SEO Playbook for Ranking in ChatGPT & AI Search in 2026 | Thomas Phillips

0:00One of our biggest clients, last 90 days, they've done$17 ,500 ,000 revenue from ChatGPTBPT and it's been a 19.7 % conversion rate.

0:15Welcome back to another episode of DTC Diaries. Not sure what episode number this is, so I'm not going to make an uninformed guess, but delighted to have Tom Phillips here from the aptly named DTC SEO agency. Some would say it does what it says on the tin, I guess. but um serial entrepreneur as i call him and uh veteran of the seo game and yeah delighted to have you on tom really excited to to kind of dive into all things seo and all things ai seo um as the buzzword of of the industry seems to be today so yeah how's it going absolutely yeah no i appreciate inviting me on ollie yeah that's good i've listened to many many episodes from you guys A lot of me and Lucas waffling, so good to have you on to bring some insights and actionable tactics for people.

1:13But yeah, it'd be great to get a bit of an elevator pitch or background from yourself on your journey with SEO, the business you're running today to start with, if that's cool. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I started my first online e-commerce store when I was 13. I'm now 33. So excuse me, pushing what, 20 years now. Um, I was basically making like miniature finger skateboards, you know, little tech decks used to make like three ply wooden versions of those in my dad's garage. Um, and then built a little HTML website with like tables, um, had a little PayPal button using, you know, my dad's, um, PayPal account.

1:52Cause I wasn't old enough to have PayPal. Um, and then sold to 39 different countries in the first year. And then I bought a motocross bike with my profits and I was like oh wow you can make quite a lot of money online this is good it beat my um beat my gig of uh selling sweets at school because my mom had a booker's card so I was like all right we've got something going on here um and it just got to the point where I was just so busy obviously with school plus that I didn't know how to hire people or employ anyone at you know obviously at that age so I just I just closed the whole thing down I didn't know what else to do, but it was really interesting because there was two main sources of traffic for that store.

2:31There was one forum, which was like finger flip ink, which was like the only finger skateboard forum. Yeah. Very niche. Yeah. Very targeted audience. That's great. And obviously Google. And that's the one that I really started to explore and, you know, started to do things. basically I started to look at like the top websites that were ranking for different things and try and just reverse engineer it all right they have loads of white text on their white background website hmm interesting they have a pop-up that has a bunch of text in that's like hidden and you know their title says exactly the search term that I've just searched so it was very very basic back then which was amazing so yeah basically just ranked for different finger escape, finger skateboard related terms.

3:17Um, yeah. And then it basically just progressed from there. Um, I had so many different online businesses. I had like a, uh, Bitcoin mining business and we built like, um, light coin miners. Uh, I saw this thing online that was like how to build a light coin miner. Cause light coin was like the silver to gold of Bitcoin, especially at the time this is when bitcoin was about 120 dollars a bitcoin and um uh and i was following this whole thing i bought all the stuff to build this litecoin miner and then it was like you need this one cable and you couldn't get it in the uk i was like ah i previously bought and sold loads of stuff from um like alibaba resold it on ebay and everything like that and um discovered there was like this one cable that you just couldn't find so i bought five of them put them on ebay sold them like almost the next day for 85 pounds each and it cost me like two pounds to buy and i was like oh here we go so i built a website like coin mining parts obviously it ranked first for like coin mining parts and then i basically it just got to the point where every day i had two massive satchels of um these cables bagged up taken to the post office every morning and that that business just blew up again and then it died off as bitcoin went up and then declined and then uh yeah sold out of that business and then we've basically just had i say we um basically just had lots of different online businesses that have all had the main primary source of traffic as seo essentially just spotted an opportunity moved into it built it up around seo got a shitload of traffic to it um build it up to a certain point and then exited out and that's what i've done 17 times over now so 17 different um exits uh at this point the latest one being petportraits.com it was like five or so months ago so it's been been fun so i guess would you describe the majority of those as quite niche like very niche specific um like going in and finding small like exploitable opportunities or would you say the more like pet portraits i guess is more like category level um just out of interest yeah yeah i mean some have been spot an opportunity move into it asap blow it up go from there um and then some have been like we've had very very large uh affiliate content websites like five six years ago when google really favored ranking for like best ride on lawnmower as an example you know we had a massive content website that was all in the um gardening and um like garden machinery space basically ranking first for best ride on lawnmower it's like 12 ,000 searches per month we were getting eight percent commission on a ride on lawnmower it was about eight thousand dollars so it's like decent commission and it was just like all day 97 profit margins on the business as a whole overall uh pretty small team there's like 10 or so people on the team and then we were just scaling up content websites like that basically and then just exiting yeah oh yeah that was that was the gravy train now you're into the joyful world of DTC.

