How ChatGPT reads YouTube, Reddit and your site | with David Konitzny, GEO Researcher @ Peec AI

0:00David Konitzny: If I'm not mistaken, being a GEO researcher at PKI basically means that you are now a LinkedIn influencer, right?

0:08Malte Landwehr: No, I'm not really. I think it's a side effect of this. Don't drop a Reddit just because somebody on LinkedIn said it's not used anymore. It's not looking at this transcript, at the video at all. It's just reading what's underneath your video, so to say, the whole description. Earlier, this term was used in all panels in between 0.5 % and 1%. So as we hear, it was not really relevant, but it was somehow there. Right now, the number is up to 28%. So 28 % of all panels have a site operating clue. You need to be fast nowadays. If I wait for another week, JGPT or some other AI model will change, and then it's all the information.

0:52David Konitzny: Before we dive in, you're listening to the Masters of Search podcast with me, your host, Niklas Buschner. Each week, I sit down with some of the smartest people around the world in SEO and AI search to bring you their strategies, mental models, and top pieces of actionable advice. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to like and subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps us get top-notch guests and create the best possible content for you. Let's dive into today's episode. Welcome to the Masters of Search podcast. Today is a very special episode because for the first time, besides our monthly Landwehr format, we have a guest here for the second time for a little, let's say, recap episode.

1:37David Konitzny: But I don't know actually how much time we will have for recap because so much is happening. So probably we'll look more towards the future. David Konitzny. So cool to have you, David. before i introduce you and give a little bit of a context i want to put a little advertising blog here because we will host the masters of search conference in actually only two weeks time here in berlin 22nd of october and we still have a few tickets left and david will also be a speaker um at the conference and david i would like you to tell people why it's a absolutely fantastic idea to still get one of the last tickets and come to the conference.

2:23Malte Landwehr: Yes. First of all, thanks to be here once again. And you should definitely come to the conference because it's one of the bigger conferences right now that are established that will give you the opportunity to talk about Jio and also not just like mingle around, but also the networking people who are speaking there are more or less like experts right now on all the topics, more or less because it's still like very young, I would say a young thing to discuss here. And as you said, I will be also there. I will give you a small recap in 30 minutes regarding fanouts, how you can actually see fanouts, how you can work with them, like a wee in-depth session.

3:05Malte Landwehr: So really, really would say like go to the conference, get the last tickets and of course join my session.

3:11David Konitzny: So cool. Yeah, David will host a workshop. We will also have other awesome speakers like Jennifer Lab, previously at HubSpot, now at Brevo, Amir, co-founder from Hayflow, Malte also, basically your boss, right, from VKI. Fabrizio Ballarini, now Revolut, previously 10 years at Vice, Markus Weber, head of web at Pipedrive. We'll have Aleida Solis. I think everybody that has spent at least five minutes on LinkedIn knows Aleida. so cool many others Marvin Müller Anita Kierkowska etc so cool yeah check out the link in the description we'll put it there masters of search dot com slash conference and you'll find it there yeah but enough of advertising David the last time we spoke you had a different job exactly what happened in between

4:12Malte Landwehr: what happened And basically, I was talking to Malte and a few months later, I joined Peak. That's a very short version of what happened. So previously, I was head of a product of organic at KKP for my agency I was working at. And everything was awesome. So I would never actually go away from the agency. But there was an opportunity. And I think everybody who is doing SEO or anything in regards of this would decide the same, I would say. If you have the opportunity to spend your whole day just doing research, just looking at the biggest database you have regarding geo, I guess nobody would really say no to a job like this.

4:56Malte Landwehr: So this was really like one of a one-time chance, so to say, you get the question, you want to join. We do have all the data you want to have. And for me, it was clear to say yes in this regard.

5:08David Konitzny: Okay. But if I'm not mistaken, being a GEO researcher at PKI basically means that you're now a LinkedIn influencer, right?

