Behind the Scenes: A Workshop on Getting Your Business Seen by AI

Welcome to the For The Daring Growth Seekers podcast. My name is Jordan McFadyen, and we’re doing something a little bit different on the podcast today. Instead of the usual format, I want to give you a bit of a behind-the-scenes look, and an exclusive listen actually, to a workshop that we recently hosted in our For The Daring Growth Seekers community. So, if you haven’t heard of this, obviously you’re listening to the podcast and that’s one part of the community, but we also have an email-only community where we email out updates about what’s happening in the AI era, plus we host monthly workshops for free. They’re short, they’re quick and they’re action-packed as well. It’s also a space where we navigate the big shifts that are happening in marketing, especially in the AI field.

And the topic that we covered in this particular session was probably one of the single biggest challenges facing businesses right now, and that is, how do we keep our businesses seen in the age of AI? Because we’ve seen those stats: nearly 60% of Google searches ending without a click. Customers are turning to tools like ChatGPT or AI Overviews, and essentially those old rules of being able to be found online, they’re getting rewritten on every day, essentially, at the moment. So, if you’re not showing up on these AI-generated answers right now, very soon, potentially, you’re going to start to become pretty invisible.

So, what I’m going to share today was this recording that wasn’t just a bit of theory. Essentially, what I tried to do is pack it with as much real-world data as I could, tried to give a practical plan as well, where we cover some actual factors that are actually influencing whether an AI is recommending you and your business, and the steps you can take, even starting today or this week, if you want to move away from being unseen to actually being trusted in these AI models as well.

If you’re interested to join the For The Daring Growth Seekers community as well, you can do that for free on our website, donebynine.com/podcast. You’ll see the sign-up form there. We’d love to have you join some of our future workshops in there as well. Like I said, it’s completely free. So, without further ado, let’s get into it. Let’s listen back to the recording from the workshop, recorded late last week.

So, the big thing we wanted to cover today was how to keep our businesses seen in the age of AI. That’s one of those key things that we need to be focusing on, and it’s changing a lot since we’ve done our previous workshops and things like that as well. So, something we really wanted to cover in today’s session. Obviously, there’s those big stats, and I’ve shared these stats quite a bit, but 60% of Google search is now ending without a click, which is pretty massive. That number’s potentially even changing more. I’ve been using that stat for a while now, mainly because it’s still massively present, still a massive challenge that we have as business owners and as marketers as well.

The way that Google’s actually moving and has moved is going really fast. So, obviously, AI Overviews has been one of those key things. So, when we’re in a normal Google search, that has been a massive shift that we’ve seen even over the last six months. And then ChatGPT comes out, and people are starting to use that for their search and discovery more and more. We’re starting to see that people, when they’re going to ChatGPT, they’re not just using a couple of keywords. We’re literally having full conversations with these tools, and I think that’s really interesting, and a key thing for us to consider and think of in these times as well.

Then, of course, the other massive one that we’ve seen is that Google has released AI Mode. Now, funnily enough, it’s only been released, from what we can see, in New Zealand so far. Obviously, the States and the UK and a lot of other places around the world have it, but the Australian rollout still perplexes me. Still haven’t quite figured out why Australia isn’t using Google’s AI Mode as default. And when I find those answers, I’ll certainly let you know. But even when I was there earlier this week, still not prevalent. But on this next slide, I’ll show you exactly what we are seeing here in NZ with AI Mode.

But it does come back to that thing that is, if your business is invisible to these models, like ChatGPT or Google’s AI Mode, or these long-form conversational bots, Copilot, for example, then you are becoming more and more invisible. So we’re going to cover exactly what is changing, how the visibility works, and some of the things that we’re learning in terms of how we can adjust with that as well.

Also, just that stat on there as well on the screen: Semrush, this is a search tool that we’ve used for years and years and years. They’ve even predicted that LLM traffic, so that’s large language model traffic, so ChatGPTs and the Google Geminis and that type of thing, will overtake traditional Google search traffic by 2027. That’s a massive claim, and that means that now’s our time to start building those bases and preparing ourselves for that future as well.