6:38Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of gone full circle again, back, back all the way around direct to consumer. So yeah. And then we basically started the agency about two and a half years ago because so many people had been asking me throughout that period of time, can you do SEO for me? Can you do SEO for my brand? I'm like, no, I don't want a boss. We only do it for our own sites. And then eventually we gave in and it's been extremely fulfilling, which is the complete opposite to what i expected like well yeah you're the you're the only seo agency we certainly send work to and i'd probably say the only one that i've seen prove prove out like a true bottom line revenue impact because i think seo can sometimes get a bad bad rep for being like quite top level quite long term like and i feel like it's just lived experience from people maybe not getting that experience with the vendors that they do choose to work with so we've certainly seen firsthand the impact that you guys can have on on our clients also yeah yeah no i really appreciate you guys sending uh sending clients away what what has the feedback been like overall amazing overall i think you're just very very commercially focused and i think that's that's a separator right i think a very focused on triple l dashboards attribute of attributable revenue impacts passing out organic from paid making sure those things are working together which i think is like fundamentally key in today's ecosystem, right?

8:06Everyone's very outcome-online focused, more so than a few years ago. And yeah, obviously now we've seen the rise of AI SEO over the last, I'd say, particularly the last six months, it feels like it's become a real topic. And that was one of the real reasons I wanted to get you on today. I've been asked about it within Slack channels weekly at a minimum. And I'm very underqualified to ever give someone a solid and detailed answer to how they can capitalize on this new and emerging opportunity. So I really wanted to dive into that with yourself today on like, how are you seeing the SEO space sort of shift from more traditional search engine to AI SEO and how that's playing out within the industry?

8:54Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have a very similar thing. Like a lot of our clients are asking us, how do we rank? How do we track it? What is going on here? And that's exactly what we're going through and being able to answer right now. I mean, we see that AI search overall is still very small in terms of traffic in comparison to where Google is still right now. um but that's basically why we started to build out or we built out the ai search dashboard inside a triple whale because basically it was about six or so months ago now we started to see chat gpt coming up as one of the site referrers and i started to see it come up and we were like looking across all the different clients inside a triple whale and we're like hmm okay this is getting a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger they're only making like 200 bucks 300 bucks there but then over time it just started to become a lot bigger which is why then we built out that whole dashboard because we like we need to start tracking this from a post click perspective um and i think really that is the key of like what we've been able to build out so early on and obviously people rely on triple whale as accurate data so it's just the perfect thing for us to um piggyback on from and like one of our i've got some data on here one of our biggest clients i'll just give you an example of this it's like they're doing last 90 days they've done 17 and a half thousand dollars revenue from chat gpt and it's been a 19.7 conversion rate which is pretty freaking big but they're a hundred million dollar brand and it's still 0.09 percent of their total revenue is coming from chat gbt compared to around 13.9 million is a touchpoint of organic search mainly from google so if you compare and that's in 90 days so if you compare 17 and a half thousand dollars versus almost 14 mil from organic search the difference is freaking huge yeah but so many people are asking about it and we use chat gbt so much in our lives day to day right now that yeah we yeah we need to stay ahead of the curve basically it's that dopamine and shiny objects right no one wants to go back and keep making google search work better they all want to get on chat gpt and make that first chat gpt sale absolutely they probably already are making sales from chat gpt they just don't track it or don't realize which is uh the other point 100 % well that's I guess that's it's like AI is the bubble right well people are saying AI is the bubble but it certainly feels like that is the thing that people just want to talk about and the new shiny thing that brands are trying to jump on I guess the data you've just pointed out there is that like search or SEO in general traditional SEO is still the backbone despite this new distribution channel popping up how are you seeing my execution across across that given that um are you seeing execution as being something that's very similar to to traditional seo or like how are you how are you driving sort of results on uh ai based platforms yeah yeah i mean there's really there's there's two sides to like i still don't think there's a proper name that anyone's really coined like we've been saying ai search internally i've been speaking to different marketers and they're like what does AI search mean?

12:33And I say like, Oh, GEO and AEO. And they're like, Oh, I've heard of that. And I'm like, basically ranking on chat GPT. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. I get it. So I'm like, okay, there's, there's no, um, uh, synchronized main word yet for this whole thing seemingly. Um, so I'll just refer to this as ranking on chat GPT, because that is the main thing that people are using. Um, I'm really like there's, there's, there's two main things of terms you might have heard is like aeo and geo so essentially answer engine optimization is pretty much if you imagine like the um the ai knowledge panels that come up inside of google or when you're searching researching something in chat gpt and it's not necessarily citing something it's just pulling in information and saying like oh ddc seo agency says that it's a risk if you only have ads long term and you know you can boost your enterprise value by bringing in seo as an example um versus geo um generative engine optimization is essentially off-site so it's it's very similar to what we're doing with seo right now on-site seo is like aeo It's the content, what's basically on your website.

