Ep 363: From SEO to GEO: How to Get Found in an AI-First Internet with Rad Paluszak

The thing that we should be worried about is how much traffic will LLMs steal from us, especially from people who are in very information-heavy industries, because LLMs are answer engines. Instead of pushing people over to your website, they will be providing the answer directly, and then users might not visit your site. So for me, that is a big worry.

Hey, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast. And today I'm speaking with Rad Palusak. He's been on the podcast many, many times. He's a founder of Non-Agency, which was formerly an SEO firm.

They definitely do GEO, so Generative Experience, Generative AI Experience Optimization for businesses. They've been evolving so much with their digital marketing agency. Of course, they run paid ads. We've talked about how all the case studies on how we've scaled businesses through SEO, through paid marketing, through a bunch of different marketing strategies.

And in this podcast, we now talk about AI. We talk about how AI is evolving for us and how we can scale our brands, our influence, and our businesses using AI. We also go through and share what is how we pop up in a and LLMs as results and why and how that has changed from SEO, and why SEO some fundamental foundational SEO principles are still important.

And we also have him share a awesome tool, which is an AI audit tool, which audits your website and your business on where it's showing up in AI, where it isn't and what it's lacking and some suggestions and what you can do in terms of keywords and where you can be placed in AI and things you can do to get more AI traffic.

He also shares a, an amazing content tool that generates content based on your brand, your ethos and values, what you're missing for AI search, and creates very cheap content. That's so powerful that it doesn't, it doesn't just create like text content. creates images, generates screenshots from the internet, internet to emphasize points.

It's a fascinating tool that I think you guys are going to get so much value from. He offers a great deal, and also the free AI order tool as well. So enjoy the pod. So much to learn from in this pod, and I'll see you on the inside.

Brad, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you for your time.

Hello. It's nice to be back after a while.

Wow. But you've been on a lot. You've been on like, I don't even know, more than a handful of times on the pod, which is great. You've shared so much in SEO, and SEO has changed massively. So yeah, let's chat about that.

How AI or GEO is changing the SEO or has changed the SEO landscape, and talk about the opportunity here. Are you, cause you've noticed from, you know, doing so much SEO work in your agency, to, you know, you do all full-stack digital marketing as well, paid ads.

Indeed.

GEO, the lot. What are some of the biggest things that you've learned in the pivot from SEO?

It's an interestingly framed question overall because it's like with anything new, you'll have people who say this isn't really that much different, and others will say no it's completely different, you gotta abandon all SEO, and you know, go go do AIO or GEO or whatever you want to call it.

For me, as with most things, the truth is in the middle because I want to emphasize this. Anything to do with AI, again, however you want to call it, let's do a GEO since you already mentioned that using this acronym. It's all based on the foundation. Okay. So in order to even start thinking about any additional things that are involved in generative engine optimization, you need to get your SEO basics done first.

Okay. So from that aspect, it didn't change much. However, the GEO itself needs to make it appeal more to AI answer engines. Obviously, you have to do a little bit more. And this is a wink at people who have been saying like us, for example, with you being the best example for years now that you have to build your brand.

Nowadays, this is also or even more elevated in importance because without a brand, without you know, having mentions of your brands in external sources, you will struggle to be mentioned or be seen as a real entity by AI answer engines as well. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So I know people who are making fun of others who say, now EAT signals. So authority, for example, is even more important than they were.

You know, shouldn't really worry about it. There's no signal per se and stuff, but like with most things in SEO, you know, all of these little things, little signals come together, and they build a big picture where the central point is your brand slash your website, obviously. But yeah, I don't know. Would you like to mention some specifics, some really important things that are for GEO, maybe?

First and foremost, I'd like to mention that I saw a very interesting study by Rand Fishkin released exactly today. So, probably two weeks before the episode, Rand's on your show, where he analyzed a lot of websites. And if I'm not mistaken, because I only glance through the article, the data suggests that only 1 % of websites of results repeat while you're querying the same answer engine many times.

Okay.

So let's say if someone is asking how to buy a business online, there's only 1 % chance that if you query, if you ask the same query, for example, Chad GP or Google, although with Google, think it's different. think they focused on Chad GP, and there was only 1 % of chance that you would appear again within 20 searches or something like that.

So that indicates, and by the way, we've not been testing it this way. You know, again, hats off to Rand that he ran this test because it's a really interesting perspective. And again, I might be getting it slightly wrong. So please read this article.

Maybe we can share it in the, in the notes, but that would indicate that the diversity of the results that answer engines show is very, very high. Okay. So with this in mind, sorry, I didn't mean to go on tangents here, but with this in mind.

This I think cements the idea that without having broad visibility in those answer engines, you probably won't have a lot of traffic if you're counting on getting traffic for it because it talks about like EAT and lot of like broad visibility being so many pieces of content out there on the internet with your brand name attached to it talking about that specific subject.

