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We share our thoughts and ideas on how to grow a business.
It takes time for a young brand that
has basically no brand presence at the
start because when people are asking
ChatGPT, Claude for recommendations
of companies in that space, what
those LLMs are gonna do is two things.
They're gonna pull from their training
data, and their training data is
obviously gonna bias towards the biggest
companies in that space because that's
what they saw when they were ingesting
all of their initial training data.
And so if you're an up-and-coming
brand, you're not in that.
So your avenue in to AI
visibility is search.
A lot of people in marketing right
now are talking about AI citations.
That's a means to the end.
You want them to cite you so that you're
influencing what they're doing, but if
they're not recommending you as a brand
in the output text, very few people are
clicking into the citations and reading
them and then concluding on their own.
I wanna point this out as an example
of another myth in AI search that
our data with Redline and many other
clients busts, is that this idea
that you can't get this kind of
visibility with self-promotional posts.
Absolutely, you can
Welcome to another episode of the
Grow and Convert Marketing Show.
Today's episode is gonna be a solo
episode with just me walking through a
case study of growing the AI visibility
of a young brand that does not have
a lot of online brand presence.
Benji is in Europe, so we're
doing this solo from California.
And the brand I wanna talk
about is Redline Capital.
And by the way, for those that
are listening on the podcast,
this one's gonna be a tough one to
follow along without the visuals.
So you can watch us on YouTube
if you wanna see the visuals
that I'll be pointing to.
But I will try my best to narrate so that
you still get value from the podcast.
So I'll narrate what I'm actually pointing
to and looking at as best as I can.
And, um, if you really wanna see the
visuals and get the full benefit of
this one, you should go to YouTube.
You can find all of these episodes
on YouTube at Grow and Convert.
So let's talk about the client.
It's Redline Capital.
They're a business funding company,
and, uh, they came to us after having
done mostly outbound and wanted to
sort of build an inbound engine,
and we are helping, uh, Nicole,
the founder there, do the organic
side, so both SEO and AI search.
And what I wanna talk about
is their AI search visibility.
It takes time for a young brand that
has basically no brand presence at the
start, because when people are asking
ChatGPT, Claude for recommendations
of companies in that space, w-what
those LLMs are gonna do is two things.
They're gonna pull from their training
data, and, and their training data is
obviously gonna bias towards the biggest
companies in that space because that's
what they saw when they were ingesting
all of their initial training data.
They saw the biggest brands
that were mentioned everywhere.
And so if you're an up-and-coming
brand, you're not in that.
So your avenue in to AI
visibility is search.
Because boiling down a complicated
thing, um, to sort of oversimplify,
there's really two ways.
There's not strictly, strictly there's
also content partners and other things,
but for most brands, it's worth thinking
of it as two ways to influence LLMs.
Number one is being in their initial
understanding of that space, what
I casually call training data.
In LLM speak, it's referred
to as their parametric model.
So in this case, business loan, business
funding companies, it has a parametric
model, meaning it has parameters that sort
of understands the concept in that space.
Just like if you ask ChatGPT a
physics question, it has a, a model
based on all of the physics stuff
that it has ingested in its initial
training of how physics works.
So same with companies in your space.
It has its understanding, its model
of the world, and that comes from its
initial training data and whatever else
they're doing in the background, and
that's called the parametric model.
If you're an up-and-coming brand,
it's very hard to influence that.
You really can't do much other than
just be present and do your marketing.
So, so to get into that is just all
of your marketing influences that.
So your avenue in, what a lot of people
refer to as your wedge- Your avenue in
is through search because that's the
other component that influences LLMs.
When you ask LLMs, we've all experienced
this, when you ask LLMs for product
recommendations, what do they do?
They say searching the web.
That's your ticket in.
What they're actually doing on the
back end, of course, is combining that.
They have their existing
model of how your space works.
It's a parametric model
based on the training data.
Then they search the web to make sure
that it has the most current information,
and it sort of synthesizes it.
We don't know exactly
how it does that, right?
Unless you're a machine learning
engineer at OpenAI, Anthropic, or
Google, and even then they may not
actually fully know the dynamics of
how this-- how, how it synthesizes.
But that's your wedge in when you're
a new brand is through search.
