Chapters

 

 

Jason Mlicki (00:02.104)
So Jeff, today we are going to talk about the day Google jumped the shark.

Jeff McKay (00:08.52)
Ooh, I love that. Look at you dropping one of those metaphor analogies, assimilates, whatever that is. That is really good. That’s almost as good as a pig in a python.

Jason Mlicki (00:15.852)
I thought I would get a laugh out of you. was like, I was pretty proud of that.

Jason Mlicki (00:23.95)
it’s not that good. It’s not that it was like it carried away here. It’s not that good. But yeah, we’re to talk about the demise of Google search. And it’s I’ve been writing about this forever. As you know, we’ve talked about it a couple of times. But, you know, I’m being a little facetious in the way I’m framing it. but I think I first shined a light on this about 18 months ago. And I said, hey, Google is dead. It’s not dead. But traditional Google search is.

dying a rapid death.

particularly for professional services firms where search has been a mechanism for clients to find you based on your expertise. When they’re looking for an answer to a problem and they were finding it through a search query and finding you that way, that’s disappearing rapidly. So that’s what I mean by a jump the shark. Google as a company is, you I think still a rock star.

or alphabet, I guess.

Jeff McKay (01:32.04)
So I look forward to the day that Google jumps the shark because they’ve had such a stranglehold on us. But this is a really important topic because for marketers and for firm leadership, Google Search is a way that brands are built.

And whether we know what’s happening or not, the brands that are showing up on Google search are the ones that are rising in the minds of the people that buy the services that we want to sell. And it’s not the only channel, but it is a critical channel. And you can’t neglect this. It’s really important.

I remember when we first started doing podcasts, I don’t even remember what episode it was, but you made a comment about Google and who are the top X firms, right? It used to be the business journals that had the top accounting firms or the top, firms, but no, that wasn’t it. The top firms are the firms that Google says.

is the top firms. And that just really resonated with me. I mean, now it seems like, well, yeah, of course. But back then, when you said that, I thought that was a great insight.

Jason Mlicki (03:10.168)
Well, it’s funny, I started saying that probably 2010 ish, maybe. And when I would say that, people would kind of laugh me out the room. They’re like, I just can’t see our clients going on Google and searching for a firm like ours. And they would just, they would act like this was heresy and this was insane insanity. And, you know, right now I’m likening traditional Google search to the yellow pages that

The Yellow Pages was a means by which you might find service providers for a very long time. And it went through a long period of decline where you could still make money as a Yellow Page operator. And you can still certainly make money through traditional Google search. You can still attract clients that way. But it’s in decline. And there’s no doubt about it. It’s going to go away. The question is just how fast. And where will go away?

And I think where it’s going away the most is in kind of this universe of thought leadership where clients use thought leadership both to demonstrate their ability to understand a problem and articulate a better solution. But as a means to connect with clients that don’t know who they are, especially for a small to mid-sized firms, the beauty of Google search was that you could author interesting insights and clients could find you even if they’ve never heard of you.

And that is disappearing. So this idea that you can kind of connect with clients that way is just not going to be a thing. It probably already is not a thing. So now what’s replacing it? guess that’s the question. I started this conversation. I’ve come at this conversation a couple of ways over the last 24 months. But one way I talked about it for a while was I kept telling firms that they were focused on the wrong thing as it relates to AI.

They, every time I talked to them about AI, they would be talking about efficiency and how they can use it to make content bad, better or faster or whatever. And I was like, that’s the least of your worries. You need to be thinking about how clients are using AI to make their buying decisions and how AI is influencing the decisions they’re making. And, and that, and that was the Google story was that they’re not going to a traditional search engine anymore to ask a question.

Jason Mlicki (05:33.656)
They’re going to chat GPT, or they’re going to Google. Instead of entering three or four words, they’re asking a full sentence, 24 words as a question. And Google is giving an AI overview right there. And they may or may not take that next step to click through and read the source content that generated the summary. So you need to be there.

