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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Tom Rudnai (00:00)
AI search and AI, AEO, GEO, whatever you want to call it. How does that factor into your priorities? Like is it overtaken SEO? Do you expect it to? Like how important is it as channel?
Sarah Cameron (00:03)
Thank
It's good question. think it's definitely not, I wouldn't want to say it overtakes SEO because I think with SEO, that's your foundation for really good content that's going to rank well on AI search engines because it's it's valuable content at the end of the day. It's best good quality content at the end of day is what's going to rank, you know, wherever people are searching. AEO definitely has
taken up a lot more of our brain space in that we've had to think a little bit more differently about how we're repackaging and repurposing our content. Video content for a while was shown to be really influential. So we already slice and dice a lot of our webinar content, but we're making sure it's turned them into shorts, putting them on YouTube, as well as LinkedIn shorts when they did that for a while. don't know, feel like every other day they change what they offer.
Tom Rudnai (01:09)
I'm
not mad to keep up with you.
Sarah Cameron (01:11)
It's
impossible to keep up. We've done a lot of citations, talked about around media earlier, but actually quotes, so embedding lot of quotes from our different events and things. So it definitely has taken up a lot of brain space and it will continue to this year. I think the goalposts really will change a lot, but I think they should, not just because it makes it difficult.
but if they have a set algorithm, if there's a set algorithm on, you do all of these things consistently, you're going to rank number one on chat, TBT, perplexity, et cetera. All you, all you're doing is that the person with the most or the company with the most money is going to be at the top as opposed to the people with the best answer to the question or, you know, with the most valuable content or, you know, even the best product. so I don't mind it being a little bit of cat and mouse because it is interesting.
But yeah, it's definitely gonna... SEO is not dead by any means, but it's definitely gonna take up more our this year.
Tom Rudnai (02:20)
No, I'm with you. I think that they're just very, different disciplines, which I think is something that most people overlook. I think because the leading voices in AEO have naturally become because it's still about discoverability, being the leading voices in SEO, there's an SEO mindset that has crept into everything that's done on AEO. It's about ranking, right? But very few, it's really hard to rank in AI because it doesn't actually want to refer anyone to you. So if we're measuring citations, we're measuring mentions, it has no interest in citing you unless you could
Sarah Cameron (02:23)
Yeah.
me.
No.
Tom Rudnai (02:49)
really force it to. It becomes a lot more about how your narrative and story is kind of permeating into it. think of it as like the old thing of like how are you helping them form the requirements and that's actually the job it's quite different.
Sarah Cameron (03:04)
Yeah,
for sure. think it's also kind of changed or help us think about different types of content to put out there. Previously, I think a couple of years ago, we talked about wanting to do vendor comparison articles, but we were a little bit on edge of knowing whether that was the right call, kind of calling out who our competitors are. Obviously not back linking to them, but is that really a road we want to go down?
I'm so glad that we did decide to make that leap a couple of years ago because those are the ones that have really catapulted us and made us kind of already when we started tracking how we show up on, think ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot are our top three channels for AI search and they have a much higher conversion rate for demo requests than they do on organic, which is quite interesting. But those were the articles that kind of had us at number one.
already. So there definitely is an overlap but it's helped us know what kind of content people are wanting to see when they're using AI search because they're wanting comparisons, they're using it for research so more of an over indexing on bottom funnel rather than top funnel.
Tom Rudnai (04:19)
Yeah, okay. Well, I mean, that's where you will get the citations anyway. So I'm always interested, like, what are you measuring? Like, how are you defining success in AI search? And presumably, there was a process of kind of trying to somehow retrofit like all of the different prompts that we want to be kind of quote unquote, ranking for and how did you go about finding those? I know that's a challenge for lot of marketers.
