Why SEO Rankings No Longer Drive Purchase Decisions

0:00Jason Lax: The 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, a member of the I Hear Everything podcast network. Ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts? Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Jordan Cooney.

0:42I'm Jordan Cooney, and joining me today is Jason Lacks, senior SEO and AI expert at SAP. Jason, welcome to the Voices of Search podcast. Thanks for having me. So you've been on the show before, Jason, so you're not a stranger to the Voices of Search. You've also been at SAP for a very long time. I'm very much honored to actually talk to someone who's been doing search at a single enterprise brand like you have. In today's modern, if we want to call it modern, I don't know if we want to call it modern, a job market, people are jumping around quite a bit. They don't traditionally stay at one place.

1:20I just want to start off with just kind of tell us your personal story. Why have you stayed at SAP for so long? And what keeps you going in this SEO, GEO, AEO world? Like what's making you excited about where we are today? Wow. And most of the time people ask me exactly, you know, both what is the company and what do I do there? Three-letter acronyms, SAP then SEO. Right, right, right. Yeah, it has been a long time. Happy times. Of course. You know, I started off working on a rather big website dealing with our customers, the community side of things. And it's been really exciting. We started like a little SEO program, realized that we can change the titles and meta descriptions and take into account a few technical SEO things and Google Search Console at the time.

2:11And we saw our traffic grew and just developed a program from that, went through some. And I've been privileged, too. I mean, we've had massive site migrations. Imagine merging a separate blog and form and content repository into a brand new content management system, which is meant to have everything in one, only for spammers to completely take over, of course. Right. And several migrations and really just build a program up from that. There are still people I work with today that I've been working with for many years, which is great. And those relationships count in a very large organization to get things done.

2:54And I've also had the benefit of being able to try things on a scale, of course. You know, I suspect that even Google's used our website to test things like schema markup sometimes. And these are things and issues and challenges that we only see at the scale we have and also the global audience. Our company is present almost in every market. Wow. So when things happen in the United States, we can actually see them roll out across the world. Just like France, for example, we enabled the AIO reviews and suddenly, you know, we've got enough volume there to see that happen and see, you know, the impact of that.

3:35So, but it's been a while, but you know, exciting times, people come and go, but again, you Yeah, but the SEO person has stayed the same. So on that point, Jason, what's exciting about where we're at today with SEO? I mean, you mentioned some of the cool data that you guys get to see on a global scale. And you've seen transformations before, right? You were at SAP when mobile became the dominant way of crawling and determining a site's context, right? Uh, you've been at, at SAP when social media took over and was, was the talk of the town. And for, for, for many, many individuals who, um, are in our industry, there was this belief that, that, that social media would kind of take over and be the predominant way of discovery.

4:31That didn't happen. Search engines still prevailed and continued to, to, to exist. Um, so like, tell us what, what makes you excited about right now where we're at in, in this AEO, GEO world. And what do you guys call it at SAP? You guys call it AEO, GEO? What's your main three-letter acronym? Well, I mean, I think even what we call ourself is becoming a bit of a challenge because SEO doesn't tell the full story anymore. And even though we've called it SEO for several decades, things have always transitioned, have always evolved, and that's forcing us to rethink about, you know, not only what we call ourselves, but how we measure success and how we optimize the SEO, AEO, GEO kind of makes sense because that shows that evolution, but it doesn't mean anything will be left behind.

5:21I mean, SEO will still be relevant for different reasons. But I think what's really exciting is that, I don't want to say exciting, sometimes it's really stressful, but there is so much change and so many things to keep track of, but also brings a lot of opportunities. And there isn't necessarily a single playbook yet. I think right now the...

5:47That's a tough question. But it's exciting. It's exciting in the sense that what really actually maybe inspires me is going back to those marketing classes I did back in university. This was back in Montreal. Really downwind from a tobacco factory strong memories there. And the marketing teacher at the time said, you know, marketing, the starting point is your four Ps, your product, your place, your price, and your promotion. SEO has always been really strong on the promotional thing. And now with the tools we have available to us and what people are using, we can actually get direct feedback on what the audience thinks about our product, our pricing, where and how we're selling it.

