Is AI killing SEO? Semrush Spotlight with Andrew Warden

0:06Hello gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. Now continuing our series with SEMrush, we will be putting a spotlight on search and somebody that knows all about search is semrush's own cmo andrew warden now they are experts in this area and it is transformed like you wouldn't believe with the advent of ai and to tell us what it all means andrew unpacks it and how you as a brand can take advantage of those changes here it is andrew welcome to the show thanks so much john for having me it's funny this this topic as you say is high on everyone's agenda at the moment I think I first realised that something was happening about two years ago.

0:40Slightly funny story with the podcast here. Because when I first launched the podcast six years ago, I wanted to kind of cut through. And I remember reading this book by a guy called Paul Arden. And his book was called It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be. But it was the subtitle that caught my eye. It said the world's number one book by Paul Arden. And I thought that's so clever. So when I launched the podcast, I said the world's number one marketing podcast by John Evans. And it's a bit of a joke. But even then, a few people messaged me. Oh, congratulations, John. Well done.

1:10How did you do it? Perception is everything. Exactly. Isn't that just the truth of marketing? I know. You've just got to be ahead of yourself, right? Just plan what you wish happens. And then a couple of years ago, I had this YouTuber in America do a seven-minute takedown video on the podcast. I mean, literally ripping into me, calling me tyrannically British bullshitter, this whole thing. It was a proper Larry takedown video. And, you know, when you get that kind of criticism, you think, well, I can either laugh with it or I can get upset. You know, what am I going to do? Anyway, so I decided to just laugh at, you know, just end, you know, end of it.

1:46And I phoned him up and I said, dude, like, why pick on me? Right. There are thousands of podcasts. Why am I? He said, I went to chat GPT. And what did I ask? You're the number one. Yeah. And literally. Yeah, sure. And suddenly I thought, oh, hang on a minute. You know, the world has changed a bit in where we get our information from and, you know, how we're feeding and that kind of thing. But how disruptive do you think a moment we are in is? Yeah, well, I think, first of all, this is this exact moment. And actually, you're referencing even a couple of years ago. I mean, really, from May of 2022 to now, it seems it's just wild to think that it's been over three years from ChatGPT going so viral.

2:28I would say that this is the most significant moment for marketers since Google started. That can either be very daunting for people or it can be tremendously exciting for people. And as I was saying before we started recording, a lot of my conversations with CMOs at public companies right now, there are typically three different types of camps. And I think this also extends to practitioners really at any level. you know there are the the marketers or even the executives who are really on the sidelines kind of watching and waiting to see how ai will play out seems like every month there's some kind of new uh refresh or you know new models that are coming all of these things make sense especially in the context of search and then on the complete opposite of the spectrum you have people who are just all in experimenting you know which is for me as a marketer amazing to see um and then unfortunately right in the middle you have people people are frozen they're terrified to make a move in either direction because maybe their organic traffic has fallen and they don't want to divert investments to llms and for online visibility for ai search and for digital brand visibility yeah i was just in new york a couple weeks ago meeting with like household name blue chip companies uh cmos and it's amazing to hear you know the question is you know andrew how do we get started?

3:46Where should we begin? How should I think about budgeting for this? What about attribution? It's an enormous moment actually for marketers. And in many ways, it kind of makes me think back if I can, if I give myself permission to date myself, it really thinks about, it makes me think about, you know, the kind of.com era, like it's just this whole new chapter for technology. And that's, and again, we're only talking here in the context of marketing and search. I mean, what about in the creative industry? What about in any other industry you can think of? You know, it's a big moment. It really is.

4:20Now, where are you seeing the biggest kind of change in behavior happening when it comes to search? Yeah, I think, you know, so it's interesting. I think search used to equal Google, right? And as other avenues came out, as other AI search engines came out, you started to see that share grow. and what we observe through clickstream data through dados which is the samrush company they're not mutually exclusive uh actually what we notice is that search behavior is expanding from google to to those that are impacted by lms so for for many months and you know marketers love a good drama you know especially for 10 plus years you know market or seo is dead you know this is over fuck this we're done with this you know it's it's completely not true so what we've observed and actually we know right now i mean the latest data that we got was from october october this month you know 94.3 percent of searches are happening on google still it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be as marketers worried about visibility and llms and the traceability and the citations there we absolutely need to in fact you know customers who are coming through ai search engines where you are referenced in an llm are 4.4 times as likely to convert so you definitely need to care but this is no this is not oh it's such a big deal we're going to stop doing our seo and we're only going to focus on lms this is like the worst decision that can be made i went on a bit of a tangent there i'm not sure if i know well i think that's interesting because i think most people's perception would be yeah we're all switching over search is dead it's now it's now but that's and i'm here to say yeah concretely absolutely not i I mean, I know, especially at Sunrush, you know, 70 % of our organic blogs for that program actually feed LLMs.

