360: How You Get Your Business Recommended by AI with Jenna Hannon

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If you're not showing up in AI Search, you are missing out on getting customers. AI Search is replacing Google Search and that is a marketing shift that no business owner can ignore. Hi and welcome to the Herbusiness podcast. I'm Susie Daphneus. I'm your host and I'm the CEO of Herbusiness and today's episode is one of those conversations that might just change how you think about marketing full-stop. Because if you've been relying on SEO or social media or even referrals to grow your business, there's a big shift happening right now that you need to understand and it's happening faster than most people realize. My guest today is Jenna Hannan. She's the founder of Hatter, which is a software-led marketing service that's helping brands get recommended inside AI Search results. Think chat GPT, Claude, Plexigy, any of the AI engines that you might be using. Now, Jenna isn't just talking theory here. She was the very first marketing hire at Uber Eats and she helped scale it from zero to a billion dollars. Since then, she's worked as a fractional CMO, that's Chief Marketing Officer, across a range of high-growth companies. So she knows exactly what it takes to get a brand-scene and chosen. In this conversation, we're talking about what's replacing traditional search, why some businesses are becoming invisible overnight, and what's more business owners can do starting now to stay visible and relevant and competitive. I will say, if you've ever felt like marketing is getting noisier and harder, this episode is going to feel like a bit of a reset. Let me tell you, it's good news for small business owners. So let's dive in. Hey Jenna, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. I am very excited for our conversation, and you and I have been having a little bit of a chat before we hit record. So I know that this is going to be super valuable to our women business owners. But I want to start with you leaving a high level corporate marketing career to build Hatter. And as I mentioned in the introduction, it's a tool that powers businesses with intelligent AI automation and insights. What were you seeing happening in the market that made you think, oh, this is a problem I need to solve right now? Well, I'm a gross person. So I'm a marketer by trade. My sweet spot is the first marketing hire. So I like a juicy business problem. I like to build a marketing team, and I've done that at startups. And then I actually joined Uber. That was not really a startup at the time, but I joined an internal startup called Uber Eats and spent four years there growing the Uber Eats business before it was a thing. So as a very first marketing hire. And this problem, I wouldn't say this came up in corporate, but I'd like building things from scratch. So not just marketing teams, but we've naturally found ourselves working on a marketing problem because that's the problems we saw. So after I left Uber, I became a fractional CMO and I was working with different types of tech businesses. At that time, AEO or AI search was not really a thing, but SEO has been important for two decades. So organic marketing was always a piece of the marketing mix. So it felt like a natural evolution that as AI kept advancing and as more people started using it, that this was obviously going to become a more and more important marketing channel. So as a marketer, you naturally go where the market is going. Where the market's going. And most business owners, and you mentioned a couple of times, I just wanted to say them again, I'm familiar with SEO and they've probably paid a consultant a lot of money to do their SEO over time. But AEO, which is answer engine optimization, that is kind of newer territory. So what's actually changed about how people search and why does this shift really matter now, especially to smaller brands, smaller businesses? Absolutely. So let's start with the definitions. So SEO is classic search engine optimization, which usually applies to Google search or Bing, the search engines. Answer engine optimization is optimizing for the LLMs or the AI chatbots, those being chat GBT, perplexity, cloud, Gemini, which you're now seeing at the top of Google results. The game of AEO is we like to call it a Venn diagram of there's SEO and AEO, you want to show up in both, but there's a lot of overlap in the tactics. But what we're finding is that more and more consumers and even B2B buyers are choosing to use AI chatbots to do research. So before they make a purchase decision, previously you would go to Google and what came up on Google was the game of SEO. Now the results are actually being summarized in a text result, which in many ways is actually harder to get into because it's shorter. But your search results rankings still matter. So the game of AEO is a combination of both SEO and AEO. All right, we're going to add a little more into that. So when someone asks, "Chach, ebt or cloud?" A couple of the tools you just mentioned for a recommendation, what is determining which businesses get mentioned and which don't? So the way the LLMs work, so let's go back a few steps so that the way an LLM runs is that one, it's training on the internet. So every three to six months, these models are going around the internet and they're taking the world's information and they're saying, "How do we train and summarize?" At the same time, you'll also notice if you're in one of these chatbots for a lot of props that you're putting into chat GPT, for example, you will see a real-time search. So what it's doing is they have a search engine that's running and