Increasingly, consumers are using AI-based tools to discover products, services, and more. All things that used to be dominated by SEO, now need to be optimized for AI visibility. So how do you find out how and where you are showing up when these AI-based tools work very differently from a traditional Search Engine Results Page.
Welcome to One Amazing About Contentful’s Palmata. Today we’re talking with Taylor Wagner, Manager, Product Marketing at Contentful and he will be sharing one amazing thing about Contentful’s Palmata AI discovery platform with us today.
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About Taylor Wagner
Taylor Wagner leads product marketing for Palmata, Contentful’s answer engine optimization (AEO) solution that gives organizations the power to understand, measure, and improve how AI answer engines represent their company. With more than 13 years in B2B SaaS product marketing, Taylor has built his career helping companies define their market narrative, communicate complex technologies, and tell stories that resonate with customers. As AI becomes a new audience for brands, he now focuses on helping organizations ensure those narratives are accurately understood, represented, and recommended by AI answer engines.
Taylor Wagner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/twagner3/
Resources
Palmata: https://www.palmata.ai
Transcript
Greg Kihlström (00:00)
Increasingly, consumers are using AI-based tools to discover products, services, and more. All things that used to be dominated by SEO and now need to be optimized for AI visibility. So, how do you find out how and where you’re showing up when these AI-based tools work very differently from a traditional search engine page?
Welcome to One Amazing Thing about Palmata, Contentful’s new answer engine optimization solution.
Today we’re talking with product marketing lead Taylor Wagner, and he’s gonna be sharing one amazing thing about Palmata, including how it gives organizations the power to understand, measure, and improve how AI answer engines represent their company. Taylor, welcome to the show.
Taylor Wagner (00:51)
Hey Greg, thanks for having me. Really, really grateful to be here today.
Greg Kihlström (00:54)
Yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to talking with you and and seeing this in action here. Definitely, you know, AEO is definitely top of mind. Lots of companies grappling with what to do, what to do with it. So you know, looking forward to diving in. Before we do though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Contentful?
Taylor Wagner (01:14)
Of course, yeah, thank you. So hey, I’m Taylor. I spent more than 13 years at this point in B2B SAS. This is kind of my world where I’ve come up in my career. I’ve worn pretty much every single hat on the go-to-market side of the house. And now as a product marketing leader here at Contentful, I’ve helped shape our broader product and corporate narrative. But more recently with Palmata, I’ve been focusing on connecting what we’re building here with Palmata, with why it matters in the world.
With AEO, with AI discovery and AI visibility.
Greg Kihlström (01:46)
Yeah, great, great. And so, you know, I know I I teed this up a little bit in in the intro, but can you talk a little bit more about, you know, what what are we going to be looking at today? what’s Palmada’s focus and, you know, who’s the audience and and why is it important to them?
Taylor Wagner (01:59)
Yeah. So I mean, our focus at Pomada essentially boils down to the fact that AI search is fundamentally changing how buyers are discovering us as brands, as brand leaders, right? Increasingly, what we’re seeing is a buyer’s first impression is more likely than not, no it’s no longer your website or an ad that you’re running or a sales conversation. Most often it’s an AI generated answer, right? So just showing up in those answers, yes, absolutely essential.
Because if you’re not showing up there, if you don’t appear, you essentially don’t exist to your buyer. You’re probably not making that like end-of-the-road consideration set. But simply showing up in that answer, as important as it is, isn’t enough. That’s not a business outcome because AI can still mention your brand, but also misinterpret you, misinterpret what you do, why you’re different, who you’re for, right? So as answer engine optimization is becoming this bigger priority, almost an existential crisis for brands.
They need to one, see how the AI systems are representing them, not just that they are representing them, but how they’re representing them. They need to be able to understand what is actually going on under the hood that’s shaping those answers. And then they need to figure out where they should be focusing the resources so they can have the greatest impact on their AI reputation. So not only do most teams kind of lack that visibility part, but they’re also lacking that clear path from that insight into what to actually do about it, like where to take action. So
Where Palmata is coming in is we’re helping organizations understand what’s going on, understanding their AI reputation, helping them measure it, and then showing them how to improve their AI reputation among answer engines and changing how they actually represent and interpret their brand. Ultimately, we’re trying to give teams that intelligence that they need to strengthen their visibility, right? correct any misconceptions that may be coming through the AI answer engines, and then at the end of the day, confidently shape their AI reputation.
Greg Kihlström (03:52)
Yeah. Love it. Well yeah, let’s as I said, I know lots of brands grappling with this right now. So let’s let’s take a look and and and see what they can expect.
Taylor Wagner (04:02)
Yeah, absolutely. So what I’ll be showing you today as I pull up my screen here is showing how we’re moving from just AI search visibility into essentially a definitive roadmap for what your team should be following so you can improve your AI reputation in the topics that matter most to you.