6:29In many ways, going back to the roots and it's been really inspiring to actually see all that come together and find and discover a lot of opportunities to pursue based on that and then collaborate in different ways and whereas like people come to us at the end of the journey like okay here's our product go and promote it now we're actually being able to set stuff back saying hey look this is how the audience perceives the product um based on the insights we can gain now by asking the right questions and measuring them, we need to look at this and see if we need to maybe change our product or at least how we sell it or correct misinformation.

7:07That's something we couldn't do with just rankings alone. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned this earlier in our episode already, which is like the fact that you've worked with a lot of people at SAP over the years. You have a lot of relationships. What are you seeing in those relationships that is changing as AI becomes more dominant in the conversation? How have those relationships paid off for you in how you think about doing work at SAP and executing the strategy you all have around organic? Just curious in your lens on the relationship piece, just because of how big and global your organization is, that's another level of complexity that most folks don't get to operate in.

7:53We also have the advantage of having the brand, of course, and the authority that comes with that. And that's not something I take for granted, of course. And we've published on this on our website, some of the things things on this and really in, let's say, optimizing for AI as its own persona, which makes sense. and it's valid because it is its own thing. But in terms of relationships, for example, I find that technical SEO is still very fundamental to making sure that the content is found, indexed, understood properly, understood accurately. A lot of those relationships I've built have helped enable that those back practices are held and understood and adhered to.

8:36And therefore, when there's opportunities to improve, Again, people do listen because they've seen the impact of doing that. Again, the fundamentals of the technical SEO still rang true when we talk about AEO and GEO. But again, now also, you know, a lot of people are realizing that the way they use AI is shifting or changing the way they experience the world around them in their own ways. And that's obviously spilling over into the business world as well. You know, just imagine that if I wanted to start a new sport, I would go to AI and ask, you know, recommendations for equipment. And it would give me an idea of who to look for.

9:15And I don't need to do the research as much anymore on my own, visiting every website or even go to the store. It gives me an idea of, you know, which brands to look at. And people are starting to realize, like, hey, you know what, the way I use it in my personal life, people are doing it also in business when they have to find a new solution to solve a problem or challenge they experience. Yeah. And people are starting to wake up like, okay, rankings don't tell the full story. Yeah. And on that note of like rankings don't tell the full story, I mean, one of the things you mentioned in our kind of planning session is that SAP is one of the leading brands in terms of citations, right?

9:52Like that you guys are seeing a lot of success in these AI responses. And what's interesting about that is that there's, A, a lot of confusion over what that means, right? So it's almost like you're educating all these partners as to what this new visibility concept is. And then I think the bigger question is the influence piece, right? Like how you influence what you're doing every day to be more sighted or more visible in AI responses. But I wanted to start off by getting your understanding of how much of this success that your team has had is a part of just the big brand or the momentum that you've had over the years?

10:44And is there a way for you to kind of decipher, hey, these are the SEO things that we've done versus this is just this giant global brand that we have? I remember when I joined the global SEO team at the time many years ago, the first thing I did was to say, look, we're going to split our time between technical and content. Because it's very easy to focus on one and forget the other. I won't say forget, but to get really, I mean, you can do technical SEO 100 % or 110 % of the time. Right. If you leave out the content bit, you're going to miss out on a lot of opportunities. So that's something that's been foundational and that's been paying dividends.

11:24So I remember when I joined the global SEO team from the user content side many years ago, the first thing I did is I told the team that we're going to split our time between the technical SEO and the content SEO. At the time, we were too focused on the technical, which was great. You do this and that, you have a win, but the content was the real opportunity. And again, just really splitting things really set the foundation for success. because, you know, at least on the technical side, we've been experimenting with href line tags way back when I was hand coding them to show that they work and we finally automated them, which has been fun and exciting.

