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This podcast series provides practical, real-world insights on scaling digital businesses and adapting to major marketing shifts.
Here's a story about a brand that we own. In twenty twenty five, May, we saw in our standard attribution reports the consistent, channels that bring traffic to our site, which are Google, Meta, email, direct, organic, and all the rest of that. Nothing exceptional. If you fast forward one year to June 2026, we have an entirely new platform driving the highest new client conversion to our website, which wasn't even a blip on the actual radar from last year. So in one year, there's been this immense sea change from the standard platforms to AI LLM, and that's significant for the entire industry going forward.
Krishan:Welcome to episode three, The Great Search Shift hosted by two fifty three Media. This is operator's edge.
Manav:So yeah. So now we are in 2025, 2026, and there's a new change happening again. Right? So we're not just dealing with, you know, Google algos and other things and meta and, you know, ads and all of that. Now there is a fundamental shift which is happening.
Manav:So Manav, why don't you
Krishan:just talk about what the old model is? Let's
Manav:set Okay, the so the old model is, or was, or is still, it still It's there. I mean, let's get that straight. It's not gone anywhere right now. Basically you would search But when you
Krishan:say it hasn't gone anywhere, what's a percent of search that still happens through the search engines?
Manav:So majority of the search, like almost over 70% of the search, it still happens So it's through not search okay. No, no, not by a long shot. Right. Let's get that clear. So what was the way people were searching earlier was you had a couple of keywords, you had a phrase, you had a long tail, you know, sentence.
Manav:You go on a put it on a Google search engine or a browser, and it will give you a bunch of links, right? And it would say, here are the links. Now you go index it and you find it yourself and you can synthesize your own answer, right? It was basically, you know, if you go to a library and somebody giving you index cards and say, Go find your book yourself, right? So that's So the user it's had human.
Manav:To do Yeah, human had to do everything, right? They had to synthesize, collect what they needed and come up with an answer and make a decision. What's happening now, and the Shift is not going to happen, it is already happening, is the AI agent or the AI model is giving you the synthesized answers. They're like, okay, fits all So the
Krishan:is that what you mean by answer engine optimization?
Manav:Answer engine are giving you the answers. Optimization is what we're going to do to optimize that. So generative engines or LLMs or, you know, chat GPTs, GPTs, is generative pre trained transformers are giving you a generated answer. And what GEO is generative engine optimization. I think
Krishan:we just have to like keep it at the top, right?
Manav:This we're moving is something about the optimization part right now. That's a different thing. So this is basically the LLMs are giving you the answers synthesized based on your query. So now you're getting, you're actually having to do less work, right?
Krishan:And
Manav:it's giving you an answer. The question is, you still have to use your judgment, right? It's not as if they're going to spit out an answer and you are going to take that, right? So you have to still use your judgment whether you want to use their recommendation, their brand or whatever. Now, how is it doing it?
Manav:That's the question. What other changes which are happening?
Krishan:But you're not going to a website. No. It's all happening inside of that screen, right? Yes. Yes.
Krishan:So it's this whole no click concept.
Manav:So the clicks are going away, right? That's the thing. So initially what it was, you would see a blue link or hyperlink, you know, after the question you've asked and you would click on the link. The clicks are not happening because either the AI overview is giving you the answer you're looking for, or your, you know, your ChatGPT or your Claude or your Gemini is giving you the answer within itself, right? Now it may have a link, it may not have a link.
Manav:And you may not click on it because you already got your answer. So you're not going to these websites and you're not going through their services and you're not going through their products, right? It synthesized it and has given it to you. So that is what we are referring to is also as no clicks, which are happening. So, you know, a lot of times people will see the clicks going down on there, even though they're doing everything right, right?
Manav:Their keywords are ranking, the backlinks are doing strong, their domain authority is good, but still, you know, the conversions are down, the traffic is going on. It's a
Krishan:lot lot of this this is talk about no click search.
