AEO in B2B: Earning Your Spot in AI Answers

   

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome. If you're a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today's episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6th and 7th in Palo Alto. We're excited to have five flocking awesome founding sponsors: HG Insights, Boomerang, Webless, Firebrick, and Webflow, and an amazing VIP dinner sponsor with Vidoso. Last year, we brought together over 100 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness, and this year we're doing it again. Same venue, same energy, and same ambition to challenge convention with an added half-day strategy lab exclusively for marketing leaders. Tickets are now available at CMOHuddles.com. Do yourself a favor—check out some of the speakers and experts we have. It will blow you away. You can also watch a video that I am confident will get you pumped up, and it also shows what Gen AI video can do right now. Grab your ticket before they're gone. I promise you we will sell out, and it's gonna be flocking awesomer!

You're about to listen to a bonus huddle where experts share their insights into the topics of critical importance to our flocking awesome community. CMO Huddles. In this episode, Guy Yalif and Omer Gotlieb get into what it means to be AI ready on the web. They share new research on hundreds of B2B sites where gaps in basics like pricing, competition, and use cases can decide whether large language models surface your brand or skip it. They outline how CMOs can design for the buyer and ensure the story being told is the one they want their customers to hear. And by the way, if you're a B2B CMO, you can meet Guy and another 101 amazing marketers at the CMO Super Huddle in Palo Alto, California on November 6th and 7th. See CMOHuddles.com for more. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Hello Huddlers! Today's bonus huddle is a little different. We've got two expert guests instead of our usual one. And that's not just because we like to spoil you, though we do, but because this topic is both critical and frankly unsettled science. When it comes to showing up in large language models, there's no neat playbook. We're writing it kind of together in real time. And it's funny, last month, I was at an event in Silicon Valley, GTM. There were over 100 people there. I asked folks, could we agree and just settle this issue? Is it AEO or GEO? And asked people to raise their hands. And predominantly, everyone went with AEO. So as far as I'm concerned, that issue is settled right now. It's over. We're going to call it AEO, and in a pre-moment with Guy, I also heard that that's all the language that HubSpot is using. And so for those of you out there who are trying to separate AEO and GEO, saying they're different things, give it up. Let's go. Let's focus on one thing, because it's really confusing otherwise. AEO boom, all right, so getting serious for a second. Here's the big issue. Organic site traffic is declining for most brands anywhere from 15 to 80%. Meanwhile, exposure in LLMs is already driving traffic and in some cases, revenue. This has enormous implications for content marketing, thought leadership, and the way CMOs invest their marketing dollars. So we got to unpack this transformative moment, and the good news is we have two terrific guides. Omer Gottlieb, co-founder of Salespea.ai, and Guy Yalif, Chief Evangelist at Webflow. They'll each share their perspective before we bring them together for a lively, lively three-way conversation. And if SEO was complicated, AEO is a whole new ball game, and the robots are keeping score. With that, let's bring on Omer Gottlieb. Hello, Omer.

Omer: Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Drew: Well, and just ground us. Where are you right now?

Omer: I mean, in Palo Alto on my way to Inbound the second day after, you know, a very interesting day yesterday at San Francisco.

Drew: Awesome. All right. Well, you and your team analyzed 1,600 B2B websites, including 100 from our own CMO Huddles community. This was a fascinating study. Can you just give us a little bit—what were you measuring in that study? And then we'll talk about what surprised you about the gaps that you uncovered.

Omer: First of all, I want to emphasize that this is not just a one-time study. This is an ongoing tool that companies can actually use to really figure out whether there are content gaps and whether they're ready for what we call the AI revolution. And as you said before, you know AEO is not complete right now. There's not like a playbook or book. It's all over. And I think there are a couple of things there. One is, how am I getting found? Two, which is what we're actually focused on right now with this report, is when I'm getting found, what are the things that the AI will actually tell about me? And you know, when I speak with a lot of CMOs, they're really concerned because you can invest a lot in the website, in branding, but ChatGPT can do whatever they actually want. So our report basically tries to provide you with an understanding of how tools like ChatGPT and Anthropic and Gemini, how they're looking at your website. What is the messaging they understand from it? What do they think about your value proposition? What do they think about the competition? What do they think about, you know, things that are missing and not missing? Because one thing that you don't know for sure, you know that ChatGPT is going to use your website, but you don't know what the questions are going to be. And that report actually exposes gaps that you have. I was very surprised because, you know, everybody speaks about it like for months, right? It's not news that people need to do something. And yet, I think companies are still struggling between what can I expose versus can I keep that secret? And I think, you know, the two main topics that I was really looking forward to seeing more and more companies exposing are about pricing and about competition. And I understand why in the era before AI, companies did not expose it, right? Speak with us. We'll figure it out. We don't want to share that. But I think what the main understanding right now for companies is that if you don't have data, somebody else is going to steal your narrative. Somebody else is going to provide their point of view on that. So for me, the main thing, the main surprise, there were things that should be trivial, like pricing, like competition, other things we'll cover today. There are some gaps, I think. Again, you know, the CMO cohort is doing much better than the entire more than 2,000 companies up till now. But still, there are gaps over there as well.

