Episode 853 | How to Become the SaaS That AI Recommends

0:00Welcome back to another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling. And in this episode, I talk with Ross Hudgens. He's the author of a new book about AI SEO, about how to become the SaaS that AI recommends in your category. Ross has a wealth of knowledge on SEO and now GEO, which is generative engine optimization, as he runs an 80-person SEO slash GEO agency called Siege Media. Before we dive into our conversation, MicroConf US ticket prices go up on October 9th. So our next MicroConf US is in Austin, Texas from April 18th through the 20th. We have an amazing speaker roster including Austin's own Jason Cohen.

0:46We of course have our world-class hallway track and producer Sonia is lining up some great excursions as she always does. We're going to be staying right downtown at the Hotel Van Zandt, microconf.com slash US to grab your ticket before prices go up on October 9th and the event sells out as our last seven events have. Use promo code ROB50, that's ROB50, to let them know I sent you. And with that, let's talk about how to become the SaaS that AI recommends.

1:24Ross Hudgens, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me again, Rob. You were on a few years ago talking about SEO for SaaS because you run Siege Media, where your H1 is full-service GEO. We make brands the answer in search. Formerly, when you came on the show, Siege Media was focused on SEO. I can imagine there's a lot of thought going into that pivot these days. How are you thinking about SEO versus GEO these days? Yeah, SEO is still definitely a massive component of GEO, but there's new flavors that are not part of it that I think is not arguable, but some people would argue. And a lot of that's the offsite things like affiliate mentions, reviews on third-party websites.

2:07That is the new element that we're adding to the previous pie. That's still a very important pie. Makes sense. So you've written a book called Generative Engine Optimization, The Definitive Guide to AI SEO. and that is available on Amazon. Well, it'll go live, I guess, about a week after this episode goes live. And you are the person to write this book when you reached out and said, hey, I think you asked me to read it and give you a quote or something. And I was like, oh, I'm so glad you're writing this because people keep asking me about it. And it's like, look, how much GEO do you think I've done?

2:42Not very much these days, you know what I mean? I used to do all the marketing and all the SEO for all my businesses and I'm not there anymore. I'm not doing the down in the bare metal nitty gritty. And so when people ask my advice on something this specific, I'm always like, well, I really wish I had a resource to hand them. And so the fact that you're writing this book I think is really helpful. I mean, I guess the obvious question is, you've been doing SEO and now GEO. Siege Media is what, 80 employees? I mean, it's a force of nature here. But what made you decide to put pen to paper and get this out?

3:14So I'm a member of an organization called Young Presidents Organization, YPO. It's other business owners. And we had an offsite and someone in the group pushed us to do something called a Misagi. So Misagi is a once a year difficult year defining challenge, which essentially is supposed to be very difficult to accomplish. 50-50 chance of failure. And I had always, I ran a content agency that became an SEO agency. I was a writer. I was like, wow, light bulb went off. This is the moment we're in AI. this is when I should write this book on this exact topic. We had been going through the transformation ourselves.

3:51So I was just like, man, I'm going to sprint and do this and spend every morning writing it. And sure enough, I got it out. And you start the book with a client story, right? You had an S &P 100 client, I almost said 500. You had an S &P 100 client that laid off its entire SEO team in mid-2025. and what they had a new group called AI Transformation within the company. Tell me, summarize that story. And just so folks know, we're going to dive in after this into some tactical stuff from the book so folks can learn how to do some GEO themselves. Yeah, I mean, so many SEO folks encountered a version of the story.

4:30This was definitely a scary one. I mean, most importantly for the people impacted, but huge SEO program, a lot of SEO impact. And just one day we woke up and the whole team was gone. And we now ended up reporting to this head of digital transformation, which is probably not unlike a lot of people. And most importantly, sad for those people that lost their jobs, but that meant a 12 % effective loss of revenue for us. It was our biggest client and it was painful. And we had a lot of churn in that same moment as well. I don't think that's unique to us, but at the same time, also a lot of demand at the other end.

