Separating AEO Expertise From Search Marketing Hype

0:00The Voices of Search podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit IHearEverything.com. Welcome to the Voices of Search podcast and I Hear Everything production. In this podcast, we'll share the news, knowledge, and strategies you need to navigate the ever-changing world of SEO. Ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts? Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom.

0:41Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton. Search isn't just changing. It's forcing marketers to rethink what success actually looks like. In fact, fewer than one-third of Google searches now results in a click to an open web, making visibility and brand recognition more important than ever and not just rankings. My name is Tyson and joining me today is Jenna Hannon, founder and CEO at Hatter. Jenna was one of the first marketing hires at Uber Eats before launching one of the first agencies dedicated to AI search visibility. And today we're going to be diving into why AEO starts with better SEO fundamentals and why AI search is changing how marketers think about visibility and attribution.

1:30Welcome to the podcast, Jenna. Hey, Dyson. Thanks for having me. Now, before we kind of hit record, we're talking a little bit about like backgrounds, upbringings. And one of the things that kind of got me excited about this conversation was being able to hear kind of your perspective of not coming from the traditional world of SEO, but coming from more of a traditional kind of product marketing background. And personally, I feel like the current state of search today is like the pendulum swing back into some of these more like traditional principles and like fundamentals. And so I'm really interested to hear kind of like how your background, your experience kind of is guiding how you're looking at the industry and how you're also operating kind of within it.

2:20Yeah. So I'm a generalist marketer, started my career in performance. I joined Uber to work on the growth team of new experiments. So at the time it was work on anything outside of the core business that the team is coming up with, the core business being rides, click a button, get a ride. One of the products that was an experiment at the time was Uber Eats. So I ended up working on Uber Eats for four years, started on the growth performance side, and then moved into product marketing. So I've seen a lot within the marketing world. So I would say I'm a true generalist. My sweet spot is, I would say, the first marketing hire.

3:03I like building the marketing foundation and then scaling, which I do think brings a unique lens to SEO because I don't come from a longtime SEO background. So when it comes to AEO, my approach is to start with the marketing fundamentals and then build out a strategy based on your marketing strategy, which is kind of similar in product marketing. So product marketing is figuring out, okay, Who is your ICP? Who is your audience? How are you targeting them? What message do they respond to? You know, it's back to marketing 101, which I feel SEO for a long time actually kind of steered away from that.

3:45And there was a lot of kind of hacks that you could do. And so SEO got quite specialized into what are you doing to kind of feed the algorithm? where I think, and I think you said this before, in one of our conversations, the pendulum is kind of switched towards kind of more classic marketing where AEO is rewarding having a deeper marketing foundation, not just the hacks. And like with that, how, because I do agree, it's like there was a time where it was just like almost blind keyword research where it's like it could be whatever word and it's just like search volume position great good and there wasn't like as much emphasis too on like conversions it was just more of like we bring traffic to the site and then good luck and now it's like obviously some of that just general traffic is moving elsewhere and I feel like you have more of been that like well what's our purpose?

4:51Like, what are we trying to achieve with it? So like, how do you and it sounds like from that perspective is like, you're starting first with that initial kind of like, how am I trying to drive the consumers or like the brand as a whole, rather than like, a specific query or keyword? Yeah, so I think there's two big changes when it comes to how AI search works versus traditional search. One is it is a recommendation engine. So it's summarizing information. And so thus less is showing up in terms of before you would search a keyword and you could get tons of blue links and you can go through as many of those as you want.

5:41Now it's going to make a recommendation of call it five to 10. And so it's now summarizing all of those search results for you. That's one big change. Two is that the way that people search in order to get a recommendation of a brand or a company, it's usually a more commercial search. So SEO had a lot of informational searches where someone was looking for information on something, and you might create content around that in hopes that they would click through to your content, maybe understand your product or brand and then hopefully convert an informational search to a commercial intent. Whereas in AI, that informational search is not going to bring up a brand mention or a citation.