12:02And then schema markup, which is great, adding more specificity to the pages, as a good colleague Martha would say, schema app. And also other things to speed up the site and making sure everything can be crawled and indexed properly. and also making sure what shouldn't be indexed or who shouldn't be indexing the site is indexed either. But all that really sets us up for success and there's no question that our content doesn't have a right to be exposed and perform in rank. Now, the content side, that's also been a journey in really understanding the whole idea of search intent, having the right content.

12:45And again, it's not all brand-driven. I mean, the brand definitely helps. I don't take it for granted, but really understanding and having, you know, strong content, strong content teams and identifying opportunities and adapting to those opportunities. And definitely with AI, there are both opportunities and, you know, AI is basically absorbing a lot of the clicks that used to come to the site, which really gives you challenges in measurement, of course. But there's no end. And also with what people see in the AI and LLM strict results also, that's giving us a whole wealth of ideas or inspiration about what actually works today also.

13:25Yeah. Driving that content forward. Yeah. So Jason, you mentioned a schema app team and kind of the great team over there in schema work. And you've done some schema work at SAP. But these foundational layers, right, they're like critical to helping to elevate the brand, as you mentioned. Beyond just schema work, like there's a lot of questions about technical efforts and the value that they create. In particular, you know, a few months ago, you heard a lot of noise around LLMs.txt and utilizing this to be more visible in LLMs. It never really came to fruition, right? And so there is value in doing these technical things, but the way we measure them and what they do for the business is sometimes very challenging, especially in a clickless world where we aren't seeing actual clicks from anything.

14:21So my main question for you here is what's the value of doing this foundational work? How are you justifying it at SAP to ensure that you're continuing to do things that you know are critical or are becoming more and more challenging to measure? I think we take it for granted how good Google is at crawling websites and understanding what's there. Though it's not perfect. I mean, I remember getting dinged for some of my products because Google said you're selling alcohol, only because the image looked like some cocktail glasses. And like, our website's been selling software for 35 years now. How can that happen?

14:56But that's a good example because even Google sometimes doesn't quite understand or it's extra careful. So again, it's this notion of specificity. I was going to say that the last few times. Yep. But making things more specific is still foundational. We want to make sure that everything on the page can and is understood and there's no confusion. Because there is a tax. If something is hard to crawl, hard to see, JavaScript, takes a long time to load, etc., you're going to get dinged for that. Okay. And the ALM bots and crawlers, they might be improving in their capabilities, but they don't visit the site as often.

15:38And they've got a lot of websites to visit. And the more efficient the experience and the easier it is for them to have a precise understanding of what's in the page, you make it easier for them. They're going to make it easier for you to be successful. Right. That's a guy in philosophy. and um you know the idea of schema app 2 or schema markup i should say there's some foundational things within there the whole idea of entities uh and being really specific about what you're talking about in as much as the technology allows you to do one thing and tagging things up on the page so it's really clear that this is a price this is a currency this is the target audience um you also understand from that like you know i've got to make sure my content is clear also.

16:19I can call my product whatever I want to call it, but I still have to describe it in a way that not only Google, but the audience understands that. So it works both ways. Yeah. And one of the things that you mentioned there is these signals, right? And that these are really critical signals to certain buyers, certain audiences that you're trying to reach. Is there a way to justify a signal versus a conversion or an event? And have you found any successful tactics in communicating to your internal stakeholders that these signals matter? Because oftentimes, the friction I'm hearing from a lot of SEOs is that, hey, no one wants to invest in these signals because there's no justification.

17:11There's no message from ChatGPT making me do this or telling me to do this. And thus there's like very difficult conversations around, even if it's a low effort thing, to invest in a signal versus a conversion or an event. I think this is a big challenge for the entire digital marketing industry at this point. And for many years, I mean, growth in organic traffic could have been actually correlated to growth in internet traffic as a whole. I mean, I've seen cases where whole countries suddenly came online with smartphones and you're like, okay, that's interesting, like our traffic increased because this particular country suddenly has access to like 4G networks.

