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Every day marketers sift through dozens of headlines, posts, and slacks telling us about the latest and greatest trend we should be following.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and like you have to figure it out by yourself. But you don’t have to do it alone. Content Matters with Nicole MacLean (Compose.ly’s CRO) is your digital partner for filtering the trends and focusing on the content that matters most — creating connection that drive results.
For more, head to our site: https://compose.ly/content-matters
Produced in partnership with Share Your Genius: https://shareyourgenius.com/
Kaylee Peterson (00:00):
What kind of changes in some ways about content is it becomes a lot more about that unique brand first thought leadership content that only you can provide, where maybe those one-on-one belongs don't drive traffic the way they used to. But if you can establish yourself as an industry thought leader with insights only you have from your experience, that will set you apart. The brand signals play a big difference on is your brand respected and well-known. It's more likely to be cited in chat, GBT or any of the LLMs.
Nicole MacLean (00:34):
I'm Nicole McLean and this is Content Matters Created in partnership with Share Your Genius. This show is your digital partner for filtering the trends and focusing on the content that matters most, creating connection that drives results. Let's cut through the marketing chaos together. Hello. Hello everyone, and welcome to a special edition of Content Matters. Now I believe in taking our own medicine here at Compose.ly, eating our own dog food, drinking your own champagne. Pick the cliche of choice, but we talk a lot about the importance of repurposing good content across channels and more importantly, optimizing that content for the channel you're repurposing it on. So in that spirit, myself and our incredible director of SEO, Kaylee Peterson recently sat down with a few of our clients to talk about everyone's favorite topic, AI search. We got really good feedback and so wanted to repurpose and share it with all of you.
(01:29):
Now in the webinar, Kaylee gives a great overview of AI search as we understand it today, a few bets that we're taking to help with visibility and performance for brands, and a couple great takeaways that you can start implementing in your content. So with that, sit back and I hope you enjoy. Hello everyone and welcome to our Ask Me Anything webinar on AI search. Joined with our director of SEO, Kaylee Peterson. Kaylee, thanks for hopping on. Hi, thanks for having me. There's a lot of, I think Miseducation and a lot of fearmongering around ai, so I think my first goal for everyone here is just to say like, yep, things are changing. This is out there as marketers, it's fun. It's just yet another thing we're going to learn and master and become really good at. But hopefully this will be the most fun discussion around AI you have because we're not here to make it sound like the world is ending, not it's just changing a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Perfect. But before we dive into the questions, I thought it would be helpful just to kind set a lay of the land, a little kind state of what's happening, help you guide through again, what's Miseducation, what has some validity, where should I be focusing? So talk us through where we are right now, what we should be focusing on, and then we'll dive into some of the audience submitted questions.
Kaylee Peterson (02:53):
Yeah, perfect,
Nicole MacLean (02:54):
Perfect.
Kaylee Peterson (02:55):
So I think in the land of AI, as everyone probably, it does change pretty rapidly. It's growing really rapidly. So everything that we say right now, we may come back to you in three months and be like, just kidding, it's totally changed again, but state of where we're at right now with Google specifically, Google is obviously leaning really heavily into AI and not just in their Gemini app, but in search. You'll have seen it in AI overviews where almost every search you make right now has an AI generated snippet of the results. You'll also see that now in the people also ask sections, which used to be a snippet of a question answer. They're now AI overviewing inside FAQs. They have just in May released AI mode, which is essentially like an LLM for searching, where you just have conversational searches, you can upload photos.
(03:50):
It is an opt-in feature right now, but you've probably, if you're using Google at all right now, you're getting those prompts to set it as your default search method. So they're really pushing everything moving to ai. Their goal, as we understand it, are zero click searches where people don't leave Google, they get all the information they need right there. They treat Google as its source of information rather than the websites themselves. So obviously that's really scary for businesses that were really reliant on driving traffic to their website, especially if you're in the publisher field or the affiliate marketing field where traffic literally was money. It's a pain point. I will say for a lot of our clients and a lot of the websites that we look at that our traffic doesn't necessarily generate money, but the services they sell on their website, they're still seeing conversions, they're still seeing organic traffic.