13:52And then GEO is basically offsite SEO. That is like backlinks, being featured in big publications, being cited, building out a network of entities. So being featured on Crunchbase, having a Trustpilot account and getting active reviews in there, being on LinkedIn, being on every, you know, all the different entities connected together is extremely important. I don't think it's been as important as it is today. And really having your unique selling points set in stone and mentioned across all the different websites. And really that's the way that the AI search seemingly right now is able to look at everything and go, great, we trust this brand.

14:38If one says you started in 2024 and the other says 2023, and, you know, there's no, it's not cohesive. across. Makes a lot of sense. I've definitely found myself using that, the answer, the AEO portion of Google more frequently, just from a user perspective. Certainly feels like Google are trying to be a bit more aggressive with surfacing those features to users. So I can see how that's probably becoming therefore more important for brands to be taking seriously. Would you would you say that's been the case yeah it is and it isn't so if you do a commercial or just transactional intent keyword search right if it was like buy black wallet right it's not going to come up with the ai search knowledge panel it's going to change it to google ads and then listings of products most likely from an organic point of view but if you're searching what is the best type of leather for my black wallet as an example then it's most likely to come up with an overview because it's kind of like all right why would i go and click on a blog post it's probably got a ton of ads i'm being hit with it's got pop-ups i'm trying to scroll through and read stuff versus i could just read the top knowledge panel and get the answer to my question quickly.

16:03So it's depending on the search term is when that top AI search box comes up basically. So from an agency point of view, we're mainly focused on commercial and transactional intent keywords because those are the ones that make the sales at the end of the day. And they're protected from that AI search knowledge panel, so to speak. With a question-based search is obviously where that comes up um and yeah do we want to be in that top part and be linked absolutely that will drive more traffic is that going to result in more sales most likely not but it is going to help season the pixel if we can get the traffic across um from that point of view so yeah that's the way that i see it anyway makes a lot of sense so when you're looking at like planning content for whether that's like on their web on a brand's website or or planning say third-party publications or features on some of these some of these other channels that you mentioned how are you approaching catering that that content towards both like discoverability from an seo perspective but then even from an llm perspective if there's something that's more if you need to make any adjustments for that medium, order for it to be like indexed and served to a user?

17:27Great question. Yeah, so from an on-page perspective, and I'm using SEO related terms here, let's dumb it down a bit. Content that goes on your own website, right? That we're still doing the exact same thing as before where we're trying to cover that niche in its entirety. we're trying to answer all the different questions that are directly related to the products that that brand is selling so that like if you rewind a year or two years ago that was a really essential and effective way of being able to rank on google because google can see all right these guys are the authority in the space they have 200 articles all about the different types of leather for wallets as an example versus if you had another store over here that had five products and about us page and contact us and that's it like which one is google going to see as the higher authority and which one is more likely to surface up at the top again the exact same thing applies with ranking on chat gpt um essentially if i'm searching that question what is the best type of leather for a black wallet if that website with five pages doesn't have that content on the site it's obviously not going to surface it as here's the answer to your question.

18:43But the site that has all of that content already there and well structured and built out and answers the question very quickly in like a key area up at the top, it has structured data throughout that blog article. And it's very easy for LLM to essentially crawl the page and surface that answer. It's going to go, bam, here you go. That's exactly what you want. So essentially from a content point of view, it's like, how can we build out and answer all of the different questions that a consumer might have for that very specific niche and and we want to be mentioning the unique selling points of that product as much as possible so it ties that in and then shows that to you know to to the searcher user whatever you want to call it it makes sense we're seeing a similar thing play out on paid search right now like that view of like in order to make paid search more incremental, because I think a lot of, a lot of problems that we find with brands on a paid perspective on Google is like, we almost are tied to Facebook spend with, with how that operates.

19:52It's like, as we raise awareness on another channel, we're able to raise Google spend. And we've obviously, we've often hit like ceilings on non-brand and shopping or, or these other campaign types but we found it quite effective to like go after like long tail problem based keywords or like top five xyz and then either through a brand or through a third party create a landing page that aligns to that and bid on that that which i think is a really interesting thing that i think has grown a lot that the momentum we've seen a big shift in growth in that strategy over the last six to eight months, which I guess is similar to what you were saying there in terms of coverage around the product.

