Brainfood Live On Air - Ep417 - GEO, What Do We Know?

0:04That's the name, Childhood Onwards. That's good to know. That's very good to know. I think, you know what, it's apparently very good for a child psychology to have a name that you can easily truncate into a nickname. Because that kind of apparently gives the young developing personality an opportunity to build their own identity and switch it around if they see fit. Interesting. Yep. So there's a tip for your folks. If you're ever naming a child, make sure you don't go monosyllabic like I have. This is no good. Locks the kid into a certain identity. No bueno. You want to have Jennifer because then Jennifer can either be Jennifer, Jenny or Jen or whatever you want.

0:45And you have much more well-balanced personalities like my co-host here. So anyway, brilliant to have you on the show, everyone. Welcome to Bring Food Live on Air. We bring this show to you every Friday, no fail. It should be 2 p.m. over there in the UK. I don't know what time it is over for you, Jen. Where are you? You're based at East Coast, aren't you? So I'm central. So it is 8 a.m., not too early. It is kind of early. I'm sorry. I usually try not to get people up too early. I think eight is just about the limit beyond which I feel like completely guilty, you know. I'm an early riser and I'm seeing the comments on the thing and I see lots of friends here, like Steve.

1:28Steve will give me like some words of affirmation if I start to look like I'm lagging. Yeah, that's it. That's it indeed. Akancha, don't worry. We bring Raj in simply by bringing him in. So if he's on there, if he can make himself seen in the chat, then I'll put him on screen. So all good. Okay, let's just do sound checks firstly to make sure everyone can hear and see myself and Jen okay. Folks, if you're watching this on Crowdcast, let me know if the audio and visual is fine. I see Raj there, there you go. I think that's probably in response to what I just said. So I dare say audio and visual is okay on Crowdcast.

2:08We should be broadcasting this on LinkedIn as well. So folks, if you can hear and see me here on LinkedIn, do let me know whether the audio and visual is okay. Probably a couple of LinkedIn's are getting blasted out here. Mine certainly is. I think Rob Walker, as ever, is broadcasting this as well. So let me know whether the audio and visual is fine there, folks. Okay, it looks like things are going good. Thank you, Hayley. And thank you, Rob. Thank you, Devin, as well. That's great stuff. Jennifer, we've got you on screen and we haven't even introduced you properly. So why don't we do that firstly?

2:41Can you introduce yourself? Who are you? What it is you do, my dear? Thank you so much. and Hung, we just talked about this. I'm only Jennifer when I'm in trouble for the rest of the time. I'm Jen Terry Tharp, and I am a VP of Enterprise Solutions at Jovio. And this is my second stint at Jovio. I came right after I left my longtime career. I spent 21 years leading talent acquisition at AT &T. And then as soon as I left there, Jovio was the place to be. And I enjoyed it so much I came back for a second time. That's brilliant. It's always good to boomerang back to a business. I've never done it.

3:25It actually is probably a good brain food life to do because firstly, how do you preserve the relationship on either side such that that is an obvious and nice thing to do? Because I'm sure there's bad exits that are regretful and both sides have lost an opportunity there to bring somebody back. So that I think could be a very good one to try and do. I think especially as more people have a more transient attitude to employment rights, we're going to do more of this and we can't be in the business of burning relationships with people who have proved very strong for us. Good stuff. And by the way, Jovi would do a wonderful job of, I think, hiring this type of talent from industry, practitioner side, into the vendor side.

4:14It's very rare to see companies with this type of commitment. So fantastic to see this. For the folks who don't know Jovio, Jen, I wonder whether you could just quickly describe what is Jovio. Some people might know it, but obviously organizations have changed so much over the last 12 months or so. How would you describe the product today and who does it address? That's a super great question. And I think that that gives cadence to my boomerang status, right? So most people probably originally knew Jovio as a programmatic ad vendor. And that's what it was in my first trek here, right? Really great things to save money to get your jobs broadcasted to the masses.

4:57But in the last two years, Jovio has really pivoted to an agentic recruiting solution that takes you literally from a traction or pre-application using sourcing, career site builder, and AI career site builder. We're going to talk a little bit about that today because it actually has a lot to do with how you're recognized in chat-based search. Also, chat, post and apply. Anything that you can think of that I kind of look at it as a former practitioner. Of all of the pieces of your stack, you would need to grease the wheels so that that great talent that you identify can make its way all the way through the process.

5:35That includes scheduling, interviews, career sites, site audits for SEO and GEO, which we're going to talk about a little bit today, as well as scheduling and pretty much anything that you can use to sort of enable your recruiters to get through your people faster and to grease the wheels so that they don't get caught up. Yeah, it's really fascinating to see this kind of expansion of capability that we've seen from technology, recruiters have kind of got lucky in a way because we've been waiting for a long time and wrestling with so many different point solutions. Really, the AI moment has provided much more comprehensive capability from these singular platforms.

6:19And what Joe Vior offer, I think, is very, very interesting indeed. We've got more stuff to show, though, because I do believe we need to bring Raj on. Let's do that right now. Hang on, I've got to change his role, though. Let me make him, I think I'm going to make him a speaker. That should now allow him to do a screen share. Okay, there he is. Cool. That's fine. Yeah. So, folks, we're going to kind of get straight into this. I think Raj is there. I do believe, as soon as I can see the video on there, I'll bring him onto screen. I mean, interesting to know, quick question for the audience here.