(04:43):
We're still seeing search behavior where users are like, yeah, that's cool from ai. I still want to go to the source and check it out for myself. I don't think the AI trust level is there right now. So while it's changing rapidly and Google's aim is definitely zero clicks, I don't know that all hope is lost in terms of SEO. We're still seeing SEO gains and organic gains across clients, and that's just what's happening in Google. Then you have the actual LLM models, which are chat GPT and Perplexity and Gemini and Deep Seek, and there's new ones popping up all the time right now. Chat, GPT has majority of the market share, and when we look at total search share, less than 10% of searches are happening in chat GP GT over Google. Now, Google used to have like 98% market share, so it is a big change in the last year.
(05:33):
Google still has the main hold and one of the pain points right now of monitoring some of these changes are you can sort of get a feel for LLM referral traffic. So I can sense if chat GBT traffic is coming to site on the Google side, if you're being found through AI mode or AI overviews, Google is looping all that data in together. So it's to get a sense of how much the Google changes are actually impacting organic traffic right now. But when we talk about ai, we tend to kind of separate them into buckets where you have the LLMs, what's happening off Google and what's happening on Google, and they tend to have two different approaches. So that's really what we're working with right now and we're looking at a lot of strategies and thoughts about being seen everywhere right now, but that's really state of the market is we're starting to see the shift. We think there's a big bell curve around specific industries and users and user behavior, but there is definitely a shift happening, and I think AI visibility is becoming a forethought for a lot of people as it should be.
Nicole MacLean (06:42):
Yeah, there's a lot there. I think one, there's a lot of alphabet soup. I think I'm so waiting to see what the market really takes. Is it, are we just moving to AI search? Is it a EO? Is it GEO? Is it a, I mean there's a lot of alphabet acronyms. Pick the one you like right now. They're all, at the end of the day, we're all trying to get to the same thing, which is if your clients are asking questions on any search tool, how are you making sure you have great content and you're doing all the right things so that your brand is showing up where necessary? I think the second point you brought up is wildest is probably the biggest shift and biggest attack to Google's market share in the last 10 plus years. AI search only still represents what 8% of the market, and so I'm seeing a lot of people and especially CEOs or people in leadership who maybe aren't as close to this, who are panicking a little bit, and it's fair.
(07:41):
I mean, it is a shift, but are saying, all right, let's stop content production. Let's stop organic. Why Google doesn't matter anymore. And that's just not true, especially right now, my hypothesis, and it's been validated by some other folks I talked to in the market of I think the people who stay steadfast in content production and still traditional Google search is that could actually still see increase despite the zero click because people are going to stop investing and stop maintaining their sites, and you're going to be able to win market share of your competitors if you stay steadfast. Now, if that's all you do, you're going to lose in the long run. You still need to be preparing and looking at best practices and adjusting strategy, but I think it's a yes and not an either or and this all works together, and I think just having a little bit of calm to this and not making any drastic movements is ultimately going to set you up for success in the end.
Kaylee Peterson (08:37):
Yeah, absolutely.
Nicole MacLean (08:39):
Can you talk a little bit, I know a big question we get is, does content even matter for LLMs? There's so much that it's going to, does your content still make a difference? Where are the LLMs pulling info from, if different from how Google shows information?
Kaylee Peterson (08:57):
Yeah, so I think traditional model was we're running a blog on our site. Google's looking for content that fulfills a user's request. If you have the best content and you have the best site, Google will say, here's your best option of information. LLMs work similarly, but a little different in that they're looking for one, they're pulling a lot from Bing, so Bing's search algorithm is a lot more open to be able to be pulled from then. Obviously Google's a very protective of their data. They want to be the only ones with access to Google's data, so it's a lot harder to pull information than it is from Bing. So a lot of the LLMs Chat GT really rely on Bing. They have Microsoft Open AI partnerships. So right now we're seeing a client that does really well on Bing is doing really well in LLMs.