So, what you’re seeing here is your first landing inside the Palmata report that we would run on your brand. What you’re looking at is a report that I built for our demo environment, our demo brand called Manta Footwear. Manta Footwear is a shoe company that does lifestyle shoes, running shoes, trail running shoes, casual shoes. But through this report, what we’re looking at is Manta Footwear, digging into how they’re performing specifically in the
running shoe market. So this one isn’t a brand level report. It’s a very tailored report focused on the priority that matters most to Manta, which right now is owning the running shoe market. So that’s already a little distinction with Palmata. It’s not, it’s not always brand level. You can steer its research to what matters most to you. And what we’re seeing here is our brand perception dashboard, essentially showing you yes, we’re visible in like 50% of the conversations happening about running shoes. Our content is cited
22% of the time, so far less. But when we are mentioned, it’s actually only 13% positive. So, like, like when I mentioned earlier, you can show up, but still not show up in the right way. Showing up is not the end game. You need to show up in the way that brings buyers to you. And we’re only bringing buyers to ourselves 13% of the time. So that’s our first aha moment compared to how we’re stacking up with competitors. And we have a quick overview right here at the top through the research. It found that we are showing up as Manta in a lot of the answers, but
Our own lifestyle-oriented copy on our website is making us seem more comfortable but unserious to serious running shoe shoppers. So now we need to dig into that. From there, we have a strategic analysis that essentially expands on that quick summary. This is a perfect executive level briefing. If your CMO is asking, what’s going on with AEO? How are we showing up in AI answers and what are we going to do about it? Here is a natural language explanation of everything that Palmata found in its research stage as it
Understood the brand, the competitors, the market, the questions being asked by buyers, et cetera, to form all of this adaptive deep research that then leads to everything else we’re going to find inside of this report. We take this research and then we’ll break it down by topics and prompts, essentially showing the exact questions that buyers may be asking and how you show up in these. For instance, here’s a topic that we found called running shoe value. If we click into it, we have a heat map of all these prompts that are.
bucketed into this topic and where Manta footwear is either winning in the prompts where it’s green, losing where it’s red, or we’re just completely missing from the conversation entirely with this white square. We don’t have content that’s being referenced in these answers. So we essentially, like I said earlier, are invisible to buyers that are asking these questions. So this helps show us a gap that we absolutely need to fill with our content. Once we understand how we’re showing up in these topics and these prompts, we can see what actual sources of content
Are influencing these answers that are coming through in these topics and prompts. If we go to sources here, you can see what is actually boosting your brand, the sources that are elevating your AI reputation, and the sources that are hurting you. Where we actually end up seeing a lot of surprises is if you search your own domain. So if I
Greg Kihlström (07:33)
Mm.
Taylor Wagner (07:33)
go to mantafootwear.com, I actually own a lot of content that’s hurting myself. So it’s not always competitors or third-party sources.
That may be knocking your AI reputation. And it’s not that this content is bad, it’s just that AI doesn’t always perfectly recite your approved messaging. It’s synthesizing everything, right? So if your content is maybe framed a potentially wrong way or in a way that could be misconstrued by AI, it could potentially hurt your AI reputation. And what’s interesting here is that this is not simply just a marketing problem.
We have like Manta’s our story page. That’s marketing, maybe that’s PR and comms. We have a compare page. That’s competitive intelligence. They own that content. Here’s a help article and a care article. This is probably support. They own that content. So it’s all publicly available content that any team across your organization is responsible for influence your AI reputation. So here’s a really quick way to see what do I own that I can take action on right now to help improve how we’re showing up in AI answers. So
All this that I’ve showed you so far is essentially the under-the-hood research that’s going on to help build context for what to do next. And essentially, that what to do next is the bread and butter of Palmata. When we come in here to actions, Palmata has taken all this research that exists and decides: okay, now what do I do? I know where I’m not showing up that well in AI search. What can I do about it? A lot of tools in this space that get to visibility.
But they don’t help you understand why you showed up that way or what to do. And this is your definitive content roadmap to overcome where you may not be showing up at that perfectly in AI search. And it gives you very focused, prioritized, and prescriptive prescriptive actions to take so that you can improve your AI reputation. For instance, right here, this recommended action at first says you should shift the content signal from lifestyle-oriented copy to performance at the most crawled and most cited page. So if I click into
This recommended action. It tells me why this action is recommended here. It tells me what my suggested approach should be. And it tells me what impacted prompts will be maybe improved if I take this recommended content action. Right now it’s just giving me the approach, but what exactly should I do? I don’t want to leave that up to guesswork or gut instincts. Palmada’s gonna help you know exactly what to do to improve how you’re showing up.
So if we view the simulated change, essentially it discovered that on this page, on the Manta Running Shoes homepage, if you come down here, here is the content that exists on that homepage. And what it has done is taken that content that was referenced in that AI answer and adjusted it. It has suggested some copy to add to this page. It has suggested some copy to remove from this page. And what it did is then simulated this change happening in your content.
ran it through the LLM again with that same exact set of prompts and saw what the output was if this content was changed to what it’s suggesting here with the green additions and the red subtractions. Of course, this is AI generated content, right? But it has discovered that if you make this exact change, the LLMs are going to give you a 10% boost in your AI reputation on any of the responses coming out that are related to this. If you want to from there, make it into your own words.