Drew: Yeah, no, it was, that was a nice little feel-good moment because we did, and we sent 100 of those reports to members of our Leader Program. You know, it was reassuring, but, you know, let's face it, there's a lot more work to be done. And the point about pricing and competition is just sort of, to me, it's so basic to are you buyer friendly? And if you're buyer friendly, you're going to have that information because in the world of e-commerce, you get that. You're used to it. Amazon has trained us. We get the price, and typically we also see the competition right there. That's kind of basic information, and it's a hump that CMOs have to get over, or their companies have to get over. And if you have complicated pricing, you can still say that, right? I mean, it can be complicated. So this is basic information that was part one. Were there any other findings from this study that you think were really important?

Omer: Well, again, one thing is, what are the gaps that we're missing in many of the companies? And again, we speak mainly about pricing and competition, but it could also be about the company vision. It could be my unique value proposition. I think what really makes the great company greater is if they have data about ICP, persona, and the right use cases, right? Because here's the discussion that's going to be with an AI. People think somebody is going to go to an AI, ChatGPT, and ask, what is the best solution? Or is this solution good for me? That's not the case. People are getting more sophisticated. People are going to ask specific questions. They're going to say, I'm a VP of Finance at a Fortune 500 company. My budget is like this. My issue is like that. I'm already using those things. And I really, you know, I really care about security and privacy. Is this solution good for me? And then the AI will fetch all those things. And if you're missing those kinds of information, one, maybe the AI will not even point at you. Two, your competition is going to fill those things because they provide it. So for me, it's be as transparent as you can. And again, I think the pricing issue makes complete sense here. You know, I've been in sales for many years, run many sales teams, and I completely understand why companies do not, or why companies hesitate in providing exact pricing. But at least give me a pricing range, right? If I have a budget of $100,000 and your solution starts with half a million dollars, that's a no-go. And I want to, you know, I don't want to waste my time. I want to understand those kinds of things. And I think companies need to understand that they will have to expose more in order for the AI to actually recommend them versus other companies.

Drew: You know, and it's so funny because premium price brands, you typically don't lose because you were the most expensive brand. You lose because you weren't worth it. But a lot of people are afraid to put the pricing information because they're worried that it will turn folks away. But the irony is, you want to turn people away who aren't qualified, who aren't, so that you have fewer, you know, you have fewer, better leads. And I think that would be a wonderful goal. But there's, there's just this basic part of this, which is this is information that your buyer wants. You may not be framing it in the way that they're searching for it now, which I think is your key point, and I think that's a really interesting part of this. And so that has to do with Q&As and content and all sorts of things. Going back to your study, it said growth stage companies came out as the most AI ready, while small business product-led firms struggled. Product-led growth firms struggled. Is there a lesson here for CMOs at large enterprises to take from this?

Omer: Certainly, it was an interesting finding. Again, 2,000 companies. It's not 100,000 companies, but I really think it's mainly about the mindset of the CMO. And, you know, everybody speaks about being AI ready. I think my best recommendation there is every CMO—and I know, you know, everybody takes it for granted—but to really put yourself in your buyer's shoes and imagine if you would use AI, how would you actually search for it? What are the questions that you're actually looking for? And when will be the time that you say, okay, I got enough information. I'm going to go and speak with somebody. If you do that, I think some of you will be frustrated because the experience as a buyer today with most companies is difficult. Now, I know there are more challenges with enterprise companies, more complex products, definitely complex pricing, a lot of competition. But that's the world we live in. But that's not an excuse, and we need to change that.

Drew: Okay, one last question for you before we bring on Guy. If you could wave a magic wand and fix just one AI readiness gap across all B2B websites tomorrow—pricing, security, competitive positioning, or case studies—which one would you pick and why?

Omer: I tend to say pricing, but I think pricing is secondary to that, although it's very important for me. It's actually, I would say, the value per use case. Really think of if you can articulate that I am a specific persona in a specific call with a specific problem. If you can articulate why I should choose you, I'm okay. I'll deal with pricing later. But I think most of the companies, they see the website as a generic place, so I don't know who's coming there. So they build a nice stage, really amazing. But then missing a lot of things. AI forces you to actually focus on, okay, this is specifically John Smith from that company. How can I actually provide better information for them? For me, that would be the main thing that you can actually focus on.

Drew: And by the way, to me, this is just smart marketing that you could have done in the pre-AI era, which is you want to solve customer problems. Talk about that, not features. You know, you're in terms of problems that you will solve. And if you can put those problems forward and own those problems over time, you win. All right, with that, let's bring on Guy Yalif, Chief Evangelist at Webflow. Hello, Guy.

