The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™

What Actually Drives Citations in LLMs With Solomon Thimothy

• MatthewBertram.com

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We unpack how search is shifting from blue links to AI-driven answers and why clean data, focused positioning, and public citations now decide who gets recommended. Solomon Timothy joins us to share practical frameworks for AEO, prompt mapping, and measurable AI visibility.

• why prompts replace keywords across the funnel
• how to make content machine-readable with schema and FAQs
• why entity clarity and niche focus boost trust
• media, podcasts, YouTube, and press as authority signals
• differences between AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity
• tracking prompts, mentions, and reverse engineering citations
• fixing iframes and technical blockers to visibility
• building internal tools while the market matures
• what to measure before and after AI visibility work
• practical wins for local and niche brands

Guest Contact Information: 

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/solomonthimothy

Website: thimothy.com

YouTube: youtube.com/c/Clickxio

Instagram: instagram.com/sthimothy

Twitter/X: x.com/sthimothy

More from EWR and Matthew:

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Free SEO Consultation: www.ewrdigital.com/discovery-call

With over 5 million downloads, The Best SEO Podcast has been the go-to show for digital marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wanting real-world strategies to grow online. 

Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of LLM Visibility™ and the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability. 

Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you’ll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve. 

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SPEAKER_00:

This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing. Your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_02:

Howdy, welcome back to another fun filled episode of The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. We are working on a new intro, so apologies, everyone. We have rebranded. We are also moving on to YouTube. So if you uh would go check us out on YouTube, it's pretty pitiful, uh, to be honest. I would love a review. Uh, if you're getting value from this podcast, we've been doing it 12 plus years. Thank you so much for being here right now. We're doing a series with a number of different agency owners on all the different things that are changing uh within the SEO landscape. So I wanted to bring on another SEO owner, SEO SEO agency owner, uh Solomon Timothy. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_03:

Thank you so much, Matt. Super excited to be here. And I love talking to veterans like yourself. So this is gonna be fun.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, well, why don't you just kind of set the table on what you're seeing uh in in the uh changing world of digital marketing and SEO, and we'll kind of get started from there.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, it's funny. You've been doing this for 10 plus years, so are we. And I was just saying uh off the stage that every year of this last 10 years we've been seeing change. It's it hasn't stopped, right? So I don't see this any different from being in the in the in the weeds. We know that every year Google always rolled out a different update. So everything we did, we were like, oh, screw, that doesn't work anymore. Throw it away. We need long form content. Oh no, we don't need that anymore. We need question answer content. Oh, we don't do that anymore. We we do this now, right? Like we need we it's not about the it's not about the quantity of the backlings, it's the intent of the backlink. It's this, it's that, it's zero click. It's like, okay, like did we ever get a day off? You know? No. We didn't get a week off. So so right now, what we're dealing with is fundamentally the way that we uh you know search or look up information has changed. And I think it's a natural progression of uh we got tired of clicking on the blue links and doing our own assessments and our own summaries in our brains on well, I clicked on 10 links and 10 things different things came up, and nine out of the 10 was this. So I guess you know we were coming to conclusions on our own. Now Chat GPT will just summarize the 10 blue links and tell you one sentence what it is. So, why would we go and do what we used to do, right? So there's a fundamental shift in the way that we um change. We change the way we we look up information, we make buying decisions. So uh to kind of give you what I'm seeing every day is that the searches became prompts, and prompts are now in three different forms, right? The top of funnel prompts, the middle of funnel prompts, and then the bottom of funnel prompts. And then we talk about long tail keywords. Well, we have long tail prompts, and and there's no two people searching the same. It has become so different that if if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably the one percent of people that know what's going on with the industry. You know that sitting around anymore is not gonna work. We have to change. We need to create a different experience so that LLMs can see our content, right? Can understand what we're talking about, and then hopefully put us in the top of the little summary of who to work with if they have this problem.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I I can tell you from the clients that I've been working with uh that have like reached out to us. Um, we've landed some really big clients recently uh at EWR, which is the sponsor of this podcast, um, that keeps it going. So thank you for 12 plus years of of sponsoring and and funding this. Um we have a lot of people that used to run a lot of paid ads to landing pages without videos or anything on those landing pages or AB testing it. And that used to work really well. You could just throw a lot of money at stuff, you could run ads to landing pages. Google was like the biggest part of the bucket. Maybe you run a little bit of Facebook ads, maybe do some retargeting. You know, you're talking about building a little bit of funnel here. Maybe you're dripping emails, maybe you're not, or text messages. Um, and SEO was typically an afterthought uh from a lot of the clients that we're seeing recently. Uh and and now you're trying to play catch up of not just like years of not doing SEO, but now you're into entity SEO, you're into GIO, you're into AEO. Like, you know, I I I've kind of coined the term LM visibility because I I think AI visibility is like the broader kind of subset of that. And then I think it's gonna be multimodal uh in the future. Like it's gonna be on any device. Like, how do you get in front of people? But it but it's all really about, and and where I started, if you look at like some of the books I've written, it was all about personal branding. It was about branding. It was and and so it's like amplifying that effect of of who you are as an entity and then how you do that and the execution of that is where you get into the tactics. And you know, it's still in debate. I mean, my LinkedIn uh it just blows up with just different people on different sides of like SEO is dead, you know, it's all GIO, it's just the same thing, it's a little bit different. Like everybody's fighting about it.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_02:

And I I and it constantly is changing, right? The LLMs are adapting, they're learning, like they're leaning on Google, then they're not, and then you know, Reddit's important, then it's not. Like it, yeah, it's a like you said, it's a constantly moving target. And you know, what is the flavor of the day today? But the one thing that sits behind it all is if you're building high quality, relevant content for the user, no matter how they're they're finding it through search, whether it's social media or paid ads or SEO or you know, LLMs or whatever it is, they're still getting to that piece of content. And you got to focus on is this a good piece of content or not? Is it help the user? Um, so I think the user experience has changed, but like what is the core of what you're offering? Uh, that really should still be the focus. It shouldn't be about like all the tips and tricks. And that's why we're really trying to change the name. Like the unknown secret center marketing should have been really uh like a uh a marketing package that you bought, like a Frank Kern sort of you know, kit or something like that. Uh, we never ended up launching that, even though a lot of people have wanted us to do that. And who knows, maybe it's maybe it's still in the cards, but uh it's really about um communicating effectively and keeping your data clean so the LLMs understand what's going on and who you are, just like the search engines. And I mean, that's why the LMs don't use Facebook because the data is really noisy and there's different topics and you know information's not being organized correctly. I think that's what it really comes down to is clean data.

SPEAKER_03:

So 100%. I definitely agree with you there. If we did proper SEO, like you said, there's a lot of brands that didn't do it because they were getting traffic from referrals or whatever it is, influencers you name it. But if we had schema markup, really good FAQ section, built it out really well, meaning the answers were clear and concise, then ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, GRAW can read it and understand and summarize it to the users. Now, if you have a website that doesn't have an FAQ section, that doesn't have uh just answering questions that your users have, because even in Google, they've already said that before ChatGPT made made all this change that you need to be answering questions, you need to be answering questions. People have questions, they go to Google ask questions, and then they created people also asked. I mean, we were seeing all of this, and we were answering those questions that Google said you should be answering on clients' website, right? It's like it kind of sort of came to a conclusion that this is where the world is going. And now I think we just took it to another level because of the fact that prompt, you can write it incorrectly, put it in different orders. You can, you know, you can just be really dumb about it and not even act like you know what you're talking about in Chat GPT or Claude or whatever it is, perplexity will find, they'll read your mind and then give you an answer. So at this moment, the website owner, the webmaster, has to do even a greater job explaining what you do. You have to be even more focused on the quality, like you said. It has to be even more granular about what you who do you serve, who do you not serve. Put things in a table format, you know what I mean? Do you help hospitality then say yes? Do you help manufacturing industry say yes? Because then Chat GPT reads that and say yes, they do, because that's the level of details people are asking.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I mean, what what what is Google's like right, right? They had two missions. One, not be evil and they remove that one. And then the other one is organizing all the information in the world, right? And so that's what SEOs are doing is helping organize that that information out there. And that's what the LMs are looking for, is nicely organized information. So if you can help them find that information about you, you you're more likely to show up. And I think that that's really what the whole debate is about is you know, uh how how are you communicating? Like, well, you know, also like you need to understand what your brand is and who you serve. And that's one of the things that I I've seen with the LLMs is like you can't be an expert on everything and you can't serve everyone, like pick a focus, right? These are things that I feel like Google's been with the like people also ask, like you said, have been leading us in this direction for a long time. They have the data, they see where the users