6:25And so that's changed the game to becoming much more commercial. So with that, it's changing your fundamental strategy in that you need to show up in those recommendations. And the strategy you take to do that needs to be much more commercial. I think the big thing we see is that when it comes to recommendations, AI is quite good at understanding differentiation, which comes back to the marketing fundamentals. If what is being said around you online on your website is similar to your competitors, it's not going to know how to recommend you or your differences because you're going to look the same as competition.

7:09So that's when I say it comes back to product marketing. That's the very start of product marketing. We have this new product or feature. We need to bring it to market. We need to understand what message our target is going to respond to. And I feel like we are back to that. In that sense too, it's like I've heard other people kind of refer to it more of like a specialization or having like more persona-driven content but it's like in a lot of ways it's similar speaking to that same piece of like what is the position of this brand as a whole feature product solution whatever facet maybe if you've gone back to those basics and you identified great we're going to focus on this positioning from it we did our consumer research with it then how are you also transforming that into is that more within the four walls of the website how much could be off site because i think like that's another area that i've seen like seo expand is it's less of like just our four walls and also like well where else are we sending those signals to then create that positioning if you will yeah to me this is actually the biggest misconception with aeo is I think there's a lot of talk around all the different places you need to be now in order to show up in AEO.

8:37Whereas I think what we're seeing is, A, most brands and companies have not figured out what their differentiation is. They haven't done that positioning exercise. And therefore, scaling those channels means they're not going to be consistent across these channels, which what we're finding is consistency matters. And it starts at a foundation. and the foundation is often your website. And so if you've done that positioning exercise, you know what makes you great, you know what makes you best in class compared to your competitors, and you're doing that well on your website, then you have a foundation.

9:15Most companies, there's still a lot of work to do there. So what we find is that the start of an AEO project is often within those four walls. Let's make sure that we know our messaging, we know our positioning, We've answered all of our customer questions that they may be typing into an AI chat bot within the website. And then we can go to those other platforms and help reinforce that. But just by starting all of these channels all at once, it's hard to keep that consistency, which in many ways is going to work against you rather than with you. it's like don't it's still a walk run where it's like you have to first address your foundational elements and then yes there are some additional icing like i don't want to say frills but like there are other things that are expanding as far as i think frills is good you know it's the you know it's the icing the sprinkles the cherries but if you don't have the cupcake Like it's just a pile of sugar.

10:19Right. And so is that is that one of the more common, I guess, catches or mistakes that you're noticing in the industry? I think it's the is it a mistake? It's when we see agencies pitching, they're out often pitching, oh, we do five channels for you. And my marketing brain is like, well, are you doing those five channels well? or are we just pumping out useless content across five channels? That's actually not helping us because if our customer actually goes to those channels and reads what we're putting out for the purpose of AEO, is it going to make us look bad? So, I mean, I had the same recommendation when I worked as a fractional CMO.

11:05So after I left Uber, I was a fractional CMO for three years. And the number one reason companies would come to a fractional CMO is we're doing a lot of marketing and none of it's working. And it was usually that problem. They hadn't done their positioning exercise of understanding what makes them different and why customers choose them. And two, they were just running too many channels and none of them will. And I think the same paradigm now exists in AEO where there's a lot of influencers on LinkedIn with the next hottest channel. And now agencies are forced to offer clients, oh, we do all five channels.

11:44We cover Reddit, we cover LinkedIn, we cover X, and all of that is being pulled in. But if you're doing none of those well, it's not going to move the needle. Which and so some of that, I guess, is like to your previous point on like within the four walls and like those fundamentals. is that more like when you're thinking of like why the seo fundamentals still matter is it more in that sense of like establish that within your domain and have that clear piece so then when you get to those you're pointing back to or is there something else to within like the fundamentals that you think is yeah worth calling out i mean i think the the point worth calling out is how LLMs work, which still has SEO fundamentals, which is LLMs are often doing a real-time search.