Guy: Thrilled to be here with you, and always enjoyed talking with you and Omer.

Drew: And where are you this fine day?

Guy: I actually was with Omer yesterday at Inbound, and I'm here at Inbound again today, although I made a trip to our office to do this.

Drew: I appreciate that. We appreciate this. So it's interesting you guys have this complementary approach because you built an AEO assessment tool that grades a site's optimization for AI. And I'm really curious of what you were measuring and what patterns you're seeing so far from the companies that have run the test.

Guy: Well, so we've been reading a ton about AEO, experimenting with it quite actively ourselves, both for webflow.com and for our customers. And this came out of a desire to create a way for us and fellow CMOs to like guide our teams, to evaluate them on AEO, and we wanted to create something actionable. So I created a maturity model with four categories in it. We're going to talk about those in a minute, five different levels. It's not intended to be complex or magical. It is a thoughtful, well-researched, educated guess, because we're all learning in this early space saying, "Hey, here's something you could action today back in the office to go make changes." And then create a road, a 600-line prompt that looks at your site, other sites, what they're saying about you. V2 is in the works. It's half a dozen agents across 1,700 lines, and we're seeing two things from many hundreds of the assessments that we've done so far. First, you were alluding to something like this earlier, but maybe a slightly different point of view. Good AEO, it's pretty close to what good SEO always should have been, like original content. To what you and Omer were saying, that's genuinely valuable to your prospects is rewarding. And by the way, third-party data supports that too. 52% of the sources cited in AI overviews rank in the top 10 results, meaning that ranking better is helpful, but not a requirement for AEO. And the second, it's early days. It feels like 2000 search, right? Multiple players, not all consolidated in one. In our data, like no one in these made-up five levels, this rubric, zero have been level five. I don't even recall the level four. Most are at three or two. Some are at one with no harm, no foul. And by the way, that the third-party data supports that too. Like even on the basics, you look at all top-ranking sites out there, a quarter of them don't even have metadata for SEO today.

Drew: So there's a couple of things. One thing that's so different about LLM search is that you might show up as your brand might show up in one search, but then you run that same search and you might not show up in the next 99. And so just actually benchmarking where you are is complicated, and I know the folks at Ahrefs and SEMrush are working on things and have launched tools, but it feels again very early days. So just I want to caution folks, if you run a couple of queries thinking that this is and you see the results, you better run them multiple times, because it's not about the one time, it's about the percentages of time that you show up. And so if somebody does a long-tail search and you show up 70% of times, you're winning, whereas in Google, in the old days, in Google, if you showed up, you know, in top five, you'd stay in the top five.

Guy: Drew, exactly to your point, given that it is probabilistic, I think we collectively evolved from keyword ranking, which to your point doesn't exist anymore, to counting mentions, to then share of voice across a basket of questions you want to be the answer to. Plus, unlike SEO, where Google's using our words with the reformulated words, you care about sentiment. So what's my share of voice relative to my competitors? What's the sentiment about my brand? Whose chances are it's not the words we spent so long carefully crafting and having our team consistently use everywhere. And by the way, you've got the big ones that won the initial war for SEO measurement, then you've got like 15 other ones that are sprouting up for AEO, like Scrunch and Profound and a bunch of others.

Drew: Great, and the jury's out on all of them, whether they'll actually add value to this process or not. We know we need that, and it's really a helpful framework. I think, for people to think about this as you're really trying to get to share of voice, and the sentiment is also important. Okay, you talked about four pillars: content, technical, authority, and measurement. I think it'd be helpful to walk through these and what you mean by them and how they impact AEO.

Guy: I invite each of us to guide and manage our teams against these four categories as we think about AEO. So at the highest level, content. We have keywords today. We move to answering comprehensively baskets of questions we want to be relevant for throughout the funnel. We may go listen to sales call recordings, you know, we use Gong, go look at emails and so on. Pick the questions you want to have answers for and answer them, and then you want that content to be super relevant. So you go to personalization by segment, by account, by individual. So this category, all about owned content optimization. Second category, technical, where we go from on-page SEO to helping LLMs understand the structure of our site and the meaning of our site. Like that's always been important. It's even more important for LLMs. You know, Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, and others came together to create this made-up structure called schema. You can think back to what we all did for Facebook with like Open Graph. It's hard to overemphasize the importance of putting the schema metadata on your site. It's like they've got to set up for here's a blog page, here's a bio page, here's a product page, here's a use case page. Help the LLMs consume your content on super-fast sites globally. Third is authority, where we go from backlinks. They still matter. They don't not matter to the importance of widespread plain text mentions. Oh, Laura cites top 10. Nancy's business is an amazing one. Those positive mentions that then point to visually stunning, emotionally engaging experiences to tell your story. So this category is a lot about earned brand visibility. Last, measurement. We were just talking about it from keyword ranking dimensions to share of voice and sentiment.

