Speaker 1traffic is it just a little tip of the iceberg as it relates to the impact that ai search geo is having on australian brands and depending on the vertical b2b b2c we estimate that now in australia 20 to 30 percent of buying decisions are being influenced by ai and that's not a number that we've kind of just plucked you know out of thin air joe and his team have done a lot of work at looking at the impact on branded search and direct search if someone's skeptical on this just get them to use chat your bt and try to get them to go and purchase a product or click on a link sites don't load properly it's just not a user experience that works people are using large language models as the research tool and then they're converting you know through desktop through mobile using google so if you're only looking at traffic you're going to be severely underestimating the influence that large language models are having on your business welcome back to the smarter marketer podcast i'm here today with joe older joe welcome back to the pod hey james good to be here looking forward to today's conversation i'll just do a quick intro joe for those of you that might not have caught one of your previous episodes so joe is rocket's head of seo and geo and we're going to be talking about how to make your business a little bit more innovative and in my view one of australia's leading voices on the evolving ai search landscape over the years joe has worked both in australia and in the uk with some of the top brands and e-commerce platforms and lead generation businesses in both of those markets working across seo strategy as well as implementation of optimization over the past three years joe has basically led rocket's response to the changing nature of the search landscape working with rocket's leading clients to help them navigate the shift from traditional search to ai driven discovery across platforms like jacobt google ai overviews and gemini and i thought it'd be awesome to have a catch-up with joe to essentially just talk about how to do great geo so i guess a look under the hood at what is working at rocket for our best performing clients who are doing great things in ai search who are making their business a little bit better and maximizing visibility who are kind of managing what is in many instances a transition kind of away from traditional search towards this landscape where now we've kind of got to have put in each camp and pay attention to both so joe i thought just a place to kick it off would be just to talk around i guess what you're seeing macro like how much has search shifted in the past 12 to 24 months what's happening with google v chat your vt google and chat your vt other large language models like what are we seeing from the rocket side
Speaker 2yeah sure so i guess like there's a few different categories here to break it down so first is like adoption of ai in australia which i think has grown significantly like i think maybe last time we even had a podcast it was high but it's continually grown i think it's basically doubled year over year um in terms of search so i think we have some stats like 77 of australian adults are using ai tools at least once a week um which is obviously a huge huge number and then when it gets to purchasing and searching for products that has also increased so 66 of b2c buyers and around 93 of b2b buyers so the majority of australians are using ai and they're also using it to inform and even make purchases
Speaker 1yes fascinating isn't it i think we um i was catching up with ash in our marketing team and we received more inquiries from ai search last month and from any other digital channel which is kind of insane right when i think 12 months ago was if we got one i was like oh this is kind of cute this is interesting but it's kind of actual it's real now right the the hype has become real our
Speaker 2geo strategy is
Speaker 1working
Speaker 2i promise you that
Speaker 1wasn't a uh you know it wasn't teeing you up for that shameless plug um and for marketers listening like when we speak to new clients or existing clients everyone's in a slightly different position with this i think you've we've seen these kind of doomsday scenarios or things on linkedin where traffic is plummeting to people's websites what are you seeing across the basket of rocket clients and i think also not just rocket but more broadly like who are the winners who are the losers is google shrinking is it growing is traffic still going to websites normally are conversions happening at the same rate they used to i think because it's particularly for in-house marketers where they're kind of siloed right they're only seeing one google analytics instance they're only across one website like what's normal now and what has happened typically to websites over the past couple of years
Speaker 2yeah sure so i think about two months ago we did a massive australian-led study where we looked at 250 australian businesses to basically answer that question like what has the impact been and so we looked at all different channels but even like zooming out google is actually growing which i is a lot of people they did their q1 report obviously the first quarter of 26 and their revenue in search was up around 19 from the 250 cohort of australian businesses we looked at they'd actually seen an increase of 43 in impressions so that's a number of times someone was searching for something and that brand was appearing so more and more people are searching than ever before which i think is like one side of it despite that we're not we are definitely seeing a drop in traffic and yeah it would more be i would say a drop in clicks because as i said more people are searching but less people are kicking through so average site loss from a study we looked at there was a much broader thousands of websites was around 34 percent drop in traffic which if your website a few years ago dropped 34 percent that's like mission critical so i think there is definitely like a reason