Manav:Yes. The no click search,
Krishan:right? Basically answer, the answers are being generated by the algorithm or not the algorithm, but the LLM, right? Absolutely.
Manav:Right. So they're synthesizing the answer because of, you know, whatever they have in the neural networks and in their data, right? A lot of that is still, I mean, the point to remember is that SEO is the scaffolding for AE over time. Okay, good. Let's just
Krishan:come back. So now we saw from the example that I gave about the brand that we own, we went from zero to, you know, I'll give you exact numbers. Okay. So on average, this brand does between 100,000 to $150,000 in revenue for search engine optimization. Correct.
Krishan:Okay. That's per month. Now we went from 0 to $10 by June without any additional, I know we were working on it because the team works on the AEO, we still need to have the SEO, right? A 100%.
Manav:That's serious.
Krishan:Can you sort of build the architecture so people understand that one doesn't work without the other? Because you don't want to burn the house down. That's built on the foundation that you need to build your artificial your answer engine, right? Right. Optimization or
Manav:your thing. So how is to take back to your example, why did your brand get cited? And suddenly people started buying from the answers they were getting from the LLMs, right? An interesting data point is you are more likely to convert. This is very, this is something which is happening.
Manav:It's still nascent, but it's happening. You're more likely to convert from answers on an LLM than you are from a traditional search thing, right? So, and even And why is that? It's the trust element. It's the trust element, right?
Krishan:Because you're, and this is how you can correct me if I'm wrong. Okay. Just to be honest, Manav in our world is the expert on AI and LLMs. I'm the guy who's working from the brand side to help try to convert all that knowledge into sales. So, but what I understand from a very topical perspective is that when you have the AI answer, you almost basically take that for, that's the code.
Krishan:That's, that's the answer. There's no second guessing it unless you really want to manipulate the, or it's way off, right?
Manav:Unless it's way off and people are trusting it. I mean, I don't think they should blindly trust any AI output because there is a level of hallucination which happens. But that's a whole different topic, right? But for the layman? For the layman, right?
Manav:Primarily Basically me. Yeah. So if you're putting in a very well thought of question, which is what we call the prompt, right? Where you've actually given it a lot of But we're talking about search for shopping,
Krishan:we're talking about, we're not talking about some deep, you know, analytical empirical question here. It's really about what's the best, you know, shoes for fall? What's the best camping gear for winter?
Manav:Right. So the trend which is happening now is that people are trusting the outputs more, right? It's not about trusting the outputs, but the likelihood of them moving to a purchase and the customer journey is quicker than it is from the traditional search engine, right, which could be anything. Why, to come back to your example of your brand, and why suddenly you went from $200 $100 some to $9,000 in less than a month from a channel which was basically nonexistent over eight, nine months ago is because there was a lot of work which was being done by the team to make sure that the brand gets cited, gets found by these AI, you know, engines and AI LLMs primarily, right, become a part of the networks. And the question is, how did this happen?
Manav:Right? It's not something that suddenly, you know, something changed and suddenly you were being cited in four different LLMs, right? What changed? So there was work which was going on at So the back
Krishan:again, I think just to create the hook for the next episode, we're going to go through the actual details of what needs to get done in the next episode. So work was being done in the background that allowed us to basically take advantage and see the results. But Manav, you know, the big thing that I forgot to mention, which is super important, is that the sales that happened were all new customers. Exactly. So 93% of the sales that came in were new customers, which has never happened before in any channel.
Krishan:Nope. Right? So whatever this experience that's happening through the Answer Engines, that it is driving a user to our website that through this trust positioning then purchases. And to be honest, our product has a very high AOV, which then makes it even more compelling. Right.
Krishan:Right. That something really incredible is going on here. And if you're not on board, you need to get on now.
Manav:Yeah, exactly. Hey, I mean, at this. I mean, it's just, it's a channel which gave you, and it's, this is only going to grow right from, It's going to grow twofold, threefold. This is going be your highest Delta channel going forward in the next year or so.
Krishan:So if you're not in the game?
