Customers are finding your brand through AI searches more than ever, but do you know how you’re showing up, and what pages are being cited? And how do you stack up to your competition? Well what if there was a way to see all of that, plus get recommendations to improve your AI visibility that can be sent straight to you DXP?
Welcome to One Amazing About Contentstack. Today we’re talking with Conor Egan, SVP of Product at Contentstack and he will be sharing one amazing thing about their Canoe AI visibility platform with us today.
Watch the Demo
About The Guest
Building products that work for both technical and non-technical teams has been a common thread throughout Conor Egan’s career. As SVP of Product at Contentstack, he’s focused on pushing the CMS industry forward and making digital experiences easier to create and manage. Along the way, Conor has earned multiple software patents, won industry awards, and helped lead digital transformations for some of the world’s largest brands.
Conor Egan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conoregan/?isSelfProfile=false
Resources
Canoe by Contentstack: https://canoe.contentstack.com
Contentstack: https://www.contentstack.com
The One Amazing Thing with Greg Kihlström website: https://agilebrandguide.com/the-agile-brand-podcasts/one-amazing-thing-about-with-greg-kihlstrom/
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Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
From the creators and host of the award-winning The Agile Brand™ with Greg Kihlström podcast, comes One Amazing Thing About… with Greg Kihlström, a show that puts the spotlight on the latest and greatest MarTech products and platforms by showcasing one feature that makes them… amazing.
Transcript
Greg Kihlström (00:00)
Customers are finding your brand through AI searches more than ever, but do you know how you’re showing up and what pages are being cited? And how do you stack up to your competition? Well, what if there was a way to see all of that, plus get recommendations to improve your AI visibility that can be sent straight to your DXP?
Welcome to one amazing thing about Contentstack Canoe. Today we’re talking with Connor Egan, SVP of product at Contentstack, and he’s going to be sharing one amazing thing about their canoe platform with us today. Connor, welcome to the show.
Conor Egan (00:40)
Thank you very much. Excited to be here.
Greg Kihlström (00:42)
Yeah, looking forward to seeing this in action here in a second. Before we do though, why don’t you give a little background on you and your role at Contentstack?
Conor Egan (00:50)
Yeah, so I’m Connor, as you mentioned. I’m the VP of product at Contentstack. So I’ve been here about five years as we’ve been developing new products and adding to our portfolio. Contentstack is a DXP company. So we help customers build really awesome websites, mobile apps with personalized content and everything like that. what we’re talking about today is one of our newest products. It’s a little bit different, but really supports.
marketers and people that are managing brands stand out better with AI.
Greg Kihlström (01:21)
Great, great. Well, yeah, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about it before before we take a look and you know, who’s the audience? Why is it important to them?
Conor Egan (01:29)
Yeah, great question. So our audience is really targeted toward marketing teams, but really anybody that has products that they want to show up on AI engines. As everybody knows, consumers are doing less and less searching on Google and more and more research on AI engines like ChatGPT and Gemini and Perplexity. And this is new for marketers because in the past you’d really focus on SEO, you’d focus on making a beautiful dot com.
But the challenge is if people are doing their research with AI, they may never get to your dot com. And they’re relying on answers that you as the marketer are not providing. So that can be really scary for marketers because they can’t control those answers. They can’t control where they’re talking about your products versus competitors. They can’t control the information that they’re using to cite that. So we’re kind of in this new cycle of what do we do with AI visibility?
AEO, GEO, whatever you’d like to call it, but it’s rapidly overtaking SEO as a really important thing for marketers to be worried about.
Greg Kihlström (02:34)
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I know. many are are this is top of mind for them. So yeah, looking forward to seeing it. Why don’t you share your screen and walk us through it?
Conor Egan (02:43)
Yeah, absolutely. So let me go ahead and share. So the product itself is called Contentstack Canoe. It’s kind of a whimsical name. So this is actually a product that you can use even if you’re not a Contentstack customer. So it’s something that is free to start. We think it’s so important that we want everybody to have access to it. What you’re seeing here is the dashboard. So what I did is I mocked up a scenario for Lenovo.
Where they’re doing some research on how their different laptops are showing up when people are researching with AI. So we give you an overall score, which is a combination of sentiment and visibility. You can kind of see where you rank against your competitors. You can see trends over time. So as you’re addressing some of these issues, you can see if they’re working or not. We break down that score into a lot of different details, and then also show what kind of areas.
AI is citing to get its answers. So of course lenovo.com is going to be at the top of that because it’s the expert, but there’s a lot of other sources like Tech Republic or PC Mag. And so this helps me as a marketer know where to target getting content about my products so that when AI does its research, it will have good information about my products.
