RX 2 - AI Transformation Overview and Why It's Urgent | Vincent DeCastro, Abma

In this week's episode of the Revenue Xchange, host Davis sits down with Vincent DeCastro, President & Founder at ABMA. Together, they explore how AI is fundamentally reshaping B2B search behavior and what marketers must do to adapt before it's too late.

Key Takeaways:
1) Zero-Click Search is the New Reality: 67% of B2B search results now end without clicking through to websites, as AI answer engines provide responses directly within search platforms, dramatically reducing traditional organic traffic.
2) GEO is the New SEO: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) requires a complete reimagining of content strategy, moving from 4-5 word keyword optimization to preparing for 40+ word AI prompts that demand deep, authoritative content.
3) Authority and Citations Drive Visibility: Success in AI search depends less on traditional SEO rankings and more on being cited as an authoritative source across multiple platforms, requiring integrated efforts from brand, PR, content, and ABM teams.

Closing Note: Vincent delivers a wake-up call for B2B marketers who assume AI search is a future consideration rather than a current reality. His data-driven analysis reveals that organizations taking a "wait and see" approach risk creating an insurmountable competitive gap. For marketing leaders ready to evolve their content and search strategies, this episode provides both the urgency and the tactical framework needed to succeed in an AI-first buyer's journey.

Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants: 0:18

//well welcome everybody. This is our first episode of what we are calling the four J Revenue Exchange Weekly. So we're transitioning our monthly live events or community workshops into a weekly series, and we are bringing on guest expert speakers, around specific topics, chatting through some of our latest for X research, as well as hosting community round tables, which is more discussion style around a specific topic. So lot more on this coming. But for today's first episode, we had to, we had to, bring on a, a really interesting speaker around a topic that I know a lot of people are thinking about. and before we get into it. Few quick housekeeping things. The first, we want this to be as interactive and engaging as possible, so feel free to toss your questions in the chat, jump on live and ask your questions. Interrupt throughout the presentation. the, for the on-demand recording, it's gonna be available on our research. How about for X? We will make sure to send this out in the community as well as through email and our newsletter. And then the recording, the audio aspect is going to be on Spotify, apple Podcasts under the revenue exchange by for X. So. More excitingly. very excited to introduce Vincent DeCastro. He's the president and founder of the ABM Agency, ABM a, and Vincent, I will pass this over your way for a brief intro as well as a little bit more on our topic for today. Awesome. Thank you Davis. hello everybody and, thanks for your time today. I'm Vincent DeCastro, founder and president of the ABM Agency. I have been in search marketing, so SEO and paid search for over 20 years now. Really seen everything, from Google, really just starting to hockey stick in terms of usage. the timeframe when, you know, print started to, head towards, you know, where it is now that we, we never saw the full conclusion of the printed page, but certainly usage went down, decline significantly. Through every single major update on Google and seen some really, really interesting things happen. And so when we started to see evidence of what I think, you know, most people call zero click search start to to come up in analytics. I got very excited and interested, not because I wanna see people fail, but because SEO has really always been a passion of mine. So we've been in ABM for a little over eight years now and, and I'm excited that the prospect of merging these two passions of mine, ABM and, and GEO as we call it, generative engine optimization, which is kind of the newest form of, of SEO. But, really looking forward to going over some slides that we have. But as Davis said, let's keep it interactive. If anyone has any questions along the way or any thoughts or experiences, would absolutely love to hear about that. So quick agenda, we've got maybe 15 slides of actual content. We'll talk a little bit about how AI or answer engines, are changing B2B buyer's behavior. And that's, I think, the main topic that, that I'm interested in. And underneath that are the, the pieces around, you know, SEO, which is what we're all familiar with, but then G-E-O-A-I-O and a EO, and then moving into, you know, operationalization of this merging of these different kind of, you know, unique marketing components. And then how they turn into or could, could potentially be leveraged for global charters, and even an ABM COE. So let's start with the, the, what I'm calling the AI First Buyer's journey. And so, you know what? What's kind of happened and we start with the, what many people have seen and have been seeing for around nine or 10 months now, which is growth in, impressions. So if you go into search console, Google Search Console, what a lot of folks saw, the tip of the spear was impressions were going up, but bizarrely enough clicks were going down, in the form of CTR. So that's kind of the first piece that you would see is your click-through rate is just gone from, I don't know, 1.5 to below 1%. and so that's, you know, the first thing you start to do is, well, maybe my rank has dropped. Maybe that's the issue. And when you see that your rank hasn't dropped, and in many instances maybe your rank has gone up, you know, you start to realize that what's really going on is that people aren't clicking through to websites anymore. so. That's the first kind of red flag that we became aware of. And when you start to look at that, you know, you start to realize that part of the increase in impressions is due to answer engines and, you know, Google's own, AI piece inside of the search results. So what they've done is they, they took their, their AI answers and they put it directly above the organic section. So that really accelerated the process of, I don't need to click through to websites anymore. So, you know, you've got paid search, then you've got the AI answer section, and underneath that is the traditional organic section folks are, are going to the AI answers and then you can even expand that further. So that's the increase in impressions is that that AI answer piece. It's designed to