So the future that we’re looking at is obviously on the left-hand side of your screen here. This is what we’ve been dealing with for, what, the last 10, 20 years. And the goal was, well, it seems simple now. Obviously, at the time, it was a real challenge, but it seems really simple now, that we just wanted to get our websites as close to the top as possible on a Google search. So the 10 blue links. Then we’ve faced challenges over the time, where then Google obviously put more ads in at the top, they put map packs in the top, they’ve added more information at the top, they’ve then added these AI Overviews at the top.

But essentially, if we go right back to the start, it was the 10 blue links. That’s what we wanted. Then we had those People Also Ask kind of functions coming up here. And the search that I’ve done here is just literally about getting a will in New Plymouth. I did the exact same search using Google’s AI Mode as well. And you’ll get a bit of a better understanding as to what we now start to deal with search, which is obviously people using it more for conversational type answers. It’s not just sending you 10 blue links, it’s sending you information. It’s literally presenting it to you in a way that is more conversational, more easier to read, and it helps you make informed decisions.

So there’s two caveats to this. Obviously it does reduce the clicks to our website, as we saw before. But the other caveat too is that we start to see that because it’s doing a lot of the research for the users, that once they do eventually get to your website, it then actually helps to pre-qualify them in a way as well. Which is why it’s so important that we have a think about how can we make sure that we are some of those businesses that are getting seen in some of these AI Overviews, that Google’s AI Mode and ChatGPT results as well.

And this means we need to stop thinking about just keywords. I think that’s one of the big things I want to get across today. Stop thinking about just keywords, and start thinking about the intent behind a user and the authority that you have as a brand. So thinking and asking you the questions of, are we the ones that are providing the single best answer to the customer’s desires, or their pain points, or their problems that they have? Because that’s what AI is essentially looking for.

And we’re going to go through this in a little bit more detail as well, around how do we actually adapt now? Because this brings us to this whole new concept around, is it SEO, which is search engine optimisation, versus GEO, which is a term which has come out a lot, which is generative engine optimisation? I like to go more for it’s literally search everywhere. So it’s not optimising just for ChatGPT or just for generative engine models. Essentially, what we need to be focusing on is how do we build a brand slowly that becomes a trusted, cited source that AI platforms can rely on?

Because not everyone is also using just the ChatGPT models and the Copilots and that type of thing. People are using YouTube search, and that’s getting cleverer and cleverer by the day as well. People are using TikTok search and Facebook search, depending on where your audience is, where they hang out. Making sure that you have a real clear understanding about who your audience is, and then really clear about who you actually serve and what that is that you actually do, that’s going to be the best way to be able to reach these different people. So then it asks us that question about how are the AIs actually deciding who to feature?

And the research that we’re seeing so far, these three core pillars that I’ve got up on the screen right now. The big one that I think is really interesting, which is not something that we’ve seen in the past, is that less than 25% of AI citations are actually coming from your brand’s own website. So what do I mean by that? I mean that the content that you’ve spent hours pouring into and optimising for bots and for search and things like that, the latest stats are telling us that less than 25% of the times that you get mentioned on ChatGPT, for example, is actually bringing content from your website across to those models.

So it’s a very small piece. Am I saying that you shouldn’t have a website? Absolutely not. We need a website to be able to build up that brand and that authority in your business. But what I’m saying is that you shouldn’t just be focusing on trying to keyword stuff, or to stuff your website with irrelevant content, with the hopes of being seen on an AI model. The AI models are, from the data we’re seeing, they’re more learning more about you from what people are saying about you. Okay? So that’s one of the big things I really want to get across today.

It’s looking at things like mentions of you on other websites. It’s acknowledging and seeing what are the links that you’ve got from other trusted sources. How many people are even, as I’ve put there on pillar number three, the branded search volume, how many people are actually searching for you by your name? I think that’s really key to have a bit of a look at as well. And your brand and your reputation in your marketplace, with your particular niche, that is now your most valuable marketing asset. And that’s the thing we need to be thinking of.