6:10And so if we were to start divesting from that ourselves, that would actually hamstring us when it comes to future-proofing our own visibility. So I think what's different and what we're doing just to give people some kind of concrete steps of what maybe to think about, you know, expanding the organic program or the owned media, no matter what you call it. at your own company, no matter the size, to go far beyond traditional SEO, but also to extend into YouTube, to Reddit, to Quora, to all of these different platforms to user-generated content. And I think if anything, now there are tools, again, like Samrush One and AI Visibility Toolkit, more and more there are tools available to SEOs and to digital marketers that didn't exist three, six, nine months ago.

6:57And I'm already watching this play out within my team at SEMrush where I actually have very high expectations for this department because now all of a sudden you're armed with literally what should be published in what channel in order to elevate visibility in AI search. And that goes beyond the organic search team. It hits PR, it hits brand, it hits a lot of these channels that as CMOs we've always cared about, but we've never really needed to prioritize necessarily. And also just for a fun fact, you know, PR, there's a quarter of the pool of journalists available that were available pre-COVID.

7:36So PR is a pretty tough game right now. But all that is to say that, you know, really the role of an SEO or a classic SEO or someone who's a digital marketer, if you're up for it, you know, you've just kind of whether you like it or not you just negotiated an enormous seat at the table and so i'm always encouraging marketers to to embrace that because and to not be frozen by that because that's a pretty big deal and i don't really see that that kind of incremental step change to what we're seeing right now like that kind of side the expression i use a lot at work is like the the earth is literally moving right now between our feet like i don't always love such dramatic references but but the earth is shifting you know uh search is shifting as we speak as we're standing so we have to not only move with it but get ahead of where where the the terrain is is altering i'd love to get into your new report as well because you just published this big new report yeah ai visibility which is by the way big big plug for that super super helpful yeah what were the biggest surprises that you think people would uh would not be expecting from the data you collected you know i think a lot of people were surprised um i mentioned just a moment ago about user generated content i think a lot of people were surprised at just far reaching how far reaching that is now organic has always been such a long tail game we publish x number or or refresh x number of posts over you know three six nine twelve months and then we'll see residual value accord on a cohort basis year over year with llms it's almost like these channels are now behaving more like paid and i think this is something that people aren't talking about a lot yet which i want to talk about because uh it also puts a certain amount again if you're up for it it gets a certain amount of pressure on the organic team to like all right it's time to move faster so that was a big surprise that we heard from people i don't think it was any surprise uh that some of our like the most kind of household name brands that we all know and love or maybe don't love uh we're we're in the top echelons, if you will.

9:41But I actually had just this week a call from someone who was a publicly traded company who was cited in this report saying they were going to mention it on their earnings call. And they wanted to double check that we weren't going to release new research in a month or two that might counter it. And I said, I'm not aware of any research, but if I were you, I would cite it. So the report has gotten a lot of traction. I think that what people are reacting to is actually how practical it is in that rapport. Like it's not just a here's the kind of the best of the best. It's actually here's how these companies did this.

10:15And I can tell you hand on heart. I mean, I brought that research with someone, Andreas and our brand team and someone in our product marketing team put together, which I'm very proud of. and I actually I kind of you know virtually walked out over to our own organic search team and I said hey how come we're not experimenting with you know a thousand uh UGC pieces here like where's where's this program and they said no no we're we're investing that I said oh okay when do I get to see the results I was going to ask you that yeah no no I'm very open I'm very transparent guy um and uh and so it's one thing you know not to be in the report but again it was very specific It was very tailored to some of these industries.