keep people right there on Google, though, not to move them to, a particular website. In this case, what we're concerned about our vendor websites. and so the reason why this matters and, and, and it's kind of the perfect storm in B2B marketing, because I think, you know, if we're honest with ourselves, we would all probably agree that buyers don't necessarily trust vendor websites. And I know that's kind of a hot topic at the moment. The reality is, is that they're just not as objective as maybe the buyers need them to be. And so the perception is that inside of these AI answer engines, they can get a more objective view of, you know, what my challenge is, what other companies have done, what's the competitive landscape, and then what are the organizations that can help me overcome that? So really interesting statistics though that we see is. 67% of B2B search results end in zero click. So that's just continued to climb. And you've probably seen, I think it was Gartner that published, a study that they expect that by the end of this year that that number is even gonna increase close to 70%. And then the other piece that, that I find really, really interesting is 68% of buyers use AI as part of their purchasing process. And that's something we're gonna gonna get into in a minute because, you know, the first thing you think is, well, are people moving away from Google? Are they using chat GPT instead? And so there's some really interesting data that we're gonna talk about in just a second. Related to that, let's go to the next slide please. So this is a screenshot of what I think most of us are familiar with the Gartner B2B buying journey. This was created back in 2019, and there's been a lot of iterations of that. What's interesting in this graphic is all of the different places where search or website visits were part of this, this overall journey. and so these are the places, and they're mostly early on in that buying journey where we see major impact and disruption. And so, you know, I haven't seen any data yet, but we're, I think we all mostly agree that about 70% of that buying process is happening outside of our point of view. That's gonna continue to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And we're currently doing some analysis to try and begin to uncover what does that look like now? But, you know, there's no doubt in my mind that at some point in time we're gonna reach 90%, where we're just not able to see what the buyers are doing throughout this journey until they get to that point in time where they, they do eventually reach out to you, but by that point. Most of that decision making process has already occurred. So, you know, again, 68% of B2B buyers now use, answer engines. And again, 67% of online searches resulting in zero click. The other piece that's compelling here is that, you know, just traditional SEO is no longer the piece that we can rely on to drive constant inbound. And, you know, it's still important. And in fact, there's a lot of research that indicates that these cancer engines are actually using search results from Google and also from Bing to put together what their recommendations look like and what organizations are surfacing. So, you know, it isn't a SEO is dead and GEO is the new, you know, important tactic. SEO absolutely still matters. It's still important, especially. Given consideration that, you know, chat, GPT, they, they use Google search results, not just in that initial prompt, but when they do their fan out, which essentially means that they're taking what you've put in for your prompt, and then they're coming up with a whole other list of what else would matter to that prompt, pulling in those search results from Google and then aggregating that as their response to your, your prompt. Let's go to the next slide, and I'll just stop right here. Curious, does anyone that's on the call have any questions, comments, thoughts about what we've talked about so far? Feel free to toss'em in the chat or come online as well. Live. thanks, Mara. So this. Is an interesting slide to me because I think, at least from what I've read on LinkedIn and conversations that I've had with folks, the, the concept of what's happening is a lot of of market share is moving away from Google and it's being replaced by these other answer engines. And while that might be ultimately where we wind up, the reality is at this point in time, Google is still really the reigning champ, quite honestly. You know, when you look at the monthly visits, 136 billion for Google, 4 billion for Jet Chat, DPT and Perplexity is really just not even on the same page as far as those two, tools are concerned. And then really daily visits, that's to me mind blowing 4.7 billion daily visits for Google, 185 million for chat GBT. Certainly nothing to sneeze at, but what we're seeing in the data is that. People are using, these, buyers are using multiple tools. They're not just using Google and then, you know, going about their business, they're using Google, they're moving over to chat, GPT and, or perplexity, clouds, et cetera. Going back to Google, perhaps for some more, analysis around the data, but the, the most, I don't wanna say concerning piece, interesting piece to me inside of all of this is that, that buyer's journey, they can do all of this without ever talking to vendors or going to vendors' websites. And quite honestly, they probably do a better job of coming up with who should be on their short list and knowing what they're great at, what they're good at, and what they're bad at. And so when they do get to that point where they say, okay. These two or three vendors are on my short list. These are the ones I have to talk to. They probably know more than sales does when they get in touch with you and they've already done all their research and they know everything about your competitors, by the time they reach out to you, they know everything they need to know. And likely all they're trying to do is just validate that their number one pick is the right pick to go with. And just at that point, it's kind of a chemistry check. Right. So I don't know, you know, what experience the marketers on this call have had? I think the last six months have been really pivotal. And, and this isn't, you know, from my perspective, this isn't future state. This isn't hap gonna happen. This is happening now in real time and it's accelerating. So. I don't know if the marketers on the call feel comfortable, maybe talking about their own personal experience relative to this, but I'm always interested in what other people are experiencing, not just what I see. And, and