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Interviews with top marketers sharing tactical tips, strategies, and lessons learned to help you grow your business. Hosted by Dave Gerhardt, founder of Exit Five, former CMO, and author of Founder Brand. Learn more at exitfive.com
E5_Rebecca Busk - Audio Episode
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[00:01:42] You're listening to The Dave Garrard Show Action
[00:01:59] Everyone's trying to figure out what actually matters when it comes to AI and search and marketing right now, and my guest today has your back. Rebecca Busk runs Kavalfek, a web flow-focused agency in Denmark that's been doing branding, design, and web for 11 years, and AEO is the thing she's talking about with clients every single day right now, and she came on the podcast to break down exactly what's working.
[00:02:21] We cover 10 specific things you need to check on your site for content quality right now. The technical side, we talk about content strategy. We talk about authority. Does PR come back in this world? Reddit, G2, LinkedIn. Do social signals matter in AI search? If you've been talking or thinking and hearing about AEO and aren't sure what to actually do about it, this episode [00:02:42] is for you.
[00:02:42] Enjoy my conversation with Rebecca Is this true, you started as a consultant, and now you ... Do you own the company? Yeah, I did. Okay. So I wanna ask about, we were talking about Louisville, being a D1 athlete, but now I got so many, we're gonna get back there, so I wa- I wanna talk about that. How did you go from working at the company to owning the company?
[00:03:01] Well, honestly, it was quite a mix of timing, trust, maybe a little bit of craziness, to be completely honest. Codefig was at a very difficult place at the time I started, and there was a lot of debt, very little money in the bank, and some people are ready to kind of move on. So it was not that a polished, perfect opportunity from the outside that most people will expect when you see, oh, I became a partner in an agency.
[00:03:24] But I saw something in it, and I saw a team that had, uh, real talent, and I was really lucky I got the opportunity. And the owners trusted me enough to let me step in, but I also think you have to bit, uh, be a bit naive to trust and brave to say yes to this kind of a opportunity, because there's absolutely no guarantee [00:03:42] it would work.
[00:03:42] I think we had about, like, $320,000 in debt when I started. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. And we were a agency of about 10 people at the time, so if you do the math, that's a lot of money that you have to pay back to the government. But I really believed that I could, uh, yeah, change things, and if ... I've been on the other side, and I know what I hated when I worked with agencies, so I know all the things I wanted to do differently.
[00:04:06] What did you hate? What did I not hate? No, I'm just kidding. Often it's like the agencies just make things too complicated. Well, I'm, I'm saying it because, like, everyone, everyone who listens to this podcast is, works in marketing, and so either they work at an agency, they've hired an agency, so, like, this is the audience to, like, vent, vent about those things, you know?
[00:04:26] So when I was sitting on the other side, I felt like all the agencies that we were speaking to always had to overcomplicate the most basic things because, you know, they gotta be the experts. They wanna make sure that they sound like the ones knowing more than you. But instead of just explaining it in [00:04:42] the basic terms so we're kind of like on eye height, on eye sight, I think you would say, then they just try to, to sell me stuff that I didn't need.
[00:04:49] I also hated when agencies just disappear after launch. It's like, uh, "We're best friends. I can't wait to jump on the check-in every single morning. We have to stand up." And then the second we go live- Ugh Oh, it's the worst experience, right? Yeah. Well, the, yeah, and yeah, or like, um, you build a relationship with the, it, it feels good, like the founder, the, the big name who runs the agency, you know, they sell you on the deal, and then you get passed down to some super junior person, which is not a bad thing.
[00:05:19] I've just always wondered how you, how you manage that. You took over running this agency. Where did you get your appetite and desire for, for marketing? You know, I, I always say, so my little line is like, "Nobody went to school for B2B marketing," and- Yeah ... you're like the perfect example of that. Went to Louisville, you know, got a MBA, was not [00:05:42] specific to, to marketing, you know, D1 athlete.
[00:05:45] Here you are running an agency today. Like, how did you, how did you get here? And also to, to be operate, owning and operating an agency means you have to be a thought leader. You have to have opinions. You have to have strong thoughts on what companies should be doing and where marketing is going. Where did you build that base of marketing knowledge?
[00:06:04] That's a really good question, Dave, and, uh- Oh, thank you. I do this for a living I appreciate that. I don't know if I have like a div- I don't know why I ended up here. So, like if I just track back and, and look into what kind of, uh, actions happened was when I was at school in Louisville, I always knew that I wanted to go into economics or finance.
[00:06:24] I really like when things are tangible, when you kind of have a foundation, you, you trust the process, you know there are certain rules you gotta follow, and then you always know that you end up at the, the right place. And it went really well. I thought I was gonna end up at Wall Street. Maybe I would buying stocks, options, puts, you know, great time.