then they are summarizing search results. So that's what I mean when I say they're still a game of SEO because showing up in these AI chatbots is still SEO is still a big component. But when you look at how LLMs work on it's taking the world's information and organizing it, that's all about text. So the information that's on your website now really matters. It's kind of like we're going back to marketing 10, 15 years ago when it was all about content marketing and it was all about blogging. We are going back there in the sense that the information that you are putting out into the internet is training these LLMs on exactly who you are, what you do, why you matter. It's so fascinating and when you talk about the summary that's showing up now, I don't know about you. I don't go much further down. It's like, "Whatever, it's telling me there. I'm in a hurry, babe. I'm in a hurry." Yeah, okay, that's my answer. I'm moving on. I'm not typically going to look much further down. And I love what you said. It's like everything and I love that we're going back really to, you know, I'm very future facing, but the fact that everything that we're putting out there, the congruency of it, the consistency of it, all that really matters. As a marketer, that juices me out. I love it. I'm sure you do too. But is there a risk that a business is doing all the right things with traditional SEO, but could still be invisible to when it comes to AI driven search? This is such a great question. Absolutely. So the strategy is different. So it actually goes to the point you just made, which is these LLMs are summarizing and it's giving you a short list of recommendations. And so in what that means is you need to get very specific about where you want to show up and what recommendations matter for you as a business. So there's to give you the tactics in a nutshell, consistency really matters. Knowing where you want to show up and why you want to show up really matters, being very specific really matters. So the game of SEO, it used to be that you would go quite broad. So we see a lot of websites that are very large websites that were going after keywords in SEO just to drive traffic, but those keywords weren't close to their business. That is going to make you invisible in the game of AEO. So AEO is all about being specific. Showing up in the for the right person at the right time in the right recommendation list. And if your website is really broad, the LLMs have trouble understanding who you are and what you do. So that is your job to the, a lot of companies that were doing well in SEO before are invisible in AEO because they're just not specific enough. They haven't trained the LLMs on exactly what they do, which to your point is classic marketing. It's going back to exactly the who are you targeting, why do you matter, what are you offering them? Right, who is my ideal client, not the, you know, let me just throw everything against the wall and see if I can draw all the people, but who am I really for? And, you know, in declaring that, who am I not for? So where do they start then to become more visible? You've kind of already answered the question. Is it just being very specific about who you're for, those three things that you said is that how we start becoming more visible to AI? Yes, so the foundation is your website. So that's kind of going back to the, it was, we went in this world where you don't even need a website anymore. And now we're kind of back because it's your job to use your website to train AI, who you are. So the website is really the foundation. And that's where it's your job to answer those main questions about your business. The other things that are being pulled into LLMs and AI chatbots is all of the other content about you on the internet. So that includes social media, press, reviews. So that's a mix of content that is owned, content that you create, social media platforms being an example of that, or content that is user generated. So your customer is talking about you online in social media, in reviews, also plays into your performance in AI search. I was talking to someone yesterday and I really thought her strategy was interesting. And so I just want to ask you about it. So she has created content over years. She used to be a Facebook expert. She's very much leaned into a new area now. And she said, rather than like delete my history, I'm just publishing a lot more in the area that I want to be known for. And eventually I might retire or re-optimize some of that content. What do you think about that strategy? So we do both. So in the world of SEO, content has always gotten stale. So the way that Google works is after about a year and a half, if you haven't changed that content, they stop indexing it. So you've always needed to refresh your content. So if you have old content on your website, chances are it's not performing. In the world of LLM's, because it's important to be precise in what you do, we find it's actually very relevant to go back and update content. So for the businesses that we work with, we are both refreshing their existing content and creating that new content. Love it. Love it. Love it. And you have, as I mentioned in your introduction, you have scales and major brands. So when it comes to AI search visibility, what are big brands doing differently to what say small business owners are not doing and should be doing? And can they even compete for a niche, for a particular idle client? Oh, this is what makes this game the most fun. Is this change has really leveled the playing field. Because if we go back to a couple of questions ago around the shift from SEO to AI search, there's a lot of big companies