17:55I think this is a challenge for the industry. The whole idea of buyer journeys are shorter and we just look at traffic alone. We might have less traffic that's more engaged because they're doing a lot of the decision-making in conversations with LLMs were. Therefore, those signals being cited, being mentioned accurately become really important. And that correlates, according to some data, with visits down the line. But again, as an industry as a whole, there's a lot more to measure. And I don't have an answer for you. I think we're still learning. But we have an idea of it. We know that being cited more often at the right time does translate to more success down the line.

18:40I mean, I think the evidence is pretty clear on that. And again, there's still a challenge of, you know, we have with keywords, at least we have keyword search volumes to work with, with prompts. A little bit trickier. It is trickier today. Yeah. We're getting a little more data than we used to, but I wouldn't say it's anywhere near the necessary insights to make good decisions. Yeah. And there's something more distracting in these tools when the prompts, you're like, I know this topic well, but that prompt doesn't make sense, and you lose audiences if you're not trying to do the right things because they're starting to picking at it.

19:16One of the things you've mentioned to me, and I really find it valuable in terms of how you message it, is that rankings don't excite you anymore, which is a huge bummer because that was kind of a backbone of how we look at SEO. But tell us why rankings don't excite you anymore and how this transition unfolded at SAP. I won't say how it unfolded at SAP. I think it's still unfolding as a whole. And I see other people in the industry talking about this every now and then that rankings just never told the full story. And it's great to have a number one ranking, but I think anybody who's been in the industry long enough has seen keywords with huge search volume.

20:02they're ranking number one and nobody's clicking through um and also it's great you know tactically yeah i can tweak the title pick some links cross links etc and then wait a few months to see if it moved the needle um and it may or may not and it's a longer journey and you know with with llms and being able to ask them specifically like why didn't you recommend my solution or my brand you're suddenly realizing that, you know, rankings didn't tell the full story. You can actually now get direct feedback. And we should all do this. You know, we should all test and see, like, is our brand being mentioned?

20:40And then when it's not, ask, well, why not? Because from that information, you get a whole range of insights that spawn a whole range of activities you can do and think about. Things like, you know, how to improve your product, how to improve the positioning, maybe even the pricing, those, you know, the four Ps of marketing. These are things that rankings don't tell you. And rankings are still important. You want to make sure when people do see our brand, see our product, they're able to go to a search engine and find us right away at the top of the rankings. It's important, but it doesn't tell the full story.

21:15And that's why it's not as exciting as it was. And it's strange. It's hard to let go. Yeah. But it is a transition yeah it is time we won't get away from it it'll always be that it'll still be measured it's just not as exciting in terms of like driving um forward how to optimize how to improve and so on there's so much more out there now and what are some of those other things that you are looking at nowadays um outside of rankings and and what are what are some of the the the value insights that you think, you know, regardless of whether you're in-house or at an agency, like these are like industry-based metrics that we need to start to like adopt or utilize.

22:04And kind of where are you going in terms of feeding that curiosity and data that you need to do good, you know, work around whether it be technical or content investments across the business? I mean, slowly we're getting access to a lot of cool insights and research to help guide us. I've been spending a lot of time really trying to understand what prompts we should be tracking that are relevant from different data sources. Again, there's a lot more research and we're getting a lot more insights in that because, again, prompts that don't make sense become very distracting and you lose focus on the data it's telling you.

22:44and then I've been also specifically like really asking the ALMs like if if we weren't recommended or mentioned why not and the answers that come back might be right might be wrong might be insightful and again removing SEO from being at the end of the you know the marketing processes we're like you know here's we're putting on a website go optimize it to me now being able to say like you know what 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 or 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?