people are getting alarmed and worried even from our own clients but we are performing great so we saw 43 percent increase in impressions we were down around 2.5 percent but i think there is currently no need to panic yeah for my last point the core reason for this or at least like i would say attributing to around 80 percent of this drop is ai overviews and ai overviews everyone would have seen now they're basically google's response to chat gpt and llm catfalls and they almost have to cannibalize their own search because they're using money where people not clicking on ads but to keep people on the google platform google has been using a lot more ai overviews so even in 26 versus 25 and again q1 it was a 193 increase in the number of ai overviews that were appearing so went from around being present on around 10 of searches to around 30 and now when that ai overview is present less people are clicking through so it's around 58 they might search for do ai overviews hurt websites i think is the example we use in the webinar google says yes people then have their answer they don't click through at least 58 percent of the time that in turn then means that traffic has fallen but that being said although traffic has dropped because of ai overviews the majority of this is very much informational content or like answer question based content so if you're a business selling products service even software or anything that kind of operates a business online that is not editorial most of this would be taken off those kind of informational searches versus people actually looking to purchase your product or
Speaker 1service because that's it isn't it it feels from a very top level ai overviews have ramped up dramatically the informational searches so anything kind of top of the funnel like if you're a publisher the news site you're going to have to do a lot of a blog etc traffic potentially has been completely decimated if you're a business that used to have a content marketing strategy and was a mix of a blog and resources but also hard nose bottom of the funnel commercial searches you might find that the blog and resourcing gets less traffic than it used to but we're finding across our clients that their commercial results themselves should still be continually growing it's just the the way to find those commercial pages and commercial calls to action are different right where people are aio views chat your bt combination of both but the convert the conversion still should be happening on your website yeah 100 so yeah i think if you're a marketer out there you're not alone if your informational pages are losing traffic i think the stat that you pulled up recently i think was in a staff meeting or in the webinar our clients had greater visibility through google than ever before if we're looking search console looking at where they're being returned um aio overviews first page of google traffic to sites was i think down two percent which i think is is good it means we're doing a better job than the average because traffic in australia i think had dropped closer to 30 but then your actual commercial results should still be as strong as
Speaker 2ever yeah exactly cool
Speaker 1so i think that's that's good framing for the conversation we're a really wonderful spirit is into what are the similarities what are the differences i guess if you can just like lift up the hood right and talk about how are we doing at Rocket, how are we working with our best performing clients to help them navigate this changing landscape and how to put together a geo strategy? So I guess, can we kick it off from the very beginning? What are we doing for our clients? How are we approaching it? And what's that framework that we're using to guide clients through?
Speaker 2Yeah, sure. So I think like to go back to maybe three years ago when this started and it's like AI is a thing, let's figure out what we do for our clients. I think there was a lot of information online. I think even Google has come out and said that good geo is just good SEO. So like we really wanted to see whether that was true or not. And I think we would have won in any scenario, right? We had an SEO client, we were worried about losing clients because of the fall of SEO, as people were saying, although it's been dying for 20 plus years. So like the first thing we really wanted to do was to understand. If there is in fact an overlap. So we basically did a study where we pulled, I think it was 100,000 keywords and we pulled them across the different AI models as well as ChatGPT, which is still the largest kind of AI search that drives traffic to Australian businesses. So what we found is AI overviews being like a product of Google overlap a lot. So if you rank position one to 10 in Google for that search term, there are around 44% chance you'll be included. If you rank position one, it's around a 61%. Then overlap. But when we look at ChatGPT, it's actually only around a 15% overlap for position one to 10. And that is from pulling the same search term 10 times. If you only pull it once or twice, the overlap between Google is like two or 3%. So if SEO is just geo, you would expect to see much more similar results and what's actually pulling. So that was kind of where we started. And then once we had a hypothesis that there is different ranking factors for both, it was basically about how we reverse. So we have to go back to our engineer here and then get to what is actually required. So yeah, I thought that was interesting framing because there is so much advice that it's just SEO, it's just geo. And I think it is true that SEO sets the base. For geo, we've had clients that come to us and be like, "Our traffic is dying because we don't have a geo strategy." And we've recommended they do an SEO strategy because their SEO is terrible. They've lost those keyword rankings because of other issues. So they definitely work hand in hand together. But if you want to dominate on both, you need a strategy for both. Hey, it's James here.