that have invested heavily in SEO that are not showing up in AI search, because they just went way too broad in SEO content. So we are increasingly seeing small players show up and show up fairly quickly, which is great. Just like in SEO, it's a game of competition. So if you are investing in AEO in a very competitive space, it's going to be harder. If you are in a small business and none of your competitors are investing in this update, it's a huge advantage for you. And we see that all the time. We are a newer agency and we get a lot of inbound leads through AI search. And so we are a brand new website. We haven't been investing in SEO for a decade, and we can now compete. So I think it's an incredible time to be a small business, because marketing is changing and I do think the field is leveled in. That is so exciting. Is it? It's super exciting. Yeah, yeah, really exciting. And there's so much noise right now about AI and marketing. I can't blink. You know, there's another story, there's another angle, there's another tool. But from your perspective, how should small business owners, we said they're in a great position to be competitive. What would your advice be to how they approach their marketing? Certainly this year, but moving forward? So the first step is to understand where you stand. And to do that, there's a ton of great tools in AI visibility. So what you want to do is you want to grab one of those tools, not to shout out ours, but we do give away a free AI visibility audit. So if you go to our website, we have a free tool where you can plug in your website and plug in your competitors. And you can see whether or not you are showing up in AI search. We'll put the details for that in the show notes as well. That's a great gift. Thank you. Of course. So it's the first step. You want to understand where you stand. For most small businesses, don't get discouraged. It's likely going to be zero. And that's because you haven't started this marketing channel yet. So now that you understand these visibility results are going to help you understand if your competitors are showing up and what they're showing up for. And that will give you your first clue to where there are gaps in terms of could be your website, could be if you're doing social media or press these things that are not showing up in AI search results that are showing up for your competitors. Most of the time, it's your website. Most of the time, the first step is is updating content on your website for the LLMs to understand what you do. And that's all content, which is classic marketing. Is going through, once you know where you stand, the next step is going through your website and understanding, is it clear in my content, who I serve, what I do, how I'm different? And that needs to be consistent across your website. And there needs to be information, it needs to be information dense. So something that can be referenced in terms of someone doing research about your industry or your type of business. And let's let them all know what you mean about the density they. So meaning generic language is not very useful to LLMs. And so your website needs to be obvious who your ideal customer profile is. Who are you talking to? And what you do for them. What you do for them, you don't want it to be a generic offering that other businesses can offer. Because that's how you show up. And you pick the category you're in, the vertical you're in, get as specific as you can on who you serve. So if you have multiple types of businesses, you want to, or multiple types of, so ideal customer profiles, you want to make sure that you have content on your website that meets each of those customer profiles specifically. Meaning don't lump all your ICPs together in content, create content for each individual I will say, it's exciting when you first do the audit because you'll see where you stand with your competitors. The execution is hard. So like with any marketing channel, it's one of those things that you need to be consistently doing. So you will be updating your website, you will be creating content, you will be refreshing content. And this is something that needs to happen consistently. So for for small businesses, you can still make a dent if you're doing this every single month. And you're investing small to start. What matters is that you're consistently doing it month over month. Thank you for saying that because it can be like, give me a quick fix. You know, I'm going to do. But what I love what you're saying there and as someone who has. You know, had the success that you have had in marketing to really iterate that again is like about doing this consistently. And you know, from a practical perspective, you know, maybe you have, you know, a half day a month or whenever it's like this is my. You know, scanning my content, getting more consistent, being really clear about my I do client profiles, et cetera. Very good. One of the things and we're seeing this all the time is people using AI and there's really no sense of voice actually in a recent interview with Patrice Polzer. Someone we both know we talked quite a bit about that. So when you say I without losing their voice or authenticity or once they get that like I sound like everyone else, how do you balance using AI with maintaining originality and connection with your audience, especially as you say, you have to be really unique in what your content is and not generic. You know, it's all about the channel. So this is this is always the case in marketing. You are going to adjust your strategy based on the channel. If I am writing on LinkedIn, for example. I use AI to help me with ideas, but I never write a post with