Is AI killing SEO? Semrush Spotlight with Andrew Warden

(upbeat music) Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. Now continuing our series with Semrush, we will be putting a spotlight on Search and somebody that knows all about Search is Semrush's own CMO, Andrew Warden. Now they are experts in this area and it is transformed like you wouldn't believe with the advent of AI and to tell us what it all means Andrew unpacks it and how you as a brand can take advantage of those changes. Here it is, Andrew, welcome to the show. - Thanks so much for having me. - It's funny, this topic, as you say, is higher than everyone's agenda at the moment. I think I first realized that something was happening about two years ago, slightly funny story with the podcast here, 'cause when I first launched podcast six years ago, I wanted to kind of cut through and I remember reading this book by a guy called Paul Arden. And this book was called, it's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be. But it was the subtitle that caught my eye. It said the world's number one book by Paul Arden. And I thought that's so clever. So when I launched a podcast, I said the world's number one marketing podcast by John Evans, and it was a bit of a joke. But even then, a few people messed me up. Oh, congratulations John, well done, you know. How do you do? - Perception, perception is everything. - Exactly. - Isn't that just the truth of mine? - I know, you just got to be a head of yourself, right? Just plan what you wish to happen. And then a couple of years ago, I had this YouTuber in America to do a seven minute takedown video on the podcast. I mean, literally ripping into me, calling me tyrannically British bullshitter, this whole thing, right, it was a proper, Larry takedown video. And you know, when you get that kind of criticism, you think, well, I can either laugh with it, or I can get upset, you know, what am I going to do? Anyway, so I decided to just laugh at, you know, just end, you know, enter into it. And I found him up, and I said, dude, like, why pick on me, right? There are thousands of podcasts. Why am I? He said, I went to chat GPT. And what did I ask you? - Give the number one. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - And literally, and suddenly I thought, oh, I'm going to make it, you know, the world has changed a bit in where we get our information from and, you know, how we're feeding it and that kind of thing. But how disruptive do you think a moment we are in is? - Yeah, well, I think first of all, this is the, this exact moment. And actually, you're referencing even a couple of years ago. I mean, really, from May of 2022 to now, it seems, it's just wild to think that it's been over three years from chat GPT going so viral. I would say that this is the most significant moment for marketers since Google started. That can either be very daunting for people or it can be tremendously exciting for people. And as I was saying before we started recording, you know, a lot of my conversations with CMO is at public companies right now. There are typically three different types of camps. And I think this also extends to practitioners really at any level. You know, there are the marketers or even the executives who are really on the sidelines kind of watching and waiting to see how AI will play out seems like every month there's some kind of new refresh or new models that are coming. All of these things make sense, especially in the context of search. And then on the complete opposite of the spectrum, you have people who are just all in experimenting, you know, which is for me as a marketer, amazing to see. And then unfortunately right in the middle you have people who are frozen. They're terrified to make a move in either direction because maybe their organic traffic has fallen and they don't want to divert investments to LOMs and for online visibility for AI search and for digital brand visibility. Yeah, I was just in New York a couple of weeks ago meeting with like household name, bootchip companies, CMOs. And it's amazing to hear, you know, the question is, Andrew, how do we get started? Where should we begin? How should I think about budgeting for this? What about attribution? It's an enormous moment actually for marketers. And in many ways, it kind of makes me think back. If I can, if I give myself permission to date myself, it really thinks about, it makes me think about, you know, the kind of dot com area. Like it's just this whole new chapter for technology. And that's, and again, we're only talking here in the context of marketing and search. I mean, what about in the creative industry? What about in any other industry you can think of? You know, it's, it's a big moment. It really is. Now, where are you seeing the biggest kind of change in behavior happening when it comes to search? Yeah, I think, you know, so it's interesting. I think search used to equal Google, right? And as other, other avenues came out, as other AI search engines came out, you started to see that, that share grow. And what we observed through clickstream data, through data, which is the semi-rush company, they're not mutually exclusive. Actually, what we notice is that search behavior is expanding from Google to those that are impacted by LMS. So for, for many months, and you know, marketers love a good drama, you know, especially for 10 plus years, you know, market or SEOs dead, you know, this is over, fuck this, we're dumb with this, you know, it's, it's completely not true. So what we've observed, and actually we know right now, I mean, the latest data that we got was from October, this month, you know, 94.3% of searches are happening on Google still. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't be as marketers worried about visibility in LMS and the traceability and the citations there we absolutely need to. In fact, you know, customers who are coming through AI search engines where you are referenced in an LLM are 4.4 times as likely to convert. So you definitely need to care. But this is not, oh, it's such a big deal. We're going to stop doing our SEO. And we're only going to focus on LMS. This is like the worst decision that can be made. I went on a bit of a tangent there. I'm not sure if I answered the question. - No, well, I think most people's perception would be we're all switching over search dead. It's now, it's now all the way. - And I'm here to say concretely, absolutely not. I mean, I mean, I know, especially in summer, actually, you know, 70% of our organic blogs for that program actually feed LMS. And so if we were to start divesting from that ourselves, that would actually hamstring us when it comes to future proofing our own visibility. So I think what's different and what we're doing just to give people some kind of concrete steps of what maybe to think about, you know, expanding the organic program or the owned media, no matter what you call it, or your own company, no matter the size, to go far beyond, you know, traditional SEO, but also to extend into YouTube, to Reddit, to Cora, you know, to all of these different platforms to user-generated content. And I think if anything, you know, now there are tools, again, like Sumrush 1 and AI Visibility Toolkit. More and more, there are tools available to SEOs and to digital marketers that didn't exist three, six, nine months ago. And I'm already watching this play out within my team at Sumrush where, you know, I actually have very high expectations for this department because now all of a sudden, you're armed with literally what should be published in what channel in order to elevate visibility in AI search. And that goes beyond the organic search team. It hits PR, it hits brand, it hits a lot of these channels that as CMOs, we've always cared about, but we've never really needed to prioritize necessarily. And also just for a fun fact, you know, PR, there's a quarter of the pool of journalists available that were available pre-COVID. So PR is a pretty tough game right now. But all that is to say that, you know, really the role of an SEO or a classic SEO or someone who's a digital marketer, if you're up for it, you know, you've just kind of, whether you like it or not, you just negotiated an enormous seat at the table. And so I'm always encouraging marketers to embrace that and to not be frozen by that because that's a pretty big deal. And I don't really see that kind of incremental step change to what we're seeing right now. Like that kind of side, the expression I use a lot at work is like the earth is literally moving right now between our feet. Like, I don't always love such dramatic references, but the earth is shifting, you know, search is shifting as we speak, as we're standing. So we have to not only move with it, but get ahead of where the terrain is altering. I'd love to get into your new report as well because you just published this big new report, AI visibility, which is, by the way, big plug that is super, super helpful. What were the biggest surprises that you think people would would not be expecting from the data collected? - You know, I think a lot of people were surprised. I mentioned just a moment ago about user generated content. I think a lot of people were surprised at just far reaching, how far reaching that is now. Organic has always been such a long tail game. We published X number or refreshed X number of posts over, you know, three, six, nine, 12 months, and then we'll see where it's at your value, according to cohort basis of your year. With LLMs, it's almost like these channels are now behaving more like paid. And I think this is something that people aren't talking about a lot yet, which I want to talk about. Because it also puts a certain amount, again, if you're up for it, it gets a certain amount of pressure on the organic team to like, all right, it's time to move faster. So that was a big surprise that we heard from people. I don't think it was any surprise that some of our, like the most kind of household name brands that we all know and love or maybe don't love. We're in the top, you know, echelons, if you will. But I actually had just this week a call from someone who was a publicly traded company who was cited in this report saying they were going to mention it on their earnings call. - Wow. - And they wanted to double check that we weren't going to release new research in a month or two that might counter it. And I said, I'm not aware of any research, but if I were you, I would cite it. So it had the report has gotten a lot of traction. I think that what people are reacting to is actually how practical it is in that report. Like it's not just that here's the kind of the best of the best. It's actually here's how these companies did this. And I can tell you, hand on heart. I mean, I brought that research with someone Andreas and our brand team and someone in our product marketing team put together, which I'm very proud of. And I actually, I kind of virtually walked out over to our own organic search team. And I said, hey, how come we're not experimenting with a thousand UGC pieces here? Like, where's this program? And they said, I don't know, we're investing in that. I said, okay, when do I get to see the results? - I was going to ask you that. - Yeah, no, no, no, I'm very open. I'm very transparent guy. And so it's one thing, you know, not to be in the report, but again, it was very specific. It was very tailored to some of these industries. And of course, in the end of the day, it's meant to educate, it's meant to help others understand how to improve. But it's also meant to be a demand generation asset. I mean, we're marketers, you know, so that's part of the point. - Yeah, I was interested in how, 'cause you looked at chat GPT and Google AI. Actually, how they operate quite differently. And we need to remember, don't we? The not every AI operates in the same way. So the results that came out both are quite different. - Yes. - And then I also thought, it was interesting how different industries were. That was a surprise, actually, to me. 