7:02Firstly, what are you doing with SEO, GEO? Is this something that you've sort of experimented with, thought about? Where are you with it in 2026? I think at the start of the year, it was one of those things that we were all kind of aware that people's interests were starting to shift from search. it was stopping at artificial whatever sort of chat tool you're using it wasn't going on to the next couple of links so the question now is look what have we learned from that are you doing anything for it I've actually got a poll running on the right hand side of the screen there and I'll ask I'll sort of read it out to you I want you to vote on this if you haven't already do you have a geo strategy for your company yes no don't know or other please click on that and have a vote please i want to check out where it is that you're at okay raj listen can you hear me um and you need to stick your video on bro um so can you do that um yeah i'm having a little trouble with my video i'm going to share my screen for showing the tool if that's all right okay it's a bit different but let's go on i'll put you on screen now so if you want to share your screen go ahead yeah if you go down to the right hand there you go yep yep yep yeah what are we looking at here man okay so so raj is my co-pilot today and as you've asked this great question about do we have a geo strategy for our company i want to just like harken us back just like a smidge hung.

8:41So I'm going to show my age a little bit, but do you remember back in the day when we, like, we didn't even have career pages? Not so long ago. Not so long ago. It was like a thrill when ATSs were able to roll this out as part of an integrated thing, wasn't it? It was the next great thing. And it was like the first stamp of digital approval to actually have a page. And then the best of the best started to actually use search engine optimization so that we showed up in search results on a search engine. Like I can remember the moment when AT &T made the top five, our own career page made the top five search results on Google.

9:32I mean, like we had the party on our like internal Slack channel. So, so the first thing is, is that's a thing that we've really been striving to do because up until a few years ago, the primary way that you knew that you were winning a candidate was if you were showing up in the first page of, of search results based on your SEO. Right. So, so that's still a thing. and there's still going to be applicants that are going to just go in and say, nursing jobs in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. That's still a thing and we still want to show up there. So as Raj was showing on his screen, and Raj, I don't know what happened.

10:09There we go. So we do have that ability, right? Jovio has that ability to look and see how are you ranking for SEO? But we also know that now candidates more so than ever are actually using chat-based search. So the next natural progression and what happens to us as TA leaders looking at the health of that is to actually understand what is our share of voice when it comes to GEO and chat-based search. So Jovio's developed a tool and a dashboard, and we're going to look at the dashboard first, that shows you, hey, first and foremost, what is my share of voice amongst my competitors in chat-based search?

10:57All right. So for people who don't know, for people who don't know, what is, I love the term share of voice. I think I get it. But how would you dumb it down? What does that mean for folks who are just new to this completely, Jen? Oh, no, that's a great question. So when someone asks a question where your result is relevant, how often are you getting lifted up? That would be the best sort of way to say that. Then from there, it's like, okay, so this is your share of voice. This is how often you are visible. And then we take it one step further. And if you look over there on the right, it'll actually tell you which AI knows you.

11:40What is your visibility? How often have you been sighted? And where are you showing up? And where are you not? So you can see here, Chat GPT, perplexity, Google Gemini. So you can see just at a super high level, which LLMs are returning results and recognizing me. Next. Okay. So cool that they recognized you, but if they're like hung, this is the worst job ever. Right? Share of voice is great, but I'm getting heat on it. I don't want that. Right. Like share of good voice is excellent. A share of bad voice is an action item waiting to happen, right? So then in addition to talking about your actual share of voice, it talks about the sentiment of your share of voice, how positive is it, neutral or negative.

12:30And it gives you very specific items so that you know what to lean into heavily, things that you're already indexing on in a positive or neutral way, and then things that actually need direct action to improve. So makes sense, right? So you want to get seen on the chat-based search. You want to have your appropriate share of voice. You want to be visible on the appropriate LLMs. You want your sentiment to be positive. But the reality is Jen can sit here all day and talk about how good jobs are at Jen's company. The reality is Jen's not the only voice that matters. It matters where other people are talking about you.

13:09So as you can see here, in addition to all of those things that we just talked about, you can see where you are being referenced, Glassdoor, Reddit. And I look at this, and again, I'm not saying I'm old today, but maybe I'm feeling a little old today because I'm using the SEO comparative, right? But the reality is here, showing up is good, but showing up where other people are talking about you gives you clout, right? Do you remember the clout scores back in the day, Hung? I do remember. I used to work for a clout competitor. So I know that very well, the influence graph we were trying to build.

13:49So yeah, I get it. So this is exactly that. I love influence graph better than clout, but it is what other places are referencing you and what you are doing so that you have the appropriate clout lift, right? It gives actual context to the result, which is very important in OLS. And then here's the biggest shift that mentally I personally had to make. And that was understanding that when I do a Google search, I just say nursing jobs near Oklahoma City. But when I do a search and a chat-based search, I give much more context. I ask questions. I say things differently. And so Raj, would you mind just walking through like one of the questions here.

14:37And as he does, just know that Jovio is part of our service and particularly for building your career sites, we actually give you context around what questions and what questions you should be asking because that's what people are asking. Raj, do you mind just giving us like a quick double click into this? Yep, yep. Most definitely. So hi, everybody. um one really important thing about finding out what prompts you need to be found for right is a task of its own and you got to think about like what people are searching what are the search volumes like unless you're just you know typing prompts and researching but those are prompts that no one's typing so the cool thing about our product is that it actually makes these prompts for you and you can actually check them out across different areas of the candidates discovery journey so you might have some prompts related to jobs and locations all of these were made in spanish because that's what the career site was in right you got prompts about pays and benefits you got about the you know best employers and comparisons because consideration is an important phase right is it good to work at verizon or is it good to work at at &t of course at &t because jen was there uh then you got all these different prompts and once you put them in not only can you track whether you're being cited, whether you're being cited in a positive or a negative manner, you can check the engine and what it's saying about you because different engines speak differently about you, cite different sources, right?