AI. Because my voice needs to be authentic as a voice on LinkedIn, and that's part of what makes the content interesting. In the case of creating content for your website, I would say you can use AI, you should use AI, but you do want to make sure that you are directing. It kind of goes back to it's not as if you made by directing. Tell us what you mean by directing. So directing is directing the tone, how you would write, making sure it matches the rest of the content on your website, going through everything that is written to make sure it's accurate. So AI classically will elucinate, and you will have a fact that are actually not true. You are an industry expert, you run the business, so it's up to you to go through all of that content. So for example, when we are creating content for businesses, everything is human-reviewed, everything is human in the loop, and that's part of directing AI, meaning it's not a hands-off you press a button, and your website is being built by AI, and there's a bunch of AI content that's going out onto your website. Because this content by the nature of it will be too generic, too show up and results. Yeah. Thank you for saying that, because again, I understand it's a shortcut, it's there to make us more efficient, but that human touch, that actually fact-checking for one, but also just having it sound like a person and not AI like, is so important. And I find it interesting that your strategy for LinkedIn, which is where obviously a lot of your businesses derive, is a lot more human than perhaps what you might do somewhere else. And not everyone has your marketing prowess. So for everybody listening, just being really thoughtful and intentional. It's going to leverage you, it's going to help your brain store my ideas, but ultimately directing it, helping massage it, injecting your humanity, your personal stories, your personal opinions and point of views, that is what's going to make it not generic. Actually, if we all put the same question, sorry, if we all put the same question into AI, we're probably all going to get a similar answer. So if you're a graphic designer, and you're asking the same questions as the graphic designer down the road, you can end up with very similar content. Sorry, go ahead, Jenna. - Oh, I was just going to double click on that because you're a marketing expert and as a fractional CMO, the number one problem that a business would have, where I would get the phone call, was we're running all the marketing channels, but none of them are working. And it's classic intention to your point. You want to be very intentional. It's better to have one or two marketing channels that are working really well than five to seven channels doing nothing. And so I always say this when working with business owners or founders, that it's not about the number of channels. It's about the right channels. And it actually takes quite a bit of time to unlock the channels that are going to work for you. So you're going to, especially as a business owner, I feel like you have an intuitive sense of where your customers are and how you can potentially reach them. So usually choosing the right channels for you is not the hard part. It's figuring out the strategy to get that channel to work, which to your point is all about attention. - That's so interesting you say that. I've been on LinkedIn since LinkedIn began, but I never paid it much attention. It was more like a resume. And I'm not looking for a job. But it was like, oh, I have to be on there. And all we were doing was reposting, things that we were posting elsewhere. And our main focus was on Facebook. And I don't know why it took so long for the penny to drop. But it was like, no, my women are on LinkedIn. And I'm showing up very generically. And so it's really just been in the last couple of months that, especially as I've also taken a pivot in my business. And we do this, like the long-grain business. We decide, oh, this is the type of client I want. Or this is the topic I really want to be known for. I've become far more intentional. And I'm like, I think this is going to be my favorite platform. And you could not have told me that a few years ago. But now I'm on a client Instagram. And I want to be on Twitter or on Twitter. I track the same joke regularly. I also use LinkedIn. And I actually love this social network. It's my favorite social network, partly because I've met amazing people on there. And so just for me starting to write on LinkedIn, I've reconnected with lots of amazing people. I've worked with in the past that I never would have reconnected with because now I'm showing up in their feed. And it's all around business. So it has a focus versus I feel like the other social media channels are entertaining, but there's not a focus. And so I'm with you. I never would have guessed that my number one social network would be LinkedIn. Great. Well, we're going to make sure we give everyone your LinkedIn profiles so they can follow along with what you're writing. Again, we've been around this a little bit in this conversation. But if you could give a business owner just one piece of advice to stay visible and relevant as AI shapes and reshapes, how people find and choose who they work with, what would that be? Ooh. The number one tactic to start with, which is the foundation is your blog. So it sounds really goofy. It sounds good. Let's do blogging. (laughs) The type of things you blog about are important for the strategy. So for example, things that really move the needle, writing blogs around how you were different from your competitor. How should your customer evaluate and choose you versus your competitors? Is something that is very important to train LLMs. Another thing that's very helpful to train LLMs is going through your benefits or your value props. So writing blog posts and taking, if you're a software product, the example, this would be features. Writing posts that are featured by feature, going deep, talking about how that feature works on your particular product. So there's lots of different ways to do that with a small business if it's benefits driven or it's product driven. But we're back to blogging and it's something that is, feels silly, but is very much moving the needle and helping you show up in organic discovery. - What? - Oh, it's old, it's new again, and I couldn't be more excited. 