How LLM Search Changes SEO And E-Commerce With Andrew Higgins

We talk through what “AI visibility” really means and why marketers are racing ahead of the data, even as consumer behavior shifts toward AI search and AI assistants. We connect SEO fundamentals to GEO and agentic commerce so you can take practical steps instead of getting stuck in paralysis. 

• AI visibility tools and why the industry lacks a baseline standard
• How context and personalization change AI search results
• Why LLM analytics is immature and often modelled on simulations
• The importance of data hygiene when AI tools disagree
• How AI assistants compress the customer journey into one surface
• Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, and why SEO still matters
• Agentic commerce and what it means when AI buys for people
• Simple starting steps like tracking, schema, and product feed readiness
• Avoiding low-value AI-generated content and focusing on usefulness

Guest Contact Information: 

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/andrewmhiggins

Website: parsnipp.com

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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 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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Transcript

Welcome And AI Marketing Focus

SPEAKER_00 0:03

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_01 0:18

Howdy, welcome back to another fun-filled episode of The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I'm your host, Matt Bertram. We are talking about everything AI marketing, AI visibility, SEO, um, kind of how you deal with the gentic. Everything's very fluid. Uh, wanted to bring in somebody I know people have been asking about e-commerce and agentic stuff. That is not my wheelhouse. So I want to be clear. Um, I do know and have great partners uh that do a lot of uh e-commerce and agentic stuff. We're doing more B2B stuff, lead gen, that sort of thing. Uh, and and so uh all right, Andrew Higgins. Andrew Higgins, welcome to the show. He's got an AI visibility tool, he's doing e-commerce agentic. Uh, we're having some different kinds of conversations around like, is LLM visibility like baseline analytics, right? Like, I think that that's uh a really interesting point that everybody's trying to add AI visibility, whether it be GA4, uh, all the different uh gold standard tools are offering um LLM visibility, everybody's doing it a little bit differently. Um, but everybody's racing to do it. And to your point, I feel like there needs to be a baseline. It would be great if there was like a standard. I don't know if Google's gonna come out and say like it is. I mean, they're switching everybody over to AI search uh shortly. So um I know it's gonna be more of a conversation. Um, but I but I would love to kind of get your landscape, Andrew, on what what you're seeing in the marketplace. I know you launched a tool um uh a while back around L invisibility. I know they're popping up everywhere. So I'd love to see what you're seeing with that, with that, as well as like kind of what is going on with e-commerce.

AI Visibility Tools Need Standards

SPEAKER_02 2:08

Totally. Well, thank you for having me. Um I think everyone is is scrambling to try and figure out the problem at the same time. And to some extent, like marketers are trying to build the plane while they're flying it, like pardon the old adage, but I think the the reality is what we know, like if we just figure out things we know, consumer behavior and the way that people are digesting and using the internet has wildly changed on the back of AI. The way we figure out what restaurant to go to or vacation or what to buy our moms for their birthdays, like that behavior, that customer journey has changed a ton in the past few years and is changing rapidly on an almost weekly basis. So I think when we think about whether it's AI visibility or e-commerce or honestly any part of the digital marketing stack, it all is being retooled and the playbook is being rewritten. So I think the the first conversation that at an industry level we're having is GEO or AI visibility or AIO or AI SEO. Like we don't even have the nomenclature right yet. Uh I'm not convinced that's the market. I think that's where the conversation today is. Uh I think that's for a couple reasons. One is because we understand SEO and we had this monolith that was Google search and governed a lot of eyeballs and the beginning of a lot of shopper journeys. Uh today, one, we have it's not a monolith. There are lots of players, there are lots of labs in large language models, and even under the hood of you know, Gemini as an example, there's multiple models that behave differently, that collect data differently. And the biggest piece is it's no longer just 10 links. No context matters. So if you and I have a similar interaction with a large language model, we will get different results because of the context of who we are. And all of that changes the way we start to optimize. If we know people are interacting with AI instead of a brand or a retailer or social media, we have to marketers, we need to figure out how to influence those interactions, but all of that is changing.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Well, I mean, you you see it with like Rand Fishkin and like what he's doing, right? Like he like he made the pivot to like ICP. So it's just like who who is the audience? Where are they at? What is happening um before they even start searching, right? Like what like it goes back, like pendulum back to you know, mad men, right? Like, like where what what is the creative? What is the brand? What is the brand image? Like, where is that brand show up? Where does it want to be around? Like, I I kind of even feel like you're like running the track. Like you got to do reps, you got to do reps, and you got to be in those same areas consistently to be viewed as that authority, right? And so it it's a full funnel optimization of where does your brand show up? Where is your audience at? How are you speaking to them? What questions are you answering? It all comes together with are you communicating with your target audience correctly and wherever they're at, uh, at whatever their need is. And and that's a much bigger ask than optimizing for top 10 links in Google.