Jeff McKay (05:44.752)
Huh. Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (06:02.19)
And increasingly, you will need to be there more over time. So let me pause for a second. What am I missing that needs to set the context?

Jeff McKay (06:10.214)
Yeah, that-

Jeff McKay (06:13.816)
well, the first thing is it’s not just a whole sentence. It’s a, could be a dissertation prompt. And you said, how are they using AI to make a purchase? I would argue or qualify that with they’re using AI to solve a problem.

Jason Mlicki (06:23.725)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (06:40.43)
Correct.

Jeff McKay (06:41.468)
So they may bypass the buying decision and use AI to solve the problem. So.

Jason Mlicki (06:52.45)
This answer is good enough, right? I I use this phrase too with AI that it’s like in some instances, it’s 80 % as good as the consultant for 2 % of the cost, right? Like it’s like the world’s like most threatening substitute for certain types of expertise, right? That’s real. I love what you said about dissertations too. You think about my own chat GPT activity or my own AI activity.

Jeff McKay (06:54.748)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (07:19.47)
Again, I’ll go back in time. You go back in time to 2005, 2008, 2010, how someone used a Google search query. They typed phrases, two or three words. And the whole SEO community was built to optimize content to win those phrases. A child GPT dialog, some of my queries start out as paragraphs. I talk to it. I’m saying, this is what I’m thinking about.

brainstorm with you on this topic or whatever. And then that chat continues on, right? And the interaction that’s being had is sourcing from somewhere. And it’s sourcing from your content if you’re doing it right. least you want it to be sourcing from your content so that you’re part of that interaction. I used to talk about this idea that with Google, was like, you’re in the boardroom when you don’t know you’re in the boardroom.

I used to love this. used to be, when I look at referral data on our website years ago, I used to be able to see data from corporate intranets, which told me that somebody is basically sharing our content inside their organization and bouncing it around. So I would always say it’s like, I’m in the boardroom having a conversation with the senior leaders of this firm, even though I don’t even know who they are, you know, because that’s what my content is doing. So AI is no different, right? Like they’re having this conversation and I’m influencing that conversation if I’m, if I’m

visible to a generative AI search engine. If I’m not, then I’m not influencing the conversation at all. So I think it’s going to matter.

Jeff McKay (08:56.08)
is mattering.

Jason Mlicki (08:57.506)
Yeah. So, do I need to that case further? What do you think?

Jeff McKay (09:00.754)
So you’ve set up the.

Jason Mlicki (09:06.392)
Cause I’m getting the same budget by the way, I’m getting the same reactions. The reactions I got in like, you know, 2010, but people looking at me and my clients would never do this is the same reactions I’m getting now. My clients would never do this. Not only would they do it, they are doing it, but I can’t get people to wrap their heads around it. So what am I missing? You what else should I say to make my case?

Jeff McKay (09:29.776)
I don’t know what else you can say. This is the nature of a point of view, right? You speak it out into the world and people either glom onto it or they don’t. They share that worldview or they don’t. So those that don’t.

I guess we’ll find out in time, you know, who was right and who was not. But I think the trend is clearly in this direction. So, well, let’s talk about how we overcome this and, and stay at the top.

Jason Mlicki (10:05.804)
Yeah, think it’s, first off, I want to say, I think it’s still pretty fuzzy. You know, I’m not going to say that I’m like the categorical expert on how to win at GEO or AEO or whatever you choose to call this thing. You know, obviously, you know, looking back in time when Google emerged, I remember very clearly clients asking me for help saying, Jason, how do we get visible with Google? How do we rank in these search results? And at that time, there wasn’t really like a language for search engine optimization, nor were there specialists.