are going, and they're they're trying to help use SEOs to organize the information on the web so that the right brands show up. And so again, I I I mean, if people ask me, like, what do you do? Right, because I mean, I don't even think my wife understands like what I do. Like, I don't think she's like, what is SEO? It's like you're organizing information online to make it more useful. And I think if that's like the guiding star in what you're doing, it it it helps you answer uh what you should be doing and what you shouldn't be doing and what what's the quality of what you're doing and what you what you don't have it. Like I can give you actually a lot of examples of things that you shouldn't be doing. Um, and then you look at the people that are winning and you go, okay, they're winning in your category for what? Why are they winning? What are what are they doing? Um, how are they positioning themselves? Like, I I again I I don't think that there are any really secrets. Um, even LOMs can give you insights, though, that that you wouldn't normally see or trends. And and so I think that how we work uh is is absolutely changing. Um, and taking a bunch of fractured information, and that and that's what search did, right? Search fractured where people are finding information all over the place, and then it's our job to like grab it all and put it back together, I guess.

SPEAKER_03:

So yeah, like practical tips are we cannot ignore any word on our website or any sections or the speed, uh being mobile friendly and all the things that we already should be doing as good SEO. I think AEO is just good SEO plus, you know, things that you should be doing.

SPEAKER_02:

So so let's go into that. Like, like all these different definitions. What what are the definitions of SEO that you're using? And then how would you define them each? I would just I would love to hear your vocabulary terminology.

SPEAKER_03:

I I I just I I love your um LLM visibility. I think that's a really good way of um describing it. But the way that we've been using it, as probably people are coining it, is AEO answer engine optimization, because it's kind of it includes Google, it includes uh Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, and all of that. Um you can do GEO, generative engine optimization, you can do something like that. But I don't think it really truly matters as the industry, like you said, is not clear on what it is that they want to call it. I know uh for a fact that we are no longer just going and clicking on blue links. That's where our uh clients are coming to us and saying, hey, we need to show up in Chat GPT. So what we did is we built an engine, we've always had our own technology that goes and can create the prompts that customers are going to type in in these three different levels top of funnel prompts, what are the companies that are good at X? What are the top companies, right? So we can go and get those prompts, and then we will run those prompts and we can identify which brands are being shown as a result by these systems. I get leads from ChatGPT every single day, so I create a lot of training resources around this. So I said, if you can figure out the prompts, that's a half the problem. So top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of a funnel, and then we find out the brands that are being mentioned, and then we can go and do the same good old SEO research. Why are they showing up? And those are citations essentially, and so we can reverse engineer what they're using to get to those answers so our clients, the people that you know we're called to serve, can actually get the same result. It is reverse engineerable, but there's the problem is there's no systems out there who can go track the prompts, the results of the prompts, what ranking that the results are coming up with, and how do you change the rankings of these things? Uh, but the good thing is it can be changed. We're doing it every single day. And then once you have that information, how do you track it so that you can make sure your clients are increasing, right, in those answers? They legitimately should have the option to do it because they are good businesses. It's just that, like I said, a lot of people ignored proper SEO. They could be a hundred million dollar business, but the one that ChatGPT shows could be a little two million dollar company with a great marketing guy like you. You know what I'm saying? So they're like, hey, they show up and they're freaking out how are all these people finding you? But the$100 million company has never done anything, so they just waited it out.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