Manav:It's going to be harder to catch up. And the longer you wait, the more difficult it's going to get. That is why, and then we'll talk about this, right? And that is why, and this happened in SEO, right? This happened in paid ads.
Manav:This happened in pretty much any digital marketing channel, right? This
Krishan:is Right. Remember when Facebook basically was really inexpensive and the conversions was really high. Everybody who's in this, the ad world or the agency world knows that.
Manav:Right. And I want to tie this back to, you know, people saying, Oh, SEO is dead and this and that. Absolutely not. And Google's going to lose its relevance because Google is the largest. I think nothing can be further than the truth.
Manav:Google is by far the most relevant and probably important channel there is still and will remain for a while, feel. Right? Because if you look at it, no matter what you do, your maximum searches are happening on Google.
Krishan:Still. Still. Right? Is a trend away.
Manav:It's a trend away, but it's still and there is a lot of information which is being taken out of Google as well. Right now, that's your top of your SEO site, right, your search engine. Then you move to your Google Ads site. You know, your Google Ads are going to have probably, in my opinion and my experience, the most bottom of the funnel clients when you're doing a search ad there, right? Out of all the other ones.
Manav:So I don't also believe that anything of that nature is happening, or it's all going to be LLMs and you know, this will lose relevance and ads will lose relevance. Think it's not going to happen.
Krishan:If we sort of bring it back, so you have, as an agency, right? I mean, as we've built this SEO muscle together. Right. And it's given us immense success and foundational support. Right.
Krishan:And I think without that, we would have had tremendous difficulty to retain our position for our brands.
Manav:Right.
Krishan:Right. Or even for our clients for that matter. So now with this momentous shift, where do you see our clients or even anybody listening to this show for brands for that matter, commit their resources? Are they pulling back on SEO and saying, you know, let's recommit those resources or is it an addition? How do you have that conversation with, you know, your own clients or how have we had that internally?
Manav:Right. So SEO is like, I always feel it's the best foundation, right? But today, just SEO alone is not enough. Right. Right?
Manav:It was not, this is not 2020 or 2019, So you need to do SEO. And I'm actually seeing people are now, clients are now actually opening up their channel, especially clients who are just completely on paid side or they would just want ads. So they're opening up. It's slow and it's steady. But the conversation has always been that you cannot ignore this as a channel.
Manav:You have to have it. And what you need to do now is because of what we just discussed about the LLMs coming into place, you need to add onto it. You need to start building on top of that to make sure that the answer engines and the LLMs are quoting you, citing you. Because like we've just discussed, and I'm sure there's so much noise about this, right? Everybody's heard that this is happening.
Manav:So we don't have to really, you know, kind of convince people that it's happening. Think everyone already knows this. So that's been my conversation with most of the clients.
Krishan:Okay. So, you know, when you have new, you're talking to new clients or, you know, when you're trying to explain what AI is doing for search and or even just answer engine optimization, I think most people get confused to make it simple. Or they just sort of eyes, their eyes gloss over and be like, Okay, I just can't handle it. So can you, you know, roll back the curtain here and demystify the black box? What is happening and how does the AI engine provide those answers that then people who hopefully are going to buy your products, you know, trust those answers on purchase?
Manav:Right. So, I mean, we can talk about AI and machine learning all day, right? But I'll keep it you know, to what's really relevant.
Krishan:Really sort of high level.
Manav:Yeah, high level. And I'm not going to talk about, you know, neural networks and regression and all of that. Right. That's that's gets two things. But how is it Why is it citing you?
Manav:How is it looking, right? So it's looking for the best answer. That's what it is. That's the simplest? Simplest thing.
Manav:It is looking for the best answer. The question is, how do you make sure that you have the best answer? Initially, algos in search engines were looking for authority, looking for, you know, a lot of information on the specific keyword, and they would kind of rank that against how it was being cited with other sites, right? Now what is it doing? It's looking for the best answers.
Manav:It's going to read through the fluff and it's going to go just looking for clear answers, which are machine discoverable and well written. So that's what it's going to do.
