Marketing in the AI Search Era With Staying Safe Online

How are customers actually finding businesses in 2026? Charles and Nathan unpack the biggest shifts in AI search, the stats every marketer should know (listicles, YouTube mentions, AI overviews cutting clicks), and what it takes to stay visible now that Google isn't the only game. Then they switch to staying safe online: a real AI scam story, how easily these are built, and the security basics every business needs.

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Transcript

AI Search Optimization Stats From Ahrefs

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Yeah. What's happening in your world, Charles?

SPEAKER_00 0:02

I've got this really interesting article. This is on um by Tim Sulu. Um is on LinkedIn. Ahrefs. Do you know what AHREFs is? No. Hrefs is this um fancy piece of online software. Uh pay as you go, month by month, and it analyzes your website uh for SEO visibility, such engine optimization, as well as agentic uh agentic engine optimization, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. visibility. And it and he came up with some really interesting stats. I'm just gonna read out the stats one by one. Um this is on his LinkedIn post. Um it's got like thousands and thousands of um likes and comments already. So it's very well received. I'll just read it. In the past six months at AHRust, we analyzed over one billion data points across 14 studies. Here's what we learned about AI search optimization. Best blog X blog listicles are the single most prominent content format cited by AI chatbots. They make up 43.8% of all page types cited by ChatGPT. So listicles are along the lines of um recommend me the top five accounting firms for city businesses, for example. Another listicle would be recommend me the top three marketing firms for industries, for construct for the construction industry. Listicals apparently make a big difference. Um point number two, 67% of ChatGPT's top 1,000 citations come from sources marketers can't influence. Wikipedia, 29.7%, uh home pages, 23.8%, um, app store, 6.6%. Only 32.3% are influenceable content like educational pages, reviews, news, and blog websites. Point number three, 28.3% of ChatGPT's most cited pages have zero Google organic visibility. All right, let me uh allow that to sync in a bit. 28%, so almost a third of ChatGPT's most cited pages have zero Google organic visibility. How interesting is that? They're pulling content from somewhere else. These pages get cited repeatedly by ChatGPT, despite not ranking at all in Google. A completely dis uh separate discovery layer.

Listicles Dominate ChatGPT Citations

SPEAKER_00 2:05

How bizarre is that? Wow. And and the amount of searches on ChatGPT is high. No longer is everything concentrated around Google. It's um very diversified. I think um as of when we were gonna publish this, ChatGPT is still the number one used uh AI engine. And so it matters for a lot of businesses. That's remarkable. Potentially a big opportunity for businesses who are never able to achieve first page ranking on Google. Yeah, yeah. ChatGPT only cites 50% of the URLs it retrieves. It fetches dozens of pages per query, but uses half of background context without attribution. This means that they're being retrieved without citing where they're coming from. So I think that's um that's a shot against uh that's a shot against content that is original. I mean actually no, that's the wrong way to describe it. That is Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right. When when I read the sentence that ChatGPT only starts about 50% of URL it retrieves, it means in my eyes, a lot of plagiarism is occurring in AI where it's not attributing original authors to the work that's being done. So that's not amazing. Um what else is uh interesting? Oh I'm gonna skip that one. YouTube mentions have the highest correlation with AI branding visibility. Wow. So YouTube matters.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

So YouTube mentions being inside the video or on the description or oh anywhere. Anywhere. Yeah, anywhere. So comments even?