So let’s just go through those three pillars again real quick. That first one, branded web mentions. How often is your brand name mentioned on other reputable sites? Sites that are talking about your niche, and they are focused on what you actually do. So you’re not just going out to random websites or random blogs just to try and get someone talking about you. They need to be in a spot where your audience is likely to be reading and searching.

Branded anchors, in talking about, are those sites then actually linking back to you and using your brand’s name, or using your clear product and service or your niche? Remembering that LLMs, ChatGPTs, they are large language models. So they’re essentially like predictive text on steroids. So you’ve got to think about your brand name and then what those following words are. Predictive text is always trying to guess what the next potential word is going to be. They’re just doing it at speed, and obviously much more complex than that. But that’s the real simple way to break it down.

So when we’re talking about branded anchors, it’s not just about getting your brand name seen, but trying to get it associated back to what you actually do, or to who you actually serve, so that you can train those models a bit more to actually understand, okay, this company does this for this particular person.

And then actually thinking about that branded search volume, we’re actually seeing that is becoming more and more prevalent. And this comes back to your overall brand strategy. It’s a slow burn strategy. There’s no quick wins with this. It’s building up a reputable brand. It’s having those Google principles of expertise, authority, trustworthiness. That’s the key that we need to be thinking about. And then if you’ve got a brand that people are actually wanting to search, or wanting to learn more information about, that’s also a great signal to these models to show that you are authoritative in your space, because people are going to these models, or they’re going and searching for your website across Google, for example. So that’s another massive one. Branded search volume is another one that I really think you need to be focusing on.

Might feel pretty overwhelming so far, but I think that there’s three core pillars that we should be focusing on today. So these are the broad pillars we’re going to look at. And then I will just leave you today with three quick things that we could do, even by the end of the week, just to see about how you can start to build a bit of an AI process within your business as well.

So the first thing that we’re looking at here is getting that technical house in order, all the technical foundations. And I’ll go through some examples of that. It’s not as difficult as what I’m making it sound right now, that we put the word technical in somewhere and then suddenly we all kind of shut down, based on, all that seems far too hard for us.

The second one is formatting, and formatting our content so that AI can actually use it. Again, not putting too much into this, because remember what I said before: only 25% of those citations are coming from your site. So also thinking about how you’re formatting your content across your social media as well. Thinking about building that overall brand.

And the third one, and I still think the third one is most important right now, is building the authority outside of your own website, outside of your own ecosystem. How do you build that authority of getting people talking about you, instead of you just keep talking about yourself? Because I guess there are a lot of brands that we’re still seeing that will focus highly on their social media, and that’s pretty much it, hoping that they’ll reach a whole new audience, when what we need to be focusing on is going back to some of that old-school marketing, the old-school PR, getting seen and talked about in other places. That’s going to help build and train these models over time.

So breaking them down. So that first one, the technical non-negotiables. This first one is a bit techie. If you need help with it, this is where getting someone like a contractor or a team like us to have a look at it, this is where you potentially need a bit of support. Starting with structured data. So you could also probably put this into ChatGPT. It’s going to give you a great understanding about what it is. It’s also known as schema. It’s essentially like creating name tags for all of the data that you have there as well. So you’re tagging different pieces of your website, different pieces of your data, making sure that it’s easily read by robots, essentially.

So it looks beautiful. That’s great. A website can look amazing to us as humans, but is it also really easily digestible from these AI models as well? Then the next one is, we’re going to focus on the clarity. Okay. So is the website content, is it concise? Is it free from jargon? Is it easily read by your audience as well? Again, we don’t want to write for robots. We always want to be writing for our actual human audience. But clarity is key. And being concise: thinking about your FAQ sections. That’s a great example of how you can really pull in some of that concise, clear type of messaging, is thinking about building out your website content, and the content of your website or your social media, kind of like you would if you’re building out an FAQ section.