Speaker 1Before we continue, I have a sincere request. If you like the podcast, it'd be so appreciated if you could leave a review for us on either Apple or Spotify. It'll mean that the pod ranks better and that more marketers listen to the content that we share. Thanks so much. Now back to the pod. And it's so interesting. I feel that at Rocket, we've always been really non-sensational. Like, we, you know, we generally try to put out awesome content through the podcast, awesome content through webinars. And in that period, two to three years ago, the more rational, uh, experience part of the SEO community was like the prevailing sentiment there was it's just SEO. It isn't different. And there were lots of kind of cowboys running out super aggressive. I suspect listeners were getting spammed in their LinkedIn with this AI is changing everything and you need a new approach and it's different and it's different. And so we're kind of stuck where we didn't want to be the sensationalist and a cowboys going off and saying everything's changing. But we also felt that we're doing the wrong thing by our clients and by the industry by saying it, it is just SEO because it's not. And yes, there's heaps of overlap and yes, as I think as you just framed it, it is this kind of foundation or it is this base for good geo. But we found very quickly that if we were just doing the same things you'd always done. For our clients, we weren't doing the right thing by them as it related to them driving as much visibility as possible within ChatGPT. I think it was quite a challenging position for us to walk. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. So maybe if we can, um, maybe let's dig deeper into that. So what is the rocket approach? Like, cause despite all the change SEO two years ago, drove 60% of traffic to Australian websites, paid search, 10 to 15% paid social, 10 to 15% direct 10 to 15%, it still is the biggest lever, right? And even, even though we've got change and we've got traffic dropping from organic and informational, it's still the foundation for a good digital strategy is SEO. So I guess how do you blend the two between not throwing the baby out with the bathwater and still ensuring clients are driving traffic and conversions through traditional search, but also then not ignoring what is kind of a big way of coming from behind.
Speaker 2Yeah. So we actually did a study, a study on that as well, when we looked at 250 websites and SEO is still the biggest driver of traffic around 48% of traffic comes through from organic search. It's still huge. And obviously a part of that is also then from these AI tools. So I guess like how it's different and the approach, at least how I see it. Uh, and this was something that we've obviously had to develop. So I tried to come up with a framework. We came up with something called the star framework and basically how we have broken it down is the first step is to come up with a framework. And the second step is to come up with a framework. And the third step is to come up with a framework. And the first kind of pillar is structure and retrievability in more traditional SEO sense. That would be very much technical. And one of the big things with GEO is Google has always been the leading tool by far, like a 95% market share or so. And ChatGPT would be the equivalent, but it's around 68% of market share. And I think people are a lot more passionate on their tools. Like they're really using Chord or ChatGPT. Some are using Gemini, some are using both. So one of the challenges with, especially from a technical standpoint is there is around 10 different main AI tools that people could be using. Previously, we just had to ensure as marketers, can Google access and crawl our content? We now have to look, can Google, and then can these 10 other AI agents that are hitting the website? So one of the issues that we face really early on, and it's still one of the issues I see very common is actually blocking these AI bots, from crawling your website, because the way your kind of server works has security measures in place. And if someone is continually trying to hit different pages, it almost looks like a hack. So that in turn was then blocking. We had a really big client in the legal space, and they basically had security limits in place. After X number of hits, it would block the IP, which was then blocking these AI tools. We removed that. And in two months, they saw, I think it was like around 150% increase in AI traffic. So that's one of the big challenges with GEO. So yeah, the first step is, can these AI bots actually crawl your content? And is it structured in a way that can then be retrieved?