10:52And of course, in the end of the day, it's meant to educate. It's meant to help others understand how to improve. But it's also meant to be a demand generation asset. I mean, we're marketers, you know, so that's part of the point. Yeah. I was interested how, because you looked at ChatGPT and Google AI, actually how they operate quite differently. And we need to remember, don't we, that not every AI operates in the same way. So the results that came out of both are quite different. Yes. And then I also thought it was interesting how different industries were. That was a surprise actually to me.

11:23Yes. Because I kind of would have assumed AI treats all industries the same. No, actually it's not. No, and this for me, this came up, I gave a talk at Disney earlier this year. It's always amazing when you, it was a Summersh Enterprise client and they had, it was called Disney Digital Days. It was so cool. They had 1 ,200 marketers globally, and they had never had someone come to talk about search and digital and like, you know, search and organic vis-a-vis PPC and like other channels. And to your question about, you know, you or your statement that you would have thought that industries would be kind of agnostic for any GPTs or for any AI, the reality is it's not.

12:02Actually, you see more and more AI overviews show up for non-transactional. So for purely informational queries, the more and more, let me put it this way, if you're prompting or if you're searching for I want to buy X, you're not going to get an overview. And so e-commerce is largely out of that picture. I think when it comes to tourism, if you're like, what are the top 10 hotels that I can visit around Disney? You're going to get a big laundry list. Like that's much more research oriented. And so right now still, it really wildly varies. I mean, on average, it can be 23 % we see right now with the latest data, 23 % on Google, you're going to get an AI overview response.

12:47But in some verticals, it goes up to 80%. And some verticals, it shrinks to three. I don't have the answer on why or how. Maybe I'll get it soon. But I'm also very curious, you know, when Google releases paid search within AI overviews. Like this is also going to be a very interesting moment for marketers too, which I know is coming up. Another thing I thought was interesting is the distinction between mentions and sources as well. Because you kind of think it's all about getting mentioned a lot, getting lots of reviews. But actually AI treats different sources quite differently, doesn't it? And there are some very highly, you know, high levels of authority from some sources versus the other.

13:21How important is it to kind of understand where you're being sourced? It is crucial to understand where you're being sourced because if, first of all, if you don't understand where you're being sourced, you can't make any kind of improvement or not. Right. And I think the trust factor between being a mention and being a source is also critical. And I might be wrong, but I believe that sources are the only, that's really where the only blue links live. Right. So for any hope to kind of escape a zero click reality is to be a source. And I could be wrong on that, but that's the last time I checked, you know, so it could change overnight.

13:54sometimes but i think this is a huge part of what will drive ultimate trust and i i think you know the way i start to think about it as well you know the era that we're in right now uh this is inning number one this is foundational again in that conversation i mentioned i had in new york a week or so ago someone asked me a question they said well you know if ai is so disruptive right now where do you think it would be in 12 or 18 months especially for buyers you know and we already know that there are major companies like united you know united airlines like testing fully agentic paths to purchase you know i think that in a year year and a half from now you and i will have our own i mean you probably already have your own but you'll have a more sophisticated gpt yourself where it knows that you're on a fitness journey just like me it knows that you might like a particular brand of cycling shoes or running shoes or training gloves, whatever they are.

14:55It knows the average shelf life of that product, how long you're going to go through it. It's going to propose and it might even automatically purchase it for you and send it to your door. And the reason why I bring these examples up is, and this is really even on a B2C side, we could also talk about B2B. If brands are not investing in digital brand visibility now to lay that foundation, to lay the many layers of that foundation right now. Imagine in 12 or 18 months, if you're not being considered as a source or a mention, or you're completely on the sideline, you're not even part of the conversation.

15:29And this is what kind of reminds me back to dot-com days. It's kind of like you don't have a domain. And that is a very intentional dramatic pause. Yeah. Because it's like, for me, that's a big deal. It makes sense. I mean, another kind of comparison to the old days I was thinking is the rules used to be what does a brand want to say about itself? Correct. These days is what do other people say about the brand? That's right. That matters more, doesn't it? That's right. So user-generated content. That's right. You know, working with other people. This is why I think content creator strategy is so key, isn't it?

