AI Expert: Everything You Know About Marketing Is About To Change

0:00Hey, business besties. Welcome back to Female Founder World. It's Jasmine. I'm the host of the show. And today I'm chatting with Emma Grace Moon. She's the founder of Grace Studio. Welcome. Hey, to be here. We've been speaking for a long time about this topic. And what we're going to be diving into today is a lot around GEO, which is a term that people may or may not know and refers to basically search engine optimization as it applies to the world of AI and LLM. Exactly. Yeah. So before we dive into that, I want to talk through your story a little bit. Like you have done workshops with us before.

0:35You've hosted group coaching calls with us before. But for people that haven't attended any of those, and also the recordings are in our Business Bestie library if anyone wants to check those out. But for people that haven't attended those, let us know your background and how you got to do this kind of work. Yeah, totally. So I'm the founder of Praise. We're a editorial and AI optimization company. I started Praise at 21 years old. I came to New York at 18 and I got a message from my boss at the time when I was in-house at a D2C brand saying that I needed to prove out the return on investment that I was bringing to the company for my salary and more or else, hence, I would be fired.

1:12And in the moment, it was a freak out. But then after, it really gave me almost like an approach to business that I probably wouldn't have had if I didn't get that push. And I fell into affiliate marketing and I was specifically in influencer marketing at the time. So the task that I was given was to prove out the return of influencer campaigns that I was doing for the company. I ended up proving it out through affiliate marketing and driving my salary and more through the revenue. And then from there, I got a tip from a friend that this same affiliate marketing model was going to impact the PR space, right?

1:44So digital media companies like Condé Nast and Vox, et cetera. So I started to experiment with pitching to media, with affiliate links, offering commission to publishers. That started to kick off. And then I decided to go into my own company, which is Praise. Because that's, I feel like you were quite early on this like affiliate PR thing. I worked in media for a long time. I was a fashion and a beauty editor. And when I started, we weren't really doing affiliate links very much. And then as ad revenue started slowing down for a lot of these publishers, they thought, oh shit, we need to figure out another the way to make money.

2:14And then affiliate links became a big part of that. So I feel like you were really early on that and you've worked with some pretty, some brands that I think a lot of our community will really know. Can you rattle off a couple of them? Yeah, we've worked with Jones Road. We've worked with Great Jones. We've worked with Victoria Beckham Beauty a lot in the home design space and the skincare and makeup space. And since 2021, when I launched my company, we've driven$15 million in revenue from PR, which is really great. But starting this year in April and the shift into AI and why we just started to go into this is because we saw in April, Google through Safari had its first decline in search activity, which is pretty groundbreaking.

2:53Like ever. Ever. Yeah, this is. And that was a huge shift. No one really talked about that. And we're like, this signals the end of everything. Everything's about to change. Exactly. Yeah. So that was a big indicator for us. And obviously our work is getting press for our clients and getting them in media. If people are no longer going to Google and stumbling across a Vogue article or something like that, where are consumers going? So we had a hypothesis that people were going to Chachabiti. They were going to LLMs for their product recommendations. Because also in July of this year, 44 out of 50 of the top news sites have seen a decline year over year in traffic.

3:29Wow. Which is also pretty groundbreaking. So this year has been the shift year in media and online commerce. So we had a hypothesis that if we could marry our PR approach, our data-driven PR approach, and GEO, which is generative engine optimization, we could influence and increase the search activity and the sessions and referrals that brands can get from ChachiBT. So essentially helping brands come up when someone is searching like best hiking boots for this specific trip. So we set out, we had a few beta clients and after 10 days of implementing our strategy, we influenced one of our clients' ChatGPT sessions by 85 % increase.

4:07Wow. And their site-wide sessions, which was about 20 % increase. That's incredible. Yeah. Like you're like someone who's really good at predicting the future. Yeah. And then you're early on this and I don't know, it's just something I wanted to call out, but we're going to talk about the specific things that you do to increase that traffic and like the work that you do. And obviously this is a space that is changing. and we want to talk about what's working but I want to spend a little bit of time like first just understanding a little bit more like at a top level about what this shift means yeah and what it means for brands we have a lot of consumer brands in the business bestie community and who are like listening to the show right now and they're thinking okay people are finding me through they're finding me through google search they're I'm focusing on pitching press what do you think this means for brands who are pursuing like a now what you would consider like a traditional marketing strategy?