[00:06:41] [00:06:42] Love to do it for a living as a hobby. And then I took my MBA, and during my MBA, I met a professor, Dr. Barone, you're getting a, a shout-out here. And in his marketing class during my MBA, like my jaw dropped because at this point, for like 25 years I believed that marketing was sales and graphic design. Why and how, I do not know, but I was absolutely convinced that all marketeers were doing is making commercials, making these graphics that you see, flyers, et cetera.
[00:07:14] And I just- Arts and crafts, baby ... I've been living in my own little bubble. Yes. I never, I never realized that there was more to it. And then he suddenly just starts the first lecture and talks about, like, buyer behavior and all the analytics behind it, and how consumers are being almost manipulated based on what you're showing or telling them.
[00:07:35] And I was like, "I love this." Not manipulating, uh, people. I want to manipu- I can't wait to manipulate [00:07:42] consumers. But I was like, "This is incredible." And then after class, I kid you not, I was that kind of student that just waited for everyone to walk out the classroom, and I was like, "This is gonna sound crazy, but, like, you just gave me, like, a jaw-dropping moment 25 years too late, and now I'm here.
[00:07:58] I have a perfect finance and economics degree, and I wanna change my direction, so how do I start?" That background makes you an interesting marketer, though. I think if you're grounded in finance and analytics and economics, it- it's a really nice pairing for the creative side of things in marketing, actually.
[00:08:16] Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, and I think then he was like, "You know what? Um, there are some basic things you need to learn and understand, and you'll learn that in my course." But he says, uh, "Show up at my office tomorrow, and then, uh, I have some research stuff I'm working on, and I'll gladly, uh, include you in doing all the- the slave work," because that's what professors love to do with their- their students.
[00:08:36] That's why you're a research assistant. And I just learned so much, and I loved it. Like, I [00:08:42] loved every part of it. And I was like, "I need to change my full direction of what I'm doing because this is what I've, my heart has been calling for." I just didn't know it existed. Okay. So you did a couple other things after that, but now the last four years you've been running this agency.
[00:08:57] How do I say the name of it? Think about, like, the word quality, and then you just say qualifiqu. Qualifiqu. Okay. Perfect. Yeah. What is it... Is that, is that what that name means? No, it actually comes from qualifications, um, kvalifikationer in Danish. Qualifiqu. Yes. Okay. So we didn't start as an agency. It started as a, a network of young talents, like autodidact young talents, two 17-year-olds starting, uh, this hub for people, trying to convince others that 17-year-olds, smart kids, can also do marketing and code your next app.
[00:09:31] You don't have to have a degree in data science or anything else. You got- just gotta have the right talents. Okay, so today, the reason that you're here is because we're gonna talk about [00:09:42] everyone's favorite topic right now, which is AEO. Yes. I love it. We've done a bunch of content on this topic, but I just wanna hear in, in your voice to the marketers that are listening to this podcast, this is...
[00:09:56] AEO is something that you're talking about every single day with, with clients. You have deep working knowledge across, like, technical side of this, the content side of this, quality, learning about authority, and your agency does branding, design, and web. What matters right now? W- what, what do we know, in your words, what do we know about AEO as of we're recording this, let's call it July 2026?
[00:10:20] Mm-hmm. What's the state of the world? What matters? What's changing? What do we know? What's important? Well, AEO has changed quite significantly how it is we're finding the answers, the product, the, the companies that we, we need to engage with. Like, it has significantly changed. An example, for myself, I'm renovating my apartment right now, right?
[00:10:41] And [00:10:42] usually, I would go down to the store and figure out what kind of ladder I would buy or something like that. Then I would Google. I'll figure out on Google what I wanted to buy, and I've actually been Googling this multi-ladder, kinda figuring out, uh, should I buy one that can extend? How big should the platform be?
[00:10:56] All these different things. But it's not really answering what I need, 'cause I don't do renovations. Like, this is new for me. So I go to an LLM. I go to ChatGPT or Claude. In this example, I actually went to, to ChatGPT specifically. And I'm like, "I have a 3.2 meter, uh, ceiling at my apartment." We have meters in Denmark.
[00:11:14] "I need kind of a" Thank you for that. Thank you for... Actually, so I love-- I play, I play a lot of golf, and I don't know if you know about golf at all, but you have this, like, uh, rangefinder which tells you how far you're, you're supposed to hit it, and my rangefinder is supposed to be in yards, but it was stuck on meters, and I didn't know how to get it off.
[00:11:29] So I had to use ChatGPT and get the conversion. I'm like, "So it's 78. Put 78 meters to yards." Yeah. Uh, but anyway, so I'm trying to figure out what kind of ladder to [00:11:42] buy, and Google Products is showing me hundreds of products, and we're talking about the biggest Danish brands, like the biggest Danish retailers selling this.