Drew: Authority is a really interesting play, because you read about things like Wikipedia mattering more to one thing, and Reddit mattering to another, and of course, the G2s and the Trust Radiuses mattering in all of this. What are you doing in just thinking about that for Webflow, in terms of trying to increase your authority, besides creating amazing content?

Guy: We, to your point, and I think all of us should, I think we all may or may not have paid a bunch of attention to our Wikipedia entries. I think it's absolutely worth paying attention there. We chose to dive into Reddit. And I think Reddit, for those that haven't already played it, is a, hear this in the right way, a dangerous place, not because it's dangerous, but because, like, marketing speak is death there, right? The normal corporate stuff we say is strongly reacted to negatively. And so we set up a Reddit tiger team. Why? Because it's the number three cited domain in Google, behind Wikipedia and Amazon. It's interestingly different audience. 68% of the people there are not on LinkedIn. And so we picked what are the Reddits we want to be a part of? And then we, again, hear this in the right way, thoughtfully lurked, not to be lurkers, but rather to like, learn, learn the norms, learn the way this group talks. And then we were ready to, and if you're not ready to, I humbly suggest you don't engage in Reddit, admit we were wrong. Say what we're good at and what we're bad at. That genuineness is highly valued in Reddit. And trying to be like, "Oh, well, this is all of our good stuff and ignore the bad stuff" doesn't land well. And I think the reason OpenAI and Perplexity did deals with Reddit is because, on the hypothesis that this is like more authentic human content, but it really is a different vibe than the other mediums we're in.

Drew: Yeah, and I just keep wondering, if I were a CMO, are there agencies out there that can really do Reddit well, that you would think because they could do it for multiple brands and really get the voice of Redditors, if you will, down and help guide? So if you're out there and this is, or you're working with an agency, I also feel that like PR agencies are going to have a renaissance too, because media authority is going to matter in all of this. So we've talked a lot about the maturity model, which, you know, moving from keywords to answer clusters and sort of this eventually, maybe deep personalization. What does the evolution look like in practice for a B2B brand?

Guy: By the way, I totally agree with you. PR is back. Like digital PR is hugely important. And to directly answer your question, you know, I think practically as we're guiding our teams, asking them, "Hey, questions that our buyers are asking." Now, why don't you pick a couple? Why don't you go create content specific for that couple to begin? And how'd you pick them? Go listen to our Gong calls. Go read the emails, and ideally, pick ones that have SCI website visit intent. And by those made-up words, I mean things that LLMs can't summarize. For us at Webflow, that's like, we enable people to build bespoke websites. But there also is a template gallery. That gallery is hard to go, you know, summarize. Some examples, then have your team answer them comprehensively. Not to be longer for the sake of being longer, but because you have more of a chance of being relevant to an LLM query. And then, as you grow over time, really go on these topics comprehensively. And that means answering the questions at multiple levels of, you know, strategic, all the way to tactical, and multiple stages of the funnel, which we've all created. You know, TOFU, MOFU, BOFU content. Now you structure that around, around questions. And finally, is what you said, creating more value by being very personal. That's sort of the end game to distinct segments, accounts, and individuals. Oh, sorry, I forgot one thing, and that is refreshing content. Yes, the content machine is more voracious, and it has a huge impact. Those that have the indicator of freshness, like a date, get 1.8x more citations. For us, real-world example, we used Airops that 5x'd our content refreshing, 42% lifted organic traffic to the updated content versus the not updated content. 14% higher conversion rates on that traffic, which I'm guessing is because LLM traffic tends to be more qualified than SEO traffic. We could talk about that, if that, it's interesting, but the content refreshing is absolutely worth doing. I think 95% of OpenAI citations were all updated in the last 10 months.

Drew: So interesting. And that's something that is relatively easy to do. You have the content. You know already what the high traffic content is because you can look at your SEO indicators, and that is the content that you could probably do. So on the to-do list today is look at, you know, your top 20 pieces of content and figure out how you can update them in a meaningful way. And I suggest that probably not by running it through a GPT and saying, "Add it." But this is—that's just me. My biggest concern in all of this is that, because it's still about content, and because it's so easy, in theory, to create content with LLMs, that folks are going to mistake quantity over quality, mistake original human-led content versus, you know, easy-to-create machine content.

Guy: Wouldn't agree with you more. One happy stat and one thought. The happy stat is, mercifully, it seems like Google is catching this. If you look at Google's content, 85% of it today is either entirely human-created, which is like, actually, I think that's like 65% of it, or a bit of AI. Only 15% of it is straight AI or very heavily AI. And I was like, "Oh, thank you. We don't have to go through an epoch of what you were describing." And the second is, as you're using AI to create content, or, frankly, do any other work, in my humble opinion, one of the least spoken about but most important things for us, even for our kids, as they're thinking about using this, is you can use an LLM to outsource your thinking, or you can use an LLM to think more deeply and do so more rapidly. And I think door number two will result in some excellent human-originated, valuable content that's been enhanced. Door number one rolls out in slop.

