How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Marketing with Nick Lafferty, Growth Marketer at Profound | Ep. 339

0:00Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. I'm Tamara Kaminsky and I'm stepping in as your guest host while Daniel's out on paternity leave. I'm a career product marketing leader and the former VP of PMM at high growth startups like Kajabi and Unbounce. Now I'm the founder of PMM Camp, a community and newsletter for product marketing leaders. And while Daniel's off doing dad things, I'll be here bringing you fun combos with some of the smartest marketers I know. Today's episode is all about AI search. And I'll be honest with you, I didn't fully get it before this episode. What is it?

0:31How does it work? And what does it really mean for marketers, especially those of us who spend years thinking about traditional SEO? So today, I'm sitting down with someone who does get it, Nick Lafferty. He's the first marketer at Profound, a company that's building AI-native search tools for the modern internet. Nick's going to walk us through what's changed in the world of search, how marketers should be thinking about SEO for AI and what we can actually do about it starting today. If you've been pretending to know what AI search means, same. This is the episode where we learn together. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast.

1:11I'm Daniel Murray, and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. Nick, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited for this one because as I told you ahead of time, I am a total newbie when it comes to AI search. I know that the way that people are searching is changing. I know that SEO is evolving. I even know that this week I got a couple newsletter subscribers from ChatGPT, but I don't understand how or what to do about it to get more of those.

1:56So today I'm hoping we do things a little bit different, and I'm hoping you can basically teach me everything about what this kind of shift means for us as marketers. A little bit of a lesson, let's say. And so to do that, let's start with the basics, which is what is actually broken about the way we search today? Why is AI search becoming a thing? Yeah, and so search is really fundamentally changing for probably the first time since the first Google search was done in 1998, which is kind of an insane thing to think about. You know, you rewind back the clock to when ChatGPT launched. They're now like the fastest growing software platform ever.

2:37They just crossed 500 million monthly active users. And it's a behavior change. Your average Google search is three to five words, and your average first conversation in ChatGPT is about 20 words, is about how long that is. And so that just has huge implications. And what it comes down to is that we've been talking to the internet for so long, and now is the first time the internet is really talking back to us. That's super interesting. And I think I even feel that myself. And actually, if I think back to my first experience with ChatGPT, I feel like I treated it the way that I would have treated a Google search and then quickly realized that was not the way to engage with it.

3:18And now I feel like 20 words, if I could say that, like I have like a paragraph every time I ask for something. And it does feel more like a conversation than like a search result, right? Yes. Yeah, it is way more conversational. you have this back and forth kind of engagement with it. It learns about you. Chat has memory now. And so it really is kind of fundamentally changing things. And as you compare that to the old world of SEO and this like sea of 10 blue links that Google would provide, the main difference now is you ask something and you get a direct answer. You don't have to click through.

3:56You don't have to scroll. And so it has implications for every brand, everyone's organic traffic from Google is declining about 30 to 40 percent. Impressions are going up because Google's AI overviews, that little AI snippet at the top of Google now is giving everyone more impressions, but folks aren't clicking through as much. And so you're watching as SEO in real time is becoming less of a performance channel for marketers and more of a brand and awareness channel. And people are kind of grappling with that shift. And it's a struggle. And so people are coming to, you know, find new answers of how do we kind of capture this market?

4:38And I truly talk to executives, CMOs, heads of marketing every week that are kind of like freaking out about this. They don't know if their team is positioned to be successful here. They don't know if they've hired the right team, if they have the right partners or tools. And so it is like a massive shift that we're going through in real time. I, yeah, I think it's such an important topic because for us as marketers, we're like, what do we need to do about it now? Because the concept of SEO in general is a long game. It's not like you write these SEO blog posts and tomorrow you're getting the traffic.

5:10And so it's like, do I stop betting on the future? Should I be betting on something else instead? So maybe we take a step back because I think you, as you mentioned, every single day are at the forefront of this industry, which a lot of us are not. We're just thinking about it, you know, in our jobs. So why don't you explain what your role is right now and what Profound even does in this space? Because I think that would help set the scene for our conversation today. Yeah. And so I'm the first marketer at Profound. I think my official title is just growth marketer, which is fairly straightforward.