SPEAKER_00 3:29

Even comments. So you so you need to be present on YouTube. So if you're your business is not in any meaningful way on YouTube, perhaps you don't have your own content, perhaps other people aren't talking about you. Yep. Your ability to be cited

What Marketers Cannot Influence

SPEAKER_00 3:40

by GPT is extremely low. AI overviews reduce clicks to the number one result by 58% when searching on Google. That's up from 34.5% just 10 months earlier. So the amount of traffic AI brings to websites has significantly decimated a lot of website results because it is giving people the answer already. Unsurprisingly. Because when I'm doing a search. You don't need a dig. Yeah, I don't need a dig. That's it. Yeah. Up speed. 99.9% of all AI overviews appear on informational intent inquiries. Transactional, navigational, and local searches are almost entirely AI overview free. Okay. So they still do want to send people to AdWords, unsurprisingly. And then the very last one I'd like to quote is AI oh, this is a big one. AI overviews change every 2.15 days on average, with 70% of content differing between consecutive observations. Semantic similarity stays the same at 0.95. The word sources and entities constantly shuffle, but the actual meaning barely moves. So I'm what I'm reading when I read that is that if I'm asking

Google Invisible Pages And Plagiarism Risk

SPEAKER_00 4:50

GPT, what are the top five accounting firms in Sydney, New South Wales, it's gonna give me an answer on the first day. But after 2.15 days, hypothetically on the third day, I ask the same query, I get a brand new set of five interesting firms.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

Why do you think it does that? What in the huh? Yeah. Is it trying not to be biased?

SPEAKER_00 5:09

I don't know. Is that intentional? But it does say that the actual meaning barely moves. So for example, if all of these accounting firms say we're the best tax account in Australia, then that doesn't change. But the actual name changes. Scary stuff, isn't it? It's very interesting. For a marketer. Yeah. Because these are the tools that people use to find businesses like mine. And like yours. And it constantly shuffles and you have no control over it.

SPEAKER_01 5:31

Yeah. And then and then I suppose that's why pays to try and preempt in the buyer journey where someone's at, at the point of going to research, they're obviously, you know, they're fed up with their problem. They're frustrated. They want to find an alternative provider of promotional products or accounting or whatever it is, legal services. If you can advance and get in front of them before that point in time when they're just starting to have that issue or starting to think about the problem, you can take them out of the market before they've actually gone and done that search. So one of the advantages of paid

YouTube Mentions And AI Overviews

SPEAKER_01 6:00

advertising is to be able to do that and put yourself in that position.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

It's like an MM rap song. Yeah, one chance, one opportunity. Yeah. And lose it. Do not miss the chance. Don't miss a chance.

SPEAKER_01 6:10

That's good.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

That's it. So how about you? What's happening in your side

Cubic Promote Sponsor Break

SPEAKER_00 6:14

of town? Very quick word. My name is Charles. I run an agency called Cubic Promote. We are the leading supplier of promotional products and uniforms in Australia and also in New Zealand. We supply to 3,000 organizations on any given year. If you're looking for a reliable partner to supply you with merchandise for your office or uniforms for your organization, trust us, Cubic Promote. And now back to the show.

The Malware Attachment Near Miss

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Well, I I always consider myself pretty good at spotting scams, right? So if I get an email that somehow makes it through the inbox, it doesn't get caught in the junk or spam filter. Straight away I'll know this is 100% scam. And I reckon I I reckon 99 out of 100 I can I can spot. Got a good eye for that. I've seen a lot of crap. But during the week, something something went through. We're on the theme of the Soccer World Cup. I let a goal in. So someone made an inquiry through one of my clients' uh websites. Now, admittedly, the website does not have capture, so the verification on the website form. Lended in my my inbox, I read it, and it said, um, hi, my name is is Sarah, and I'm inquiring about this such and such services. And it was very well written, very conversational tone, uh, and absolutely convinced me that it was real until I started doing a little bit of digging and I had a look at the email address that it came from and it was.com. We only deal with Australian-based companies through this client. So that was a little bit that was a little bit off-putting. So what I would I did was I searched the name, I searched the URL, nothing came up, nothing came up. So I was a little bit hesitant. I replied and I said, yep, yep, happy to help, happy to have a conversation. They replied back. Now that reply back that they sent through to me was caught by our spam filter. And we've got a we've got a pretty good security company that handles all that stuff. So it was caught by them, and the only way for me to see that email that came through was for me to contact our security provider and say to them, please release it so I can do it. So I go into Microsoft's quarantine. I don't know if you've used their quarantine service before, you can actually go in the back end and see what has been caught. And that's not spam filtering or anything like that. This is a separate section which is which is you know, it's a separate net that catches things before they go through to your spam filter or through to your um.