SPEAKER_02 5:29

Well, and I think the all the principles that you just walked through are the same. Like AI doesn't change the core principles of marketing. We have new channels, we have new use cases, we have new ways we need to try and start measuring data. Like, so principles are the exact same. We just understand consumer behavior is different, and it's that's the reason I think AI visibility is a big conversation today. I'm not sure it will be tomorrow. And reason being is step one is like understand the usage, under start to try and figure out the channel, understand how AI talks about my brand, how it's different to my competitors. And then the biggest thing is if you go, if you go all the way back, you mentioned the Mad Men era. Well, there used to be 10 TV channels and some a few radio stations and a few large publications. People read the newspaper. So the ability as technology has continued to advance, we can target our user. And I think AI is another leap in the direction of your ICP is becoming less and less broad because your ability to personalize is stronger and stronger. So today, when context influences, you know, if you know, how an LLM interacts with a shopper, then we as marketers need to be able to get down to that level of specificity as well. So I don't I think core principles are still the same. I think the playbook is being rewritten, the tools, the stack looks different. But the hot topic today is the data, which is AI visibility, which I don't think will be a long-term category. I think it of course will matter, but also the data is not accurate yet. Like I've that's the data is this is benchmark data. And if you use 20 different tools doing something related, you'll actually get 20 different answers, which is a problem.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Well, you I mean, that even goes into like why the models are hallucinating or whatever. It's like bad data, right? And like even when I'm like doing some programming stuff, I'm going, like, why did you grab that? And then I'm like, go down a little bit of rabbit hole to like understand why it brought that in. And like people are sensationalizing, like, oh, this AI got um what was it? Like I got got really interested in like the Golden Gate Bridge, or there was that like stuff, and it was like, well, if you keep feeding the model, there's like a decay rate and attention, and like, of course, that's what the models do if you understand the models. But if you're looking at everything black box, then you know that that data hygiene and and understanding like the math that goes into this is really quite important. And I I believe I believe what you're saying because the visibility pieces, like, we're just trying to figure out how to measure, and then once we measure, it goes back into like, well, is your marketing good? Because that's the debate right now with everybody on social media that I'm seeing is like geo is completely different, and then no, it's the exact same, it's just good marketing, right? And it's it's this back and forth. Then it's like, okay, it is good marketing, but how how to do it and understanding that this is a completely different technology than Google, like Google works differently on how it gets to the answer, it might get to the same answer, but how it gets to it and understanding the the under the hood is how you get the competitive advantage to execute, but good marketing is always gonna win. And and really, I feel like market feedback and and I think that that's leads into e-commerce is understanding the user, the the the the customer has changed is how how has informing you on what you need to do, on how you need to speak to them. And if you have e-commerce versus like a B2B where it's offline, online, like whatever, and you can't track everything, you get cleaner data. So data hygiene is like like first, right? Are you measuring everything right? And e-commerce, you get to see kind of the full experience, so you can optimize what's happening and you get more data in that process because it's you know, you're you're targeting the user, you're engaging with the user, they're buying online, and then you're drop shipping them something or whatever, right?

SPEAKER_02 9:49

Well, and I you're I agree completely. I think we we don't have a feedback loop. So it's if this is a new discipline of marketing, we've got to create the feedback loop so you can truly understand what works and what doesn't. Um, but the interesting piece is we don't have usage data yet. So if we yes, we have to understand the technology and understand how large language models work so that we can start to reverse engineer them to figure out how as a brand we optimize ourselves to be visible, to be present, to be discoverable. But the state of the market, like the marketing discipline of you know, AI search, GEO, whatever we're gonna call it, is still quite immature in that what we're actually doing under the hood is it's predictive. You're building a model of a shopper and having simulated interactions. That's kind of like buying a Facebook ad and meta saying, I'm not gonna tell you the number of impressions, I'm gonna guess, I'm not gonna tell you your click-through rate, and I'm not gonna pass through a tag, but buy my ads anyway. And we wouldn't do that. I mean, there was an era you know, of TikTok where it was the usage was so high that people were willing to invest advertising dollars in an exploratory way, but of course you started getting B2B APIs so you could measure these things, and so you could close the feedback loop. We're still in the infancy where we don't have the feedback loop. And that's I think what a lot of marketers are trying to establish as a step

The Measurement Problem In LLMs

SPEAKER_02 11:13

one.

SPEAKER_01 11:13

Okay, so so one of the interesting conversations, which this might be out outside of this discussion, but I've I've started to see it is I know Facebook got in trouble. I mean, they're getting in trouble for a lot of stuff right now, but um, they got in trouble for really faking impressions like early on, like like they're and and you wonder why like these ads are not working the way they should. Like, my I always went back to like, are they showing them to the right people? Right, because they need to get there, they're trying to hit spin numbers, right? So they keep expanding it out, expand it out. Google does the same thing. I saw a study recently that compared um running ads on the Google platform versus using like a DSP or something like that to buy ads for you of the target audience set. Interesting, because Google is showing. I mean, you're paying like a percentage to run through the DSP, but if you took the same dollar amounts, right, and go, well, I'm getting 12% more uh just doing Google and I'm not using the DSP. What's gonna be the result? Yeah, the results from this study again, like I don't have all the details and don't quote me on it, but it looked to be really, really accurate that Google was serving ads to properties that benefited them more than benefited the user, and they had a limited inventory, so like they're forcing things that are are not the best use of your money. And if you if if if you have more inventory to select from and you kind of lock in who you're trying to reach a little bit tighter, you'll always get you're gonna get better targeting, right? Like it was it was kind of like you knew the the setup, but it's so true, right? And I feel like I mean now to your point, measuring LLMs, like different use cases. Like when I see an LM and I'm like, ah, we're in Claude and like, oh my gosh, like people are stealing all our stuff, like you know, like that's what I think, like, but like like you you all of these different channels, right, or AIs, people are gonna have different relationships, and I think the battle is like which one's gonna own, like, which one's gonna be the one that is the one that everyone uses.