(09:49):
The other piece is they are looking for good content, but they're also really focused on brand signals they're looking for on your website. Is it clear what you do? Is it clear what your products are? Are your product pages really straight to the point? Very clear. The content itself is, is it well structured? Are there clear bullets, clear sections? Is there a question and an answer? We talk a lot of times about these LMS are kind of lazy. They are scanning content, they're pulling patterns out, but they're not necessarily reading content and taking it in comprehending. So they're really looking on that backend code, structured data, bullet points, lists, anything where they can quickly say like, here's the title, here's my answer. I can provide it as quick as possible. So they're looking for well-structured content. They're looking for brand signals in that are other people talking about your brand?
(10:44):
Is your brand being cited as trustworthy? Do you have good reviews on all these platforms? Digital PR starts to play a part of, wow, they're cited in Forbes and CNN and all these listicles all the time. They must be a good brand for me to recommend. And the final piece of all this is that unlike Google, Chachi PT is not live indexing content. It is working off of a database that right now I think their last database update was about mid 2024. So unless a user is using the search with web option chat, BT is not looking at current live web results. Now, the other LLMs, perplexity, Gemini, they are doing live search results. So what we say for one isn't necessarily applicable for all, but our big takeaways of what kind of changes in some ways about content is it becomes a lot more about that unique brand first thought leadership content that only you can provide where maybe those one-on-one belongs don't drive traffic the way they used to. But if you can establish yourself as an industry thought leader with insights only you have from your experience, that will set you apart. The brand signals play a big difference on is your brand respected, well known, it's more likely to be cited in chat GBT or any of the LLMs. And that Bing visibility too actually plays more of a factor now than strictly paying attention to Google.
Nicole MacLean (12:05):
There's a lot there. One thing I want to underscore is that relationship of being success to LM success. It's by no means a tried and true. I'd say it's a bit of a bet we're taking, this could change two weeks from now because that's the other thing. It's an ever evolving time as we see kind of how these LLMs are pulling from. But again, we're seeing some early signals and we are actively, we have a couple clients, I know one of them is on the call right now that is really kind of on board and willing to test with us and do this experimentation and give us good feedback. And so that's kind of what we want to consistently bring back to you is what are we seeing in these tests? What are the early signs of anything that's going to give us a good directional strategy of what could work? This is a great transition to one of the questions we received, which is on prompt tracking or prompt management or knowing which prompts should I show up for? Am I showing up for the right prompts? And I think we're all craving an hres or a SEMrush for LLMs. Then I hate to break it to you, that just doesn't exist right now, but can you maybe just help guide us in what does that mean? How should we be thinking about prompt tracking?
Kaylee Peterson (13:24):
Yeah, so we've been testing a lot. We've tested almost every tool on the market right now around AI search and AI visibility, and there are some stark differences to the SEO rank and tracking that you're used to versus what's happening in L lms. So in SEO with Google, I could say I want to rank for technical SEO 1 0 1, and I can pull that as a keyword. I can pull all the research around it, I can track it and I can see specifically how our page does or doesn't show up across a variety of things. And you will have seen in Google, sometimes you type a variation of that and Google will shift you over to the prompted search anyways. So you end up getting really, really good data on users are searching for this. I have search volume, I have keyword difficulty. It's very easy to track.
(14:16):
LLMs on the other hand, are extremely personalized search results. So if I have been using my chat two BT account, and it knows at this point I'm an SEO expert, I have all this context and background. If I ask it a question about technical SEO audits, it's going to give me a 3 0 1 answer. It's going to skip all that 1 0 1. It's not going to link me to any of those guiding blogs. It's going to give me the hey SEO experts do this. Versus if someone who's never spoken about SEO before with their LLM makes the exact same search, they're going to get a completely different response that's customized to what the LLM knows about them. So that makes it very, very difficult. It's so personalized. The other piece that we're seeing is no tools right now really offer prompt specific finding. So where you can go in and track specific prompts and say, the only thing I care about in the world is showing up for good content writing services, and that's the only thing we want to care for.