16:00Content creators, influencers as well. And I'll try my best not to reveal the brand. but it was really interesting from one of, from one of those CMOs the other night where that audience is, it was basically healthcare or life sciences brand where the audience is actually folks who are maybe 75 to 85 years old. And one of the first questions from their CMO was like, well, Andrew, how do I get them to generate UGC? Like how, how is, how would that be possible? Like these people are, I was like, I don't know. My, my mom's 82, 83. She's not, she's addicted to her phone more than, I am. But seriously, I said, well, how about, you know, sending like a, again, this is a very US focused audience.

16:40So sorry for the US reference, but, you know, most people I know that age, you know, love a good Dunkin' Donuts or something like this, you know, send them a gift card if and only if their grandson or whatever, some family member makes a write-up and starts creating that once you get that to scale and like her eyes just kind of open so widely, like, oh, that's all it would take to get started here it's very interesting for me and this is what i mean about this kind of frozen camp people don't know where to begin and this is the biggest challenge i see but you just have to start it's funny i mentioned the the comedy review that i got as well the other moment where i suddenly went i get how this is working i got to invite you to speak at a conference last year and um i i went to conference organizers said i have interest why why pick me and they said oh well we were originally searching for mark ritson and your video with him came up top of the search then we were looking for les binette and his video with you came up top of the search every speaker we looked at linked to content you had made with them and effectively you were you were coming out top organically because of that sort of thing i'm like oh that's interesting that you know putting stuff out in the world collaborating making content that's just for other people is key to this and there's also the but there's also the the freshness of the content that matters because again big shift from the way we used to think about organic you know you write a post it's technically very accurate it checks all the boxes it has all the authority all the eeat every all these things and you kind of set it for six months and forget about it absolutely not like now your publishing schedule it needs to pull forward at least three or four x i mean it is not enough to have that rather i mean you still need a static program in that way i will call that static or traditional seo model but there has to be this whole other new muscle that's being trained no one expects it no one including me expects it to be perfect i don't i have a high standard for my team of course at semrush i don't expect it to be perfect but i expect this to be failing every day on these things to try to figure it out and we're being you know really aggressive with that right now so um yeah it's a big that's a very different mindset isn't it compared to when you know you and i were cutting our teeth on marketing you know a few years ago where it all be about you're very generous a few years ago exactly but you know you know you go through all the approval processes and you're spending lots on production you get all the sign-offs you'd spend a lot of time getting it right yeah now you're putting stuff out there quickly seeing you know what works and then deciding and i think this also depends on like the the viewpoint and the appetite for risk frankly from cmos and what what their boards will let them get away with i've always been in the camp of i will ship at 80 and clean it up after that applies to pretty much my every single day because especially in marketing we're so conditioned you know to be perfectionist and for it to be you know i think right now with llms i mean there's so much hallucinating that happens so many wrong answers i mean i still think i i have a reference about how an AI overview, you know, said it was okay for pregnant women to smoke at some point.

19:45Like it's just all kinds of, you know, just, I'm just being, I'm being hyperbolic on purpose and obviously don't support that. But it's interesting. Like I would much rather us push to be aggressive. And then if there's a mistake, we can also clean it up. But, you know, right now, even in the past couple, I think within the past six weeks, we had a sprint with our, now what we've called our online visibility team or our digital brand invisibility team you know we've seen like a 3x result in the number of ai overview mentions and citations even when compared to like our biggest competitors and so that means like you know we're we're making really good progress there my next challenge which i don't care as much about right now but i know everybody else does is attribution given a zero click reality you know does that just dump into the direct channel maybe is that good enough for me no you know um so there's a lot of a lot of unanswered questions still.

20:39But, but for me, this is also the part where, you know, again, a lot of people get really spooked by that. They get nervous. They get nervous about being able to show results and, you know, and I think this is the moment where marketers just need to lean in. Hold on. I was called the hold onto the table moment. Just hold on, hold tight, you know, steady, steady, steady course, but get moving. You know, speed is key, isn't it? Cause like when you get a structural change like this, the winners are often not the best. They're the ones that move quickest. into the gaps and take advantage of them. Something else actually that popped out of me when I read your report was the brands that came out top.

