you is accurate and represents your brand and isn’t a hallucination and isn’t filled with things that aren’t factually true? The conversation starts getting shakier and shakier. And what, what come, um, then lastly, I’ll ask. Do you win at live retrieval and do you have a strategy for winning at live retrieval? So what a lot of people forget is an LLM is old information, meaning, you know, Chad GPT is locked in time from a year ago or eight months ago. So if you’re an e-commerce brand, it doesn’t know that your shoes are in stock. It doesn’t know that you just changed your mission statement or your brand. It has no clue, right? And so a lot of the game for brands is around live retrieval. If you want to buy something or you just check something, right? Like that’s all live retrieval. And so it’s the LLM being augmented by live retrieval. So you need a governance strategy on the basics. What are we going to allow them for to train? What are we going to block from training? Are we measuring and looking? Is the information on us even correct? Is it accurate? And then lastly, Do we have a plan for what we allow them to retrieve live and what we don’t? Are our feeds set up for AI? Because usually they’re not, they’re set up for ads bots and other types of bots, but then no one has them set up yet for perplexity, for those types of things. So it’s not a fun answer, but governance is definitely the way you should be, like tackle that first. You can’t control what you can’t govern, right? So like tackle that first up would be my advice.
Greg Kihlstrom: Let’s talk a little bit more about perplexity, the traceability. So, you know, they faced a little backlash for avoiding some traceability in server logs. Maybe if you could give a little more context there, but like what lessons can brands learn from this incident and the importance of transparency and search and data handling? We need to modernize our protocol.
A.J. Ghergich: So most of what you can do with a traditional, let’s call them dumb bots. Just there, that’s the dumb bot that in the past it comes in, it crawls your site and crawls the web and takes your information. What’s interesting and people don’t realize is you can’t tell the dumb bot. what to do. People think you can, but you can’t. You can only tell it what not to do. And all of that is in one simple file. It’s a text file, TXT, robots.txt. So if you go to any website right now, walmart.com or just anything, and you just like slash robots.txt, you’ll see their rules for the robot. Look at it. It looks like it’s from 1982. Like it’s that dumbed down. And so Perplexity and others have now reminded the world, you know what, that’s not a legally binding contract, buddy. Those are suggestions of what our bot should do. So we really, Botify and myself and others have been talking with partnerships. We actually have our partner with Bing and some other search engines. Like these protocols have to be updated. You have to give brands more optionality because the new bots that are coming are smart pots, they can actually have bi directional conversations. But the the infrastructure itself is got has to change its old infrastructure with old rules that don’t work today. And so it makes it a really complicated question to answer. But it’s an infrastructure problem, first and foremost, in my opinion.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. So let’s get back a little bit to the landscape and the competition aspect here. And Reddit recently blocked Bing search engines. It’s kind of indicative of this growing tension just overall. How could moves like this impact the broader search ecosystem? I mean, Reddit may have been an early one, but is this the way it’s going to be? How does this impact things in the way that brands use platforms like Reddit? Or if there’s other ones in the future that do similar things, how should they use them for engagement and visibility?
A.J. Ghergich: Yeah, I mean, this is where I start to kind of, I don’t know, maybe I’ll give you some hot takes here. Yeah, it’s good and it’s bad, you know, but you’re going to see these walled gardens where these ecosystems kind of exist outside of the open web. And what’s in my now this is now squarely my opinion. The open web will be the domain of bots. So the person who uses the open web the most will be bots, not humans. And that will happen rapidly. Think about it this way. So you talked about Apple intelligence, which by the way, let’s go ahead and say that has to be the most disappointing launch of 2024 by far. I was so hyped and telling everyone it was going to be great. It’ll look like an idiot. Like it was so bad. Hopefully it gets better.
Greg Kihlstrom: Underwhelming, you know, yeah. Underwhelming is the word.
A.J. Ghergich: Underwhelming is the word. But imagine this though, if you have the whole planet and we all have these AI enabled lives and search is a very quick, it’s one of the first things to change, right? instead of you doing all the activity, like you have to go, you wanna buy a new pair of running shoes, you have to go think of what to search, you have to click, you have to read, you have to read reviews, you have to scout, all that’s gonna get outsourced to your assistant, to your AI assistant. So think it through though, what happens when everybody has an AI assistant researching sneakers and where their kids should go to school and how much money should I save for that? And it’s just assistants, assistants, assistants, the entire web is going the open web, will be flooded with bots talking to bots. And it’s really interesting. So, Botify, we sit on tons of data from the world’s biggest websites. I won’t say the name of the publication, but one of the largest news organizations in the world on election night, for the first time, the majority of traffic that they got from search traffic from AI bots. We watched it tip over and it was literally on election night in the US.
Greg Kihlstrom: Wow.
A.J. Ghergich: And so, yeah, what you’re going to see is lots of these deals. Google will make a deal with, you know, Reddit. Amazon will counter and make a deal with an Apple. And it’s going to create lots of little walled gardens. And the open web is going to be primarily traversed by bots that are acting on behalf as agents and assistants for people, which then if you’re a leader, you’re like, OK, what do I do with that? Again, think about your website. Your website is written in HTML and JavaScript to talk to dumb bots. These new bots can talk back. So what does your infrastructure need to look like? What would you communicate to a smart bot that you wouldn’t to a dumb bot? And there tells you a lot about how you should retool and reimagine your messaging for AI. And it also tells you an infrastructure play where you need to be ready for a lot more bot traffic than you currently are. Right now, you think you get a lot of bot traffic, you don’t. Wait till that swarm of agents come and your infrastructure has to be ready for it.