And so we were kind of grasping at straws trying to figure out how do we influence these new tools that are showing up. I would argue we’re still sort of in that same kind of fuzzy zone right now where there’s a lot of research being done by different service providers and software companies and there’s a lot of opinion about how you win. But I don’t know that anybody’s really cracked the envelope open on what it really is. And they may never, let’s face it, at the end of the day,

A lot of AI researchers and AI innovators don’t understand entirely how AI works. So even there a little bit like, I’m not really sure how it’s doing what it’s doing at times. So, so I think there’s some of that. but anyway, I’ve, you know, what I’ve, I’ve synthesized from a lot of different research I’ve done over the last 18 months to come down to what I think is most important. You know, there’s a handful of things that appear to be most important that, that tend to show up in the things that I’ve read about or I’ve researched or found as it relates to.

how you have an impact on these things. So I wrote a blog post last week that put together really five kind of key things or like I called them five tactics that you can focus on if you want to have impact in this area. And there are things that I want to say to people, it’s like, just like when Google search emerged, it’s not something that you influence with in three months, right? This is a long game, just like Google.

Google Search was always a long game. You did a handful of things really well, and then you consistently did them month over month, week over week, year over year for a very long time, and you were rewarded. And I think the same thing will play out here. So I’ll start with that.

Jeff McKay (12:21.308)
Well, that’s a really important point and I’m going to emphasize it. There are no quick fixes. Cause we’ll be talking about, you know, some in these tactics, indications and directions that you could pursue, but you don’t want to be willy nilly dabbling in this and dabbling in that.

because that’s not going to serve you because you have to build up a corpus, if you will. And many firms just don’t have the resources to do that. So it’s important to think strategically about what the context of these tactics, if I will, and be thinking long-term strategically, but acting tactically in the short term.

and right now I think the main goal is learning, right? Action, learn, action, learn, action, learn. And, I think that’s important for people to understand. There are no shortcuts.

Jason Mlicki (13:35.766)
No, there are no shortcuts. And there were never any shortcuts with Google. And quite frankly, the firms that tried, that thought they’d found shortcuts, usually ended up in a bad place. So I’ll give an example. And when traditional Google search first emerged, everyone sort of figured out that Google was indexing pages based on keywords and based on content on the page. So there was this window in time when these SEO providers would essentially like

hack a web page with tons of keyword content, but they would do it so it’s like white text on a white background so no users would see it. And they were just, it was called keyword stuff. I mean, it became a really popular thing that they were doing and it worked for a very short period of time. They rose in rankings. Then Google figured it out and Google got really mad. then not only did they stop ranking them, they basically blackballed them and said, you will never show up in Google search ever again. Right? So it’s like that kind of stuff gets you into a really bad place. You so you don’t want to that stuff.

Jeff McKay (14:21.992)
Let’s start.

Jason Mlicki (14:33.326)
So the same thing, there’s probably loopholes here that people are trying right now and it’s going to end badly. So you want to avoid this. Anyway, okay. So, you know, we’ll start with a couple of things. One is, you know, I didn’t actually put this in the blog post and you actually reminded me of it this morning when we first started. And the first thing is I think one of the things that we have to recognize that so much of generative AI

and generate AI engines that people are using to kind of have these types of searches and queries now. The large language models, they train on tons of content, right? And so it’s actually raising the need for original research. So having original primary research that’s uniquely yours, that you’ve gone and conducted, that the AI engine can cite, it values because the generative AI tools are hungry for fat.

They’re trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not. And so anytime there’s data, they crave the data, because the data is super useful for them to say that this information is good and it has credence. And so that’s the first thing to start with is that if you don’t have any research underlying anything you do from a thought leadership perspective, everything’s opinion, then that would be one place to start to say, we’ve got to get some research into our work. That’s ours.

not just us citing a study from so-and-so. In this research for this article, I saw that SEMrush predicts that AI-generated searches will overtake traditional searches by 2028. Well, that’s their research. Seems plausible, makes sense to me, but it’s not mine. I want to have my own data to pull from as well. So that’s the very first thing that I think is probably the most important thing, actually, that I didn’t even put in the post as the first thing.

That would be one place to start.

Jeff McKay (16:29.448)
And the thing about that, Jason, that hasn’t changed. That primary research that leads to a new perspective has always been the foundation on which, you know, great thought leadership and an intellectual capital agenda is built. And there’s different ways of going about it. you know,

Jason Mlicki (16:34.83)
Thank

Jeff McKay (16:57.116)
We may have listeners going, well, I could never afford primary research or whatever it takes to compete with big four or whatever. Well, there’s some truth to that, but there are ways around that. I don’t think it’s a good idea to write it off completely because you’re small. There are ways of attacking that. But that has not changed.