(15:17):
Great. I can go type that into any of these tools and track it. But so far, none of the tools are able to say, Hey, when users search this, that's how they get to your site. Like you see in EMREs or HRESs where you can pull like, oh wow, I didn't know this keyword was driving things that doesn't really exist in LLMs right now. And the other piece, and I'll quickly show you one of the tools that we're testing when we do specifically track these prompts, these prompts are tracked individually in each LLM. So for one prompt, I could track it in chat, GPT, every version of chat, GPT, Gemini, every version of Gemini, you could end up tracking one prompt in about 10 different ways. You can also track hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly because that's how often the prompts change. So for this prompt that we're looking at right now, it is where can I find reliable content writing services for my business?
(16:11):
It's a mouthful. It is a very, very long tail keyword. We've been tracking this daily for a while, and what you'll see is one, what they're citing are these listicles and articles about content writing services rather than necessarily the content writing services themselves. And when you actually track the way the citations change, you'll see kind of how volatile the results are, where supposedly often shifts from one to 10 to not mentioned at all to five to one on a day-to-day basis, and the amount of citations that they're returning are changing on a day-to-day basis. So obviously that makes it very difficult to pull any conclusions out and make a sense of, oh, if I want to rank for this prompt, this is how I do it. So what we're focused on instead is thinking more about how the LLMs understand your brand as a whole.
(17:02):
If I go ask chatt, perplexity Gemini today, what do you know about comly? And it doesn't come back to me and say, oh, they're content writing. They do SEO, they can do hire a writer. They've got it all. If it doesn't understand that about comly, that's where we actually have more work to do than trying to appear for specific prompts. So right now with the data limitations we have with the tool limitations, a lot of our work is focused on that audit and strategy and understanding how they're thinking about your brand. Then thinking about specific keywords and phrasing the way that we used to
Nicole MacLean (17:37):
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(18:32):
You'll be one step closer to having those projects off your never ending to-do list, so you can shift focus back to the big picture that's clutch co slash content matters. How would you recommend we go educate our compatriots or our leadership teams on how to maybe adjust our thinking about reporting and ROI on marketing efforts when the data maybe isn't as clear or the signals aren't as clear? And you mentioned earlier like zero click search, you can still drive conversions, but if all of a sudden traffic goes down now I'm maybe a little worried. What does that mean for by performance? How can we get ahead so that we're at educating before we have to put numbers in front that have been impacted by this change in search behavior?
Kaylee Peterson (19:26):
Yeah, I think that's the big question because if you can't prove the ROI, you probably can't get the budget behind it. And I think one of the biggest shifts, we've always done organic reporting, so where it goes from traffic to what happens on site engagement rate or bounce rate to conversion, and that's, here's the SEO pipeline, it's working or it's not working. The shift now with LLMs, even with Google zero click searches is that a lot of those searches are not going to be labeled as organic the way that people get to your site. So for example, in Chachi, bt, I think it's something like 60% of the times that it says a brand by name, it doesn't link to that brand. It will just say, here's Compose.ly. So what you'll see instead is if composes being mentioned a lot, your direct searches might go up, your brand searches might go up, and so we start measuring website performance in a lot more holistic way than specifically looking for organic search.
(20:26):
Does this, I think if you start thinking about tracking online visibility through ai, referral traffic through standard organic traffic and through direct traffic and performance, you'll get a better full funnel view of how are people getting here. The other piece I would pay a lot of attention to is I think traffic is going to go down. You get less clicks to site some of that great 1 0 1 content that just used to drive a ton of traffic maybe doesn't anymore. But where I think you will see improvements is in the quality of that traffic, and that's really where the reporting should be focused on. So looking at when people get to site, what's their engagement rate? Are they clicking on other pages? How much time are they spending on the page? What's your bounce rate look like? Do they leave and they get there right back out, they didn't have what they needed.