'Cause I kind of would have assumed AI treats all industries the same. - No, actually not. - No, and this for me, this came up, I gave a talk at Disney earlier this year. It's always amazing when you, it was an enterprise, enterprise client. And they had, it was called Disney Digital Days. It was so cool. They had 1200 marketers globally. And they had never had someone come to talk about search and digital and like, you know, search an organic vis-a-vis PPC and like other channels. And to your question about, you know, or your statement that you would have thought that industries would be kind of agnostic for, for any GBT's or for any AI, the reality is it's not. Actually, it's, you know, you see more and more AI overviews show up for non-transactional. So for like purely informational queries, the more and more, if you, let me put this way, if you're prompting or if you're searching for, I want to buy X, you're not gonna get an overview, right? And so e-commerce is largely out of that picture. I think when it comes to tourism, you know, if you're like, what are the top 10 hotels that I can visit around Disney, you're gonna get a big laundry list. Like that's the most more research oriented. And so right now still it really wildly varies. I mean, on average, it can be, you know, 23% we see right now with the latest data, 23% on Google, you're gonna get an AI overview response. But in some verticals, it goes up to 80%. And some verticals, it shrinks to three. I don't have the answer on why or how. Maybe I'll get it soon. But I'm also very curious, you know, when Google releases paid search within AI overviews. Like this is also gonna be a very interesting moment for marketers too, which I know is coming up. So. - Another thing I thought was interesting is the distinction between mentions and sources as well. 'Cause you kind of think that this is all about getting mentioned a lot, getting lots of reviews. But actually, AI treats different sources quite differently. - Sure. - Very highly, you know, high levels of authority from some sources versus the other. How important is it to kind of understand where you're being sourced? - It is crucial to understand where you're being sourced. Because if, first of all, if you don't understand where you're being sourced, you can't make any kind of improvement or not, right? And I think the trust factor between being a mention and being a source is also critical. And I might be wrong, but I believe that sources are the only, that's really where the only blue links live, right? So for any hope to kind of escape a zero click reality is to be a source. And it could be wrong on that. But that's the last time I checked, you know, so it could change overnight sometimes. But I think this is a huge part of what will drive ultimate trust. And I think, you know, the way I start to think about it as well, you know, the error that we're in right now, this is ending number one. This is foundational. Again, in that conversation I mentioned I had in New York a week or so ago. If someone asked me a question they said, well, you know, if AI is so disruptive right now, where do you think it would be in 12 or 18 months, especially for buyers, you know? And we already know that there are major companies like United, you know, United Airlines like testing fully agentic paths to purchase. You know, I think that in a year, year and a half from now, you and I will have our own, I mean, you probably already have your own, but you'll have a more sophisticated GPT yourself where it knows that you're on a fitness journey just like me. It knows that you might like a particular brand of cycling shoes or running shoes or training gloves, whatever they are. It knows the average shelf life of that products. How long you're going to go through it? It's going to propose and it might even automatically purchase it for you and send it to your door. And the reason why I bring these examples up is, and this is really even on a B to C side, we could also talk about B to B. If brands are not investing in digital brand visibility now to lay that foundation, to lay the many layers of that foundation right now, imagine in 12 or 18 months, if you're not being considered as a source or a mention or you're completely on the sideline, you're not even part of the conversation. And this is what kind of reminds me back to dot com days. It's kind of like you don't have a domain. And that is a very intentional dramatic pause. Yeah. That's a big deal. It makes sense. But I mean, another kind of comparison to old days I was thinking, the rules used to be, what does a brand want to say about itself? Correct. These days is what do other people say about the brand that matters more, doesn't it? So use generated content and working with other people. This is why I think content creator strategy is so key, isn't it? To content creators, influencers as well. And I'll try my best not to reveal the brand, but it was really interesting from one of those CMOs the other night where that audience, it was basically healthcare or life sciences brand where the audience is actually folks who are maybe 75 to 85 years old. And one of the first questions from their CMOs, like, well, Andrew, how do I get them to generate