20:39Absolutely. And that's also a great thing. We love to work with clients that are already running Google Ads because for that data, like you said there, Ollie, we can take that data and then build that out from an SEO point of view. So we can then have two placements. We can take up more digital real estate inside of google because we know that like based off of uh let's say 100 people search for a search term it's literally like less than two percent are clicking on the google ad and then 40 are clicking on position one for organic so if we're only on paid up at the top we're missing out on tons of potential traffic yeah but if we can be in both placements happy days real estate more real estate yeah it's more digital real estate no i think that's kind of real estate that's what we want how i'm kind of thinking about ai seo when you mentioned though the percentage of revenue in absolute terms today is very small but i expect it's going to go on that kind of hockey stick trajectory as this kind of behavior gets more normalized right um and are you finding that yeah you're seeing brand ranking translate quite like directly across from from general Google to, to AI?

21:55Are you seeing that, um, having your fundamentals really set up in one place doesn't always translate? Like how are you, how are you seeing that play out? Yeah. Well, it really depends on the search term. And, and this is, um, like we were discussing just before this about, um, an event that I went to, it was like a four day event and someone was speaking for like two hours on how to rank and check GBT, AI search, whatever. Um, and at the end of it, he was basically talking about how you can track the, um, uh, the, the percentage of brand voice essentially, like based off of a whole bunch of different search searches inside a chat GBT, how many times is your brand or a client's brand surfacing on that?

22:39And then it's calculating what the percentage of voices with that. Um, and we, we deep dived into that and basically wanted to find that out because we're not tracking the data on the front end in terms of like what the visibility is or was we're tracking the final click and the actual sales so it's like okay we're missing this piece of the puzzle here but let me explore that further so i basically started to look at it and it it's it really depends on what the search term is but the issue that i have with it is like you and i probably search for things in different ways even though we're asking the same thing you know i'm probably misspell a ton of stuff or you know it's it's mixed around in a bunch of different ways or it's embedded in 20 other things i've already asked about that particular thing so i'm like there's there's no proper way right now of being able to work out like we are ranking for this for this search term like let me dial that back actually you you can obviously do that like if I'm typing in something very specific, it does search and goes, cool, you come up.

23:45But it's not like SEO where we can see 10 ,000 people a month are searching for this exact keyword. It's like the keyword is embedded in a million different ways of saying a question. And unless you have typed in that exact question, it's not going to track it. So it becomes very difficult to work out what it looks like from an impression point of view on the front end. And I think that's really where these tools are still evolving um to to the point where it will get a lot more accurate but it's very difficult to work that out right now which is why we're tracking post post click um as being the main the main thing right now which is what most people care about anyway but yeah interest yeah interesting to know and i like you say we're early in this and i imagine they're going to start to bring ads and a lot of these other tools to the to the channel because everything on the internet becomes an ad platform eventually and you'd assume that analytics are going to follow like more in-depth analytics would follow you'd hope but it was interesting when you sent me the loom video where you kind of walked through some of your best practices a couple of weeks back on how like even based on like previous chat context your outcome can be very different so if you've chatted to chat gpt about your brand and then you're trying to see how people are seeing your brand in the llm it's going to give you a completely different experience than if you start a completely fresh chat with no context well i think you've got to click that little um like chat bubble icon up at the top right when you start a new conversation there's like a little button basically it puts it into incognito mode so it doesn't remember any of your previous chats from the past year as an example because if you search you know what what is the best xyz and you've been talking to it a ton of times it goes oh obviously your brand is the best you know and then our clients are like sweet we're ranking first i do a search in the incognito window i'm like all right we're not quite there yet but this is how you should be searching on it um because it's extremely biased you know so load up a fresh window first with that incognito button that is the key and it will properly search without being biased to your previous data and searches so i think that's a good point but ollie i've just remembered there's one there's one point um just going back to branded searches so from an aeo point of view right let's say for example you're doing some research in chat gvt it doesn't necessarily have the links to click on those different websites or brands but it's talking about well this brand does this and it's a great unique selling point now what would you do at that point if you saw that and you were like oh that's awesome what you'd most likely do is copy the brand name go to google chuck it in there and then click on the branded link because you don't have the confidence in knowing what that url of that website is it might be a.co it might be a.com it might say join field30.com or buy field30 or whatever it might be so we i definitely think we're going to see an increase in branded searches from like what would originate from chat gpt even though it's not trackable because someone is just going straight to google checking in or another search engine and then finding that website from there so i think that's going to be an interesting one that is interesting so it's still functioning like as the point of discovery rather than the end point of conversion and those two things i guess it's we've not not seen those two things converge quite as much as they probably are going to further down the line with the whole rising the whole integration of checkout the whole shopify integration that's that's coming into some of these channels oh yes god that is going to be extremely interesting um yeah and there's just such limited information right now from chat gbt or open ai with that connection obviously fill out the form jump on the wait list and that's pretty much it but have you heard anything more about that in terms of the integration like from my understanding it's going to be like similar to the shopping feed for for google shopping where you're filling out the entities and attributes yeah not nothing nothing major yet i think it's interesting to kind of hypothesize around yeah that feed is going to have a feed integration but then i feel like feeds for google are heavily optimized towards search and optimization so you use a lot of language that's not natural and i feel like the whole idea of optimizing around like natural language versus things that we are like colors being an example like you're not searching for like midnight blue handbag you're searching for like blue handbag like it's i feel like there's going to be some some different differences in how we have to show up on that channel but we haven't had a huge amount of information on how it's gonna play out in its entirety i guess that's the key everything's changing so fast right um and i think yeah i'm sure we'll see that percentage of revenue increase I wanted to just touch on like, we obviously saw OpenAI drop Reddit entirely as a source of context for many queries.