Change some of the content strategy that’s existing here, make it more on brand, use a specific type of language. You can go ahead and edit these suggested changes, change the copy, re-simulate that copy now. And it’ll run it back through the LLM and give you an expected improvement percentage right here. So what we’re doing is across all these topics where you could use a little bit of love from an AI reputation standpoint, we’re figuring out what content may actually not be working in your favor in those responses.
that’s being cited or mentioned and by AI answers, tweaking the copy, changing what’s going on. These aren’t like under the hood technical tips and tricks, right? Like changing your schema or like an LLMs.txt file. These are the exact words on screen that you and your various content stakeholders should go in, change, simulate the impact of it. That way you’re confident before pressing publish. But then you can press publish, you can come up to this action that it recommended, mark this as done.
And now, next time you run your Palmata report, it’s gonna refresh all of this. It’s gonna know which actions you took. And then it’s gonna ch show you the delta, the change, the improvement over time from before until after you made those changes. It’s important to remember that even though you are making changes, your competitors are probably making changes too. So even
Greg Kihlström (12:21)
Right.
Taylor Wagner (12:21)
if you do nothing, right, your AI reputation can change over time because there’s new content that’s entering the market.
So that’s why it’s so important to stay on top of your AI reputation like this, instead of just being a passive bystander to what’s going on in the market around you. You wanna be the one controlling your AI reputation, not your competitors. And Palmata is gonna give you that exact content roadmap to make sure you’re staying on top.
Greg Kihlström (12:44)
Yeah, yeah. Love it. Yeah, no, this is this is great. And yeah, I mean I think what I’m what I’m struck with is how, you know, a lot of brands just kind of take for granted that AEO GEO is just the next SEO. And I think that’s you know, to it as evidenced here, it’s taking a lot of things for granted that are not that are not true, right? And
You know, there’s elements of like sentiment analysis from social media. There’s elements of other things, but you know, kind of to your point about it’s good to be able to see the content, even if the content is findable, is it the right content? And you know, there was that old SEO kind of the you know, the SEO approach was let’s just get as much content out there as we could, but it seems like now that very very different focus there. So it’s good to be able to see how.
You can identify yes, it’s there, but it’s not helping you, right? It’s in fact hurting.
Taylor Wagner (13:42)
Well what’s what’s interesting is like AI and answer engines, they don’t care about your org chart, right? Like they don’t care that this material is not marketing content. They don’t care that this material is not intended for a top of the funnel buyer. It’s support articles that are intended for current customers or maybe troubleshooting a current issue. It doesn’t care that that’s a a different stage of discovery. It finds it. It finds anything that’s publicly available, and now it uses that as context to answer any question, regardless of what stage of the funnel the shopper may be at.
So it’s really important to understand how your entire content landscape is now making up your AI reputation.
Greg Kihlström (14:17)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the another thing that struck me was just the I the ability to simulate. You know, it’s it’s one thing to get a recommendation and then put it into the CMS or DXP or whatever and then wait for I don’t know, a week, to a few days at the very least and and hope. But to actually be able to run a simulation and and and get almost you know, near instant feedback on that. I mean, that’s that’s great. I mean, I I would imagine that massively accelerates your ability to
To your point, keep up with the competition ’cause they’re they’re doing this stuff too, right?
Taylor Wagner (14:51)
Exactly that. Like if I publish something on Palmada.ai, our website, I have to then wait for it to be indexed. And then I have to wait for it being indexed to then influence the AI answer, which could take a week, two weeks, if not more, I’m not able to rapidly iterate. I have to just like hurry up and wait and s and cross my fingers and hope that it influence the answer. But now before I ever commit any resources to changing content, I can have a good idea of what’s going to impact based on those changes.
And it makes me just feel a little bit more confident pressing go on that content change. And then I don’t have to wait. I’m not just like holding my breath and seeing what happens with AI answers. I have a pretty good idea of what’s gonna happen and then I can move on to the next.
Greg Kihlström (15:30)
Yeah, yeah, love it. Well, Taylor, thanks so much for showing. I’m sure there’s plenty plenty more we could see here, but well thanks for showing what you did. And for those that are interested in in learning more, what’s the best way for them to where where should they go?
Taylor Wagner (15:44)
Come to Palmada.ai. You come into that website. You’re going to get an opportunity to sign up for a free Palmata report. It’s free forever. It’s going to be a one-time look at your AI brand reputation. You’re going to be able to add anyone from your organization to it, unlimited seats on the free. So just go ahead and sign up. It will do some adaptive deep research to serve up your report to you. You’re going to get a report that looked exact very similar to what I just showed you, but it’s for your brand. And make sure that you take a look at those content recommendations because there’s going to be a lot of teams.
across your organization that touch this content, invite them in, come up with a definitive roadmap for a week, two weeks, a month, figure out what content to move on. And then when you’re ready to see how that has impacted, you’ll be able to either upgrade or sign up and run a refresh report to see the impact that these changes have had on your AI reputation.