That foundation is Prioritized GEO.
So I'm gonna start off by showing you,
just reminding folks what Prioritized
GEO is and how that pyramid works.
So I'm on our Prioritized GEO post, and
just to review the pyramid, everything I
explained is sort of the argument behind
why we put owned content as tier one.
Or really you can talk
about tier one and two.
Is we're saying that that-- And we
have a full video on prioritized GEO
and, and so you can find that on our
channel or that episode in our podcast
feed wherever you're listening to this.
But our argument is most people on GEO
are talking about this tier three content
tweak stuff, which is once they've
gotten to your site, how do we help make
your site more crawlable to these LLMs?
Our argument is most of this is hearsay.
We have yet to see good data that it, it's
sort of any of these things are proven,
and they can already index your site.
They can understand English
like a regular person.
So they understand natural
language just fine.
And so instead, your avenue in is to
show up on when they search the web for
product or service recommendations when
their users are asking about brands
and companies like yours and products
like yours and services like yours.
And so there's two ways to do that.
Be in other people's results on Google
for those searches that the LLMs
might do or have your own result.
We suggest almost everyone
start with their own result.
You could do number two, which
is off-site, but the problem with
off-site is you can't control the
narrative, and it's not your site.
It just takes time, effort, money
to do this, and if you get a
mention, it's a short mention.
The owned content, and we'll show an
example with Redline in this case study,
what the advantage that owned content
has is several over off-site mentions.
Number one, you don't need
to ask anyone for permission.
Almost every company has the
operational horsepower to be able
to publish content on their site.
N- So there's just like an execution ease.
Number two, you have all the space in
the world to control your narrative.
And what we argue in topic-based
GEO is that actually the way LLMs
recommend solutions in their output
text and say, "Use this brand."
Not-- We're not talking about citations,
and I'll show with Redline the
difference when they actually make a
recommendation and say, "Use it," which
is f- which is what you're going after.
A lot of people in marketing right
now are talking about AI citations.
That's a means to the end.
You want them to cite you so that
you're influencing what they're doing.
But if they're not recommending
you as a brand in the output text,
very few people are clicking into
the citations and reading them
and then concluding on their own.
They're going off of what ChatGPT, Claude
recommend to them in that product space.
And so that recommendation happens
with an extreme amount of specificity
That when someone-- And there's a
third post that sort of completes our
trifecta of AI strategy called invisible
prompts, and this diagram at the top
shows it exactly, is when somebody
asks, "I'm looking for something."
In this example, it says, "Find me a
content agency." So for those listening,
the diagram is a schematic of an
iceberg, and the iceberg above the
surface, someone asks ChatGPT, "Find
me a content agency." You think that
that's it, but this is not Google.
Actually, ChatGPT, and we show under the
surface a bunch of text representing this,
knows a bunch of detail about that user,
and it's using that detail to recommend
content agencies that are right for them.
So even if the prompt doesn't say, "Find
me a content agency for XYZ scenario
with this budget in this space with
this scen- use case, and we have these
pain points, and we have these specific
stuff," ChatGPT already knows that.
Claude already knows that about the user
from their context history, so it will
recommend things for them, meaning your
content needs to be really specific and
tying all the way back to the GEO pyramid.
I realize I didn't explain this
to folks that are just listening.
There's three tiers to our
prioritized GEO pyramid.
The bottom foundation is tier one
owned content, the middle tier
two off-site mentions, and the
top tier three on-site tactics.
And our argument is you work your way
from the bottom up in terms of priority.
That's why it's called prioritized
GEO, because we think too many brands
are wasting time doing it in inverse.
So the reason tier one is owned
content and not off-site is that
gives you the canvas in which to
paint the picture for LLMs of all the
really specific scenarios where your
brand, product, or service is best.
What users, what scenarios,
the case studies.
You can't do that off-site.
You can maybe ask, pay some two hundred
dollars for this little mention of
you or a link in some other thing,
but the context isn't there for you
to be recommended really specifically.
So that's all of our strategy background.
Now let's look at Redline Capital.
So what I'm pulling up here
is our Traqer dashboard.
This is at traqer.ai.
We built this.
So unlike Peak, Profound, and
all, this is an AI visibility tool
built by us practitioners of this.