Trying to maximize how many pages or articles or keywords, so to speak, because we no longer actually operate with keywords directly, because it's like so much, so much more with the AI. Maybe we'll get to it in a second, but forget about keywords.

If you're ranking for that keyword in charge PD now, you might not. If someone else searches for it or if someone else, if someone searches for it once again.

Right. I'm so that's very interesting. But leaving that as a side note, I would say the top few ranking factors, if you can even call them that for AI answer engines is how like you already mentioned this by the way, are how many sites are mentioning you is slightly, this is a very fine difference between link building and mentions.

But it appears that all of the AI engines, they care more about you being mentioned than you being linked to, which is a big change in SEO. Because a lot of websites had been approaching you for links if you just mentioned their brand name or their URL, right? Without linking to it.

How many links are linking to your website for authority, versus an AI engine is looking at things that are far deeper than just a link to or from your brand, your brand. And one of those is just your brand being mentioned in multiple, in a variant or array of places.

Yeah, so that gives you more opportunities, really, but again, you know, since we're already hammering this so much today, it indicates that the brand is very important because if you don't have a brand name on your website, you don't really get mentioned that much.

Yeah, right. It comes back to why you need to think about your brand, what your brand means, and how it's mentioned. And if you are getting mentioned, you know, how is your brand name mentioned along with the context of what your brand is about as well. Not just is Jaryd Krause, but like Jaryd Krause helps people acquire businesses, online businesses, versus just my name being out there.

Right.

Yeah. And I think, I think this is also creating a lot of opportunity for personal brands or people's names being attached to brands, right? Because obviously, AI, Google had already been understanding that someone works at the company or, you know, this is an entity correlated with, let's say, a website, right?

But now AI understands it probably even better, right? And when it's gathering information, the semantic relevance of even your personal name that will be reflected or attached to the brand name is also pretty important. So that when it comes to mentions, this is a great, great way to gather your, gather mentions, which in turn will probably tell AI that you're pretty important. Right. And obviously, from you know, being an SEO, we have been trying to build mentions as well as links.

Overall difference from the SEO perspective, like from the agency perspective, is not that big overall, but there is one thing that we noticed that is really interesting, and I think AI Answer Engines will start fighting with this: when your brand appears in listicles with other brands that AI may have already heard about, it gives you a big push.

Elevates you because you're in the mix of other people associated in the same category or niche industry doing the same thing as you. It's kind of like you're put together, you're lending their authority as you would in the old days of like, if you've got a link on a high authority site, but if you've got to mention amongst a bunch of high authority figures or brands, it elevates your trust metric, and your authority.

Yes, exactly. So, if we could use a sports analogy, it's like if you had a team that is very new in champions league or some other top league, and then they play their first match in that league and they win against a very popular team or better known team.

Obviously, that newcomer will be elevated into the spotlight, and people will start getting interested in who that team is, plays ther,e and stuff like that more trust that maybe they could even beat another bigger team because they beat that team.

So we've been testing, for example, getting some startup CRMs on listicles where those listicles mentioned like monday.com, Hapspot, and all these other bigger CRMs. And we've seen that this gives you a very powerful push.

Cool. What else are you seeing that is helping people be found in AI engine results?

Focusing on social media and, in particular, Reddit or medium.com would be an interesting direction. We've seen that websites mentioned by redditors or getting some blip on the radar on Reddit, that people start sharing, which seems to indicate to AI. I know it's still around mentions, but I'm just trying to look at it from the practical perspective, if people who are listening to us were to look at some first steps, for example, or next steps where to point them to.

So, this is pretty, pretty, it just works. And we've been saying that, you know, let's say, indexing in LLMS is growing if you get some visibility in social media. Another thing would be, you know, since we're speaking about social media, try to get your profiles out there as well. Because again, for SEO, we were always saying this is brand building. We were always saying this gives you some indirect influence on your rankings.

Whereas here it's on top of that also mentioned, but that proves that you're a brand that proves that you're, you have some activity somewhere else. And from what we've been seeing, LLMs are pretty quick to digest social media like YouTube, for example, or I saw that Facebook groups are on the come back recently.

Facebook groups are growing rapidly. And if you check Facebook's rankings and traffic, the group section is like exploding at the moment. That's that, that might be another gold mine for you, for yourself as well.

What are some interesting optimization strategies for being discovered by, your brand that's not normal or just interesting like this? It's like completely new and hasn't been done before. Or are we just really like using obviously the same strategies from SEO, but with an LLM, like it's obviously authority, trust, mentions, quality content, like trust out of association, those sorts of things.