'Cause again, I don't know, maybe I insured it in China, but we've just gotten more serious about our blogging. We, again, have like a lot of people, I think 2008, we started blogging. And then it was kind of this graveyard. It was like, oh, we really need to be posting elsewhere. And then we've become again just more consistent in that. But we thought it was face-to-face, but no, it's for all organic search. And that is the clincher. That is what's really powerful about what you just said. I am so excited. I am like, I'm itching to talk to my team. - I mean, one other big update I will give is, especially for small business owners, you're gonna meet a lot of agencies, SEO agencies that are now pivoting to AEO, that are going to try to sell you what they call technicals. And this is the old school SEO of, we go on your website and we optimize it. So page speed, making sure, you know, canonicals are correct. It's a bunch of stuff that the SEO industry, used to sell you that most people don't know what that is, but we need this and we need an agency to be doing this on a six-month contract. In the world of LLMs, LLMs are looking at text. So the technicals of your website are not as important. The blog on your website has now become more important. And that's text. And so if you hear an agency, if an agency is trying to sell you technicals, I would be very wary of that in the world of AEO. You wanna work with an agency that understands content, that understands your business, that understands strategy. - Very, very important. Thank you so much for that insider information. I love it. We have a tagline here on the show. It's your business, your rules. When you hear that, tell me how does your business, the business that you're running, how are you running it by your rules? - Ooh, this is a great question. - I really have to think about it. - Me, my co-founder and I worked for big companies. So by the nature of starting our own business, it's by our own rules. And by the nature of what we started in, so we both come from growth teams at big companies. And we really care about growth. We love the puzzle of growing businesses. We think that's fascinating. So for us, we're doing what we love to work on, which is our own rules. I think the thing that makes our business by our own rules is we decided that we didn't want to just be a service business. We also wanted to be a tech company. So we're a very different kind of agency in that we are both software and service. And so we build software for our customer to use, but at the end of the day, we sell them a whole solution. And that's that to us as a solution by our own rules. I love that because we can design our business every way. It doesn't have to look like what other people in our industry are doing. And so that is definitely by our rules. And sometimes we, I think as more business owners, we forget that we, this is our game. We get to design it any way we like. And that is what your business, your rule, really is and so I appreciate you answering that question kind of a little bit on the spot. Hey, thank you so much for joining me. I have loved this conversation. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. I loved this conversation with Jenna because at its heart, it really brings us back to what great marketing is and that's been clear about who you serve, being specific about what you do and showing up consistently with content that actually means something. Yes, the tools are changing. Every day. Yes, AI is reshaping how people search and choose, but the businesses that will win are the ones who are intentional, not the ones trying to be everywhere and to say everything. So if this episode got you thinking about your visibility, especially in AI search, be sure to check out Jenna's work. We've included links in the show notes, including her AI visibility audit, which I highly recommend that you do. It takes just a few seconds and it gives you a really clear picture of what your business's current status is as far as AI visibility. You'll find details at herbusiness.com/360. That's herbusiness.com/360. As always, I would love to hear what resonated with you. So come on over to Instagram. You'll find me at @herbusiness and share your biggest takeaway and let's keep this conversation going. If you enjoyed this episode, also be sure to subscribe and share it with a friend who's trying to make sense of all this AI and marketing noise right now. And we would love it. If you would leave us a rating or a review on Apple podcasts, it helps us. It helps our guests. And you can do that on your favorite listening platform or you can send us a message over on Instagram. And once again, you'll find us at @herbusiness on Instagram. On our website herbusiness.com/360, you're going to find a summary of today's episode, links to other resources we've discussed as well as Jonas' details. And remember, it's your business, so play by your rules. I'll see you next time right here on the Herbusiness podcast. Bye for now.