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24:39This is what the feedback is from the market about this. How do we address this? Or is this accurate? And if it's not accurate, why is that information getting out there and then taking action to correct any misinformation or data gaps? so and what yeah with these data gaps and kind of where you guys are filling in the holes like have you seen that there's any partners or other parts of the business that have really been in more involved than in the past when it comes to trying to understand data trying to understand where organic's going um so many more teams today are asking questions of the seos the organic team members in these enterprise businesses, where are you seeing more excitement and more engagement?

25:28This is not necessarily new when you think about it, because for many years I've been telling people that the journey doesn't start on the website. People are seeing and interacting with their brands in search results. And now people are realizing that that's actually happening maybe a lot of the time, if not most of the time, before they even arrive on the site. There's this whole world out there that we might have control over, or we might only have influence over, or we have no control over, and then we need to find ways to interact with that. So, you know, looking at what gets cited, for example, we started to identify types of content that are cited most frequently, and then say, hey, do we have anything like this?

26:09Get inspired for different types of content we can be publishing that, you know, help the audience and ultimately help expose our brand. And then get an idea of which websites help influence decisions. We can think of some of the review sites, for example. They might have different segments or different business sizes. If our solutions are deemed only to be for very large companies and we realize, well, that's actually not true, do we appear in the right segment? So on. And then even fundamental things, going back to the whole relationship with schema markup and so on. Are we even describing our products in the right way so that the ALMs understand that this solution that we call, whatever we call it, is clearly understood to be a solution for this type of software or industry and so on.

27:00So, yeah. Yeah. On this piece, because you've mentioned this before, right? That we're moving from this reference era to this inference era. And this is definitely on this theme, right, as you share some of these examples of how LLMs are describing or highlighting what SAP products are. Tell our listeners what you mean by that and share some examples, if you can, of how you've been seeing that transition from reference to inference. I took some notes here for that because I wanted to be as precise as possible. Now, the reference arrow was lookup. You type a keyword, you get a list of documents or links, and you do the synthesis yourself.

27:44Which is funny, when you look at some Google research from 2015, it was funny that we assume that the executives are doing all the search and research and so on. But it turns out that they just give it to an intern for the summer to do. So now we just give it to LLMs. So again, reference was just look up keyword, do the research yourself, and so on. And the inference really flips that. people can increasingly describe a situation, not just a topic. We're a company of this size. We've outgrown this solution or have this challenge. What should we look at? What do we need? Who provides this? In many ways, it's kind of like selling medical solutions, for example.

28:29I've got two kids. I don't start searching on the medicine name or I start searching on the symptoms they have. to try and figure out what I need. So that's been the flip. Really, the ALMs to really understand what you need based on these conversations. And again, keyword research misses it. The prompts aren't keywords. They're longer. They're situational. They're full of context. Things that were always maybe assumed and understood from the search box from Google. And again, we don't have any strong data volume to go with it. so we could reverse engineer some of it. But that's really the shift in many ways.

29:10I hope that clears that up. Yeah, no, I mean, this shift is definitely something that I want to dig into further because I fundamentally believe that these are the kinds of mental models that are going to help SEOs become more effective at their jobs. Yeah. Right? And in this inference kind of era that we're moving towards, what ends up happening to things that we used to do like keyword research? Because keyword research, like we were saying before, they're not as exciting as they used to be. So are we still doing keyword research? If so, how? And how is it different in an inference era? The keyword volumes are still really impactful to understand what people are searching for.

30:03But it's important to go back to the whole notion of intent-based search, which predates AI and LLens and so on, really understanding what do the users want. That's why I love for SEO and basically search marketing as a whole, sometimes the best starting point or best starting place is actually the search result page themselves. Do you drop in a keyword there? Google is answering a whole range of search intents. Yeah. And we could, fundamentally, I mean, we're, again, it's nothing necessarily new, but we need to double down on that whole notion of, you know, what's a navigational query, what's informational, what's transactional, you know, what's behind the keyword.