5:41And so my job is I'm literally doing all of the things. I'm running webinars to build awareness, education about this. We have a ton of data internally. And so Profound, basically, we interrogate ChatGPT and all these other answer engines, as we call them, every day. We send them hundreds of thousands of prompts, and we record and organize and kind of categorize all of the responses. And so part of my job then is to look through all of our data and say, how is Profound using Profound? Where do we show up in ChatGPT when someone is asking it, like, what are the best providers to increase my AI visibility?

6:17Like, I want to make sure we show up first. And that's what Profound does. And it's my job to make sure that we do that. And there's a ton of opportunity out there to go through. And it's a lot of education is kind of what it comes down to is just like the call that we're having right now is everyone has these questions and especially board members, investors, CEOs. There's a lot of tops down pressure that's happening. And so that's manifesting in a ton of interest and a ton of inbound lead volume for us. And so I get to go kind of like manage all that stuff as well. It sounds super interesting.

6:52And, you know, like it's a completely new space, so you don't really know what you're going to get out of the data too. But I know that like this wasn't really what you were doing before you joined Profound, right? This was a bit of a shift from what you were doing. So what made you want to move on from the opportunity you were pursuing earlier and move into this space? Like was there one exciting data point or maybe a person you met? Like what caused the shift? Yeah, it was kind of two things. is one, I was just kind of leaning into the moment of this is everywhere now. And then the second thing is I started seeing Profound in particular everywhere.

7:28Before this, I was consulting, doing ads for a lot of high growth B2B SaaS companies. And I was surprised that three of my clients were already in active negotiation with Profound, trying to onboard with them. And I was like, what is going on? And so while I was interviewing with Profound, I was also joining those demo calls as my clients, too. So I got to kind of see both sides. And ultimately, who we sell to at Profound is me. Like, I am the buyer. It's other growth marketing experts, heads of marketing, that person. And being able to speak with the buyer and kind of resonate with my experience and talk them through this new thing was super exciting and something I couldn't say no to.

8:11So obviously, I have not used Profound personally. So how would I, as a marketer, engage with that tool? Like, how would that help me in this kind of strategy of being more searchable in, you know, these language models? Yeah. And so Think of Profound is the platform that gives you insights and action to improving your visibility in AI search engine. And so we will go in and plug in your company. we would set up a bunch of topics and prompts that are most relevant to you. So if you're Apple, it could be as broad as, you know, do I buy an iPhone or an Android? Or what colors do the iPhone 16 come in?

8:50Or should I get the iPhone Pro or the Pro Max or just the iPhone, like the normal iPhone? And so we set up all of these topics, send them all out to ChatGPT, and then record their response and display that in a nice, very pretty dashboard for you. And then we expose the citations in the data. And so when you go ask a question, ChatGPT does web search now. So it'll go out and look at the internet and then it'll tell you what citations were used to inform the response. And we'll aggregate this and tell you, hey, here are the top 10 most influential domains in your space as we've defined it. And then within that, here are the top 10 most influential pages.

9:32And influential in this case means they were cited the most. Maybe this page was cited 7 % of the time, or this one was cited 10 % of the time. And we'll tell you, was your brand mentioned or not? Did you show up? Did you show up favorably? Was there a negative sentiment on that page where you described in not good language? And then the task becomes, okay, as marketers, how do we go improve this? Do we need to go get mentioned on this site because we're not mentioned? Do we need to go make content that looks like this? Maybe it's a best phones article for teenagers or for adults or for millennials or whatever, you know?

10:10And we kind of give you the blueprint of what ChatGPT is using to inform its responses so then you can say, okay, let me go and tackle this problem with this new information that I have. So it's kind of like keyword search before, but now props is kind of of a simple way. Okay. I'm just going to my simple SEO brain. Now, one of the things I've been curious about and thinking about ahead of this episode is how does personalization play into this? Because I think, again, my rudimentary understanding of basic SEO is like there's keywords, but with ChachiPT, it's giving me answers like me, Tamara, a different answer than you, Nick, because it knows things about us and our personalities.