(21:14):
What do your conversions look like? Making sure that your GA four, your key events are really strongly set up to track exactly when someone fills a form. When someone clicks a button, that's important to you. Even some of those mid fiddle conversions where they're downloading resources that you have available, they're submitting their email to sign up for a newsletter, that's some of the tracking points you start seeing that are less about that traffic. They're less about clicks, but it's more about are we still meeting our audience where they are and can we get them where they need to be? Which I think brings some of the focus into what does your website journey look like If someone gets to your website, is it clear what next step they should take, what the path should be if they get to one of your great blogs, do they have a chance to convert when they get there or do they just get the information and leave and making sure that you bring in maybe a third party to just say like, Hey, if you didn't know anything about us but you wanted to buy this one thing, go to my website, give it a test.
(22:12):
See what you would do there. And some of that CRO work too around conversion rate optimization where if the searches are no longer as direct as they used to be, if they're just typing in a brand name and getting to you because they got recommended elsewhere, is it clear how they get to your end goal and are you tracking that end goal? I think those become the more important metrics moving forward to be able to prove that the marketing is working because it is, it's just not as easily tie to this search did this thing and we're doing great.
Nicole MacLean (22:41):
Yeah, I think what I'm hearing in the summation of it is make sure your tracking is set up well. I would make that a top priority heading into Q3 if you don't feel confident about it. And I think the initial education around organic traffic and clicks can no longer be the leading indicator. It still has value, but making sure we're being holistic. If you work with Jackie, one of our account managers, we were just talking yesterday that she was going over with a client who has seen organic traffic dip, but hey, when you look at it holistically, referral traffic went up almost the exact amount that organic dip.
(23:17):
You're going to start seeing those correlations and you are again, telling a story with data is our job as marketers. It's not just putting the data in front of the team and your leadership team. It's how you tell that story and tell the narrative of what you're doing. I think that just becomes even more important. The other nuance I want to say too on this is I'm sure there are some people out there, but there is a lot of, especially on LinkedIn, just AI search is changing everything. SEO is dead. And I think it also really depends on your buying persona and your target market. I will think back to the role I was in before compose. We were selling to water operators. I loved them. They were some of most the best people I've ever met. I can't imagine they were early adopters on chat, GPT and ai.
(24:06):
The way they're going to interface with this, they're probably more on the laggard, which means that company has a lot of time before how the buyer wants to use AI impacts them. Yet I think of anyone in the health and fitness space that is a common recommendation or a common use case people talk about online is like, well, just put in the ingredients you have in your kitchen and chae tea and get the macros and get the recipes and stuff. So if that was a big part of your business and how you drove traffic was like recipes. And yeah, you may have to maybe evolve faster and start dealing with some of this impact. And so depending on where you sit too, I also think is important. And as you think about your strategies heading into H two is how big of a priority is this to switch everything on a dime? And it really is answered by who your target market is and how they are using AI in their everyday workflow.
Kaylee Peterson (25:01):
Yeah, I think that's been our biggest takeaway in the last six months. Even of this, everything's changing. SEO is dead. If I had a dollar for every time someone said, SEO is dead,
(25:13):
People will search till the end of time where they search might change. But the function of searching has always existed back in the days of Ask j Eves and Chacha where you could text in your questions. Someone has always been searching and asking questions somewhere. So I think when we see this a IO and GEO and all these different terminologies, if you really get to the core of what's working and what's functioning in these tools, it's great content, good content that ranks well is still being cited in LLMs. It is good clean technical sites there. The foundational SEO, that core, good technical SEO is in place. Your site is crawlable. It's searchable. It's indexable. That's all good, good. SEO and it's brand mentions and brand building. It's some of that digital PR work. It's some of that thought leadership. It's providing content on your site that nobody else has. Cool interactive tools, great client first content. I think it all comes together where it's about a good strong SEO content brand strategy more so than drop everything and go rework the wheel for GEO or a EO. Because I do think at the end of the day when you look at what works, it's good marketing, it's good SEO, it's good brand, it's good content.