Jason Mlicki (17:23.446)
Yeah, it’s funny because some of the things as I was writing this blog post, I realized that there are things that are sort of coming full circle like you and I have talked about. And as we get further into this, I’ll explain what I mean by that. But and that’s exactly one of them where it’s like, you know, for a while it was like, well, maybe we don’t need research. There’s so much research out there, but I think you need it more than ever because you need it for separation. So the second thing I wrote about was just

prioritizing high authority content placements. So much of traditional Google search.

Google couldn’t really discern quality the way a human discerns quality. It used different sets of indicators to determine when something was good or bad, and in order to rank it higher or lower. And it used things like backlinks. That was a big thing. Like how many people are pointing to a piece of content would tell Google how good that content might be. It used, like I said earlier, very basic information about things like site speed.

They build up repositories of things they called domain authority over time, which is really just a function of all kinds of all these things kind of collected together. But these are all sort of proxies, right? And the interesting thing about generative AI is it actually functions a little bit more like a human. Like it sort of discerns information and recognizes that when people talk about stuff they read, they value the stuff they get from certain places more than they value others.

They might value this, things they get in HBR because they trust the editors at HBR and they trust the way that they vet authors and vet ideas more than they trust content coming off of a self published blog. So the very first thing is that when AI is trying to discern what’s true and what’s not, and what’s, what’s quality and what’s not, it actually looks for exact, you know, it looks for evidence that what you’re saying is been

Jason Mlicki (19:28.034)
picked up in reputable places. So really, the first place to start is to get your thinking published in high authority content zones, business journals, industry trade publications. it’s sort of amping up that earned media issue is probably the first most important thing that you need to do, assuming you’ve got foundational research, which foundational research is what gives you authority to get into those places. So that’s an interesting mix.

Long-winded way of saying, I think the self-published earned media mix needs to change for lot of firms. A lot of firms have deprioritized earned media. They don’t care about it anymore. And they need to reprioritize it, because it’s really important. Make sense?

Jeff McKay (20:13.842)
We’ve talked about this on some of our other episodes. This is why I think there’s going to be the resurgence of public relations work. Because most organizations are not going to have the horsepower to get those types of placements that they want. And they’re going to need help. And I think having a really strong PR strategy is going to be critical.

for this dimension of.

G-E-O, I guess. Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (20:49.678)
or whatever you choose to call it. Yeah. And I think it’s a two-pronged PR strategy. wrote about this in here is that, prong one is getting your, your experts placed full length, byline articles, interviews, that type of stuff in a journal about their point of view. Right? So it’s, it’s you talking about how to solve the problems you solve, in a way that’s compelling and interesting that industry journalists want to pick up and they’re giving you a full length byline. That’s sort of like prong one.

Prone 2 is actually traditional PR. It’s the old school, hey, we need people talking about us, talking about our firm, what makes us interesting, our culture, our work. And now I’ll explain more about that later. But essentially, you have to have some of that again, which I think a lot of firms, I’ve been even telling firms to de-prioritize. I could never understand why you wanted that. I always thought it was like you’re much better off getting your thinking.

the marketplace than you are getting someone talking about the corporate journey or something. But it’s important. yeah, as much as it pains me to say it, PR firms are going to continue to have their day.

Jeff McKay (22:07.408)
you will see, won’t we?

Jason Mlicki (22:09.502)
Yeah, exactly. So the third or fourth thing I’m losing track here, A2D, is get to the point. I wrote this as get to the point. And what I mean by that is that when you publish for earned media, often you’re a little more provocative. You’re a little short. You’re very point of view and perspective driven.