Speaker 1And that was an interesting one. It was, because we won't mention the name for the privacy, but it's a very, very, very large law firm coming from a really big base. So it's not like we're talking about a percentage increase that is meaningless. A lot of traffic, a huge amount of traffic coming out of Google organic. And it's just to get that structural piece right. So important to then have very quick wins.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1So if we kind of move on through the framework, so S for structure and reliability, T?
Speaker 2Yeah. So this is another interesting one that I feel like goes very like quiet in the AI landscape, like not many people are talking about it. And I find it's one of the most important factors. So you have kind of visibility and that is, are you ranking when someone asks, what's the best SEO agency, right? Like is Rocket appearing? But we basically did a study where we looked at millions of real user prompts and we look to understand how are people actually using ChatGPT and these AI bots. There's basically no information from any of the tools. So we kind of had to do our own data scrape here to get that. And what we found was one of the really big use cases was business research. So people have actually maybe further along the funnel and they are looking like, should I use Rocket agency for SEO? Is Rocket a good idea? Is Rocket agency a good agency? How does Rocket compare to one of our competitors? And we found a lot of people were searching this way. Like, should I use X business? Would you recommend X business? So that is why the second framework is like your trust, truth, and sentiment. So how are AI tools actually objectively understanding who you are as a brand, how you offer your products? Would they recommend you in the space? So we've asked, like, we've had some clients where they've come on board and we've literally asked them, like, how are you doing? And they've said, well, I'm doing good. Would you recommend this brand? And it has just responded, no. And then an answer. So if we know that a huge amount of Australians are going to these platforms to make these purchasing decisions, if you're then asking, should I use X brand? And it's saying, no, that's going to have a massive impact on your conversions.
Speaker 1And it's really challenging, right? Like we started off the conversation talking about traffic, traffic increasing, traffic decreasing, because that is the metric along with conversion. Like we started off the conversation talking about traffic increasing, right? Like we started off the conversation talking about conversions, that for the last 25 years, as digital marketers working with in-house marketing teams have obsessed upon. I think it'd be interesting if we can just talk a little bit about how that's kind of flipped now with AI engines, that we can't just rely upon traffic to be the measure of success. I think the stat that you talked about in the webinar was, like,
Speaker 2super low. Yeah, it's only around 1%.
Speaker 1So we'll get to measurement and reporting shortly, but I think think as a marketer i think it can be challenging to be shaping reshaping perspective in-house where for most marketing environments are used to having a dashboard or monthly reporting and they handed up the food chain or deal with different stakeholders and it's always been it's the you know if the graph's growing we're succeeding happy days kind of thing where the nature of these ai chatbots the nature of gemini the nature of ai overviews chat your bt we go back and forth we go back and forth we don't then kind of click out on the within the actual platforms themselves like the the user interface within chat your bt is really not designed to kind of go out onto the open web and browse commercial websites so and we'll get to kind of measurement and sentiment but i think just making the point that it's not the volume of traffic coming out of these platforms which is an indicator of success or failure often it's what's being said about you that you need to be measuring which i think if we could talk just a little bit i guess about how do we measure the sentiment
Speaker 2piece yeah sure so we have a few deliverables at least that we do for clients and depending on it so like in my head at the moment i'm thinking of one of these banks that we have been working on i've been working on that quite a bit recently and basically the way that we have done it obviously you need the tracking piece that we're going to get into we have asked a number of problems and we've asked them across all the different engines and a number of different times so basically breaking it down like how are they currently perceiving this bank and that is per sub category as well like would you recommend them to use as your mortgage uh would you recommend them for a savings account like going through all of their categories and seeing if they're coming up and recommend it because again this is what users are going to be searching for the other really interesting one is like then looking at their information that has been cited so for this example for this bank when i was looking at it one of their interest rates was coming back around one percent higher than was actually listed listed because ai was using outdated information and like something like an interest rate for a mortgage that is the reason you would or would not go with that provider so you can have like catastrophic events if it's like really incorrect and users are seeing this incorrect information interestingly as well we've been working with a few other clients in the kind of legal financial space and they've actually received letters from apra and asic which are industry bodies basically stating that you are responsible for the information these ai poor value so that's kind of the third bit is the compliance like making sure the information we have that is being retrieved is compliant and it's something that's really hard to control obviously but there is ways to us engineer where this information is being cited from and then going back and yeah
