As AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s SGE become more widespread in how users discover information, traditional SEO is expanding into new territory.
In this episode of the Majestic SEO Podcast, our host David Bain will be joined by Tasha Antwi, Jon Mest and Luke Gosha to discuss how to position your brand at the forefront of the AI search revolution, and why the future of search is not just about ranking, but about creating unique, personalized experiences that capture the attention of both AI algorithms and human users.
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Transcript
David Bain
Hello and welcome to the August 2025 edition of the Majestic SEO panel where we’re discussing how to do SEO for AI models.
I’m your host, David Bain and joining me today are three great guests. Let’s get them to introduce themselves, starting off with Luke.
Luke Gosha
My name is Luke Gosha. I am the head of Search and AI at a brand and performance agency called Strategiq, and we’re based out in London.
I’ve been in SEO for well over 10 years, and have really been leaning into the AI search world and really excited by where we’re going.
David Bain
Also with us today is Jon.
Jon Mest
My name is Jon Mest, and I’m the CEO of Just Reach Out and ChatRank their Digital PR and AI visibility software platforms.
My background is in various different types of software and SaaS products. I kind of stumbled away into SEO and AI visibility a few years ago, but really, really excited to talk to more about it today.
David Bain
And also with us today is Tasha.
Tasha Antwi
Hi, I’m Tasha Antwi and I am an SEO and search strategy consultant. I predominantly focus on luxury premium brands as well AI search.
In terms of my background, heavily SEO, but probably a bit of an SEO all-rounder at some points in my career, even looking after a Digital PR team.
David Bain
Tasha, lets stick with you for the first question, because I think you hear so many different descriptions and terms like AI Models and LLMs, so what’s the difference between an AI Model and an LLM?
Tasha Antwi
I think there’s crossovers between the two, and I think it’s always good to kind of clarify what the difference is between them both.
So an LLM is a Large Language Model, and I guess this is like a type of AI model that is trained to understand and generate human language and something conversational. So a good example of that would be ChatGPT, whereas an AI model is probably more of a broader term, and sometimes includes an algorithm that’s been trained as well. So a basic example of an AI model would be something along the lines of like facial recognition, for example, that some software and some things use as well.
So that’s how I would kind of differentiate between the two of those. I don’t know if anyone else has any other opinions on that.
David Bain
Thank you, Tasha. Let’s get the other two panelists opinion on that. So Luke, what are your thoughts?
Luke Gosha
I think that was good summary. I think there’s a lot of acronyms going around in the SEO world. If SEO wasn’t enough now we’ve got AEO, GEO, LLM optimization, and when it comes to those specifics, I think my opinion is they’re all one in the same. They’re all ways that brands can be found from through tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, et cetera, and it’s important for us to tackle it with a search first mindset. That’s the only thing that I would kind of add to that whole mix of new acronyms that we’ve now come across in the SEO world.
David Bain
Jon, what are your thoughts?
Jon Mest
No, I think that that’s spot on. I think for us, at least, we really focus in on the chat model, so more like the LLM types that are really, really helpful for search now. That’s now, as in today, in the summer of 2025. It could be not long before video and image and everything else could be absolutely added to this and you could be trying to rank for images. I mean, there’s a lot that could be happening here. I think for today’s discussion, most likely we’ll be sticking with the chat models, which is the traditional LLMs, the ChatGPTs and the Perplexities.
David Bain
I’m just wondering if LLM SEO, or AI SEO, is likely to have more search volume and what people should be optimizing their LinkedIn profiles for.
Jon Mest
I generally prefer to say that you should be growing your ChatRank, but I’m a little biased there.
David Bain
Is that a branded search?
Jon Mest
Our business is called ChatRank, and yes, we do believe that you should be growing your ChatRank.
David Bain
What should be people should be focusing on in terms of their LinkedIn profiles?
Tasha Antwi
I think that is a very good question. I’m tempted to check actual search volumes in terms of how people are searching around those, but I feel like people understand what an LLM is a bit more than the other phrases. So I might go for LLM search.
David Bain
LLM SEO has an easier trip off the tongue phrase going about it, and that tends to become what we use, but we’ll see. Maybe you can do some searches, and we can find out later on the discussion?
Luke, in terms of different LLMs, different AI models, user interfaces out there, do they act quite differently, or is the way that SEO is done for them quite similar? And as long as if you optimize for one, you can optimize for many at the same time?
Luke Gosha
From my perspective there’s a kind of broad view we have to take. Certainly, these different models do behave in different ways. For example, OpenAI’s ChatGPT was originally using Bing’s web system. There’s been recent studies as well that I’ve seen on the likes of LinkedIn where people are saying it’s actually has it switched up and it’s starting to use Google’s index? I cannot confirm nor deny that specifically, but those are kind of nuances that we need to take into consideration, especially when we think about the likes of Gemini as well, and how that’s Google based IP, and how that would work as well.