5:19Malte Landwehr: I'm not really. I think it's a side effect of this. So really, why we are actually so visible on LinkedIn is the reason to share our knowledge. So I mean, right now, everybody sees this on LinkedIn. everybody is sharing everything regarding AI search. And everybody, of course, has a different opinion. Mostly the issue is that those opinions are based on smaller tests. So you have like five prompts, you execute for a week, and based on the results, you decide, okay, this is now my hypothesis and this is the result at the end. And we as a research team, we do have, of course, like a ton of data.

5:56Malte Landwehr: We spend the whole day just looking at patterns. We do have those patterns in mind. and therefore also we share everything because I think this is like the most relevant part, not just like keeping the knowledge and talking in the office all the time about like what is changing, but also like sharing everything and also like to see if others come up with other ideas. So recently we shared everything regarding the leaked data we have from ChatGPT, all the search engines that are being used. And of course, we sometimes also have no idea what those search engines are doing. So we rely on the community to help us to find certain things, do some research on their own, share everything so that we can do this together at the end.

6:42Cool.

6:43David Konitzny: You published quite a lot and you've been doing quite a lot of research. If you had to pick one or two of your favorite insights, favorite projects or however you would call them yourself, what would that be?

7:00Malte Landwehr: I would say in particular two things. One of the latest ones I published was regarding YouTube and how JGPT in this regard is actually reading YouTube videos, which is kind of different to what everybody else was expecting the whole time. And the second one is coming in handy nowadays again, because I think like six months ago I was sharing a small research regarding JGPT deep research. I think not everybody knows the deep research functionality within CHPT. It doesn't matter here right now. But the findings I had there are actually right now something that we see more and more coming in handy for analyzing CHPT, the default version, so to say.

7:43Malte Landwehr: And I will talk about this, I think, today as well. So those would be the two main parts that are really approaches to my heart right now. and everything else that you see on LinkedIn, as I said, it's like everyday research, everyday. It's not that I create everything at once and just share it like in the next couple of weeks. It's really when I share something, I did the research in the morning sometimes or in the evening and immediately share something because you need to be fast nowadays. If I wait for another week, JGPT or some other AI model will change and then it's all the information. So it's always the new shit I'm posting, so to say.

8:22David Konitzny: Very cool. Can you give us a little insight or summary key takeaways around the YouTube thing? Because I feel like on the one hand, you posted something interesting about YouTube, but you also posted something interesting about Reddit. And both as UGC platforms, somehow, I feel like they are somehow connected or at least people see them as connected. So what did you find there?

8:48Malte Landwehr: So we all have this one chart in mind when Jhpd was switching from 5.5 to 5.6, the model version, that Reddit went down in the retriever. So Reddit is basically not visible anymore. And all these amazing strategies regarding this use Reddit for our AI visibility and nothing else, they basically blowed it up. So this was one of the things that we knew about, so to say. And what I found in the last couple of days was that it's not just Reddit, but also YouTube and other platforms. So there's those UGC platforms, so user-generated content platforms that are dropping. And this drop from YouTube is not connected to the model switch, which is also kind of interesting here.

9:37Malte Landwehr: It's out of context, so to say. It just happened, I think, on the 28th of September around this time. So there was no model switch in between. there was nothing happening. It went just down. And what went down, what I mean with this is those platforms are not used so often anymore in retrieval. And I know there are a lot of studies saying they are still retrieved, and that's true. So they are still retrieved and they are still important. But for Chachapiti, they were one of the main platforms, so to say, to take all the information out. So they were retrieved all the time to get all the information.

10:12Malte Landwehr: Nowadays, the search works a bit differently. It's going away from just like broader search towards like specific search. So that's why we have those site operators, for example, or the term official in the fan-outs that we are particularly looking at certain domains, platforms to receive the information. So one of the things that I was looking at was for those UGC platforms, really hard word right now, that all those AI platforms were completely different. That's one of the main key points here right now. So don't drop a Reddit just because somebody on LinkedIn said it's not used anymore. Maybe it's not for JGBT so useful anymore, but for AI overviews, for AI mode, for any other platform, they are still retrieved quite hard.