16:16So you can check all of that detailed info right here in the prompt discovery ladder, basically. So super cool, tons of insight, But Hong, one of the reasons that I adore you and that I love being around you is that you always are like, what's in it for them, right? Like, what's in it? What do I do if I'm doing something with that? So the reality is what you do is you take the site audit and you see how well you perform there. We give you direct AI-generated ways to improve your rankings on chat-based search. And we talked earlier about how Jovio shifted and we have things like AI driven career sites.

16:59And if you are actually a Jovio AI driven career site customer, do you see that little button there that says fix? Yeah. If you're using an AI and Jovio AI generated career site, you can literally just fix it now. It'll give you options to help make your site more recognizable in the chat based search. And we'll actually do it for you if you're using our career site. And if not, we'll give you a direction on how to do it yourself. You can choose how you want to do that. Click go and you're on your way. Yeah, so I like this. I mean, basically, I guess if you're using Jovial to build your career site in the first place, this type of thing could even be dynamically sort of there.

17:44So in other words, you're tracking how the site appears with all of these different engines. It may dynamically update if ever we need to do it, which obviously is the most sensible thing to do. However, we know not everyone's going to be using a single platform to build their website. So I guess if you have a career site that's non-Jovio, it's a case of just putting your link in there, isn't it? And then it will be able to figure it out from there and then give you a bunch of instructions on what you need to do. Yes. So obviously easier if you're using a Jovio AI-driven career site. But if you're not, you're not left in the dark.

18:22We can help you still. Yeah. It's really cool. I take it in terms of using this, though, like do you have to be already a customer? Or is there a way in which people can get a taste as to where their sort of career site is today before they make any kind of paid commitment here? The check's in the mail. so you are welcome to reach out to jovio or to me directly jen at jovio and we can go ahead and get something on the calendar to walk through that yeah it'd be interesting i think this is this people need simple solutions but it looks like this is the sort of thing that might be able to give us that so that's fantastic stuff uh rash thank you so much for the screen share man i appreciate it um let's um let's get on with the show um folks um is this kind of thing interesting to you as a manager of career sites, a tool that could give you basically a little bit of a lookout as to what these engines are producing for you, but also some instructions on what you need to do to step it up.

19:26Let's bring on some of our guests to help us discuss this topic because this is such a moving target. It's not easy for us to properly understand, especially not lay people like me, to properly understand how things go with everybody else. So let's bring on Alexander. Alexander Tchaikovsky, of course. He is coming on. I think Kareem is there as well. Let's bring him on. Who else was coming? Devin is here. I think we wanted Devin here, didn't we? Where is he? There he is. And we also have Steve. Let's see Steve Gart. Is he here? I hope he's not too late for Steve. We have loads of cool people to bring.

20:06We might be able to bring some more people on if we wanted to. But we've probably got a full stack here already. so let's not get too crazy. We have Alexander. He's the first one to get on screen. Alex, great to see you. Nice haircut. Why don't you... It is. I think you've cleaned yourself up, mate. It looks good. Alex, why don't you quickly introduce yourself, man? Who are you? What it is you do? Hey, nice to meet you, everyone. Thank you for the invite. Alex here, working with job boards on all topics around SEO, search and match job scraping ai and automation pretty much any technical that job boards do nowadays i'm your man fantastic stuff and alex c brilliant commentator online you're one of my favorite commentators online actually alex you i i you know i regularly call you a madman i hope you don't mind um no it's great i think you are like insanely passionate about this super niche topic, which anybody outside of recruiting would not understand.

21:06But you go so deep within this job board, job advertising space. It's just fascinating to see the nooks and crannies you get up to. So follow Alexander on LinkedIn. If you haven't already, I've just shared his LinkedIn on the chat. We have Kareem Ansari here as well. Kareem, great to see you. Can you quickly introduce yourself who are you what it is you do i think kareem's on mute isn't he it's a great start sorry yeah hi i'm kareem i'm the co-founder of perception x i'm based in dubai i've been you know working all over the world and i've been actually measuring employer brand for for a very long time and start of perception x off the back of uh what's happening with geo and everything so um we we work with a lot of uh really large enterprises to help them i guess educate them on on you know uh geo's impact on employer brand and also how to how to move the needle and and and influence it yeah great to have you on the show kareem and and thanks for like interacting online as well to to on some of the stuff i've been posting it's really educational sort of uh learning from you on your take on this i was very keen to get you on screen to have this chat um we have uh we have uh devon here as well uh devon wonderful to see you again um great to see you back on screen you were so great last time we had you on on on this show dealing with i think similar topic but i thought i'd bring you back simply because things move so fast right i mean we don't know what was true six months or so ago is it still true today i thought you know what it's gonna be perfect to bring devon here to give us an update so uh devon why don't you quickly introduce yourself who you what it is you do man so hey y 'all i'm devon jen i'm in the same time zone as you so i'm feeling your pain right now uh so sorry guys i'm a consultant for g uh for jovio i run a company called pen pixel creative we do a lot of consulting for companies who also want to understand how they appear in ai search and how to appear more in ai search guys i'm really happy to be on the panel because I know Kareem, Alexander, and I think Stephen, they all share my similar outlook on AI search visibility right now.

