Good Enough Isn't

When LLMs don't like you: Has your brand's SEO survived the search-pocalypse?

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When LLMs Don't Like You: Has Your Brand's SEO Survived the Search-pocalypse?
Featuring Matt Beaulieu, SEO Director, Level Agency

Episode Summary

The search engine results page has changed more in the past two years than in the entire history of SEO. In this episode, Brad Stephenson (SVP of Marketing and Sales Enablement at Level Agency) sits down with Matt Beaulieu, a 15-year SEO veteran and Level's resident expert on AI brand visibility, to unpack what is actually happening to your brand inside large language models, and why most companies have no idea.

Brad and Matt break down the shift from a 10-blue-links world to one dominated by AI Overviews and zero-click environments, where informational queries are being answered without ever touching your website. That is not the real problem, though. The real problem is that LLMs are building a consensus about your brand from sources you may have forgotten existed, including outdated social profiles, Glassdoor reviews, Reddit threads, attorney websites, and Wikipedia, and the picture they are painting may be costing you business right now.

The good news is that this is fixable, and the brands that move first have a real window to pull ahead. Matt walks through Level's AI Brand Consistency Audit process, the content and technical levers that actually influence how LLMs cite and recommend brands, and how to approach reputation repair in a way that is authentic and durable. Whether you are a CMO who has never thought about schema markup or an SEO practitioner trying to evolve your approach, this conversation gives you a clear place to start.

What You'll Learn

  • Why clicks from search are down 45 to 50% for many brands, and why leads can still be up if your content strategy is right
  • How LLMs build a "consensus" about your brand across dozens of sources, many of which you do not control
  • The most common culprits behind unflattering LLM outputs: outdated social profiles, negative reviews, regulatory mentions, fee criticism, and Wikipedia
  • What an AI Brand Consistency Audit looks at and what Month 1 of an engagement looks like
  • The content formats LLMs love most: answer capsules, FAQs, ordered lists, tables, and simple extractable language
  • Why off-site activity (backlinks, brand mentions, Reddit, UGC communities) matters more than most brands realize
  • The "black hat" LLM tactics that worked briefly and got shut down, and what that means for content strategy
  • Why challenger brands have a real opportunity to overtake established competitors in AI-driven search right now
  • The one thing Matt wants every CMO to do tomorrow

Featured Guest

Matt Beaulieu is an SEO Director at Level Agency with 15 years of experience in search. He began his career at a white-label SEO company working across SMB, mid-market, and enterprise brands before joining Level three years ago, where he now specializes in higher education (with a deep focus on trade schools) and financial services. Matt leads Level's AI brand visibility practice and developed the agency's proprietary AI Brand Consistency Audit methodology.

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Myles Biggs

Hey everyone, Myles here, and welcome back to Good Enough Isn't. Before we get into today's episode, I wanna give you a quick heads-up that you're gonna notice something a little different this time. We're introducing a new format where Level's own subject matter experts sit down for real in-the-weeds conversations about the topics that actually affect your business, the examples where good enough quite literally isn't.

Brad Stephenson

Same show, just a new dimension to it. Today, we've got Brad and Matt talking SEO, and honestly, it's a good one. So, let's get into it. Hello, everyone. Um, I am Brad Stevenson, SVP of Marketing and Sales Enablement for Level Agency. I've been working across various areas of the agency for many years now, um, and, uh, actually led our SEO team for a while, and I'm excited about this conversation today. I'm joined by, um, a guy I've worked with for a while here at Level, uh, Matt Beaulieu. Uh, it is a very... It's a very difficult name to pronounce. It can't really be spoken by the human tongue, Matt. Uh, I understand you have an extra muscle, uh, in your, in your face that allows you to actually pronounce that last name. I'm joking because for some reason, it's a very simple name, and it's been very difficult for me to, even though we've worked together for years. But hi, Matt. Hi, everyone. Yeah, I know it's a lot of vowels, and... But, uh, no, I'm excited to be here. And really, you know, we, we wanna really talk about how your brand shows up in large language models.