[00:11:51] So think about Best Buy and stuff in the US for like electronics and stuff. That's what we're talking about. But then I go to the, the LLM, to ChatGPT, and I explain my situation. And only two ladders show up. Two ladders. I've just seen hundreds of different ladders in Google, but only two showed up in AI search, and I ended up buying one of those two, not any of the 200 others that I found that looked a much better match for me, because it didn't answer whether or not it was fitting my needs.
[00:12:20] But the LLM could say these two specifically has optimized the product on their site, and it's fitting your needs. So basically, as consumers right now, the way we are finding answers and buying products, we used to have to do all kind of the research ourselves, clicking through 20 different pages, reading all the product specs, kind of doing our [00:12:42] own sheet probably to figure out which one matches my needs, what is the cost.
[00:12:46] Now, the LLMs are doing that for us. Like, AI search is changing completely how we are buying, both in B2B and B2C. Yeah, and even, you know, you mentioned ChatGPT or Claude. I've noticed that recently, so like if I'm on my phone, I'm doing a Google search in Chrome I can't even remember the last time I went to the traditional search page, because now you get that context in the AI overview, and then if you click, like, More or whatever, you can just chat back.
[00:13:15] And I was talking to my wife the other day about this. It's like the whole way you find information is changing, because it used to be search, scroll, see what's kinda, you know, on page one, maybe go to page two, see what's there. Now I'm just, like, having this conversational interface for all of this, and I'm like, man, this is gonna totally change how people think about their websites, how people think about traffic, how people think about the metrics here.
[00:13:38] You have some advice about how to show up in, [00:13:42] in AEO search, and so I have our little prep talk that our, our team, team gave me here, but, uh, this is really interesting. You're the first person I've seen say this. This is topic... The first topic that we have is this. You said, "Don't write AEO content with AI."
[00:13:55] This is your most vocal and controversial position, and you lead with it in a lot of your LinkedIn content. Can you, can you tell me about this? So, so don't actually use AI to write the AEO content? Yeah. So the reason I'm saying that is because AI and A- like, just basically the LLMs is basing their answers on content that's already out there, and if you wanna be cited, you should not sound like the 2,000 other sites that are out there.
[00:14:22] You need to provide something that's unique. So you need to go inside of your own business and figure out, do you have some data? Do you have some, some specs? Do you have research? Do you have expert knowledge that you can add to the conversations that will separate yourselves? And I've seen way too many try to do the, um, "Hey, Claude, can you please [00:14:42] write me a blog post about why they should pick my ABC, and my B2B software is the best for this industry.
[00:14:48] Please write me a blog post." It is so generic. It's so vague. You can easily see when it's a AI content because it's just missing that piece that's making you go, "Oh, wow." It's making you, like, stay in there. Yeah, the soul. It's all those little, like, choppy little sentences. I can't... I don't have a good word for it, but I just have that feeling.
[00:15:09] Yeah. But it's like they're over-explaining the basics, right? So it's like you have no real examples. You have no named customers, no cases, no trade-offs, no numbers. You're like, it's basically just giving you that beating around the bush talk, and you're like, it all sounds really good, but do you actually tell me anything that I could use for anything?
[00:15:28] And I am extremely tired of seeing the mass production of content we're seeing right now. Even on LinkedIn, you see like 1,200 posts about the same updates to, um, Claude Cowork. Ugh. I know. I get so many [00:15:42] comments, like, on my posts about just people using AI to, like, write comments on my posts, and I instantly know.
[00:15:48] It just makes... It gives you a certain, a certain feeling. So- It's interesting because we, we kind of flocked to these tools early on to write content, but now it's like if everyone has access to these tools, and everyone is writing their newsletters or their blogs or their social posts with AI, we're missing the fundamental ingredient in marketing, which is, like, how do you stand out and, and be different?
[00:16:10] Yeah, and it's gonna cost the brand so much trust. So all the content marketeers and all the CMOs out there, if you have a student helper right now just mass producing a lot of blogs because you think you're gonna show up in AEO, it is gonna make your brand sound like everyone else, and it's actually gonna hurt you in the long run.
[00:16:26] So please make sure that you add something valuable inside of it. I'm not saying that you cannot use AI to actually rewrite all the great content you have. It has great stuff you can use it for, but not to make original content. So how would you think about ... Maybe let's go, [00:16:42] like, one level up. How would you think about a content strategy right now for, for a business then?
[00:16:47] Like, what do you need to be thinking about? What, what role should content serve in, in the business today? And then how do you go and create? Which content should you create? Should you have a blog? Is it landing pages? Is it articles? Is it some type of website structure? Just any thoughts on the overall content strategy that works right now.
[00:17:04] Yeah, so I think the most important thing right now is the, the one question you should not be asking yourself is what blog post should we write or what page should we write? The questions you should be asking yourself right now is what do buyers ask the sales before they buy? Like, when they talk to your sales team, when they book a, a demo.