30:46in many ways people just have the opportunity or the need to really use that as a prompt now. I guess in many ways we've been spoiled by Google too. Yeah. And on this intent piece, how do you think about where the concepts like grounding queries, fan out queries, you know, those are like these new techniques that really kind of connect back to traditional keyword research, but obviously have much more integral insights into intent. So how have those efforts been perceived by you and by SAP or other brands that need this kind of data to scale their efforts? it's helpful in many ways we're familiar with it you know remember answer the was answer the public at the time um it was great uh at helping with intent but again fundamentally the toughest challenge with that sometimes is getting something that actually makes sense um can be tied to any type of volume of interest and so on and i guess sometimes when you start with a single keyword you miss certain nuances that are specific to your audience.

32:09I prefer to try and work with a group of keywords for a topic because you get a lot more meaningful insights into what the audience might be looking for. I don't think I have actually seen a tool that does everything yet, and I still do a lot of my own research to try and cover things that actually make sense. But again, it's all rooted back in the whole notion of a 10-based search. which has been, I guess, a great foundation. I mean, it holds true after all these years. Right, right. And from your perspective, obviously as much as marketers are shifting the tactics or the data, so are buyers, right?

32:48So buyers now have much more power than they ever had before to synthesize and to kind of create their own journey, their own intent journey, to your point. So how are you capturing those insights about buyers and getting the intel you need about how buyers are shifting or moving through the buyer journey or the discovery journey with LLMs? I think the jury's still out on how the journey is being impacted. There was some really great research we saw over the past year really explaining how the buyer cycles are shorter now because people are able to come up with what's called the day one short list really quickly and get an idea of who to consider and really get off the ground running, let's say, and start engaging with the brand.

33:42So, you know, that translates into more engaged visits. Yeah. Now, the other thing too is what's been really interesting too is to see a lot of research that we had access to for years, such as insights into our buyer's persona and so on, becoming increasingly relevant. I mean, think about it in terms of how we really try to cater to those audiences and meet their information needs and the challenges they're facing. And if the ALMs are meant to really, let's say, I won't say replicate, but emulate those types of, those intents and buyers and so on, they're looking for content that satisfies that and obviously answers their questions too.

34:29Correct. Yeah. In so many ways, I also want to add that we can also action on that content using AI too. Right. I mean, you mentioned this actually when we were talking in our planning meeting about the types of questions that you should ask LLMs, right? And a lot of the questions you referenced were why questions, like why is my product not being recommended or why is my product being recommended? What have you seen from doing that kind of exercise and what insights are you looking for when you do that? Yeah, I mean, the journey for that was actually really seeing where we are sided and not sided in terms of being recommended for a particular solution.

35:12And then when, you know, identifying where we're not being recommended and then just really asking the question, why not us? And I encourage everybody to do this. Now, when you start aggregating all that data, certain themes start emerging. It doesn't mean like the answers you get back are necessarily accurate. It just means like there's maybe some opportunities in making sure that that content is getting out there. And again, within your website that you can control or other sites that you could influence. And it might fall back to maybe some technical SEO issues that the way the content, that particular piece of information is on the page isn't necessarily in a way that's easy to get to.

35:52And that could inspire a way to optimize your pages for that or using markup, schema markup to tag it. And at the time, there just might be an information gap. Like, hey, you know, we've got this great information. We do have it on our site, but it might be in a PDF or in a video that doesn't have a transcript. Well, let's get the transcript there. Let's see if we can maybe take it from the PDF and put it on the page and so on. So it's really interesting to ask those questions and see what themes generally start to emerge on that. And you get really inspired really quickly about, okay, what can we do?

36:25And again, this is stuff that we didn't necessarily see as precisely just when we were measuring search rankings alone. Correct. I mean, the feedbacks were much faster, right? So the loops of information are much faster. That's what makes it a little bit dizzying, right? It's hard to keep up with all the AI stuff. And then, bam, ChatGPT comes out with a new model. and everything that you've researched on these why questions or any question about your brand suddenly become just a little less relevant because the new model just treats data context a little differently. True. And then when is it going to crawl your site again?