For your self-published content, you have to be comprehensive, and you have to be both clear, succinct, comprehensive, and parsable. This is kind of the language that I chose to use in here. And what I mean by that, this is why you’re seeing things like frequently asked questions pop up everywhere now. I’ve even seen some firms that are creating FAQs on their practice pages or their service pages even.

And the reason they’re doing that is because again, you’re trying to give the generative AI engine content that it really understands and it can map to the types of questions it’s getting. So when you write a position piece, like I wrote a position piece on how to, I called it how to win in GEL. I wrote this about six months ago. And at the bottom, I included, I think a 12 point frequently asked questions section, just with like super basic stuff. What is generative engine optimization?

Why does it matter? Like just all the types of questions that someone might ask a chat bot. And it gives the chat bot the training content it needs. We’re even doing this on landing pages now. We’re taking landing pages for thought leadership and adding in frequently asked questions section about the research, let’s say, that helps the tool understand what it’s actually there. So your self-published content still matters. It just looks a little different.

It’s maybe more driven about comprehensibility than anything, would be my guess. In fact, we’re even kind of, like for Rattleback, I’m splitting our content, like our newsletter content that goes out every Wednesday. We’re writing more short, provocative pieces and those are going to LinkedIn and we’re writing deeper, more comprehensive pieces and those are going to the blog. And so we’re kind of splitting it, whereas in the past we would have published everything to the blogs. We wanted to build up the authority of the…

Jason Mlicki (24:35.158)
of the website, right? That was the most important thing to me. But now it’s more like, hey, we know we got to build relationships in ways maybe we didn’t in the past. I know if that makes sense.

Jeff McKay (24:46.886)
Yeah, you sure you’re not just doing keyword stuffing there?

Jason Mlicki (24:51.362)
Hmm. Every chance I get, maybe. Most of buying backlinks from anybody I can find in Eastern Europe. It’s great. It’s great. You know, I get a thousand for a dollar.

Jeff McKay (24:53.416)
and then…

Jeff McKay (24:59.27)
Thank

Jason Mlicki (25:04.041)
Hahaha

Jason Mlicki (25:07.65)
It’s totally working. It’s totally working. We’re mentioning it in every genitive act.

Jeff McKay (25:11.888)
Yeah. But FAQs are important. And I would argue, given what you just described, you really need to understand the buyer’s journey and what types of questions are being asked at each stage of that journey. One of the exercises I do with clients is the 100 questions exercise.

And we go, yeah, well, we go through and we’re like, okay, what are the hundred questions you get along the buyer’s journey? you know, and at stage one of building awareness, that’s more the traditional demand, Jen type of stuff. But once you start moving into, you know, the, the later stages of the buyer’s journey, there’s a completely.

Jason Mlicki (25:42.094)
a lot of questions.

Yeah.

Jeff McKay (26:09.564)
different set of goals the buyer has, therefore a different set of questions that need to be answered. And I think these are going to be even more relevant, given what you just described.

Jason Mlicki (26:26.87)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it’s just, you know, I love the hundred questions, by the way. I would be a little terrified to actually do it with you. I don’t know if I could come up with a hundred and then I don’t know if I’d have answers to more than 20, but, but it would be fun to do. I’ll say that much. So,

Jeff McKay (26:43.11)
It’s a great, it actually is a great exercise. gets people thinking because everybody gets to 20 easily. It’s 21 through a hundred that are really hard and it requires you to put yourself in the buyer’s shoes, which can be a transformational exercise. I encourage everyone listening, do the hundred questions exercise and

Jason Mlicki (26:46.124)
Yeah, I… Yep.

Jeff McKay (27:11.93)
it will pay great dividends for you.

Jason Mlicki (27:14.392)
Yeah. Well, it’s funny you say that because I think back to when we met, we met and I’ve told this story many times. We met at a conference in Chicago and you stood up and you made this comment. said, I think firms understand why clients buy, but they don’t understand how. And that comes back to that very statement, which is they don’t take the time to think it through. just don’t. They just don’t. like, that’ll take a long time. I don’t want to.