So I want to parse out some of the things that you said. Um, you know, first, um, like I I do have a score um that that I've kind of uh been putting together, and I think that we're on a similar line of thinking from a LM visibility standpoint. So really the LM visibility uh for me is I've broken it apart and saying, okay, there's things that benefit SEO that also benefit AI, and there's kind of this Venn diagram overlap. Um, I'm really looking at, okay, let's just look at the LLMs and what matters to them. Now, certainly there's other things that you can do, but I think that's where the GEO, the, you know, AEO, like like it gets it gets messy and it gets blended. And, you know, I would say GEO, see I AEO, GEO, like, you know, like GEO is kind of, I would say, more of what I'm doing, but I'm really focusing on the generative engines. I'm focused more on the LLMs and like, okay, let's let's get a score that that we can focus on on how well you're doing from like an AI readiness standpoint, right? And there's a lot of tools out there um that are starting to pop up. There's a couple, like uh a buddy of mine just got into Y Combinator, he's doing one of these tools as well, where they basically um track the rankings uh and and average it out uh over the searches. You know, that's not even like a perfect answer, in my opinion, because your LLM, right? And okay, so like if we if we scoop back a little bit and look big picture, um LLMs don't matter today or not as much. Now, I think they matter on the reputation management side because I'm actually seeing some of the data from like similar web and stuff. When people go to a site, guess where they go right after the site, where that where that where the referral traffic's going. The referral traffic's going from the site to the main source of Chat GPT or you know, Gemini or whatever perplexity. So people are going to check out a site, they're finding it from an ad or however you're finding it. And some of them are finding it through the LLMs, but they're going to check it with their chat GPT or whatever they're using. There, I think everybody's gonna have like a personal LLM that they're gonna trust and believe in. Okay. And I think that, you know, really, how do you get inside the training data of that LLM that you're talking to? Like you you talked about, middle of the funnel, uh, top of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, I think is a great kind of format and also a great kind of matching component of what you're doing. But the personalization component when you're doing keyword tracking, even all these tools that are coming out, how like your LLM, if we did the same prompt search and I did the same prompt search based on my instruction set of what saved about me, is gonna get different results based on location, based on interest, based on previous searches. And so attribution is probably one of the biggest or hottest topics out there of like, well, you know, are any of these tools? And all the major tools are coming out with um new new ways to track stuff, but already the old ways to track stuff was horrible in itself. Like, I mean, you can't trust, like I had to look at three different tools and always triangulate what the answer was of what I'm gonna try to do because they all don't give you the same data. There's no consensus data of actually what it is and where it's pulling from. And so, you know, I I would love to understand more about, you know, what what are the tools? We're building a couple of tools that are not like we're not trying to like we're not trying to sell the tools, but we're working on on the back end for stuff we're doing internally. I would love to understand kind of what you're doing, some of the use cases, maybe some of the case studies that that you found and just kind of share notes. I think that that's what people like on this call the most is you get to share notes of what's working for people. Um, and uh, you know, everything used to be very uh close to the best when you're doing that scale. You're like this strategy, I don't want to get it out there. But now I think everything's like out there and there's multiple points of view. And um so yeah, so I would just love to dig into that a little bit more.

SPEAKER_03:

Definitely. I agree. Everything is out there. The problem is who do you trust? What do you take because you only have limited time to implement? Um, so right now I think the tool business is relatively early. There's just no tool out there that's going to give you what you need. There's no SEMresh or HREFs that's AE already or G already. Um so that's my that's my take on tools. Uh we have a business that we built years and years ago. It's called ClickEx. Uh we built our own tool to onboard clients and do automated reporting and things of that nature to help us scale as a business. So we have every API that you can imagine already connected to it. We have ChatGPT Perplexity, uh, we have uh you know email marketing, you know, HubSpot, you name it. And so we're able to just expand onto our own tool set that we built, and that's how we're uh figuring out what is happening in the marketplace. So we could run any and all searches in Perplexity Claude, ChatGPT, and actually see the answers that it provides. So then we can take that and then say, hey, here's where my customer is. And if it's giving you one, two, three, and four, then we assume that that is what it's giving to everybody. You're absolutely right. My LLM knows me who I am, what I like. Like and it tells me, Oh, you're a health freak and you like to eat healthy. So here's your three options. Because it doesn't tell me the poor, you know, restaurants when I ask for a restaurant. It does it automatically. But for the most part, I think we can use the generic answers to find out where our customers are and then figure out how uh we can rank them. We already do that today, and we also can see one, two, three, or four who are the brands that are showing up. The best part, I think, as an SEO, which maybe the general public can't figure out, is going and finding the links that those websites have where they're mentioned. Those are the hard parts because Chat GPT doesn't have anything to go by like Google, so they use something else to figure out why in what order do these things matter, right? So there's the um the authority engine, basically the recommendation engine, and how do we really figure out what how do we uh influence this? And so our research has been we have to go get the same links that the other guys that are showing up, doesn't matter the size of the company. They have consistent citations, they have quality data, and so the two things, just like SEO did back in the day, good quality links and frequent uh mentions of your brand in different places, are the exact same factors that they're using it. What is interesting, Matt, is that just because you show up in AI overview, you don't automatically show up in ChatGPT or Perplexity. We are seeing three different visibility percentages depending on the same prompt. Our companies are mentioned different times. So one of them, actually, from our examples, Google is like the worst. ChatGPT keeps showing up more and more particular brand, and perplexity might be less. And Google's like, I don't know, maybe Google has more brands to show. So our clients or people that we're working with aren't showing up as much. It hasn't been the opposite where you're showing up so much in Google, not in other places. So we were under the impression that they're taking the blue links, just being honest, like I'm being an old school SEO and then just creating a new version of answers. You know what I mean? Like, hey, people don't want to click on that. They want this, so let's just take all of this and just give it to them. But no, they're not doing that. They're giving me completely different answers than what Google's AI overview is doing.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and I think it's uh around the logic of how they're figuring out what the value of a brand is. And so now you're not thinking about uh and and like there's been a couple studies, I believe it was AHRFs that uh came out with the studies like something like 21 or 27% of the the answers that were being shown weren't even indexed. Okay, it's like so so like I mean, we know Google doesn't follow the no follow. So like there, I mean, and I asked Chat GBT this after I saw that study, and it was like, no, like it has to be indexed, and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, okay, well, where are where's all this data that you're coming from? And and a lot of it is getting ingested that might not be indexable, right? Like that's that's in the the training sets. But how they're determining what brands to show is a completely different like workflow or process. Um I mean, they're like an intel, they're intelligent, like they are intelligent and they're using intelligence like a really intelligent person would do to research a brand. So they're finding all kinds of different stuff. They're looking at, they're not just mapping Google. Now, I think at the beginning, when they just opened up the grounding trading sets, they started to do that because that that's kind of the what you lean on. Um, you're like, hey, Google, like I'll lean on that. But I but I I'm seeing the LLMs even evolve into how they're searching for information and presenting information finding it, which is really fascinating to follow. Um, I would love to hear more kind of case studies or um things that you're seeing in the data.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, so um going back to it, it's it's interesting because some sometimes if the company is well known, they're going to get mentions more because there's just a lot more citations of that brand out there and the consistency is there. And other times, if you're in a very niche market, like you know, we have a client that's in the uh they do training and and and equipping you know professionals for certain certifications and all of this stuff. Nobody does that stuff. They it's a it's not it's a very niche, you know, HR people look for it. Those people are they get found more, but there's not a lot of searches. So it was easy to get that particular company to get found. It's either you know some of these big uh testing firms or boom, this consulting company, right? So it wasn't hard for them. We have uh executive search companies that we're helping with. And and when you have a muddy, uh, I would say extremely competitive industry, it's harder to break through that just like it is in Google, because the bigger the brand, as you said earlier, it's going to it's going to be hard to beat