Krishan:So my brand story, I think we're going to get this again in episode four, but I have this beautiful brand story about my sun hats and how I developed them with my grandmother. It does not care. The AI engine doesn't care.
Manav:Does not care. Are you going to provide the correct advice?
Krishan:But my grandmother and I spent a lot of time on those sun hats.
Manav:Does not matter.
Krishan:I just don't care.
Manav:Nope. All right. They want to see, okay, you know, if the user is looking for, can it give me shade in, you know, 120 degrees weather? Right. That's the answer it's looking for.
Krishan:So it's very, very logical.
Manav:It's very logical, right? And it's going to do that. And that's why a lot of times when this initially started, if you, you know, went back about six, eight, ten months, a year, and you were looking at these, asking these questions on any LLM, you would look at here of brands you've never heard of before. I think a lot of people tried that. And now it's changing because people are now repurposing the content.
Manav:So that is what it does.
Krishan:Manav, when I think about AI in terms of the answer engine, it could not, like your answer that you're putting out to the world may not be the answer that the AI response provides back to the user. Right? So for example, if I have all this great content, but for whatever reason, it's not produced in the way that, for example, chat grabs the information, then I'm not presenting who I am, but chat, or it could be perplexity or, you know, Claude, is grabbing it from another source, which means that somebody else's opinion and somebody else's like diagnostic of me is what is being pushed out. My brand now loses its voice over its authenticity and its sort of marketing when you originally think of what your brand stands for. So like now I'm held hostage to somebody else's idea.
Krishan:So if you simplify this, like I think I might be confusing it. Can you give us an idea of like how you could put that into real terms so people can understand what I'm talking about?
Manav:Yeah. So it takes me back to the same, you know, point of how Search was happening earlier. First, the engine would just give you the links, right?
Krishan:I think this is when you walk into the room, that's the example, right? And somebody has already the networking event. So yeah, you go walk into a networking event and somebody's already told everybody about you. Okay, so start with it.
Manav:All right. So, you know, let me explain that with kind of an example, I think.
Krishan:Yeah, think if we put into the real world example, because I think it might be difficult for people to really sort of grab or grasp how important it is to control that narrative. Because if you don't, then somebody else does, right?
Manav:Yeah. And that's primarily what the engine is going to do. So I think, you know, a kind of relevant example is, you know, everyone goes to networking events and meeting people, right?
Krishan:I know. You love those things.
Manav:Yeah, exactly. So imagine you walk into this large networking event, right? There are hundreds of people there, your peers and everyone. But when you go in, everybody has already formed an opinion about you before they've even met you, right? Because somebody else has been telling them that, you know, this dude's nuts or something like that, right?
Manav:He's crazy. Or he's, you know, he's into fishing where you may just be into, you know, making computer chips. Right. Right? It could be completely misinformed.
Manav:Versus another person who walks in and he's like the belle of the ball, right? Because somebody else has gone and told the room something completely different about that guy and lifted, you know, propelled his So the
Krishan:idea is somebody has gone in and because he has taken control by having the correct structure of how to present the content, then he's controlled the narrative of that person.
Manav:Yes, this person, yeah, this person has gone, reached earlier. How bad does that suck? Yeah, this person has reached the room earlier, met with everybody, spoken to them, got their attention and then told them, okay, you know, X, Y, Z is this, ABC is this. And don't forget the trust, right? And he's already trusted, right?
Manav:So the person has already built his trust. And then you walk in, two hours late or later or one hour later, and look at the amount of work you have to do now to go back and, you know, reaffirm your image, right? So that's what's going to happen if, you know, if you're not, if you're going to fall behind. So, I mean, just again, you know, not a very simple example, but that's how I see it. Right.
Manav:Because when you're asking, everyone's done this, you ask a question, and if you're talking about a product or a brand, the AI gives you some sort of a, you know, generic overview of what it is. Right. It'll tell you, okay, this is good for this. This is not good for this because it's already been spoken to by somebody else. And they're saying, oh, wait a minute, no, these guys are not this.
