2265 - Navigating the New SEO Era: Enhancing Your Brand’s AI Presence with Vertology's Liudmila Kiseleva

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.

0:51Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you.

1:05With us right now, it's Ludmila Kisileva. Ludmila, it is so great to have you. You just, full disclosure, you are our SEO agency of record. We've been working together for a couple of years, so we know each other. We go back, and I am really excited to talk about this new platform that you have been working on, and it is now available, and it has to do. Listen, we're going to tease it this way. What does ChatGPT really know about your brand? And that's what your new platform, Vertology AI, has created. We're going to talk about that in just a second. Hey, but Lumila, before we get into your superpowers and everything that you do, outside of work, what have you been doing for fun lately?

1:55I don't know if there's any game you're playing, TV show, movie you've watched you really like, hobbies, that sort of thing. What is Ludmila doing outside of work? Hey, Josh, and thanks for having me. And hello. It's great to be back. It's great to be here. And to your question, you wouldn't believe it, but my family lost me for like literally two and a half weeks in the evenings. I got so obsessed with just one thing, my new hobby. And don't kill me anybody, but I was vibe coding. Yeah. I was literally building an application and I loved the process so much that I cannot tell you how excited I am about it.

2:39And it's not just a new hobby. It's not just a new thing that I think I will abandon soon. It was super, super exciting journey. That's something that fascinated my brain so much. I literally spent two weeks and a half actually building Virtology. You know, so when people, I think a lot of us have heard of vibe coding. I share your passion as of when we're recording this. Like we're on the very, very cusp of launching into beta our new platform, PodVerified. And yes, I think we're going to get on smashingly here because I've been a coder in the past. I would say today I am a subpar coder, but I feel like I'm a really good vibe coder because you don't have to get into the weeds as much.

3:37Can you define, Lyudmila, what vibe coding is? So for me, it was just like talking to LLMs, and I know a few things about LLMs. I'm a non-technical agency founder, but I do have some background in data science. so I don't know how to code but I kind of have a good understanding of the outcome so I was raised in the family of engineers not being technical I still kind of understand how the problem solving component works so I was super it was super exciting for me to speak to a software that can actually code for me and accomplish the tasks while I was making coffee doing some yoga stretches So you know how it works.

4:18But the whole idea behind it, behind those two and a half weeks journey of building Vertology, was about something else. It was about AI search, Josh. Yeah. Well, let's talk about that. So by the way, the website is vertology.ai. We have the link in the show notes. And so let's, okay. So SEO is evolving. SEO is changing. The world of SEO is, again, I would argue is probably completely getting disrupted by AI. And you've always been a little AI-centric. I remember, you know, it's, well, and thankfully you have because obviously that's where we are today. So do you mind kind of just before we get into how Vertology works, do you mind just kind of giving a state of the union for SEO and AI search?

5:15Absolutely. And those are great, great, great questions. So let me break it down into kind of like a little bit of a background here. First, AI search, GEO, SXO, there are a lot of terms flying around right now in the industry. and that's quite new and everybody understands that. But if we look at it from like the executive standpoint, from the entrepreneurial business owner standpoint, we need to understand that AI search comes into two major shapes and forms. First, we have native AI search and this is a very new thing. This is where people are using perplexity, chat GPT, AI models with the search function on.

5:56When you have those citations, the links and from ChatGPT, people discover your brand, people discover who you are. So you get those citations within the platforms. So think about it like as a native AI search. It happens on ChatGPT within the platform. And then we have the AI search features. This is how Google tries to keep up in the trace. And those AI overviews, the Gemini AI generated snippets that you will see almost everywhere now above the search results, this is what it is. So we are still in the traditional search SEO-driven environment, but we have a major disruption. We have those AI search features like AI overviews appearing above the search results.

6:39And imagine what it does for your organic rankings. Google anything. You will see, you will have to scroll once at least or maybe twice to get to the first organic result. So for 17 plus years, I have been promoting businesses to rank number one on Google. now. Imagine how the game changes. People are losing 20 to 30 % organic traffic year over year left and right. And by people, I mean B2B brands with content teams, with the SEO investments of hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is what's happening in the SEO world right now. Yeah. All right. Well, million dollar question, Ludmila. How do we all position ourselves so that the AI platforms out there love us and send lots of traffic our way?

7:33And by the way, Ludmila, we have seen like where our traffic is coming from and our AI inbound is really has been going up quite a bit. And that's exciting. I don't know exactly what we did, but I think it has to do with working with you. But we love it because I say our SEO is just OK, but I feel like our AI is really good. so a little secret josh we have been setting up uh you as our client and many other our other clients of ours for success since september last year when google released ai overviews we completely changed the way we work as an seo agency so we are like now i wouldn't consider rampic to be focused on seo that much yes the fundamentals are still there yes you have to work for Google because Google still has that big market share.