5:05Everyone's asking about AI search. We've been doing a lot of this. We had already started the path towards adding the services and turns out we had done a lot of them already, which we'll get into. That was already helping GEO. So we were lucky. It was super painful. Beginning of the year, we took a major hit. That was painful to the company, but we've added new services and we're coming out the other side really strongly here in the end of the year. So it's exciting. So, you know, most of my listeners are going to know about Google SEO. There's on page, the basic stuff you do. there's off page mostly link building and mentions I guess these days I know it just keeps changing but should you do that first and then GEO is additional stuff or is it more like a Venn diagram you know where there's two circles and if you're going to do GEO you can do that without doing all the traditional Google optimization I think it's possible it's definitely more challenging especially if you're a medium-sized SaaS company, I would say.

6:04I think it's feasible, especially for a lot of your listenership. Increasingly, and I was just looking at this data, a huge corpus of influence for LLMs is G2. Capterra and their kind of audience, but specifically G2 continues to increase. So if you as a function just had product marketing be great at asking for reviews and those were really high reviews, I bet you could ignore your website effectively. And still get recommended pretty strongly. And let's talk about this. So one of the things in the book you talk about is like the best and then category, right? So best email marketing software.

6:41So why should a SaaS company publish best email marketing or best category that they're in post that list them plus their competitors? Yeah, it's not a universal, yes, you should do this, but especially new entrants to the market, places where there's not massive brand awareness, where you may already have a corpus of tons of reviews like that, there's a lot of value in it because one of the main reasons is it's the main way to surface in those kinds of searches. Google preferences and LLM's preference these roundups, and there aren't alternatives. In most kind of smaller niche SaaS markets, there aren't affiliate websites.

7:20In consumer markets, there's people publishing on like the nerd wallets of the world. And those will be recommendation engines for LLMs. But in B2B SaaS, it's really G2 and then it's the website. So the kind of plug in there is to create a version of that article, do it really well. Ideally, you don't say you're the best overall for something. You say, I'm the best at this component of CRM software, as an example. I'm like, I'm best for CRM for small businesses, maybe. And then that kind of enters you in the conversation. Other people find you and they add you to their lists and that kind of becomes a snowball.

7:59That's what we had done before LLMs. And now we're seeing that snowball happen for ourselves as well. And is there anything like that separates a roundup? Cause I see a lot of these roundup, like what separates one that gets cited a lot or that works from one that doesn't, what are their best practices? Good question. I mean, hitting them in sequence, one, we just hit the, like, I generally would suggest don't call yourself best overall. That helps LLM segment you into a curated summary. Like if you say you're best for small business, that also makes it easy for other people to also call you best for small business.

8:33They're probably not going to call you best overall. They're going to call you something different. So you're lowering friction to getting in that list. That's one, the right positioning of the company, which is a positioning thing. Second, make it look nice. Make it actually do deep research. We like doing branded screenshots. So you take a screenshot that's available on these other websites, put a little brand border behind it. Not hard, but you can replicate this across all of them. Give like a pro and con section for each. Generally do 10 or so. Freshness is really relevant here. So updating in most SaaS markets quarterly is a good goal.

9:10So you want to kind of relook at the list. Is the pricing correct? Is the positioning correct? That will give you a freshness boost. LLMs like freshness. So all of those components are generally going to add up to hopefully some relevancy and visibility for you. Is there any data available on search key, like term? They're not keywords because people are asking these. Everything's a long tail, it seems like. But like as a former SEO, I think of like the Google keyword tool back when it didn't suck. And then now we have Ahrefs, right? And there was Moz and SEMrush where you can say, hey, I guess it's not perfect data.

9:47It's clickstream data, but I at least have an idea that a lot more people search for Nike shoes than they do for email marketing software in a given day, right? I know it's 100 times more or something. Do we have any idea about LLM volume for terms or industries or categories, or is that a thing that's yet to be discovered? There's people trying it. I think there's a lot of pessimism around the data. A profound does a version called prompt volume, but they've said it explicitly. That it's synthetic. It's kind of like... Simulated or made up or something. Yes, exactly. So our recommendation is to use search volume data as a proxy.