Drew: Rolls out slop. And we're not in the slop business, folks. Okay!

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Drew: All right, let's bring back Omer and continue this conversation. You talk about AI readiness. Both of you, if you're a CMO with limited resources, which is kind of the way most CMOs feel these days, whatever the first dollar best spent in this world of AI readiness. And again, I'm going to use content, tech, authority, and measurement as possible the four categories, but Omer, you could add your own if, because that's Guy's framework.

Omer: First of all, I have a lot to say about what you guys discussed. Oh, good. Let's double down on this for a second. First of all, of course, SEO is not dead. And without getting into the details, one of the first things that ChatGPT is doing when asked, like, personalized questions is actually going to Bing. So if you're not on Bing, you won't be at ChatGPT. But here's the caveat, right? What are people doing for SEO? They're publishing a lot of blogs, a lot of content, and Guy said something, or you, Drew, said the content has to be genuinely relevant to the user. And we know that, you know, content—sometimes it's much more quantity than quality. So here's the problem, right? Let's say you publish a lot of content and ChatGPT captures that, but ChatGPT then is going to base their answer based on that old blog page that you wrote, and might be relevant, might be not, and then you kind of—okay, how do I position myself based on that? So I think one of—and again, we have a solution for that as well. We can speak about it later, but it's very interesting. The contradiction between you have to do SEO, you have to do AEO, but you need to be smart about how you do those kinds of things. If, you know, I would be a CMO with limited resources, I think measurement is really important. But I think there are a lot of free tools out there, like what Webflow have done, like, you know, we want that you can start with good measurement on your own, without a budget, even for that. So the first thing I would say, let's start with HubSpot. They have a free tool as well. There's plenty of them. Just measure the basic things. See those things. For me, the most important part is really would be on the authority, because with the authority, you understand what content is missing, and first of all, make sure your house is clean, right? If you know, the main outlet for a company is the website. If that website doesn't have the right content, then, okay, how do we expect people to, you know, to gain information? But once you figure those things out, content outside is critical. Even, you know, HubSpot CEO yesterday went on stage, and the first thing she said—this guy said, you know, website visits are dropping, and you have to publish content out there. It's clear, but you have to do it smart. You have to do it with authority. And for me, it's really, think of the way your buyers are going to use AI. And as before, I know they're not going to ask, "Who is the top five? You know, what's the top five system?" No, they're going to have an agent in a few months, right? They're going to have a B2B buying agent that will ask them, "Hey, Drew, what are your KPIs? What is the size of your company?" Great. Let me recommend the system for you. And in order to do that, you have to have the authority. That would be my recommendation first.

Drew: Yeah, and well, I want to come back to B2B buying agents in a moment. First, Guy, where's the first dollar go?

Guy: The mental model I would humbly suggest using is all this content we've created, our websites—they now have two audiences. You need this visually stunning, emotionally evocative, engaging experience for humans. People are going to want to hear you tell your story your way forever. That will not change. How they get there, how they discover things they learn—that is changing. And the second is an interface for machines where it needs to be well-structured, concise. Make it cheaper for them to crawl your site. So put, you know, text. You know, this webinar—post the transcript for it below the webinar. So I would suggest, I know you asked for one, but I would suggest consider two things in this regard. One is ask your team the questions that are coming up in the funnel, and ask them to pick two or three and create content for that. See how that does. See how that muscle memory feels because they're used to counting keywords. And the second is make the interface for the LLMs a bit easier. Add metadata about structure. Go put schema. We can help you do that, and there are others. They can too, but it's hard to overemphasize how much that helps the LLMs understand what it is you want out there.

Drew: I'm imagining, and correct me if I'm wrong, so in some ways, is it conceivable that there's actually sort of this bot website that the consumer never actually sees? I mean, it's funny, because in the early days of SEO, it was like hiding words in white type and all that stuff. Are we there for AEO?

Guy: We're, in my opinion—Omer, I'm curious—we're totally not there today. And I am curious, might we one day end up there? Today, we were the first to support llms.txt. For those that know robots.txt, right? We've been using that forever to tell Google, "Crawl this. Don't crawl that," for good reasons. Llms.txt is a proposed, but totally not yet adopted standard where you tell the LLMs where to look. And you can imagine a world where that then points to an equivalent of every page on your website that's in plain text, specifically markdown, which the LLMs like reading from. And so you could imagine Webflow and other platforms auto-generating a markdown page. I'm not previewing a roadmap. I'm like, where might this world go? And you could imagine that world, and then you've got to have some intellectual consistency between the two, and how do you manage that, so you don't have these black hat experiences that you're describing. But, you know, I mentioned this to our CTO, and he was like, "Yeah, but we'll have infinite context windows for these LLMs." And I think he's spot on. We eventually will. I also believe, again, this is like opinion and conjecture, that the LLMs also will invest more crawl budget in places that are cheaper for them to crawl. So having that parallel version that's easier for them to consume will perpetually be a valuable thing. So, Drew, that's a bit of speculation on where the future might go, but I personally would say we're totally not there today.