Vincent, we have a great question from Heidi. she's glad to see the balance between S-E-O-G-E-O and a EL, but how would you advise investments in traditional domain authority and domain rating? Yeah, that's a great question. So I have always been, much more on the technical side of SEO. My experience has always been that the site authority should come first before the content. and I, and I've seen evidence in GEO that that absolutely is also the case. And so when you think about how all these things fit together. Because you don't wanna just eliminate SEO, like the fact is we're all still getting organic traffic from Google. It's just smaller and smaller and smaller. The other piece that I forgot to mention that we have seen that's really important is that most properties are still seeing very robust traffic for brands. They're still, you know, getting great conversions out of that, and they're still very, very visible. I haven't personally seen instances where the AI answer piece in Google is actually above the organic section when it comes to brand. What we have seen is a precipitous drop off in what we call discovery and commercial search. So that means they're looking for someone who does X, Y, or Z. They don't have a brand in mind just yet. We've seen instances of 70%. To, like worst case scenario, almost entirely lost any kind of traffic coming from commercial or discovery search. And so, you know, when you start to think about that question is, is, is super relevant, you start to think about where should I put my time and effort? SEO just becomes a lot less of the imperative that it used to be. And my, a year ago, if you would've asked me what's the number one thing I should be doing as a B2B marketer for inbound and impact, I would've said SEO, hands down, no hesitation. I've always been the biggest proponent and believer of, you know, SEO, especially Google Organic of anyone that I know. And I now, I'm, I'm definitely changing my opinion. It's still a piece, it's still a component, but it is absolutely not the imperative that it used to be. I published an article last week on LinkedIn on this exact topic, GEO. If it's done right, it's absolutely gonna lead to good SEO results. The inverse is not necessarily true. So good. SEO doesn't necessarily translate into good answer engine visibility on the other side of that coin, good visibility and good brand mentions via GEO and even a EO absolutely will have the inverse impact on the organic section on Google. 100%. I missed that question. It came up and it dropped. I'm sorry. Did you catch that one in chat? this, we have another one from Moira. Is there a way to measure a EO? Yeah, we're gonna get to that in just a minute. And you know, it's, this is the brand new industry. There's a lot of new tech on the scene. I've got a list of tools that we're gonna go over in just a minute. the, the short answer is there's no. There's no one-to-one comparison for what we used to be able to measure with just straight organic site traffic or just, you know, analytics on your website. There is nothing currently like that. So if you think about the whole concept of zero click search, they're no longer coming to your website. How do you measure something that didn't happen on your site? So, so it's very difficult at this moment to have the ability to view this through the same lens. And so it's important to start to take a very different perspective on what does moving the needle look like. And so we're gonna get into that in just a second. So, great, great question. Let's go ahead and just move, and everyone's gonna get this recording or have access to it and I can Absolutely, we can. I think, Davis, you tell me, but I think we can share this deck with folks after, after the call. Is that cool with you? Hundred percent. Okay. Yeah. Awesome. So a lot of acronyms as marketers, we love our acronyms, right? SEO, we know that stands for Search Engine optimization, GEO. you know, it means a lot of different things. In this instance it means generative engine optimization. a EO obviously answer engine engine optimization. And then a IO is AI optimization. They're all a little bit different. but I think, you know, my personal point of view is GEO is kind of the umbrella for these other two acronyms that to a degree will fall underneath them. it is a bigger initiative. a EO is, is a little bit easier to move the needle on and, and not the big giant like undertaking that GEO is turning into. And you'll see that here in a little bit. a IO is, is from my perspective, a little bit more related to the content and so, you know, there's, I have a lot to say about the content piece. and I don't wanna like go off on this long tangent, but I will say anecdotally, from my experience. That when you look at the answer engine results, depending on what tool you're using, you're going to see a distinct lack of ability to click through to the brands that are mentioned or recommended, if you will. I hate to use the term recommended, but the citations do oftentimes have links. So smart marketers are figuring out, this is the new content marketing, this is the new way for me to make sure that I am getting people to my site, because that is almost, eh, I'd say, and, and again, guesstimate here, but 80 to 85% of the time those citations are gonna have links. It might even be higher than that. So being cited for those prompts is, I don't wanna say it's more important than being brand mentioned as the vendor, like you should look at these vendors. But what happens after that mention occurs? And there is no way for that person to get to your site. What do they do? Do they go direct to your site? Do they go to Google and type in your brand and end up there so you can start to imagine a universe in which all this stuff is very much tied together. So looking at your direct traffic and looking at your brand traffic as a indicator that your initiatives around G-E-O-A-I-O or a EO or being successful is absolutely gonna be part of that question that you asked Moira. Like, how do you gauge success? That's gonna be part of it. You're, you're going to see a lot less traffic coming from chat, GPT, perplexity, clawed, co-pilot, et cetera, especially to your primary. I always use the term money pages, but those are your service pages, your product pages, right, where you want people to go to because you know that's what, where they're gonna convert. You're just gonna see a lot less traffic. You'll still see. Traffic from chat GPT traffic from, perplexity, but it isn't going to be enough to warrant the investment of time, energy, and resources that you truly will