8:29But you mentioned a really great term or keyword in the old school kind of like way of thinking, but positioning. This concept changes everything on AI search. Why? Because LLMs are not calculators. They are good readers. And the way they read your profile on the web is very different from what we know, with what we have known for 20 plus years of Google dominance. So the main difference for brands and if you have a strong personal brand, not necessarily your own B2B space, we can talk about the personal branding as well here, is to make sure that you have your digital footprint updated regularly and you work on your authority.

9:14Because LLMs love first-party data. Think podcast transcripts or interviews or anything that you do for your personal brand where you speak for yourself or as an executive, you speak for brand. Like, for example, me representing Rampic and Vertology and a little bit of myself. So when we are talking about the best next step that brands can do to improve their AI visibility, my professional opinion is that we need to work on unifying and updating our positioning from the highly visible, highly serviced website perspective. And don't get me wrong, that was an awesome fact for me. Then when I was checking myself on pathology, when I was building it, we have like two types of audit memory in life.

10:02I'll talk about it in a minute. But Josh, up my influence interview, got cited. Our conversation, our last conversation. Yes. Podcast interviews are being cited in ChatGPT, in AI. Yes. Yes. I love that. someone who's done over 2 ,200 interviews just on this show and then another 600, 700 on other shows. Ah, no wonder Josh is happy about the AI inbound. Josh, that has been like an amazing contribution to people's visibility on AI. And in the right context, by the way, I would be, oh my God, thousands and thousands of interviews. That's gold because what LLMs are hungry about is the first party data.

10:49blogs, any articles or any content that the industry has been producing, the B2B industry has been producing at scale over the past 30-40 years, that's good. However, LLMs can differentiate the authority-driven first-party data from the rest of the sources. However, there is a very important concept for us to understand. LLMs have two types of memories. They have the long-term frozen memory, which is kind of hazy. They get it from trainings, like training phase. LLMs, like as models, they have the training phase, and it has a certain calendar cut-off date. They only know about us and the world up until the certain date when the training stopped and the model went to fine-tuning.

11:36And for many businesses, this is actually bad news because they could be mispositioned in that memory-based space. So that is why, actually, I built Vertology. I started building Vertology because I asked myself a question over and over. Okay, how do I know what it knows about me? How do I know what it knows about my clients from under the hood, like from the memory? And when I started reading those memory audits, I figured how vague and hazy they are. That is how we can use the live, like red, augmented part of it. When you enable the search function in chat GPT or perplexity, and you send the model out there to get the new results, this is where the magic happens.

12:22The model does the web search and pulls the fresh data about your name, your brand, and it blends it with what it knows about the memory, from the memory. And this is how, and this is why optimizing your profile, optimizing your positioning to who you are right now matters a lot. So from a branding and positioning standpoint, what would you say are best practices for that? Imagine that we are talking about, Josh, like your brand, right? you have a digital footprint of owning, operating, launching, expanding your businesses. And up to a certain point, for example, the model will know only a fraction of what you did.

13:11Or in my case, they might still see me as an SEO provider, not AI search provider, because it was quite recent. So the best next step for you and me, or for any entrepreneur, or any B2B business is to create the first-party content that positions you in the right way to who you are right now. Because the bad news, you cannot reframe the model. You cannot retrain it. But the good news is you can update your profile. You can update your positioning in the highly surfaced, highly visible resources so that the new generation of models know who you are, not who you were, if that makes sense. yeah uh well i okay i like that uh you know because you know in in media i mean that's always super helpful right is that you you want you know and and it sounds like like you just you want ai to understand this too like who are you like what are you know and if you're generic and you're all over the place and you kind of keep changing your messaging every couple of months like ai is going to be like yeah i'm not so sure that this is a reliable source whereas if you're like, no, no, no, I'm the best in the world at this one very specific thing.

14:20This is all I obsess on. And here are my thoughts and ideas on it. Like that sounds like something that AI would probably trust more than someone that's kind of all over the map. Correct. And especially when it comes to from a trustworthy, validated resource, meaning that you have good interviews, good podcasts appearances, good presence where you are consistently, and this is like, this is where AI models pick it up from the SEO world. Consistency is the key. It's not enough just to put out like one podcast out there and think that AI, hey, now I am like this, or like I'm doing that. It's the consistent work on making sure that you appear in the space out there from the verified sources with the same positioning, or if you're updating position, launching something new with some updates, which actually help you build out that digital footprint in the way where AI understands that transitioning.

15:20It's okay to reposition. It's okay. We all grow. We all pivot. We do everything that we're going to do as entrepreneurs. But being consistent in your journey and communicating that consistently over and over, that's the key. Yeah. All right. Well, Ludmila, vertology.ai. If somebody goes there, it's going to ask for a couple of things. And it's going to ask for your brand name. It's going to ask for your email address. What happens here? How does Vertology work? So Vertology is designed to give you three things. First, the memory-based audit that we talked about. And it's free for everybody. I encourage everybody to go ahead, plug in their brand, their email address.