Matt Beaulieu

We've had a lot of interest in this, and, um, it is really a topic that people really wanna know about, so we're gonna, we're gonna jump in on this today. And we... I- it's been an evolving conversation, right? It's been something that, you know, as, as AI Overviews launched, as we thought about, like, what do we need to do to our, our clients' websites, our own website, how do we need to shift that? How do we need to change schema and structure, and, like, to ke- try to keep up with this, um, understanding what types of content to, to create. Um, and then now there's the Reddit, um, you know, conversation that is, like, very prevalent in the space in terms of how Reddit is influencing how brands are showing up in, you know, sort of AI answers. So it's been a really interesting couple years, um, as that has evolved. So, um, I, I guess my, my first question for you, Matt, then is, you know, when did you kind of first realize, what was kind of the, "Oh, wow, this is, like, actually fundamentally changing," and really kind of breaking that traditional SEO model that brands had been traditionally optimizing towards? Yeah, I mean, in the old days, it was keywords and, uh, you know, people built backlinks. And really, nobody would pay you for brand in the old days, right? And now that, that has to change. So, um, if anyone's listening, uh, who is considering getting an SEO engagement, strongly consider- re- thinking about how you can improve your brand online. And so, like, the reason why it has changed is that large language models are just so much more sophisticated because they're natural language processing tools, and of course they can read natural language like reviews, whether that's in Google Business Profile, G2, or any other review site. Reddit, as you mentioned, Brad, Quora, other UGC sites. You know, there, there's so many places where, um, you know, we did work for a financial services company. They actually... The authority sites they looked at were some, actually some attorney sites where there were some litigation cases against them. So you just don't y- There's a lot of authority sources that, um, that large language models consult, and what they try to do is build a consensus around your brand. Like, what are you? What, you know... And so that is super important to, number one, understand what is being said, and then, you know, we'll, I think we'll talk more about it later, but, like, making sure how you talk about your brand is consistent. And, and then thirdly, you also wanna have accuracy about your brand. So the, these, these are all super important because a lot of times when you see a hallucination, it, it might be something that you have. So I'll give you an example. We have a, a large trade school client, and they said on their Facebook and YouTube pages they had 11 campuses for one of their schools. But they had, they had eight. Hmm. So, so you wonder why sometimes AI hallucinates. That can be a reason. So, you know, we'll really talk about brand accuracy when you walk in the door here. And that's not a hallucination, right? That's just- It's an- content that wasn't updated, right? It's outdated, right. So sometimes there's outdated information. Mm-hmm. And maybe you did your Facebook page eight years ago, and then you did your YouTube three years ago, and then, you know, and the way you talked about yourself changed, and you maybe went under, under went a, a, you know, sort of a branding exercise or a change, and you didn't really carry those things for- you know, or, or, or go back and backfill those. And so that's important. And then also, you know, the brand promise you have if, if reviews are showing up online that are disputing that. Like, we had a client who, um, they said their admissions department gave inconsistent answers, and he had some bad experiences there. That is important to understand.

Brad Stephenson

That's gonna show up in large language models- Yeah for sure. Cool. Um, we dove right in. I'm gonna take one s- quick step back and say, you know, Level Agency, we're, we are full stack, um, you know, from acquisition, uh, all the way through to retention, uh, loyalty programs, things like that. Um, SEO is one piece of that. Um, but it's becoming more important than ever that SEO is an integrated piece of your digital marketing mix. So, um, really thinking about how paid search, traditional, and AI SEO, how all of that is aligned. Um, just because- When people are asking questions, they're not really concerned about necessarily which one of these various places on the SERP, the search engine results page, I'm getting my information. They just wanna feel like it's trusted information and it's answering their question. And so I think that's an important piece to, to think about when you think about agencies like ours. The other thing I wanna do, Matt, is just have you give just a very quick snippet of your background and some of the types of brands that you work with here at Level. We work with financial services, home services, uh, B2B, higher education, uh, we work CPG, uh, kind of a- across consumer health, across the spectrum, right? But, um, talk a little bit about your background specifically, what got you here, um, and what types of brands you're working with today. Yeah, sure. I mean, real briefly, I've, I've been in SEO for about 15 years.

Matt Beaulieu

Mm-hmm. And I started out at a white label SEO company, did a lot of SMB SEO, and I did some mid-market and enterprise brands there too. However, uh, at... When I, I moved to Level three years ago, and I've really been working primarily with EDU clients pr- and, and, and specifically a, a, a subset of that, like trade schools.

Brad Stephenson

And I've al- I also have, uh, finserve clients as well. So those are the two areas where, where I specialize in. However, a lot of the advice we're gonna give you today can be applied across really any, any vertical. Yeah. Yeah, cool. Um, so Matt, we, you know, we take for granted that, you know, we, we kinda eat and breathe this stuff, and we, we take that for granted sometimes, right?