need to devote to this initiative. Because a lot of it is going to be, you're trying to make logical connections in different data points. And you know, as a, as a big believer in data, and we've put a lot of energy and resources into the dashboards that we provide for our clients, I know a hundred percent of the time, at the end of every year, our clients wrestle with how do I prove attribution? How do I prove the, the veracity and the validity of my marketing budget and what we were able to produce pipeline and revenue wise. And so I don't have the answer to that one. Like that's, you know, that's gonna be a struggle for marketers. We're stepping back probably, you know, 10 years, 15 years in terms of. Attribution around this stuff. And so it's gonna be, it's gonna be a conundrum, there's no doubt about it.'cause there's only, you know, you think about it, you're, if you're an enterprise organization and you're the VP of marketing or the CMO, it's gonna be tough to go in front of the board or the CEO and the CFO and say, Hey, I need more money to do this, and I won't be able to tell you exactly what we've gotten out of it. That's a tough sale. So, you know, trying to just get creative around what are the metrics, and we'll have some, I've got some stuff in here too that, that, are recommendations or even suggestions at this point in time. But any questions about any of this information so far? Yeah, Vincent, I have one more. So if we're. Like, are you, are you saying GEO is kind of the collective term to use out of all of these? Is that the, the broader one, like if we're trying to sound educated on this topic, like should we rally it up to GEO versus a IO or a EOI. My COV is, yes. And I'll tell you why. Because at the end of the day, this as a like forward thinking marketing initiative is going to require PR content, brand demand, everything in order to really truly move the needle. And when you, and, and I'll talk about the prompting stuff in a minute, and this is the exciting, scary part about this whole thing, is that the traditional keyword search on Google is four to five words. The average prompt for answer engines is 40 plus words. And I had, I had an inbound from chat GPTA couple weeks ago. And, and I, I emailed her right away and I said, Hey, can you tell me what your prompts was that you used? Instead of just sending me the prompt, she sent me a screenshot of what she typed into chat GPT and what the response was. And it was mind blowing. It was 67 words. And it was, I am a AI healthcare platform and I am trying to do direct mail and digital out of home and something else. And I mean, it just went on and on and on. Like the, the detail involved in the prompt was mind boggling. And so as a, an old school search marketer, I was like, well, how the heck would I optimize for this? And I didn't like, thank goodness I didn't have to, like we were the number one mention. But it was, it wasn't just agency, it was me or us, the agency. And then it was like Sendo, and then it was some other direct mail platform. And then it was something else. Like, you know, my, I I'm not fully convinced of the, answers sometimes that come back from, from these answer engines, but doesn't matter what, I think it only matters what the end user thinks. Right. Are they convinced that it's correct? Yeah. I missed that in chat. I'm so sorry. Okay. Bye Christina. so, so the answer is more my perspective and, and it's really up to the interpreter at this point, right? Like, there's so many terms getting thrown around. I believe that GEO is the, how I approach it is that's the umbrella, that's the full organizational initiative that's really, truly gonna be required to move the needle on this. And so the other piece is, I feel like are parts of it, like the content. Can be treated individually on your site, 100%. how you handle, you know, the schema and the markup and the structure and the scale of it. I think that that really is going to be more of a, a smaller initiative. And that's why I say like GEO is like the big, big heavy lift for organizations. But my perspective is you don't have a choice. Like, if an organization is, is going to ignore this and take that wait and see attitude, or maybe it isn't that important, I, I feel like that's incredibly dangerous and shortsighted. and, and I am, again, I'm a guy who's seen every major Google update come and go, and I've always taken the wait and see attitude. Let's give it three weeks, let's give it two months. Let's see what happens in the end, this is only going to accelerate. And the real reality of this is that the gap is gonna continue to grow very quickly. So if you aren't an early adopter and you do take the wait and see attitude, the gap will grow so quickly that trying to make up ground is probably going to be almost impossible. That's my opinion. So yeah, let's move on to the next slide. I think there's really some great stuff in here. Some stuff you can do short term more. I'd say, you know, really a great way to start to see underneath the hood is you can actually get a sense of, what is chat GPT, what are the prompts, via, there's fighters that are coming to your site already. So in Search Console, you can pull this data right outta search console right now. and so for those who aren't aware, Google Search Console is the SEO's kind of tool to use to understand how Google sees your website, how the spiders see your website, you know, the crawlability of your pages, how they're ranked just on, and there's so much incredible data. But the, the chat GBT fighters leave a footprint and you can start to uncover what people are actually asking that answer Engines in search console at the moment. this is a, again, really just, you know, rough way of extracting data because right now you still don't have access to the data that you'd like to have, which is, you know, what did someone type directly into chat GPT and chat GPT gives me that information. We don't have that at the moment, so this is the next best like default. So in search console, you can start to filter and search for terms like 20, 25, 5, 20, 24. A full way to do it. And this would be taking the data outta search console. Would be to start to say, okay, just show me the searches that have at least seven words or more. Those would be good strong indicators that they are coming out of chat, GPT or other spiders from different answer engines. But, you know, directionally, right now, this is the best quote unquote keyword research tool that we have at our disposal. So, anyone have any questions about this? I, I have a question on the, how would you, what, what is a