[00:17:23] What do customers misunderstand about your category? Like, what objections comes up again and again in sales calls? What do we explain on calls that's not written anywhere on the website? I want you to go inside and talk to kind of your team, the experts on the team, and then after that you're gonna say, "Okay, all these great [00:17:42] questions we just asked, are they being answered by us or our competitors right now?"
[00:17:46] And if none, you have a golden opportunity to be cited literally tomorrow if you go and write that content. So content matters a lot, and it's always have, but you need to ask some questions that makes it unique. So is it more like bottom of the f- is it more like middle, you need more middle and bottom of the funnel content now?
[00:18:05] Or is it that you need to have more... The things you should be creating should be more unique than just... Y- you know, remember like the five or 10 years ago, it was like if you sold a CRM, you would make a bunch of content that was kind of like, what is sales? What is a CRM? And you would do that play. Am I understanding that right?
[00:18:26] Yeah, so the way we think about it here at Qualifit, 'cause we do a lot of AO, is we kind of divide it into three different categories. So you have the foundational prompts. So the foundational prompts are kind of what is a CRM, what is AO, what is Webflow, for us specifically that we're looking into [00:18:42] its ranking on.
[00:18:43] Then you have the core ones that it's like, I need to find a Webflow agency. What kind of skills should I be looking for? What kind of cases should I be looking for? And then you have the must-win ones. That's I want to hire a Webflow agency. Who should I hire? So you need to figure out in your strategy which one of the three prompt strategies that you're kind of going for, and that's of course up to you, the strategist at your company, together with your agency or internally to figure out what is it right now that you're not ranking on that you feel like you should be ranking on.
[00:19:14] Because usually people still go through the funnel 'cause they're asking different questions. For example, you're asking the question, I think that I need a new website. What kind of indications should I be looking at if my, my current website is outdated or not performing? So they're asking the questions until suddenly they realize, oh, shoot, maybe I do need a new platform because I can't grow on this one.
[00:19:36] And then you move from foundational to core to must-win. You mentioned, um, [00:19:42] not thinking about the blog, so I, I think there was a good... Like, th- those are good- Answers on, like, the how to rethink the prompts. But people often wanna know where should the content live today? Like, do blogs still have a place?
[00:19:55] Should it just be you write, do you not need a blog, and you just need 10 core articles on the site that act and answer those questions? How would you guide someone on-- 'Cause when we talk about content, pe- this can mean anything. It could be you should have a podcast, you should have a newsletter, you should have a blog, you should have articles on your website.
[00:20:12] For the sake of showing up in AI search, do you have any strong opinions on which appr-- like, how you should be executing on this content? I personally do not have a strong opinion whether or not it should be a landing page, a product page, or a blog page. I think the most important thing is kind of how you're structuring it on your site.
[00:20:32] So there's kind of some common rules that you have to follow no matter what page it's placed on. I am not a machine learning expert, but the testing we have done [00:20:42] ourselves have shown that it did not matter whether or not it was on a service page or on a blog page. Content is content, and if you're answering the right questions wherever you are, it makes sense.
[00:20:51] So I think we have to think about the human perspective on it, too, because humans are landing on your page, and what feels natural for them. So don't just optimize for AI search, because if you're suddenly gonna have some kind of blog post feeling narrative on your product page for your B2B clients, they're gonna be like, "What just happened here?"
[00:21:09] Because this is a really bad user experience. You mentioned earlier when you were in, in college, like, thinking about, you know, you got interested in the brand and the storytelling and the narrative, and it's like, I think we forget that the goal is not just to optimize for AI. But okay, I might use AI to find, you know, in your ladder example, you might use AI to find you the two ladders.
[00:21:31] But then when you actually click on the site, what if one of those ladder companies had, like, a really cool brand and it was really interesting and had a real story? It's like it's this one-two punch where [00:21:42] making sure your content is discoverable for the robots and then it's the human who's gonna make the buying decision.
[00:21:47] You need to win them over maybe more emotionally than you would with the AI. So do you wanna talk about technical? Like, do, should we talk about what matters technically here? I think we've, we've, have a good primer on philosophy, on, on content strategy, and the types of quest- like, think backwards from the questions people would be asking.
[00:22:05] But should we talk about the technical side of, of, uh, AEO? Yeah. No, crawlability is super important because if you have the perfect content strategy and you have the perfect marketeers asking the right questions internally, but your site is not crawlable, you're still not gonna show up, so all that time would be wasted.
[00:22:23] So it's super important to make sure you do the audit on your site that is crawlable, that all these AI engines can actually run through reading the content in the way it should be read, because otherwise it wouldn't be decided either. So I think that's super important. Some of the things about crawlability, and I'm sure that, uh, you talked about this [00:22:42] previously on the pop test too, but schema markups is a great way to make sure that the AI engines is reading the content in the way you want it to read your content.