We do this every day.
This is our lifeblood.
We do this for clients.
This is our business.
We're not sort of tech bros
building a tech product without
understanding of the space.
We use it every day.
I wanna start off with a simple graph
of LLM visibility percentage Combined
across all the five LLMs we're tracking
for Redline Capital, ChatGPT, Perplexity,
AI Overview, AI Mode, and Gemini.
And you see this sort of
nice linear, steady growth.
Back in November when we started--
We actually started with them in
May, but when we started tracking
them in Traqer, it was November.
We had z- basically zero visibility
for the topics we were tracking, and
now we're at twenty-nine percent,
nearly thirty percent visibility.
What that means, what is that percentage?
It means on the topics we're tracking,
or in, in this case actually it's prompt
base, of the eighty-three prompts we're
tracking, almost thirty perc- thirty
percent of the time, Redline Capital is
either mentioned as a brand or cited.
And by the way, those are very different,
and we're gonna separate the two shortly.
But this is just the percentage of the
prompts you're tracking where you have
either a brand mention or a citation.
We actually think that's not the
best way to do it, and that's how
actually a lot of other AI visibility
tools work, by the way, is they
just give you that one number.
Twenty-nine percent.
Last week it was twenty-nine percent.
The week before it was
twenty-two, so you see growth.
And there is growth here.
The problem with this is if we scroll
down, we see something very different.
Now I'm gonna scroll down the
ta- Traqer dashboard, and you see
that it's organized by topic area.
It's not just a bunch of disparate
prompts on one line each.
So we see same-day business loans
we're just setting up, by the
way, so that we're gonna ignore
that, so there's no prompts there.
But the next topic we see is
revenue-based financing companies.
After that, something very different,
construction line of credit.
Let's just explore that for a second.
And actually wait, and I'll contrast
that with something where we have a lot
more mentions, which is merchant cash
advance for electrician, merchant cash
advance for senior care facilities,
and lawn care business cash advance.
So there's these three topics where the
folks watching on YouTube see a bunch
of green bubbles, a bunch of citations,
a bunch of brand mentions across the
prompts in these topics, merchant cash
advance, essentially for electricians,
senior care facilities, or lawn care.
But if we scroll back up for these
topics like revenue-based financing
companies or construction line
of credit, we see almost nothing.
For revenue-based finance companies,
they have zero visibility right now.
For construction line of credit,
only one in Perplexity for one of
the prompts, there is a citation,
no brand mention, nothing else
anywhere else in any other AI tool.
You see the problem is when you
see a graph like this of just
a single visibility percentage
going up, all of that topic-based
nuance and detail is gone.
So if This company was like, "Listen,
the only thing that matters to us is
visibility for revenue-based financing
companies." Then you would l- It looks
like you have a bunch of visibility,
but actually you don't in that topic.
If you don't separate the way you're
analyzing your AI visibility by topic,
you lose this really important nuance.
So this other way we vis-- And
then this other thing we can do is
there's a misalignment of incentives.
That's the other problem, is a marketing
team or an agency that wants to make
themselves look better to executives,
all they have to do is stop tracking
revenue-based financing companies,
construction line of credit, or
basically remove any prompts where
there's zero visibility, and all of a
sudden these percentages will go up.
So what we built into Traqer that
we think is a more honest and
accurate w-way to visit is, uh, view
it, is topic-based visibility, and
you see even better growth there.
What this is counting is it's
not a percentage anymore.
It's a, it's a count, a raw count number.
You see on the Y-axis it's zero to fifty.
And what this is counting is
the number of topics or really
topic and LLM combinations.
So we're tracking nineteen topics
total, but nineteen times five is
ninety-five, or at least I hope it is.
Yeah, it must be, 'cause
twenty times five is a hundred.
So nineteen times five is ninety-five
different topic and LLM combinations.
On how many of them do we have some
visibility, meaning at least one prompt
in the topic is lit up green with a brand
mention or a citation, and we can toggle
that later, or, and h- and how many of
them have greater than fifty percent
of the prompts we have some visibility?
And that's the teal line versus
some visibility is the orange line,
and you see both of them going up.
This cannot be gamed or manipulated.