SPEAKER_02 13:36

I don't care it might not matter though, it might it that who knows? I think we we there will be a lot of evolution that might be like saying you have to pick one social media channel to market across, right? That these might be use case specific.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Well, yeah, but uh so this is what I would tell you these AIs store okay, chat GBT, for example, they came out and said they're gonna remember, like I think like it's like government surveillance, whatever, but like they're gonna every single thing, just if you're listening, look in the terms of use, every single thing you put into chat GBT, they're keeping forever. I don't know if everybody knows that. So if you're listening, that that they came out and said that, not so like FISA warrant, whatever. Like so, just know that if you're using Chat GBT or using codex, every single thing you do is going in that now. Then you got people, Andrew, that are uh taking open source LMs, putting them on their own servers, air gapping it, like all their data is not leaving, it's not getting processed because anything you put in any of these tools is getting processed off site. So I think anthropic, I uh you know, it was 30 days at one point. I don't know what they changed it to, but they they they clean all the data every 30 days unless like you store it. But but perpetual memory, like memory is a big conversation, uh, I feel like around these different AIs and how it recalls information and like the rag pulls and all that. So what people are finding that are using these tools that are consumers, not builders uh in these tools, is they're getting really comfortable with one AI because it knows them and it learns them, right? And they're comfortable with the interface and they know how to use it. I I mean, I feel like I know people that are jumping around between different tools, yeah. But the people that are not in the marketing space, like like I would consider just straight consumers, yeah, they've started to use one tool, they haven't done it, and right, and they get comfortable with that, and and like even there's like little debates on like, well, I like Claude better and I like ChatGPT better, and then they're like talking about how they like it better, but no one's tried the other one. And I feel like there's ingrainment in that interface, and the more things you plug into it, right, and it gets better data, uh the the switching costs become harder, right? And right, and so I I mean again, like we don't know what the future holds, like who knows? Like, I mean, we don't even know if there are aliens yet or not, right? But like AI, like I I would tell you that I I think the battle honestly is who builds the best consumer tool that everybody has an AI that they filter everything through because it knows them so well and it helps them make decisions. I mean, you're even seeing kids, you know, and like don't talk to it like a human, and like I mean, it's causing like all kinds of things, bad things to happen. Um, I I think that there's gonna be a trusted agent, like or whatever that you're working with that that is your primary like assistant that you filter everything through, which of course you could build some advanced things that plug in and grab the different models and all that. Um, and there's a tool out there, guys. I think it's called Poe. I I don't really use it, but it it grabs all the different LLMs and you can ask it a question if you're using it just as a chat bot, not like as a development tool. But um, like I just think people are gonna have their go-to and they're gonna filter everything through it. So if that I I can tell you right now, I was looking at um to buy something on Amazon or whatever, and I was like, screenshot it, put it in there, look at the reviews, like do some additional research. Yeah, tell me this and tell me if there's something else that I um that I'm missing, and then it was like, Oh, well, uh, you know, you're you're wanting to do this. Uh like it was like a supplement or something, right? It was like, um, you're wanting to do a gummy, like that might not be as whatever, and and I was trying to decide between these like mushroom gummies or whatever, right? And then it basically was like, No, you need a capsule, and then these are the brands, and then these are the like like I was down this path, and like these were like through that like consideration phase, yeah. Like I was there, and then it just pivoted me to go like, no, you didn't think about these things, you need to figure out, and then these are the three brands that you should select from, and here are the links like that. Like, because you're okay, going back to L invisibility, like if like how did I get prompted with that question? And then it represented this, and someone answered it, and then these three brands answer that question the most effectively and had the most reviews, and like whatever else, that it got shown to me, provided me links, and then I bought something over here that I wasn't even thinking about, right? Like, that's the world that we're trying to measure.

SPEAKER_02 18:49

Well, and think about how much of that journey sat on one surface to your point of like it sat, whereas the fragmented like digital customer journey, yes, you still transacted on Amazon or wherever you ended up purchasing, but pretty soon that transaction will also be able to take place with uh with the AI buying on behalf of the shopper. So I think about you know, the con I think about how long the customer journey is is gonna be on one single surface. So is this visibility is not the right question. This is, and that there will be so many use cases built into one channel. You know, this is yes, visibility will always matter, and you yeah, but you will have to figure out how to stay visible, you will have to figure out how to, as you get into consideration and you get into competitive comparison and return policies, you'll have to make transacting easy. You know, when you think about like currency, you know, currency across, you know, a bunch of different models in different markets, you know, where you have context on the shopper and pricing promotions in different regions, like this stuff gets very complicated. And we know the drop-offs we see and conversion and engagement when you do those things wrong.