Matt Beaulieu

So for a CMO or a VP of marketing who hasn't really been living in this world day to day, um, what does the SERP look like now versus a couple years ago? Well, what's changed and why is that really important? Why should CMOs and VPs, marketing leaders care about that? Yeah. So number one, it is the bit, the... So the SERP, the way it looks today, has changed more than it ever has since I've been in the business and, and really ever, right? So before it used to be 10 blue links on Google. You have your paid ads above that, maybe local search results if you have a local business. And now the AIO result is what you're gonna be faced with typically. And parenthetically, large language models have a similar appearing result, right? So what happens is people can ask LMs, including AIO, you know, and that takes you into AI mode, but it'll... You can keep asking questions and you... What the result for you as a CMO is that people come to your website much more, a little farther down the funnel. So that's good news, so you... But the bad news is, you know, we call it a zero-click environment. A lot of websites have seen- Clicks drop, uh, from search by 45, 50%. And that's because a lot of those informational queries are gone. So if you're just producing top-of-funnel content, be careful, right? Because that's gonna get answered in, in Google now, in, in AI Overviews, it's gonna get answered by a large language model. It may not even need to go and, uh, you know, pull information from the web to answer the question. So, so those are, um, some really big changes right now that, that we're seeing, and, and you need to change how, how, how you market right now. You need to go more bottom-of-funnel, um, and you need to really, um, you know, think about how you are planning out your content to, to, to adjust for that.

Brad Stephenson

So we're shifting a lot of content to that bottom and middle-of-funnel. And, you know, I'm actually speaking at, uh, SMX, uh, in early June. Um, and I'm gonna be talking about unifying the search ex- experience. And I think part of what's important now is, like, you know, the blue links that you talked about. I think it's important for people to think about the, the, the questions that are most important to them that their customer, potential customers are asking or their customers are asking, and understand and audit how they're showing up holistically, not just how am I performing for this keyword, how am I performing for this citation, how am I p- like, really truly understand what the competitors are doing, what that SERP looks like for that specific query. So, um, you know, that it's auditing the SERP page, not auditing just a specific keyword at, at this point, I think is really, really important and key. That, that is super important. And just to add to what you're saying. To get an idea of where you are, um, I, I would definitely advise people to... So number one, we can give you a free AI brand visibility audit.

Matt Beaulieu

You know, we, we can do that if you reach out to us. We have a f- a free tool. Uh, number two, though, i- if we're using tools like Profound, Writesonic, and other AI visibility tools to help understand your AI visibility scores, your citation rate, meaning the number of times your website is cited as a reference when, when it's looking for information, and share a voice, and there's other metrics as well, including sentiment. So those are things that you can get from those platforms, but there's, there is a little m- the... Well, I will say this though. You know, there, there are tools that they probably don't want you to leave, right? So they, they usually give you a pretty positive sentiment score, but I, I would encourage you to do searches in ChatGPT, in Gemini, and other large language models to see what's really being said. Um, you know- Yeah because that is gonna really help you in- inform how you approach your, um, your, your, your marketing, quite frankly. And, and to give you one concrete example, we had a very large financial services company come to us for an audit, and the triggering event was that when advisors who are looking to come over from another- You know, another financial services company and they bring a whole book over, so that's a really important thing to happen for them. Um, they were getting a lot of mixed messages about, um, you know, some things that weren't too flattering, quite frankly. And so they were unaware of this and, you know, we gave them a playbook of things to do to, to fix that even in the audit phase just to make sure that they're okay. Um, and so, um, so it is super important to understand that and, and if you don't, you might be losing business without ever knowing it 'cause people will just stop their search right there.

Brad Stephenson

Yeah, that's an interesting segue into this next question I have. You know, we're, we're hearing more and more about brands that have done everything right sort of traditionally, right? They're ranking well, they have solid backlink profile, great content, and then they realize that like the LMMs are saying unflattering things. Um, we know how that happens, right? It's, it's... You know, you mentioned some content that might be out there that they don't realize, that they've lost track of, that's outdated. Um, but how else? You know, talk about the other ways that this happens to these brands that are surpri- kind of surprised by this sometimes.