10:27So if it's like, yeah, project management software has the most search volume for you and your market, kind of turn that into a prompt that's what is the best project management software. And then just kind of do that for all your core terms would be how we suggest it. Okay, that's what my 16-year-old is actually interested in GEO and has been starting to noodle on it and is helping my wife with some stuff on her website. And we were having this exact conversation because he's deeper in it than I am. And so I was asking him this question. He's like, yeah, there really isn't that. And I was like, I would use basically Google search traffic as a proxy or Ahrefs numbers basically.

11:04So that is good to hear. Let's switch topics. We've just talked about best in a category, articles. But you also took a lot about versus articles. and specifically you mentioned it as a very underrated AI tactic specifically. Why is that? Yeah, so this was a newer kind of discovery. I mean, it's always relatively obvious. It's a down funnel content type you should have on your website. But we had always started with best X tracking in these prompt trackers and the like. And sort of part of the thought process was that's where you're not already being shown. Of course, you're being shown for us versus someone else in these trackers.

11:46Therefore, why should I track them? Then your incentives become, do I even need to build these articles? Yada, yada. In short, at some point, we ran a correlation study of across our client base, specifically in B2B SaaS. And we asked, like, trying to find what are the correlative attributes to higher visibility? Is there any specific content type that seemed to show more? And actually, versus articles had the highest Spearman correlation across alternative and BestX software pages of sites that had the most traffic. Not that the articles themselves had the most traffic, but the people that had those articles at the highest volume had the overall most LLM traffic to the site.

12:27And there's also supporting data from G2 that came out similar timing. They have all those competitor comparison data. 33 % of their data is the best X articles is how people are starting to search for things. And then very shortly after that is X versus Y. So versus. So how do you structure a versus article so that a model actually like lifts it, which is kind of what you want it to do, right? Yeah, well, part of this is that positioning piece. So we talked about the best descriptor. So if you have authenticity about how you're described, this is kind of the next evolution that I don't think any LM tool is yet perfectly solved.

13:06But you want to think about, and it's even worth tracking within LM trackers, what are the qualitative attributes you're being described as? So we talked about prior to the call, and you mentioned at the front of this recording, we used to be an SEO agency. And now we're kind of, we're still SEO, but we're doing GEO2. How LMs perceive us is pretty important for that final decision. So you want to start actually considering what are the qualitative descriptors LLMs are framing for us? One, we should create the articles, but a lead off of that is, are we positively mentioned on these comparisons?

13:42Do we win the mentions? What are the descriptors? Are they the descriptors we want? All of those are kind of the elements, but generally you can rank for these still relatively easy. It's more about what are you getting out of that ranking that's worth doing? And then generally I'd say, sometimes it's competitive. So that's often the challenge for our clients. It's about, do they even want to publish this thing? So you want to use neutral voice, not insult the other company, be authentic in the framing, and all that generally helps get across the line. Right, right. Yeah, there usually is a little bit of resistance or objection I've heard around doing versus.

14:20And I'll say across our tiny seed companies, 217 investments. And I bet, I don't know if half of them have versus pages, maybe a quarter. I mean, it's a lot, right? So there's a number there. Trying to think of the number of complaints that they've gotten from competitors, whether it's a CEO getting all pissed off at another founder, or an actual legal letter, it's only been three or four. And I say only, for those guys it was a bummer because they had to deal with it. But most of them got around it by just saying, cool, so what do you want me to change? And they're like, well, that sentence isn't true.

14:52Fine, I'll remove it. You know what I mean? And then they went away. I think someone actually got a C &D from a lawyer and they just took that particular page down, but they left all their other versus pages up or something like that. So this stuff is not legal advice, you and I are not lawyers. But don't let your objection and your fear of maybe something bad happening be a reason not to do something that could market your company. Agreed. It's a decent dovetail into platforms like YouTube, Influencer. So if you really still have that objection, one way to get around it potentially is work with an influencer who does SaaS reviews to generate that video.