5:02Yeah. So I think specifically for PR and media, as we were early days in the affiliate PR space, right? So turning PR into a growth engine for brands. And we did this because we saw ad revenue down, like you mentioned, and media prefers working with brands that are offering a commission and have a competitive growth focused revenue driven channel. Right. When we were building those relationships, we really saw how the backbone of media was functioning. Right. Like they were prioritizing brands that were offering that 20 percent commission. They were including us in more content. Right. If we started to perform really well for them.

5:37But now we're seeing, OK, if the consumer is no longer going to Vogue and that media company is no longer getting that commission cut because they're going to chat to BT. and also the whole media ecosystem relies on traffic and clicks. That's like how they prove out how big their company is. And if that's no longer a thing, I think brands are going to have to get really clear on their PR strategy and have an even more data focused approach than they do now. Some brands have gotten away with not having to do affiliate or commission. They've thought about affiliate PR, but maybe it's not the right thing.

6:08They've had a PR agency for a while that's just getting good traction and it's just it's good for now but we're about to go into a different world that you're going to have to have a data mine when it comes to your PR strategy so that's one shift I think so if you don't have an affiliate strategy get one also we have I'm going to put it in the show notes but we have a workshop with you that is available yeah people can check out if they want to do that yeah but I think the second thing for brands in general it's like the like purchase journey is condensing because visibility, education, awareness, and conversion are all going to one place.

6:42It's no longer, okay, we see an ad here and then we see a billboard here and then we see this here. Someone is going to ChatGPT asking for the best lip gloss for this. They're getting that. The power that this company is going to have. Yes. It's wild. There was a recent press release that I saw that OpenAI is the most profitable company in the world right now, which is insane because that just shows how. We should all just go work for OpenAI. Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, I think it's just what is brand now? That is such a big question that I don't have the answer to at the moment. I think we're all trying to figure that out.

7:14But it is something that I really advise brands to think about. If the search window to conversion window is just shrinking, what does that mean? And how can we still educate and get in front of consumers, which is GEO, which we'll talk about some strategies there. But if you're not going to your website and you're not seeing the beautiful branding, like what does it mean to have a brand? you know. Wow. I just pulled up the statistic here that I read this week that ChatGPT is now Walmart's second biggest traffic, like second biggest source of traffic. Yeah. And it's driving more than 20 % of Walmart's traffic.

7:46Yeah. I'm not surprised. That's insane. I'm not surprised at all. That is so insane to me. That's crazy. Okay. So let's talk about how brands get featured in or get like recommended by ChatGPT because like we've also seen that ChatGPT is now incorporating checkout. That's new too, right? Yeah. That happened just a few weeks ago and it's on a wait list, but it's just, it's going to become just where every brand needs to be. So there's a few things that currently influence LLMs. So the first thing obviously is press. Like authority is so important, but it's a specific kind of press. This is a hot take, but I think majority, let's say a brand gets featured in 50 different pieces of coverage.

8:27We're heading in a direction where I think only three of the 50 are actually going to impact that business. Interesting. From a traffic perspective, from an LLM influence perspective, where now, you know, it's great to get mentioned in a 50 best food gifts for dad, right? A kind of article in BuzzFeed or whatever it is. But if people aren't even going to that article or they're not even clicking through, like then what is the impact of that? LLMs from our research are really referencing a set list of articles. And it really varies by the prompt that the user is giving. It varies by the brand and the category.

8:59So it isn't like a specific category of press coverage. It really depends on the brand and the product you're selling. So it's really important for you to have the capability to search for those prompts and then figure out what specific press pieces are influencing those prompts. So press is really helpful. Also, smaller blogs and influencers, smaller content sites are really great. You'd be surprised some small blogs that you've never heard of are influencing llms why like why are they pulling that as their data source i don't understand it goes back to authority because when you think about it i mean ai knows that vogue and these big conglomerates are influenced in some capacity right and it wants to create a balanced very factual kind of resource for you right like its whole task is to find an answer that is the best answer out there so by pulling a bunch of different sources and its whole training model is, okay, this is going to be the best answer.