Krishan:I think if you were to ask me what is one of the most, or what is the biggest gap or potential, minefield or like, I don't know what, like a mine, right? Not even a mine. It would be something where am putting myself in the shoes of my brand, right? That if I can't control what other people are saying about me, then all the work that I'm doing, especially if the world is moving towards this answer engine, right? Structure, then if I miss it or if I'm not attuned to it, then it's going to be very expensive.
Krishan:Right. And that scares me. Right.
Manav:It is. I mean, it's happened so many times earlier, right? People have missed and, you know, said, No, okay. And going back to your own example from episode one, from the first one, where you had to pivot from something which was an afterthought, which was 10% of your revenue to something which is now 80% of your revenue, right?
Krishan:Bring me back to those dark days. Bring you back
Manav:to those dark days. Imagine at that point, if you still said, No, let me wait another year. Let me wait two more years. You know, I'll still open another store, right? Yeah.
Manav:Your trajectory today. Yeah. So it's the same, right? Well, I
Krishan:don't think I'd have a trajectory.
Manav:Yeah, you wouldn't have a trajectory.
Krishan:Dead in the water,
Manav:man. Dead in the water. So imagine, and that's what happens when people get on, jump on, or brands jump on late these, you know, technologies, these new evolving trends.
Krishan:If they're late,
Manav:If they're late. Yeah. But this one's going
Krishan:to be even faster.
Manav:Already moving at a breakneck speed. We don't need to tell anybody how quick it is. Everyone's in it.
Krishan:I didn't realize how fast it was until I saw the data of our own brands. For me, you know, okay, it's there and we got to address it. But I mean, the evolution and the speed of it in terms of how fast it's all happening. I think specifically in the new client component, and you know, if I'm another brand listening to this, what is the Holy Grail? One is obviously, you know, word-of-mouth marketing, which is guerrilla marketing as cheap.
Krishan:But even that so I think it's really new clients, right? If you find where you can sort of mine those new clients and do that inexpensively, and you're not paying for the advertising, but you're only adding to the SEO, then you need to get on board quick, man.
Manav:Yeah, absolutely. And it's also, you know, again, my financial services, experience, if your brand, if you're seeing that your, and this was happening, was happening with your brand as well, right? If you're seeing that only your recurring, returning customers percentage is creeping up month on month, year on year, you know, that's kind of, it's a sign.
Krishan:Right. You're just not acquiring new clients.
Manav:You're not acquiring new clients, and eventually your graph is going to start to plummet.
Krishan:And also, I mean, if you're not acquiring new clients and you start, you know, hemorrhaging or not hemorrhaging, but the attrition on old repeat clients tends to happen too. Then, you know, you're going down, the whole pretty quickly.
Manav:Yeah, exactly. From like 60 old, 40 new split, if you move to 80 old and 20 new, that's showing something about your own business life cycle. So you have to keep finding ways of attracting new clients, no matter how, you know, strong of a position you may think you are right now, oh, I've got, you know, five or six or 50 or 500 legacy clients, right? But I don't need new that's going to hurt you in the long run.
Krishan:You know, when we now think about what the opportunity is here, most people are aware of this in some context and they know they have to do something, but even then maybe they're frozen or they don't know how to execute, right? Yeah. So do you see this as an opportunity for first movers?
Manav:100%. And it's not, it's not so much about, you know, the people I mean, you will only move once you decide and you've accepted that this is something which has to be done.
Krishan:And by the way, can I just be clear? That if you haven't accepted just based on my evidence, then go back and look at your attribution. If you don't have attribution, you got to have attribution. But it's super important that you look at the attribution that's happening and you recognize that this AILLM is actually driving new traffic and new conversions. So do it now.
Manav:Absolutely. And there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this is kind of exciting because it leveled the playing field also. So it's a great opportunity for like brands who earlier than were not doing too much on this to not catch up. And actually, they can even be ahead of a lot of the larger brands. So the time is now.