15:31So then LLMs, are they looking at YouTube videos and mentions? I mean, I guess the transcripts are up there, right? So that must be part of their corpus. Gemini has generally done a good job from what we've seen in our testing. The other LLMs, not as much. That's a fair point. One of the core things we do say, more specifically to Best X roundups for SaaS, is you can nudge them in description copy. Like, we are best for marketers, best for enterprise, things like that in the text that has jumped to is about your brand. So that description copy is obviously crawled by everybody and probably a good place to be influencing.

16:13Yeah, because I think you mentioned in the book that YouTube is the number two most cited domain behind Reddit. Is that still true? Has Reddit gone down in citation? It has, it has. I still think it's influential, newer model. Astra in ChatsGPT is high, but Google is still the model, right? Even traditional results, AI overviews are effectively AI. They're called AI overviews. So if we think about that, I think it's Reddit, it's still influential. So our framing of clients is use Reddit if it is good, is where your customers are. You would have invested in the channel. Otherwise, LLMs are just kind of a sugar on top.

16:51I think if you do that kind of thing, you go where influence is, you're going to have a good time generally. So let's say I take Tiny C Company Wasapi. So Wasapi is an all-in-one WhatsApp platform for customer support. So imagine you're flying into Cancun, every van there that you're hiring someone to drive you, like those van companies, everything's WhatsApp. When you get there, you know there's some operator, a dispatcher that has some software that can manage 20 different WhatsApp and track all this stuff, right? So Wasapi is that software for them. So how would you think about like, all right, I want YouTubers to maybe mention this.

17:29Like where do you start? Yeah, there are a lot of influencer marketplaces. So that would be my easiest suggestion. I mean, you can do it scrappily and go just, I would do pattern matching. So have they done a review of a relevant, so I would go big, probably like customer service software that's broader is probably a great place to start. Look for reviews of those singular companies. Use that as a wedge to just reach out to those people. If you're willing to pay them, you probably are going to get a response. Second is go straight to the listed rates in platforms. So in B2B, Limelight's a good one.

18:06Passionfruit, two O's, also a good one. Those are two good marketplaces. Partner Stack is also, if affiliated is a channel for you, it's the kind of go-to B2B platform that also will have YouTubers on there as well. Sometimes you'll do affiliate listings plus YouTube as like a package deal as well. Let's dig into affiliate and sponsorship listings. things. I'll just say Google, I don't think ever weighed sponsorships. You buy ads places that it didn't have past a link juice or anything, unless it was a link that nobody disclosed, of course, you know, that it was paid for. But LLMs, are they doing it different?

18:44Are they actually looking at ads that are hanging around and that, I guess, maybe lends credibility? I mean, not PPC, but if you do an organic search, the easiest way to think about it is if you do an organic search, you look at those top 10 results or do the LLM search and then look at the sources, you'll see roundups there. And some of them are on your own site. Some of them will be G2. But depending on your market, you may see a niche category listing. And the more niche your industry, the more likely this is to be the case. So for example, in Siege's case, this is not, agencies are in a market that generally have affiliate programs because it's hard to track to conversion, but we pay on a monthly basis to be listed places.

19:26So that's kind of the component is we want to show up on the listings. And there is a component of you still kind of source reviews and tag yourself correctly. That's definitely a component that can still influence higher visibility. And then so many of these things, the value is almost a snowball effect is like you show up there and then someone else is going to use that as research for their own article. So if you're going where eyeballs are, you're going to, or you're actually a great product, you're going to snowball that out. Got it. Okay, so just to set the stage or to get someone's head around it, tell me if what I'm imagining is correct.

20:01There is some site out there with a bunch of probably cache in Google, traditionally, that's how affiliates have done it, right? And they're writing a roundup of best GEO agencies, right, in the US, maybe, or best GEO agencies, period, or best GEO agencies in whatever city you're in. And those are affiliate links. Is that the idea? If you had an affiliate program, which you don't, as you've just said, then they would link out and get a cut. Or in this case, they might just take direct payment in order to include you in the roundup. Yes, you're correct. So some traditional examples that could be relevant to your listenership, technology advice, no affiliation with these companies, by the way, Technology Advice and then selectsoftwarereviews.com are two known affiliates I can think of immediately.