Jason Mlicki (27:44.27)
I got Deadline on Friday, I’m get that done.

culture of optionality you like to talk about. OK. There’s two more things on my list of tactics. One is actually tending to the corporate Wikipedia presence. So oddly enough, in a lot of the research, at least right now as it relates to generative AI, and you see this in your own behavior, I’m sure, it references Wikipedia a lot. It draws Wikipedia content a lot. And there’s a couple of reasons, at least I believe.

One is there’s a ton of content, right? There’s a ton of content on Wikipedia and it’s more or less pretty well vetted by the Wiki editors, right? Like the community does a pretty good job of like weeding out stuff that’s promotional or persuasive or false. I mean, it’s pretty good at kind of like doing that. I mean, it’s kind of proven out that it can do that over the last 25 years or whatever. And it’s probably pretty, you know, free of copyright.

infringements, right? It’s all open source. So they’re not going to get sued by Wikipedia the way they’re going to get sued by the journal, right? So it makes sense that in these early days of optimizing these models that Wikipedia would be a valuable resource. when I first wrote about this, I was like, yeah, just build out your corporate Wikipedia presence. I didn’t know a whole lot about it. And then I started researching it. And I realized, well, you can’t just show up and build a Wikipedia page for yourself. That’s not a thing. So you have to…

Jeff McKay (29:09.916)
You mean it’s not a shortcut?

Jason Mlicki (29:12.542)
It’s not a shortcut. It’s like, mean, you kind of can, but like you’re going to get outed real fast and kicked out by the Wikipedia community because it’s a very strong community. And there are Wiki editors you can work with that will help you build out a presence. They’re not technically supposed to do this, but there are some that have been able to do it. But the most important thing about it, I’m just going to tell listeners is it’s, it’s, it’s, there’s this thing called notability. And basically there are notability rules in Wikipedia and

Because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. if you don’t have some level of notability, there’s no reason for you to have an entry. Again, pointing back to my suggestion that you need a traditional PR strategy. So it’s like a Wikipedia presence, you can’t build that on your experts writing byline articles. You build it on people writing about your company. And so you need to have original research. You need to have things that people are writing about such that it makes sense for there to be a Wikipedia entry.

about your organization. So that’s why that’s going to matter. At least in the short term, it looks like Wikipedia is a pretty meaningful source of training content for these tools.

Jason Mlicki (30:26.05)
Make sense?

Jeff McKay (30:27.27)
Makes sense. And Wikipedia is well documented. So you have to have footnotes. And I think that’s another important thing that can link to the thinking that firms have. So I’m not a big fan of Wikipedia. Whenever I do a Google search or search in AI and something comes up from Wikipedia,

That’s my third or fourth click, not my first. So I assume there’s some people out there that are the same way. You just never know. That’s why you need a more comprehensive strategy.

Jason Mlicki (31:10.402)
Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of people that feel that way about Wikipedia. I’m, I would say I’m on and on again, off again with it in that, I find that it’s actually quite good at giving sort of foundational understanding of what’s generally agreed upon about a person or a company or a topic. you know, I don’t use it on the, on business to business work very much. It’s more in kind of my daily life, right?

And so I don’t know how important it’s going to be in the B2B landscape. But I think that it’s one of those things where if you are relatively notable as a firm, I think about a lot of the AE firms we deal with, a lot of their projects, they’re really big and they’re very well covered. You’re designing an airport. That’s all over the business press and a community when that’s happening. So large projects get a lot of coverage.

So the lift to get a corporate Wikipedia page built for a firm like that would not actually be that hard because you have a lot of notability from the nature of your work. It’s a lot harder for a consulting firm because a lot of times when consulting firms show up in the press, it’s negative. Like at McKinsey, McKinsey just getting right over the coals over the last 24 months or whatever. So that makes it harder. And I’m sure they have Wikipedia entries and they’re…

trying to manage the downsides of those things as best they can indirectly, So PR unit or whoever. All right, so I’ll cover my last one, and then we can just kind of talk about maybe what to think about. But the last one is the one I’ve kind of leased. It seems like lowest priority, but it definitely comes up, and you’ll see it in your own behavior. This came up in a lot of research. It appears that generative AI tools

definitely love to reference content from discussion forums, tools like Quora and Reddit. And you see this in your own, I’m sure you see this in your own experience. You do a search on Google and the generative AI overview gives you a summary and you look at the sources and it’s like Wikipedia, Reddit, Reddit, Reddit. And again, same reason as Wikipedia. It’s a treasure trove of discussions on every niche topic you could ever imagine.

