Why Getting AI to Recommend Your Brand is the Next Big Growth Opportunity with Alex Dees

0:02John Lee Dumas:Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here, and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by HighLevel, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today, we'll be breaking down why getting AI to recommend your brand is the next big growth opportunity. And to draw these value bombs, I brought to Alex Dees and EO Fire Studios. Alex is the co-founder and CEO of Meridian, an AI startup that helps brands measure and improve their visibility in AI search. And today, we'll talk about building in public. AI is really rewriting discovery, the collapse of the buyer journey, winners versus losers right now, and oh, so much more.

0:35John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Alex and our sponsors. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Fire Nation, are you ready to make 2026 your best year yet? I believe it's time to start your transformation by attending the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and featuring football star and entrepreneur Tim Tebow and President Trump's son, Eric Trump at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire.

1:20John Lee Dumas:Again, request life changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Alex, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:37Alex Dees:Hello, Fire Nation. It's great. It's great to be here. Thank you, John. I think the thing that I would say is becoming successful is usually after many years of failure. So if you're going through that failure, just keep going.

1:49John Lee Dumas:Well, Fire Nation, we're going to talk about why getting AI to recommend your brand is literally and figuratively the next big growth opportunity. And Alex, one thing I want to start talking about is building in public. I mean, you've literally gone viral as a founder by sharing your journey in real time. So how does building in public change brand power, change trust and speed of growth compared to traditional marketing?

2:17Alex Dees:Yeah, I think it's really about building trust from day one. And that's to everyone that you're selling to, right? When someone has seen your face before, just by, you know, scrolling on our feeds, they just have, I think, a lot more trust and they know what you're about, rather than the first time you email them or the first time you go on a call. So I think this really applies to, you know, first calls with investors, first calls with employees, and really, most of all, first calls with customers. They already kind of know who you are. Hopefully have a little bit of that trust built in. So I think in today's world of distribution is everything.

2:50Alex Dees:You really got to be thinking about distribution early and building that trust.

2:55John Lee Dumas:So what's been one of your more viral moments by doing this?

2:59Alex Dees:Yeah, so we started building this company about the summer of last year. About 10 weeks in, we launched on Twitter and LinkedIn. The Twitter ended up getting 5 million views on the video itself, about 15 million impressions. And I think that kind of made the company go a lot faster than if that hadn't happened. So obviously we put a lot of work into making sure that it went as viral as possible. But I really do think that speeds up the trajectory.

3:28John Lee Dumas:What do you think was the reason it got so many views? Like it went so viral.

3:33Alex Dees:I think we, we did like three main things to optimize for distribution, right? I think when you want to go viral, the main thing is you want to get people to engage with the video and everything should be about engagement. So one, the main three things we did is gave away a great giveaway, getting people to engage with the video comment to, we pattern broke, right? I think a lot of people see these videos, like these launch videos, and they see the same thing over and over. Well, you want to do something different than that. And three, we really just gave people a lot to talk about on the video.

4:08Alex Dees:If you're not giving people a reason to engage with the video, it's very hard for it to go viral.

4:12John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, you heard it. Alex just broke it down. And I want to talk about how AI is literally rewriting discovery. I mean, search, social, and recommendations, they're just no longer human first. We have to call a spade a spade. So can you break down how AI is changing, how people are discovering brands and products? I mean, even expertise. And why haven't most businesses caught up yet?

4:36Alex Dees:Really, AI is making more and more decisions. People are asking AI what to buy, where to go. AI is recommending and people are going more and more with that recommendations. And so I think every part of the buyer journey is now being encapsulated in AI. and so you need to be thinking about that first. Why I think a lot of businesses go wrong is they're still thinking about humans as their only buyer but really everything that should be done online especially should be also kept in mind of you want to be marketing, you want to be selling to AI so that AI is recommending you when you're not there.

5:11John Lee Dumas:So just like you did last time, can you maybe give an example of what does that look like in the real world? Like what does that look like in practice?

5:18Alex Dees:Sure, I think the best way to think about it is kind of what is like a typical buyer journey, right? Say I wanted to figure out what I want to buy my mom for Christmas. It used to be I would maybe go Google that, find some blog, put 50 ideas around what to buy my mom for Christmas. I'd look through those 50 ideas. Maybe I would find one of them. Well, then I would go through that same journey, Google that on that product, right? Find the best one, go read a bunch of review sites, go look at what's good, spend maybe 20, 30 minutes on the internet, a bunch of different sites, until I found what I wanted to buy, and then go buy it.