29:18How do you think brands should be looking at that? I guess in terms of, say we're trying to build a longer term view of how to set ourselves up for success on these channels with the view of growing revenue as they mature. like what do you think are like the key fundamentals to to achieving that objective to really building a solid long-term strategy for someone just getting started here yeah yeah i think it's very similar to the mindset with seo is like don't go after a rank and bank strategy we call it essentially it's like you know if you if you saw that reddit was coming up a whole bunch of times and you're like oh my god sweet i'll just create a bunch of free accounts post a load of stuff, change the sentiment of the brand, you know, or get ranked better using that.

30:08And then AI or OpenAI just go through, as they have done, close that whole door. And then you're like, oh, great, I'm back to square one again. So all these companies and businesses were spun up purely based off of that. And it absolutely did work, by the way, we tested it out. Within two weeks it it was pulling in reddit uh related stuff for our different brands internally that we were testing on so it's super interesting to see the speed at which it was picking up on um like external entities but what i'm really getting at here is like if you have the long-term mindset approach which you should do with any brand that you're building then go after stuff that is is harder but it's more evergreen so as as an example like when you do a search and you see the citations let's say for example i'm searching what is the best uh e-commerce paid ads agency as an example you'll start to see all the different citations of where it's pulling that information from so it's like okay cool if we get listed on those websites or other entities similar to that are created via backlinks uh guest posting um digital PR, those things that are much more expensive, but they're much more long term, then we stand a chance of ranking long term.

31:35And that's so much better for the brand than being featured there for a week, getting a ton of traffic, and then it just dying out forever and you having to try and chase the next little update and closed loop. So doing the stuff that is more expensive, but it is more long term, and it's brand building at the end of the day. It has a two-pronged approach with SEO and with AI search, ranking, and chat GPT. So that's really the view that we have with things. It might take a little bit longer, but it's absolutely freaking worth it. Makes sense. Would you say that's somewhere that most brands get hung up on SEO in general, just like chasing quick wins, chasing just the wrong strategic approach?

32:21I think a lot of the biggest thing that we see from different clients or leads who I speak to is they purely think SEO is just spinning up content and putting it on their website. That's 100 % what they think SEO is. And literally, it takes our team like six to seven hours to create one blog content for a website because of the level of in-depth research, how it's structured, how it's optimized, how the images are, the internal linking to other pages, linking other pages to that new page, uploading it, all these different parts of it, instead of spinning it up in chat GPT, copy, paste, done. All right, onto the next one.

33:07It has no value versus a well-researched, in-depth article. So that is literally like 20 or 30 % of our overall strategy is like the content creation, which some people think is 100 % of SEO overall. A really big part of it is link building. Like if you load up a, uh, uh, an SEO tool, do a search term for, you know, competitive search term. There is always that website has a ton of high quality relevant backlinks like it's impossible to rank up in the top three for a competitive search term without having backlinks so that is such a big area of focus and now the benefit as well is that by being featured on these different external websites now ai search chat gpt whatever is now looking at those to see are you referenced multiple times saying the same unique selling point that that person is searching for on chat gpt if so great we are going to pull that information and serve that brand as a recommended brand to you specifically are you working with like existing publishers and um to build those backlinks like is that is that relational is that something you're working with existing publishers is that something you're setting up internally?