10:52So how is that impacting both your ability to predict what we even need to do to be optimized to show up in search, or even how something like ChatGPT shows up what shows up. Does that make sense? Yes. No, it makes complete sense. And it's honestly a question that we get a lot. And so personalization comes into this and really how you choose the prompts that you want to monitor. And so I kind of describe it as a bell curve of when we go and we set up this with customers, if we pick a topic, again, say like iPhones, for example, we'll go in and we'll set up 50, 100 different prompts that really kind of covers the whole span of personalization from you to me, all of that stuff.

11:36And kind of the secret sauce of how we do this is we've acquired a bunch of real user prompts, like quite literally hundreds of millions of prompts that we use that we've then trained our own AI model that then helps us approximate real user prompts, real personalization, kind of like across the whole bell curve of possible responses. And so it's about like coverage and making sure you're getting all the little pockets. And like truly every time you ask ChatGPT a question, the answer you get today might differ from the answer you get tomorrow. And so there is a like element of you need to stay on top of this every day and because things can change and their underlying data sources can change.

12:17And staying on top of that over time is important too. Yeah, and I'm sure we're learning a lot as these models even evolve. And in your work, have you guys seen that this applies across all of the different tools? If I'm optimizing to show up in ChatGPT versus perplexity versus something like Claude, am I taking the same approach? Is it a blanket approach? Or do I need to choose a tool that I want to show up in more and I have to take a bit of a more targeted strategy? Yeah. And so there's two ways I would look at this. One is look at the volume of users of each of these tools. And when you look at it that way, ChatGPT is far away the largest tool with the largest amount of search volume or conversation volume in it.

12:59Then you have perplexity, Claude, Grok, it kind of like waterfalls and falls off very quickly from there. And so you have ChatGPT in one bucket, and then Google and Google AI Overviews. And then they just recently launched Google AI mode, which is effectively chat GPT within Google search, which is a very interesting kind of shift of them basically admitting that chat is the future surface of how people are going to search on the internet and not 10 blue links anymore. And there's already been a bunch of analysis done of what ranking factors are these individual answer engines prioritizing over others.

13:42And Kevin Indig, who's a prominent SEO kind of voice, did a great study of which factors are most important for chat GPT, perplexity, Google AI overviews, and then compared to traditional SEO metrics. And it's actually quite different where SEO, you care about backlinks and total keywords on your website and even existing traffic to your website and answer engines don't really care about any of that. And they have different weights and different priorities and they really care about things like sentence count and domain rating. And so like those things I think are becoming more and more important too.

14:19Okay. Well, maybe let's make this super practical because I feel like we're all bought in now on the shift and I feel like I have a little bit of an understanding, but if I'm a marketer and I'm working at a brand, what are the things, what are the questions I should be asking? And then what are like the basic things I should be doing if I haven't even considered this strategy yet? Yeah, I think that the best thing that marketers can do is really just lean into this moment. And I've been doing demo calls with prospects. I've done probably about 25 demo calls with marketers where I have led the call and gone through the whole process with them.

14:52And this really interesting trend has emerged of that SEO practitioners, most of them that I've talk to, they're more skeptical. They've seen different movements in SEO. They've like been through this many times before. So they come in a bit more skeptical, but then they're getting this intense pressure from their boss, their boss's boss, investors. It's like a lot of tops down pressure. And so I think the SEOs that really lean in and kind of embrace the moment because the shift is happening kind of regardless of your own personal feelings about it. So it's like more of a call to action of like lean in and just start learning, start consuming content.

15:31And to me, that starts with following and engaging with the right people. Kevin Indig, who I've referenced a couple of times, has put out great original research on this. Lily Ray is also a good resource. Michael King from iPoll Rank is also a great resource. And then go out and start experimenting. Start asking ChatGPT questions about your brand. Just do it manually. You don't need a fancy tool like Profound and just kind of understand where you are, like where you sit in the landscape right now, and then kind of start asking questions from there. A couple of like immediate tips I give people of who want to really optimize for this.