Speaker 1counteracting it i think we're finding it's it's kind of a throwback to the early days of seo right and not in a totally spammy sense but i think there is first mover advantage at the moment where back in the day i used to kind of be you know white text white background and kind of google caught onto that and then it became the 500 to 700 word blog article with keyword stuffing but it kind of works for a period right but at the moment there is an ability to go in there and shape the content that these large language models are pulling and returning for your brand what advice would you have uh as to the best way to i guess get like what are you know the top 10 large language models saying about their brand and i hate to kind of keep putting the boot into optus but we're kind of using them as the negative case study in a webinar that we ran last month where there was just like chat bt was ruthless and gemini was ruthless when you're doing comparisons between mobile plans and mobile reliability between the major telcos yeah
Speaker 2i think basically negative mentions was around 72 of the answers that were being cited when we were asking about optus so it shows like the yeah the impact that this can have and i guess my recommendation here is really to have that reporting and measurement piece sorted and making sure you are tracking so
Speaker 1just so just for reference the star framework s for structure and retrievability t is trust truth and sentiment we'll come back to a but this is r so reporting and
Speaker 2measurement yeah so reporting a measurement and and i guess i'll come back to the sentiment stuff had been one of the biggest challenge one of the things i was saying before right like there's 10 different ai tools even if we did have this information that accurate it would be spread out across 10 different places but we basically do not have any information at all and chat gpt has no way of getting this i was hoping with the launch of chat gpt ads it would start giving out some information but yeah even the ad platform is just so basic google search console gives you very light data on ai overviews but it's not very strong so the way that we do it is we have a lot of data and we have a lot of data and we have a lot of data but the way that we do it or rock it is using that independent study that we did we have a framework of how people are searching in chat gpt and other tools based on the real user prompts that we've mined and then we use a traditional seo keyword research search volume and then mine it towards the structure and prompt structure so if you're a business i would recommend doing kind of long tail what is the best x could be what is the best seo agency what is the best bank for my mortgage like those type of terms like people really search using best a lot then comparing to your direct competitors so it might be optus versus telstra for mobile plans and that you're not looking to be incited right you want to actually look at the answer and see are they recommending optus over telstra because again these are the type of searches people are gonna do i would then also ask and this is just kind of on that brand piece i would also ask give me a cia level breakdown of everything that you know about all of my brands and entities and even do that as subcontracting so i would then also ask and this is just to give you a kind of an idea of what you're looking for in a subcategory level like for optus mobile plan tell me everything that's in your training data and that should give you a bit of an idea of the information it has at least in its stored data or where it's pulling those sources from and then obviously you want to move on to the kind of more broad tracking terms i recommend tracking at least 100 terms and this is where it gets challenging if you're not using a tool but because of how much ai is personalized and how much it differs you kind of need to ask the same question minimum 10 times but ideally around 100 times per month to get an idea and then get an average of where are the key sources what is my average visibility for the best mobile plan etc etc and then we add it up we use the data that ga gives us and that kind of gives us a reporting instructor so specifically on the brand and sentiment we have created a sentiment score where we kind of look at the number of mentions how many positive how many neutral how many negative and come up with a score a lot of these ai tracking platforms have similar so i would look at that as well as negative mentions and then the other two key metrics that i see for ai visibility one is visibility percentage so out of the prompts that we ask however many times we ask them what percent are we actually being retrieved in the answer and you want to be careful here to exclude any branded terms so those brand terms we spoke about earlier make sure you're not including them in your ability score i've seen quite a lot of the ai platforms do that and it's obviously going to be very skewed in your favor you'll always be cited in those brand ones and then the third metric outside of traditional more google analytics stuff is share a voice so out of all of the prompts and answers what is your share of voice versus your direct competitors if you have 100 are we currently getting around 20 of those searches and maybe our competitor is getting 30 and so yeah they're the three kind of metrics i'd look at