SPEAKER_01 20:02

Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, I mean, relevancy is going to be a big component, but you're right, visibility honestly doesn't matter. It's like at what stage of the buying process are you at? Correct. And now here's the thing to have who like the work is what was done to make that recall happen the way it happened, right? Like, so that's where all the like invisible work comes in. I um what was I gonna say? Uh you were you were talking about something, and I was like, man, I need to write this down, but um keep going, keep going, and I'll think of it.

SPEAKER_02 20:40

But but that that is where I think the challenge becomes exponentially harder because we're not optimizing for one click and then owning that experience on our site, it's very multifaceted.

SPEAKER_01 20:49

Oh, this is

Google AI Mode And Funnel Shift

SPEAKER_01 20:50

what I was gonna say. So, Google, if you watch like um their, you know, every every every big brand, uh, and I would encourage anybody that's a marketer. Uh, if you can't go to these events, um, and and I I I don't go to all of them, but like you can go watch them on YouTube or whatever. But Google's last like yearly unveil, it's kind of like the talk where Steve Jobs would always come out and unveil like the new product or whatever they're doing. So Google's big event, I I uh it's escaping me what it's what it's called right now, but they were unveiling AI search and they were unveiling what we're talking about, is and I think that the reason they're doing it now is they don't want to lose uh customers to another surface, like or another, and so they're switching to AI mode, right? And that's why they're doing it because they already know that the whole uh value funnel or or the search funnel is gonna collapse, and they want to keep it on Google. And so if everybody uses uh you know uh Gemini or whatever's powering AI overviews, and that you can search on Google. Google, ask all the questions and buy, and they have this, you know, huge market share, they're probably gonna win this next evolution, right? Correct. Because there's not I think you're muted by the way, Andrew. I don't know. Um, but uh there you go. Okay. And uh and uh I I I mean I I think they're making the switch, they were prepping it, but before too many people are doing the buying journey and some of these other platforms, they they still have the market share. People are still saying they're using AI because they're looking at the overviews, right? And like everybody feels good. I think I think they're looking at the metrics and and they're gonna hard switch it because if they can capture everybody just to do it on Google, um, they'll they'll win the next uh round, right? And then all that customer journey will happen there. So I still think optimizing for Google is uh what needs to happen.

SPEAKER_02 22:58

Um I also yeah, and I don't think they're conflicting like tactics, which is the I think Optima, even the SEO versus geo discussion, like they are they belong in the same discussion, and there are things that are uniquely positioned for optimizing for AI that are different, do not matter with the way Google indexes traditional search, but there's also a huge overlap, right? And so I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I think the the reality is that like the core hygiene uh that is SEO will continue to be true. There's now just a bunch of other elements of building a website, marketing online, working with PR and you know that that matter and are ingested in a different way, whether through RAG or through you know, the way large language models interpret information. And also the way we search, just with when it was when you had one search and you had to win that initial keyword or that keyword phrase, and you you optimize for fewer pieces. Now it's you have to optimize, you know, along that whole journey, and the way the way you do that changes based on where you're at in the funnel.

SPEAKER_01 24:04

Yeah, no, I I totally agree. So, what are some other insights that you're seeing on the e-commerce side that would be helpful to bring into this conversation?

Agentic Commerce And Payments Future

SPEAKER_02 24:13

Um, that it's coming first and foremost. I think agent agentic commerce also even by itself is a broad conversation.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

Like are you talking agent to agents?

SPEAKER_02 24:22

That's exactly what I think. Okay. So most of what I deal with on a day-to-day basis when I think agente commerce, it is how is e-commerce going to be integrated into large language models? Like, which is I think only a sliver of the discussion because the way in which agents are gonna work, you know, work on behalf of shoppers is much more plentiful than that.

SPEAKER_01 24:43

Okay, so for a while, anybody that listens to me, I kind of went down this um uh cryptocurrency path. Uh, and and we have some big clients in the space uh that we're doing we're doing geo work for and all that. But um I really see so there was a protocol back in like 91-92 that the internet do you know what I'm talking about? Like the what it what so basically there was a protocol on the internet where you could transfer money uh online, but it was never used. I think this year they just turned it on, um, and they're getting ready to move to digital currency uh in the banks, and there's some laws being passed and everything like that. Because, well, I think that the agents are gonna want to use like a Solana or like something fast to be able to transact and uh fractionally buy. And you're seeing it with API token usage as well, but I I think it's even broader, right? Like agent to agent commerce, which what I've read, it's gonna be like 75% like eclipsing the current e-commerce.