12:36They have their own proprietary search algorithms. Or if you're on Google Gemini, it's still sitting on top of Google. You still will type in questions where they won't do a real-time search. And so that's trained on everything that's been on the web in the last three to six months. But SEO still matters. How your website is ranking across the key terms you care about is going to impact your AEO. So when I say that it's still SEO fundamentals, I think we can't throw good SEO out the window if you still need to be ranking. I think what we can throw out is some of the SEO hacks that have been done over the last five to 10 years, which are just not going to work anymore.

13:22But that's how all marketing works, right? A new frontier emerges, you have to learn the new game and you play differently. I think what I like about where AEO is taking us is that the game is being played more like classic marketing and brands are being rewarded for being good marketers, which I think SEO got a bit away from that for a little while well and it's it's also kind of funny because even your piece earlier on like consistency of like well yeah you have to make sure that like the content or the value props that you're creating on the website is going to be then consistent with those other areas it's like that's almost like a principle of also local seo just consistency of So like, yeah, if Google sees one name address combo, another name address combo, there's going to be then a weakening of criteria.

14:17And like, there's not as much confidence in that. LM, you see a lot of similar principles where it's like they're looking for consistency. And a lot of these are like basics that we've operated within. it's just like yeah to me it's like it is a it's the same game it's a slightly different board that we're playing on agree it does bring back to like more consumer behavior driven elements versus just the like yeah quick win hacks i mean it's fun to say seo is dead and here's the new frontier it's just not the reality it's the game has changed but good seo still matters yeah and i i think in a lot of ways in that same sense it's like we're not we're not necessarily getting away from that but it is interesting of how like people are looking at it um we talked earlier too around kind of like looking at like visibility and footprint and like understanding that to then guide the next steps.

15:29I know you have an AI visibility kind of piece within the website. Tell me a little bit about how you use that. Like how does that, I'm assuming also play into this like brain positioning that you mentioned at the top? Yeah. So the fundamental metrics have changed. So I think that's a big part of the shift from to AEO from SEO. To your point, a lot of the SEO foundation is still there, but the way you're now measuring success is a little bit different. We are a hybrid of a tool and an agency. Our tool is a lot around the metrics. How do you measure? because that's a big part of what's changed.

16:15And so we are looking at visibility. How often is your brand showing up in the queries that you care about in AI? And how often is it being cited? And what is the sentiment of those citations? Which I think is a little bit different than traffic. Just measuring impressions, clicks. You're actually looking at, okay, in a high intent query, what percent of the time is your brand showing up versus your competitor? This also makes measurement harder because traffic's just a little bit cleaner. Traffic is easier to fit in existing attribution tools and saying, okay, someone has clicked something on our website.

17:00They've gone through. They may have looked at a pricing page. You can see more about the journey. Whereas a brand mentioned, you don't know how much that influenced someone's choice. What we see is sometimes you'll see a change in direct traffic. But honestly, the best way to measure is, especially in the B2B side, is how are people hearing about you? So on your sales calls, how did you learn about us? And that's where we're starting to see more people say, oh, ChatGPT. or I did a search on Gemini and you were recommended. Because the brand citations is going to give you kind of a leading indicator or directional insight and is what we're doing to influence us appearing in AI helpful.

17:50But at the end of the day, it's very hard to tie it to your existing marketing conversions. And what would you say like the updated or kind of like new KPI funnel should be? So it's like we're looking at visitability, I'm assuming, across a variety of search platforms. Like what would be kind of your ideal world? Like if a company came to you and it's like, how do I attribute success in search right now? Ooh, I mean, we usually say are more people coming in referencing ChatGPT. And that can be done on consumer products as well. So in an e-commerce flow, how did you hear about us? We say, did that lead to a conversion?