If you remove, if, if the sort of
self-serving marketer, agency or
in-house, removes prompts or reve--
or, or entire topics, like they
just remove revenue-based financing
companies, these numbers don't go
up because they're not a percentage.
It's a raw count.
So the only way to get this to go up
is actually to start showing up for
topics, and therefore, we think this is
a more honest way to do it, to track it.
Most AI visibility tools don't have this.
They're not built like this because
they're not built by practitioners who
are doing this every day for real clients,
where real business is on the line.
They're just building tech tools.
So this is a more honest way to do it.
Now, now let's separate.
So, so we have overall growth for this.
How are we getting this growth?
Simple.
Tier one owned content If we look
into this, now that we see the
topics, we can go into merchant cash
advance for senior care facility, and
you see that for the prompt fastest
merchant cash advance for senior care
facility, we have a brand mention.
And actually, before I click into it,
let me answer a question some may have,
which is where do these prompts come from?
And, and there's a misunderstanding
from a lot of folks that, oh,
people are searching for this.
They think Prompt tracking in AI
visibility is the same or analogous
to keyword research or keyword
volume rank tracking in, in SEO.
Specifically, they think when tools like
Traqer come up with these prompts, that
that means they know that that's what
people are searching for in ChatGPT.
We do not, and my argument is almost
every single other tool does not.
There are some, like Profound,
that have access, or they say they
have access to some dataset of, I
don't know, millions, you can look
up what they say on their website.
Don't hold my word for the exact number
or, you know, some large number of
prompts that real users have done.
It's true, they have that.
That's called clickstream data.
What that is, is people who have opted
in, hopefully knowingly, opted in to
having their web browsing tracked.
And so those people with, with either,
like, a web extension or something,
something, they've opted into this.
They maybe get some small amount
of money or some, you know, tokens
or something, something in some
system or with some company.
They get their web browsing tracked,
and they are getting data of what these
people are typing into these AI tools.
There's a couple issues with this that
hamper or don't give you the accuracy
that people think it gives you.
People think it's like SEO, where,
like, Google has all this search data,
and they just tell you in Google Key-
Google Keyword Planner back in the day,
or these third-party tools like Semrush,
Ahrefs, they just tell you search volumes
because they're tracking that stuff.
It doesn't work like that
for a couple reasons.
Number one, that clickstream data is a
tiny fraction of the amount of people
that are using AI tools, especially if
you're selling high-end B2B services.
If you're saying, "Oh, our ideal
customer is the head of HR, the CEO
founder," do you think those people are
downloading these web extensions and
having all of their web browsing tracked?
I don't think so.
So if you're tracking people-- If you're
getting the data from people who are
exchanging getting their web browsing
tracked for a few dollars or points in
some, like, online system, and that's
not your target customer, your target
customer is CEO, CMO, CIO, CTOs, then
there's alre- alr- already a mismatch, so
you're not gonna see their real behavior.
But the second one is invisible prompts.
Even if your tool were to actually
tell you exactly what they're typing
in, what it doesn't tell you is the
contextual detail that's giving a
personalized answer to your user that
you can't reproduce, that your tool,
whether it's Traqer, whether it's Pique,
whether it's Profound, whether it's
Scrunch, whatever, cannot reproduce.
It doesn't have the
personalization of your user.
So when your user asks, "Find me a
content agency," they're not gonna get
the same answer as you, and we have an
example here of it inside this post.
So what Traqer does-- This is
one of the reasons, actually
the reason we track by topic.
The n- the first reason is we organize
by topic is we are, I think the only
tool I know of that acknowledges this
blind spot of all of these tools and
says, "None of us really know exactly how
someone is going to ask for merchant cash
advance companies to get a cash advance
if they run a senior care facility."
People are not gonna literally type
this in, but instead what we wanna know
is if this topic comes up naturally
between user and LLM, how likely is it
that Redline Capital, our client, is
gonna be mentioned by different LLMs?
So that's why we ask about it in multiple
different ways to say on average over…
If you ask about it five ways,
you can ask about it 10 ways.
We have clients in this dropdown
where there are some topics where
our strategist has asked about it 20
different ways to see what is that number.
That we think is far more accurate.
So when I click into, for example, fastest
merchant cash advance for senior care
facility, and we see a brand mention
from ChatGPT, so we see the screenshot.