UGC? Like, how would that be possible? Like these people, and I was like, I don't know. My mom's 82, 83. She's a dictatorful and more than I am. But seriously, I said, well, how about sending like a, again, this is a very US focused audience. So sorry for the US reference. But, you know, most people, I know that age, you know, love a good Dunkin' Donuts or something like this. You know, send them a gift card if and only if they're grandson or whatever. Some family member makes a write-up and starts creating that. Once you get that to scale, and like, her eyes just kind of open so widely. Like, oh, that's all it would take to get started here. It's very interesting for me. And this is what I mean about this kind of frozen camp. People don't know where to begin. And this is the biggest challenge I see. But you just have to start. It's funny. I mentioned the comedy review that I got as well. The other moment where I suddenly went, I get how this is working. I got to invite your speaker, conference last year. And I went to conference organization. I said, have inches, why pick me? And they said, oh, well, we were originally searching for Mark Ritson. And your video with him came up top of the search. Then we were looking for Les Binet. And his video with you came up top of the search. Every speaker we looked at linked to content you had made with them. Effective, you were coming out top organically because of that sort of thing. I went, oh, that's interesting. Putting stuff out in the world, collaborating, making content for other people is key to this. And there's also the freshness of the content that matters. Because, again, big shift from the way we used to think about organic. You write a post, it's technically very accurate. It checks all the boxes. It has all the authority, all the EET, all these things. And you kind of set it for six months and forget about it. Absolutely not. Like now, your publishing schedule needs to pull forward at least three or four X. I mean, it is not enough to have that rather-- I mean, you still need a static program in that way. I will call that static or traditional SEO model. But there has to be this whole other new muscle that's being trained. No one expects it. No one, including me, expects it to be perfect. I don't have a high standard for my team. Of course, it's semi-rush. I don't expect it to be perfect. But I expect this to be failing every day on these things to try to figure it out. And we're being really aggressive with that right now. So yeah, it's a big thing. That's a very different mindset, isn't it? Sure. Compared to when you and I were cutting our teeth on marketing a few years ago. What would it all be about? You're very generous of a few years ago. Exactly. But you know, you go through all the approval processes and you've got lots of production. You get all the sign-offs, so you'd spend a lot of time getting it right. Now you're putting stuff out there quickly seeing what works and then deciding. And I think this also depends on the viewpoint and the appetite for risk, frankly, from CMOs and what their boards will let them get away with. I've always been in the camp of, I will ship it 80% and clean it up after. That applies to pretty much my every single day, because especially in marketing, we're so conditioned to be perfectionists and for it to be, I think right now with LLMs, I mean, there's so much hallucinating that happens, so many wrong answers. I mean, I still think I have a reference about how an AI overview said it was okay for pregnant women to smoke at some point. Like, it's all kinds of, just, I'm just being hyperbolic on purpose and obviously don't support that. But it's interesting. Like, I would much rather us push to be aggressive and then if there's a mistake, we can also clean it up. But right now, even in the past couple, I think in the past six weeks, we had a sprint with our now what we call their online visibility team or our digital grand visibility team. We've seen a 3X result in the number of AI overview mentions and citations, even when compared to our biggest competitors. And so that means we're making really good progress there. My next challenge, which I don't care as much about right now, but I know everybody else does, is attribution. Given a zero-click reality, does that just dump into the direct channel? Maybe. Is that good enough for me? No, you know. So there's a lot of unanswered questions still. But for me, this is also the part where, again, a lot of people get really spooked by that. They get nervous. They get nervous about being able to show results and, you know, and I think this is the moment where marketers just need to lean in, I was called the hold on to the table moment. Just hold on, hold tight. Instead, it's steady course, but get moving, you know. Speed is key, isn't it? Because when you get a structural change in this, the winners are often not the best, they're the ones that move quickest into the gaps and take advantage of them. Something else actually that popped out of me when I read your report was the brands that came out top. So brands like Patagonia or Garmin, Gucci, for example, were all brands with very strong stories to tell, very powerful brands. So you might be tempted to think in the AI world brand matters less. If anything, your report's just in brand matters more. - No, it's absolutely brand matters five times more. I personally love Patagonia as a brand, as a company. I mean, they have been, they're probably one of the best winners in all of this that I can think of, probably purely by accident. And that's great, great for them. But for years, they have been storytelling about, you know, everything's about being outdoors, care, and sustainability for the planet, which is square in the audience of those