16:02You'll get a link and it will give you the brand memory audit where you will be able to see how you're presented in the model's memory. And for most of the owners who tested Virtuology, and by the way, not just tested, I have more than 200 audits completely there already and we are less than a month old since we launched. So the feedback will be, oh my God, why is this so inaccurate? Or it's only partially accurate. How can I make that better? And your best next step will be to run the live audit to see where exactly the model takes the data to enrich the memory-based presentation of your brand.

16:46And this is your first action item. You will see where it took the information about your brand. And if you see that, for example, it surfaced you on your LinkedIn and you look at your LinkedIn page and you see, oh my God, it still has incorrect position from 2020. I haven't updated my LinkedIn page for a while. This is where we saw marketing people and business owners start thinking really hard how exactly they can improve. And this is where we step in because that live audit shows us not just these, but also the checklist, the checkpoints that we need to accomplish together to make the brands appear better in AI overviews.

17:27So the third report that you can get is the comparison so that you can compare the memory-based report with the live audit side by side and see the gaps. This is the first most foundational point that the brands need to take right now. It's 2025. We will be seeing the models launching over and over faster and faster. There's the dog race, and there's going to be a lot of winners here. So the sooner we start to work on leveraging our positioning personal brands, B2B brands, in the right way, the better we will become positioned for the new models updates. This is why I built Divertology. I want to show the brands where they are right now.

18:10I want to show them how inaccurate, how hazy the knowledge of the model can be and what's the best next steps that they need to take. This is a silly question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. You could just ask GPT, tell me everything you know about me. versus what your tool does. Explain the difference. So I do have some background in data science. And I worked with models and I trained the models even before it became a thing. So even before the ChargPT appears in everybody's smartphone or everybody's computer, I actually clustered, tokenized, and did all those funky stuff. Of course, not at the big scale, but the fundamentals are still the same.

18:58So when I am building stuff with that background, I am embedding all the knowledge that I have from the marketing perspective and data science perspective to give distilled results. So think about it. Everybody can prompt anything about their brands in ChatGPT. But now that's going to be affected by your previous history. That's going to be affected by the memory that ChatGPT has. Depending from the free account or paid account, you will get different results. and what i would like to establish in cryptology i would like to establish a more or less unbiased way to work with it's like something average that a lot of people will see when they google or like google that's a wrong word that when they when they do the search and chat gpt um for the first time or when they are researching on chat gpt for the first time if they don't have that search button enabled this is what they are likely to be to see for example from the memory-based audit.

19:54Josh, I got compared to Neil Patel. Well, that's flattering as much as it can be, but that's not me. I'm not Neil Patel's direct competitor. I'm a B2B digital marketing agency, and the model didn't know that about me. That's the reason why, and this is how Rampic can be seen for a lot of people who are just researching for a good B2B digital marketing agency partner. That's how virtuality is different. It gives you a more or less objective, non-biased presentation of your brand in memory-based conversations. And then it will give you the most likely sources that people will see when they're going to be searching for your brand in the live environment.

20:38I love it. I mean, plus, ChatGPT is going to just tell you what you think. It thinks you want to hear. It's not going to be objective. I mean, it's okay. But, you know, again, ChatGPT sure loves to glaze. So Ludmila, the website, I want to share both your websites, by the way. So Rampique.agency is your marketing agency and you do SEO marketing and everything. And then the new platform we have all linked up, it's vertology.ai. It's free to get a free audit. So just punch in your information and it'll spit that out for you. And then obviously you have services or a platform available on the backend to improve this, right?

21:25Absolutely. Absolutely. So please go ahead and use it. You'll see an option to interact with me. If you have any questions, you'll have an option to interact with my team if you would like to better understand how exactly the memory audit works, why you're seeing the results that you're seeing. and by the way for everybody who is listening josh if you don't mind i have a gift to share please for everybody who's listening please feel free to use promo code friends on the back end to give to get the live audit and to get the comparison audit for a fraction of its cost josh i love your audience you you're doing great things for the industry so i wanted to be grateful as well.

22:09So for everybody, I think that's exclusive for the Up My Influence audience, for the Future Prop Verified audience. So everybody who's listening to that, promo code FRIENDS at the back end will give you a massive discount for your live report. Yeah, love it. All right. Promo code FRIENDS, the website, vertology.ai. Ludmila Kisielova, thank you so much for joining it. Love the conversation as always. Thank you, Josh, for having me. I appreciate everything. Thank you.

23:06every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders, asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required, where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies.

23:51Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning. That's right. Seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed. I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day. Thanks for listening. And thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.