SPEAKER_02 25:55

The TAM projections are astronomical, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:59

Right. And so, like, it's not even it's like the agentic e-commerce. Okay, that's like I I guess a good framework for I I would just say the agent economy, like agents to agents talking on your behalf based on like what you've done. And I was I was doing a little bit of stuff on eBay where I was like trying to get it to bid on stuff, and yeah, and then I didn't put in some guardrails and I bought a bunch of comic books essentially. My wife was like, Oh my gosh, uh, but but I mean, I wanted to test it out, right? Of like what's happening. Um, and it was it was a really good experience uh to know what's possible and like kind of where things are going. And I think there's a lot of catch up, but yeah, I I I mean, I you're plugging in every API and MPC to these things, like they're gonna be connected in, like they're gonna they're gonna know, like, okay, you put like I was I was I spoke at a conference and it was like cameras, sensors, yeah, LLM models are on all this stuff. So, you know, okay, we're talking um direct to consumer, your refrigerator, the internet of things, knows like where your milk's at, and then knows what you buy, and then it sends you an alert hey, would you like me to order this milk? You you know, it orders it, and then people deliver it to your house, right? Like that that is gonna be happening very soon. And and so I have been looking at like, okay, where are we going as an agency? And um, I I bought another kind of governance AI, it's called Modal Point. Um, haven't been talking about it a lot, but it's it's really like about data hygiene and like what is your data doing and where is it going and like what's happening? And the other piece that I'm kind of like looking at is going, how are people gonna sell to these agents? How are they gonna integrate their business and services? And I even interviewed a guy from Google right before COVID, which was weird that it was right before COVID. But what he told me is he said, every business, and you know, he's talking to like I was talking to P B, he said every business should have a shopping cart on their website and be able to do commerce through their website as much as possible because he said everything's going that way, and if you just think about how it's all going to be interconnected, it is 100%.

SPEAKER_02 28:18

And I the yeah, so I try and simplify this at least so I have like language that I understand in a as a career, as a marketer, and so like I just think of them as use cases and channels still. It's so easy to get like mired down in the language and the technology of AI, but like you get lost. And so, to your point, like there will be a bunch of use cases of agenda commerce. There will be like, is this agent to agent? Is this as simple as how do we make e-commerce storefronts and transactions work in a uh in a large experience within a large language model? Is this it or is this an eight you're a human's own agent working and you're still buying directly on e-commerce sites? Like, I think we'll see all versions and permutations of, but the nice thing is at least as this matures, especially at least from the large labs and the LLMs that have you know the majority of usage, protocols are starting to be released, you know. Like Stripe is Stripe has done their integration with Chat GPT. You're starting to get the foundations and be able to see at least a little bit into the future, and it allows you to start building tools and strategies and figure out what to do.

SPEAKER_01 29:29

Well, I I want to I want to buy into Stripe and it's like privately held, right? Like I'm like Stripe's in the middle of all of it, right? And I I even think uh what a the uh what's his name? Uh started square. Um uh what is it? Yeah, yeah. Dorsey is I'm telling you, like they they're right in the middle of of of of and and I think Elon Musk knows what's going on too. All the PayPal guys, right? All the people guys were trying to do this, right? They were trying to do this, and the technology just wasn't caught up yet. And to your point, the fragmented like growth is gonna happen, like certain businesses and people are gonna get it, and there's gonna be a huge tail on this thing, but I mean it's all eventually gonna end up there, and and and to your point, like I just think that knowing that the the I mean, do you remember when QR codes came out?

SPEAKER_02 30:26

Like, no one was using QR codes, they were popular in Asia, but the North American market for some reason QR codes didn't work in marketing, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

It didn't it didn't work, and then COVID happened, and that use case came, and you're like you can't touch anything, and now everybody's got a QR code, everybody knows how to use it. Every menu, yes, yeah, yeah, everything, right? And and so you know, maybe there's gonna be some kind of catalyst like that, but I I see a gentic, whatever, you know, people have different names too, right? Like autonomous, and like they're everybody's using their own branded, like connected whatever, uh connected worker, like and so but I I see cryptocurrency as kind of this like frontier technology, uh, and payments. Let's just call it payments, really. Yeah, absolutely is is what I think it is, uh, more than anything else. Like, there's a couple cool things, but you different use cases, but but I think payments is the big thing, and then you got agentic, and and then and then you got well like decision infrastructure essentially. Like, how do you which is data, yeah, which is data, but big data, data lakes, like how do you hook it all together? And all these things are just coming together, and I I I feel like there's there's just so much in that space in any direction, it just is going in all these different directions, and it could turn into all these different use cases. And and I think that that where those points meet is where uh where everything's going eventually. Uh, and as those things kind of collide into each other and people develop new things. Like, here's the coolest thing for anybody that hasn't done any programming, you don't need to know how to program, you just need to know how to know what you built and kind of understand, like maybe the blueprint piece of it. But like, I got a 3D printer right here. I I mean, I can create whatever in my head and then it can make it like the like the possibilities of where things are going, and then like I mean, you I could just I mean, there's technology that I could just drop ship that to somebody super easy, or you could probably have 3D printers that would make stuff, and then someone has a bunch of them working and they drop ship them for you. Like, I mean, that's and then you talk about organs, they're doing it with organs, like the where everything's going is just um mind blowing, and marketing is right in the middle of it. And marketers, I went to this conference, Andrew. That that is all agencies owners, and what they were telling everybody is you need to learn to be the AI expert, and clients are gonna outsource that to you, and like and that's what the data is showing, and everybody was like, I did not go to college for this.