Jason Mlicki (33:25.902)
And it’s all for user generated content, that’s copyright infringement free. So it’s a great place to learn about human language, especially in its shortest form. And so it makes sense that that would be a place it would go. I think if you’re going to play here, one, I don’t know how long this is going to last because I just don’t know if that, I mean, sort of diametrically opposed to my suggestion number one, which is.

getting yourself placed into high authority places, Reddit is about the least high authority place there is, Like anybody can say anything anytime, anywhere. So it makes you think, those things are diametric, you’re opposed. So I don’t know if this will play out over the long haul, but I think if you’re going to do it, you know, and I had a discussion with a firm recently where it was really interesting. They had talked to a marketing expert.

And the marketing experts said, Hey, you really need to kind of amp up your presence on LinkedIn. That’s where B2B buyers are. And they said, yeah, but it’s weird because when we look at our referral traffic, they’re all coming from Reddit. And what they were finding was that their technical decision makers, because it’s a tech, IT firm, IT services firm, we’re hanging out on Reddit. And so was like, well, then go to Reddit. You know, like, I mean, if that’s where you’re seeing your clients hanging out, then that’s where you should go.

That’s the first time I’d ever heard that in my entire career. So I think there is more of that going on than maybe we realize. But if you’re going to do it, you can’t just buy some Reddit ads. You have to actually get your subject matter experts authentically wanting to be involved in the discussion forums within their domain the same way you would want them to get involved at LinkedIn in the same way, right? Not just blasting.

opinions to the world, but actually engage in the community. So that would be the way. Totally can. You can outsource everything to marketing, Jeff, even delivery. We can take care of everything. Don’t worry about it.

Jeff McKay (35:19.836)
You mean you can’t outsource that to marketing? Are you saying that’s not another short?

Yeah. Build my brand on Quora and answer all these things for me. gosh. Yes. If you’re going to do that. I mean, you look at the people that have authority on on Quark or Reddit. They’ve been out there for years. Right. And again, they have a corpus of work that they can point to.

Jason Mlicki (35:36.536)
Not a problem, not a problem. I can do the client work too.

Jeff McKay (35:56.723)
There are no shortcuts. You got to get out there. If you’re going to be a thought leader, have some leading thoughts and be engaged, right? And, you can’t just say, well, let’s start posting our stuff to Reddit or we run into the exact same thing. Marketing ruins everything. So Reddit will be the next thing that marketing ruins because they’ll get some app to auto post stuff.

Jason Mlicki (35:59.063)
no shortcuts.

Jeff McKay (36:26.756)
out to Reddit and it’s… Don’t do that. Don’t do that.

Jason Mlicki (36:32.354)
Yeah, well, marketing is going to ruin generative AI as well. That’s totally going to be a thing, So bloating it with promotional content or whatever. anyway, so those, mean, that’s my best advice right now. Like those are the things in order of priority that we’re recommending to clients. Like if you care about search,

Jeff McKay (36:36.739)
Hahaha

Jason Mlicki (36:59.404)
You care about the fact you’re losing traffic from traditional search. think the other thing I wanted to say is I think you have to do some level setting here. So whatever your experience has been with inbound site traffic and inbound leads over the last decade, I think you need to reset. Because the volume of traffic you’re going to get in the future from generative AI type search tools is going to be lower. It is. And the number of leads you’re going to get is likely going to be lower too.