[00:22:51] So that's kind of the, the biggest difference, that you're basically giving it the recipe to say, "This is the date. This is the title. This is..." Et cetera. Where we as humans, we can identify that when we scroll, but these engines are not scrolling the page as humans do. So I think it's just super important for marketeers out there to go back and actually double-check.
[00:23:13] Go to your Google Search Console and put the URL in on the page that you're actually not sure. Is it actually showing up? Is it being, being indexed right now? Just go and copy-paste them. You don't need a developer to do that. So if you're in doubt about any of the, the pages, do it. 'Cause we see a lot of the same things happening with kind of the crawlability issues, like it's bad redirects or it's 404 pages, orphan pages, all these things that are kind of hurting the strategy.
[00:23:38] It's kind of... It's still SEO. It's basically the same, uh, [00:23:42] things you have to follow. Yeah, so schema markup is... We have this in our... Schema markup is the structured meaning you add to a page. It tells search engines and AI systems what the content is, who it's from, and how different pieces of information relate to each other.
[00:23:55] So if I just write an article and publish it to my site, I'm not gonna automatically have this. You need to add the schema markup there separately? Yes, exactly. So most, uh, website builders don't have it built in. As you mentioned at the beginning, we have a Webflow agency specifically. That's our platform tool of choice.
[00:24:13] And what I really like in there is as, as a marketeer, when you go in and you add meta title, your meta description, all the content, they actually have this JSON LD script place where you can just generate with AI the schema markup. So you don't need to be a developer to actually do it. Because I think one thing that's been holding marketeers back is that most people don't know how to write a schema markup, but thanks to, to AI, they can pretty much help us, um, generate the, the, the content for us, and then you go to schema.org, and then you [00:24:42] validate that it's the right schema that you put in.
[00:24:44] Okay, I'm listening to Rebecca on the podcast. Yeah, we have a bunch of content. Oh, my gosh, I actually don't know the technical side of this. What, what's, like, a checklist of things that I should do after this podcast to go and make sure that my website content has? Yeah. First, I would say go and check whether your key pages are being indexed, and you can do that on your Google Search Console.
[00:25:05] Afterwards, I would go and check if your page, um, has the meta titles, the meta descriptions. Then I'll go and make sure that your headings are clear. I will add the internal linkings between related pages because that's also helping engines to kind of understand how the contents are structured on your site I would create FAQ sections where it's relevant.
[00:25:25] It's still important to have it, whether you have it on a specific FAQ or you have it up, and then add the FAQ schema to it. Because then you're telling these AI engines, "Here is a question that's often being asked. Here is the answer to that question. So if someone is asking this question as a prompt, [00:25:42] you can pull this answer for them."
[00:25:45] I think that's something you can do immediately, and then just go and, and use Google's, uh, Rich Results Test for the schema validation. Go and check these basic things to begin with. I think that, uh, would be amazing. Do the... Does, like, Webflow and others, do they have these things built in now? 'Cause it's like if I don't wanna...
[00:26:02] Why go do this manually? Aren't I gonna have a hosting platform that's gonna just make me smart and ask all these questions for me? What I love about Webflow is they're really thinking AI first now, 'cause they know they're not gonna be competitive against other platforms if they're not gonna make sure they stay a step ahead.
[00:26:19] So Webflow launched this AO tool not too far ago, where you can actually have this overview that's showing you, do you have pages that are missing the meta titles or the meta descriptions? Or if you have prompts that you know that you wanna rank for in, on your page, you can write it into the tool directly in the platform, and it will actually tell you how they're ranking and what you can do to improve it.
[00:26:41] So all this is, um, [00:26:42] already included in the platform itself. And then, as I talked about earlier, the schema markup is, is probably one of the things that's making most marketeers go, "Oh, no. Now I'm gonna be in the backlog at my developers, asking them to implement this on the 200 pages we, we have on our site, if we don't have it already."
[00:26:58] Having that little JSON LD box that the, the Webflow have on all the pages, where you can just generate a s- a schema markup with, with AI, is just magic. So yeah, I think that's just beautiful because a lot of people, again, going back to me talking about what I hate with agencies, is that I have to ask agencies to go to every single page and make an update for me.
[00:27:21] Like, just imagine how expensive it is if you go to, to an agency and say, "Hey, do you wanna go through 200 pages for me and validate if it have schema markup? And if not, do you wanna go do it?" And just imagine if it's, like, $150 an hour, right? That's expensive. So now marketeers, uh, communication content strategists, they can go and do this themselves directly on the [00:27:42] platform.
[00:27:42] Just love it. Could you do all of this with, like, a homegrown site? Could you just build something with AI and agents that can just kinda always do this- For you, Claude code generate, you know, here are the things people are searching for, generate 100 pages, you know, update them, have all the right markup and everything on it.