As we dig in just a little bit more, so the way that we’re doing this is actually by prompting all of the different engines. So in this case, we have Chat GPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. So we’re asking different questions that are relevant to what our consumers might be searching. And you can actually dig in and see the actual answers that are being given back. Now it’s going to be a little different for every person because their AI harness knows something about them.
But in general, it’s gonna score the sentiment. It’s gonna look at all of the different citations and summarize that all for something that’s actually actionable for me. I can dig into pet competitors. We have a really great graph here of share a voice versus sentiment. So you know exactly where you sit. And probably the most important thing, and something that’s really differentiated in our solution here, is really specific recommendations.
So it will recommend content changes, it will recommend different places on the internet to show up. And then of course, as a DXP company, we can just hand these directly to one of our agents and actually help you author the content so that you show up better and close that gap with your competitors.
Greg Kihlström (05:17)
Nice, nice. That’s great. Well, yeah. And yeah, I mean, I think the to your point, the the recommendations piece, I mean, since this is it’s very new f I think it’s new for everybody, but it’s very new for some. getting visibility is is great, but actually knowing what to do about it, right? It’s I think many are still struggling with with what to do about it, as well as even just not everybody has access to
all of the L LMs to be able to see how things are showing up differently. So being able to see all that side by side seems pretty valuable as well.
Conor Egan (05:53)
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And with SEO, you know, this is a pretty mature thing. Google gives you tools like the Search Console to actually see, you know, what people are searching for, what ads they’re clicking on. This is really a very new area. And these AI companies are really focusing on the quality of their answers. They’re not really focused on giving brands the tools to actually affect those answers. So it’s almost like the early days of SEO all over again when people are.
putting white text on white backgrounds and trying to
Greg Kihlström (06:24)
Right.
Conor Egan (06:24)
gain the system. So it’s almost like that whole cycle is starting anew with AI.
Greg Kihlström (06:30)
Yeah. Well, and I think the other part is, even though there’s a lot that you can do on your own website, there’s a lot these answer engines, they’re citing other sources as well. So it’s helpful to be able to see where they’re pulling things from. Cause if you have content from 10 years ago about a product or something that doesn’t that no longer exists that’s getting cited, you know, you’ve got issue you’ve got to go back and and try to fix some of that stuff. So being able to see how like who they’re citing.
Seems pretty valuable too.
Conor Egan (07:00)
Yeah. And we also give you some feedback on what particular pages the engines tend to visit to get their information. So obviously, if we’re talking about notebooks, they’re probably going to go to the product pages, but what other pages are they using to get those answers? And it can help you prioritize where to improve those pages, how to make that content more digestible by AI. There’s certain things that it likes to do, like have very small encapsulated answers. So it actually can change how you structure and write your content as well.
to optimize for this channel that is now becoming, you know, one of the most popular ways to do research and get information about brands.
Greg Kihlström (07:38)
Yeah, yeah, nice. And then you mentioned being able to basically close the loop, right? So you know, if if you’re on content stack, for instance, already as your DXP, you can take these recommendations you said through through an agent and actually kind of make it happen.
Conor Egan (07:53)
Yeah, exactly. So Contentstack
has our own agent platform called Agent OS. And we’re building out an integration between these two so that an agent is constantly listening to recommendations from CNU and then actually making suggested content edits on the content side. So when you wake up in the morning, you’ll have a proposed change to your content. You can review that and actually publish it. because the AI is changing both how you
create content, but also how that content is consumed. And we really think as a digital experience company, we need to give you tools for both of those things and really close the loop. And then you can see improvement over time as you do make those changes.
Greg Kihlström (08:34)
Yeah, love it. Well, Connor, thanks so much for joining today and and showing this off. for those that want to learn more and and get access, where should they go?
Conor Egan (08:43)
Yeah, so I’d recommend checking out contentstack.com. There’s where you can learn about all of our products. canoe.contentstack.com is the landing page for this product. As I mentioned, we think it’s so important. We actually have a free tier that anybody can sign up for today. If you become a heavy user where you’re running a lot of reports and a lot of prompts, there is a paid add-on. But I would recommend going to canoe.contentstack.com.
Plugging in your brand and starting to get reports and AI visibility.
Greg Kihlström (09:14)
Love it. Well, again, I’d like to thank Connor Egan, SVP of product at content stack for joining the show. You can learn more about Connor Contentstack You know what? I’m gonna do that again. Sorry. Well, again, I’d like to thank Connor Egan, SVP of product at content stack for joining the show. You can learn more about Connor, Canoe, and Contentstack by following the links in the show notes.