Matt Beaulieu

So number one, y- there are... Like in, in the case... I'll give you a, you know, example with this company. So, you know, there, there were some regulatory issues that, that were surfacing in those, in those results. There were... Even on their Wikipedia page there were some negative things, uh, you know, o- on there because when Wikipedia makes a page about you, it covers the good and the bad. Their reviews on Glassdoor, which is r- super important for those advisors, also had some information. Um, and then, you know, there, there was also stuff about their fees that was talked about in, you know, in user-generated sites. Uh, so, so really, it, it can surface in a number of places and I... There's a cool tool called SparkToro. It's free and there's a... It's paid, but there's... You can do it for free, and it'll help you find where people are talking about your brand. It'll also help you look for where people are talking about keywords online. You can join those conversations and see what people are saying about you. So I think that's super important as well because one thing you want to do is to, if you wanna flip the script, uh, which is, you know, be proactive about fixing those issues, is you would wanna join those conversations. You would... You know, if you're on Reddit, you know, I'd be encouraged to do an AMA, would be a, you know, a, a good way to get going, and a paid AMA is even easier. Uh, they help you, uh, quite a bit to get started. And so y- getting in there and, and finding out and joining those conversations are gonna help you take control of your brand. But the first thing you should do is do a, a brand audit. So we have a thing called an AI brand consistency audit. So we wanna see where we're starting, what our scores are, you know, we have a scoring rubric we use, and it tells you about the consistency of your owned properties and also in these third-party properties. And, and we help you figure out what to do, and to bring everything into alignment and, and also how to talk about yourself online. So, you know, you need to have a consistent way you're talking about yourself as well. So tho- those are all things that, um, um, you, you wanna really talk about, you know, really handle, which is AI brand consistency, accuracy, and then, you know, brand story.

Brad Stephenson

So if, uh, you know, if you do, you, you do these audits and you, you check out the brand consistency, you work with an agency like Level or you do it yourself, like, if you, you realize that LLMs have a, a wrong or outdated impression, is there even a clear answer to how to fix that? What should brands be doing if it's like, you know, think about the trade school example, for instance, like, or the, uh, or was it FinServ? Like, you- Yeah you mentioned a couple different examples where it was like this, "We have outdated information." What do brands need to do if they realize, "Hey, this, these LLMs are, are s- giving, you know, bad information, wrong information," what do they, what do they need to do to fix that? Yeah. So I mean, here, here are some really specific examples.

Matt Beaulieu

So in the case of the trade school, y- we, we went and updated their YouTube and Facebook channel f- with the accurate campus numbers. So there, if you have inconsistent numbers and data and information about your own business on your own properties, you just need, you just need to fix that. However, there are also other barriers that happen, and that's an example with this FinServ client. So for example, their advisor testimonials, um, they, they hadn't really done those. Uh, so what's more powerful than an advisor testimonial? That, that is kinda UGC content, but it would be live on the client's website. They didn't have their structured data, um, really, uh, in, in good shape. So, um, and s- and structured data is like, it is schema, it is, uh, some HTML markup that helps, um, large language models understand what, you know, could be an FAQ, it could be, um, you know, or, you know, like you can say you're an organization, so there's different kinds of schema to help, uh, large language models understand what's happening. And then, so you wanna have that technical part right. And then, um, you know, we do ad- we do advise making an FAQ or blog post to address concerns. So if there were concerns that have frequently come up, uh, in reviews or o- other UGC sites, y- we want to address those. And then f- in, in this case, again, the FinServ client, they had a lot of really cool numbers and stats about how, you know, about their, you know, the positive things about being an advisor, but they were in an image, and those couldn't be surfaced- So we advise them to turn those into text. You know, so still a visual, nice visual, but it, it would be, you know, text, so it could be indexed. And then they also had a lot of, uh, PDFs that were, um, you know, not accessible, so we, uh, we told them to make sure those are accessible and indexable, um, you know, to HTML. So, so those are all examples of things that you're gonna wanna do, um, to, to change story. And, and of course, you know, just doing the content marketing is a big part of it, but then you're gonna also have to go and join those conversations I mentioned and, and, um, you know, really, um, help build that consensus on other sites. Because doing things on your site is good, but you need to do... join those conversations on other sites because remember, large language models are building consensus across all those websites.

Brad Stephenson

So if you can join those conversations, you can help, um, smooth things out and, and really, um, be on those sites providing that data. Yeah. And we, um, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll jump in here to kind of pitch something we've already done that is available to people, is we hosted a virtual insider session, which is our fancy way of saying webinar. Uh, but webinars are boring, Matt. Um, nobody wants to go to a webinar. They wanna go to a virtual insider session, we've found. So, uh, we had one with a couple of our, our friends from Reddit, uh, recently, and you can go to our website, level.agency, and, uh, access the replay of that. Um, so I would encourage people to listen to that, 'cause they talk a lot about how Reddit is influencing, uh, how Reddit communities are influencing these AI answers, and what brands should be doing and how they should be thinking about that.