[00:28:02] Is that possible? Dave, you're going back to my yacht earlier we talked about. Do not- 'Cause I gave you a layup. I don't know what the rowing, I don't know what the rowing analogy is here, but I gave you a layup. 'Cause that's- Yes. I'm asking that because that, that's how we feel, right? That's how marketers feel, like we listen to this podcast.
[00:28:17] If I go to Linke- if I open up LinkedIn, I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm so dumb. I'm not using..." And I'm texting Dan, I'm like, "We need to Vibe Code our whole website, and we're gonna just have Claude Code dynamically create 1,000 pages for us." That's... So it's possible, but it's not gonna work? What, what's your reaction to that?
[00:28:34] It's not gonna have those real example. It's gonna be vague. It's just gonna be too generic. It's not gonna add any value, and it's not gonna be [00:28:42] cited. So one, of course, you gotta make sure if you do this homegrown, that you make sure that it's actually crawlable and indexed. But after that, you're not gonna get cited if you're not adding thing new.
[00:28:51] They can already cite someone saying, "What is a CRM?" They can already cite someone that's saying, "What is AEO?" What they cannot cite, if you're saying, "I'm considering implementing an AEO strategy, come up with some examples of how others have done this." If you have written original content saying how you have implemented an AEO strategy on a client or on your own brand, and you actually share some of those results, I almost want to, and I need to be careful on a podcast, guarantee you that you will show up.
[00:29:21] And I did this test myself not too long ago, and it did work. If you're providing some real original content, AI will cite you, and of course it has to be truth, and you have to have some authority that validates it. So it's like why... You're making the case for... It's almost like we've... There's narrative like, "You can automate everything.
[00:29:39] You can have cloud code do all this stuff." But what you're saying is like, yeah, [00:29:42] sure, the robots will read that, but it's actually not gonna be the thing that stands out and actually drives conversions for you. And so you don't want to create 1,000 pages because you need to have a human in there actually making it unique?
[00:29:55] Exactly. But I do wanna say one thing, so please quote me on this, because you can use AI as the editor or the researcher or the structure assistant. Right. Yeah, you're not saying, "Don't use AI." Exactly. Yeah, you're just... Okay. So, so where does, where does AI fit in that workflow then? It's, it's, it's your researcher, it's your editor, it's not the- Exactly.
[00:30:15] So you can do some research saying, "Hey, I do need some authority for this article that's outside of my own brain, so can you please go out and see if there's any big, like Gartner or someone, that has done any research on AEO where there is some great stats that I can also reference in my own where you also cite them?
[00:30:36] Do some research there." But you need to add something then and say, "With my clients or with my [00:30:42] brand, what we achieved was this," and it might be so much different or so similar to what Gartner said, or Forrester or whoever you wanna reference. And then you add something to it where the LLM is gonna say, "Mm, yummy, I love this.
[00:30:55] I'm gonna show it next time someone is gonna prompt this." I like this. Okay. We have, uh, 10 things that all, everyone listening to this needs to check on their content quality right now according to my new friend Rebecca. I will, I will tell you the thing, and then you, you can explain the what and the why.
[00:31:12] So number one is improve readability Yes. So for readability, think about when you're going to read content. Make it easy to understand. Do not use kind of a vocabulary that normal people wouldn't understand, because humans wants to read something that's easily digestible, engines want something that's easily digestible too.
[00:31:32] Adding fancy buzzwords, saying utilize instead of use, it's not gonna make you look better. It's actually gonna make it harder for the machine to understand the content. Add clear [00:31:42] definitions Make it very clear what it is that you're talking about. You cannot just make assumptions that the readers already know what it is.
[00:31:51] So if I'm saying, "Oh, AEO, my AEO strategy blah, blah, blah did this," explain what an AEO strategy is because a lot of people's probably gonna be, "What the hell is that?" Use Q&A sections. So make sure you just answer y- the, the prompts, the questions. So you don't have to have an FAQ to do that. Rewrite the titles to be the questions.
[00:32:14] Why should I implement an AEO strategy? Why should I write content that will be cited by AI search? And then you answer it in the, the, the content underneath. I really like this. I just like the idea of, like, the Q&A and the FAQ. I think it's a good frame for thinking about what questions should your site answer.
[00:32:33] Versus a lot of times we kinda just go and make the website. I like when we think about, like, for right now we're working on the website for the, the... We have this page up for our event, which is [00:32:42] Drive, exit5.com/drive, and at the bottom we have FAQs. But that's only because over time we've learned all the things people ask about this event, which is, like, you know, which hotels are nearby?
[00:32:52] How far is it from the airport? Is there, you know, foo- the dietary restrictions. You know, all those questions is what ma- actually makes it unique, and so I, I, I like going back to that. Uh, move the main answer up. I like this one. Put the key point or definition in the first paragraph. This is, like, 'cause we all have no attention span today, and so you better give me the answer immediately.