And then that final one there is Google’s E-E-A-T principles. So I talk about this a lot. And I know pretty much most of the people on the live streams that we’ve got today have heard me speak or talk in the past as well. And if you’ve listened to our podcast in the past as well, pretty much every podcast will mention this principle somewhere in there, because I still think it’s one of the most important things we need to think about.

And that is the E-E-A-T principles, which is experience. So what type of experience are we actually providing our customers and our consumers? And it goes back to that messy middle concept. If you don’t know what that is, we’ve got heaps of content on that on the podcast. But the experience is kind of like, once you’ve converted someone, then you’ve actually got to give them a decent brand experience, which then enhances the chance of them to talk about you. You see where I’m going with that? So it’s about trying to get them to actually then talk about you, that branded web searches, building that whole ecosystem. The second one there, showing your expertise, your authoritativeness, and obviously that trustworthiness as well. So those principles are still key.

And I use this analogy. So I was in Melbourne on Tuesday. We’re doing a workshop with an organisation there called VicHealth. And this came up in conversation there, because what we’re trying to show is that literally we could have sat around in that workshop. We could have all jumped on ChatGPT. We could have all come up with a business plan, come up with a new business name, potentially a new logo, probably built a website, came up with a marketing plan, everything like that. We could have actually sat down and done that on ChatGPT.

But the difference between just being able to sit down and do that, versus what’s actually required to build a business in today’s age, comes down to those principles. What you don’t have when you build something that fast is you don’t have that experience, you don’t have that authoritativeness, you don’t have that trustworthiness. That’s the stuff you need to slowly build up over time, but making sure that it’s not only building up over time, but you’re actually using that data as well. So those are the big technical things that I would focus on if I was you right now.

The next piece then comes down to that clear, concise content that we’ve got across not only our website, but also across our social media and things like that. Formatting our content so that AI can actually easily grab it and use it as an answer if they wanted to. They’re going to probably rewrite it in a way, but we want it written in a way that you can imagine that they’re literally lifting up that paragraph and chucking it into the answer. Again, your goal here, to make that content that perfect source for a real direct answer.

And this means creating content in simple, extractable formats, goes back to what I said before. FAQ pages are key for that. Thinking about those drop-downs, and thinking about how you format a typical FAQ page, that type of content is perfect. Think about your how-to guides, providing clear step-by-step directions or instructions about how to do certain things that’s related to your product or service, or even how you work, making it really clear about those steps of how you actually work. And then using concise, short paragraphs in there as well. Trying to keep one idea to a paragraph is what we’ve seen content-wise is working really well. That makes it really easy for AI to lift that type of thing as well.

Then we’re coming to the final step as well. It’s about managing your reputation and thinking outside of your website. And again, this is where I think the old-school PR is coming back massive. And this is a big thing that we’re working through with clients as well as trying to think about that overall brand. That’s one of the key things that we need to be thinking on.

There’s some real basic stuff that I’ve put on the screen here of what you can actually do to manage your brand and your PR easily and quickly. Google My Business profile. That’s simple. And we’ve been doing that for ages, but people just don’t keep them updated. They’re not actively encouraging customer reviews. But that in itself is a real powerful way of building up trust and authority.

One test I’ll get you to do as well, which relates to what I’ve got here on the screen, is if you do have a model, a ChatGPT model or a Google Gemini model, that uses some sort of thinking model. So the thinking models are, for example, usually the pro models or anything like that. When you ask ChatGPT a question about your brand and you use a thinking model, it’s under a little drop-down, but you can literally see how it’s actually come up with its answer. You’re going to see what websites did it go to, and what type of Google searches did it actually do? Where did it get its information to be able to put together that answer?