11:03Malte Landwehr: So I wouldn't say like you shouldn't focus anymore on Reddit because this would be false information. and it also really helps you still in Chattapiti in regards of Chattapiti. As I said, Chattapiti is still using Reddit for certain defects. So if you have, for example, a new product coming out and there's nowhere something written about it, it still makes sense to create like maybe a post on Reddit to have a community to discuss this new feature of your platform because this information will be retrieved and will be used, especially good for fact-checking, so to say. So if a lot of people are claiming that you are, let's say, one of the price is options, you can also use Reddit to really discard this sentence and say, well, those are our pricing options and we are actually not so expensive as others are saying.

11:52Malte Landwehr: So this is in regards to Reddit, as I said, YouTube. The same thing, as I said, I shared this. Retrieval went down. Doesn't mean that YouTube is not so important. But what was really the trigger for my next research was a lot of the comments on my LinkedIn post were telling me that, oh, actually, Chachapiti is just using the transcript of your video. So what's the issue here right now? And this whole transcript part was then triggering me because I wanted to understand how is actually Chachapiti retrieving information from your video. So is this really like just a basic transcript or is it something different?

12:30Malte Landwehr: So what you need to understand here is JGBT, as I said, has like 70 search engines in between or 70 pipelines it's using. So it's not just like one single source, let's say Google or Bing, which we all know, but there are like multiple layers or like a library, so to say. And like 70 % of this library belongs to Labrador, which we know by now is like the internal index from JGBT. And within those pipelines, there's also a specific pipeline for YouTube. So they are using something to retrieve the information from YouTube. Now, of course, a lot of people are testing this and saying like when I paste a YouTube link into my ChatGPT chat, it tells me, yeah, information couldn't be retrieved.

13:17Malte Landwehr: Correct. Because this is like the live fetching and fetching is not working for YouTube. But the information ChatGPT is receiving is coming from a different pipeline, so to say. And this pipeline, it's a really basic thing because what is happening here is Chachapiti just placed one external provider into their pipeline to receive the information. And I think all of you know Serp API. There are different versions of how you can receive information from Google, from Google News, and also different versions of how you can actually get information from YouTube. And one of those pipelines is actually not taking the transcript, but just the description underneath your video.

13:58Malte Landwehr: And this is then what also, what I found out, is what JGDP is actually getting when it's retrieving a video. So it's not looking at the transcript, at the video at all. It's just reading what's underneath your video, so to say, the whole description. And I shared a screenshot to show everybody that I'm not just lying or coming up with a certain idea. It's like really written down in the code. The exact frame of the description is in the code. So it's kind of easy for everybody to understand. Yeah, it's the description. And everything that's in there will be used. So if you have a long description regarding, I did the test, I think, with a pizza dough, how to make a perfect pizza dough.

14:40Malte Landwehr: And you could actually find all the ingredients, everything in the description, which also Chachupkee was referring to at the end. And one of the best things, which could be also a good strategy, was you can also include timestamps. So there are like automatic timestamps underneath every video that will be not retrieved, but you can actually also include your own timestamps. And using those timestamps, you can basically tell then, JGBT, what's inside of your video. And exactly this will be then also retrieved. And for example, the answer would be like in minute three, this video will describe how to create this perfect pizza dough.

15:22Malte Landwehr: And in minute 70, you will see how the pizza dough is going into the oven, for example. And this is actually what you can then use to come up with a brilliant strategies how to create your videos. And as I said, this doesn't mean that right now, because I said YouTube is not retrieved anymore. Why should we do this? it's still worth though because sometimes certain informations are just ambiguous and we need to keep in mind this whole chat functionality will change in the future. So right now we also always see just a plain text. And recently we also see like products for example showing up, images showing up and also sometimes if there's the reason for the system so to say, to show you a video also a video will be shown.

16:08Malte Landwehr: For like, let's say I want to clean my car how can I clean my windshields in the perfect way? And what technique do I need to put into this? And you can see all of a sudden a video. And the video, as I said, really like one of the layers is like the description. The other layers, which I also found out, were some really interesting parts because it's like about your views, your followers, and if you are a verified channel. So verified channel, it's kind of easy to achieve. Views and followers might be harder, but I think everybody who is doing this in a way deeper way than I do this, they know certain ways how to increase views and followers.