who are outdoors all the time, preserving, you know, the planet for the future, they even change their products to make sure that they're aligning with that vision. And they've been telling that story for at least five to seven years. And then you have all of this brand fandom around them. So everyone is posting constantly. Gucci, I think, is a little bit more obvious because it's kind of this kind of, you know, Yolo, you know, very sexy brand, you know. Patagonia, I think, you know, it's a bit different where it's this kind of long and steady, consistent storytelling, consistent brand building. And that really connects exactly to what I mentioned before about SEOs and digital marketers, you know, now have the tools, especially with Semars 1 and other tools, to actually feed into the brand teams, to be like, you should be talking more about X, Y, and Z, because that is where actually our competitors are eating our lunch on LL invisibility, you know. And so that's where we are really, you know, Semars for many years, we've always thought about what we do and how we help customers is really about boosting online visibility. From now on, at least for the foreseeable future, it's about digital brand visibility. For those who are at Spotlight today, I was really pleased James McCormick, who's a super senior analyst at IDC, you know, gave a 30-minute talk, all about digital brand visibility. And he talks to a lot of very senior clients, you know, Fortune 100. This is what is keeping CMOs and CEO's up at night. And so I think this is where it kind of connects me on what we saw with AI visibility. And maybe, maybe right, maybe that was a bit surprising, even for me to see that a lot of these channels where we've always kind of classified it with softer metrics like impressions or share a voice. All of a sudden now, I can tell you, I'm reporting to my board about our share of voice vis-a-vis our competitors and vis-a-vis those who are like similar enough or, you know, larger companies like HubSpot, which we don't consider a competitor, but like, think, you know, brands we want to look like or sound like or feel like, share a voice a year ago? Come on, are you kidding me? Impressions a year ago? People laugh at you, you know? It's only about registrations, trials, payments, you know, and high-quality traffic. So yeah, it's really interesting to see that the kind of channel mix is almost flipped on its head. I don't know if you agree or if you agree. - I really love your framing, actually. 'Cause like, we're obviously, you know, trained in what's your share of voice across your media mix and you take all traditional channels and go, I've got this share of voice versus my competitor and that, or I think I'm gonna outperform, et cetera, et cetera. But the thing with this is because so much of it is earned rather than paid, you have to find a different way of measuring it and because of the LLMs of putting different priorities on different sources, then what you need to see is, you know, what's the net of all that and what's your share of voice once or that's taking consideration. So digital visibility, I think, is a really neat way of looking at it. - Yeah, it's digital brand. And for me, that's why we put brand in this brand in the sense of the digital brand visibility because now it's not only about, like, getting blog posts up and redirecting traffic to your site and getting payments, but like, how well is your brand showing up? - Yeah. - Period. That's been a discussion we've been having in as an exact team for a couple of months about what's really, what's the really the heart of what we're delivering for customers, the value that we're delivering both for our subscription customers but also for some of our enterprise customers who have even, I mean, everybody has big marketing challenges, you know, but I think it's even more tricky when you have multi-national companies with hundreds and hundreds of team members working in different countries on very similar problems. But yeah, I think it is this kind of total shift in how even marketing is seen. So it's like you start with this kind of seismic shift of, you know, it's no longer traditional SEO, now it's that plus combined with AI search, but now that it's impacting other channels that are usually well beyond the station of the organic search teams and then when other executives are seeing certain declines or certain inclines and then it's like, well, what's the PR? How come the PR team isn't delivering this? How come the brand team isn't more visible like where are our activations? Like how come you don't have more impressions? These are not the questions that we've been having for the last five or 10 years. So personally for me, I think it's really exciting. - No, I like that a lot. So taking that on a step then, if you would advise, I mean, you talked to a lot of CMOs, don't you? And you mentioned a few earlier. What would be your advice then to a CMOs listing gang? Okay, I need to get on top of this. Because you're right, it changes the structure of the organization, isn't it? So it's not like a bottom of the org thing that's done in the last click, it's now, how do we tell our story? - Yeah, I think the way that I'm advising folks right now is that I think there's two things, you know, number one, the expansion of the role of the SEO department or the digital marketing, or whatever you call it internally, can be organic or whatever. That combined with brand and product marketing really as a center of gravity is a big element that will retool and will actually redesign marketing functions. I think the first thing that I ask folks is, who's running your program and how legacy-minded are they? And it's not a popular question. And I'm not sorry for asking it. Look, I'm