21:16So brands like Patagonia or Garmin, Gucci, for example, were all brands with very strong stories to tell, very powerful brands. So you might be tempted to think in the AI world, brand matters less. If anything, your report's suggesting brand matters more. No, it's absolutely brand matters five times more. I personally love Patagonia as a brand, as a company. I mean, they have been, they're probably one of the best winners in all of this that I can think of, probably purely by accident. And that's great, great for them. But for years, they have been storytelling about, you know, everything's about being outdoors, care and sustainability for the planet, which is square in the audience of those who are outdoors all the time.

21:59Preserving, you know, the planet for the future. They even change their products to make sure that they're aligning with that vision. and they've been telling that story for at least five to seven years and then you have all of this brand fandom around them so everyone is posting constantly gucci i think is a little bit more obvious because it's kind of this kind of you know yolo you know uh very sexy brand you know patagonia i think you know it's a bit different where it's this kind of long and steady consistent storytelling consistent brand building and and that really connects exactly to what i mentioned before about seos and digital marketers you know now have the tools especially with some rush one and other other tools to actually feed into the brand teams to be like you should be talking more about x y and z because that is where actually our competitors are eating our lunch on llm visibility you know and so that's where we are really you know summers for many years we've always thought about what we do and how we help customers is really about boosting online visibility from now on, at least for the foreseeable future, it's about digital brand visibility.

23:07For those who are at Spotlight today, I was really pleased. James McCormick, who's a super senior analyst at IDC, gave a 30-minute talk all about digital brand visibility. And he talks to a lot of very senior clients, Fortune 100. This is what is keeping CMOs and CEOs up at night. And so I think this is where it kind of connects me on what we saw with AI visibility. And maybe you're right. Maybe that was a bit surprising even for me to see that a lot of these channels where we've always kind of classified with softer metrics like impressions or share of voice, all of a sudden now I can tell you I'm reporting to my board about our share of voice vis-a-vis our competitors and vis-a-vis those who are like similar enough or larger companies like HubSpot, which we don't consider a competitor, but like think you know brands we want to look like or sound like or feel like share a voice a year ago come on are you kidding me impressions a year ago people laugh at you you know it's only about registrations trials payments you know and high quality traffic so yeah it's it's really interesting to see that the the kind of channel mix is almost flipped on its head uh i don't know if you agree or if you i i really love your framing actually because like we're obviously you know trained in what's your share of voice across your media mix and you take all traditional channels and go i've got this share of voice versus my competitor and therefore i think i'm going to outperform etc etc but the thing with this is because so much of it is earned rather than paid you have to find a different way of measuring it and and because obviously lms are putting different priorities on different sources then what you need to see is you know what's the net of all that and what's your share of voice once all that's taken consideration so digital visibility I think it's a really neat way of looking at it.

24:55Yeah, it's a digital brand. And for me, that's why we put brand visibility. Brand in the center, like digital brand visibility, because now it's not only about like getting blog posts up and redirecting traffic to your site and getting payments, but like how well is your brand showing up? Yeah. Period. That's been a discussion we've been having as an exec team for a couple of months about what's really the heart of what we're delivering for customers, the value that we're delivering both for our subscription customers, but also for StarMarsh Enterprise customers who have even, I mean, everybody has big marketing challenges, you know, but I think it's even more tricky when you have, you know, multinational companies with hundreds and hundreds of team members working, you know, in different countries on very similar problems.

25:42But yeah, I think it is this kind of total shift in how even marketing is seen. So it's like you kind of, you know, you start with this kind of seismic shift of, You know, it's no longer traditional SEO. Now it's that plus combined with AI search. But now that it's impacting other channels that are usually well beyond the station of the organic search teams. And then when other executives are seeing certain declines or certain inclines, and then it's like, well, what's the PR? How come the PR team isn't delivering this? How come the brand team isn't more visible? Like, where are our activations?