16:52Malte Landwehr: And those numbers are also tiered in buckets for the same. And for every bucket, you receive additional value. So at the end, what you can do is, by all the scorings, the scoring is taking your description into account, your title, your description of the URL. And it's also taking into account your views and your followers. So if you have more views and more followers than the other video that was taken into the retrieval, chances are very high that you will be the chosen video to be shown in a chat version. And this would be like what we called back in the SEO days, like a small boost. So having certain things on your page will give you a small boost and having like more views and more followers will give you also more boost for your YouTube videos, so to say.

17:43David Konitzny: Okay, David, that was a lot of information. And my job here is to boil it down in a very simple way for people that listen to this, that do not spend so much time with all the research as you do. So my first question is, so should we still do something on Reddit? We are obviously keeping in mind, we don't want to spam etc authentic engagement etc but should people still do something on reddit yes or no yes yes for sure okay then second question how can people still know which threads or which subreddits are relevant if it's not possible to see it transparently for example in retrieval or citation data in tools like PKI?

18:33David Konitzny: Like, how do I know where to go on Reddit? Because it's obviously a huge platform.

18:39Malte Landwehr: As I said, the retrieval data is not at zero. So you will still see certain threads showing up in your citations, for example. And I would really like aim for those because those are still the most relevant ones that you should be activated.

18:53David Konitzny: Okay. Okay. And do you think that beyond the threads and Reddit URLs that we can still see in the retrieval, do you think that beyond that there is like an indexed corpus, etc., that OpenAI uses that we just cannot see? or do you really think that just a tiny fraction of what used to be retrieved from Reddit is still relevant? And I don't know, OpenAI has changed their mind about the relevancy of Reddit.

19:24Malte Landwehr: No, there is actually one pipeline called Reddit within the code that we can see. So they are still storing the information. I think they are just like trying to understand how to use this information way more easier to use. and I would never say like switch now or go away from Reddit because we never know if this trend is going up again and at some point Reddit will be actually important again and then you need to build up everything once again. So keep your things at Reddit.

19:56David Konitzny: Okay, then for YouTube. So is it still something that people should focus on either optimizing existing YouTube videos or creating new YouTube videos?

20:07Malte Landwehr: Most definitely because all LLMs are working the same way. Search everywhere. So every information about you everywhere will be at some point retrieved. And understanding how YouTube is actually retrieved from Shared Beauty makes it just way easier now.

20:22David Konitzny: Then if people might not have huge budgets, how important is actually the content of the video, like what is in the video compared to the packaging of the video. So the title and the description. And a follow-up question already. How important is this thumbnail? Do you have data on the thumbnail?

20:46Malte Landwehr: Regarding the thumbnail, I don't have real data about this, but this could be a great research for coming up with that. If you do it, please tag me on LinkedIn

20:52David Konitzny: so I can get a little bit of your spotlight also to my little LinkedIn profile.

21:00Malte Landwehr: For sure, I will. So the whole package is really important. So if you don't have so much money to spend on YouTube, I would still say create a great video because as I said, this will be also viewed by other people, by humans. So it's always good to have a nice video. And also it will be retrieved, as I said, from other LLMs where it's maybe more important, especially on the transcript. Specifically for chat.gbt, if your whole aim is just to be more visible on chat.gbt, focus really importantly on the description. So as I said, use it basically as a landing page where you place in all the information that you could place in.

21:37Malte Landwehr: Keep in mind that YouTube has also its own algorithm on its own. So no keyword stuffing, so on, would be also brilliant here.