[00:33:11] Yes. I, I literally have a rule of four that I really wanna dive into, and that is rule of four. It's, like, crazy because AI likes to say rule of three, so I'm breaking their structure, too. I like rule of three, but yeah, rule of four. 'Cause the rule of three is- ... you know, stop, stop. I don't know what it is. In, in, you know, in the States, you know, it's like stop, drop, and roll, or you call 911.
[00:33:30] It's three. But we'll go with your rule of four. It's okay. So, um, going back to the main answers near the top, I have a rule of four. Answer first, explain second, prove third, and [00:33:42] expand fourth. Follow this on your page- Yeah, that's good ... because that is how the LLM's AI wants to skim the site. Yeah, so you're like, "Hey, I'm gonna...
[00:33:52] Okay, great, I answered your question. I'm gonna k- tell you all the why in a second, but first let me answer your question." Mm-hmm, exactly. Yeah, it's like if I'm cooking, I would go Google, like, what's the time and temperature in the oven for salmon, and I gotta scroll down, like, you know, some blog on Food Network four pages just to find that.
[00:34:11] It's like what, what's great about the AI overview is it's gonna tell me that right away. Mm-hmm. Uh, add dates and add author and source attribution. Why does that matter? It's super important because LLMs do not wanna cite old content. So you might have some really great content from 2013 that's still worth gold.
[00:34:31] You know, we all have a favorite marketing book or a sales book that's, like, ages, uh, old, but they still publish a new version where there is new data. The same goes for, like, having content on [00:34:42] your site. You have to have some kind of visible publish date or last updated date because the LLMs wants to make sure that the content has actually been reviewed or changed, because it takes the most fresh content and the most relevant content.
[00:34:54] So that's why Add key takeaways. End long pages with a short summary of the main points. So similar to how you'd answer it up front, after you blah a lot of content on the page, you need to, like, re- you know, tie a bow on it. Yes, and I think what I usually do, and of course, uh, I can ask Claude and ChatGPT, how do you exactly go and find it?
[00:35:15] I believe, and my hypothesis is, that in the beginning of your page, you need to have the key takeaways or, like, a TLDR, too long, didn't read. Imagine a- again, the short attention span. You need to summarize all the content that's coming beneath. What are we actually gonna cover here, and what are the key takeaways?
[00:35:32] Because if the engine decides that this is actually really important, it is gonna skim through the rest of the page. But within the first 30% is usually what I say. If it's not [00:35:42] getting all the nice stuff within the first 30%, it's gonna leave your site and find the answer somewhere else. But then in the end, I also still want to say put a summary because some people then scroll all the way to the last part of it and then give them the summary that is separate from the key takeaways, and then you just cover it both ways.
[00:35:57] But again, that's my own. I do not have anything to back that up, but it- I feel like it seems to work with the clients we've done it with. Yeah. It's like good, good writing. You kinda recap what you've done. Also, I think it's consumer behavior to open up something, scroll to the bottom of it to kinda see the ending.
[00:36:12] Yeah, exactly. Go to the last page of the book. Use proof and examples. Replace your vague claims with numbers, cases, quotes, or specific details. I think you covered this earlier, but this is the stuff that AI just isn't gonna know. It's like leaving this for placeholders for you to come in and actually put in specific examples.
[00:36:29] Yeah, just think about how often you've seen on a page, like, "We build websites," or, "We design good experiences." If you change that out to say, "We rebuilt websites with 800 [00:36:42] plus pages for this client and improved 170% demo bookings," bam, then you just got something that an LLM just thinks is really yummy, and they wanna quote you on.
[00:36:51] But everyone says they build websites. Your college professor would be proud of that. I think one of the consumer psychology lessons that I learned is, like, to have real numbers and be specific, and that's what makes it real, and we're more likely to believe 100... Like, if you say, "I have 100... Here's 100 B2B marketing examples," that's okay.
[00:37:12] I actually like, "Here's 93 B2B marketing examples." I like that one better 'cause it's, it's more specific. Two more, which is number, uh, this one is strengthen internal links. What does that mean? So basically make sure, just like you've done with SEO all the time, that you add, add the links from the key pages to the relevant service pages, blog posts, case studies, et cetera, both for the humans reading it, but also for the LLM skimming your site to make sure that if you're referencing a case or a case study or a product or a testimonial, you're linking to that case [00:37:42] study or that testimonial.
[00:37:43] Because most likely the LLM will go and verify whatever claim you're making to make sure it's actually backed up either on the client side or the brand side. And the last one, which I think you, you hit on already, is u- uh, use the right schema. Match the schema to the page type such as organization, article, product, service, FAQ, or breadcrumb.
[00:38:00] Exactly. Okay, let's talk about the last topic which we haven't covered yet, which is really interesting to me because I started my career in PR and content. So authority, what others say about you. Obviously, you can say a lot about yourself, but authority from others is... You know, when other people say that you have the authority matters.