23:22So it's great to meet everyone. Great. And by the way, I think it's kind of a symptom or a sign that there is kind of this supply demand issue when it comes to GEO, that there is like a consultancy business emerging around this. So I'm taking, as Red, you guys have been able to make a successful career out of it. Presumably, that means that people know there's an issue, but they don't know enough to do anything about it, or it's too much for them to grasp themselves. And therefore, expertise can come in. And you guys are able to fill that gap. I think Steve just, we're going to try and get him back.

24:00But whilst we do that, we'll carry on the five of us here. Okay, what are the gaps then in terms of GEO. Can you tell us how things have moved since the start of the year? Alex, let's start with you because I think it was your post that stimulated the creation of this event, actually, when you're talking about the AI summaries in Google. I think it was all about suddenly it's triggering more than it was before, right? So as I understand from a layman's perspective, AI summary is not always triggered in every case when you put in an inquiry on on a search engine um but increasingly it seems that it's producing a summary so it's like oh maybe at the start of the year it was 20 you get a summary now 2026 coming in 2027 it's like 80 or something is that the case um and if so why well i think just just to say by the way i don't make any money of geo consulting right so just for the sake of this conversation most of the geo consultants are snake oil salesmen from my perspective and i'll i'll get to that and i'll explain why i do like traditional good old school seo which i think has like the long-term impacts specifically for job boards um and in our space you have to differentiate between queries right because there are informational queries where people search for like what is it to work at glass door and is indeed a good employer and we know they're probably not but these kind of queries right they have been triggering ai overviews for a while now and it's been just growing although google now said that they're kind of reevaluating the whole strategy because they're not making enough money on search for the first time ever in 20 years their search revenue declined so maybe we'll see less of these But for job boards and essentially like for career sites, the most important queries are transactional one where I'm searching for, you know, product manager jobs in New York.

26:00And literally up to like two months ago, AI overviews did not show up on these queries. And just out of nowhere, they started showing up and they started showing up very aggressively. In the US, I tracked like millions of these for clients that I work with. I guess right now we are at a 50 % stage of where an AI overview is going to appear together with Google Jobs on a transactional search query. So that's a big, big change. In Europe, we're still at like 10%. Stop press, Alex. Transactional search. Again, dumb this down for me, man. What does this mean exactly? I think I get it. But can you just educate me a little bit more on what you mean by the term?

26:43In the most simplest term, I like search queries where you have jobs at the end, right? Because you're expecting, you know, to go to do a transaction and transaction. In these cases, I'm searching and I expect to click somewhere where I will see a list of jobs that match my, you know, search criteria. Got it. So I'm not just exploring away. I'm not having a freeform exploration of the internet. I have a specific thing I want to do, which is get a job. The way to do that is to bring up some sort of results which allow me to click through to apply to a job. That's the thing I'm going to input into a search engine.

27:20Transactional search. Got it. Thank you. And historically, this would have usually start the Google Jobs, you know, SERP feature that all of us know, that lists jobs. and below that you'll see the links to Indeed, ZipRecruiter and their own job search listing pages. But now we have an AI overview on top of it. And this AI overview, depending on how niche the queries, can actually link directly to jobs from third-party career pages. It can link to other category pages. And on mobile, this is the first thing that the user sees. So it gets very interesting, right? Because now you have to think about how can you actually optimize this?

28:02And can you at all optimize it? Which is a different question. Yeah, really interesting. So this happened recently. So we know Google moving target, right? There always have been. But they're now starting to introduce this a little bit more. Although caveat, they're also saying it's damaging the way in which they traditionally make money, which is showing ads in different places. AI overviews, we know, kind of distract people from clicking through generally. So maybe they change it again. But as it is today, it seems that transactional searching is producing AI summaries more and more. And obviously, everyone's got an incentive from an employer advertiser side to appear there if, in fact, you know, it's being shown or the audience making the queries the right type of person.

28:49Kareem Ansari, how does that take? How does it look to you? Is that a summary you would agree with? Or is there other things you think need to be said about where we're at, state of GEO right now? I mean, there was a lot said there, but yeah, I agree with a lot of it. In our own data, like we started measuring this late 2025. And we look at specific types of prompts for our clients because we try and follow the candidate journey. So everything from informational type prompts, like, you know, what are the benefits like all the way to what is it like to work at the company? How does it compare to, you know, X company in San Francisco or wherever it might be?

29:34And AI overviews at the start were very limited, but right now we're seeing them at almost a 100 % rate. I think the real story here is, you know, how do you equate that to candidates applying and the quality of the candidates that are actually applying? Because there's a zero click issue here. If the AI overviews are good enough, you can't really translate that to website visits. So it's an interesting thing to follow. And I think. Yeah. the the ai overview so again for the folks who don't know the reason why google sat on the transformer architecture for about three years before uh releasing it is because i think they they knew um that if they release this it's going to eat into their traditional search business um and that's allowed open ai to gazump them basically and since then they've been like way behind everyone else um but they're belatedly rolling it out and hey presto it is actually eating into their search business.

30:36So they've got this weird situation where kind of the technology, which you can argue they invented, they were reluctant to release because the threat it would pose to the traditional search business, they did eventually release it. Now it is threatening their search business and they've got to kind of try and make both of those things match. Delivering better value, which is I think what we get from AI versus classic search, but also still trying to send people to destinations. They don't want the blue links to go away. Devin, how does that sort of work? I mean, Alex mentioned that links are appearing in AI summaries now.

31:14Is that true? And is this Google's attempt to basically square the circle? So I don't know what Google's attempting to do, but Alex is right. And he's right that links are appearing in there. He's right when he says that it's harder to appear in there now. because there's fewer links. So you really have to strategize and have tools that are going to help you get in there, or else you are going to lose candidates. You're going to lose those transactional searches. You're not going to be a part of them if you don't do something.