34:35Like how are you approaching that process? Yeah. So we have two different ways of doing things. We have a whole link building team that basically they have a 16 point checklist. They go through a website in so much detail to work out, okay, is this a toxic link? Is it going to do nothing or is it going to have a benefit to that website? And the last one, the benefit is the ones that we go after. So it takes a huge amount of time to find those websites then we contact them then we work out a rate that is suitable to essentially create a piece of content on our on their site rather um we absolutely have to grease some palms that's just part of it but that's where a huge piece of our budget goes into and that's why the cost of seo is is a lot um because of that um and then essentially we're able to be very hyper targeted to exactly which pages on the on the website we want to rank super efficient and effective way so we have a 10 person link building team at this point the second way is um through digital pr so basically getting featured in those big publications there's three main different ways that we do that one is data-driven stories um And like we've just done one for UK radiators, actually, it went freaking viral.

35:55It had like 113 links off one campaign, which is nuts. So that went absolutely crazy. Basically, what we're doing there is we're pulling in piece data, putting it into a story angle and then essentially pitching it to certain journalists. And then if a massive website picks it up, it usually then gets syndicated out and goes viral and other big websites then pick it up as well. The next thing is expert commentary. So we really, really like it when a brand already has an expert, either in-house, maybe it's the founder or, you know, a medical director that they're working with, as an example, or we source that expert for them and have them be represented in the media.

36:42and we're basically doing inbound pitches at that point so hey you know journalist needs help finalizing this article all about leather wallets as an example great we have a leather expert cool all right we can help finish finish the article for them and then the final one is gift guides so this is a huge one especially for ddc like best mother's day gifts best gifts for dads over x age whatever like at that point that's where we also want to get featured and really to get that as well as is if you have an affiliate program with your brand you are much more likely to get accepted especially in the much bigger publications so those three ways are the main ways that we get a ton of media but yeah absolutely works love it i think the middle two though especially are like super interesting um we're seeing a big rise in obviously pr and experts as content angles i think it brings an element of trust to a brand and i think it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out in a world of more ai generated creative content etc i just feel like we're going to see a rise of credibility being a real driver of of results yeah and that's an absolute that's a fantastic point because the whole eeat basically expertise authoritiveness and trustworthiness has been a big google update uh for a fair few years now and essentially it's like is this content written by an expert and has it been fully checked and approved by an expert as well as so for all the content that we're creating it's basically signed off by an expert so as an example like um the different pet pet clients that we have we have a veterinarian that basically goes through verifies checks all the content edits it and then has their stamp of approval so now we have this article has been vetted and essentially edited by this veterinarian who's registered licensed everything like that so their credentials are now attached to that article that means it will rank so much better in google in comparison to like a straight chat gpt article but then to your point with the whole ai search side of things that person's authorship is attached directly to that entire article so again it just helps with um um authoritiveness trustworthiness expertise everything like that so that's why all the fundamentals of seo are just bleeding over perfectly into ai search which is why we found it tricky to like try and build a um uh ai search how to rank in chat gpt package because yeah yeah yeah because it's it's all the existing stuff we're already doing so unless we just repackaged seo as that uh i don't know yet so yeah something we're working that's a good thing at least you don't have to do you have to do a completely a different thing for a completely different process of delivery i guess um absolutely yeah i think that credibility piece is really interesting i can see a lot of the work if you to able to join up a lot of what you mentioned around backlinks with with like paid performance working really well like pulling like we're seeing the rise of whitelisting and third parties on meta if you've got an seo strategy that's already engaging a lot of third party publishers i think there's a there's a way that those two things could converge and really drive even more impacts across through through through crossing those two channels collectively um yeah really really interesting we're seeing a lot of like accounts running sort of native ads from third party pages like really top of funnel old school like really direct calling out the problem running through a publication and that's really helping grow top of funnel audience so i imagine you'd be able to yeah work with some of those people in some of those publications there super yeah yeah and it makes a ton of sense because obviously once they've clicked through to the site and you have the meta pixel google pixel on the site you know it's just going to help um find more people similar to that help season the pixel overall you know which is yeah i'm sure highly effective.

41:11100%. You mentioned that trust, I'm not going to butcher the acronym, but you mentioned that being an update. Obviously, Google's an ecosystem that seems to update even more frequently than meta. But over this year, have you seen any other key shifts in the SEO landscape in terms of what are the couple of tactics that maybe the top 5 % of brands are executing really well that others aren't, if that's applicable?

41:42again it just comes back down to the fundamentals like they're just doing more of what works um so like yeah more more back more depth more content yeah yeah exactly that yeah yeah so the bigger the budget the the bigger you can go the wider you can go with things yeah the the the depth of everything and you know if you're a brand and your budget is relatively small compared to a much bigger site that's growing at a faster rate, your chance of outranking them is extremely slim. And really, that's why we deep dive and build a full audit and strategy before we start working with someone, because we may or may not be able to absolutely blow it out of the water or the investment amount might be so much that that brand can't quite afford it at that point because of what is actually required.