a human too. I get stuck in my ways. I have my rhythms. This is not the moment for conservatism. This is not the moment for, we've done it this way for three or four years. This is where CMOs need to ask very hard questions of, do we have the right talent leading these teams? So that's number one, right? Is there enough elasticity in that person and can you upskill them? Or are they already training their own models? And I'll give you like real example here. In our team, gosh, it was maybe three or four months ago, I was actually struggling to find some really good product messaging on a very particular product that I just wasn't really happy with. And I can be quite vocal at times. So a couple of people heard about that. There were two people in a team that had no responsibility for that whatsoever, not in product marketing. And within three hours, they used cloud and they came up with some of the best messaging that I'd seen since my time at Semrush. And my point is, these are the people you want to find and also celebrate them and show them off to the rest of your team because it's not only about, it's not my job, I did it anyway. But I'm experimenting, I'm trying, maybe it's shit. Now it's not, and I just find that with organic because there has been this sort of 15 year long swell or slog or cycle time, whatever you want to call it, it's changed overnight. And the question is, is that person ready for that change? And so if they're not, you have to do something about it. And the good news is there are plenty of people who are very interested in this right now. So I think that's kind of point number two. And I think thirdly, the biggest risk is to over rotate on LLMs. They're absolutely important, crucial. Gotta do it, no question. But again, it's the combination of traditional SEO and AI search, which will equal digital brand visibility. And that's the equation that, when I say it that way, at least the CMOs, it seems to make sense then, right? So it's like, I understand traditional SEO, I get it, I don't really understand AI search just yet, but now I'm starting to understand what's feeding LLMs. And overall, that digital brand visibility is about this, the increasingly complementary nature of channels that they've always been intertwined. But now you can measure it in ways you never could. So that's where I think these are the majority of my conversations with CMOs right now. It takes me actually talking about this, because there is a flip side I wanted to come onto this. We're obviously been talking about how, as marketers, we can train the LLMs effectively to make sure that the right contents out there are people discovering us, and our brand is very visible. But with AI's doing, do you think that, as a consumer, if you put yourself on the other side of it, that actually, more and more and more, your choice is effectively being made for you? - Oh, you must have seen the TED Talk. - I did see a TED Talk, yeah, you must have seen the TED Talk, yeah. - 'Cause you leaned into this question, didn't you, Richard? - I think that, I think it is a very interesting question. And I think it's possible. I think that, just as I referenced this, you might have your own agent in a couple of years that makes decisions for you, based on your previous purchasing behavior, based off of your browser data, based off your mobile data, the microphone that listens to you, whether you like it or not, I think it is very real and very possible. And I don't necessarily think it's a negative thing, but I do think it's something to be aware of, that the very systems that we design, of course are inherently political. It's not, I'm not the first person to think about this. I think it was Langdon '80s, as a philosopher who published that piece around, literally every object, this share, this rather deep share that I hope I'm not subject too much in, has some kind of politics that are embedded in it, right? There's a certain height, there's a certain width, tables or wheelchair accessibility, everything, right? Bridges in New York, in the '40s and '50s, were designed at a certain height, so that buses couldn't go underneath them, which meant that people who couldn't afford to drive private vehicles couldn't enter. So objects have politics, and I think that also the systems we're designing right now absolutely have politics. But that's very esoteric. We could have our own session just on that. But to get right to your question, I think that the more that can be done now, because as a marketer, I want that outcome, actually. I actually want you to not realize that you need something, you just need it. And more importantly, I want your credit card to be saved, and I would rather run the risk that you might return something, which is probably a one in six that you would return it. Again, going back to the fitness example or one of these things. So I think that that future is not that far off, but the question of who's creating demand is very interesting to me as a marketer. And if I were to go back to LSE and do some more research, I might query those things where it's like, what does demand look like for both B2B and B2C in the future? Is it generated by the consumer? Is it generated purely by the perception of what you might need? And how far ahead is AI thinking for you and predicting? Because when you see what's possible with Gen AI right now, just imagine what's gonna be a five years. - I mean, for me, it's fascinating. - It is, it's, yeah, it's so. So yeah, that's a bit of the extrapolation of the, the cuff notes from the TED Talk. - But I mean, the point you rounded on which I think is, I mean, so I wrote it 'cause I work at a chemical system one, which is all about instinct and emotion. - Yeah. - Is that's gonna become even more