And to add more kind of fire to the mix, I’ve been tapping into AI mode and really digging into AI mode as well, which uses a completely different system, like the Query Fan-Out technique. So as these different products are out there, there are certain nuances, but there is no one guide around how to optimize for all of these there’s no one source of truth. It’s all going to be trial and error. It’s all going to be learning through experimentation.
But what I like to communicate to clients and people that I talked to this subject about is the fundamentals of SEO, LLM search and AI search are the same. The only difference is that we have to lean into certain things a bit more when it comes to LLMs, especially when we look at the different types of LLMs that we have.
If we think that the likes of Google, their crawlers, and their rendering systems have gained so much experience and pace throughout the years, whereas the likes of ChatGPTs might be slightly behind, especially when it comes to things like rendering JavaScript. We know that Google can do that pretty well. Whereas, these other LLMs are, let’s say, in their infancy from a crawling perspective, although, they are ramping up and moving very far. So I don’t know if infancy is the right word, but they certainly haven’t had the head start that Google’s had, and we have to kind of think about that when we’re strategizing.
The fundamentals of Technical SEO from a rendering perspective are even more so important now traditional things like off-page signals and wanting followed links may not mean as much. What’s more important now for LLMs is brand mentions and the context that your brands are being referenced in.
That was kind of a long answer to your question, but there are certain nuances when it comes to traditional SEO and LLM optimization. But I think we have to think of it in a search first way, but just have to lean on certain aspects a little bit more.
David Bain
Luke mentioned that Google have obviously been around for a lot longer, since the late 90s or so. Jon, is that a help or a hindrance for them?
Jon Mest
Is it a help or a hindrance for Google? It’s probably a help now, when it comes to actually ranking invisibility in the AI models. Luke mentioned the infancy of the ChatGPT crawlers or the Perplexity crawlers, and that can be a way that you can kind of take advantage of some of that as well if you’re a brand that’s thinking about this smartly.
I’m sure Google is much happier at having 30 years of experience of crawling web pages so they don’t get stuck in a page of JavaScript and run away and hide and cry because they understand how that all works and they can maybe process information a bit better.
So to your question about the models having differences? Yes. I think for us we see Google being especially interesting because of their snippet targeting and there’s very punchy one sentence things you see a lot at the top of search, like that is what we really need to focus on for the Gemini models and for Google to make sure that you are and your brand is front and center in those punchy snippets and those AI overviews at the top of the page.
Now, when it comes to Claude and Perplexity and ChatGPT, there are definitely nuances to the models. Our customers ask about this a lot. What we tell them is, 90% of this is fundamentals. It’s making sure that you are keeping your brand at the top of what it should be doing from the SEO perspective overall. And sure there are, there might be little model nuances here and there, but for now, for the most part, we really kind of focus in on helping our brands kind of get visible across the models with one little slight nuance for Google targeting for the AI original snippets, because that is such an important aspect of different visibility.
David Bain
Yeah, okay. And Tasha, what would you like to add there?
Tasha Antwi
I agree with what Luka and Jon have said in terms of how people should be looking at it, and it definitely needs to be from a search first point of view. I do think that in this era people might start to forget about covering the basics, or the basis of the fundamentals of SEO.
Something I always say all the time is that your website is like the engine of the car and all the other digital touch points is like the body of the car. The car doesn’t move without the engine, even though you might not see it. Does that make sense? So all the information that then gets surfaced into these different LLMs are obviously coming from the website, which means that you still need to cover the basics when it comes to Technical SEO and ensuring that their various different crawlers can crawl and index information as well.
I think people have forgotten about that important element, because even if you’re doing some Entity SEO optimization, which we know is pretty important for this, you still need structured data to be able to do that as well. So you can’t escape it.
Obviously there’s always going to be more of a focus on Google, just because Google has so much more experience when it comes to this, and they’ve been in the game so long, but then Google also have different functionalities, which then pull in different formats that come from various different places.
So I think that’s why Google can’t be entirely ignored or put to the sidelines. It still probably needs a bit more of a focus when it comes to that, and then obviously to what Luke was saying. I do still think backlinks are important, but obviously now it doesn’t matter if it’s a follow link or if it’s no-follow link, or if it’s a link at all, just because they all the different LLMs will look at where and how you’re being mentioned, and then measure the sentiment of that to then determine if it’s an answer worthwhile given to whoever’s searching or asking that long tail query.