them. So, what we're finding out is how do we make a small brand show up in these in these things? The only thing we can control are these brand mentions that we're talking about, right? So um, one of the things that we found, believe it or not, this is like pure internal testing and research, is this podcast right here is considered media. And so when I show up to this podcast, it is actually being transcribed. If you put this on Apple or on Spotify or anywhere, YouTube, it's getting transcribed and it's getting used in in AI training. And so, and it's considered another citation, another brand mention. And so, if you want to follow the latest of a brand, it's just follow the founder, like you, and then listen to what they're saying. So I think ChatGPT is going to have better answers, or Claude or Perplex, you name it, because it's actually consolidating all these things where it's Google wasn't doing that. It's actually studying you and I as a brand and following us around and studying everything that we put out there and updating its own. Does that make sense? Yeah. Research because we've influenced the answers or we've influenced the order in which the companies are showing up by showing up in media. So we've we've then begun getting our customers on podcasts. Like you like, it's not a clear answer. You know, I wish I could just say, hey, you do these three things, we have our own framework. But it's things like that that I'm sharing that we're seeing is influencing the results. So a press release back in the day mattered because it was like a good quality link for like a day or something, but a press release also is media, and you can put in. So I have a client who launched a brand new YouTube channel, and there was no mention of this company in ChatGPT after they launched a YouTube channel. They put out a couple of videos, you go to Chat GPT. Well, we put out a press release about the channel and all of this. Then you go to ChatGPT and it knows everything about this this YouTube channel. So we're like, hey, I think we're trying to figure out how they're doing it. And the good thing is, I think it's the exciting part, that they wrote an algorithm. So just like Google had an algorithm, if you can figure that out, right? Like it's not impossible to figure it out, but I think it's easier than actually people make it out to be. So we're doing good old outreach spray mentions, right? Quality press mentions, um, and and podcast interviews and things that we can influence that are then able to then change what they know about you. If LLMs don't know about what you do, because you give it more no information, you don't have structured data on your website, you don't have any content, right? You don't have schema markup, you're not answering questions, then it doesn't matter. We're not going to show up. Those are like your foundational things. And then from there, you just got to go keep working on creating content on YouTube and making sure the same exact answers are being done. It's a lot more content creation. However, it's it's totally changeable. And we're seeing and we're tracking every day. So we're we're seeing how the answers are being influenced by the activity that the brand is doing.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think that was great, great points. I think that uh share a voice uh in media is is key. And the easiest way for most brands to do that is YouTube. You saw in the big announcement from Google, they pivoted to YouTube. I mean, they again they see where these things are going. I think that they're uh under a lot of pressure to come up with new subscription models with uh ads that are are kind of moving away and they're trying to. I mean, I I don't know if we're gonna see ads in LLMs. I I mean they say they're not, but I I I you know it remains to be seen. Um, you know, I I think press releases are phenomenal uh as well. Uh I think there's different places to get citations and what the training sets look like, um, a lot of educational-based stuff. One of the interesting things that um I would consider maybe a pro tip, it was something that that we learned recently as we were building out a new site, was alums don't pick up iframe embeds. Okay. So, how many websites out there have a lot of really important content in an iframe embed? And well, it's not a schema unless you, you know, if unless you're labeling it, unless maybe you have some schema markup referencing what it is, uh that's not going to show up. So schemas, you know, people debate on whether schemas appointed to structured data. It helps uh build trust. And that's what Google's about is is is building that that that trust. So I I think that there's a lot of stuff that that's changing and it questions your assumptions. And like I I love to like know what I know and then go like, let me go test it. Let me go see if something's different, let me go kind of tweak it, let me go see what see what happens. And so I'm really enjoying uh the discovery process that you know everything's different, everything's uh everything's new. It's kind of like an unexplored land. Um I I've I've done a couple posts. Uh I have a newsletter on LinkedIn that I need to probably uh do a little bit more consistently. But you know, I I did the post about um, it's kind of like you know, Columbus Day, we just had Thanksgiving. I know this will be released uh probably in January, but we're doing this right after Thanksgiving. Um it's new land, it's new territory that that is unexposed. Now, certain people just uh inherited it, but if they're not really doing the things they need to do, they're not gonna be, they're not gonna maintain that ownership. And um also you can't just stumble on this anymore. Like it, it's it's very um intentional, I think a lot of uh a lot of what's happening. Uh you've made some really interesting points, which uh, you know, doing a press release before a campaign that you launch is is something that's pretty standard, but seeing that in the data of you have a YouTube channel and then you're calling attention to it. Like there's a a paper out there, uh Attention is everything that kind of kicked this whole thing off uh with the LLMs. You're calling attention to that. And then LLMs are going and checking it out, kind of swarm theory, and then they're going and checking out the podcast, and then they're indexing the whole podcast, and it gets the training data is that's that's a that's a super interesting insight.