Manav:And it's already here. It's not coming. It's not going to come down to you. It's already here. And this is what we've been talking about, right?
Manav:This is the data that we talk about. It's going to move really fast. It's going to be like a U shape sort of
Krishan:a hockey stick transition. So there's a gap. First movers are the ones that can grab the voice. Correct. The risk is that somebody else controls the narrative about your brand or your agency.
Krishan:And that from our own data, AI traffic is better traffic than general search traffic.
Manav:Well, yeah, mean, the early trends seem to suggest this. Okay. This is again, early days, that's the opportunity, And the early trends do suggest this.
Krishan:Okay. And just from our own, you know, internal data, we've seen all of that. Yes. Okay. If you had to provide general numbers, are people looking to actually implement AI search or answer engine optimization into their business models?
Krishan:Or is this something they're still on the fence about? So,
Manav:they're now asking about it, inquiring about it. They're concerned about it. Some of them, a lot of them actually Why also taken the first
Krishan:won't they pull the plug? Why won't they be like, yes?
Manav:See, again, it's, you know, they just want to make sure that it's something worth doing. A lot of them, right? They also want to make sure they understand what they're doing, right? They also want to make sure that they want to also understand what agency is going to do. So the questions have started, they've started understanding that this is how it's going to go.
Manav:There's so much information and noise around this already, right? It's everywhere.
Krishan:Is it because people don't know what the ROAS is or they don't know what the return on investment is?
Manav:I think a lot of them do not know that. The tracking? The tracking is off. That's again, going back to your attribution conversation, right? A lot of people do not understand how to attribute the return on spend.
Manav:Right. Absolutely. So that is an issue, right? They will believe whatever the dashboard tells them.
Krishan:Right.
Manav:Without actually And it's
Krishan:easier for them to say, let me spend X amount on Meta or some sort of social platform. And then for that platform to tell me that I'm getting Y back.
Manav:Yeah, Right.
Krishan:But if you have the attribution like we do, then there is no question. There's no question.
Manav:You know exactly where it's going to go.
Krishan:And if you know, and again, I want to just reemphasize this, if we are clear that the conversions are new clients, then don't hold back. This is it.
Manav:I mean, it's a no brainer, right? If you're getting more new clients from a specific channel
Krishan:Than from any other channel.
Manav:Than from any other channel. Mean, that's
Krishan:what we've seen.
Manav:Yeah, a percentage or absolute terms. I mean, I think that's brilliant.
Krishan:Right. From zero to 10,000 in four months and what we expect to be at least 10x of that by the end of the year.
Manav:Right. And this is, again, this zero to 10,000, what you're talking about is not, is, has happened without you spending any money on the platform.
Krishan:That's right.
Manav:That's important.
Krishan:Yes, yes.
Manav:You've not spent any money on the platform. This was just the work which was being done at the back end, which has just kind of, you know, you have used the same structure to get this result. So it's not like you had an ad spend or something on this. This came understanding the model.
Krishan:Right. Understanding it, using the institutional knowledge of our SEO team, understanding what is required to be found in those answers. Right. And then having it go forward. Right.
Krishan:Like releasing it. Okay. All right. Good. Okay, Manav, if we need to close with sort of one big takeaway just from this episode, it's a mind shift, mindset shift.
Krishan:It's this concept of clicks and being one of many options in terms of a search result to the only answer. That's how I heard what we discussed today.
Manav:Yeah, absolutely.
Krishan:All right. So before we end the episode, there's one piece of homework that we want all of you to do before you move on to the next episode. And that is go into the AI platform that you use the most, if you don't I'm sure you have one at this point. And let's say it is chat. I personally like Claude, but if it's chat, then type in for your clients or for your own brand, a question about your brand that's important, to the audience that you're servicing, or if it's an agency, whatever specifically is important to your company.
Krishan:And then look and see what the answers are. And we'll discuss this in the next episode.