So I think that side of thing is going to become way more important now, especially if you want to start building any form of brand affinity and you’re trying to use search to do that.
Luke Gosha
Just to add as well, and maybe referencing back to the question that we had at the top of this session around calling ourselves LLM optimization, or SEO, etc. Of course, the SEO in me wants to see search volume, but I do think the kind of we’re blurring the lines a little bit by having these different acronyms, that search first approach is definitely what I’m communicating to a lot of people that I’m talking to about this subject.
I think the differentiations that we have with these other acronyms kind of take us away from those fundamentals, that search first mentality that we have, and SEOs have the skills and have the history of working with algorithms and working with answers that are appearing to users and helping brands to be discovered, that we should lean into that and not create kind of these separation within the industry.
I don’t know if it’s just me or it might be my algorithm on LinkedIn, but I do see a lot of people almost arguing about the point around people being geniuses about LLM search and SEO, but we’re all part of the same team. It’s all one in the same.
Tasha Antwi
I do agree and I do think we are one of the same team. But my only gripe with that phrase, as an SEO person, is that it sometimes ignores the audience element that goes towards it, because we’re used to keyword data and things like that. There’s a few Audience Insights tools that I use, and one of them Google’s a client of theirs, because even though Google probably sits on a wealth of information because it knows what everybody’s searching at every given moment of time, they don’t always know why people are searching for particular things, or why it’s going up and down.
That gray area of why is basically the thing that I think if as SEOs, we kind of need to move into the area of, how do we then address this? Because that’s why people go to ChatGPT, as opposed to Google. Does that make sense to depending on how they’re searching? All of these different updates that we see across the board is to do with the audience first, if that makes sense, so it’s like audience and search first.
Luke Gosha
I agree. I think, especially with what LLMs and AI search has shown, that we’re moving in a direction of personalization, and that’s where users may have felt let down by the 10 blue links that we had traditionally seen in in the SERPs for the longest time, right? So that that that’s certainly a point.
Something that I say to my team and SEOs that I’ve met in my career, is that for me, SEO is good marketing. And one of the great things that AI search has really brought to the forefront, in my opinion, is that it reinforces the fact that SEO is good marketing, because things like brand and how your brand’s being mentioned and referenced, and brand building activities you can do to really make sure that we’re training the models on, and positive brand sentiment is all a really important aspect of good marketing.
This is especially true, for example, when I come across clients that historically had been ranking for things that maybe their brand didn’t warrant ranking for, and they were generating traffic from that, but now all of a sudden, those kind of queries are zero click queries and have zero click intent.
The landscape has changed, but it makes us, as SEOs, really lean into and think about how what we do is essentially all aspects and flavors of good marketing.
David Bain
Luke, when you talk about the landscape has changed, what do you actually mean? Is that in terms of volume of users using AI models to conduct searches versus more traditional search engines?
Luke Gosha
So the landscape can mean many things. The landscape of Google is changing in front of our eyes, but what we’ve got to reference as well, isn’t it? It’s a great point, and I’m seeing it in analytics profiles for a lot of different clients in different industries. And again, it’s not to diminish what we’re doing.
In terms of AI search, I certainly believe on this journey of where we’re going. But the fact of the matter is, some of these LLMs are only driving 2-3% of traffic. Google is still the big player. I’m fully aware that a seismic shift could happen. There’s news of OpenAI launching a browser, which could change the model completely. There’s also been talks around Apple potentially changing their default search engine.
These kind of things that are happening in and around us could be a seismic shift. That means that more users are moving away from Google. But as it stands and the history that Google has is they’re still number one, they still have the technological capacity and competitiveness to also make a seismic shift so that people potentially use their platform more than these other LLMs that are coming into the market.
I think all of this has highlighted that as users, we have almost been let down by the Internet and quality of results, and as a result of that, people aren’t changing their user journeys and using different tools to discover products and to discover brands. There’s also something to be said around the entire user journey changing as we’ve started to adopt AI and users are starting to adopt AI, and it might mean that their initial touch point with a brand and the research that they do for a brand is on a ChatGPT like tool, and then they might then go to traditional search to discover that brand in more detail, or to go direct.
So the whole user journey and different touch points is convoluting the whole kind of user touch point and life cycle, but at the same time, it presents so many great opportunities for brands to be discovered. And that’s what’s quite exciting about the whole landscape that’s kind of changing in front of us.
Jon Mest
Yeah, that’s wonderful. I agree with that Luke. I think you are absolutely right, and we are making a bet that the switch from search engine to answer engine is happening, and so we’re just kind of like seeing our clients are coming to us because they see that too.