Omer: I want to make a bet and a bold statement. First of all, I think, Guy, and then we go—not to the cheapest place. I think they will go to the place that they can provide the best answers to the customers. Some of them will take a while, but yeah, we've actually been betting on something. We've released a product that creates a twin website, or a shadow website. So imagine, and Guy mentioned the challenge, those websites are amazing. They're built and designed for human beings. They need to be visual. They need to be, you know, structured in a way. LLMs behave completely differently, and we actually have a product that identifies when an LLM accesses your website and then creates a shadow website. On top of this, will that be the standard? I could hope so. But you never know. Those things are changing every day, every week, every month. But, you know, we mentioned, you know, think of the future, and we can only argue whether the future is three months or three years from now, and nobody knows that.

Drew: I think the summary of this part of the conversation is, have your bot. Hashtag, have your bot talk to my bot.

Omer: It's clear. It's clear that, you know, people right now are using ChatGPT. Tomorrow, they will be designated B2B buying bots or whatever. And those bots or agents, or whatever you can call them, they consume information and data differently than human beings. So I think there will be a way, whether that's a protocol, like Microsoft is working on an MCP protocol for websites, Cloudflow doing some things. So whether that's a protocol or content, or a different place or different—but they will allow companies to expose more and more content in the right way for the agents, because that's a win-win for everybody. It's a win for the agent, it's a win for the company, it's a win for the buyer. So I'm sure it will be.

Drew: So, and you guys are basically dealing with the last question I was going to ask you also. We're already in the future, but let's get back to the present. That was sort of the future of agentic web, right? Where bots are talking to bots, doing this work for you. Off we go today. We got humans talking to humans. That's the three of us. And these humans need to know what to do right now. And I'm kind of curious. So there's big news, which is that Google has just dropped below 90% of search. That kind of monopoly is still mind-blowing. It's still the place. And if you look at actual number of daily searches on Google relative to OpenAI, it's kind of huge, right? So, I mean, just think about the number of searches in Chrome alone. It's just crazy. So we're here right now with a Google-dominated world. Again, I'm going to just sort of ask for something for the CMOs here. Help us prioritize. We've started to talk about content, and to me, it's content leads to authority, right? It's kind of, you can't go authority without content, because, you know, what are people going to respond to? So having a differentiated content strategy, which means having a differentiated brand, is not something that an LLM kind of helps you with, right? This is kind of human. You want to differentiate. I mean, they can do an analysis. So how are we going to help if the whole thing here is you need to create content that will give you authority, plus deal with Reddit and Wikipedia and make sure you're on Bing? Should we just be talking about better content right now?

Omer: I think it's, first of all, content is everything, right? But it's what the content—along with what Guy said before—is that you think of the questions your buyers are actually asking. And again, you can use tools like when your salespeople are talking to them, like Gong. You can use tools like ours that, you know, we can tell you what people on the website are actually asking. You can go and speak with customers. You know those questions, by the way. I mean, it's not a difficult exercise to come up with the top 10, 20, 50 questions. You won't be that surprised, but I think the exercise is: okay, how do we do this differently than SEO? SEO is what are the keywords, right? Okay, if somebody speaks about this, I want to—this is not about a keyword. This is about if somebody asks a question, what is the right answer, and then, based on that, actually create the content. Now, unfortunately, I don't have a recipe to say that's the type of the content, that's the format of the content, that's the outlet of the content. The answer is all of the above. I want to just remind you that one of the most important things is your home is your website as well. But it needs to start with that, and then, you know, go to all the other media and outlets and formats.

Drew: Before you answer, Guy, I want to sort of pose a—so if you have Gong or you are recording your customer conversations, is there a workflow such that, and this, again, could be automated, where these conversations are recorded, they get transcribed, that transcription goes against your current FAQs. You say, "Oh, there's a question we haven't answered on the website. Let's get that on the website," and have this be nearly automated, like almost to the end where it's just push-button publish. Is that the world that we should be looking at?

Omer: Absolutely. Before Guy—just a second—again, even, you know, our product right now enables people on your website to ask questions, and one of the features is exactly like this: what did people ask that you don't have a good answer for? It's very easy to do that in Gong. It's very easy to upload this transcript and do that, you know, in any GPT like that, and really focus on that.