Myles Biggs

So just a little plug there for s- for something else we've done here and, um, Reddit's really important to these conversations today, so. Um, let's talk about s- you know, kind of... With... We, th- we talked about the zero-click world, right? And we hear like, "Oh, people aren't actually coming to my site because they're getting answers from AI overviews." Are we s- Is that what we're seeing with our, our own clients, or are we seeing a different trend? Like, what, what does it look like across kind of Level's set of clients in, in terms of how we're, how we're thinking about that, how we're supporting our clients in those ways? Yeah. So, and so what we are seeing is we are seeing less overall traffic from search.

Matt Beaulieu

Uh, although I will say this, uh, you know, we have had, because of our, our... the way we do content, we, we have, like, a, a content structure where we answer questions in answer capsules, and we have an answer for each subheader, and we have the meta description also have the answer and so that's for top-of-funnel content. So ours has actually performed very well relative to when a client comes in the door. But that being said, you're still gonna lose some traffic in a zero-click world. Um, that being said, what we have found is that traffic is, is down, but leads are actually up, and that's because we are focusing more on the bottom of the funnel and the middle of the funnel. And we are optimizing whether it's a program page for a, um, an EDU client or a services page for a FinServ client, for example. And also for if they have location or campus pages, we're optimizing those. We're improving internal linking and doing a lot of other things to really, um, you know, improve not only, um, you know, the performance of the page in search, meaning keywords, but also, um, CRO so the page converts at a, at a higher level.

Brad Stephenson

So those are all things that are, are super important. So, you know, I, I think, uh, Google recently said that, um, "Hey, remember how we said this particular structure was so important? Well, I think there, there's some testing happening right now that's saying, like, maybe it wasn't as important as, as we thought after all."

Myles Biggs

Uh, I kind of I wanted to get in- I wanna get into the content, the, the technical aspects, the authority aspects. Like, what is most important? So if I am like, I really want to own this particular prompt or this particular question that customers are asking, what is the most important thing or the most important things that brands should be thinking about from a content authority technical perspective?

Matt Beaulieu

Yeah. So, yeah, I Authority is super important, and I would even add to that trust. So when AI trusts your brand, you're gonna get cited more frequently. And so there are things that you wanna do to build trust, and part of that is content marketing and making content that is valuable and, uh, helpful to the user. But there's also, um, y- building backlinks is also helpful on high-traffic, high-authority sites. That's gonna help. If your brand's showing up on some, you know, large, you know, newspaper sites or, you know, other sites, um, that are high caliber and high traffic, that's also a trust signal. And as I mentioned, having positive reviews and experiences with it, with your brand are super important. And, and I would say parenthetically, if you have some tough reviews, you need to really face into that and change your internal processes. And you can also do things like, I'll give you an example. Uh, we, for a client who had some tough reviews, we, um, we have a, a, a, it, it's, it's a custom GPT that does, uh, it- we call it a bad re- review remover, which, um, doesn't really remove the reviews from Google Business Profile, but it spots ones that are, um- That are, that violates Google's guidelines, and then we just manually request that they be removed. And we, we moved a client's review score from 3.8 to a 4.3 just doing that. So, but there's a lot of things, but, you know, ultimately there are, um, a lot of things off-site that need to happen and on-site, and then from a technical standpoint, you know, we talked about schema, but you also wanna make sure you are, you have a site that is well-structured, good hierarchy, and it's, you know, all, all the technical health score stuff where, like, you know, duplicate meta descriptions and, uh, all kinds of technical error, uh, issues that could confuse Google or large language models t- as to what your page is about, those need to be fixed as well.

Myles Biggs

So given all that, you know, we, we, you know, many people know the term black hat in SEO, right? These are bad practices that people would do to kinda game the system. Um, is there a version of that? Are we seeing a version of that in this world? Are people trying to game LLM outputs? Like, what, what are you seeing? Like, obviously we would never advise this because it comes back to... You know, these things always come back to bite brands. They could win for a while, and then it was very, very bad for them, so. But is there, is there something people are doing right now or, or brands are doing that... Are there bad players who are kinda taking advantage of this?