21:45David Konitzny: And can you say anything about production quality? Because we also have it when we work with clients that they sometimes, the first reaction to saying, hey we should create videos for youtube is yeah but i don't have a production setup and like it costs a load of money blah blah blah so does it actually make a difference if the video is for example a podcast recording like we're doing it right now or a loom video where somebody shows something in an interface and just rambles hopefully with some good information rambles about a topic or does it really have to be like a full-blown production with i don't know a big

22:30Malte Landwehr: budget i don't think you need to have a big budget for creating an amazing video keep in mind you want to share information about you your product and so on so keep it simple like a podcast like this right now where you don't need to spend a ton of money at least that's what i think like last here um you uh it's the best way because you are just the the whole idea is to share information about you about a certain feature that you have anything else so this is the most relevant part everything around it making it nice yes it's it might might be nice for your ceo who really like wants to have a shiny product here but the end is just regarding the information so keep it uh keep it easy, just record something, maybe like a screen recording is also completely enough, make it look nice a bit, and then really focus on the information that you're sharing.

23:26Malte Landwehr: So no fun jokes and stuff around it. Keep it simple so it's easy to retrieve, easy to understand, and then the information would be also taken for the retrieval.

23:36David Konitzny: Okay, cool. Now, thanks for the quick rapid-fire wrap-up. I think this is helpful. Maybe also for the better retrieval of the information by humans and agents. Yeah, but another thing that I was curious about is the whole site search aspect because you published some interesting research around, I think, especially ChatGPT using the site attribute. Maybe you can also quickly explain then what the site attribute is more heavily in its query fanouts and something that i cared about or that i'm curious about is like how often do you see this happening and i think this is maybe the even the question that i care even more about if the query fanouts target a specific domain do i still have a chance to show up as a brand if i'm not this domain or part of these domains like do you know anything about that?

24:44Malte Landwehr: Yes, I know. And I would say, I thought so. So the whole site operator for everybody who's not an SEO, because the SEOs know about this, the site operator is something that we used to use in Google. So when you open up your Google view, you can put into the search bar site and the site operator and then a certain domain. When you do this, you will just see in the results just the domain and all the sites that are indexed of this domain. This is like the way how to see like what URLs of my domain are basically indexed. And you can actually also add words and so on into this operator to see is a certain URL that is indexed associated to this.

25:34Malte Landwehr: So let's say I have like site, the accelerator for PKI and I place in the word pricing. I will only see all the landing pages that have something in connection with pricing. So the word pricing is included and the landing page. And this feature is something that Chachypt is nowadays also using. Keep in mind, they also want just to create a new search engine and they're just learning from all the other search engines how they're working. And they came up, I think at least with this idea, to really specifically target certain domains to retrieve more information from there. Because back in the days, it was just a broad search.

26:14Malte Landwehr: Those fennels will be used for a broad search, and then all the information within the search will be used for the answer. Now with this operator, they can look at certain brands, for example, the pricing, and really target those brands, those domains, look at the pricing and use this information. This is really important to keep in mind. This came actually in place with the new model 5.6. So in August, early August, this was something we saw massively. Earlier, there were also already signs of this. So earlier, this term was used in all panels in between 0.5 and 1%. So as you hear, it was not really relevant, but it was somehow there.

26:56Malte Landwehr: Right now, the number is up to 28%. So 28 % of all fanouts have a site operator included. And how it works, it's basically, we have different layers nowadays. So back in the days, JGPT was usually just doing one fanout. So based on your question, it was summarizing your question, created a keyword phrase for its own to use it for search. And this was, as I said, this broader way. And now it has like several layers. So we still have the broad search. Let's say I'm looking for running shoes and I have white feet. And so it will look for running shoes for white feet. And within the first layer, he will find, so the system will find different brands.

27:41Malte Landwehr: And based on those brands, he will do a certain search, focusing on those brands and use the site operator to find out some further information regarding those shoes. So how wide are those shoes? How pricey are those shoes? And those are then the connection with the side operator. To your question, if the side operator, if it's used, can I still sneak in my domain to this? No. It's a single no because it's already aiming for this. But I shared, I think it was yesterday, a new research from my side. what we can see is that since the last couple of days, there are new URLs or new domains taken into account into the site operator.

28:24Malte Landwehr: So when this whole site operator came in place, there was already a certain list of domains that were always targeted, probably because OpenAI has so much information already that they knew that certain brands are always connected to shoes, to certain other things. Now they are looking for more information for new domains. And I can see that the numbers for those new domains are actually increasing. So it's pretty much the system recalculating other new informations out there, other new domains that I never have checked previously that I should take into account right now. So it makes really sense right now to check once again your fanouts to see if there are domains visible that haven't been visible previously and what they are right now doing.