31:54Yeah, and I guess you might know what those somethings are, Devin.

32:01So yeah, that's actually why we're here today. They talk about this tool from Jovio. It's part of the puzzle that's going to help you get your company seen when users type in these types of prompts, right? You want to make sure that this is a few of the things that have changed since the last time we've spoken. You know, it's become the LLMs can read your brand from every aspect, right? They can read your data. They can read how you appear on third-party sites and all. So having a tool like this GEO Advisor that Jovio's developed is one piece of that puzzle to make sure that your brand appears clear across the internet so that the LLMs will start to trust you.

32:50I think Alexander and Karim, they also, and Steve, they also make products that help do this. And so, you know, perhaps they can speak on it also and they can agree with me or bounce off this. But the ultimate goal is making sure that the LLMs trust you, which in turn will make the users trust you. Yeah. So LLMs may not trust. Shouldn't they default trust like the domain? Like, isn't the case that if I'm, you know, hungli.com, I run this business, whatever I say, ipso facto should be more trustworthy than if hungli is mentioned on a third party site. So doesn't it not rank sort of the where the content sits, the original content sits and says, you know what, that's at least verified source.

33:44Similar to how we might interpret a political speech, for instance. You don't go on Twitter and say, oh, Trump said this. Actually, he might have said that because he tweets it out. A normal politician, you'd probably go to an official press release before you freak out on what some interpreter would say, oh, this person said this. So do LLMs work in the same way where there's a hierarchy of trust? And the closer you are to original source, primary source, we trust that more. And then it just goes all the way down to third party stuff and all the rest of it. Is that true or not? So there's two things in what you said there.

34:22There's the ranking, which is sort of the legacy SEO. And that's kind of what Alexander was saying, that these new GEO companies are selling you. They're still – Alex, I totally agree with you on what you said about these companies kind of being snake oil salesmen. They're still selling you rankings. They're using legacy SEO tactics to kind of say that they're going to get your name in these AI generated answers. The second part of what you said is more likely, if you really think about it, an LLM is going to do exactly what a human does. If they see something, if there's a claim on your website, it's going to go out to third party sites to verify whether that claim is actually true.

35:07So if you're on a third-party site that's reputable, and that claim matches your claim on your site, then the LLM is more likely to trust you. And there's a layer that the LLMs use that these trusted sites sit in. And as time goes on, they'll refer to you more and more. As new models are trained, they'll refer to you more and more. yep so this is really interesting i'm gonna bring steve guard in here for a sec because we've got steve although i do suspect given how pixelated you are steve this is going to be quite tricky technically um but steve great to see you let me see if i unmute you here uh can you hear and see it's okay steve oh i don't think you can steve hello no i think we're gonna lose steve it's not happening that's okay no worries um oh you're back steve can you hear us

36:17okay i think we're wrestling away steve when when you can hear us here's okay just chime in okay um so good geo is good seo i think all of us are generally aligned to that idea and good SEO is what exactly? It's basically making sure that you've got consistency of voice, let's say, in your own sort of domain, but then you're widely discussed in other domains, third-party domains. Again, I'm rolling in this basic stuff here. You want basically your brand to be spoken of in the places that search engines and now um uh i guess generative uh engines are scraping so you want people to talk about it on reddit in a positive way you want to have glass this is all like looking at glass door linkedin those kinds of places is that is that still basically true um anybody want to say something there yeah i mean i'd say sorry i'll keep it short um i think if you're trying to show up when ai searches the SEO playbook still matters I mean I even see that in you know trying to get Prescription X's name out there more from an SEO and geo perspective because the top models still search the web roughly half of the time you know most of us have that web search toggle on so it's if you're on cloud it's using brave search it's on Gemini obviously it's using Google so with SEO the reader but but if i'm putting my employer reputation hat on which is what i'm focused on with geo we're really optimizing for consistency right with seo you're optimizing for keywords and then the reader sort of decides what your message means if they decide to click on that topic with ai the machine reads thousands not thousands but a couple hundred sources decides which ones are relevant um so the work with with employer reputation or optimizing for employer reputation bhEO is is as jen showed you is optimizing for the career site your social channels um and what employees and the press say about you um and all that needs to match right so if you're saying one thing on your career site and then uh people on glassdoor reddit twitter whoever it might be are saying a different thing, that gets translated into a messy little message on AI.

38:42So it's all about optimizing for consistency. And the bigger the company, the more complicated it gets. Yeah. And that's obvious simply because there's more voices, right? And there's more places where you might show up. And actually, different departments may authentically say different things um and maybe maybe search engines and generative ai agents engines are maybe struggle with that like it may not be a contradictory thing for instance for a megacorp organization to have one certain voice in this region in that department and then a different voice in this in another region of the department it's actually authentic to be different but maybe the thing scraping it and trying to interpret it would actually see that as a bad signal, when in fact, it's actually a true signal.

39:32So maybe it's not, you know, maybe we have to think about the different challenges for large scale businesses, which maybe opens up an EB opportunity for smaller organisations that can speak with a more unified voice, I guess.

39:49okay so knowing sort of what we what we know about the geo today what is going to happen when a lot of the places that these search engines are searching start walling things off like we saw with with with reddit for instance everyone talks about reddit being okay this is the place that we need to go to find information about what's happening. This is the place pipes into OpenAI and so on. But now they're saying, oh, it's a logged in experience, folks. Sorry. And you can imagine and understand why. It's because they don't want to necessarily have search engines just mine everything out. And AI companies mine everything out.