Speaker 1and it's been fascinating like at rocket we generally try to use ourselves as the guinea pig and i'm involved in rockets marketing and how we're perceived out there we get a monthly report of how we're appearing right within all the different large language models and it's kind of rocket versus a small number of agencies that we think are a similar competitor set would you recommend rocket uh what what do you think rocket is what is it not what's a good at and it's so fascinating hearing from from one of the large language models and i think rocket is a really good example of what it's perception of us is and it's allowed us to actually shape that over time right our head office is in sydney we've got a little satellite office in melbourne to allow us to serve melbourne clients it was kind of saying we're a melbourne based agency and melbourne founded and we found out that it was through one of kind of the aggregator websites that had kind of pulled data and manipulated it incorrectly so we're able to then go back to that source change it it was pulling some really wacky content around pricing and how we approach pricing for clients and that that was from an old blog that i'd written kind of years ago so we're able to jump in and change the original source of that and we have a saying which nothing you know more broader than the conversation we're having now which is that that which gets measured gets moved and so actually starting to have data coming in has allowed us to kind of manipulate and change what the large language models are returning on us so it's definitely not this theoretical impossible to move thing it can be measured by machine measuring it and getting that data coming in in the first instance right yeah
Speaker 2yeah yeah i actually have another really interesting example of that and like where we've actually changed the opinion we work with one of australia's biggest construction brands like very much household name and when we were asking about the sentiment would you recommend them they have really good reviews on big trust pilot is like their kind of main review platform they're like 4.8 stars thousands of reviews and when we were asking like these ai tools would you recommend it's it was coming back there's a lot of negative reviews um which like looking at data i was like that's confusing i looked at it and it was citing from product review where they're they had i think three or four reviews versus thousands and those three or four were negative so we just got the client to direct their review strategy to product review for the next few weeks got up to a hundred and now basically it's recommending them again so although they're very smart like these ai models because of how they work and where they retrieve the information it's kind of why they use sometimes the wrong sources there's no way to control that so you kind of have to move their eye away from it can you
Speaker 1talk just a little bit more around what metrics and how in-house marketers should be looking at in terms of how their business is performing in this landscape yeah
Speaker 2sure so first is um share a voice so that is your kind of share of voice versus direct competitors and one interesting one which may be a bit more granular is citation share so especially if you're just starting out you're going to want to be aware of the fact that you're not just starting out you're going to want to be aware of the fact that you're starting to be aware of the fact that you're not just starting out you're going to want to be aware of the fact that you're not just starting out you're going to want to be aware of the fact that you're not just starting out you're going to want to be aware of the fact that you're not just starting out you're going to want to be aware of the fact that you're not just starting out you're going to want to be brand specific questions and that is what percent of the time is the ai tool citing information from your site or at least an own site so an own site could be wikipedia could be yellow pages because that's something you have direct control over versus an external source is much harder to control then your kind of overall sentiment score so out of the score of 100 what is ai sentiment about you so for optus it was like 20 the sentiment score uh for rocket it's something 90 or higher right so it's like a huge difference and it's a really good factor to just see how it's being perceived and the other thing is just looking at your kind of ai traffic and coming into ga4 but i think this is a good like not warning but i guess something to be aware of as we discussed before one percent click-through rate from ai tools so what you see in ga4 is such a small snippet and i think it's why it's so important to have a tracking methodology in the tool so that you can have a tracking methodology outside of google analytics and also not to just listen to google analytics i've spoken to clients in the past and they have said we don't need a geo strategy because there's only one percent of our traffic and then if we go in there it's not recommending them yeah it obviously is having