important, right? And this is the juxtaposition I think people are not realizing that the more we automate things and the system predicts and all that sort of thing, yeah. The more important human emotion and humanity will become to those brands that want to win. - Well, the authenticity part is what's gonna matter because I think the, especially as things become more and more automated or let's just say, you know, the next pair of running trainers show up at your door, like it's not really, it's not like a delightful touch point for you. It's just purely transactional. So I think that also means that brands are gonna have to do even more, you know, to stand out to make you feel something. So it's interesting when you're bringing that up in terms of the emotional part. So yeah, I think that was also part of that narrative of, okay, so as things get increasingly more prescriptive, like marketers not only have this greater technical challenge, but there's also this like greater challenge on the art side where how do you make people feel things when, you know, people are constantly just scrolling and desensitized to what they see on their reels and on talk and on everything, like, you know, at a certain point your brain is so saturated, like what feelings do you have left to give? So that's why I think the work that you're doing is also very interesting. - Yeah, it's really interesting. I think it changed its behavior 'cause I mean, we go back to COVID days, we suddenly adopted to having meetings online really quickly. That was the positive thing. But then we all went to concerts 'cause we're desperate afterwards, we're desperate to kind of meet people and what places like this, you know, going to conferences as well, you know, we crave that human interaction. - I mean, I certainly hope that doesn't go away. You know, I think that's the part where I think that's the biggest existential question about, you know, any kind of synergistic moment when, you know, there's parity with AI and all of these things. I still think at the end of the day that part is still very overblown. I think that, you know, buyers still feel things and whether you're B2B or B2C, especially on the B2B side, you know, people buy from people, they trust brands, they trust track records. And yeah, AI will get you part of the way. I'm talking about generative AI, you know, but having that foundation in traditional SEO and AI search, like for me, it's just this table stakes that didn't exist before, you know, SEO was always kind of, it's important for CMOs, important for companies. But it's so amazing now how, you know, the attention is like almost well of a paid. And then some companies, you know, where you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on paid and you're spending a fraction of that on organic, you know, and now CMOs are saying, what are we doing about this? How come this isn't as well funded? You know, we need to fix this. It's just like a wild moment for marketers and also for Samarach, like it's a great, great time. Yeah, it is indeed. And then just lastly, you mentioned Samarach 1, which I think you announced they didn't use. So what will that enable people to do? Great question. So we've been responding to customers, you know, I think it was about, it was in January of this year, we released something called the AI Visibility Toolkit. And this is a $99 monthly subscription that helped you understand how your brand shows up and why and also some teasers of how to make improvements. And over time, we realized that, 'cause actually it wasn't really clear to us even, I would say. And again, I'm not a product guy, but I am a CMO. So I'll tell you at least from my perspective, it wasn't immediately clear. Should we be going all in on LLMs? Should we be maybe thinking about slowing some of our SEO spend all these things? And actually after the balance of the year of research, we knew that it needs to be the combination of both. So that we know for sure, that one I would be willing to die on the hill as the expression goes, you know, to prove it and to advocate for it. So the new subscriptions include that, so there's basically new tiers. There's starter for those who are starting out, like, you know, maybe brand new or a smaller company. ProPlus, which is more sophisticated and then there's this kind of advanced or ultimate, so in that ultimate advanced solution, which includes like API access, like all the bells and whistles. And of course, then there's enterprise, which is for very large companies. And the biggest net new or incremental improvement is that these subscriptions now will not only have better limits, but they also include de facto, all of the AI visibility components baked into them. So Pavel was just up on stage showing demos where it's this expansion of what was offered earlier in the year, an AI visibility toolkit was our fastest growing product that we ever made at summer. So in the span of, and by the way, it only took us about a month to make, which is even more impressive. So what we're really doing now is saying, okay, here are net new and more valuable traditional SEO tools combined with AI search and AI visibility tools, all in one subscription, you know, and that's something that is pretty unique at the moment. So, fantastic. Well, Andrew, thank you so much. Congratulations on the launch and on Spotlight, which another success. Yeah, great to see you there. Yeah, appreciate all your advice and wisdom. Thanks for having me. Thank you, cheers. Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored CMO. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast. If you want to contact me, you can do, I'm over on X at Uncensored CMO, or on LinkedIn under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.