9:52So smaller content sites can be really helpful. Influencer. I would also say having a really good SEO strategy at your core is really important. I've seen a lot of misinformation online where people are saying GEO is the new SEO and it's just so not true. It's not true at all because SEO is the backbone still. You still need to be ranked in those blogs. You still need to have an optimized site. But at the end of the day, GEO is almost like SEO's little sister. I like to think of it that way. So it's important to have both. So then after SEO, technical backend optimization is really important. So when you think about the backend schema of your website, your image schema, like making sure from the backend AI can crawl your website at a really fast speed.

10:38What does that mean? The backend of your website has a bunch of different coding, right? And you need to make sure that it's updated so AI can crawl the site super quickly. SEO, it's a little bit of a different function. So think of it as the infrastructure is just slightly tweaked of the backend of your website. It has nothing to do with the creative or front end of your website. Yes, updating your product pages to be a little bit more specific, like Cetaphil, for example, recently this year updated their, I think it was their facial cleanser, one of their products, their PDP, their product page.

11:09It went from just facial cleanser to facial cleanser for poor minimizing skin or something like that. It was very specific. Why? Because AI wants to see what is the use case of this product because then that will help it match to a prompt. So when you think about when you're putting in a prompt into ChatGPT, best facial cleanser for my type of skin, it's searching for those keywords all over the internet. And so if you have that on your product page already. It just makes it easier for Chat2BT to be like, okay, I've got the answer. So the structure of your website is really important. And then I think that's like really the core, right?

11:46So PR, blog and smaller content sites, a good SEO backbone of your website, and then the technical implementation and technical optimization. You mentioned like smaller blog sites and you also said influencer, I think in there. Did you mean by influencers did you mean influencers that are like have websites small blogs that kind of thing or do you mean social media yeah blogs and small websites yeah does social media have any play on this from our research no that could change one thing that I will say is reddit that is huge right now I've heard this yeah the online forums the community forums really influence LLMs which is pretty crazy because I can't remember the last time I thought about Reddit.

12:27Totally. At least personally. I just don't think with the demographic. But yeah, it's going to be more important for brands to have a Reddit strategy. So that means having a brand profile on Reddit and monitoring forums of people asking about products that you sell or maybe your company too, making sure things are factual, right? Like people are saying correct information. If not, maybe jump in. Having a brand presence on Reddit is going to be more important and making sure that you have some sort of conversation going about your business. on. That's so interesting. I've never even thought about doing a Reddit strategy.

12:58I know. Like I wouldn't even know where to start. I know you can do Reddit ads as well. Who even knows? Okay. That's fascinating. There's one part of running a business that TapGPT or Google just can't solve for me. And that is business finance. It is one of the most gatecapped areas of business. And yet it is what separates running a thriving company from really just having a very expensive hobby. Every founder at every stage of business deserves to feel confident managing your money. And that's why FEMA Founderworld is partnering with Mercury to bring you Cash Camp. It's a free three-part live workshop series designed to teach women in business the financial skills that we need to scale.

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14:08It's simple, intuitive, refreshingly modern, and just nothing like the business finance tools that so many of us business owners are used to. Head to femalefandwell.com and click on Cash Camp to join the workshop series or click the link in the show notes. Mercury is a fintech company, not a bank. For important details, check the show notes. I want to talk a little bit more about the specifics of where you get press and what impact that has and where you should be going. So you said it is super, super specific to the brand. Can you talk to me a little bit more about that? So you obviously don't have to tell me the clients that you've like piloted this with, but maybe some broader just like categories or types of brands and then the press that you saw influencing how they were being recommended by LLMs.