18:43That's the best way to measure. But in order to get a good feedback loop of understanding what's working, you need to understand, okay, what are the leading indicators that lead to that conversion? Unfortunately, I think the best we have for that is, are we getting more citations? Are we getting mentioned more often? Are we closing the gap between what our competitors are being mentioned for that we want to be mentioned for? And that's kind of the best you can do in terms of leading indicators. Although I'd be curious if you're seeing other metrics that you guys are following. I think I actually do think impressions are an interesting one not in the sense of like looking at it from like a keyword perspective but it's like as Google I mean Google's released it for a lot not all yet like their additional kind of reporting things made a little bit of noise kind of that too but I think like impressions are interesting because yeah you're not seeing the exact query or necessarily prompt but you're seeing also the page that is getting that exposure and so it's like being able to then understand okay these would be the prompts that would lead to that page and that impression and then tying that into because what i hear more and more is like impressions up traffic down conversions depends yes and so it's like a lot of people you have that compressed buying cycle because more of it's happening outside largely that's going to be ai visibility impressions in some form or even like crawl logs i would say are super interesting of like every time you have a citation you are also going to get a ping whether or not that page is a live 200 url so that can be detected too every time you have that ping well now you you don't know the the prompt that triggered it but it's like you know that that was been an impression that you can kind of track to um but i think it's like it's more cards in the hand rather than like it is step a b c 100 absolutely which is kind of back to like overall marketing you know like most good marketing is very difficult to measure and often can't be captured in an attribution funnel.

21:08Brand, for example, I think we learned a lesson on that at Uber because I came from a performance background. I came from being a very analytical marketer where everything is measurable and I run ads and I see directly how they convert. And then when I was at Uber, we had a brand problem. People thought we were the evil bad guy and Lyft was the positive brand, but we didn't put any attention into our brand. And then the problem got worse and worse. And then finally, we started, you know, it was a team of performance marketing. We had no brand people. And finally, a few marketers were like, hey, I think we need to start thinking about this brand thing.

21:48And it took a while to convince leadership. And then we started to invest in brand and try to turn around the narrative of the company. and that made a big difference for the company. I think Uber today is no longer perceived in the same way it was perceived back then. And that's a big part of brand marketing that you're not gonna see in an attribution funnel. Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Previsible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You can pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges.

22:28Or you can work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategy-less project with low success rate. None of those sound very good, now do they? Well, that's where Previsible's integrated consulting model comes in. Previsible draws from a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Prefizzable's four-stage approach ensures that your SEO programs thrive by starting off with a strategy-first approach.

23:03Then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues, and most importantly, they'll work with your cross-functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, eBay, Canva, Atlassian, Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Previsible. For more information, go to previsible.io. That's previsible, P-R-E-V-I-S-I-B-L-E.io.

23:39No, and I know this is kind of like... Is that right? Side quest. going yeah but i'm like what was like what was the tipping point that got then okay hey we do need to invest in brand like this is impacting everything like what big one i don't know if you remember delete uber the campaign the delete uber campaign happened and internally we We were like, we have no idea why this happened. And we're not sure what actions we did that led to this. And it finally allowed marketing to have a voice. We were like, hey, we've been over here. Like, we got to figure out this brand marketing thing because our perception is not good.

24:27And that moment, the whole company was like, okay, cool. We're going to take our performance marketing budget. We're going to take a big portion of that and we're going to start to think about reputation and brand and how people feel about us, which is fundamentally how humans choose to buy. That's interesting that it was like so pointed of like that was the moment. It was not great. I feel like we could have avoided that long before. We also had, I mean, this is really getting into the side quest, but we had, there was so many positive things about Uber in the early days that we just never chose to, we weren't telling those stories because there was no one in the company whose job it was to tell those stories.

25:11And one big example of this is when Uber entered into a city, the amount of drunk driving accidents just plummeted. Deaths from drunk driving plummeted. And so just an amazing stat and story that we never told. So we had a lot of things like this of when you give people access to transportation, when you give people access to work, what does that do for a place? Obviously, Uber is a hard company to manage and there's a lot of dynamics there, but we just never told a lot of those stories. Interesting. And so with that, to me, I'm like, we've heard this narrative in SEO where it's like you have old traditional companies of like, oh, they just don't get it.