SPEAKER_03:

Every single one of our clients um automatically are getting this level of support. It's not an add-on. You don't go and say, Oh, I want the traditional SEO, and then can you give me this other thing? We can't. There's no way it's all intertwined. Um, so we have the opportunity to test all of our theories against all of our existing clients, as well as the ones that are coming in uh by me putting out a lot of resources and content and you know, just what we're finding every single day. Um and it's been interesting to say the least, because no one's ever, this is a new territory, even for the the experts of the experts, they're still figuring it out. Uh so back to your point, Matt, uh experimentation is what we do. We've always done that. We never knew anything until we can prove something. Uh and then and eventually it stopped working. And I think the same exact thing is gonna happen. Um, I believe that marketers are going to ruin Chat GPT because we now know what the freak we need to do. And that means that we can't trust it like we used to trust. And right now it's probably clean, but eventually, as you know, everybody can figure out how to show their brand up there, and so it's going to become more harder, and some other thing is gonna pop up to make it harder or to to actually have the quality data. The the the more interesting thing, I think, is our customers do not care um how you what you do, they want their answers. So I think we need to solve for the customer. We are, and I don't want to be the guy that's that's got the secret to showing up in Chat GPT. That's not the that's not the thing. We you and I have clients that have hundreds of millions of companies out there, they have a specific type of customer they're trying to serve. They don't need everybody, they just need the kind of people if you're if you make some sort of an engine for a uh a plane that only fits these types of planes, that's the only kind of customers that are really gonna help you. You don't need everybody else calling you. But the problem is you need to inform these LLMs what you do and who you do it for and the specificity of your services. And and and so for small businesses, you can only serve a small geographic target. So somebody in Nebraska isn't gonna help you if you're in Texas. You don't need the traffic from Texas or from somewhere else. So I think if we could just hone in on there's enough money to be made for everybody. That's number one. There's no like you're not gonna miss out on it. But what we are going to miss out on if you don't have enough information about you and who you want to have as a customer, and if the LLMs don't know, it cannot answer the prompt. So every time we're doing this, we measure the visibility before we start working with people, and then we look at the visibility after we start working with people. It's often that their own brand isn't mentioned for the thing that you do. So if you're a real estate agent, I have just brought on a real estate client in South where they are, they don't show up in the town. They're selling luxury homes in the town that they serve for I don't know how long. They don't show up. And you know why? Because every real estate agent has a cookie cutter website, Matt. You know this, everybody's got the same thing, some kind of MLS search. There's no schema markup, there's no content, there's nothing about what you do. They just people that know you go to your website. It was never a funnel, it was never a top of funnel, middle of funnel, and then, oh, I want to buy a house. There was always, like you said, some iframe or something of MLS. And so they're like, Salman, I can't, I can't have this because if I sell one million dollar house, it is enough to pay for your services for the whole year or whatever it is, right? Like, like, like I was like, Yeah, you're right. You know, it's like, do you see like how much money is on the table? If you don't show up, it's it's tens and thousands of dollars per month that you could be missing out because you didn't put anything about you on the internet because you know, word of mouth, referrals, and whatever is how you relied on it. And that person was like really frustrated because this is the reality, this is the new reality.