spider? How do you define that piece? Yeah, those are the, the crawlers that are, you know, this is how the web gets categorized. It's the, the code behind how Google works and how these answer engines work. And so these are basically bots that are out there that are. Extracting all the information from the internet off of your websites, off of every other website that's out there, and they're just working 24 7 to get that data and then start to use the algorithm to group it and to categorize it. And you know, it happens in real time in many instances, right? They all have kind of different, roles to perform. I mentioned the fan out, I'm about to cough, so I apologize for that. The fan out is, is kind of a unique, facet of answer engines, particularly chat GPT where you go in and you prompt chat GPT and then that AI says, oh, well you also semantically might be interested in this, this, this, this, and this, and it will go out and then sprawl Google for those search results and pull those in. In very short period of time, aggregate all that information. To answer your question in, in the most holistic way, and you probably have seen with chat GT five, it kind of, it, it, I wouldn't even say reads your mind, but it gives you stuff that you didn't even think about, like it overturn results that you were like, oh, yeah, I didn't even think about asking that, but that's great. Thank you. Right. And that's part of the fan out process is like, it's trying to give you, you know, I, I, my concept of this whole thing is like an intern or a mid-level marketer, right? And, and direct prompting into like chat TT four was like dealing with an intern. You're constantly correcting it and you're like, no, I meant this, and no, you need to look at this and time consuming, right? Like, where we wanna get to. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. David said he was going to, where we wanna get to is a Gentech ai, which is like a mid-level marketer who you can say, Hey, I need this done. And they go and do it. They do it great and they come back and there's a, there's not a lot of feedback required. it's the true, like, I think, purpose of AI ultimately. And so the spiders, you know, that's what they're, they're starting to do now is they're starting to give you even more than you asked for things you didn't know you needed. Right. Kinda like the Steve Jobs comment about the iPhone, like people didn't even know they needed it, but he had come, come up with the concept already. So, yeah. So spider's an important component. The real, real, real smart people out there that are in machine learning are publishing data nonstop about how these fighters work and what the formulas are for each of these answer engines.'cause they're all different. That's the other piece. The complexity like goes off the charts because you're not just thinking about Google Organic and how do I optimize for that? But now you're like Google Organic Gemini, AI mode chat, GPT, perplexity Claw and Brock. Copilot, like, oh my God, how do you keep up? So yeah. Let's go to the next slide. Tools. I think this is a great place for, for us to be and maybe take a, a, a pause and just kind of chat a little bit. But, some old tools on here and some new tools, some stuff that, you know, if you've been in marketing for a while, you've probably come across before. Things like SEM Rush. is there a way to show the whole i I mean, hold that up, sorry. yeah, yeah. It, it does fall off a little bit. That, that slide is a little bit, there you go. Some real time edits. There. There we go. Perfect. There you go. Awesome. And then there's some and screaming Frogs. The Screaming Frog has been around forever. there's a free version plus there's a, a subscription. It's a, it's actually software that lives on your, on your device, which, who does that anymore? But it's, so it's always been the most useful technical SEO tool that I've ever come across. And so now they have a lot of really cool data that they can extract out of your search console and your analytics around, these AI crawlers on for all. Another great platform that's, that's been around for a little while. These two over here on the left are brand new, and, I've tested both of them and, and I, I wouldn't say one over the other. I use both of them at the moment just because they're, they're both so cool and they give you a lot of information. So Scrunch in particular gives so much information around potential prompts, like what could people be prompting. So it takes that, that same process that these, answer engines do, which is, you know, the semantic approach to what people might be searching for or prompting. And it will track your visibility against your competitors across every major. A answer engine that's out there Profound is a little bit different. I love Profound because it'll give you, you know, it won't take into consideration only your direct competitors that you feed it, but it'll take into consideration like, what did it come across? But then it takes it a step further and it'll make recommendations about here's the content you're missing. You know, if this topic is something that you want to be an authority in, here's the content that you might wanna start to, to create. And it'll actually, in the tool, it'll actually even write the content for you that you can kind of start with as your first draft, so to speak. and there was something else I was gonna say that was kind of relevant there, but it came and went. yeah, but I, you know, the two in the middle. Those have been around for a long time. Quite frankly, they are incredibly expensive for, if you compare those to the profound and scrunch tools, those two are incredibly expensive. And, and I can't say for a fact that they do anything more significant than profound or scrunch do. in fact, I had, I had contacted, SEMrush and talked to a rep there and I was like, look, I just want to kick the tires and see what the tool does. And they were like, Nope. Minimum investment. I think it was like, I don't know, I can't, I don't wanna misquote the number, but there was a minimum investment involved that, in my opinion, was way too high for testing a tool that I didn't even know what it did. So I would say I'd point everyone in the direction of Profound and Scrunch and then add on Screaming Frog and on for all, for the more technical stuff. I think you've got a pretty good tech stock at that moment in time to really start to move the needle on, like, how do I, how do I attack this stuff? Where am I at now? What do I need to do? Okay, Ashley. and then the other piece is really gonna be around