SPEAKER_00 8:17

So we talk about quarantining emails.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

Yes. Spot on.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

Stronger spam filter.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Stronger spam filter and all managed by Microsoft. Yep. Um, I think you can add some of your own rules in there as well. Anyway, um, I went in there and did like a little preview of the email, so it doesn't download the email or any of the detached. Anyway, read the email and it said I've attached my financials for reference. So this was again a little bit of a red flag because generally people won't send their financials unless they've been asked to do so. Um particularly via email. Um and so I emailed our security provider and I said, Hey, can you release this email? And they said, We'll examine it. They examined it, there was malware in the email, so in the attachment.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

They examined it in their isolated environment, and they said, Of course, we won't be releasing this email to you. Um, thank goodness, because who knows what have ended up happening as a result of that. But that was that was really good. That was a really good scam. And they're probably this is probably AI because you know they're able to do these at scale. And I thought, this is getting pretty scary.

SPEAKER_00 9:18

And it can be set up very easily as well, what you said. There's nothing sophisticated about it. In fact, if um I have a laptop in front of me. I I feel that I could have I can create that scam right now in under five minutes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

I don't doubt it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

And then and then if you give me maybe 30 minutes, I could then hook that up to an automated um email sending system when it has been warmed up so that it doesn't get captured by spam systems because I could just buy that off the net. So give me a credit card, I could operate that. And I could start and oh, and then I also need to scrape a data list as well, which I can also get as well using. Apollo is is a is a good one, yes. I could scrape a data uh based list from instantly is another one as well, where I could just get um sales navigator from LinkedIn, once again, so free legitimate data uh database sources, and I could just tell it just to start pushing it out using instantly um and then creating a loop every time someone replies, create a workflow around it. If they say this, if they're interested, say this.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

You've got it all figured out.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

If they say not interested, do this. It's no different to running a business.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

It's regular marketing, but it's regular marketing in a sinister fashion. That's all it is. It is, it is, it is the same with every every bit of psychology around marketing and selling. You can use them for you know with good intentions or you can use them with lots of.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

So do you feel with the malware their ultimate aim was to take control of your computer? Um, and so they could log in your keystrokes and then um access your bank accounts.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

So I've got a security guy

Ransomware Response And Security Playbook

SPEAKER_01 10:45

that sits behind me in the office, one of one of our colleagues, and I showed it to him and he said exactly what you did. He said they would lock your computer.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

Is it ransomware they call it?

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Yeah, it's ransomware. Yeah, we had that happen to us once. Did it?

SPEAKER_01 10:56

Oh Jesus.

SPEAKER_00 10:57

Yeah, a decade ago, we had um someone that and that was before AI, we had someone send to one of our team members a YouTube, supposedly a YouTube link to an amusing lib. She clicked the link and then it downloaded something, and then all of a sudden our websites float. We didn't get access to our share drive. Uh, it still was a message. Um, and I figured it was Russian, but you never know nowadays. It said all in Russian words, uh, somewhere along the lines of, oh, you know, we've taken control of all your assets, pay a certain amount of money into this account. You have this amount of time to do it, otherwise we'll publish it. And then what we did was we You paid it, obviously, right? No, no, no, we didn't pay it. So we we caught up um my that that was on a Friday afternoon, so bad time.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Thank you very much. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

Five o'clock, six o'clock. So no one was around. And so I talked to a person, um, I helped us, he's like, Oh, I can't help, but he could refer a friend. And so referred a friend, this um a friend called Michael Tran, and he was um they they have a they have their own community, so he was a level something something white hat hacker. And so apparently it was really good.