If you go through those, you’ll actually see that it is looking at things like a Google My Business profile. ChatGPT is more closely aligned with Microsoft and Copilot, but to be fair, it is referencing Google My Business profiles often. It also shows you some of the websites that it actually used to generate information about that particular search. And this is where it goes back to finding yourselves, going back to that old-school PR of getting mentioned on other trusted sites. Maybe it is guest articles. I would say thinking about those industry publications as well, one of the big ones that I’ll be focusing on.

And then that final one, which also comes through if you use that extended thinking on ChatGPT, is really thinking about a niche focus. We really need to become the expert in a really clearly defined area. That’s truly what we need to focus on. And it goes back to having that true understanding about who we are as a business, what we actually do as a business, the service we provide, but also who we’re serving. The persona, the person, the customer, that needs to be crystal clear now.

We can’t think that we’re all a Coca-Cola that can market to all ages. We need to be thinking about really focusing our marketing efforts on real clear small chunks of the market, and then letting those chunks of the market grow that authority that you have, and bringing in some of those referrals. That comes down to that experience piece as part of the Google messy middle concept. But when you’re going out to market, finding your new cold audience, trying to get seen on an AI model like ChatGPT, becoming that go-to expert in that defined area is going to be one of the easiest ways to move forward.

So the next step, because I know we’ve got a few minutes to go on today’s webinar, because I wanted to keep it nice and short today at half an hour, because I know we’re all very busy as well. So I wanted to give you three ideas of things that you could actually do right now. Hopefully, you’ve taken more notes throughout this presentation so far, but if you could even take these three things, that would be a bit of a win, just to get you moving and to get you really forward focused.

Starting over there with that audit of your foundation. So thinking about auditing that site-structured data. Again, this is probably the most technical thing that you’d need to think about, and it’s potentially where you might need to reach out and get some help from somebody just to understand. But the quick one in there is also just working out, is the website even loading fast? What is the page speed like? You can use a lot of different page speed tools. Just go to Google, Google PageSpeed Insights. It’ll give you a great test. It’ll give you some great ideas about what you could do to potentially fix it up and move a little bit faster as well.

That’s the foundation. Okay, so if you can start with that, audit that foundation of your website, that’s a great place to start. Those are some quick tests you can run. Then that second one, I reckon, even today, is a bit of a win. Add a simple FAQ section to one of the key pages that you have in your website. Think about answering in small, concise snippets some of the real common answers that people are asking you right now, and make sure they’re on there. It’s really clear. And like I say, it’s really concise. You’re keeping one answer to a paragraph. Try that as well, because I think, especially if you focus on some of those important pages that you have on your website, the highly trafficked service pages on the site, adding some of those FAQs is going to be a great way to start building up that authority.

And that third piece is brainstorming, and even getting a partnership with some sort of authoritative website. Maybe it’s a podcast, I’ve said, in your industry, and start to build that list. I’ve got a Google Sheet on my computer that I start to think of ideas, or places that I want to be seen on, or publications that would be good if they could talk about us and what we actually do. And I’m starting to build that list over time. And that’s something that I think is going to be, again, going back to what I said before, of building up that old-school PR mentality, that’s going to be key.

It’s not just waiting for everything to come to us and come sit on our plate and just work for us. We’ve got to get out there and hustle with our brand, try and be seen with some of these other reputable organisations. And that is going to be probably the best first start you can have for building up your awareness in models like ChatGPT. So, look, hopefully you found this helpful. Hopefully these three things here, if you could go away and do some of those, I honestly think that would be a key start for you to really have a bit of a look at.

If you’ve got any questions or anything like that, obviously you can email me at any time, Jordan at Done By Nine. If you’ve enjoyed today, and you’d like to invite someone to join us in our Daring Growth Seekers kind of space that we’ve got here, or even just get them to listen to some of our podcast episodes, that would mean the world to me. Obviously, we put a lot of work into our content and sharing about different pieces of knowledge and things like that. Really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy days. And I know for the Australian people, your busy mornings, and for the NZ crew, obviously just about to go into our lunchtimes as well. We hope to have you join us on the next one there as well. Have yourself an awesome day, and we’ll catch you later.