Guy: Well, I agree completely. I love what you are building at SaleSpeak, and I think it is a great way to connect what you're hearing in market to content. Drew, the place where I diverge was the very, very end where you're like, "and you just press publish." I don't think we're there. I think we're a long way from being there. Yeah, I think we can get closer to there. And candidly, I mentioned before we use Airops. I'm a fan of the logical approach they use and the things that come out of it in theirs. And we have a similar mental model within Webflow for the website, but like, you have this brand kit where you're like, "here are all my assets." You have this—and here's how I speak, and here's my voice. And then you have this knowledge base where it's like, "here are the things to know about my product, about my whatever." And then you combine those two with the workflow you were describing, Drew, and I think you are much more likely to get to a place where a human's review is really efficient to get something valuable out there. On "where should I?"—is it all about content? In my humble opinion, I think it is content plus structure, in terms of what you own, in terms of what you control. And then I think there really is a bunch of work on authority. Now those questions you want to—you want to be part of the answer to. If you're not, now you've got a whole—the new version of backlinks. Go find who was cited. Go talk to them. Go see if they can plain text mention you. Maybe backlink too, but at least plain text mention you on their site, then maybe you get listed there. And the last thing, Drew, if I may, that you mentioned, "Hey, you know you intimated, hey, we have this sea of sameness because we're all using the same LLMs." I could not agree more. I think it is—we're all the first, the leader, the best. That having been said, I think if you pair deep customer intimacy—Omer, you mentioned this before—I think an LLM in the spirit of helping you think more and be a really helpful brainstorming partner, and be a really helpful place to go back and forth. And then hopefully you've got original data. Omer, you just brought some today. And finally, I really hope it can help you be consistent once you've made those creative choices, to be consistent in everything you're doing.

Drew: I'm not familiar with Airops, and I don't want this to be a commercial for Airops. It sounds like it's a sort of full-service tool that helps in—it's GPT on steroids.

Guy: It is a tool. It is absolutely SaaS, and our team has used it to speed up the updating of content, and they're using it to help with some content creation and to—again, the point where we diverged—like nothing ever would go out without us really looking at it in depth, but the distance it covers versus like, in some sense it's "get your stuff together," right? Get your brand voice together, get your content together. Now put that into your context window every time. In some sense, it's a workflow to do that. In another sense, you really can stitch a bunch of things together to create the workflows you're describing, Drew. And they're not the only ones to do this. They just happen to be the one that I'm familiar with most because we use them here, and we like the team.

Drew: So I want to go back to something we talked about at the very beginning, Omer. We talked about the importance of having competitive information on your website. I know that some folks feel like this is playing with fire, and they struggle with it, and the head of sales doesn't want to deal with it, but the opportunity really is to define your frame of reference. In the old days, it's "convince blank to use blank instead of blank because of blank." Well, "because of" instead of "blank" is a really important part of this thing, and LLMs are going to do it for you whether or not you participate. But I'm curious, is there a way of serving up competitive information in the SEO world? We look at it as a buyer's guide that you framed. What is it in the AEO world?

Omer: I think it's mainly your point of view. And I agree there's different—I would say levels to that. You don't have to expose all of your secrets and so forth. But although I would argue that there are no really secrets. I mean, if a competitor wants to know how you position yourself against them, they will know. I think the key is convincing the customer. And you have two seconds, right? They've asked a question. You're not in a sales conversation that—like the LLM needs to respond right now, and you better have a good response for them. Response could be, by the way, another question for them, and then answering that. But you have to be able to expose that kind of information. By the way, it could be at your website. It could be, again, on the shadow website that's just exposed to the LLM and not exposed to humans. It could be in other ways. I think each company needs to decide on a strategy. But if you don't have that competitive information accessible to an LLM, your competitor will define their point of view. That will be the point of view that will be presented to your buyer. I don't think you have a choice.

Guy: So I agree with Omer a lot. I think why this change? Because Omer, you said, "Hey, your competitor is going to know how you position." I'd humbly push back slightly in that the cost to do so is if they really care, right? If they really care, they're going to find out. But if they don't care that much, or if one of your prospects simply is not going to take the time to dig in that much, then the bar, the cost was high. LLMs have lowered that cost dramatically, and I completely agree with you. If you don't put that story out there, your competitor will. And so I too have generally been in the camp of like, "No, I don't want to do the head-to-head comparison pages on websites," unless everybody's already super clear that XYZ is a competitor. Now I think in this change, you should turn the dial there. You should put more of them up. You should, yes, you've got the long buyer's guide. I think you should do the like blow-by-blow. And here's how we're framing our stuff versus their stuff. And be thoughtful about it, just as Omer said, have it tell your story, right? It may look like a feeds and speeds table, but really, it's actually framing the whole thing the way you would have in the buyer's guide, like you were talking about Drew.