SPEAKER_01 11:58

You went you went straight to the gold chi.

SPEAKER_00 11:59

Yeah, and and he did a diagnostic and okay, you can't unfreeze this. So you have two options, you either pay it or you know you don't pay it. Um, and then subsequently we went through, we had a look to see exactly what was locked down. We made a decision not to pay because what was locked down was nothing. There was no credit card details. There was no real client, there was no client details there. What was there was simply just internal stuff, such as internal prices, our margins, our markups. We had um a lot of product photos. So I'll have fun with that. We had a lot of data about um procedures, policy documents. And I figured, all right, take it. Let them have it there. Yeah, let them have it. Let them waste their time. Yeah, and so we just reset our computers. But if we were any other company and we had credit card details in there or anything else, yeah, then yes, it would be a problematic. Imagine if we were an accounting company or a legal company and you had all your client data there. Exactly. Even just an email and maybe the financials are that would be very problematic.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

And that's why they've changed, that's why one of my clients has changed security provider in the last couple of years from a company that was good but may not have had the high level of security that was required. So we made that switch and it's been, you know, there's a lot of legwork involved in switching security provider when you're when you're serious about what what you're doing and locking down that data and making sure that everything's protected. Because if something goes wrong, you know, you you've got to email everyone in your database and admit to them that there has been a breach. Like you need to be upfront about that, and it it can cause serious catastrophes, let alone all the financial ramifications.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

The hard question is how do you identify someone that's really, really good. How do you define someone who's a good security expert uh as opposed to who's not? That's the hard part.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

Yeah, and I I think I think there are there's certain class levels of security. I don't know too much about it, but there's certain class levels of security where you can get accreditation and that kind of thing, and that's that's helpful. Also that if you know the technology that that they're using and how that stacks up as well. The other the other avenue is just referrals. Like you've got to you've got to talk to people to get their input. If there's someone else in your industry that that you look up to and and you think, well, if they're investing very heavily in this company, then you know, you hope that would at least give you some insight into you know, are they doing the right thing or not?

SPEAKER_00 14:08

Yeah, we we we do a lot of manual processes nowadays, which is we have a team member that is responsible for ensuring every team member in our team does a virus scan at the end of the week. And so he would just check, oh no, have you done a full virus scan? If you haven't, all right, I'll sit here and I'll wait until you do it just to ensure that all our systems are clean. That's one of your policies. That's one of our policies. So we do that every Friday just to uh clean out. And no one is allowed to work in our business if they or even if they're a service provider, um, that might be maybe they're a web developer, for example. They can't actually work on any of our systems unless they send us a screenshot of a cleaned uh virus scan once every Friday. So we're pretty medical health check. Oh, we're pretty strict about it because it's we have a lot more important data now compared to what we had ten years ago. And we just can't let it leak. No, you can't silly.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

The reputation damage is is is a big problem, let alone the damage that it could cause to your clients or you know. Yeah. The reputation damage is just enormous.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

It is, it is.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

You know, we know this had that big leak a few years ago, and I'm sure that they lost stacks of cut customers from that.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

I wonder how they recovered because they haven't really said anything ever since. I I think they had a few scandals uh in and around that time period as well.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

They did, and I think the C I think this CEO resigned around that time um because of that that that issue or that scandal. But you know, in an industry like that where there's only a handful of major players and where yes problems that occur and frustrations can occur so quickly. Like the other day, I'm looking at my phone and I'm going, I've got no internet on the phone, I've got no internet on the laptop, what's going on? Frustrations occur all the time. There aren't very many options out there. I've probably I've probably had disagreements and arguments with all of the telcos over the last 15 years. Yeah, me too. It blows over. These things blow over.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

Because there's not enough choice.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

There's not enough choice. There's not enough choice. So that's that's you know, but if you're a smaller business, that can be terminal. It can be the death of you.

SPEAKER_00 15:59

Yeah, because there are there are a lot more choices when it comes to small businesses. Yeah.