It says number three, Redline
Capital, and it has a little blurb.
It's not because someone's
literally-- we know that people
are literally typing this in.
No.
W- This is just the best
approximation of this is one of
many ways you can ask about it.
But you see at the topic level how
you don't need to… When you, when
you measure in the topic-based way,
you don't need to literally know
anymore exactly how they ask about
it, because it doesn't really matter.
You say, "Look, we asked about
merchant cash advance for senior care
facilities in three different ways,
and regardless of how they ask, it
seems like every single time ChatGPT
either cites or mentions Redline.
Same with Perplexity, Gemini less,
et cetera." And then when you look
at a difference between topic, you
can say, look at that versus if you
asked without a specific industry,
electrician, senior care, or lawn, if
you just ask for the fastest merchant
cash advance providers, it drops down.
We are cited, but we're not
mentioned as a brand once as fastest.
So now the marketer has something
to do, the content marketing
team has something to do.
If it matters to you as a brand in
your positioning to be the fastest
and to be noted and recommended by
LLMs as the fastest merchant cash
pa- advance provider, you need to
provide the content that does it.
Now it looks like here we're starting to
at least get the citations, and over time
brand mentions hopefully will show up.
But that means you have
something to work on.
You can publish more about this, you
can change your positioning around
this, you can tweak your content to
talk about how fast you are, et cetera.
Or in a, in a starker contrast, now
you're like, "Look, we're-- we have
no visibility around revenue-based
financing. No matter how we ask about it,
it's mentioned zero." See what I mean?
Now, you don't need to know
exactly how people ask about it.
That whole SEO way of thinking
of like, what's the keyword
that people are typing in?
Topic-based sort of moves that to the
side and says, "You don't really need to
know how you're asking about revenue-based
financing companies, because however
you're asking, we don't seem to be
visible. We asked about it five ways,
and if you don't trust that, ask about it
five more ways to-- for a total of 10."
Okay, so now let's click in
fastest merchant cash advance
for senior care facilities.
Redline is mentioned and cited.
I wanna point this out as ano- an
example of another myth in AI search
that the, that our data with Redline and
many other clients busts, is that this
idea that you can't get this kind of
visibility with self-promotional posts.
You can.
We're the number one citation,
the first citation, and it's
literally mentioning us.
And let's compare.
So inside here, how does it mention us?
Redline Capital.
ChatGPT says, "Specifically advertises
MCAs," a particular nuance in our
industry, "for senior care facilities,"
merchant cash advance, and says, "It
can fund qualifying facilities the same
day based primarily on monthly revenue."
And if we open the actual
post, we can find it.
Look, h- the third bullet in the intro,
how much paperwork do they require?
Most MCA lenders, merchant cash
advance lenders, claim they can fund
same day or next day, but they rarely
deliver because their underwriting
process demands too much documentation.
And so you should look for some that
do, and it advertises Redline Capital
and Age Two same-day cash advance.
And we say here in bold, we qualify
applicants based entirely on monthly
revenue, which is what cuts out
the extensive financial review
that slows down traditional ones.
And if we go back and look at what
ChatGPT says, look at this, "Specifically
advertises cash advance for senior
care facilities and says it can fund
qualifying facilities the same day
based primarily on monthly revenue."
Where is it getting
that argumentation from?
It's getting it from this post.
This is the only thing on the entire
site that talks about merchant cash
advance for senior care facilities.
So this has-- This should bust all
of these things that you see on
LinkedIn, this narrative right now
that, oh, you, you can't produce
your own content that self-promotes
you and have it work for LLMs.
Absolutely, you can.
It's reading this content.
By the way, it's Googled its way to it.
We can check that, merchant cash
advance senior care facility.
Now, I don't know the, what
the exact fan-out query is,
but this should be good enough
Number one result, Redline Capital.
Why is it number one?
Because this is such a specific query.
We're gonna be number one.
Although there are others.
The, the number two and three are
MCA debt for assisted living, MCA
for assisted living facilities.
And so it's found it through Googling.
There's no way for a brand as new
as Redline that this was just in
its parametric model 'cause it
knew in the training data that
Redline Capital had merchant cash
advance for senior care facilities.