40:36They're going to roll out their own AI. And they're going to say, this is our proprietary information. We've built like a billion comments in our site, we're going to just put a big wall up. And then if you want to know about your business, you've got to come by our tool and maybe subscribe to us. What does that mean for GEO when we have a walled garden scenario? Any thoughts? Jen, if you've got a thought on this, by the way, just pop in with your view as well.

41:06I feel like that was a call out, but I love the experts. So I would just generally, I would generally say, nobody believes, nobody believes self-published information. And I almost steer to the point that we should answer. We should change our thinking from supplying vast amounts of rivers of information and getting to the point of answering direct questions that are then more easily searched. Yeah. So as I understand this, Jen, so I'm a volume person, by the way. So this is probably where you and I have a separation. So I'm like, just throw everything out there. I understand that's not necessarily best practice, but that's basically my default.

41:51But what you're saying is understand the questions that are typically asked by individuals, whether that's in a search engine or in any chat function, and then make sure you've already, if you like pre-built responses, I guess, to the most common sort of responses. Have them on your website and presumably that's going to get scripted. Sure. But maybe even more important than that, particularly for job search, is making sure that job postings, things like making sure job postings are actually structured as single specific answers to questions that would be ask in an LLM as opposed to relying on a job description to meet the remit of somebody wanting to know about a job.

42:38So restructuring your jobs to answer questions as opposed to be a page of information might be a tactic. Yeah, really interesting. Steve Gard, I think we're back and we look pretty solid. Great to see you, Steve. Thanks for wrestling with the tech for us. Hi, guys. Can you hear me? Yeah, perfect. Perfect. Crystal, mate. Why don't you quickly introduce yourself, Steve? I can't hear you now. This is no good. Oh, no. Steve, I think the gods are telling us no. No worries, mate. We've got to let you go, bro. Okay, no worries. A question I was going to ask Steve was actually this issue of what Jen mentioned just then.

43:18Does it change the way in which we need to communicate information on the job description? Traditionally, it's an archaic document when you think about a job description? It's venerable, let's say, maybe a kind of word than archaic. There's a reason for that. We expect certain things, right? So I mean, candidates also probably don't want a completely new experience when they're looking at a JD. They want to look at job title. They want to see responsibilities. They want to see all of these things. But do we also want to put in things that are kind of going to be machine read? I think that's where Jen's going.

43:50It's not only a human eye that we need to care about it's actually also an ai thoughts on this um anybody i have we already haven't kind of speak to that go ahead devon look oh i was gonna say i can speak to that i don't think i'm not as deep into the talent acquisition world as maybe the other guys on this panel but one thing that i do remember when searching for jobs is there were questions that i would have that were not covered on the job description or the job description was messy or vague. And I think now it's important to really study the prompts that are being asked, the questions that are being asked so that you cover those in the job description.

44:34I know it was always hard for me to know what a salary range would be. I think that in my opinion, that's probably going to be the number one question that candidates yeah well we have this data you know we have we have something called a job posting schema and the job posting schema already has it in a machine readable format so pretty much every llm can call this the question is are they going to go into the direction of building a job index which is probably the more interesting bet here because the only company that actually has a job index is Google right now. And none of the others have like, I mean, ChatGPT has something which is like a native job search product where they have some vendors plugged in.

45:27But it's not like what Google has. Google has a huge index of pretty much everyone that has jobs that they submit to them to the Google Jobs product. so they are in the best position to build search on top of what they have the other guys still have to figure out how to index all these jobs so i think the data is there i wouldn't necessarily say that we have to change something in the way that we write the descriptions just make sure that you have the job posting schema on them and if you use a good ats that would be a given if you don't use a good ATS then time to change I think that's one of the biggest I think that's kind of where I was going with this so the the ability is there and there are people that know how to include this information like Alexander is saying it's just that it's not always included and so speaking to what Hung was saying where what do we unlock now what information do we want to add, I would say that's one thing that's important to be put on your job descriptions now instead of locking it behind some form of login or a way to keeping that information secret.

46:41You want to include it. Yeah. If I could add on that, Devin, to your point about making sure you answer the questions. So we look at this data constantly and we group things into like attributes and themes and the attribute with the lowest owned share by a company, but also the highest negative sentiment is candidate feedback. And the reason that that is is because all that sentiment that AI relies on comes from, you know, angry candidates on Glassdoor and Indeed and stuff. And none of it is really counteracted by, of course, positive sentiment around the talk, but also owned share of voice from the employers themselves.

47:28and so figuring out how to to include more of that information whether it's in in the job post itself but also uh in career sites um is super important so things about you know the ghosting why it happens the the feedback policy everything you know um i always tell the clients that we work with that um we need to make you know your career site just a prettier knowledge base now yeah i like this because it kind of forces people to change behavior a little bit and i'm kind of it seems to breadcrumb a little bit towards things like do we need like more senior manager visibility for instance uh do we need more founder-led marketing um it's it's it's it's less about so oh you know career page that's hrta's function or maybe recruitment marketing function you deal with it you tell our story no um it's like everyone has got to be telling the story because you've got more voices, more authenticity just pumping into the internet, so to say.

48:30And that's just the biggest surface area from which all of these crawlers are going to be pulling information from. So I think advantage goes to like, you know, prominent and vocal founders, right? So, you know, you see it online. I mean, I think one of the things we've seen maybe last seemingly post-COVID, it seems that we've seen a lot more founder-led marketing where they've just taken, maybe it's the Twitter experience, they've just gone to typically X or LinkedIn, and they've just like spouted forth. And it's really had a huge impact is like, it's it lands heavier, and it moves much further than anything that's produced by corporate.