Matt Beaulieu

Yeah. So there's always gonna be a hack or a shortcut that you can take to, that will work for a while. Uh, the biggest example I can give you right now is listicles and comparative content were outperforming by wide margins. I'll give you an example. Profound told us that LM... I'm sorry, um, that, um, comparative and listicle content was getting 32% citation share, and all their combined was, like, 9% comparatively a- a- as those ki- kinds of content. And so it was, it would be kinda crazy not to do those kinds of content, and it still is a good idea, but what people were doing is self-serving comparisons where they were awesome and everybody else was bad. And Google had an update a few months ago that put an end to that. So if you do do, you can s- you can still do comparative content or make a listicle, which is, like, top 10, you know, um, you know, trade schools in the Southeast or something like that. So, but they need to be, they need to have, like, a rubric, and you need to have a methodology to your review, and it needs to be even-handed and fair, and the same thing for a comparative content. So, so th- those are the kinds of things that people will do a shortcut. Another one was press releases. LLMs were taking press releases as facts, and that's also been kinda shut down.

Myles Biggs

Cool. Um, thinking about that content, like, what, what types of content work well? You mentioned listicles. Um, I know we've talked a lot about tables, um, on pages. Yes. Uh, FAQs. What, what types of content do the LLMs really, really like? So the, what, here's what LLMs like. So number one, they like simple language.

Matt Beaulieu

They like you to, if there is a question, answer it plainly- Mm-hmm and simply, and answer it quickly. So on a blog, I would put a key takeaways section that, that, you know, that can be extractable. So you wanna make your content extractable. And then when, then for each pa- each header of your, of your blog, you wanna have, if it is a question, which I sh- if you are doing a, a question answer blog post, like, you know, who's the best, uh, trade school or, you know, like, you know, how long does it take to learn HVAC training? Then you would wanna have the answer right away in the first paragraph, and then you can extrapolate. And then each sub-area that has a question, answer it right away, 40 to 60 words, keep it kind of brief so it can be extracted. And then, um, and then you also wanna have ordered lists and tables. Yeah. Both of those are highly extractable.

Myles Biggs

And, uh, as I mentioned, you wanna use simple language. Um, if it's too convoluted, it just won't get ex- it won't get extracted. Cool. Um, if I am thinking about, so let's say I've got a list of, you know, sort of five to 10 most important questions that I know customers are asking that I wanna show up for. Do I need a landing page for every single one of those, or can I, can I take the, like the really highest priority ones and create specific pages to address those and try to win for those, and then some of the lower priority ones I can kind of combine?

Matt Beaulieu

Like, how, how do we think about that strategy in terms of content with our clients? Yeah. So I, I think there are options where, you know, there, there are situations where you'd make a blog to answer a question, and there are situations where, you know, when I think of like a use case, you know, I call it use case SEO. So for example, if, if you're, you know, if you're making a, um, like a lawn care product and, and, um, and the subsection of that is, you know, weed removal or something like that, you, you know, I think having a weed page under the main lawn care page is important. So, you, you know, or if there was a software that, you know, I need a software that does this thing, then I would, I would make a page for that.

Myles Biggs

Absolutely. You know, and that's a use case, you know, uh, page. But then if it's just a question, um, like, um, you know, how, you know, how, how long is HVAC training? That I think is, is more suited for a blog. Cool. That's great. Um, the brand comes to us today and says, "We're concerned about our AI visibility." How do we respond to that as an agency?