But I have seen firms tell me, and I’ve seen some evidence, that the quality of those leads sometimes are better. Because that person has done more due diligence. They’ve made it into your ecosystem and said, OK, this looks like someone I want to talk to. But there is some level setting that has to happen right now for a lot of firms, where what their expectations have been based on the last 10 years are going to change. And if you don’t do that, you’re going to be

very disappointed in what you see. And you don’t think about other channels to clients as well, because clearly, I don’t think you want to be relying solely on inbound from generative AI search. And there’s a lot of firms, ours included, that relied heavily on traditional inbound leads from traditional search for the last decade. And so it’s an important time.

Jeff McKay (38:23.208)
That’s a great point, great point. I would add this to your great list, or maybe an umbrella over your great list.

These tactics are not going to be useful unless you’re thinking strategically about what you’re trying to accomplish through this. And GEO, AEO, SEO is a pillar in an intellectual capital agenda, right? A more comprehensive approach that is building brand preference for your firm, right? These are channels.

These are tools, levers that we use in order to get the message out in the market. But if the message is wrong or the message does not resonate or the message is not differentiated, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing here. So you really need to make sure you have your strategic ducks in a row before you all of a sudden just say, hey, let’s start optimizing all this stuff for GEO. It’s…

It’s not going to work.

Jason Mlicki (39:36.482)
Yeah, I love that you said that when I wrote this article, Jeff, I instantly thought of you because as I was writing it, I was like, what are these things? Are these strategies or what are they? And I was like, no, these are 100 % tactics. There is nothing strategic in what I’ve suggested here. It is entirely like, like you just said, if you know what issues you want to own and you know what your point of view on those issues are, this is the way that you would go about getting your voice heard.

in the universe of generative AI enabled search, So there are 100 % tactics. And if you don’t have the first part figured out, then by all means, don’t take any of the advice in this discussion. Don’t do anything. Figure that out and then come back. Is this something we should care about? Is this something we should care about? Because I actually, at the end of post, I even kind of said, I came back to it’s like,

Jeff McKay (40:18.342)
Hahaha

Jason Mlicki (40:32.492)
I don’t want people to think that this is the whole totality of your, of your thought leadership strategy. In fact, you know, when, when chat GPT first burst on the scenes, I was telling clients and I still maintain this. You have to give your clients a reason to want to find you. Not just your expertise, which is why we talked about brand and content experiences and the things that we do in those areas where clients are looking for that, that brand you’ve built for research or whatever it might be.

Because generative AI is just just scraping everything else. And so I kind of in the piece I noticed it’s like you need to have a two prong strategy, one for the bots and one for the people because like they’re going to be in generative AI, your clients are going to be there. So you want to be there. You want to be where they are. Right. But you also want to be other places they are. That’s the only place they are. Right. So.

Jason Mlicki (41:32.322)
Hope this was helpful.

Jeff McKay (41:35.634)
feel like I learned some things.

Jason Mlicki (41:37.474)
That’s good. That’s good. Let’s start. That’s the only time you ever said that to me. Most times you just tell me Jason already knew all this.

Jeff McKay (41:39.16)
Ha ha!

Jeff McKay (41:44.712)
that’s not true. That’s not true. You’ve taught me a lot. Most of it wrong, but you have taught me a lot.

Jason Mlicki (41:51.022)
Well, I’m a big believer in misinformation.

Jeff McKay (41:58.856)
All right, so listeners, go back to your conference rooms and start whiteboarding this so you can attack it. Do not wait. There’s a sense of urgency with this, and it’s a long-term game.

Jason Mlicki (42:11.554)
I’ll wait.

Jason Mlicki (42:15.118)
Yeah, and I think it’s a great window, honestly, because I think there are so many folks that haven’t really thought much about this, honestly. It’s not on their radar. A lot of firms, no one’s even looked at the Google traffic and realized there’s been a decline. No one’s even bothered to look. Like, oh, really? I didn’t notice.

Jeff McKay (42:33.522)
So step number one, do a thorough Google Analytics review.

Jason Mlicki (42:37.996)
Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Jeff McKay (42:42.534)
All right, buddy. Good conversation.

Jason Mlicki (42:44.524)
Yeah, thanks for digging into my head on this one. So it’s fun.