authority. And so this to me is, is probably the biggest difference between GEO and the other stuff. The A IO and a EO is the authority. And so citations and authority are two different things when we talk about GEO Authority is, you know, think of a enterprise organization, like a Salesforce and Salesforce is the authority in CRM, right? Like, I think we could all probably agree that is the case. Salesforce doesn't have to do anything, quite literally anything to own these, you know, mentions in the answer engines because they've. Already been the recognized authority. They have all of the citations to prove it. They have all of the brand mentions to approve, to, to prove it, pr, news, articles, everything. Now what they're gonna see is that there are other facets of their business, that they are different business units, if you will, that they will absolutely have to do a ton of work to gain that same kind of recognition and authority. So, and I say this because I had seen people post on LinkedIn about, well, you know, if you're a big enterprise, you don't have to worry about it. You've already done the work. Yes, but no, in your main swim lane where you are the undisputed authority, that's a, an accurate statement. But if you have 2, 3, 4, 10 other business units where you are not the authority, you have a lot of work to do to play catch up there. So that's just, you know, again, this is my experience. It's gonna be a case by case scenario, but that, I think is, is from my perspective, the essential piece around GEO is like, what, what am I an authority in? What do I have ownership of? And then how do I go about getting a similar recognition in these answer engines for the other things that I am not the authority in. Let's hit the next slide. Metrics for success. How do you measure something that you can't see? And you know, the truth is like, I think if we have all used, answer engines enough, they, the response is gonna change a lot from day to day. And, you know, that's, that's hard to keep up with, not to mention that this is, from my perspective, the true definition of personalized search. It's going to be different from person to person. If you have an account with Chad TPT and you've been communicating with it for a year, it knows you probably better than you know yourself, number one, or at least what you're willing to admit to yourself. And it's going to give you responses that probably you want to hear'cause it knows what you want to hear. so this, this is a very complex playing field, and you'll see this in the tools when you use them. Your visibility is gonna go up and down. Well, that is due to the fact that the answer is gonna change constantly. It's a moving target. So what are the KPIs you've got to layer in? I'm a big fan of, I want silos for data that at the end of it, I start to combine it for the true snapshot, because if I merge it all together and just decide that it's all treated similarly, that there isn't any. This is more important than this approach to it. You're going to get false positives. So you have to say, these are the silos, these are the pieces, and this is how I weight them. This is the north star. And then in descending order from there, how do they impact the overall output of the data? And that's the approach that we're taking in terms of our KPIs and and analysis of how are we moving the needle around this stuff. So, you know, the visibility metrics, you can't rely on those heavily'cause they're gonna change day to day, quite literally. And probably from prompt to prompt user interactions and engagement on your website. We all know that's, you know, very, very reliable. The problem is, is that we go back to zero click search. You're only seeing a tiny drop of the bucket if only thing you're looking at is traffic to your site from the answer engine. If you're missing 80% of the equation, the, are you cited, are your pages getting cited? Are they, are they proof points? To the answer engines that you are recognized authority is gonna absolutely be huge. And again, I think that there's a whole like industry that's going to grow up around content marketing relative to answer engines. I think that that's going to absolutely be a big thing in the very near future. And then, you know, performance is going to still be pretty standard. You know, what, what is happening? overall performance relative to my positioning and ability to be found. And then of course, the last one, which is probably the most nebulous of all, what's the business impact? and, and my personal opinion as marketers, we, we absolutely should recognize that business impact in the form of pipeline and revenue and other metrics are important to everything we do. At the end of the day, it's just critical for us to be able to say, Hey. We've had this much impact on pipeline and this much impact on revenue. Is it a hundred percent accurate? Maybe not. But you know, the reality is, is that we, we do contribute a significant and significant amount to the bottom line of performance of major organizations. And this to me is a representation of that because the work that we have done in brand is critical to the success on answer engines and visibility. That's a fact. So the smart organizations are starting to see that brand and PR and content are super important in this brand new future. They're absolutely critical, but breaking down the silos, and we'll see that in a minute is, in my opinion, just as important because we have to function together. There has to be a unified approach to this. There has to be a sheet of music we all operate off of, otherwise it turns into anarchy. And one thing before I forget. Is there's a, a, a, a topic called shadow brand. These LLMs are pulling information from the recesses of the internet. And if you have 6-year-old partner information that's off brand and no longer relevant, a co a product that you sunset years ago, whatever information it, they're gonna find it. And so being able to go and really do a, a very deep dive recon into all of the stuff that we've published, and make sure that it tells the right message because you do have some control over the narrative. What are these LMS saying about you? How are they saying it? It doesn't just get populated of thin air, it comes from sources. So just a side topic of, as marketers start to look into that old information that might still exist, might still be accessible to LLMs, but isn't. The most current version of your brand anymore. Let's go to the next slide. So let's take a break here real quick. We don't have a lot more time. 13 more minutes. Any questions, comments, thoughts, ideas