So most of our clients that come to us, have an SEO agency or an SEO tools, I think they’re still doing the traditional SEO. I know the lines are blurred, and we actually know that to be true, because everything you said was true. But also, as these tools, even the Googles of the world, start leaning more into zero click answers and just to kind of these answer engines becoming the answer engines, how your brand sets up for that is different.
So like Tasha mentioned with the backlinks, backlink-ing is not dead. Obviously you need to make sure that your brand is out there and visible. But as mentioned, you don’t need even the do-follow link. What you need is that people are talking about your brand. It doesn’t have to be the New York Times, the BBC anymore. It could be like Reddit, Quora, YouTube comments, and even things like G2 reviews for software, Yelp or TripAdvisor traditional businesses, etc. This matters so much more than the answer engines, because social proof and sentiment, is all that matters to the LLMs, and so for us, we are thinking about things from a Technical SEO perspective where your page speed needs to be good, but also your links needs to be good, as it all still completely matters.
What our clients are coming to us to bet on is, how do we position our brand so that in 6-12 months from now, as these things start to evolve, are we, as our brand, set up to win in these answer engines? Like I said that, in that snippet targeting, are we going to have that punchy one sentence answer when somebody goes to Google and ask for something? Are we going to have all the right kind of answers and kind of social proof in these review sites, these aggregator sites, things like Reddit, that’s the thing that we’re betting on as being the next step.
So yes, everything you said was totally true, the positioning your brand for these answer engines that the things are turning into is so valuable to any brand, whether it’s B2B or B2C.
Tasha Antwi
Just to add to that as well, because obviously YouTube comments and comments across the board are important, but I think I remember reading something which was basically saying that most of the responses that come out of like ChatGPT is actually driven by Reddit. And Reddit has different subreddits, which are a community of people talking. So if you strip all of this stuff back, it always goes back to people who are building a community.
I think in this eight day and age, it’s very important to build that brand affinity. But there’s also a lot of research that’s showing that people are no longer building any brand affinity because they’re scrolling on TikTok, they see a dress that they like, and they’ve clicked on the link and they’ve bought it, and then their relationship with the brand ends there.
From my experience with my last couple of clients, you’re seeing that performance non-brand wise, is great and it’s going up, but then brand performance is going down. Obviously there’s several different theories as to why that could be. I can say that from a point of view when it comes to fashion, because all the places where I like to buy clothes, I’m now shopping by the apps. I’m not on the website anymore.
There’s so many different ways to look at it, but I think if you want to be creative, you need to be creating those campaigns that drive people to want to know more about the brand, to get them talking about it on these little pockets of places that they’ll have their communities. Then the LLMs are using that to determine how relevant that is to what somebody is asking. But then when you start building this level of affinity, you also get the consumer coming back to convert as well. So there’s a win, win situation there.
Luke Gosha
It goes back to that point around good marketing, and what these LLMs have also done, and is for SEOs to also lean into different channels, right? We need to be leaning in and talking to Social Media Managers about how to build communities, how to ensure that any comments or reviews that are being left on social are kind of contributing to the greater good, and we also need to be leaning into Marketing Managers to understand where the brand’s going.
It’s all really just re-emphasizes that as SEOs, we need to be working across different channels, and tapping in and collaborating, because really it comes down to what’s the best experience that a user is going to have with a brand. And that statement touches so many different traditional marketing channels, which are all going after the same goal.
Jon Mest
Imagine telling one of your clients that a Reddit thread would be more important than a Vogue feature. It’s crazy, but that might be the truth.
Tasha Antwi
I literally had to tell a client something similar a couple of weeks ago. I noticed that you have to take control of the conversation, and I think that’s what brands miss, as in, if you don’t take control of the situation, you’ll have your consumer, your audience, create a subreddit for you, and then they then manage and own the narrative of that entire Reddit.
Whereas, if you’re smart as a brand, you would create a subreddit. So first of all, people can’t steal that name or whatever they decide to call it, but then you can also start to control the narrative, but do it from a genuine place, so not adding or trying to sell anyone anything, but use it as a form of just inserting yourself into real cultural conversations and even using that as a basis to solve problems or issues that people are genuinely interested in. And then that then heavily influences the rest.
David Bain
We’re actually going to have a specialist Reddit SEO episode on the third of September. So we can put that same question to the discussion panel then as well.
Jon and Tasha, you carried on by talking about the importance of Reddit for ChatGPT as well. So is Reddit the new Wikipedia?
Jon Mest
Google seems to be betting on it. I mean, it’s not public, but Google’s spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay Reddit to basically get their data, get their information, get everything that partnership is open and available now. So you can only imagine, like the AI models are doing the same thing.