SPEAKER_02:

You know, I I think it uh marketers should do a better job of when they're presenting to clients on what the lost opportunity cost is of not uh utilizing. And I think you hit on that. One of the things that I that I started to think of when you were talking, and we're getting close to the end of the pocket, so I want to give you time. Yeah, I know. This has been a great discussion, and uh I would love to keep going. Um, I just got a hard stop here, but uh essentially uh I was on a speaking tour um and there was uh like a VP of Coca-Cola. I don't I don't remember her name, but uh she said something. She said a focus beam of light attracts more moths in the darkness. Okay. And everybody understands that that analogy that when I talk to a lot of brands, they're trying to be everything to everybody and they're trying to serve too big of an area or a specific area. And Google looks at trust. Google's like, do you really have clients in this area? Do you really serve this area? Can you really do all these things excellent? Because I want to give the best absolute answer. And so that's what I'm seeing happen with LLMs as a multiple, is you need to get really, really clear who you are and what you do and who you serve. And you need to build content around that based on the customer journey, based on the target persona that you're going after. And and the more you get focused, you can amplify that focus, but you want to, like all of us, want to get clients that fit the box of where we serve the clients the best, the type of customers or the even the type of um people to people, because people do business with people that we want to work with. Like trying to serve everybody, um you're gonna be that jack of all trades, the expert of none, like that that analogy. And I'm not saying that people aren't experts in multiple things, but you got to prove that to the LLMs, you got to prove that to the search engines. And it's a lot easier to start small and expand out, just like uh the GMBs do. So um I just kind of wanted to highlight that for everybody is having that focus beam alight um uh of what you do uh clarifies it for search engines and LLMs alike. Um Solomon, I really liked the insights you shared. I would love to have you back on. We can talk further uh as things continue to progress. Um, how do people find some of these resources, follow you, get in touch with you, um, hire you?

SPEAKER_03:

Absolutely. No, I'm happy to give all my resources away. I actually create a lot of resources around this very thing, AI visibility. Uh, I put a 45-minute free training out on the internet. It's just a simple website they can go to 10x10x.info. Literally, it's free. You don't have to do anything, you don't have to buy anything. The reason I do that is I want to make sure that small businesses, those companies that desperately need the help, maybe they can't afford a consultant or whatever else, they should know what to do so they can actually do and get to a place where they can start paying for services because there's so many business that are going to be lost. It's gonna be like internet all over again. Where do I start? How do I do it? You know, people thought talk to me and say, Well, I can go train it myself. I said, You can't. They don't take what you and I say and and change the the training. It doesn't do that.

SPEAKER_01:

People were trying to talk to AI in the beginning to like make it remember them and and it doesn't, it doesn't.

SPEAKER_03:

So so that's what I mean, right? So things there's some just think simple things we want to add value to as many people as possible. So they do that, they can go connect with me on social media, but it's more about uh educating yourself, learning, finding the right people to help you based on the size of your businesses. But yeah, so if they want to email me, happy to help. It's all on my that website, 10x.info.

SPEAKER_02:

Awesome. Well, uh, I'll put your links in the show notes as well. Thank you so much uh for coming on. Solomon really enjoyed it. Uh, everyone, if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet. Well, I used to say the internet, but maybe it's LLMs. I don't know. I think that we're gonna have an uh AI revolution here. Um, reach out to EWR for more revenue in your business. Uh, thank you so much for listening. If you liked anything we said, please leave a comment. I do read all the comments, please leave a review, follow us. Um, check us out on YouTube. It's really, like I said, it's really sad. We need to do some stuff there, but we're we're working hard to uh make that quality content for you. We got shorts and all that sort of thing. So I'll and we'll give you some of those to share as well. Uh so thank you so much, everybody. We appreciate it. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.

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Matt Bertram

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