37:04You can't submit a URL to ChatGPT. So how do you think about that context switching that we're constantly dealing with today as LLMs evolve their models, do you think it's going to create less confidence in buyers? Will they use these systems less for their discovery journey? Do you think it'll change the way marketers collect data and insight? Because model changes can happen pretty quickly, and we're seeing that they're much more frequent than we may be able to keep up with. And candidly speaking, there's multiple LLMs, so it even kind of multiplies itself. So how are you looking at that challenge?

37:52It depends where the market goes. And even then, we have our own biases. We think that if we use ChatGPT, everybody does. But within my house, my kids use YouTube as a search engine. My wife uses one LLM. I use another. And if that's within my household, just imagine what happens in the audience, let alone that certain companies might be deploying their own AI models. or restricting people that have access to. Correct, yeah. It's an evolving journey. I think we're going to be learning a lot. I think it's going to be really important to experiment and try things and see what works. And then also we're going to have to get used to the idea that, you know, what comes back isn't necessarily what we want to be there.

38:38But I'm excited by it. I mean, again, I mentioned this before. I mean, going back to those, you know, marketing one-on-one classes way back when, you know, fundamentally, no matter what the channels are or how it's being promoted and so on, if you've got the best product at the best or optimal price in the right place, the right promotion, you're going to be successful. Yep. And now we have not only different channels that exposes this information and helps buyers find your solutions. We also have the same tools that we can use to find out what's working and what's not working and get inspired about how to get our message out there, our products out there as well.

39:18And again, for me personally, it's creating a lot more work. And sometimes I'm just thinking, like, I've had too much and I want to give up. But at the end of the day, I'm probably using alums a lot more than I used Google before. Yeah. You know, not only for work, but to explore it. Yeah. On that behavioral shift, because clearly it's something that's here to stay, right? It's here both as a tool for discovery, which we spend most of our time talking about, but it's also a tool for productivity, right? Like it's something that we use to get work done. And one of the things that is really interesting from what you've noticed is that Microsoft Copilot is one of the most underrated LLMs, right, especially for B2B buyers.

40:07What makes you believe that claim? And how have you come to that realization that this is something that B2B buyers or B2B marketers, excuse me, need to focus on more? I don't want to say like it's the dominant one, but we have to recognize I've had examples of this. I remember way back when that we assumed everybody had access to YouTube at their place of work. And it turns out it was not the case. I mean, I used to work for a bank, for example. I had two computers because I was working on websites. I had a computer that was exposed or connected to the Internet and one that was internal only with only like, I think, six websites I can visit.

40:43hmm so again this goes back we can't assume that you know how we use the internet and what social channels we use is the same thing that the audience not only uses but has access to so just like when there was different social media channels available linkedin or facebook or tiktok or whatever not you have to measure what works for you and focus on that and that's probably very true with LLMs. And again, there are examples of companies just saying, look, you might only allow Copilot, or it comes bundled in right now because we're running MS Office. Other companies or places of work might be using another company's productivity suite, and they're matching LLM, or they might develop their own tools in-house.

41:30But we have to be conscious of that and not assume that the way we use the internet and experience the world is the exact same way as the audience does. And then that puts a huge burden on us that we've, like it was hard enough just to measure Google sometimes and maybe Bing and also the way the internet operates in China. And now you add to the mix perplexity, copilot, so on. It's a lot of data to go through. But we just had to be open-minded. And just like when social started picking you up, we really understand like what works, what doesn't work, and root that back in data, of course, and pursue it.

42:09And kind of last question on this whole Microsoft Co-Pilot piece, because I really do think that this is fascinating, is when you look at how enterprise buyers may have limitations or may have access challenges, how does that make you think about brand and brand efforts from the SEO perspective? and the need, essentially, to have some level of universal brand knowledge, regardless of the model. Look, again, I don't necessarily know what each audience, and this is going to evolve. I know within our company, when you get a new laptop, your default search engine is not Google, which is interesting in itself.