26:19Like, how come we don't have more impressions? these are not the questions that we've been having for the last five or ten years so i don't personally for me i think it's really exciting and i like i like that a lot so taking that on a step then if you were to advise i mean you talk to a lot of cmos don't you and you mentioned a few earlier um what would be your advice then to a cmo who's listening going okay i need to get on top of this yeah because you're right it changes the structure of organization isn't it so it's not it's not like a bottom of the org thing that's done at the last click it's now how do we tell our story yeah i think question the the way that i'm advising folks right now is that i think there's two things you know number one the expansion of the role of the seo department or the digital marketing or that whatever you call it internally can be organic or whatever that combined with uh brand and and product marketing it really as a center of gravity is a big a big element that will retool and will actually redesign marketing functions I think the first thing that I ask folks is who's running your program and how legacy minded are they and it's not a popular question and I'm not sorry for asking it look I'm a human too I get stuck in my ways I have my rhythms this is not the moment for conservatism this is not the moment for we've done it this way for three or four years this is where CMOs need to ask very hard questions of do we have the right talent leading these teams so that's number one right is there is there enough elasticity in that person and can you upskill them or are they already training their own models and i'll give you like real example here in our team gosh it was maybe three or four months ago i was i was actually struggling to find some really good product messaging on a very particular product that I just wasn't really happy with.

28:12And I can be quite vocal at times. So a couple of people heard about that. There were two people in a team that had no responsibility for that whatsoever, not in product marketing. And within three hours, they used Claude and they came up with some of the best messaging that I had seen since my time at SEMrush. And my point is, these are the people you want to find and also celebrate them and show them off to the rest of your team because it's not only about it's not my job. I did it anyway. But it's the I'm experimenting. I'm trying. Maybe it's shit. Now it's not. And I just find that with organic, because there has been this sort of 15-year-long swell or slog or cycle time, whatever you want to call it, it's changed overnight.

29:02And the question is, is that person ready for that change? And so if they're not, you have to do something about it. And the good news is there are plenty of people who are very interested in this right now. So I think that's kind of point number two. And I think thirdly, the biggest risk is to over-rotate on LLMs. They're absolutely important, crucial, got to do it, no question. But again, it's the combination of traditional SEO and AI search, which will equal digital brand visibility. and that's the equation that when i say it that way at least the cmos that it it seems to make sense then right so it's like i understand traditional seo i get it i don't really understand ai search just yet but now i'm starting to understand what's feeding llms and overall that digital brand visibility is about this the the increasingly complementary nature of channels that they've always been intertwined but now you can measure it in ways you never could.

30:01So that's where I think these are the majority of my conversations with CMOs right now. It intrigues me actually talking about this because there is a flip side I wanted to come on to this is that we've obviously been talking about how, you know, as marketers, we can train the LLMs effectively to make sure that the right content's out there and people are discovering us and our brand is very visible. But with what AI is doing, do you think that as a consumer, if you put yourself on the other side of it that actually more and more and more your choice is effectively being made for you oh you must have seen the ted talk i did see your ted talk yeah you must have seen the ted talk yeah because you leaned into this question didn't you i think that uh i think it is a very interesting question and uh i think it's possible i think that just as i referenced this um you know you might have your own agent in a couple of years that makes decisions for you based on your previous purchasing behavior based off of your browser data based off your mobile data the microphone that listens to you whether you like it or not i think it is very real and very possible and i don't necessarily think it's a negative thing but i do think it's something to be aware of that the very systems that we design of course are inherently political it's not i'm not the first person to think about this i think it was langdon in the 80s as a philosopher who published that piece around you know literally every object this chair this rather deep chair that i hope i'm not slouching too much in has some kind of politics that are embedded in it right there's a certain height there's a certain width you know tables or you know wheelchair accessibility everything right bridges in new york you know in the 40s and 50s were designed at a certain height so that buses couldn't go underneath them, which meant that people who couldn't afford to drive private vehicles couldn't enter.

31:51So objects have politics. And I think that also the systems we're designing right now absolutely have politics. But that's, you know, that's very esoteric. We could have our own session just on that. But to get right to your question, I think that the more that can be done now, because as a marketer, I want that outcome, actually. I actually want you to not realize that you need something you know you just need it and more more importantly i want your credit card to be saved and i would rather run the risk that you might return something which is probably a one in six that you would return it again going back to the fitness example or one of these things so i think i think that you know that future is not that far off but the question of who's creating demand is very interesting to me as a marketer and if i was if i were to go back to lse uh you know and do some more research i might query those things right where it's like what does demand look like for both b2b and b2c in the future is it generated by the consumer is it generated you know purely by the perception of what you might need and how far ahead is ai thinking for you and predicting because when you see what's possible with gen ai right now just imagine what's going to be in five years it's i mean for me it's fascinating yeah it's yeah so So, yeah, that's a bit of the extrapolation of the cliff notes from the TED Talk.