29:11Malte Landwehr: Maybe you are now also included. Perfect match. Or you see other competitors and you can basically, as back in the days, steal the ideas, steal what they are doing and try to incorporate this into your strategy as well. Okay.

29:26David Konitzny: So to also do a little rapid fire roundup here. ChatGPT is searching more for specific domains. and if it searches for a specific domain with a site operator, then you cannot be part of the results because this is like a binary. If the site operator is used with a domain, then it only searches for this domain. But still, if the site operators are used, there's still a chance that your brand, even if it's not in the site operator, can be mentioned in the response. So you don't have to basically be sad and say, oh, this is all very unjust from OpenAI and I will write Sam a very bad email and a bad review, you can still get into the response.

30:20David Konitzny: So no reason to stop doing your optimization work, right?

30:28Malte Landwehr: Exactly. It's not a hidden club that you have no entrance.

30:31David Konitzny: Cool. And do you see, because this is also something that I felt in your research, you are, at least that's my impression, please correct me if I'm wrong, you're focusing a lot on ChatGPT in your research, right? How is it with other models and other platforms and what is the reasoning behind it? Like, ChatGPT is the biggest platform, obviously the biggest AI native platform, so to say. Is that the reason or is there just more to uncover? Is it harder to find these patterns and things from Claude or yeah, just please give me a little bit of the backstory here.

31:10Malte Landwehr: I'm not just focusing on Chaggpt. You need to understand that Chaggpt is one of the easiest tools out there to understand everything. So we know from the beginning how easy it was to see fanouts, to see anything that is changing within the code, just using the dev tools, and it's still really easy. So it's not really a black box. The only black box is maybe just the data that you don't have. So you need more data to understand the patterns. Everything coming from Google is a black box. So it's really hard to understand what they are doing. Of course, you can see the fanouts here as well. But retrieving the data and understanding this is still something that is really hard.

31:49Malte Landwehr: For Claude, yes, it's the same behavior as with ChurchBT. You can see a lot of things. but then of course the the linked linked in brain in my side is like nobody really cares about cloud so much because as you also said like first mover effect jgpt is out there everybody's focusing on jgpt so it makes also more fun to share a thing regarding jgpt and as itself it does change so often it's so easy to see all those patterns and that's why there is so much research that you can do one on the cloud side there there's not so many things changing on a frequently basis as

32:24David Konitzny: for chat gpt okay and do you think that chat gpt is aware of uh making it easy for people like you to understand this and then in turn they this so is it basically a pr strategy this is my question

32:44Malte Landwehr: this is a good question so uh at least i hope uh it's a pr strategy of them uh to do this otherwise i would be really shocked and why okay because as i said you can see everything so before for example the ads came out in chat gpt you could see within the code how an ad is structured what it will be used using and everything else so you could say well they do have maybe a terrible team on their side, not knowing how to hide certain things as Google in the code. Or the other side could be also like, they don't care. They know that people are seeing this. And it's also great because people like me share a lot of research on this.

33:24Malte Landwehr: So everybody's focusing on ChatGPT. So it's awesome for them. So it's really hard for me to say if they are doing this on purpose or not. Certain things, for sure, they are not doing on purpose. What I can already say was, remember when we had those labels within the code where we could see SERP, BRIDE, and all the other pipelines that we could see right now in the leaked data? And this was there for like two weeks, I think, and then it was vanished. Stuff like this, I would say like, oh, it was a mistake. So somebody executed something. It was visible for everybody. They were aware of this and tried to go back again to an older version.