26:02They don't understand how search works now. And it's like, I feel like there was a lot of frustration stories around like more traditional brands that were focused on some of those broader PR areas and things like that. Now, fast forward, we're seeing there's like a rebalancing in the industry with these changes. on one hand you're like there are brands that are then more experienced more conditioned more practiced in this brand positioning kind of traditional marketing arena at the same time I feel like you do have like an inside lane especially in like a really competitive industry where it's like you may like if I was a smaller brand in a very competitive industry I'm like great now is my opportunity like there's something I can take advantage of now there's a new like I can pivot quicker how would you say like who has the advantage in that sense of like someone that's more practiced in these traditional areas or someone that's like more ability to react quickly like I don't know who who do you think is the advantage I love this question I do think overall marketing is always a game of speed.

27:23So which means there's always opportunities. And I, to your point, I think now there's a lot of opportunity for some of these smaller players in a, in a frontier where they can start, they can be in the arena, essentially. I don't think you have to be a storied brand or an old brand to figure out your positioning, your differentiation between your competitor set. So the big companies that have invested in brand for years don't necessarily have an advantage. It's going through the exercise of figuring out who are your customers, what do they care about, what are your competitors doing, and how are you different, and how are you better?

28:05And no one has an advantage in that. That's just classic marketing strategy. Even Coca-Cola is not necessarily better at that. And they have one of the biggest marketing budgets of any Fortune 500 companies. So to your point, I think there's a lot of opportunity in AEO for smaller players that they can play in the arena. They still have to have a foundation, which includes the classic marketing. but a lot of these older brands that have been around for years are who were good at seo are not showing up as much in ai search and we see that all the time seo doesn't necessarily translate into aeo especially for companies that were doing kind of hacky seo that not the fundamentals like you're talking about where you know consistency matters is your phone number the same is your address the same you know like good seo is more like oh if we take advantage of all these hacks Hacks are always short term.

29:07That's just the nature of them. Yeah. It was just, we can produce a million pages, so we probably should create a million pages. Exactly. And being bigger and having more capital probably made that easier back then. Today, anyone can do that. And you're not going to win the game by running that strategy. So I think it's a more level playing field. and i do want to be mindful of time if you had one piece of advice to share with like someone that comes from the opposite side of the experience where they are the analytical purebred seo that was creating millions of pages like what advice would you have to give them of like coming from the other side of the aisle.

30:00Ooh. I think I'd probably say the same thing that I've been saying, which is figure out what makes you unique, different, or the companies that you're working with and make sure that everything you're doing, even if it's traditional SEO, is reinforcing those messages. is in a lot of ways and i don't know why like a sports analogy is like keep like just jumping out to me in this is it's like yeah like it doesn't matter you still have to put in the work and it's like you even though you have new tools new things it's like it still depends how much effort you put in how much attention to those details are you willing to do and i think like the smaller players that are beating the bigger ones it just to me comes down to like well they were putting out more effort more consistency more yeah i mean marketing is always like that i think we always want the magic wand where you wave the wand and marketing happens but marketing is a very difficult practice.

31:12It's never the same. It's always fluid. And a craftsman, having the craftsman mindset is probably the most important skill, which is if you're just going through the motions of here's the things that you need to do, your marketing is probably not going to work. And it's always been like that way. And I know I just said the last question there, But what's exciting you most? Because it's like, I feel like you're applying an expertise and an experience in like a new facet of the same industry. It's like coming into also, yeah, the space that you guys are operating in. It's like what's driving you?

31:58What's making you excited to then take on this new endeavor and this new chapter? Oh, there's a lot. I mean, I like new. I'm a marketer. I like to figure out a new puzzle. I think the most exciting thing is what we just said. It's the smaller players have a chance. And so new game to be played, smaller players that are willing to put in the effort, willing to do the work are going to be able to play in that game against their big competitors. And in marketing, those opportunities only come every few years when there is kind of a shift. And so I think we're going through a shift, which is exciting for challenger brands.