No way.
It found it through Googling.
We wrote… So let me walk through
the marketing steps to do this.
Identify, we haven't really talked about
this, but identify that senior care
facilities is a segment that matters for
them, that there's some search volume,
that they can do merchant cash advance
type loans for senior care facilities.
Produce a detailed article about that,
explaining and selling Redline, being
unapologetically self-promotional,
casting aside this LinkedIn
marketing guru nonsense that you
can't do self-promotional listicles.
We do it.
Have it rank Then if anyone who has
a senior care facility, by the way,
they do not need to type this into
ChatGPT just to emphasize what I spent
the last ten minutes talking about it.
As per invisible prompts,
they don't need to.
They can say, "We-- I run a--" They
can say, "My business needs m- uh, some
kind of cash advance or a loan." And if
they're a regular user, which nowadays
business-wise almost everyone is of
it, of Claude, ChatGPT, whatever, it'll
say, "Okay, let me go find business
loan, cash advance type companies
that serve businesses like yours."
If you don't believe me, read this post.
There's an example in there of that,
of someone asking for a content
agency who found us, which by the way,
is the founder of Redline Capital.
That I did, I did not plan that.
That's just a nice coincidence,
the example we have in here.
Long story short, that, that's
sort of the, the story arc from
beginning to end of how you get
this kind of brand visibility.
So for young brands, th-
that's our recommendation.
You start at tier one, identify what the
actual specific… And so read Prioritized
GEO, read Invisible Prompts, read
Topic-based GEO or if you don't, just I
explained it to you already in this video.
Is you need to identify the really
specific topics, the use cases, the,
you know, maybe case studies, the pain
points of your users, what type of user.
Just like cash advance for senior care
facility, for electricians, for lawn
care, et cetera, for manufacturing.
You see we're starting to get
visibility for manufacturing in Traqer.
You identify those,
produce good SEO articles.
That's a separate topic.
You can read our-- you listen to our
other videos or episodes about good SEO.
You can read Pain Point SEO.
Google Pain Point SEO for sort of the
starting foundation of our SEO practice.
We've been talking about
that for ten years.
And you produce this pub, uh, work,
you do proper SEO, the LLMs discover
you when they search the web.
They will search the web for these types
of product, brand, business, product
recommendation, service recommendations.
They'll see yours and they'll, and
they'll, and they'll parrot it back.
It is not a coincidence that when I scroll
through the Traqer dashboard for Redline,
a new and early brand that's seeing
this kind of nice overall AI visibility
growth, that where that initial growth
is happening and coming from is these
specific industry-specific topic areas.
Because if we're just asked for
general same-day loans, construction
line-- or construction line of
credit is, is industry specific,
but this is really competitive.
Revenue-based financing
companies is a classic example.
Zero visibility.
One, two, three, four, five prompts
across five LLMs, 25 combinations, not
a single citation or brand mention.
This is really competitive, and
Redline Capital is an up-and-coming
new brand, so this is gonna take time.
But in the meantime, what you can
do is you don't need to be the
revenue-based financing company that
all LLMs recommend from day one.
That's not your only avenue in.
There must be specific customers, use
cases, verticals where you shine, where
you have case studies, where you can
talk about how you do really well and
how you're a good fit there, whether
it's your product, service, whatever.
And there you can get those
recommendations, and our argument is
that's more aligned with how people
actually use LLMs They don't ha--
They don't put in short key phrases.
Sometimes they do, but mostly
they're having conversations, and
the LLMs have this invisible context.
There's a ton of context that's invisible
to all of us and your AI search tool.
But they're gonna recommend
based on that context.
So they're gonna know when someone
asks for a merchant cash advance, what
kind of business they run, and they're
gonna look for content and companies
that say, "Hey, we specialize in this,"
and nobody else, your competitors
aren't doing this, so if you do
this, you're winning out of the gate.
Okay, some other cool Traqer
features before I close.
You can see how this changes when I move.
So right now I'm at… I'm using
a Traqer feature at the top.
It defaults to both, so everything
it's measuring in terms of visibility
is both citations and brand mentions.
But if we move to just brand mentions,
look at how much lower the numbers are.
Now only fifteen and three.
You see the shape of the graph.