16:08ChatGPT loves listicles. They love comparative content. And so best X, you know, X versus Y, like those topics are cited the most in our data set. The other thing it likes a lot is tables and well-structured content. And so if you have really fancy JavaScript embedded items in any of your content, ChatGPT can't read that. They can't parse and understand JavaScript, which is how those embedded elements on your page function. And so it could be as simple as maybe you have a Novatic demo on your site. ChatGPT can't see that. And so maybe you have a transcript or if you have a video on your page that's embedded, maybe you also copy-paste the transcript and put that on your site.

16:54The last tip I'll give is that ChatGPT also loves big, chunky PDFs. They love all the content that for years marketers have hid away behind a web form. And so finding ways to expose that in a public place where ChatGPT can click it and it pulls up the actual file that they can look at instead of having it behind a web form. There's tons of great content in PDFs that ChatGPT would love to access and it's probably blocked for them right now. That's so interesting. The listicles makes me anxious because I feel like we're going back to the BuzzFeed era all over again. One thing that I have seen online and I want you to like myth bust this for me is the whole Reddit thing.

17:37So I keep seeing like these LLMs, they love Reddit. You should be on Reddit now. Is that true? Is it not true? It is absolutely true. Oh, no. That you should be on Reddit, which is kind of scary for anyone who really values the Reddit community of marketers are about to just like come all over this place and potentially do what all marketers do, which is ruin things. Reddit is ChatGPT's second largest source of truth. And so we did a big analysis of 10 million citations for ChatGPT with Profound's data. The number one most cited source across all of our data is Wikipedia at about 7 % of all citations.

18:23And the second largest citation was Reddit at about 6 % of total citations. And so it is absolutely true. And it's coming. So yeah, get ready. So what does that actually look like? Like, let's imagine for PMM camp, I want to be able to show up more. I want more subscribers, you know, coming to me from ChatGPT. How do I think about approaching Reddit? Like, I wouldn't even know where to start. Do I just go in and start doing comments? Am I posting different types of content? What does that look like? Yeah. And so there's a couple of approaches. There's a great tool. It's called RedReach, R-E-D Reach, which is a alerting tool that tells you when a Reddit post or a Reddit comment has popped up with certain keywords.

19:14And so then you can plug in like product marketing or product marketing newsletter or whatever to get alerts. So then you know when you need to go join in on that conversation. I think at a super high level, it just kind of comes down to a lot of folks have prioritized maybe LinkedIn is a channel, maybe traditional Google search, your website, you kind of just have to start thinking about, okay, where do, where does my audience hang out on Reddit? And how do I maybe just start cross posting my existing content, my newsletters there? Maybe it's not even posting something new. Maybe it's just commenting more and like building an actual Reddit presence that's tied to your name the same way you have a LinkedIn presence that's also tied to your name.

19:58And so I think it's really just about adding another channel into the mix of repurpose what you already have and just find ways to distribute it there in addition to everything else you're doing right now. I could just see all the people who love Reddit are going to be so anxious about this. Those poor Redditors. Okay, so one question, and I think you kind of danced around this earlier, but I want to like double click on it, is what the future of Google search looks like. Like, will Google search still matter? And how does that change over the next 12 months, 24 months? Yeah. And so a lot of people are counting Google out of this fight, which I think is a mistake.

20:38Like if you compare the two, you have Google and you have ChatGPT. And on average, you know, search engines get maybe like, I think it's 155 billion visits a month or something. And ChatGPT is up there, but they're in like the four billion visits a month. And so there's still this like kind of massive gap between between these two kind of platforms. And so Google isn't going away. But this week, actually, the week that we're recording, Kevin Indig, who I keep referencing, came out with his most updated prediction that if ChadGPT's growth rate continues, as it has been, that their traffic will eclipse Google's traffic by October of 2030, which seems far away, but it's really only a couple of years away.

21:23And so a few caveats there, like it depends on the growth rate continuing, Google's decline also continuing. And so I think that kind of like puts things into perspective a little bit. But I think overall, like what is happening is that chat is becoming the interface that people will be going and using to find and consume information on the internet. And so I think adapting to that sooner, the brands that adapt to this future now and start to kind of redo how their content is will be the ones who win compared to the brands that don't. And it's like, I think for millennials, it's kind of the first true technological hurdle that we're all going through.