42:34um so yeah it's just it's just more of what works essentially it's similar to like what alex or mosey says yeah what does he say better more on you i guess i guess that builds defensibility and moat though in a way that's very hard to do on like facebook where facebook is just a channel where everybody rips each other's ads constantly and i guess everyone's always a bit apprehensive to commit to SEO that's got a longer term payback. But I guess what you're saying there is the defensibility once you get to that point is there, if you can commit to that. Yeah. Well, and the enterprise value increase as well.

43:15I think that's a really big thing that a lot of brands just don't think about. Pardon me, like if your brand is 100 % reliant on paid and all of a sudden something happens to Meta, as an example, or even Google Ads for that matter, the tap turns off immediately versus if you're adding in SEO as that backbone of profit, even if your ads go sour for a few weeks or whatever might happen, then you still have that underlying amount that keeps the lights on and you're branching off into another traffic channel. So yeah, enterprise value increases based off of that, which is always really nice. Yeah, really high quality traffic and that residual base of revenue which I think is a backbone for any really successful scaling brand.

44:07We have a lot of younger brands or newer brands watching this as well as more mature, I guess. If you're early in that journey, you've got time, maybe a bit of budget to invest, where would you start from a strategy perspective just to give people maybe a couple of takeaways ways that they could action right now if that's if that's them yeah yeah i mean if if if you're a brand new brand and you're looking at investing in seo like unless you're funded or you're like okay i have 100 to 200 grand a year to to chuck at this and i have a long-term mindset great seo is definitely a good start plus everything else um what i wouldn't do if you have a smaller budget is I wouldn't just immediately start on SEO, unless you already know how to do SEO and you have a team.

45:00I would get started with Google ads first, especially around search, because if you can prove that Google search campaigns are profitable for you, you are going to be wildly profitable from an SEO point of view. And it gives us the data and confidence to go, great, we know exactly what we need to do. We know what we need to optimize and build out and expand on outside of, you know, just the search terms that you've gone after initially from a Google Ads perspective. So I'd say if you can crack that and it works, great. Now invest into SEO. If you're already a brand and, you know, you're a few years in, you might have had some previous press coverage, you know, meta ads are working, Google ads are working, fantastic.

45:46great then at that point yeah 100 % look at seo and and to add that in essentially really the first thing comes down to building the strategy overall and this is where a lot of seo agencies just seem to go here's a package it's five grand you get 10 blog posts and 10 links good luck you know it'll probably work maybe but what we do at the start is we we build out a one-year strategy it's essentially auditing the existing site and the strategy around all of your different competitors what is the gap how powerful are they in terms of like the number of backlinks the amount of digital pr the amount of content their technical analysis what is the gap between you right now and them and how quickly can we close that and how much work is actually required so literally in our in in our strategy we charge two and a half grand for it we basically break even because the amount of time it takes us to actually build out we're putting all of that together into like a pretty big presentation ends up being like 40 pages but there's so much data in there because there's so many nuances to everything like we're even dialing in like how many links is this page required to actually rank first given the amount of power and size of your current website so so many like calculations based off of data that we're looking at um i would say that's the first thing build out the strategy get an understanding of what the actual cost is going to be or investment amount rather and then from that you can then make a decision is this something we fully want to go into do we have the budget do we have the timeline um to make this happen uh or not you know if you want to exit a brand long term obviously i'm an advocate of seo because we've seen it work so many times so uh you know definitely want to be plugging that in it'll be a lot easier to sell it'll sell a hell of a lot quicker as well from that point of view makes sense makes sense so yeah i guess long-term mindset commitment to a lot of strategy over an extended period of time with a clear goal and and resourcing towards that um and then ai seo is all based on the same fundamentals as as previous seo maybe not as shiny an object as everyone thinks yet um which i guess absolutely keeps things a bit simpler for now um yeah where do you see where do you see that going like how do you think it's going to play out any predictions do you know it's interesting because this morning i was literally searching through i was i saw stuff on um on x about the slowdown of um the adoption rate for chat gpt and how people are actually not using it as much as they were i was like oh okay this is super interesting so i don't see yes i'm not yeah not sure like there was a lot of people saying like the answers are nowhere near as good as they were uh the hallucinations are obviously you know i feel like they have the hallucinations under control um now compared to you know 4.0 and things like that but yeah i mean if there's if there was a peak and now it's kind of people realizing oh shit i've got brain rot because i'm just asking everything to it it knows my entire life at this point um should i pull back and maybe not use it so much and actually i'm still using google a lot and google's share price is still going through through the roof um then it's kind of like hmm so i mean we're going to focus on it for sure because we can see it's generating revenue and clients are asking for it.