Speaker 1a much bigger impact we're using an iceberg analogy within the agency when we speak to clients or prospective clients which is traffic is it just a little tip of the iceberg as it relates to the impact that the traffic is having and the impact that ai search geo is having on australian brands and depending on the vertical b2b b2c we estimate that now in australia 20 to 30 percent of buying decisions are being influenced by ai and that's not a number that we've kind of just plucked you know out of thin air we're looking at decreases in traffic but conversion rates staying the same joe and his team have done a lot of work at looking at the impact on branded search and direct search where when we saw the rise of facebook coming through kind of 15 years ago you would see this effect of big investment in facebook campaigns driving huge amounts of branded search and direct search through google to click to websites and became pretty clear two devices see people seeing something on one device clicking onto the next if someone's skeptical on this just get them to use chachi vt and try to get them to go and purchase a product or click on a link sites don't load properly it's just not a user experience that works people are using large language models as the research tool and then they're converting you know through desktop through mobile using google so if you're only looking at traffic you're going to be severely underestimating the influence that large language models are having on your business so definitely in that 20 to 30 range they're real now they're not peripheral trying to build up a measurement framework that's going to be really important to them and they're going to have to do a lot of work that isn't just automated don't just look at last clip data in your analytics start speaking to your clients start you know maybe getting some heard of us data on contact forms check out forms just to start building a bit of a profile because there's a big gap at the moment between the hard nose measurement piece and what the real world activity is um so i think it's really important joe just in terms of practically like how can listeners measure this stuff because you're not getting the data in ga google search console is not giving much chachi vt is giving you a lot of information about how to do it and how to do it in a
Speaker 2way that's really important to us so i think it's really important to be able to do it and to be able to do it in a way that's really important to us so i think it's really important to be able to do it and to be able to do it in a way that's really important to us so i think it's really important to be able to do it in a way that's really important to us so i think it's really important to be able to do it in a way that's really important to us so i think it's really important to be able to do it in a way that's really important to us so i think it's really important to be able to do it in a way that's really important to us so i think it's is probably not worth it. I think they all very much do similar things. But the feedback that we've had, we've had a number of clients that kind of already have this in practice. I think the big gap that all of these platforms have at the moment is actually using this data. So they will give you all of those metrics and you will know how you're being perceived, but it's kind of where they stop. There isn't much in terms of recommendations or actions. I'm sure that would change. But yeah, we have had clients that struggle to actually use the data, even spoke to someone who owned one of these tracking tools and they said a lot of businesses are kind of setting up and they're not really going in there since. So if you have an agency, it'd be good to get their advice and work with them on it.
Speaker 1And what are we doing for our clients? I mean, I know, but I think it's more for the purposes of listeners to kind of understand what we're doing.
Speaker 2Yeah, so we'd built a number of different custom tools where we kind of thread it into our own reporting methodology. So we use one of these track prompt tools, but then we also have a number of different layers on top. So we have our kind of own independent research. So we know how people are searching in different areas. We have a way to then turn that into prompts. Then we have our own like independent tools we've created to look for compliance issues, incorrect information, sentiment. And that is, again, just because a lot of these tools don't offer it. At the moment, like you can do it if you explore all the raw responses and go through manually or try and use like Clore to go through and look for it, but it is quite challenging. So we found there's a bit of a gap and we had, to create our own kind of tool set here.