20:50So they would have listings and depending on who you talk to, they describe themselves as truly editorial. But if you can pay a little bit more than someone else, they might put you a little higher. You have to weigh that for yourself, for sure. And I've known founders who won't do this and I've known founders who will do it. I also know White Hat SEOs, I know Black Hat and I know gray hat. And so that's fascinating. All right. So that would make sense then because the LLMs view them as content, not necessarily as pay to play. Exactly. And I think there's still, people are willing to pay to show up on a sponsorship that's sustained there long-term or generally better companies.

21:29So that is like if you did payroll software or CRM software, you can't compete with HubSpot and Salesforce in terms of what they can pay because of their conversion rate and their brand awareness. So I believe wholeheartedly it's not a bad factor for LMS to consider, even if there's a transaction that's occurring. Talk to me about Reddit. We touched on it earlier, and it seemed for a while like Reddit was just the number one domain. And everyone, I mean, gosh, people were spamming Reddit so much. And then within even a past, it seemed like three, four weeks ago, I saw something on social that was like, well, Reddit's been not delisted, but deprioritized potentially.

22:07I don't know if that's true or not. It was just some rando on Twitter, then 20 people retweeted them, you know? So what is your take? Because you're in it, right? You're doing this. I'm sure you're pulling data citations across hundreds of sites, if not more, to see how impactful Reddit is. What's your take? Go where your audience is. So if your audience is on Reddit, I think it's a great place to invest. Where people went astray is they invested where their audience is not. So we hit that theme of snowball effect. even if Reddit was not directly influential, if your audience is prominent and reoccurring on Reddit, it doesn't even matter if it impacts LLMs directly because a lot of audience will find recommendations and brand awareness for you there that will long tail contribute.

22:51That's the pie in the sky version. I do also, it's still being used. I used Astra more recently, may have a new model by the time this comes out in a few weeks. It's still being referenced. It's not quite at the frequency. I think they're going a little broader than they used to as they're building their own index at ChatGPT. But it's everywhere on Google still. So we'll see how their renewal goes with Google because that's still up in there and how that visibility affects. But if your audience is there, I think that's still a very impactful place to go. So I have a question about subreddits. I've known people with like relative, like a SaaS product with a couple hundred customers that will start a subreddit and I'm always like what is that about like do you have a I think you mentioned in the book there's like a test you have of like when you should consider it because I I get mentions you know I have I don't remember the software I use now because it just pumps directly into slack but it's mentions across reddit and other social media of me this podcast my books biker conf tiny seat you know whatever things I'm monitoring and they get mentioned a lot on reddit in slash startups and slash entrepreneurship slash SaaS slash I don't even know what else, slash probably indie hackers and such.

24:02I haven't set up a subreddit for, I don't think any of these things. And I'm just curious your thoughts on that and what the benefit is. Yeah, so our two recommendations to be like, go where the community is. Is one, if that's true, build a subreddit, build a community. And second is to run paid ads at the place where redditors exist. So you can attract more customers on Reddit. Downstream will attract people mentioning you positively if you have a good product. But to more directly answer your question, some different benchmarks we set and think about if you have a lot of search volume. It's kind of a matrix of branded search volume against the customer lifetime value.

24:44So we'll roughly say 20 ,000 searches a month, which is quite high. If some of your listenership has a high average customer value, that may be a little lower. I think that's fine. But part of the consideration there is like, if they're searching your brand name, that means they're looking for you. They may also be adding clarifying questions on top of that. So you could help address them on the subreddit sometimes in a way that's a little challenging on the site. So one example I gave in a recent talk is someone who I think organically posted on Chime's subreddit, is Chime a good bank? And that you can't really answer on your own website, it's just kind of strange.

25:22But if a true user puts it on Reddit, it's a little easier. You're on your own turf. You can control it. You can delete things. That is some of the value, but you don't want to empty to, I think that's sort of what you're leading to, just a quiet ghost town. So that's some of it. Yeah. Got it. So as we wrap up, if I'm a bootstrap founder, maybe I have a co-founder, don't really have, you know, such a big team, if at all, but I am doing 5 or 10k a month and probably early stage or maybe let's say up to even 50k a month and I'm just kind of cranking on it. I haven't done any GEO stuff yet. What's the first few things to do in the first month?