[00:38:18] I came up in, like, the V1 of this, where the biggest thing you could get as a startup was to get a back link from a, a domain authority, you know, like, from a strong domain. What matters today? I think you, you talk about Reddit and G2 and these other sites or, you know, getting PR and back links, but let's just spend a couple minutes before we wrap up talking about what matters from a, an authority standpoint, and there's...
[00:38:41] Is there, like, a PR [00:38:42] play here? How does this work? I think what matters a lot is whether or not you're getting confirmation outside of your own little bubble that you're living in. Like, are other people talking about you? Are customers validating your claims? Are trusted site linking to you? Are real people actually connected to the company?
[00:38:57] Do you have employees linked on your, your webpage, and they're actually showing up on LinkedIn as well, where they're claiming that they're working there? Do you have examples that are specific enough to, to believe? So there's a lot of things to it, because smaller businesses cannot just show up on these big brands on high authority websites.
[00:39:15] But you might have been receiving an award for something unique in, in your specific industry, right? And that award someone else have given you, and of course there's a lot of awards out there that's just a, a scam, but there's also award, awards that's very much validated. And if you can then say, "We actually received this award from this place, where we were up against these people, and this is why we won it," then you're suddenly making a real claim about [00:39:42] something others have said or done, and hopefully they've also posted about it or they're somewhere that the, the AI can verify this.
[00:39:49] And if so, it will be cited if no one else has any content like that. Do you think PR... Uh, does PR have, like, a resurgence? I... With AI, does... How do you think about PR- today and getting other people to talk about you. I think PR is making a comeback, but a big but, it has to feel natural and authentic. So that's why I also mentioned Reddit.
[00:40:12] Like, Reddit is such an authentic place for people to share their opinions and all that. And I know Webflow actually did an experiment where they tried to go in and see if, like, can you actually change the behavior of what people are thinking if you answer the questions? And I think they did it toget- together with Graphite, if I'm, if I'm not incorrect.
[00:40:29] Anyway, I remember the conclusion being you cannot go and just post a bunch of places that, oh, Webflow is the greatest platform. It's this and that. But if the Webflow reps actually went in and replied to real questions [00:40:42] and problem-solving and making sure guiding people with validated solutions, they actually started getting a lot more authority.
[00:40:48] So I think it has to be authentic too. You can't start the conversation yourself, but you certainly could go and answer it, and if you give a valuable answer That works. It's like what works inside of our community. If you started a thread and you were like, "Hey, I own this agency. Here's what we do." Or if, if you went into, if you went into a post and you added value in the comments, that, that's a, that's a great way to do it.
[00:41:11] What about, uh, LinkedIn? Like, you're, you're writing on LinkedIn, I'm writing on LinkedIn. Is there any research or data or info, like does... Do the LLMs take any social signals? Is that possible? My honest answer is I'm not sure. But so far with all the AEO strategies and testing and clients we work with, I've actually never seen any social proof coming up.
[00:41:32] Like, I've never seen LinkedIn being one of the sources to any of the things being cited. So my gut feeling is saying I don't think so yet, but I actually don't know. Yeah, [00:41:42] 'cause I feel like LinkedIn is kinda... LinkedIn is closed. Like, for some reason they, you know, they've never been able to, to scrape that.
[00:41:49] And then the other thing that's interesting for me on the PR side is, like, the media landscape has, has shifted. There's not a lot of... There's not as many, like, traditional publications, but I'm wondering if the influencers today are people that have LinkedIn followers or who write on Substack or people who have podcasts.
[00:42:05] It's, it'll be interesting to, to understand if... And if, if you're listening to this and you have any data on that email, email us, hi@exit5.com. Just, I'm just curious. Okay, Rebecca, thank you for coming on the pod. Good job. Thanks for coming out and, and chatting about AEO. I hope people feel like they got a little bit smarter.
[00:42:22] I'll give you the mic one last time if you feel like there's something I, I should have asked you or we should have covered before we wrap. No, I think it's been a, a huge pleasure, um, being on here, but I really hope all the marketeers out there is kind of following the 10 things you can go and do yourself right now.
[00:42:35] You do not have to rely on an agency or a developer to go and fix the stuff that will make your site get s- y- [00:42:42] your website being cited by AEO. That's kind of a... Look at that. That's a marketing lesson right there. Agency owner saying, "You don't need to rely on us to go and do this." That's how you win trust and credibility, right?
[00:42:54] Yeah. All right. Good job, Rebecca. I'll see you soon. Appreciate you coming on the podcast. Find Rebecca on, on LinkedIn. Send her a message, connect with her. Tell her you heard about her on my, my podcast. That always makes me happy. Thanks for having me, Dave.
[00:43:11] Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even gonna ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at Exit Five, and you can go and check that out.
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