14:52And also, do you want to, can you define LLM? Yeah. So large language model. So Chachibiti. Chachibiti, Prophlexity. Is there an LLM? I don't know. Oh, Manasai. It's apparently one out of China. I don't know. I use it. I think all my data is being sold somewhere. Or Grok, for example. Yeah. those are all llms yeah something that we notice is like four of the prompts that we were running this beta test for so we analyze a few things we analyze when our client came to us and said we want to rank in llms we looked at their industry-wide visibility score so basically taking all of the search traffic that people are coming through and into chat to bt or in majority of the llms like gemini etc across their industry so let's say it's cookware for example right and then we looked at specific prompts.

15:40So we looked at best blue cookware or best cookware under$200 and the visibility score in those specific prompts. So we had about 20 prompts that we analyzed as well. And then after we made the implementations, we saw that brand started to rank under prompts that originally did not rank in at all. And it was after we targeted specific press articles that we saw and we have different technologies in place that we can do this research of, okay, in this specific prompt, what PR articles are influencing this and other blog and small content sites. One thing that I think some people are getting wrong about doing this back-end research themselves is I see a lot of people saying, I put in my Chachubiti what best cookware under$200, and then what are the articles ranking under this?

16:23Asking Chachubiti for a strategy for this. But we have to remember Chachubiti is very biased to us. It wants to give us an answer based on us, right? Your answer is going to be very different than my answer. So for any brands that are approaching, like trying to find the press articles, it's really important to have an expert praise, going to just shout out praise, or someone else that has that kind of unbiased approach. Because if you do search this, you're going to get a very different answer than I am. And the articles vary. It really, there's no rhyme or reason. It's just for some reason, it's like this article or that, and then that can influence your strategy.

16:57How do you think about or like what's your process of auditing how a brand is performing at the beginning and then after you've run your test or done your work to help them? Yeah, so. I'm just thinking from the perspective of someone who actually does want to go and figure and obviously working with an expert is the best way to do it. Yeah. But someone who's sitting there and they're like, I just, I don't know, am I being recommended? You can see your chat GPT as a referral source, right? Yeah. How do you see that? So you can go into Google and your backend. Like Google Analytics? Yeah, yeah, GA.

17:28So you can go into Google Analytics and you can see the referral traffic there. And then you can also, there's different technologies out there. There's Peak AI is one of them. Sorry to do some research because there's going to be other SaaS products that we're going to have to get to be able to determine the lift from LLMs. But Google Analytics is really key. And then we have other technologies in place that we can see that overall visibility score, right? So we're not only analyzing ChatGPT, we're analyzing perplexity, we're analyzing Gemini. And we look at visibility score, right? So per prompt and also for the category at large.

18:01And then we look at the referral traffic and then we monitor that every single week. So when we make our implementations, whether that's a tech implementation to the website, adjusting a product page, a title, whether it's maybe landing a press article that's influencing LLMs, it changes very rapidly. When you think about SEO, it takes about six months minimum for you to see the return and the lift on your website from updating and optimizing your SEO on your site. Whereas GEO, after our implementations, it was 10 days. Like it's so quick. So it's really important to look at visibility scores and also traffic from GA on a weekly basis, even daily if you wanted to, because then you'll be able to see that like upwards trend and it changes really quickly.

18:47in terms of any mastheads or publishers that you think are being favored is there is it like an allure a vogue are those kind of legacy brands getting favored because they're more credible or they've been around for longer or you're not really seeing that i'm seeing mostly it's the publishers that are getting the most traffic and just have the bigger names but really not necessarily daily mail i would say like dot dash meredith they have a really great seo strategy So when you think about publishers who are updating their articles to rank in Google in the first swipe, when you're searching like best lipsticks, those are the publishers more often than not that you want to target.

19:25Because when you think about it, that article is driving a ton of visibility, a ton of awareness. And that is like authority. And right. And so LLM see that and they're like, OK, a lot of people are trusting this article. A lot of people are going to this article, whether that's Birdie or People Magazine. so if it can help you narrow down if a brand is coming up when you type in google and you see them in that first swipe that can be a directional cue for you but then again you need some of these like more technology platforms that are catered to determining ai and what the llms are referencing this is so fascinating i'm really interested in what this means for like media yes because it's like they're servicing this product that they're not actually getting any benefit from yeah and how that screen what that's going to do over time because you think where's the incentive for them to continue to like want to rank in google if they're not actually getting any benefit from it and they're actually just fueling revenue for a competitor which hwt will become a competitor so i'm yeah curious about where that's going to go but also for influencers do you think that this will make influencer marketing less influential or more influential in terms of having real people recommending stuff on social media?