Nicole MacLean (26:35):
So I know that we've been doing that for our clients. Good content, good SEO technical, but I hear it a lot. We get a lot of questions around, well, what are you doing to change for AI or how are you future proofing? So I know we have a folks on the call that are doing a variety of things. You may just be creating content with us. You may be leaning on Kaylee and her team for SEO strategy and that brief process and topic ideation or getting where we're actually taking care of the technical part, making sure you have good clean site structure and a passing health score. So maybe looking at those three buckets, Kaylee, just quickly, how are we making adjustments or maybe leaning into best practices in each of those already for clients who are on the call today?
Kaylee Peterson (27:22):
Yeah, so we've, since January updated our content process and our briefing process, especially to include some of these AI thoughts. So if there's a SERP that you're targeting that has an AI overview in it, we're going to go look at that AI overview. We're going to pull out what is Google highlighting that they think is really strongly associated with this search. We're going to make sure that's in the brief, it's in the content and the writers understand this is a big focus of making sure that this matches what Google says the search intent is. We've always been focused on FAQs, but really highlighting FAQs are a great easy way to build in some of this scanability that the LLMs like to see where they want a question and an answer. And even if you beautifully answered it in three paragraphs above that, they still want a, what's the question?
(28:09):
What's the answer? Let me highlight and pull it out. So we've been doing some of that structure adoption into our SEO work. On our publishing side, we've really updated our publishing to include a lot of that structure, a lot of that schema and structured data on the backend when we're publishing, we're indexing when we publish. So we've made those shifts there. I think our writer team has been briefed into some of that writing style that the AI's really like, which is that direct no fluff, here's your question, here's your answer, here's the thesis statement, here's exactly to the point, and then I'll expand and get that good brand tone in detail. So that's been happening. It's just part of our process. Now looking to the future, I think where we see immediately a need for in what we've discussed is that AI tracking and dashboarding and being able to say, here's what's happening on our site from ai.
(28:59):
So we've developed, I think, a pretty good AI dashboard that will tell you exactly those pieces where and how is that referral traffic getting to your site, from which LLM is it converting when it gets there, how does it compare to direct and organic? What do my brand searches look like? What does my visibility in Bing and Google, and what does my technical look like? We've wrapped that all into one really great dashboard that it's in beta right now, but we're very excited about it. I think it's ready to go pretty soon. And the last piece that we're working on that I also think will be ready to go here pretty soon is AI auditing. And as we've talked about, it's about how does it understand your brand competitively, where you placed what's on your site, what are gaps on your site, what's working or not working?
(29:42):
It takes the best parts of all of our existing audits, our content audits, our technical audits, our keyword research reports, and puts it through an AI lens. So I'm going to go ask chatt BT in perplexity and Gemini, what do you think about this person? What do you think about all their competitors? How would you rank them? If I asked you who's the best content writing service, what would you say and why isn't it composed? And how do I fix that? That all gets wrapped into a audit and strategy where we can tell you, here's your gaps right now. If you had to go make an H two plan today, these are the gaps I would focus on.
Nicole MacLean (30:16):
That is very helpful, and I think important to know that there are changes that are actively being made across the board, training writers, all of that good stuff. But then also we're trying to stay as on top of the trends and the tools and that as we possibly can, and working that in to be a helpful resource. The thing that I was most disappointed in as we've been talking about these things is just how manual it is to really find where you are in these AI tools, because it is manually going in and putting these prompts and hoping everything kind of works out. But I'm sure people are recognizing this gap. So I'm sure there's a future, some rush hres that will be coming out and we'll share. I know we're at time and we've probably just scratched the surface, but we definitely hit the top five questions we had submitted or that I hear on client calls pretty frequently. So Kaylee, thank you for sharing some insights. Thanks for listening to this episode of Content Matters created in partnership with Share Your Genius. If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a review and share with a friend. Otherwise, you can find all the resources you need to stay connected with us in the show notes. Until next time.