I’d say that this is a bet they’re making, that Reddit is a forum that matters, so I think Wikipedia still matters. I think Quora, bizarrely, still matters. Like I can’t believe Quora is still relevant in 2025 but it is like being Places like this are just the ways that brands can get social proof, and they can get people talking about them and chatting about them. The AI models love that because, again, it is almost more real than a backlink and a random blog that who knows if that’s real, and I guess like they’ve given that more credit. Okay, that could change at any moment, but I think that overall, Reddit seems to be a good forum and opportunity for people to air those that information, and the AI models are responding.
Tasha Antwi
I have a controversial addition to what you’ve just said, and the controversial edition is, you see how you said, obviously you’re surprised that Cora is still going the way I see it is, Quora is Diet Coke, and Reddit is Coke Zero. If you know what that reference is. So obviously Coke Zero is something that was marketed towards men, and then with Diet Coke, that one was marketed towards females. So they introduced Coke Zero to address the potential like gender nuances between those, but that’s the way I see. I probably know more females using Quora than Reddit, and I hear more men talking about having subreddits about various different things, and I think we’re newer on those individual platforms, if you see what I mean.
And then I think, to your point, with Wikipedia, I think it’s because it’s not easy to update a Wikipedia page, and the information on there can still be wrong, and it is through a very biased lens, whereas on the Quora’s and Reddit’s, they’re fluid conversations that people can’t necessarily change or edit or manipulate someone’s opinion on something. Does that make sense?
David Bain
You seem to indicate that different types of people may favour Reddit or may favour somewhere else. Does this mean that Reddit isn’t right for every type of business, and you need to research where the community is likely to be for your business before you just jump on optimizing for Reddit?
Tasha Antwi
I think you absolutely have to, because where I’ve had some clients who are more in the luxury space, none of those platforms are really relevant. Instead it’s actually YouTube, because especially if it’s what I call an entry level consumer, they want very detailed reviews and conversations, so they’re probably going to go to YouTube first, before they go to a Reddit or a Quora, and their journey is a bit more of a bigger cycle. After that they’ll often finish their conversion in a store, as opposed to online, because they want the in-store experience of going and having champagne, being showing everything, because it’s a whole experience.
In some niches, Reddit might be better to go to, and then for other niches it might be Quora. So if I was looking at, I don’t know, skincare, even I’ve seen Quora pop up for relationship advice. And who is asking the questions? It’s with emails. Do you see what I mean? So that’s where you see those rankings for those kind of queries are high for Quora, but you wouldn’t really find it on Reddit. Does that make sense?
David Bain
Luke, you mentioned the importance of building communities. Sorry for this horrible question. How do you measure the SEO impact of building a community?
Luke Gosha
If you are measuring brand sentiment, there’s different ways that organizations will look at that measurement, and that could be one way that positive sentiment around your brand is important. Brand searches and traffic coming in from brand searches is also a way that you could measure, as well as making sure that your brand is being mentioned where your audience hang out.
Like has been said, it might not be Reddit for certain industries, it might be YouTube, it might be TikTok, it could be different communities, but you’ve got to be in the face and be present where your audience are hanging out. That’s just part of the reason why it’s important to build communities.
David Bain
Jon, is brand visibility the way to go about measuring the impact of appearing within the AI models?
Jon Mest
I believe so, and people’s way of buying is changing. Tasha mentioned earlier, she doesn’t buy from websites, she only buys from apps. Now, some people still prefer to buy in store, but whatever it is, we see that people, at least in our research, are going to the LLM specifically, like a ChatGPT or a Claude or a Perplexity, to do research. They want to understand what am I about to buy?
I have a great example. I needed a new like backpack for my computer for my commute. I just needed a new laptop bag. I went to ChatGPT, gave it very specific instructions, explained exactly what I wanted: black, weather resistant, no brand, and no logo on it, because I just wanted to find out what my options were. I worked with ChatGPT for about 10 minutes on the conversation, and they gave me three options. Then later I was watching a YouTube video on one of the ones that was the winner, and then I bought a bought a product from their website directly. That was my buying journey, and it’s a very normal kind of a buying journey in today’s age.
So did I go to ChatGPT and buy from ChatGPT? No, I didn’t. Now this happened to be before they added the shopping capabilities, but you know, the way people buy is changing, and so for us, the way we talk to our clients about this is, is your brand being mentioned? Are you visible when these LLMs are being asked these questions? And that stays step one, and probably the most important thing to be in that consideration step. So is being number one important? Sure, but being number two is also pretty good. Just kind of being in the top five means you’re probably going to get a look for one of these products, top 10, even for some software vendors, if they’re going to try to look at if they are going to be in the consideration set for being chosen?