5:55Alex Dees:The new journey looks like all happens in one chat log. I ask AI, hey, my mom is this, she likes this, what should I buy her, maybe it recommends some options, and then I like one of those, tell me the best one of those to buy. And really, I'm just offloading a lot more in my decision making process to AI, who is taking that solution. Right. And so when that happens, this entire buyer journey is happening in this one instance in the chat box. And if you're somebody who wants to be selling something, if you want to be a gift that people buy for their mom for Christmas, it's pretty helpful if AI is recommending your product, your brand in those conversations.

6:34John Lee Dumas:Okay, I want to dive deeper in this. This is specifically the collapse of the buyer journey. I mean, funnels, awareness stages and linear customer paths. I mean, they used to make sense. You were just kind of going through what they used to look like. Now the traditional buyer journey is breaking down. And of course, what's replacing it, you said, is like these chatbots, like this happening within one chatbot. So give an example of like, what does this actually look like in the chat bot? And then how exactly can we as business owners who are maybe looking to get in front of these leads, the right leads, at least, what can we do?

7:10Alex Dees:Yeah. You know, when I think about the buyer journey, it really is kind of four stages that are being collapsed, right? It's finding, evaluating, choosing, and then buying the product. We kind of just went over the finding, right? What do you want to buy? But there's this whole entire buyer journey part of like, what do you choose? How do you get to that? What you choose? It used to be review sites. It used to be comments. All of these kinds of things are really just getting fed into that one moment in the chat bot. Now AI is sourcing that from all the different places to recommend. And so when we are selling our products now, when we are trying to market our services, we make sure that ai has great answers to talk about us across each one of those parts of the buyer joining the finding evaluating choosing and then making sure that it can buy the product anyway i think when you're thinking about like as a business owner right the best way to kind of like test this out is really just go into your chatbot see what it recommends for that buyer journey for one of those because it really is an entirely new way to think about distribution when you are selling to AI versus a human first marketing.

8:22John Lee Dumas:That's very cool. But like, let's just say you find like what the chatbot is recommending. How do you maybe get in front of your competition at that point if it's recommending your competition?

8:32Alex Dees:That's a great question. I think you kind of think about like, how do you win in AI chat, right? And really for that bottom of funnel queries, right? Best X for Y, it is kind of a zero sum game. AI is recommending you or is recommending your competitions. And of course, you want it to get recommending you. Now, what we help a lot of our customers with at Meridian is that winning. You know, how do we win against that competition? We generally think about it as really six main services across the Internet that, you know, we help with. Back-end code on their website, front-end content, net new content to make sure that we are marketing and telling AI about our product, about our solution.

9:13Alex Dees:as well as the rest of the places on the internet that matter for getting picked by AI, right? Editorials, socials, directories. What do we prioritize? And that's what we help our customers with to make sure that they are the one getting picked and not their competitors.

9:29John Lee Dumas:There's a lot of stuff going on here, Fire Nation. I mean, this is the world that we're living in. And guess what? This is a game that you can still win. Just like you could win the funnel game back when it was funnel, awareness stages, linear customer pass. you can win this game, the finding, the evaluating, the choosing, the buying. That's what your customer is doing. And they're doing that within an AI platform. So what is AI doing? Well, you have to figure out what content are you creating? What places actually matter for AI? As Alex just said, I mean, editorials, that's interesting stuff.

10:01John Lee Dumas:I mean, you think about what matters for AI if they're going to give results. And we're going to be talking about all this stuff and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Fire Nation, are you ready to make 2026 your best year yet? Are you looking to learn the proven processes and success systems that have been used to create thousands of millionaire success stories? See thousands of success stories and testimonials from real people just like you, who Clay Clark has mentored and coached into prosperity at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO Fire. Clay's proven business coaching program is month to month and it costs less money than hiring a minimum wage employee.

10:37John Lee Dumas:Yes, it's month to month. and costs less money than hiring a minimum wage employee. Schedule your free personal 13-point assessment with Clay Clark himself today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOFire. Because Clay only takes on 160 clients and only allows 300 attendees to each business conference, you will interact with Clay directly, see thousands of real success stories, and learn about attending the Thrive Time Show two-day in-person workshop featuring football star and entrepreneur Tim Tebow and President Trump's son, Eric Trump, today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOFire. Become the next success story, schedule a free consultation, and request tickets to join football star and entrepreneur Tim Tebow and President Trump's son, Eric Trump, at Clay Clark's next business conference today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire.

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12:25John Lee Dumas:So visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial and see why thousands of businesses are switching. That's highlevelfire.com where marketing, sales, and automation finally come together. High level, join the revolution. Alex, we're back. And we talked about this before the break, but I want to dive even deeper. And that's the winners versus the losers. I mean, in this new AI driven landscape. How are small businesses already winning or losing customers without even realizing it?