from anyone else on the call? Okay. Let's jump in to this last little bit. This is the rough, I think approach and, and I just mentioned it a minute ago. The reality is to move the needle significantly. It's gonna take all of these functions working together. I see, and Davis, I know you mentioned it in the beginning, I see ABM playing a very, very unique role in this ecosystem. And what I've seen work firsthand is this deep. Content. If you think about the funnel and ABM one to many, one to few and one-to-one, as you move down that funnel, you get more specific. You are, you know, at one to few, you're industry specific, you're ICP specific, you're persona specific. You're creating content. And as you get into one-to-one, you're targeting that one individual buying group or account. And you have a lot of intel about them and you're showing them case studies that are very much relative to who they are and what they do. And you're crafting very specific messaging and information for the key decision makers. I advocate for turning all of that stuff into content, and I don't mean, you know, showing everyone's logo and brand and everything else, but if you take that same ABM funnel approach to content as your focus and structure going forward. You are going to put yourself in a position, and again, assuming authority,'cause that's critical, you're gonna put yourself in a position like I spoke about earlier, which is a 67 word prompt that was so incredibly specific that I could have never optimized around it. But because of the content that's on our site and how deep it gets, we were able to be brand mentioned for that. And so that is where these pieces start to come together. And I have always looked at ABM as being a central piece for brand and demand and lead because of that deep, meaningful, low funnel content. This was even before GEO. So now that this approach is going to become necessary for organizations, I feel like that approach is even more critical. I think ABM and the content and the knowledge that it provides and the research it provides. Is absolutely mission critical to organizations who are going to undertake a meaningful approach to generative engine optimization. Vincent, can you say that again? Sorry. So you're saying what, like, more thoughtful content is important, or what was the takeaway there? So, if you think about ABM and the funnel approach, let's, let's take one to few. For instance, when you construct, a one to few campaign for a client, you are segmenting by industry or maybe sub industry. you obviously, you know, have a lot of thought put in about your ICP, you know, the personas who are going to be involved in those decision making processes and how you want to influence them. The way you communicate and the messaging to them will be different and unique to each of those job titles. That's the exact information that LLMs are looking for. That is the exact information that is going to, again, predicated on authority, going to give you an approach to a EO that is going to be successful without trying to figure out what are all the ways people are looking for me, because that's the part that you can't do. I'm firmly convinced like I can, you know, the math is pretty simple. If it's, if it's five times five, so it's a five word query, there's, you know, 25 different ways that you can configure that query. I can do that, and I can optimize around that. If it's a 47 plus word prompt, I can't possibly optimize around all the different ways that can happen. Not to mention personalization, et cetera, et cetera, but my content can tell that story. And these LLMs are smart enough to start to understand how all of these pieces fit together. So, structuring your content. In a very similar manner to the way an ABM campaign would be created, a full funnel ABM campaign, one to many, one to few, and one-to-one is, in my experience, and I've done this absolutely at this moment, the way these things work is absolutely a roadmap for success for your content to have major impact on visibility in these answer engines. Now, the caveat is they're all different. Gemini and chat, GPT and perplexity probably have a lot more in common than the other ones. If you talk about like flawed or Brock or copilot, they're a little bit different. But those are the three. Three main ones that I optimize around right now are Gemini. So really Google in general chat, GPT next, and then perplexity after that. Interesting. That's really cool. Okay, so, and this is just, you know, for conversation sake with. Higher ups, you know, executives. This is the structure in terms of how do we attack this process and, and I think it starts with that slide that we looked at with the Gartner B2B buyer's journey. Why? That's the why this, that's the why of the whole entire thing. In my opinion. It's because you're going to have less and less and less visibility and ability to impact the buyer's journey than you have ever had before. And it's shrinking quickly, and it's going to turn into almost absolute zero at some, some moment in time. The stuff that layers into that, buyers don't trust vendor websites. They never have, they certainly don't know. They perceive answer engines to be a lot more objective than humans. And the reality is, is that we as humans trust AI more than we trust other humans. Right or wrong. We believe them to be more truthful, more accurate, and more objective. So this piece of the puzzle is the most important part. If you think about it now, we have almost no ability to directly impact that sales process. If they're not coming to my website, if they're not requesting meetings with s SDRs and BDRs, what do I do? Yeah. Yep. It's fascinating. Yeah, absolutely. Heidi. That's a, that's a big question real quick for our podcast listeners. Heidi's question is already a shift in websites to more simplified landing page style and funnel pages. Any other recommendations for clients on websites structure to adapt? Yeah, I, so I'm gonna answer a question that I have with my own first, which is, you know, think through and be thoughtful about what kind of experience can you provide the end user that LLMs can't provide? So give your end users a reason to come to your website, whatever that looks like. Like what can I do to give you that you can't get from an answer engine? That to me, is the question we should all be asking ourselves in terms of site structure. You know, the truth of the matter is, and this is like I've done the exercises and I've spent the time. evaluating my own hypotheses and seeing what actually works. Long, long form expert content absolutely is