34:03Malte Landwehr: but they didn't calculate it with their whole research audience out there who just did 24 hours, nothing else, then receiving all the information to do some calculation. So stuff like this, when you see a pattern and it's not there anymore, then for sure they don't want to share the information. But other things like fanouts, I believe they will stay there forever because they basically also don't care. I mean, for them, I think it's like, what would you do with the fanouts? for us is like it's a gold mine as you can see so many patterns in there and do you still feel

34:37David Konitzny: like because this is a question that i get quite often um now by chat for chatubit we obviously have quite a lot of transparency due to um all the research that you're publishing for example um and obviously the good uh open ai pr strategy but do you like how different are the mechanisms for the different interfaces like how different is claude really to chat gbt how different is ai overviews to chat gbt and i know just to spare you that part maybe that um behind the scenes obviously there are different um so factually different tools working like claude uses the brave web search at least i think it's still the case etc but like how different can search really be This is what I'm curious about because people often approach me with, hey, do we need completely different strategies for AI overviews, AI mode, chat, QT, and cloud?

35:36David Konitzny: And then also maybe for enterprise companies for co-pilot. What would you say to that?

35:41Malte Landwehr: Actually, yes. Do this mind game on your own right now. If you ask 10 people to search for something, for something really simple, everybody has their own preferred tools that they are looking at. Some of them are looking at Reddit. Some of them are using Instagram for getting information. And this is the same with all those different LMs. All of them are using different sources. Google is using the whole Google universe, of course. The others can scrape. Sometimes I'm not allowed to scrape. Google universe needs to go to Brave, to Bing. And once you are on the site, you get also different results.

36:20Malte Landwehr: You get also different information. and this is like really like what we see right now so all the lms of course are using or are waiting different sources differently and therefore also sometimes the results is completely different so for broader thing of course if i ask like well what is the main city of paris of paris of france everybody will of course say paris and there is no web search included but as soon as you start to do a web search or those students are doing a web search information could completely be different And this is just like the waiting behind the scenes. So, yeah, you need to have the different strategies, but it always refers to what is your main AI tool, I would say, because most of the people are just focusing on ChatGPT.

37:04Malte Landwehr: You don't need to have now to use a strategy that is only working for cloud or for DeepSeek. DeepSeek is also something completely different. So my main goal would be here, if you have something like those UGC platforms that you see, like Reddit, don't go with the hype to say, like, we don't need to focus on this anymore. Keep in mind that there are several different engines that are used completely different. Like back in the days with SEO, everybody was just doing SEO on Google. Nobody cared about Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, and so on. But there were still specific brands that really focused on this because they got more traffic from Yandex, from Yahoo, so that you need to have experts to understand how is this engine working and what do we need to do differently this is the same story here right now

37:50David Konitzny: as well cool and what do you think how much should people change or adjust or like do little tweaks on their geo or ai search strategies based on new research that's coming out so if for example i see you posting something because i think a lot of people listening to this feel because this is i think a general sentiment in industry feel overwhelmed by the amount of new information that has been thrown at them every day would you say that it makes sense to change stuff with every new release and every new thing or how could people differentiate signal from noise or what's your mental model also my mental models over always are overloaded

38:47Malte Landwehr: um it's always full of information um i would again compare this to uh seo uh back in the day so whenever a core update came up and the worst part you could ever do was like whenever a car that is there i need to change my whole strategy this was never something you should actually do Keep up your strategy as long as you believe that you have a strategy. I think this is like the first layer. You need to have a strategy. So Reddit is not a strategy for AI. Or YouTube is also not a strategy. You need to understand how it's retrieved and how it's working. So understanding searches everywhere. Every information out there can be used.

39:27Malte Landwehr: This is something you need to understand. What we are sharing sometimes is giving more a hint towards how those systems are working so that people do have a better understanding. Do I need to adjust my strategy? Because previously I was just focusing on Reddit, as I said, and now somebody posted, it's actually everything else as well. So it's just like a different layer and inclusion into your strategy. But don't change your strategy after every post. People post every day something, so I wouldn't change every day. And also, this is not a strategy. If you change everything on a daily basis, then you don't have a strategy at all.