Speaker 1I think we never chill for Rocket on the podcast, but if you are genuinely stuck with measurement and understanding what's happening to your business within AI and large language models, we are doing a little bit of standalone work. So for clients where we're not doing service layer or in terms of actual optimization ongoing, we do have a small product where we are allowing clients to plug in just for the measurement piece, just because it is so difficult and fast moving. And I do feel like we've got a really solid offering, which is particularly good for Australian businesses. I think if you are stuck, feel free to just kind of come through the Rocket website and we can look at how we could potentially just feed in that measurement piece, even if you're not engaged with us to do the ongoing optimization. Then that's really good, Joe, from the reporting and measurement piece side. So now in terms of the staff framework, A, for answers. -
Speaker 2Yeah, sure. So answers, in fact, now is basically the equivalent to your content strategy. So how AI works is if you ask a question, so what is the best mobile phone provider? ChatGPT and other tools then break that out into 10, even up to like 80 different sub searches where they basically run agents to do equivalent of the Google search in their platforms. So it could be, what is the best mobile phone plan if you live in Sydney? What is the best mobile phone plan with unlimited data? What is the best review plan? What is the best security plan? What is the best app that you've ever used? What is the best mobile phone plan that you've ever used? being searched you have addressed on one of these platforms i think that is yeah by far the biggest lever then outside of that like kind of what we're speaking about brand and sentiment like how are you perceived online is really important especially because the number of times people are asking best like what determines best it's reviews it's um awards it's sentiment those things also do help definitely not easy to do but like a number of reviews number of awards do you have
Speaker 1i think definitely pointing out to listeners that be very careful basing large language models perceptions of your brand on your own queries there's so much data within your account within chat gbt etc that you're not going to necessarily get the same returns that an average potential customer in your space will get so you need to solve that within your business because you might find that you're getting all these awesome positive feedback but it knows you're an employee there or it knows you work in marketing or it knows you're the ceo so you've kind of got to be really careful to not fall into that trap we've seen that a few times with kind of providing the initial sentiment surveys to clients they're like no no that's not what i'm getting on site with you what you're seeing is not what the ordinary australian is
Speaker 2saying yeah chat gbt loves to please the user and it's led to a few awkward situations great
Speaker 1question james it really does um i think joe like as we kind of look to wrap things up any other kind of closing thoughts or things that you you think in-house marketers need to be thinking of when they're approaching this space
Speaker 2i think from speaking to a number of businesses in the space often i see it framed as seo or geo like we need to cancel seo and put our money into geo we're not doing a geo product and i kind of said it before um how it really sets a framework but i think like there's been some studies on it where 77 percent of users are using seo and they're using both tools together and they really work hand in hand yeah seo still drives a huge amount of traffic so does ai there's 33 percent of people start on google and then they will go to ai tools to basically be like is this correct should i use this brand 68 percent would use ai and kind of your point previously like the click-through rate is not a great experience they will then go to google to then finalize their searches that's why we're seeing brand so yeah not thinking of ai is just kind of the geo strategy but broader picture but then i guess to the opposite of that is making sure you have a strategy for both because as part of seo we are not looking at your brand sentiment we're not looking to see if there's incorrect information it's not a real core part of the seo offering so really make sure you have a very clear offering that's addressing both and using them hand in hand together yeah it's
Speaker 1so interesting isn't it i think like two years ago the narrative was chachapiti is growing and google's dying or going to die and i think we've i'd like to think that most business people most marketers are now at that point of going it's not one or the other it's one and the other and the last q1 results showed google search growing 19 chachapiti is still growing or the other large language models are growing faster than it now claude etc but it definitely doesn't feel like we're not in this monolith kind of um situation like we once were right we've got a whole bunch of different players and the the landscape is more fragmented joe thank you so much for coming back onto the podcast i really hope that the listeners of this episode that you've all got at least one practical thing you can take away hopefully more and um yeah i look forward to having you back again sometime in the not too distant future joe
Speaker 2cool thanks james thanks mate
Speaker 1thanks for listening to the smarter marketer podcast stay up to date about new episodes on linkedin and instagram by searching for smarter marketer podcast you can purchase your own copy of smarter marketer via the amazon website and if you want a second opinion about your business's approach to digital marketing send me an email james l at rocketagency.com.au or visit the rocketagency.com.au website thanks for your time
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