SPEAKER_02 33:14

Like I think it was I think it was Mark Cuban the other day on TV PN, but like this is the new category, right? Is is AI integration. We had digital transformation, we we had to move into the cloud at one point. But like, how do you build new digitally native businesses? And those businesses that are not digitally native, how do you make that integration seamless? Like, that is a massive category. And I think that brands and businesses don't have enough internal expertise yet. Like that will change over time, and then there will, but right now there's a big chasm. And I at least for marketers specifically, I think there's one luxury is you don't need you don't need to be all the way at the bleeding edge because mark the marketing doesn't become relevant until the consumer behavior like substantiates it. So we actually don't need it's a one, we should understand the systems and talk about it because it's important, but like we sort of get the fast follow because we don't need to beat our customers to a channel or to a use case, we just have to be incredibly responsive and nimble.

SPEAKER_01 34:16

And and the clients have a lot of regulation and internal stuff that they have to deal with, so they want to push it to us right now because they can't do it yet,

The Agency Opportunity In AI

SPEAKER_01 34:27

right? Like, literally, they're trying to outsource it because they can't bring it in-house yet, like they haven't all figured it out. So now is like this kind of golden sweet spot, whatever, for anybody that's listening that's in marketing to take advantage of it and become that expert. And I mean, there was people when when chat GPT really came came on the uh scene, even people in our organization that didn't know how they felt about it and kind of was like, I'm not sure about this, and people are concerned. And I'm like, this is not like just a fact, this is a trend, this is a movement, and we gotta get on the span wagon and in front of this and become AI first, AI native as quickly as we can, because that experience compounds. Like, I see it, and even people on my team, I got power users, I got people that are dabbling, and the power users are compounding their quick, right? Yeah, and then like if you're if you're getting into it, yeah, you're gonna compound too, but how much how much far ahead is this person or this company gonna be ahead of you before you jump on it, you know?

SPEAKER_02 35:40

100%. I mean, I I think, and also the it's hard to build really great marketing when you also have thrashing like at the foundational level. I mean, as as we have the ability to advertise across AIs, as we have the ability, as commerce really like gets its footing and becomes a real thing that shoppers rely on, like there's gonna be a bunch of changes. So I think it actually it's very hard. You have to sort of thread the needle by like this matters. Brands, marketers, businesses need to start like understanding this is how they're chopper and how businesses buy and search and use the internet, but at the same time, there is such a thing as being too far out in front of your skis because things are gonna change on a dime.

SPEAKER_01 36:24

So it's called parsnip, right?

SPEAKER_02 36:27

Is that like the vegetable? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:29

Like everybody that so that's interesting. Okay, I want to talk about that for a second before we get into it. Is I feel like I'm seeing, and we're we're actually launching a campaign um the next month, next month, we're launching a campaign next month. But I'm seeing so many AI companies find a a thing, like what whatever it is, uh bear of like like so. In this space, there's bears, there's carrots, there's yeah, they're they're like any kind of like uh thing that everybody knows what it is and can remember it, but then they like put their spin on it so you you you can uh subconsciously, I I forget what it's called, but you're you're creating a peg to something that they know about, and so it's helping you with uh memory recall, but it's something different enough that it's not AI is gonna know the difference in whatever it is. Does that make sense? Uh 100.

SPEAKER_02 37:28

Naming is hard. Like, I mean, I this it's it's like one of those silly things that like entrepreneurs like it's actually a it's actually a hurdle. Um, and I think it's challenging. I think it would be to our benefit if people liked parsnips, the vegetable more. It's a pretty inconsequential vegetable, so we have to make it into a more consequential software business. But uh, no, but like namings, naming is hard.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

So just to finish out kind of what I was saying is um so we re we used to be called e web results. We've been around 26 years, our agency's been around a long time. We did web development. I don't talk about it a lot on the podcast. Our audience set of who we work with and who listens, completely different. EWR sponsors podcast, probably should do a commercial, but essentially, um the brand there was an e in front of everything, right? With the internet, right? Yeah, so e web results, e web style, e-web results were really in vogue, but you know, 10 years after no one uses the e, it was kind of like we need to update it. So we did the KFC thing, that's all I could think of. The KFC Kentucky Fried Chicken went to KFC. We shortened it to EWR digital, but nobody can remember EWR, they can't remember it.