20:33I wish I could predict the future. Yeah. But I do say I feel like people are we're human, right? We love connection. We love seeing someone. We love talking to someone. So I have this like idea that I think we're going to get to a place where the pendulum will swing to AI and we'll get all of our recommendations from there. But then like in human nature, we're going to crave that community. We're going to crave that connection that I think like both like the efficiency of AI and also the connection of influencer marketing are really going to soar. So I think if anything, influencer marketing is going to actually increase in popularity and impactfulness for businesses.

21:09I also think that like loyalty programs, when you think about influencer marketing, but like more embedded in your business, like loyalty programs for your customers are going to be a little bit more popular because when you think about it too, like that can be really helpful to connect with a brand, to be invited to events, to get first merch, to community building. Exactly. I think that just from reading, shout out to the book Sapiens. It's been like the best book that I've read this year because it really shows like how humans adapt and how we are attracted to optimization and efficiency, but also like we're human at the end of the day that we want that connection.

21:43And I think that can come up in the business world too. So I think influencer marketing is very primed. And I think specifically for influencers, I don't know about you, but when I go through TikTok and I see ad, I just swipe right through. I'm like, I don't want an ad. I know you're selling me something that I think actually affiliate and embedded in influencer marketing is going to become more popular because it's more authentic. It's yeah, use my link if you want versus this is a very catered ad too. I only created this because I was paid for it. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So interesting. Yeah. Someone is listening.

22:16They are a consumer brand builder and they want to do something in the next week that is going to have some impact on their GEO strategy, what should they do? What's the one thing, the next thing that they should do? I'm going to say follow my newsletter, BusinessWise on Substack, because I spend so much time doing research on just how commerce media is being impacted by AI and this new AI era. So that can be great. Following TikTok creators that talk about AI. Who do you like? I'm happy to write a newsletter about all my favorite TikTok creators in the AI space because I don't know any off the top of my head.

22:51But I think just with the speed of things changing, it's really important to not reference something like two months ago, which I know is crazy. But TikTok is, you know, new videos every day, right? So following creators that are really experienced in this space can be really helpful. Something that I've been telling people that I think can be helpful for you to just start to wrap your brain around how this is impacting businesses is go in incognito mode in Chrome or whatever browser you use and type into Chat2BT with not logging into your Chat2BT because Chat2BT is biased to you and you do not want that kind of response for this type of prompt.

23:27Ask it a prompt that pertains to your business. So best skincare for women over 50, whatever. See what it gives you, the brands it gives you. And then it will give you the sources that it used to make that recommendation and start to just look at what articles are being used in there. Are there brand websites? Are there retailers? Sometimes you see Walmart come up as an influence there and just start to keep tabs on that. I think also something that brands can do to future-proof their business is not only get used to generative AI, which is what we're using right now, which is I'm going to ask a question and I want an answer back or I want you to go find information.

24:03Then there's agentic AI happening tomorrow. It's very quickly adapting to the public where it's going to actually make a decision and act on something for you. So then soon enough, we'll be able to say, I want a SPF that will last this many hours for the day. I'm traveling this place. Can you get it delivered to my hotel? AI will place that order for you and it will know the address. And let the patient know it's coming. Exactly. It will actually act on that. And I think as a brand really staying ahead of the curve there, that's going to be the future. Another recommendation I have is for people to start to download Comet, which is Perplexity's new browser.

24:43that is a really helpful practice for just getting to understand agentic AI because it is a full browser where it can do things for you from like plan a reservation at dinner for a dinner tonight to searching something to building out a newsletter all in one browser. Do you use it? Yes, I use it. I love it. What kind of stuff do you use it for? Oh gosh, for reservations. I'm like, I am looking for a Spanish restaurant tonight at this time in this neighborhood and it will book the reservation for me. I love it because on one tab, it could be like editing a newsletter that you just wrote. And then on another tab, I'm doing research on something else for the newsletter.