Greg Kihlstrom: So then how do you measure, in a world where the majority of traffic is search traffic, is bots, what’s measurements of success in search?
A.J. Ghergich: Yeah, right now we’re frankly looking at a lot more on visibility over rankings. It used to be, you know, you’d get a call from the CEO, hey, we no longer rank number one. Right, right. Classic. Those days are gone. Ranking number one doesn’t mean anything with personalization. Number one for you is different for me. Um, your AI is going to start getting tuned to your likes and dislikes and your result is going to be different than mine. So it’s really about visibility. So a lot of what we’re focusing on are so like SEO, you know, like I said, I’m at SEO on Twitter. I’ve been in SEO game forever, so I’ve watched it evolve. And like, here’s the current state. The old way of SEO was all conversation. A lot of conversations on keywords and rankings, keywords, rankings, revenue. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. What I’m telling folks to do is look at the left side of that graph, if you will, or that flow, if you will. So the left side of keywords, rankings, revenue is raw, render, index. So if the AI can’t raw, render, and index your content, you never get to keywords, ranking, and conversions. But in throw out keywords and rankings, you never get to visibility. So you have to, that information has to be accessible. Again, it’s not the great, sexy answer. It’s the truth. You have to be able to be accessible to these AIs or you’re never going to be visible. You’ll never show up. And so visibility is the, is much more of the metric, not rankings. And there, we are going to need all new metrics as well. None of the analytics tools have caught up yet. And so a lot of folks are blind right now.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It definitely sounds like. Well, on a lot of fronts, but yeah, definitely that measurement front, there’s probably going to be some significant changes in the, in the years ahead. Right.
A.J. Ghergich: Exactly like the same thing I was talking about with a CMO. If I ask her, do you know your gen AI share a voice? I talked to, you know, fortune 100 company. I’ve never had a single person say yes. Yeah. Right. Because they don’t have the tooling they can’t yet. And so there’s a lot that has to happen with the tooling to even see if you’re showing up one and then two, when you show up, is it true and factual and not, not a hallucinated false answer. Right. But all of that starts with visibility and indexation. Can that, does that AI have the information? Do you have governance in place that gave it the information you want it to have and kept it from the information that you don’t want it to have? And can you win it live retrieval? So when it goes to see if those, those Nikes or Adidas or, you know, a hoodie is in stock, it knows your information.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. I guess one last question for you here, looking out, you know, months, maybe a couple of years ahead, even. I know we talked about a lot here and some of this was, you know, kind of forward, forward reaching. But, you know, what what would your maybe one or two pieces of advice for marketers to be doing now to prepare for all the stuff that we’ve been talking about, all these changes?
A.J. Ghergich: I’m going to take a bold move here. I’m going to stick with Bing. What I really like about what Bing is doing is they have this feature called Index Now. A lot of content is waiting on things to for all your website and it’s very passive and then they get my information. So with being, you can actually push your information directly into the index. So, and it’s free. So like every brand could go and set this up right now. And then again, why Bing? Because Bing is open AI, Bing is chat GPT. So do you want to direct inject your information at live speeds into these AIs? Which one would you do it with? Open AI, it’s there, it’s free, the protocols right in front of you, you just got to go implement it. So that to me, that’s like, if you take one thing away from that, go tell your folks to do that, or you go do that. And thank me later, because that’s your first step into what I’m saying, again, you want the visibility in the rankings and the conversions, but you got to do the infrastructure plays first, or you never get visibility.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Love it. Love it. Well, before we wrap up here, one last question I like to ask everybody, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
A.J. Ghergich: So what I almost did, I did not do. I thought, I was like, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go download all of your podcasts. I’m going to feed it to open AI, you know, pro, pro a one mode and be like, what’s no one ever said. And then I was just too lazy and didn’t do it. Uh, but that would have been cool. Maybe somebody else, uh, more, more, more entrepreneurial will do it. I was actually thinking about this question because it’s that time of year, right? It’s the beginning of the year. And for me, I think that it comes down to avoiding filling spaces in time. And I’ll give you a quicker answer to that. Orbit immune system attacks empty space. If you have room on your calendar, if you have space for projects, they magically get filled with projects. And so for me, especially this time of year, it’s not about what you’re going to start doing, it’s about what you’re going to stop doing. What are we going to stop doing so that we can maniacally focus on these things, which is going to leave these voids of time. that the corporate immune system will want to fill and you have to say no. If you say no to that, you actually have the time to go deep on the things you’ve decided on. It’s more of a message to myself, I don’t always do well at that, but you gotta, that’s how I try to stay agile, don’t always do it, but it’s maniacally focusing on that and realizing when, hey, this is just the immune system trying to fill the time void, and that time void is actually what you need to focus.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I love it. And for what it’s worth, no one has said that before. So that’s, that’s amazing. It’s amazing advice anyway, but it’s, you accomplish what you set out to do without doing all the work.
A.J. Ghergich: Yeah, it isn’t taking over just yet.