32:38100%. Well, with that, we're going to jump into the lightning round questions. So these will be five shorter form questions thrown at you. The first one I want to ask, what's the biggest misconception about AEO today? That you have to do many channels to show up in AI search. And to someone that's being tempted by that, they've heard Reddit, they've heard all these different other avenues, like how do you ground them? You should do an AI visibility audit. So pick one of the tools. We have a free tool. put your company in there, put your competitors in there and see what AI is citing. Rarely will you see Reddit in there.

33:29Rarely are you going to see LinkedIn as one of those top sources. It's the easiest way to debunk that myth. And also that should be music to a lot of the traditional SEOs ears knowing, hey, you can still apply the same practices in this new flavor. What's one SEO habit marketers should stop doing?

33:56Broad keywords. So trying to go very broad, the game is getting more specific. And so if you're doing keyword-based SEO, which still applies today, you want to get you want to keep it specific don't don't go too far just for grabbing traffic because that's going to hurt you in ai search and it's less about chasing that high search volume and i'm assuming it's more of alignment to the brand positioning rather than just whatever had the highest 100 and all around those commercial terms so what of what's actually going to drive the traffic that matters or the intent that matters for your business.

34:45Next question I have for you. What's one advantage you have from a traditional product marketing background in today's AI search environment? I think it's that process. So with everyone we work with, we go through that positioning exercise at the start of the journey. And so as a product marketer, I've done this many, many times. So I think it gives us an advantage in helping businesses refine that. So once we start executing, we are helping them with the right message and helping them stay consistent. And what does that process look like as far as going through that brand position? If someone's just looked at keyword search volume, what's the overview of that process?

35:47The process. It's a lot of condensed brand workshops. So we take them through the initial questions about their business. Who is your customer? Why do they buy? Who are your competitors? How are you different from your competitors? Where are the differences in terms of products and services? Are there feature differences? Kind of going deeper in terms of their kind of the what are you offering that's different? And we can condense that. So if big brands do that in a brand workshop with a very fancy, expensive agency that's going to charge you 100 ,000 to do that. We can do that. You can do a smaller version of that and still get a very good output in a couple of days.

36:37And to me, that's something that's also really cool about the industry today is you don't have to just rely on these six-figure consumer research, census group things it's like you have the access to that same data and I think like that's one of the real exciting things too of like what search data can tell you is like you have access to the most massive sample like test pool it's just more of how do you make use of that and then bring that into agree yeah and also the speed the ability to say hey what are what is the price of all my competitors cool uh what is their top message okay cool uh you could do that so much faster before that was a long process yeah and it's like it's a matter of days or weeks rather than like a six month six figure exactly so yeah i think that ai is also unlocked that for us is it like i don't think we could offer what we're offering today if if we weren't able to do to get access to that information so quickly.

37:50Fair. What's one marketing fundamental that AI will never replace?

38:03Ooh. I mean, I don't think marketing is going to be replaced with AI in the way that people think. I think that the core of marketing, which is the strategy, which is what we've been talking about this entire conversation, is not going to get replaced with AI because it takes a human to synthesize and understand human emotion, to understand why someone purchases your product. But you can scale with AI. So this is why I keep coming back to the positioning because input equals output in AI. So if you're trying to scale your marketing efforts and you're having AI doing a lot of drafting of ads, tweets, LinkedIn posts, if the message that you're putting in there or the inputs you're putting in there are not good, you're going to get crap out.