49:09And so, you know, that seems to be maybe one of the behavioral changes that would be looking for companies to do in this kind of new era of uh of uh of what they they've got to do so yeah super interesting um alex you've got a quizzical look on your face um do you have a critique to make um yeah do you have something outrageous to say um i mean i'm hoping no no no just now i was just thinking about like the previous discussion we had with like what works in geo and i just you have in my i was literally writing a post on LinkedIn because what you were describing was essentially backlinks, you know, brands mentioning you, which is literally the definition of a backlink.

49:52And you were describing indexation, which means LMS being able to crawl your page. And this is like the foundation of SEO. So I was just kind of formulating LinkedIn posting my head. So that was the face, essentially. No, that's all good. But it seems that, okay, if you good at SEO, then that's going to translate inherently to GEO. So we need to double down a little bit on this. Although SEO has changed, hasn't it? Because previously, it used to be a super technical thing. You'd need someone to essentially translate your website so that it was optimized for being crawled by search engines. But now it seems that AI can actually do that for you um so what kind of what kind of advice are seo people now like producing or giving um to companies that want to basically improve how they appear online i mean like beyond the traditional um guidelines that have i think not much has changed to be honest over the past 20 years, the one thing that has changed is that programmatic SEO was a huge part of the toolset of a traditional SEO agency.

51:10So basically creating hundreds of thousands of templated pages. In the case of job boards, that would be your so-called category pages, your jobs in New York listings. But over the years, the past year specifically, because of AI content, Google became extremely skeptical to pages that have a high content velocity. And this is a fancy term for essentially a website that just publishes a lot of pages. So this also has changed the way we do programmatic SEO. So there is right now the term, kind of the idea that programmatic SEO doesn't work anymore, which is fairly wrong because job boards still get predominantly most of their traffic from programmatic SEO.

51:55But it has to be done differently. like all these tricks that you know you read about hey we scraped the site map of our competitor and we plugged it into cloud code and published these 10 000 articles and we stole all of their traffic this doesn't work but if you want to try it out and you want to do it then go ahead because then you might come back to one of us and we'll fix it for you you know so that's the that's the good side of it for business i love it so some skullduggery going on not really skullduggery i I mean, it's hard to draw the moral line between a lot of this stuff because arguably SEO itself has a bad rep.

52:33It's like, oh, you're basically trying to obviously falsify, but you're manipulating the results. And, you know, that's basically what we're trying to do. We're trying to get sort of the sort of things that are optimized for us. and yeah, but it can go to the wrong way, which is trying to steal competitor stuff or redirect people from one search to another based on some hacky attempt to redirect. You make a good interesting point on AI generated content though because one of the things that we've seen with artificial intelligence, generative AI, should I say, is that it's been an enormously sort of increase of productivity for anybody creating content.

53:22Initially, everyone thought this was a massive boon because, you know, hey, it took ages before we could create this story. Now, suddenly we create very easily. But it's now overwhelming. And it's very clear that, you know, it's turning people off. So how do you – what's the advice to companies that want to kind of become more productive? They want to keep a consistent voice. They want to pump stuff out, basically. But they want to make sure that it's an authentic voice and it doesn't get penalized by either search engines or generative AI engines that will look at it and think, oh, we've categorized that as a sloppy domain and we're not going to produce, we're not going to kind of elevate those guys.

54:06Any thoughts on that?

54:10Alex just really tied in what old black hat tactics of SEO were, where you just kind of flood the internet with a bunch of crap and hope that you rank higher. A lot of these SEO companies now are basically trying to fit that into GEO or AEO, whatever we're calling it. A better tactic is to constantly update your pages. So constantly be looking for ways to make your pages better or even add content to them. The LLMs like to see updated pages with new information that add to the conversation instead of just copying other things and trying to rework it or publishing more pages. So it's actually more beneficial to structure your site with less content that adds to the conversation than just throwing a bunch of stuff out there.

55:03Okay, so how does this look differently? So I guess we're talking about conversational threads maybe. So we're looking at one theme or one topic that's on your website or career page. What you're saying, Devin, is that you need to basically keep that conversation going by adding more and more context rather than starting another conversation from scratch and just throwing another stuff out there. Is that basic sort of rule of thumb? Yeah. So if you think about the way a website is architected, we used to have a website with a lot of bloat, right? And we'd have these internal links going everywhere.

55:43If you want this topic, go to this page. If you want this topic, go to this page. Now we're saying wrap it all up into one concise thread, like you said. And if there are some subtopics from that page that need to be explained and they don't actually fit the main conversation, yeah, link out to those. But keep them, keep each topic siloed, or I guess we call them content pillars, right? We keep them in the specific pillar so that the LOM can parse that and easily find the answers. And then, of course, again, it's just inherently easier for us as humans to find the answer also when everything's all in that one page.

56:27Most people too, if you think about it, are probably not actually going to read that content. They'll land on that page and then they'll get Gemini or one of their AI agents to actually summarize the page or find that specific information right away. So again, you want to have it really organized well so that the LLMs and humans can find this information. Yeah, that's a really interesting, I mean, it's an interesting thought, maybe extends to a deeper conversation that we need to have going forward. We've designed content, we've designed the web generally for the human eyes, for the human as the first sort of audience.

57:08But we can see that there'll be a moment where the AI agent on the candidate side is going to be the first thing that reads this. You know, I don't know when that's going to be, but I think, you know, two years, three years down the road. I think it's happening now. Yeah. It's happening. I think it's happening now. right this second as we speak so we did we did a we did a study with 300 active job seekers in seven different countries and 77 of them said that they they are willing to delegate their their entire job search to an ai agent so if it's not happening now it's gonna happen soon yeah yeah this is i mean i can understand this job search is bad folks it's just naturally bad ux It's not something about sort of the particular employer or whatever it is.