There's, there's still growth in
the graph, but it's much lower.
This is natural and normal, and this
is also why this narrative that's
happening in AI search optimization
online of citation, citation.
How do you get a citation?
How do you get ChatGPT to cite?
Citations do not equal brand mentions.
It's not the same thing.
It's much easier to get cited,
but if you are cited, like here,
let's do-- look at an example.
Nope, I have it filtered
to brand mentions.
If we look at just citations,
or actually let's go to both and
find a scenario where there's a
citation but not a brand mention.
Merchant cash advance, same-day funding.
ChatGPT cites us number nine.
We are one of a ton of citations.
I'm gonna read them out
for people listening.
NerdWallet, NerdWallet, Simply Funding,
Wall Street Journal, money.com,
business.com, lendingtree.com,
forbes.com, then Redline Capital.
First of all, I think that by
itself is pretty impressive.
If you wanna talk about, you
know, self-promotional listicles
from a brand, uh, don't work.
Yeah, right.
Look at this.
ChatGPT merchant cash
advance same-day funding.
Look at every other domain I listed.
NerdWallet, Nerd-- Simply Funding,
Wall Street Journal, money.com,
business.com, LendingTree,
Forbes, and then our client, Redline
Capital Inc, one of a mi- million
different business loan companies.
It works.
But there's a difference between
being cited and being mentioned.
If you actually open up ChatGPT and
you read this as a user, are you really
gonna click on the ninth citation?
So this is a good sign from
a marketing standpoint.
Um, and in fact, it
actually mentions no brands.
So that's another thing is it
actually doesn't even mention
any brands because it, it treats
this like an informational query.
But if you're s-- Um, so this is gonna
take time, and that's normal It takes
time to actually be a brand that, that,
that it decides to actually mention.
Another reason why you do topic-based SEO
and start with really specific topics.
So we can toggle there and, and,
and see brand versus citation.
Most tools don't even default to
this, so, so, so pay attention.
Citations is not the same thing as brands.
And then the last thing I wanna close
on is talking about attribution.
When this is starting-- So it would be
too much sort of revealing confidential
and private information from the client
to be showing their internal analytics,
but I can explain it at a high level.
What we're seeing here as we're
getting coverage, especially in AIO
and AI mode, is actually less people
clicking into the actual articles.
Meaning when these AI tools mention
you as a brand Redline Capital right
here as a brand, and that's ChatGPT.
If we look at AI Overview, they
Google fastest merchant cash advance
for senior care facility, and it
mentions Redline Capital right here.
In this case, in this AI Overview
I'm showing it happens to be linked.
You know from your own experience
reading AI Overviews, I'm sure the vast
majority of the time it's mentioning
brands, it does not link them.
What are the people gonna do?
They're going to copy and paste the
name or just remember it, open a
new tab and Google the brand name.
They're gonna get to the homepage,
and they're gonna click in that way.
You will have no idea what piece of
content actually got you that lead
because it looks like either direct
to your homepage or it looks like
it's Google organic to your homepage.
Not entirely, like here we are the
number one citation in AI Overviews.
They may actually click
into it, so you'll see some.
We're not talking about
complete one and zero.
It's not like traffic to individual
blog posts has gone to zero.
That's absolutely not true.
But it's significantly reduced because
some sizable portion of people that
would've normally in the pre-AI
world have clicked into the article
'cause that was the only option
before AI Overview existed, before
ChatGPT existed a few years ago.
Now they're gonna see it mentioned
by name, Redline Capital.
And so from a measurement standpoint,
what you need to do as a marketing team
reporting to executives, reporting to
clients or whatever, is you're gonna
need to have more holistic attribution
where you're looking at what about
overall leads from just the homepage?
What about overall leads from
direct in GA4 versus total organic
and also leads from specific URLs,
articles, and blog posts on your site?
And you look at that holistically
and see overall growth.
Because as your AI search visibility
grows, you're gonna start to see,
oh, we're just like the individual
blog post stuff's not happening.
Yeah, because you're mentioned
as a brand up top now.
So this, I hope, was useful.
Ask questions.
If you want me to help break this down,
if you want us to break it down or give
advice on your brands, ask us questions
in the comments, or you can email us.
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