critical. You're thinking about content hubs and, and that isn't a new concept, right? Content hub is nothing brand new, but it's even more important than it ever has been before. So what's the central theme and then what are the supporting pillars that help us to prove that we know everything about it? That's where the fan out stuff comes in. And then you can even get ideas. If you go to Google and you do a search now, and Google has all of these recommendations in the answer engine part, those are your topics for additional content for that content hub. That is your insight into how Google sees that particular topic. And so these are all like laborious tasks, I'm gonna be honest with you. But the other piece that I find extremely interesting and so far is a hundred percent true. Is that you can absolutely use good AI writing to get citations in these answer engines. Okay? And that doesn't mean you don't have an editor and someone, you know, goes in and, and fact checks it and makes sure that it sounds human and that it makes sense and sanity check it. But if you structure your content specifically for answer engines, and there's a lot of information out out there about that, like how do you chunk out the content Q and A are super important, you know, trust checkers, case studies, all that stuff in very long form page content is absolutely gonna move the needle in terms of, of citations. And so, you know, you, there isn't, I haven't seen any tools yet. I've talked to some people about like, this would be cool if your tool did this, that really take it to the next level, which is. Here's my topic. Go out and do the research, our Google chat, GPT and perplexity fanning out around this particular topic, and then go out and create that content, and then get a human in the loop to go and edit it and publish it. And rinse and repeat. That is, there's no short cut to this stuff. That's the, the difficult part. But the shortcut is, I can use AI to do a lot of the writing. Yeah. That's awesome, Vincent. That makes a lot of sense. And you're right. I mean, long form is always gonna stand out. That thought leadership, that richer content. But no, these are great ideas. Thank you. Mm-hmm. The other piece, and I didn't put it in this deck because it's a whole nother topic. Every industry has its own authoritative sources. you know, wall Street Journal, Wikipedia, Reddit, you know, they're, every industry is a little bit different and these, answer engines are. Using and, and in fact, if anyone who wants it, I've put together a cheat sheet for a lot of different industries around, site or authority sources ranked by, you know, top priority, mid priority, and low priority. if you want that, just message me on LinkedIn. I'll be happy to get that over to you. But that's a, another piece. That's where, you know, you start to look at things like, you know, PR and content and comms. How can they play a role in this piece? Because you're, when you think about it, when I think about it, I'm like, oh my God, this is so much work, so many things to, to move the needle on. A and they, and they're all important, but I start with authority because without authority and also good SEO, you're, you're just not the, you're, you will not perform as well as you would like to. Like, those pieces have to be in place. You have to have authority. It has to be able to be across all of those different sites that these answer engines care about in your industry. And you have to have. Already good ranking in SEO. Last we, we'll move if we have one minute, we'll move very, very quickly. this gets, let's go past this into the next two, I think are kind of important. global ABM charter, more important now than ever because of how it fits into the structure of GEO that we've kind of reviewed. And so this chicken and egg, in my opinion, global charter, COE, I don't know, it's hard to say which comes first. I think probably the COE first and then the charter can come after that. It really just depends on, you know, what you've got and what you've done, the work. But from the perspective of how does all of this stuff begin to come together, I firmly believe that the content from ABM has more value than it's ever had before. Not just in terms of ABM campaigns, but really the structure of your content should be using best practices around ABM. Hundred percent. How do you put ABM and GEO and AI automation together? To turn this into more of an engine is really kind of a passion project for me, because I see AI as not generative. A AI is impactful. A agent AI is where things really start to get amazing. And so there're really two very, very unique and different things from my experience. Next slide is dedicated to center of excellence and you know, this is from our perspective and experience. Center of excellence is really your, your command center for what you do. You can, if you have an ABM COE already, that's great because now you can start to leverage that in all sorts of different directions because as my experience shows and what we've talked about today, that stuff is gonna become even more impactful than just. Awesome ABM campaigns, great results coming out of our targeted accounts or one-to-one pursuits. It starts to give you the scale factor that organizations are really going to require to be uber competitive in this new AI first buyers journey, era 1101. Well, we got it. Well, this was, thank you. So I have like three or four pages of notes and then other questions on top of this too. I feel like we could have done two hours easily. thank you everyone for joining. We will share out the recording as well as the slide deck post. And Vincent, I know others have more questions for you as well. Where is the best place to go find you? Yeah, you can reach me at Vincent at ABM agency.com. Or find me on LinkedIn. I think I'm pretty easy to find. Just, you know, I, I'm one of the few Vincent de Castros on LinkedIn. certainly the only one who's the president and the founder at the ABM agency. So you can contact me directly there. or our website is ABM agency.com. You can go check that out. In fact, I can just go ahead and drop in a link to this services page and they may, this is our, they might have a road show coming to a city near you Cannot confirm nor deny, allegedly. Yeah. Yeah. Let's, let's make that happen. I think that'd be a lot of fun.'cause I agree. It is. I mean, I love to talk about this stuff. It's, it's exciting. Exciting and cutting edge. And thank you again, Vincent. Thank you all for joining and we'll catch you next week on the next revenue exchange. Awesome. Thanks everybody. Have a great day.