12:58Alex Dees:I do think it's a whole new paradigm shift. When you think about, you know, like SEO of the last 15 years, John, a lot of it was kind of cemented stone, right? You'd go local SEO guy, they might tell you, Hey, it's going to take us 12 months to improve our rankings. Luckily, it's a little bit faster than that now in most cases. And I think, you know, the great news for a lot of your audiences, probably a lot of their competitors, aren't even thinking about this new channel yet. How do we optimize and really investing in it? But when you look at how do you win, I think it is just starting to understand what AI looks for, reversing engineering from that, and making sure that you have the questions to those answers.

13:38Alex Dees:A lot of winning in AI right now is just being the answer. We want you to be the answer in the question and answer for those users. So how do we make you the answer? And as long as you kind of do that repeatedly in the places that matter on the internet, you will hopefully, you know, get a lot of leads, get a lot of customers and make a good amount of money.

13:58John Lee Dumas:Okay. I'm going to go for some free consulting here from you right now, because A, I have you, you're here on my show, you can't go anywhere. And B, it's going to also be, you know, promoting and pumping Meridian. So it's going to all make sense. Here I am, you know, I, I've recently partnered with High Level and, you know, they sponsor every single podcast that I do 365 per year. They're our feature partner. We do a lot of cool co-promotions with them. And we're always looking to get more leads that want to try high level, which is a CRM, like a HubSpot, like a Salesforce, et cetera. And I create a lot of content specifically on YouTube.

14:35John Lee Dumas:I'm going to actually be really ramping this up, creating even more content on YouTube to really get people fired up about CRMs and which one should they choose. Like, why do you need a CRM? And this kind of does actually go back to finding, evaluating, choosing, buying, funnels, all these different things. Email marketing, sales pages. It's like the all-in-one process. And this isn't meant to be a commercial for high level. What it's meant to say is I'm looking to create content around high level that AI is choosing to recommend when people are going and saying, what CRM should I do? Is high level better than house water or vice versa?

15:13John Lee Dumas:What would you recommend? And what would Meridian be having me do? and how would Meridian help me in this discovering how to position myself as the AI choice?

15:25Alex Dees:That's a great question. I would take that and talk a little bit about what do AIs look for when they are recommending a solution? I think there's really six main things and I'll kind of go over them real quick. One is clarity, right? Can it quickly understand what you do for whom and why you're different? Two is consistency. Do you have the same content, the same positioning across your website and all the other places on the internet that matter? At the end of the day, these are large language models. They need language on the internet that answers user questions and says that you are good. And that's what we're helping optimize around.

16:02Alex Dees:Three is authority. There is a lot of language on the internet. So what is the authority that you have for being the one that is recommended for AI? Fourth is proof. Simple example is case studies or quantified outcomes. We want to add those to your content so that AI knows that these are real claims that you are making. And then fifth and sixth is one, we want to make sure that your content is fresh. It's not from 2012, 2014. We want to make sure that it's relevant today to the user who's asking the question today. And then lastly is specificity. You can say that you help everyone and that this is this CRM for everyone, but then it's probably not going to get recommended nearly as much as for like a niche position, right?

16:49Alex Dees:When you look at how people ask AI, they like to give a lot more context on themselves, on their use case, the problem that they're trying to solve, and how we'll match that for that specific positioning. And so we want to make sure that you are positioned in a way to win the customers that are great fits for your business and you want to be funneled your way.

17:07John Lee Dumas:So let me ask you if you think this is a good idea, because it literally just came to me as you were talking is I would maybe go to an AI chat and ask the question of like, hey, what CRM do you recommend for an entrepreneur and a small business owner? And then they would give me an answer. And then I would say, then my light bulb idea is saying, hey, like, you know, AI, how did you come up with that answer? Like, where did you pull that information from? Like what articles or content did you use to form this opinion? And then if it gave it to me, I could say, oh, well, that's where they're pulling the content.

17:47John Lee Dumas:So I can go to those places and create better content and like, you know, more clear clarity, consistency, fresh, relevant, specificity. I can do all those things. What do you think about that?

17:57Alex Dees:Yeah, I think that's a great way to start. Right. If you're just kind of getting into this generative engine optimization place, I think to recommend to all of the listeners of this podcast would be go do exactly that in your, you know, maybe chat GPT instance. Ask the question that you want to be the answer for. And if it's not recommending you, understand, well, who is it recommending? What is the sources that it's recommending? And that's a great lead list on where to start. And you can start today on increasing your visibility and AI search.

18:27John Lee Dumas:Let's talk about the next 12 to 24 months. I mean, looking ahead, where's all this going? Like, what should business owners be preparing for now? I mean, if they want to stay visible, relevant, and trusted as AI becomes a primary gatekeeper, what do they do?