So for us, it’s about being mentioned and being in the answers from the AI models for these LLMs as its super valuable to get to be in that consideration set. Now when people buy, it might be a month later, it might be a week later, it might be two years later, but your brand is almost like advertising. It’s almost like being a billboard in the LLMs, and for us, that’s we kind of preach as starting points.
Make sure that your brand is there and visible. When your community is asking the question, you should be the answer to that and that’s what you should be kind of wanting to rank for.
David Bain
Shall we talk a little bit about optimizing your brand to actually appear in these AI models? Because, Jon, earlier on you actually talked about snippet targeting. What can you do to make it more likely that your brand is going to appear within these snippets?
Jon Mest
We see this all the time, brands with excellent websites, with excellent content that really is kind of geared towards their audience. Amazing. That’s really good. We don’t want you to change your brand perception, your brand image, how your consumers perceive you, but the LLMs are very specific. They want answers. They want to know who you are, why you are that, and like, why we should believe that you’re the best at that.
So snippet targeting is all about things like, I am Brand X, we do X or a very specific thing for this X community, and these are kind of the results they get. That one sentence. I know it might sound robotic or formulaic and might not exactly be what you want to be perceived as your brand, but that one sentence, I promise you, has more action in LLM answers than a five sentence answer, which is more fluffy language.
I know that it’s kind of a back and forth between tying into your brand image and what you kind of want to beat your consumers, but those shorter, punchier kind of, here’s the answer to your what your question could be, sentences work the best.
You can do it in the bottom of FAQs if you want to, or at the bottom of your posts or at the bottom of your pages, however you want to set it up to make it more consumable to your audience, but basically, those kind of punchy answers, two questions that people might be asking is your best chance for these LLMs to pick up you and your answer, because, again, they’re lazy. They want the exact sentence they could just repeat rather than having to synthesize information and figure out what that answer is.
David Bain
It’s interesting that you said that you could be at the bottom of the page there Jon, because with traditional SEO, you’d probably want the key information to be towards the top. Are you saying that position on the page doesn’t matter to LLMs?
Jon Mest
Ideally it’s at the top, the middle and the bottom. But for some of our brands, they don’t want to do that. So you at least need to have it somewhere on the page where it’s available and visible in plain text for the scrapers to see.
David Bain
Tasha, do you have had anything that you wanted to add to that?
Tasha Antwi
The only thing I would add to that is it’s just probably more the off-page part of things, because I was just thinking about my recent shopping experience. I using ChatGPT and I was looking to buy a new eye cream. I did the same thing as you Jon where you put in your specification. I want the best eye cream. Good value for money. This is what I’m targeting, in terms of what I want the cream to do, and then obviously it’s given me a bunch of results.
But what I found interesting when I was reading the results and the responses, not only did it pick a couple of options for me, but it was looking at the sources, because sometimes I also asked the sources. It was looking at all these external publications which have reviewed this product, and then, based on the sentiment of the review, had then ranked which ones I should go for first versus the others, if that makes sense, which tells me that doing content campaigns and getting those brand mentions, doing events, doing like bigger things away from traditional stuff, actually might be more important than doing the rest.
Obviously, we still need to do the basics to make sure that you actually appear in these type of searches, but in terms of how it then gets ranked, and how people then perceive it based on what they’ve read, that sentiment is going to be really important, because I didn’t pick the top one, I picked the second one because of what people had said about the product versus the price.
So I think that’s going to be very important, because that’s now my ‘brand experience’, if you see what I mean?
David Bain
We need to optimize for the same phrase in as many different places as possible.
So I’m thinking about if we’re on Reddit or if we’re interacting other communities, do we need to pick the phrase that we use to describe what our brand is and who it’s for that we want to actually train LLMs to actually understand this is how you describe our brand, or does it not matter so much if you describe your brands in different ways and different platforms?
Luke Gosha
Going back to Jon’s point about being really specific and clear, and avoiding that fluffy language, if you can. I know there’s a balance between how brands want to be perceived, but it’s really important to be clear. What is it that you do? What are you known for? How do you do it? What is excellence? Demonstrating that and being really clear with that is really important.
Then going back to what Tasha mentioned as well, building your brand and building that off-page real estate in other areas and communities and having positive sentiment about your brand and products is really important.
I’ll add one more to the mix, which is around what I like to call creating hubs of relevance. And what I mean by this is ensuring that we’ve got semantically relevant content that is easily accessible from one page to another. So, for example, if I have a product that sells T-shirts, then I might want to talk about things like comfort, material, weather and conditions, how to clean it, etc. Having all of those different, but semantically relevant, topics linked to and having content that is really clear, to the point, and is not too fluffy, is also very, very important.