22:06I think it's basically like a career cliff to where if you're not learning and adapting and finding ways to use AI in your entire workflow, I think it'll be like when past generations never learned how to use the internet or learned how to use a desktop computer. I think it's like that serious. And so it's advancing and moving faster than we've ever seen anything before. And the faster we adapt, I think the better everyone else will be. And I think you hit on something important earlier, which is like, we don't know the answers. This is evolving super fast, but the best thing we can do is like, get in the game and experiment, or at least that's how I've been thinking about it.

22:44It's like, get more and more comfortable with this topic every day. And then at least you're on the journey to wherever this ends up taking us versus, I think sometimes I see this, especially people who are a little bit more established in their careers, they're like, well, I'm just gonna wait and see how this shapes up. I don't wanna change my whole content strategy now. Like I don't wanna be on Reddit, whatever it might be, but I think we're seeing the technology move so fast that if you do wait to see where it ends up, you could perhaps be really left behind and it might be too big of a gap for you to catch up at that point.

23:15Yeah, that's exactly how I feel to circle back to the first part of our conversation. It's why I joined Profound, because I wanted to be on the inside of this shift. I can kind of see it happening. And it's also a ton of fun. And so this has been really exciting to kind of go through and see from an insider's perspective. I bet. So as an expert on the topic, I'll call you that now, is there a question you think I should have asked you about this that I haven't asked you? Because of course, I don't even know what I don't know. Yeah. I think the question I get the most often is like how how ai tools are kind of like enabling brands to go and make all these changes i talked about like i've hinted at oh you should do this you should do that and the reality is is that right now all of those are manual tasks of like i need to go write listicle content i need to go research this you could have chat gpt do it but we've kind of figured out that chat gpt isn't that great at actually writing good original like authoritative uh like originally researched content.

24:17It's much better for kind of editing, polishing, shaping. And so I think like where this is going and where people ask me questions a lot is how does Profound or any tool kind of like enable me to kind of automatically do all of these things? Like maybe a tool that says, hey, Profound tells you that this comment on Reddit just happened and you should go reply. And kind of what this is shaping up to is that AI agents have kind of inserted themselves into this traditional two-sided marketplace where in the old days you had kind of like Google and you had the user kind of on both ends. And now you have agents in the middle where like people are asking chat GPT a question, the agents from chat GPT visit your website and then kind of gives this person an answer.

25:03And so there's this world that's kind of slowly emerging of agent experience of how do we optimize for agents and not humans, which I think is like honestly really scary. Yes. There's a future where web design and how nice your website looks, does it matter? Because humans won't be going to your website. They'll be going to a chat box to ask it a question that then it goes and visits your website, which is so radically different that I still have trouble like kind of grokking my mind around that whole concept. And so TBD, everything is moving so quickly. But like there's a chance that humans and how we interact with the web is like so fundamentally different in the next 10 years that it's a little scary for us right now.

25:46I have heard that prediction as well. And it does, it makes me feel uncomfortable. Honestly, a lot of this makes me feel uncomfortable, but I think that's a signal that I need to lean in more because there's something interesting happening here. And we, the shift is undeniable, as we said. So one question we always love to ask every guest that comes on the Marketing Millennials is what is one marketing hill that you would die on? Can I die on two hills? Is that okay? Can you split me up and put me in two different places? I'll give you two hills. Amazing. Amazing. Okay. First hill, the how did you hear about us question, adding that to your form or your signup process, I think is the single most bit of information any marketer can collect on new prospective customers.

26:32I did this in my first week at Profound and the amount of insights it unlocked for me of where people are coming from. I now know that we get way more leads from LinkedIn than I thought we did. I know exactly how many leads we get from ChatGPT, perplexity, all of that stuff is I think the most impactful change a marketer can make. A second hill, and this is a new hill, a newly developed hill I will die on, is that I think marketers, especially if you're selling to other marketers, I think you should take demo calls by yourself, run through the whole demo process yourself, which is what I I've been doing.