38:58And so that marketing strategy, the center of all that, the core, is still quite human because it's based on your insight of selling to humans. So I don't think that's going to get replaced with AI anytime soon. AI is allowing you to scale bad marketing, which I think we're seeing a lot of. But humans that are still doing good marketing have an incredible tool with AI in terms of scaling their efforts. Yeah, it's an amplifier. Absolutely, great word. Where if you were on point and doing the right work, now your reach is that much greater. But if it was terrible before, now it's just very terrible yes and it has the potential to be become more terrible faster true and at least at least you know you get that feedback sooner that's true and with that too i feel like it comes back to that just the human elements whether it's like yeah there's consumer behavior there's emotion there's unique creativity involved it's like those are still the things that are going to create a emotional response to your messaging, to whatever content, whatever touch point you're having.

40:17And it's like, it's again, it's that tool for amplification, but not necessarily the muse underneath. Exactly. Yeah. One of my, one of my close friends is actually on the brand team for Coca-Cola. And when I was talking to them about where they're focusing now that they have, you know, they have access to all these AI tools. And they were saying just that more time spent on who are our customers, how do they feel, what's going on in their everyday life, more around the human side of marketing. Interesting. I feel like that could be an entire conversation too of like taking a brand as broad and vast as Coca-Cola into like well what are those common threads because you have such a broad array of consumers absolutely this is where it's like a niche product like to me it's like that's very obvious and bright in your face, the more generalized it becomes.

41:27Like, to me, that activity becomes a lot more challenging. Absolutely. This almost goes back to what we're saying around being how small brands have somewhat have an advantage here is they don't have to sort through that because that answer is going to be a lot clearer. You're going to know your customer better if it's a much smaller target group.

41:51which, yeah, so then you have an advantage and disadvantage. Yeah, exactly. Always, always, right? Yeah. What AEO strategies are not working today to move the needle? Ooh.

42:13We see a lot. So a lot of this is not happening as much anymore, But in the beginning, there was a lot of this programmatic, just pump out stuff using AI. It's all about volume and programmatic pages. That's not working. The algorithms, no. It's kind of like content farming. It's back to that. But it worked in the beginning. And so there was a big spike and then it crashed. The multi-channel, as we've talked about. And so just do it, trying to do every channel, but no channel well. is not going to move the needle much for you. It's going to be very expensive. We don't see that working as much.

42:56I'm trying to think if there's any other big ones that are not working. A lot of the classic SEO best practices that are like the length of the article and the keyword stuffing, that's not going to work in AI search. Anything else you guys are seeing? it's a lot of the checklist going through the motion type items and so it's like yeah they could be all those but I think again it comes back to like your purpose and intent behind doing the activities and anytime and it's I think a lot of times why a lot of like the SEO checklists are usually like not very valuable is because it's just like great i have a hundred things that could be improved what do i do with this what's the importance what's the value what's the direction behind um but i think like the common factor for me is like adding something that new whether it's like new perspective in content or new like creative angle it's like if you're just regurgitating the same information that lives on in a thousand different web pages it's like there's nothing really that separates and so it's like I guess in the spirit of this conversation it's more of like well what is that to that brand positioning but I think like the common thing is like yeah you have to introduce something that new.

44:35Otherwise, it's just regurgitation of the exact same thing that's already existing. And then why would it? I do think that's where the industry is going. I think the algorithms are going to get better and better at understanding authenticity. And it won't be about whether you wrote with AI or a human wrote it. It's rather are the ideas and the information in there authentic. It can be fully drafted with AI because it's actually very hard to detect that it's is this a new opinion is this new information is this unique and it is yeah because it's like it's a very thin line of like well is it unique in the sense of I didn't think of creating it or compiling it in that same viewpoint but I think again that's where it's like a lot of like firsthand experiences like something that can be net new offered has like such intrinsic value um and it's also that much harder to replicate agree well with that that is going to wrap up this episode of the voice of search podcast thanks again to jenna hannon founder and ceo of hatter for joining us if you'd like to contact Jenna, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in their show notes, or be sure to go on over and check out her company's website at gethatter.ai and be sure to check out their free AI visibility tool.

46:06If you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing and AI search knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed in the following day. That's all for today. Thanks for stopping by and we'll see you in the next episode. Thank you.