Matt Beaulieu

Where do we start? What's that, what's the audit process look like, uh, when we work with brands? So yeah, the first month we're gonna spend on doing So we would do an AI brand consistency audit. That's a proprietary audit that we do internally and give you a score. We are gonna, um- We're, we're gonna look at your, um, your page structure and page hierarchy. We're gonna look at your technical SEO scores, and we're gonna recommend potential changes to all of those. A- and, you know, we wanna make sure that the c- the content that you have on your page is, is structured well. Uh, so that could be if you're an EDU client, your program pages, your campus pages, and that could be, you know, services pages or location pages, depending on, on your business. So the, those are all super important things, but month one is spent seeing where you're at, making the large recommendations, and then moving forward from there. Cool. Uh, y- you know what the problem is. You know, talk about some of the levers, um, to actually fix those, those issues. Yeah. So if, if we found that, um, for example, there was inaccurate information about your company, we off- we always, we're, we are recommending now that you do an official company information page on your website, or you can modify your About Us page. And it becomes more factual about your company. So if, if you're The example of this would be if you're an EDU client, you would list all of your campuses. You would have your founding year. You would have a lot of important information about your business on that page, so it's extractable. So that's, that's critical now. So you have to change the way you do that, that page. And then, as I mentioned before, changing the way you do content and creating that content calendar. And of course, making sure that you have your schema set up right away and, and fixed. So even though Google has, um, diminished the importance or, you know, it's really not counting FAQ schema, LMs do count it. So we would still do it, uh, but all the other types of schema are, are still very important. So th- those are all things, and once we identified what technical issues affects, we would go through and we would either fix those items for you or give it to your web team to, to help you understand how, how, how to, how to make those corrections. Cool. Um, what's something that, like, a lot of brands are ignoring right now that you feel like, like, hey, pay, pay attention to this. This is important. If you ignore this right now, in, you know, 12 to 18 months you're gonna really re- regret this? Yeah. I think a lot of brands are very, um, reticent to, to do link-building and to really pitch themselves and get out there o- o- on the web. And I think now it is important to not only, you know, try to attract, um, backlinks, and, you know, really it's the content of the links that's important for large language models. And additionally, get more brand mentions and have your social people out there. Um, I, I th- people really focus probably too much on their site without realizing that it is a lot of what's happening off your site that is driving, driving large language model responses.

Myles Biggs

Yeah, the, the, the Reddit team talked about lurking and listening. Um, so, like, one, one very important thing that I think brands should be thinking about is be out there, pay attention to what's being said, understand how those conversations are going. Don't necessarily... Please don't immediately jump in and start, you know, s- getting defensive and trying to correct those things in real time in those communities. You, it, it needs to be authentic. You can't, you can't do that. But it is important to at least at first understand. It's like, it's like discovery, right? When you're working on any type of project, you wanna understand, um, what is happening out there, right? You wanna understand what the community's saying because if you don't know that, you don't really know what you need to be addressing with your own content, with your own approach. And the other thing I would say is, like, fix your product as well. If there are issues, if there are real issues, genuine issues, you can't talk that away. That's, that's the big thing about marketing. That's always been the issue with marketing, right? Is you can put something in a really nice wrapper, but if the product inside is not good, um, or has issues, people are gonna talk about it. It's, it's going to be an issue for you down the line. So really, really take those things into account as well. It's not just about fixing the narrative, it's about fixing the actual issues that, um, that the community is talking about. And when you see a lot of brands do this well, it seems like they are genuinely saying, "We've addressed this thing. We understand that this was an issue. We have, we have fixed this. We hope you'll come back. We hope you'll, um, you know, we hope that this addresses what you..." And, and they're, they're really genuine about it, and I think that's really important too. Yeah. No, that, that, that's well said. And, you know, just as an example, a real world example of something that we helped fix, we had a client who had a, uh, a breach, actually, a security breach, and they're a financial services company, and, like, $36 million was stolen from their accounts.

Matt Beaulieu

And, uh, but it was all returned, and the person went to jail. But when I asked AI Mode why they, Google wouldn't recommend us, meaning the client- Mm-hmm it was because of that break-in back in 2022. So we made a page, and we addressed about all the security improvements we did and so on and so forth, and we put out a press release, and we added it to a couple other pages where that was important, uh, for their different products. So, so it, it does, it, it is such an individual thing. Like, if you remember back to that financial services company, those were specific recommendations. We're really gonna get in the weeds and make specific recommendations about what to fix, but that, that is an example of something, you know, conceptually we would do.

Myles Biggs

Yeah. Cool. Um, is this a- Is any of this a reason for brands to panic? Um, or is this more of just a, "Hey, there's, there's just more, much more to think about now than there used to be in the, in the, the SEO space." Yeah, no, I don't think panic, you know, I wouldn't say panic. However, I think we need to widen our scope of what we were paying, of what we're paying attention to, as you've said many times, Brad.

Matt Beaulieu

And the brands are to an extent panicking when they realize that there are things being said about their brand that are very unflattering, and it's deeply concerning, and it actually has real world business impact. So it, it is concerning, but not a reason for panic. You know, come in, get an audit, speak to someone who can help you create a plan.

Myles Biggs

Um, and again, that, that is gonna be a lot of things we talked about. It's gonna be a, maybe some internal business processes. And so if we at- attack it in a methodical way, um, you know, this can absolutely change. Cool. Um, talk about the opportunity though. We've been talking a lot about the negative impacts of what's happening.