Drew: Yeah, it's the old and again. Well, we're going back to Brent Adamson and making buying easier. This is one of the ways to do it, having a buyer's guide. I want to sort of get at something that's kind of daunting to me. In the SEO world, you can know what words rank and what are important based on that. In the AEO world, because these are such long-tail combinations of words, you don't have any tools to tell you what people are searching, right? Because there's no sort of standard. Well, you don't have a Google with a dominant—like if you showed up in Google, that was what mattered. So we've said that the strategy is listen to your customer conversations and go from there. Is there something else that CMOs can do to sort of know that they are spending—saying, you know, you've got to create priorities, right? You have to know, what are the bigger things that are gaps in our content, based on what people are actually looking for, and how do we get there? That's a long question. Good luck answering it.

Guy: I think Omer will go deep on gaps in a second. I'll chime in that I think today we get zero context from the LLMs. When a query comes over, I hope that follows the arc search did where over time, we will get a lot of context, and then maybe there'll be a monopoly. We get less context, fine, but like, I hope we get a lot. Today, what do we have? We know where they went, we know what content they consumed. We can look at that to infer, "Hey, are we happy with that?" right? We hear these questions come up a lot, but actually, LLMs are coming up for these other pieces of content. Should we go invest more there? And so I think, you know, the where they go on our sites is the single best signal we have today about where we're showing up. I also think we should take those questions that we've identified and go run the queries and go see, are we showing up, either ourselves at Hawk or with one of those, you know, 15 tools or two incumbents.

Drew: Right? Okay, so I just want to make sure I understood what you said. So we know, because in some rare cases, they actually go from the LLM to your website. We also know that most of the time they don't. So there's a lot of searches that are happening on or queries on LLMs that we have no idea what they're happening, right?

Guy: Yes, and there's another piece where they don't leave the LLM but the LLM bot came to our site. I think one of the nuances of this is the LLMs are running searches virtually every query now, right? It's different than Google, where they've got the world's best, you know, stratified database of the web. The LLMs are running it more often. Will these $100 billion-plus companies build their own caches over time, like Google has? Almost undoubtedly. But today, we get that privilege of seeing that, and so you get more data, even if the human never made it over.

Drew: Got it. All right? Well, there's so much that we have gotten here. I mean, you know, in my mind, the shining light here is the better you know your customer, the better you know more about them, the more likely it is that you can solve their problems and create content that will help them solve their problems. And if you do that, you will get rewarded, recognizing that there's probably some technical additions to what it is that you're doing. I want to give you both one sort of final words of wisdom, whether it's two mistakes for CMOs to avoid, or two things for CMOs to go do right now, or at least ask someone on their web team or content team to do.

Omer: I'll start with one. Okay, good. And for me, it's really back to the basics, and think about it. Marketing job, design for the buyer, design for the buyer, design for the buyer. Put yourself in the various shoes. Understand that they behave completely differently than how they behave a year ago and three months ago, and they will change. But if you design for the buyer and make all the information that you can accessible, that's your opportunity to own your point of view. If you're not going to do that, somebody else is going to own your point of view, and then you're going to lose. So again, I know it's back to the basics, but I think a lot of companies forgot that in the last few years and introduced many hoops and many challenges and frictions for the buyer. I think what's one of the great things about AI is that they're really elevating the buyer expectations. Think about it. Your expectation as a buyer today are completely higher than they were six months ago, and they'll change because OpenAI is doing other things as well. If you design for that, you'll win.

Drew: Okay? Guy, final words.

Guy: I agree with Omer that the fundamental jobs of marketing haven't changed. Build brand, drive demand. These are all means to that end. The two things I would keep in mind: one, don't abandon SEO. It still matters. The world didn't turn upside down. This is, in some sense, an expansion or evolution with a few important changes. I heard anecdotally about—anecdotally, not verified—a Fortune 500 CMO fired their entire SEO team, and they're like, "We're focusing on AEO." If that's true, I could not 180-degree black-and-white disagree more. And two, get started today. There's so much opportunity as there is with any new medium, and you don't need a whole new set of resources. You can use your existing team, guide them, perhaps using our maturity model, using some of the insights email tool will give you about what content you're missing, but begin experimenting, just like they do today, with different SEO tactics.

Drew: Yeah, it's funny. I think, sort of like the Klarna example, where they fired the customer service team and then, of course, brought them all back. I suspect those people may not be in a hurry to go back to that company. But yeah, I suspect that we'll be reading about it shortly. So Omer, Guy, thank you both so much for sharing your insights. Given the pace of change, I suspect we could have this conversation probably every three months and maybe have some different nuances to the answers. My key takeaway on this is a timeless part of it, which is focus on your customers and your prospects. Buyers want clarity, credibility, and confidence. If you get that right, even the robots will have to give us credit, and that, my friends, is a wrap.

 

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Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!