Sarah Cameron (04:41)
Yeah, it definitely is. think last year was very much of a kind of test and learn year for us. So the prompts that we tracked were a mixture of ones that we already knew that we performed well on for SEO and a mixture of ones that we thought we would perform well on for AI search and then ones that we wanted to be ranking for. And so over the last year or so we've been, for example,
deployed a lot more agentic capabilities. So agentic has been quite a big keyword for us and making sure that we're synonymous with that in the market. So that kind of helped us create a list of our first kind of set of prompts. And then when we're tracking it, we're looking, really, I look at the kind of demo request kind of endpoint to make sure to see that conversion of like, you know, how many demo requests did we get in the past quarter?
you know, how many came from organic versus AI search, because apart from a relatively small investment, to be fair on like our AI search tracking tool, we use Otterly AI, who've been brilliant. They're they're quite a, they're startup. think they started a couple of years ago, but they've been great in kind of listening to our feedback and providing features that we're looking for.
That's what we're looking at. And that's where we've noticed that, you know, the conversion rate from people coming from AI search and then going on our website and clicking a demo is far greater than people obviously using organic because they're finding as probably they're not as high intent when they're on Google versus on chat.tpt, for example.
Tom Rudnai (06:25)
Yeah, well, mean, that's one of the kind of company you don't just get a link, you get a recommendation, right? So AI kind of functions as a trusted advisor. And I think that it feeds into how you need to treat it. I'm always saying you shouldn't, you shouldn't really look at AI as a channel. You should look at it as an actual like a market participant that you need to educate, enable on who you are, what, who you're for, when, how to recommend you. And then you can slowly over time, increase the strength of that recommendation. And that's one of the things we're trying to do a lot of work on here at Demand Genius is
Sarah Cameron (06:33)
Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (06:55)
measuring that next level below, not just are we getting a link, but is it a link with a recommendation? How is our network leading into the requirements and the way that the LLM talks about the market and things like that. But it's such an interesting space to be working in because it's just this whole new thing to get your head around.
Sarah Cameron (07:02)
Yeah.
Yeah,
for sure. And people have a lot of questions about it. Like even, you know, our exec team and the board have tons of questions about how we're showing up on AI search and what are we doing about it. So it's definitely kept me on my toes the last few months to make sure to give good updates on these are the prompts. This is how we're doing for each of these prompts. This is where we're, you know, it gives, utterly gives us a ranking in terms of like how many citations, you know, with the link and then also kind of where we sit.
on a grid versus any competitors that are also ranking for those terms. So it's kept me on my toes for sure.
Tom Rudnai (07:50)
Yeah. Well, that's, I think that's quite an interesting thing to talk about a little bit of like, how do you stay up to date? And then also how do you keep the organisation up to date? So let's take the first one first, because I think I speak to like events or meetups in London. I speak to marketers all the time who are like, I have a day job. I'm also meant to be the authority on AI and marketing, how we can use it as a kind of source and as an efficiency driver. And it is like overwhelming to stay on top of all of that. Are there like,
techniques or habits or particular sources that you have found particularly good for keeping you up to date.
Sarah Cameron (08:20)
Mm-hmm.
Honestly, I feel like LinkedIn keeps me up to date whether I want to want it to or not. Yeah, it definitely it definitely is a really hard thing to juggle. And because you know, as you said, like being an authority, it's not just on AI and marketing, it's on how and what our industry is doing. You know, we we report quite regularly on changing regulations and
know, sanctions updates, et cetera. And so I need to be somewhat abreast of all of that, you know, to make sure that our content is valuable. But then I also need to be abreast on, you know, all the new marketing things. I think LinkedIn is a good one for me. go, I try and like fit in a lot of webinars and throughout the month, you know, maybe one a month that is focused on marketing. And honestly, I mean, I don't know.
maybe their ads are working well, they're targeting me well, because I feel like I'm not even really having to research them, they're just in my inbox or they're on LinkedIn. So I try and diversify it, make sure that I'm not listening to the same voices all the time, because I think that's where you can get a bit of group mindset and not actually try things that are that innovative, you're just kind of doing what everyone else is doing, which might not work for your