Matt Beaulieu

Like, there's a big opportunity right now, right? There, the, we are still in the early days of brands getting this right, and I think for a lot of brands, there are major opportunities. Would you, would you agree with that? Absolutely. So the brands that get it, the ones that are doing a lot of the things we just talked about today, are, can, can increase those... You know, so we, we measure it through metrics, like sort of visibility score, the amount of times they're being cited. Uh, you know, we have brands that are being cited at, like, 58% rate, and their next closest competitor's at 16%. So I just did a re- a, a, you know, a monthly review with a client, that's, that's absolutely the case. And so it... a lot of people are asleep at the switch. So if we're, if we're one of those companies that's switched on, you know, we, we can get in there and change, again, the way we- we're doing things. It's a lot of the same strategies for AI and large language model optimization. It's just you're tweaking how you do it. So, like, the example how y- we're making content change, but we're still making content. And, you know, the same thing holds true for a lot of other, uh, things that we're, we're recommending today. So we're still doing off-site SEO, but we're doing it differently. And so those are the things that we need to, um, you know, to recommend to brands to, to really amp up their, their presence in large language models so they can be the ones that are recommended.

Myles Biggs

Cool. I mean, we're even seeing, like, champion, big champion brands, um, where there's an opportunity to kinda overtake them in this space, uh, by some of those challenger, smaller challenger brands, right? So, like, that's- Yeah it's, it's a g- it's a good moment for challenger brands, I would say, too. Absolutely.

Matt Beaulieu

We have, we have clients who are just doing AI SEO with us. You know, they probably realize that traditional SEO is, you know, they're, like, you know, like, you know, I'll just g- give an example. Like, if you're up against Merrill Lynch and you're a smaller company, you're not gonna take them out. But maybe if you switch over to AI SEO, you can get, get ahead.

Myles Biggs

And so some, some brands are making that decision and, and trying to really focus on, on, on that portion. Cool. Um, okay, Matt, this has been super helpful. I, I am, I am a CMO, I'm a VP of marketing. We're having this conversation. What do you want me to do tomorrow? So, um- When I walk away from this, like, what, what are you, what are you gonna tell me to do tomorrow?

Matt Beaulieu

Yeah. Well, the first thing I would do, I would just go in, into ChatGPT, I would go into Gemini. I would, I would do three or four different models, and I would find out what... You know, put, put some important queries in there and then see, see what's being said about you. But if, if you are interested in getting a, an exhaustive look at where you stand, I, I would definitely come in because when brands have gotten an audit from us, it has been an eye-opener. We had a, a company who once they realized what their SEO company wasn't telling them and wasn't understanding about how SEO's changed, they were excited about... You know, really they, they said, "Well, at least we can get rid of them in six months." You know, they, they, you know. So it is important to really take the bull by the horns on this one and make sure you are being proactive.

Myles Biggs

We don't wanna get left behind. Yeah, that's great. Um, Matt, thank you so much. I'm gonna ask a, a last sort of, like, non-marketing question. What is some content that you're enjoying right now, whether it's film, book? Um, give us a recommendation before we, uh, before we go, and don't, don't give me some business book that you're reading.

Matt Beaulieu

That's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for something more fun and light than that. Um- Yeah. No, sure. I mean, uh, so I'm actually watching, uh, a TV series called Legends that it's interesting. These, uh, these people who are from different jobs, government jobs, who are now, you know, undercover and trying to take down a heroin ring in, in, in, in England. So that's, that, that's, that's my fun watch right now. Cool. That's awesome. Thanks for the recommendation, and, uh, yeah, really appreciate the time today, Matt. Yeah. Thanks, Brad. So, so the people, just a, a recap here. If you are interested in diving deeply, uh, into this, reach out to Level. Um, let us know. We'd be happy to run, um, either a quick scorecard, a full deep dive audit. Um, check out, um, our website for, you know, our conversation with Reddit. We have a conversation with our, our partner Profile, which is one of the largest ad visibility platforms out there. Um, we work with other ad visibility platforms as well. Um, yeah, so let us know if you need, need our help, but check out our content as well, 'cause we've got a lot of really great stuff that really kind of dives into different areas of this.

Myles Biggs

So, uh, Matt, thanks so much. Thanks everybody for joining us today, and, uh, and we'll, we'll see you soon. Bye, everyone.