42:58and again what goes on you know really in b2b what goes on within companies can really shape or influence things and then specifically with so many models in so many different ways your products can be perceived yeah it's a huge challenge um you know one thing which has been really interesting is to see where there's model consensus or not and where there's a diversions in understanding or recommendations um and again we have a huge portfolio of products and solutions. So this is something that keeps me up at night. Yet when you get inspired and you start looking for consensus and seeing whether there's variations or not, or all the models agree or disagree, you get pointed in the right direction where to start looking and then see what gets cited by the models and so on.

43:45Again, this, like you mentioned, evolves, just new models coming out and so on. We just have to adapt, you know, and keep an eye on things. And part of that is also was making sure that we're tracking the right prompts over time. I mean, it's easy to add prompts, but you want some consistency there, things that make sense, that really give you insights that are actionable and work. And over time, you can, again, measure those over time and see how things go. I don't have an answer for you. I think we're still learning, and it's still a huge challenge. Everybody who says they've got a playbook, a little bit skeptical.

44:26I'm with you. I'm with you. Well, let's move on to my favorite part of the show, which is our lightning round. I'm going to ask you some questions related to the topics of this week. So Jason, what's the biggest misconception marketers still have about AI search? That it's a separate channel needing separate content. It isn't. It's the same fundamentals, just on whether you're worth mentioning rather than where you rank. Yeah, absolutely true. Love that. Which AI search platform are marketers paying the least attention to today? I'd rather not name one because the risk is always answered from your own habits.

45:12The platform you're under weighing depends on your audience, not mine. I mentioned this earlier. My kids live on YouTube. some enterprises might only allow a specific tool at their places of work. And you've got to measure across all of them and let the data tell you where the gap is instead of assuming that it matches your own usage. And then there's China. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of markets and different audiences, but knowing your own audience and then mapping theirs is a great starting spot. I think it was China and Korea years back that my colleagues there said, yeah, people use Google at work, but then in their personal lives, they use Naver or Yahoo.

45:58Less the case now. Or it was the reverse or something. So it was interesting. The search behaviors were different depending. So that might be the case. I use ChatGPT on my phone at home, and then at work, I use another model. What's one SEO metric you think teams rely on too much? It might be sessions and visits. And we're kind of hung up on that. We're used to it. But as, you know, AI is absorbing the informational clicks, a lot of that low-intent visits or those low-intent visits are dropping off. And the people who do arrive or click through are actually a lot more engaged. So we've got this thing where, you know, volume drops, the quality goes up.

46:36And the catch is that the decline can also mean that you're just losing visibility. So, you know, on the line, the chart looks the same. But again, sessions alone just won't tell you the difference. So you need the mentions and conversions alongside them to really understand what you're seeing. What's one thing every enterprise SEO team should start doing this year? Ask the models why they don't recommend you. Okay. And then start looking at those answers and turning them into tactics or sharing them with the teams that can actually help shift that and turn that around. Yeah, it goes back, I keep going back to this, four Ps of marketing.

47:21Still remember the professor standing in the class, tobacco factory in the background, the product, the place, the price, and the promotion. All of them got to work in tandem. You know, in SEO now, we're not just taking it at the promotional thing and looking for and chasing rankings. really getting insights about what might be the challenge with the product or pricing and so on. We've got access to that now, and we can send that information back. But yeah, again, just ask the models, why not? So crystal ball, looking years into the future here, will we still be talking about SEO rankings? We'll still be measuring a position somewhere, but it won't be the headline, the most important thing.

48:04and the main question will be are you being recommended or not? Are you being recognized? In many ways, that's maybe what it's about. Ultimately, a ranking was a recommendation about where to click through to. A citation is a recommendation about where to validate the answer or maybe even what to do within the answer itself. Yeah. Absolutely. And that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. A huge thank you to Jason Lacks, senior SEO and AI expert at SAP for joining us. If you'd like to contact Jason, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on thevoicesofsearch.com.

48:44If you haven't subscribed yet and want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed every week. Okay, that's all for today. Until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.