26:02And I guess the second question is how do we measure this? I hear this like percent visibility thing thrown around. Like what is that? What are we looking to measure and how do we measure it? Is part B of that? Yeah, a great question. The good thing about Geo is a lot of other channels kind of indirectly impact Geo now. So hopefully you're already asking your customers for reviews. I would get that absolutely dialed in in terms of the motion. One thing we've been suggesting is you could even suggest, could you review me on G2 or this Reddit thread if you have it in an account? So if some CRM software thread came up, you could point them at that.

26:40They might publish. If you give them the OR function, maybe a little easier to do that. That's one route potentially. I do think transactional content on your website, very fruitful. So if you can't immediately identify a directory like Clutch in our world, that's not G2 in your niche, create those roundups, make them high quality, and also create the versus articles. That's 100 % where I'd start first, and you'll drive a lot of visibility. Then on your measurement side, there's a lot of good prompt trackers out there. They're all getting kind of blended together. We're using Peak currently. I like them.

27:15as they continue to get adopted. How is it? How is it spelled? P-E-C dot A-I. And yeah, it was reasonably priced. We were able to not have to pass the cost on. So that was one reason we use it. But using that proxy search volume for what is the best X software for your industry, creating categories around each of your product use cases if you can, and then tracking that over time. And one of the core simple ways we suggest influencing visibility is you look at the source URLs there and you aim to be positively mentioned on as many of those or replace those source URLs by creating the content yourself.

27:56So that's the short summary of how I would show up in AI. Amazing. And if folks want to learn more, they should go by. Generative Engine Optimization, the definitive guide to AI SEO. It's a heck of a title, sir. and you have, as an SEO yourself, you of course are going to try to dominate Amazon by naming the generic. You've named the generic. You got in Definitive Guide to AI. You got AI SEO in there and you got GEO or Generative Engine Optimization. Don't think I don't see you. I saw you a mile away. I wanted AEO in there, but that's too keyword spammy. It's just a little, yeah, yeah, exactly.

28:35You know, I mean, I've been saying for years, I would tell founders like, organic search and ranking and optimizing for that. We all say Google, Google, Google, but YouTube's number two. So that's not a bad place to rank, whether you start your own channel, whether you get on other people's channels. And then Amazon has got to be in the top five search engines in the world, right? You probably know it in order. I mean, I would go after that, like even back when I was doing Drip, which is email marketing software slash marketing automation. I published an ebook, something about, I don't even remember if it was SaaS, email marketing.

29:09And I think we may never have gotten it on Amazon or it may have been pulled down since then, but I wanted to rank in Amazon for the term email marketing. And then WordPress, WordPress.org at the time, we got the slug email-marketing. WordPress.org slash plugin slash email-marketing. And we built something enough to make it a suitable whatever and we got traffic from there. It wasn't the highest quality traffic, but all of this stuff was me thinking, how can I just be in all these places? I think we even launched a Chrome plugin. You know, it's stuff like that. Back then it took time and effort to maintain.

29:42Now Cloud Code could get you. Do you do things like that, like for you or your clients, where you look at the whole landscape of all the searchable, all the search engines that exist and think about how to rank there? Yeah, I mean, we have e-commerce clients too. And undoubtedly, I mean, Amazon will show up for LLM influence because that's where all the reviews are being pulled for them. So it's definitely part of the consideration set, for sure. A little less prominent in B2B, but I think that's very smart. Obviously a big marketing play to put out a book and then rank for that thing. But hopefully it's worthwhile.

30:19We'll find out. I know it's been worthwhile for you, it sounds like. Well, good luck on your launch day, man. Thanks for taking time to join me today. Obviously folks can find you at siegemedia.com. And is there any other place? Where do you hang out? Are you on LinkedIn, Twitter? Yeah, LinkedIn, I've posted a good amount, and Twitter, just Ross Hudgens on both. I would love to connect with anybody. Sounds great. Thanks for taking time. Thanks for having me, Rob. Thanks again to Ross for coming on the show, and thanks to you for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling, signing off from episode 853.

31:05Thank you.