57:58People are, particularly if you're involuntarily unemployed, you know what? You're high stressed. You need the job. Last thing you want to do is loads of friction. You want a solution through all of this horrible experience. Of course, you're going to delegate that to something that is more efficient. And so the world changes for all of us here when you have sort of primary audience is no longer a human being, but an AI agent that's basically designed to cut through the crap, right? So it's basically there to completely neutralize all of this and get to the point. So that we've got to find a way to really address that actor rather than trying to sell at the human level.

58:40Okay, cool. Guys, we're moving towards the end of this show. So we've got to just end with, I guess, some recommendations, I suppose. Let's do a quick whip round of recommendations for people watching this and they think, you know what, I need to improve my GEO game for 2027. We've got this website hasn't been changed for this amount of time. It's behind, it's behind outdated. Now is time. We've got to step it up. What do they need to do? Give us one thing that they should be doing. Okay, Alex, you first, man. All right, only one. Oh my God. I would make sure that their website is properly server-side rendered or has static content because LLMs are bad at rendering JavaScript-based site.

59:31So if you have like a one-page application, good luck with that. right so this is a quite a technical um a bit of advice um so client side server side basically where is the rendering taking place um there was a big movement not so long ago to push everything to the browser right um but what you're saying is we actually need to serve the page from a server right from another computer um that is i guess more robust that's more of an ai friendly a way to do things that's a really good uh uh thing to think about i hadn't thought about that But yeah, very, very good, Alex. Karim, your one piece of advice.

1:00:11Yeah, I mean, this is for the employer branders in the chat. I'd say employee advocacy needs to evolve from, you know, really being focused on LinkedIn, which is still a big channel. But, you know, AI is flagging that LinkedIn is not the only channel that you should be focused on, but a multi-channel strategy beyond just social media, but online forums and really stop or paying more attention to the employer review sites that are pretty much dictating the representation of your culture. because a lot of companies tend to put them aside because the belief is that only unhappy employees go on Glassdoor.

1:00:54And indeed, I don't believe that. But yeah. I think by default, you can't get complainers, but that is obviously not representative. But therefore, you need to have a policy there. I think you're right. People still go to Glassdoor, even though I think even the people who try and get the information are aware that it's likely to be a bunch of people that are not happy. But it's worth diving into. Blind as well, of course, has been huge in tech circles and increasingly different types of communities. So you've got to keep an eye on all of those and develop an approach. Devin, your one bit of advice, please.

1:01:32I would start with getting your site re-audited to check out its technical SEO, get your content audited, audit your brand to make sure it's clear across the web, and then even take it a step further and make sure that you are auditing to make sure your site is machine ready, able to be used by agents without a human interacting with your site at all. Yeah, I love that. That's a very good segue to maybe another show we'll do. Like what does a machine ready, machine first career site look like? And what are the elements that go into that? Fantastic stuff. Jen, stay with us before we let everyone go here.

1:02:13But thank you so much for our wonderful panelists here. It's been fantastic to get a little bit of access to your intelligence in this show. So Alexander Tchaikovsky, thanks for joining. Kareem Ansari, thanks for joining as well. Devin Bagwandan, I believe it is. You got it. Yeah, I think it's okay. Sorry, Dev. No, that was great. I hope, thank you so much for your contributions. Brilliant stuff. Steve Gard, I appreciate you giving a go getting on as well. Really appreciate that. But folks, I hope you enjoyed the show. Keep an eye on where you're at with GEO. I think it does make one of those differences.

1:02:51Also, maybe one of those more presentable differences that you could take back to your business. If you're able to move your presentation of your business online, you can take it from an as-is position to a 2B, I think very clearly. Something that I think we in TA need to care about. Okay, that's about it. We're back next week, of course. I am going to New Zealand. Quite right, Rob. I'm kind of halfway there myself right now. So I'll be in New Zealand next week. We're going to next week's show is going to be how to hire a New Zealand. Does anyone know how to do that? I hope some Kiwis know because that's the show.

1:03:25And we'll be talking to a load of local recruiters to figure out what it is hiring on that side of the world. Totally different market for a lot of people simply because of the general remoteness and time zone sort of issues there. I'd be very interested to see how local recruiters do that. Okay, let's say goodbye to everyone here. Alex, great to see you, man. Have a good day. Kareem, great to see you as well. Devon, take it easy. And Jen, thanks for being co-pilot. Really fantastic to see you and have a chat with you on this topic. Great to have a review. And thanks, Raj, also for walking us through on demo.

1:04:02So I think it's fantastic that Jovio have this sort of audit solution so people can get an immediate taste to see where they're at and then maybe find a way to move further forward once they have that. Okay, cool. Jen, I hope you have a very good day. What are your plans for the weekend? Anything exciting? I am actually traveling to California, so I am going to be an even earlier time zone. And I am going to make a shout-out to all of my employment brand and candidate experience colleagues to watch the replay of this brain food because they have a bigger part in GEO than they maybe realize. Oh, that's very exciting.

1:04:41So let's see what that means because you'll get the replay immediately after we finish and we'll also get the assets as well. So we'll get those moving through the internet also. Okay, Jen, listen, brilliant seeing you. You take it easy and we'll see you. I'll see you around soon, hopefully. That's excellent. Thanks, Hong. Thanks, team. Thank you.