49:24So the combination of the two makes sense that we would continue to optimize, track, and build on top of that. Whether or not it takes over from organic search, Bing, Google, et cetera, et cetera, I'm not entirely sure. Because I saw a stat that was like 65 % of the users are under 25, I believe it was. Yeah, I think it was a big persona consideration with it as a channel, like every channel, really. It's like every, every channel like TikTok, it tends to creep up over time, age, age, like, um, average age of users. But, um, I think if you sell into people over the age of 45, like it's, it's, it's unlikely that they're going to be using chat GPT on a daily basis.

50:09Um, struggle to use Facebook for an example. Um, so it's like, maybe it's easier to use than that, but like, I think there's a big persona consideration with anything i like that yeah yeah and especially us marketers we're in such a bubble that people over the age of 45 as an example who are marketers do use it a lot and i i would love to see like the the cohort of like or the demographics of marketers and age range who use chat gpt versus general public who are not marketers um like my parents still don't use it even though I've tried to show them as much as possible. Like, yeah, look how cool this is.

50:51It does all this cool stuff. Yeah, versus like we've had leads coming in and now turned into clients from ChatGPT and the CMOs have been of that age range or if not older. So that's why I would love to see what the difference is because as marketers, we can be biased to what we see in our bubble essentially. So it's, yeah, super interesting. uh to see but i don't know where it's going to go but i do i did see this morning as well that they are starting to test ads on chat gbt and i cannot wait for that i think that's going to be awesome i'm sure you i'm sure you guys are the same like yeah i think i think it's like whenever i hear new ad platform it's just like an art it's just going to be an arbitrage opportunity right it's like yeah there's going to be a time a very under there's usually an underpriced auction for a period yeah and that that presents a new distribution opportunity for brands yeah i think in a world where brands are especially the last 12 months there's been a lot of pressure on brand p &l i feel like any any new opportunity to get in front of audience that isn't just Facebook which tends to take up the lion's share of most people's budgets is a positive um yeah so yeah I'm interested to see how that that plays out but it's also like it's also the other side of that is I just feel like it's complexity right like brands have been so beholden to Facebook which everybody says is a negative but then if you look at the last two to three years the increase in complexity on an advertising and distribution sales channel level is just crazy in comparison to the five years previous you've got TikTok, Amazon SEO, PPC TikTok shop search, app loving so many things to think about it's overwhelming and I think that's just going to keep going keep progressing yeah yeah and do you guys rely a lot on triple whale to try and like aggregate all that data to see everything or do you guys have another platform or yeah we tend to use triple whale to review like media mix um we'll look at things like impression share over a 30-day window we'll look at top level channel budget split and how that correlates to efficiency um but yeah just seeing more and more channels drive meaningful revenue share which just increases complexity for operations and creative and requirements right yeah good yeah it'll be interesting to see see how it goes and i did have you used um the open ai or chat gbt search atlas what are they called it i think it was atlas wasn't it the browser that they built i haven't used it extensively i've seen a lot of funny videos where people are getting it to play like blackjack forum and um and like because it can control your screen and i do think that's a really interesting way to like interface with the not blackjack specifically but just like the broader broader internet um yeah but yeah i haven't use it extensively have you yeah i i tried it a few hours after it came out and like i feel i'm quite tech savvy okay i loaded this thing up and it's like great log in and you just like on the computer or even on your phone you just expect it to like pull in all your passwords and show stuff up but it because it was like a separate entity window it wouldn't let me pull anything in then I had to go like try and find out my password.

54:44I had to go reset my password. It's a whole ordeal just to get to the point of actually opening up. Then it has like a few different tabs at the top. One of them is search. I was like, great. All right, let's do a search. DDC SEO agency. Cool. And I was like, hold up. This looks awfully similar to Google. And then I opened up another Chrome window next to it, did the same search. And I was like, it's pulling in the exact same thing. And then it says at the top from Google or like view on Google. I was like, all right, so it's just using Google for its search. Okay, that's weird. It's Chromium, isn't it?

55:15It's like built on the Chrome. It's built on top of Chromium. Is it Chromium, like what they built Chrome on? Yeah, I think so, yeah. But I was like, okay, well, there's no real value in me using this over that. I was like, okay, let me try the AI agent thing. And I was getting it to do different. I made a little video of it, getting it to do different things. And so she sat there for two minutes adding a product to cart. but I'm like, what is the use of this? I don't think it's developed out enough to the point where they should have launched it yet because it seems like it's kind of half built.