So having that kind of linked as a hub of relevance is, is super important, in my opinion, and that’s really what ties the ability to be able to appear in some of these AI overviews and LLMs and, from my research and experimenting with this Query Fan-Out technique and learning more about that, I think these hubs of relevance are really what’s going to kind of take-off and needs to be thought about.
It’s things that as SEOs we might have been doing already, but gone are the days where you’re creating content for contents sake and just trying to generate clicks because you’re leveraging your authority. I think that’s going to die out. Instead, we need to be having relevant content and semantically linked hubs of relevance.
Jon Mest
Tasha mentioned it as well. It’s the citations and the sources which are the elements that are going to give you the feedback. They’re going to tell you what they’re using, to say who’s relevant and who’s not. So use that. This is what part of the process is, understanding how the LLMs are telling us how they answer these questions, or how they’re kind of telling you essentially what they’re doing, because they’re giving you their sources, they’re giving you their citations. Use that to your advantage.
This is what our product does really well, but basically anybody can do it. Just click on the queries you want to rank for, click on what is winning there, what kind of sources and what kind of citations are being mentioned there, and learn from that. Sometimes user testimonials are the most important thing that matters to the LLM for that answer. Sometimes it’s like a product description page having the best information that tells you exactly what you need to answer the exact question they asked. Sometimes it’s a customer or a case study that shows that social proof. And sometimes it’s a listicle of the top 10 vendors and you we’re put number one because the blog or brand that put together this listicle is trusted.
You really need to use that to your advantage and understand that better, and use it to create content that addresses the goals from that research to make sure your brand is winning.
David Bain
Are we moving towards just having an answer engine instead of a search engine? Or is there still an opportunity to actually to be featured as multiple answers within an AI result? Or are AI tools, LLMs, AI models actually wanting to evolve so that they just give you one succinct, definitive answer to the majority of queries?
Luke Gosha
I personally see this evolving, and instead of a single answer, I see it being a personalized answer. With these LLMs, the more we use them, the more they know about us, the more they know about our nuances. At the moment, they’re just a shell as a browser or app experience. But in the future, who knows how they could look? They might be integrated within us, they might be VR, who knows. But the way I see things are going and where it’s evolving to is definitely personalization and I think we’re heading there slightly.
Circling back to AI mode, it’s going to know things about cookies. It’s going to know our Google accounts. It’s going to know exactly the websites that we visit. It’s going to start to become personalized. It’s going to start to reference sources that they know that I visit on a regular basis. All of these things are just going to be kind of bespoke personalization engines.
Tasha Antwi
I agree with that as well, because even if you use ChatGPT, predominantly the app version of it is where I see this happening more, is it’ll give you two options of an answer, and then it’s asking you to select the answer that you prefer. So I think it’s in a process of testing probably what works better.
I think essentially, the outcome that we’re probably going to see from that is that, depending on how you like your responses, ChatGPT is going to learn that, and then everything will tailor all of its responses to be in that format.
So I’m someone who sometimes thinks in bullet points, and likes to read bullet points, so when I write prompts in there, I’m asking for things in three simple bullet points, because I don’t want the whole jazz and then give me sources. That’s all I need. But whereas other people, they need the fluff that goes with it.
I think eventually, what we will move to see, is that it will just be personalized. But at the moment, they’re learning how we want to read and receive it. So I don’t know if you guys have seen that before, where ChatGPT is actually giving you an option to pick the answer that you prefer?
Jon Mest
Yeah, so ChatGPT openly state they’re using your memory, so you’re opting in to let them use that to personalize to you. I think, like Claude, basically by default those terms, I thought they don’t even do that for you. So it’s kind of model dependent.
I don’t want to call it a hot take, but I have maybe, like a lukewarm, slightly warm take here, and that, I think, right now it’s kind of this leaning towards personalized answers that’s giving you that answer. But I feel like once these LLM start turning on the ads, which nobody’s really talking about, but once they do, I feel like people are going to get a little more skeptical of that single answer they’re getting. Even if it’s personalized, even if it’s there, it’s like, wait, does somebody pay for this answer? Did somebody?
Right now, people trust the LLM answers, because it is supposed to be very objective and very meritocratic and very real, and so I personally believe that if they start leaking ads into these answers, even if it says ad, if it doesn’t say whatever it is like, people are going to get a little suspicious, and I don’t know if it’s going to be just simple answers anymore.
I was just listening to Sundar Pichai on a podcast a few weeks ago from Lex Fridman, and he was talking about this, and asking “are you guys putting ads in AI overviews?” And he basically dodged the question, because the answer is already yes. This hasn’t been talked about very openly. I think Elizabeth Reid, the Head of Search, basically hinted at it. They’re already starting to do it, but he shut down when he was asked that question. He did not want to talk about it very clearly.