33:20I mean, the point you rounded on, which I think is ironic because I work at a company called System One, which is all about instinct and emotion, is that's going to become even more important. And this is the juxtaposition I think people are not realizing, that the more we automate things and the system predicts and all that kind of thing, the more important emotion and humanity will become to those brands that want to win. Well, the authenticity part is what's going to matter because I think the, especially as things become more and more automated or let's just say, you know, the next pair of running, you know, trainers show up at your door.

33:56Like it's not really, it's not like a delightful touch point for you. It's just purely transactional. So I think that also means that brands are going to have to do even more, you know, to stand out, to make you feel something. So it's interesting when you bring that up in terms of the emotional part. so yeah i think that that was also part of that narrative of okay so as things get increasingly more prescriptive like marketers not only have this greater technical challenge but there's also this like greater challenge on the art side where how do you make people feel things when you know people are constantly just scrolling and desensitized to what they see on their reels and on talk and on everything like you know at a certain point your brain is so saturated like what what feelings do you have left to give so that's why i think the work that you're doing is also very interesting yeah it's really interesting i think it changes behavior because i mean we go back to covid days we suddenly adopted to having meetings online really quickly that was the positive thing but then we all went to concerts because we're desperate afterwards we're desperate to kind of meet people and well places like this you know going to conferences as well yeah you know we crave that human sure that human interaction and i mean i certainly hope that doesn't go away yeah i think that's that's that's the part where i think that's the that's the biggest existential question about, you know, any kind of synergistic moment when, you know, there's parity with AI and all of these things.

35:15I still think at the end of the day, that part is still very overblown. I think that, you know, buyers still feel things. And whether you're B2B or B2C, especially on the B2B side, you know, people buy from people they trust, brands they trust, track records. And yeah, AI will get you part of the way. I'm talking about generative AI, you know, but having that foundation in traditional seo and ai search like for me it's just this table stakes that didn't exist before you know seo was always kind of it's it's important for for cmo is important for companies but it's so amazing now how you know the attention is like almost well above paid and then some companies you know where you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on paid and you're spending a fraction of that on organic you know and now cmos are saying what are we doing about this how come this isn't as well funded you know we need we need to fix this uh it's just like a wild moment for for for marketers and also for semrush like it's a great great time yeah it is indeed um and then just lastly uh you mentioned semrush one which i think you announced today didn't you so what will that enable people to do great question so we've been responding to uh to customers you know it was about it was in january of this year we released something called the ai visibility toolkit and this is a 99 monthly subscription that helped you understand how your brand shows up and why and also some teasers of how to make improvements and over time we realized that uh because actually it wasn't really clear to up to us even i would say and again i'm not a product guy but but i am a cmo so i'll tell you at least from my perspective it wasn't immediately clear, should we be going all in on LLMs?

36:57Should we be maybe thinking about slowing some of our SEO spend, all these things? And actually, after the balance of the year of research, we knew that it needs to be the combination of both. So that we know for sure, that one I would be willing to die on the hill as the expression goes, you know, to prove it and to advocate for it. So the new subscriptions include, so there's basically new tiers, there's starter for those who are starting out, like, you know, maybe brand new or a smaller company, ProPlus, which is more sophisticated. And then there's this kind of advanced or ultimate, not ultimate, advanced solution, which includes like API access, like all the bells and whistles.

37:38And of course, then there's enterprise, which is for very large companies. And the biggest net new or incremental improvement is that these subscriptions now will not only have better limits, but they also include de facto all of the AI visibility components baked into them. So Pavel was just up on stage showing demos where it's this expansion of what was offered earlier in the year. And AI Visibility Toolkit was our fastest growing product that we ever made at Sumrush. So in the span of, and by the way, it only took us about a month to make, which was even more impressive. So what we're really doing now is saying, okay, here are net new and more valuable traditional SEO tools combined with AI search and AI visibility tools, all in one subscription, you know, and that's something that is pretty unique at the moment.

38:28Fantastic. Andrew, thank you so much. Congratulations on the launch and on Spotlight, which another success. Yeah, great to see you here. Yeah, appreciate all your advice and wisdom. Thanks for having me. Amazing. Thank you. Cheers. Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored CMO. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show so please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.