SPEAKER_02 38:41

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 38:43

Okay, right, and so I'm trying to peg it to something that people remember. Yeah, so we're launching a campaign, we're doing a big rebrand. EWR uh is an airport ticker symbol. Anything that's government, you have no like marketing rights to, there's huge volume. Anybody that goes through EWR is usually going international, um, right? So our business users are multinational companies. We work with a lot of energy companies, they know of EWR, and people at business conferences will be like, EWR, like are you out of New York or Newark or like yeah, like whatever. So I was just like, Okay, this is the cloak. I'm not gonna change the name again because a rebrand, and I've done a number of podcasts about this. I would not encourage anybody to do a rebrand if you don't have to. It is tons of work, painful, like there's so much legacy stuff out there. You're talking about data hygiene, clean, it's bad. And and and even these the memory sets on the search engines and now AI, like it's gonna be difficult.

SPEAKER_02 39:45

AI learn faster though, so that's to your benefit. As in, it takes a lot longer to climb the you know the blue links in traditional search, it's faster.

SPEAKER_01 39:53

Yeah, fair enough. So, so we're gonna be doing this whole campaign on like kind of take yourself to the skies, like like as a hub, uh, for whatever. Like, we're gonna do like this big play on it. Yeah, and and then I get and then my team, we were kind of debating it. And uh, sorry, I'm going on a tangent, everybody, but we were doing that. We're it's interesting, I think. Hopefully, you'll find it interesting. So basically, they're like, No, we're gonna get confused at the airport. And I was like, is that a bad thing necessarily? Because AI, I can tell you it listens to us and it knows like who we're around and they know your behaviors. So if you're a business traveling person and you're looking for a marketing company, it will probably know, hey, I don't know which one to show this to. But if you're just like a regular user and you're not looking for a marketing agency, it's gonna know to serve EWR, so there's gonna be some confusion. We're gonna get a little bit of lift, I think, temporarily from EWR.

SPEAKER_03 40:52

Pun intended.

SPEAKER_01 40:53

Yeah, well, yeah, pun intended, I guess. Yeah, I gotta uh there's a lot of fun things actually. I'm thinking from a marketing standpoint, we could do, but but same thing, like I just I see this consistently uh with new companies as they're tagging it to something of a word or a topic or an object that people are familiar with, and then you add AI or whatever you're doing on it, and then and now you're like, Oh, I remember that, and you know, like it's totally different than that thing. So I I I think I'm I'm that was a long-winded way to congratulate you on uh the naming of it is difficult, and you did something that people already have in their brain.

SPEAKER_02 41:35

That's the help. And we have we have an emoji we can use because there's a carrot, so it we can shorthand it to the emoji keyboard if we need to.

Parsnip Roadmap And Content Quality

SPEAKER_01 41:43

Yeah, so tell tell me a little bit about kind of how you started and then um where you see the opportunity now because as as we start talking about at the beginning of this, AI um visibility may not be a category, it's just kind of a standard infrastructure as we move forward.

SPEAKER_02 42:00

Yeah, I absolutely think that there will a peer play AI visibility platform will not be the type of tools we're talking about. And I don't know the time horizon is this six months, this 12 months. I think you have to understand AI visibility. I think you need to optimize for it, but that dovetails into the use cases as a marketer that you actually need to perform, right? Yeah, like a big piece of that is content, right? One of the one of the core ways to go combat traditional SEO and improve GEO visibility is through developing great content. Like Parsnip is not a content company, right? There are some really great AI visibility tools that in my mind, they're these are content companies, right? There will be when I think of Parsnip, we have an AI visibility tool that does exactly what brands need. You figure out how you index today, you go through, you figure out how you rank against competitors, and then you spit out recommendations on how to get started. That's cool. I think the core competency, though, is for us is agenda commerce. So figuring out if we have this really long customer journey where you have to build content, you have to update parts of like you know, website schema and product feeds, and you're gonna be able to advertise across AI. You will have software tools that help, I think, and have competencies in each of those. For us, it's figuring out if you understand your visibility, how do you move, how do you integrate that with the ability to sell on the surface? So that and we're e-commerce folks, you know, historically. That's that's our background. We built kind of software at the intersection of social media marketing and e-commerce for the last decade. So in many ways, it's the same, you know, just the usage that we're helping marketers respond to is not people on social media, it's people using large language models.

SPEAKER_01 43:48

Yeah. And I what you started talking about where I keyed in on it specifically, and I haven't done a podcast since the new Google Core update release, which Content AI generated content, a bunch of uh directory sites got taken down. Um there are things that you need to do when you're generating content and and tools like Parsnet um help you uh make sure you're checking all the boxes, like make sure you're if you are using AI to help generate the content, um there there are fundamentals and things that you need to be doing to make sure that you don't get taken down and usually attaching it to a human, there's kind of eats that you need to focus on, expertise, authority, trust, experience. Um, I mean, Google came out and I thought they waved the light flag and said, hey, if it's useful content, it's fine. I feel like AI generated generated content was pretty targeted uh in this last update. Um, but there's things that you can do to mitigate it, there's things that you need to be thinking about, and it's constantly evolving uh to your to your point, Andrew. And and the consulting and strategy piece, I think is big of what people are looking for and in tools providing that that that knowledge to say, what do I need to be focused on? What do I need to be learning at? Because I'm not going to be the expert in this. I'm trying to do my job and all this other stuff. And so I I think these kind of tools are really, really helpful to give you almost like a checklist or or synthesize it down or abstract it out so that you kind of have a direction of like these are the buoys that I need to start to hit or go in that direction.