I think people generally, at least right now in search, understand what’s paid for and what’s organic, and whether you agree with what’s organic should be at the top or not, you kind of just understand that that’s been earned, and not bought. Whereas, going forward, if these AI models do start introducing ads and paid content, that could make it me a little bit more skeptical, a little bit more like, can you give me a few answers and some options so I can read about this more and make it more clear that this isn’t just the answer.
Tasha Antwi
And it’s not just the answer. I think what we will probably see, in terms of the ads, is that the sources that it’s referencing, it would probably list it out in terms of those top bits. But I think it depending on how they’re all laid out, that’s what will be interesting the minute like something like ChatGPT really turns on ads.
David Bain
Let’s finish up by asking our panel one final question and getting them to remind the viewer, the listener, where they can actually find them online.
So Jon, you said that you might have shared your answer, so hopefully you’ve got another one ready to go. And the question is, what’s the quickest win that an SEO can do to take advantage of their brand appearing in AI models?
Tasha, should we begin with you and ask you to share where the listener can find out more about you afterwards?
Tasha Antwi
I think the biggest win in terms of low hanging fruit is optimizing for more, longer tail kind of questions and queries, but also focusing on that Entity SEO element as a very basic, quick-win, low hanging fruit. And also don’t forget about your audience, so understand who your audience is and add that to your keyword research. Don’t just do keyword research about the products and services, but also do keyword research around what that person would also care about, and then write content on that and optimize for that.
I’m Tasha Antwi across all platforms, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.
David Bain
Luke, what are your thoughts on the question?
Luke Gosha
I’ll come back to the initial question, because I feel like we need to do a part two because there’s so much more that we can be talking about, including what Cloudflare are doing to block LLMs that we could have spoken about as well, as well as the question around should LLMs be able to train themselves on content that has been resourceful for various different brands? So there’s many questions like that.
There’s also a huge disparity between impressions and clicks, and CTRs are dropping with more zero click searches, which we should also be thinking about as well. I’ll tie that into my one thing that you could be thinking about, and that is that there’s more zero click searches nowadays, and they’re not going to go away. We know that you need to also focus on brand, but at the same time, I think it’s important for brands be thinking about experiences. What experiences are you creating, either on-site, through your app or just in general, throughout all the various different touch points that a user has with your brand?
Think about those experiences. What’s going to entice the click? It’s getting harder to get those click-throughs if AI is summarizing everything and giving you what you need, so you really need to have something or be thinking about an experience that is exclusive and that is only available through you.
You can find me, Luke Gosha, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, and on Twitter.
David Bain
Thank you, Luke and Jon?
Jon Mest
I’ll just tell a very quick story, I promise, but the way to win in AI search, in my opinion, is to just own your message, own what you want to be, and just really lean into that. So we own a business called JustReachOut. It’s a Digital PR business and it helps you outreach the media and podcasts to get your brand visible and available.
Now we compete against the Much Rack’s and the Meltwater’s of the world who spend millions of dollars more than we do on marketing. We’re not going to win on traditional search against them and we’re not going to win on very specific AI search. What we lean into is, we’re more affordable, we are DIY, we are more flexible. You need to own your long tail things that you care about, and just hone in on that on your website, on your about us page, on your blog, on everything, and tie it all together.
So now, when you go to ChatGPT or these AI searches and ask what are the best media outreach platforms? We show up. Not because we’ve spent the most money here, because we might even not even be the best, even though I think we’re really good, but because we are that more affordable, more month-to-month friendly.
For us, it’s really about owning your niche, especially if you can’t spend the millions of dollars you might need to, so you can win in other ways, like these traditional search or these SEO ways. We did this for ourselves. It’s why ChatRank exists, and that is because we built this engine for ourselves, for Just Reach Out, to make sure we win the AI models, and then we productize them to ChatRank.
I’m Jon, you can find me at JustReachOut, as well as ChatRank.ai. These are both tools that our team owns and operates for the more Digital PR and media outreach side of things, and the other is purely for helping your brand rank better and win in the AI models. Both are the self-serve. Sign up for our software and use it as well as our managed services and done for you plans for helping you rank better in AI models.
David Bain
A wonderful discussion. As Luke said, we could have kept on going and we could have added different elements into it as well, and perhaps we can persuade all three of them to come back at some point in the future for more.
I’m David Bain and you’ve been listening to the Majestic SEO panel. If you want to join us live next time, sign up at majestic.com/webinars and of course, check out SEOin2025.com too.
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