40:04Malte Landwehr: So the best strategy is if you stick to something and test it at least for six months, see if it's working and learn from your own mistakes. So this is also like what we are always doing, like learning what is working, what is not working and doing another round of this. So I would say what you definitely need to do is like check if there is something completely new to you. So something that you were never aware of, like certain platforms are retrieved, certain ways how images or videos are received. this could be this could change your strategy of course but if somebody's saying all of a sudden oh i see a peak in governmental domains that are now retrieved your strategy shouldn't be that you need now to have a connection with the governmental domain to get like a product

40:50David Konitzny: layer on this or something like that and what would you maybe um on on that note again what would you generally say if people are just getting started for example with on their geo journey because i feel like a lot of people might they might have been doing something for seo obviously but they they didn't put dedicated focus on ai search or geo what would you say Also, based on your overloaded mental model. No, just kidding. Based on your enormous context knowledge that you have about this whole space, how these platforms really work. What would you say would be the three best ways to start? Or what should be things to focus on first if people want to put dedicated focus on AI search or geo?

41:46Malte Landwehr: The first thing you already said is like, stick with your SEO team and what they are doing. So make your domain visible, make it retrievable, place all the information in there that you want to get retrieved. As I said, there's the site operator for Cheshire Bt in use. So they are actually looking at your own domain as well. So it's not just everybody else, but your domain as well. Second, figure out where people are actually talking about you. So understand where they are talking about you. Is this like a review platform? Is this Reddit? Is there different platforms where people talk about you and your brand and your products?

42:23Malte Landwehr: Be visible there. And if there is a lot of negative way of talking about you, try to change this. Not aggressively, of course, but over time, try to be more like part of a community, share the stuff with them. And the third layer would be figure out where your competitors are actually visible, where you are not visible at all. You can do this with tools like PGI, where you can just look at the citations, then the domains, and see where there's a certain gap, where your competitors are mentioned and you are not mentioned. So like comparison portals, newspapers and so on. And then try to find out a way to sneak in somehow there with like digital PR campaigns, with your normal PR ways or different ways to like be really part of a discussion.

43:07Malte Landwehr: I will say this is like the difference. And I say, oh, you just care about like how you look like, how your domain is retrieved, how the information is there. And in AI, you really care about how people talk about you, how visible your brand, your product is and how well received everything is. And of course, if the information that is out there is also still true, because some of the information might be for a long time out of date, they are not true anymore. So make it also visible. So be part of the Internet at the end.

43:37David Konitzny: That's one of the biggest advice I would give. I like that quote, be part of the Internet. This is good. It's not Neuland anymore. This joke only Germans will understand. um okay cool um david we already covered quite a lot of stuff but i know maybe you have something in mind that we should talk about that we haven't talked about and as a probably frequent listener of this podcast uh you know that in the end that's always my question so what didn't we talk

44:13Malte Landwehr: about that we should have talked about and what i said in the beginning regarding church bt deep research. So one of the key findings here was that ChatGPT is reading your landing page, which is, we know about this, so it's retrieving the information. What is new or what was new is it looks for specific words and tries to find them on your landing page to just get a snippet for this. So let's say again, pricing, it will look for the word pricing in your content and read the part that is retrieved and from there on. Why am I saying this? Because right now with the newest default version 6. So it was yesterday an announcement that now in the UI, the model is switched from 5.6 to 6.

44:56Malte Landwehr: So we just jumped for positions. We do see all of a sudden this pattern just exploding. So ShellGPT is reading like a human being, so to say, your domain or your landing pages right now. And it makes sense. So make sure that everything is in your HTML text, not a JavaScript or something like this. This is in short what we couldn't cover right now, but what we should cover the next time.

45:21David Konitzny: Okay, so cool. I think we will probably have you on at least once more based on the amount of stuff you're putting out. I can highly recommend to anyone that wants to see more, hear more about what David is spending his whole day with on LinkedIn. we'll put the link to your profile in the description linkedin.com slash in slash david in one word so so cool thanks so much David for making the time I guess you have to jump right back into GPT 6 research and curious to see if you will still put something out today or maybe tomorrow and And yeah, thanks so much for all your great insights.

46:16Malte Landwehr: Thanks for having me and see you soon at the conference.

46:19David Konitzny: Yeah, see you soon at the conference. Looking forward to it. Bye-bye. Bye.