SPEAKER_02 45:35

But it's because most folks, like we like we nerd out and talk about these things all day, but most folks go, okay, I understand this, you know, I understand people are using chat GPT every day and having conversations I care about for my business, but they don't know where to start. So when I think of when I think of what Parsnip looks like today, it makes it as easy as possible to understand where you stand and how you get started. What are the 30 things you should start doing? I don't think that's the full picture. And I all and so I think we're gonna see the evolution really fast. Like we made the decision not to go deep down the content route. I think there will be great content companies that support GEO and AI visibility. And I'm also a little, these are put these are my words, you know, this wasn't part of the Google announcement, but like why AI content was targeted. I don't think it was targeted because AI can't help build great useful content. I think the problem was some of the early GEO strategies are kind of like when we used to put clear text on websites for keywords in old school search. You know, you'd have your website and then you'd have your keyword 30 times in clear font, you know, so that you know Google pick. I think that we there's a there was a little bit of we're gonna have use AI to generate derivative content, answer the same thing 50 different ways that was not useful. So, like yeah, yeah, it's spam filter.

SPEAKER_01 46:57

Yeah, yeah, it's just a spam filter. It's like it's not genuinely useful content. Yeah, yeah. Hey, so uh I uh I was talking to somebody and I I use the term AI slop and they got a they actually got offended. It was like a big like, and then like I'm like, this is the word of the year for like uh what what what what uh what um dictionary was it? Was it Webster or something? That AI slop was the word of the year. Oh, where they do word of the year, yes. Yeah, it was AI slop. I was like, I was like, sorry, like I didn't think that this was offensive, but um, you got to be careful AI slop.

SPEAKER_02 47:36

So um it's it's about usefulness and to your point, like e like AI. So by the way, there's great AI content out there, there's also really horrible AI content out there, and so I think using it's like using the right tool to solve the right problem, like AI will be the answer in a lot of those contexts, but it doesn't mean that you flood the system. It's also not the way the internet can work. If agents are having conversations with themselves proactively on behalf of the shopper to infinity, like nobody wins ultimately. Like that's a that's a bad format.

Takeaways Plus Where To Follow

SPEAKER_01 48:10

So, so Andrew, we gotta we're getting close to time here. I gotta wrap up. Um, I would love to hear like what is the biggest takeaway that with companies you've worked with consistently on the e-commerce side that they've just failed to do, or there's a gap, a blind spot in that they could help improve uh their their whatever they need to do, ranking, visibility, access to the right customers, kind of in that vein. And then share a little bit more about uh where you're posting online, like kind of where your conversations are happening, so people can follow you and uh plug whatever you would like to plug.

SPEAKER_02 48:47

Absolutely. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me as well. Been a fun conversation. Um, I think the biggest, the biggest issue most folks have is it's kind of like analysis, it's paralysis through analysis, is everyone is having these types of conversations, like the one we had today, and assume they have to like hop over the chasm. Specifically with commerce, there are baby steps, and there are things that if you market or sell online, things you absolutely need to be doing that are not overly challenging. It's just more likely than not, this isn't a marketing discipline that your team is up to speed on. So it there are ways to take bite-sized chunks, is the biggest feedback. There are ways to make sure you have a correct tracking pixel for Chat GPT, or integrate a product feed, or make sure that your product catalog is organized with a schema that LLMs can read. Like very simple stuff that every e-commerce professional or digital marketer, they understand the tactics, but I think there's a disconnect between all the things they're really good at and they've done their whole careers and AI. And a lot there's not enough conversation that's connecting them. So they go, well, AI is this big quagmire, we need to figure it out. And then they understand tagging and product feeds and tracking and content marketing. And so figure out the way to take a few small steps and start working in the direction.

SPEAKER_01 50:08

Love it, love it.

SPEAKER_02 50:09

Um then obviously we, you know, part snip is we are we launched the business in November, uh, but we do a lot on LinkedIn uh and our website are the easiest places, but we've tried to make it's a it's a free tool to try. We've tried to kind of put our money where our mouth is in terms of make it really easy to get started and just start to figure out what the roadmap should look like.

SPEAKER_01 50:30

Very cool. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for coming on. I think this is a great discussion. Um, I think that you know, you get a bunch of PhDs in the room and they're talking about a bunch of AI stuff uh on both sides, and nothing gets done. And you gotta you gotta have somebody that comes in and translates it. And hopefully we we did that for you today, uh, for people listening, like understanding where things are going, maybe some action steps and kind of giving you that general direction to take the next step and to move forward. We do do coaching and classes if you want to reach out, uh find out more information about that. Uh, bestseopodcast.com. Um until the next time, guys. My name is Matt Bertram. Uh, if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, which maybe is AI, not the internet anymore, uh, reach out to EWR for more revenue in your business. Thank you so much, Andrew, for coming on. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Talk to you later. Bye bye for now.