Or is there something that's like so wild that we're like, well, we should be worried about is how much traffic will LLMs steal from us, especially from people who are in very info content-heavy industries, because LLMs are answer engines. So instead of pushing people over to your website, they will be providing the answer directly, and then users might not visit your site.

For me, that is a big worry, although not answering your question, which I didn't realize.

It's important to note that people are going to have less visibility and views on their site because these engines are going to use your content to keep people on their own platform.

Yep, they don't have much incentive to send people off their platform.

There's also, and I've been having discussions with people around addiction, AI addiction and how their incentive, you know, LLMs, chat, GVT, Claude, whatever it is, their incentive is to keep you on the platform because then you feel like you're getting a better ROI from what you're paying and to keep you on the platform, you build a better relationship with them.

You trust them more. You're going to use it more; keep your membership going. So their incentive is the opposite of helping you and incentivize you to create content so they can use it for their platform.

Exactly. And if you think, if you look at what is currently being deployed in LLMs, where they can basically go and find products for you and even purchase them. So that's going to keep you on the platforms there even more. So I think we're heading in the direction where we won't be optimizing your website for users. We'll be optimizing it for AI agents basically.

Going back to what you asked, I wouldn't say this is anything like extra ordinary different. There are additional elements in AI optimization that we do. However, this one is what I really like to mention because it's pretty contradictory to what you would think of Google.

Know that Google is looking at user behavior, where it analyzes whether or not some people like the websit,e and that might, you know, be looked at from the perspective. Does it have a nice UI? Does it have, you know, a clear navigation and stuff like that? Right. Whereas for AI bots, it doesn't really matter.

They don't care. Okay. As long as they see your content, we're even seeing that a lot of content where there's absolutely no formatting whatsoever, just a blob of text, no navigational links, nothing basically, not much in terms of, you know, real value for the user that would make you want to read this article. AI seems to digest it better occasionally.

Okay. Isn't that wild to think, because in SEO for so many years, we've been thinking about experience and how people experience the content on your pages, and how it's easier to read for humans. There are also different things that break up the content, like gifts, memes, videos, audios, and all these thing,s where we optimize for the human to consume that content.

Whereas no,w if it seems like it can be more B2B relationship with your website and an agent, where we might be moving into as this evolves, who knows where it might look like. Just, you know, as you said, we optimize our page and content for AI agents for them to have the easiest experience to consume the content in a way that gives them the answer as fast as possible for their, for their, you know, boss, who is the human, guess.

Yeah, that's an interesting way to look at this. Obviously, I'm not saying for anyone who's listening to go off and start removing everything and just leave plain text on the site. Because let's remember we still have the users, we're not there yet.

However, as you said, it might be some time before the easier you make your site to be digested by AI or chunked cause that's another term that is floating around in the industry. Now it might be easier. Obviously, both studies and our observations seem to indicate that chunking is not really that important for current AI. It's just doing too wel,l and the context windows are too big.

So you can basically dump a lot of content in the AI, and it will figure out the answers. However, we need to be looking at is, at the moment, finding the balance between real users and the AI users. Okay. So some elements still matter for obviously real users. And I hope those elements and those users never cease to exist in either a literal or figurative sense, obviously.

However, you know, for AI answering, let's remember that answering questions for AI is what it's for current AI and for LLMs, this is what it's built for. Okay. So we can help it, obviously, but it will probably figure things out pretty well.

Instead of focusing on small things like chunking content, you know, how you structure whatever, if you're really thinking about AI, which let's also be honest, the visibility and AI in AI, the market share is growing, but it's still relatively low. So it's something to remember and look at or start looking at, however, overly obsessed about the moment, unless you're in the industry that can go into JetGPT and start selling like Etsy or over shops on Shopify.

But I think what I'm trying to say is there are slightly more important things, likethe quality of your content and doing proper research and looking at a few technical things that AI is actually looking at. So in AI, in the industry, we use the term query fun out, fun, sorry, fun at the moment.

And what that means is if you're searching for, let's say, a term buying business online, the AI will actually, under the hood, probably request a few additional like supporting queries that are related to this on,e and gathering the results from those websites as well.

So in this case, building not just one page about buying online, buying business online, but building a hub of pages that can or might all rank for those related,fanned-outt queries.

That might be more important than, you know, obsessing about this chunk here good, or should I put it somewhere below, or is this information important or not? So semantic relevance, creating content with purpose and not just one page, but surrounding pages. That's something I would be looking at.

Okay. So where do we go? Where do we go from here in terms of, like, what, you said, it's not, we don't just drop SEO completely. It's, it's a foundation that we build on, and we keep it and we don't just pretend our website is not being used by users like humans, which it is. That's also getting discovered by a, what does a e-commerce brand or a media business do with their website to, to gain these on top, to be on top of it, and make sure we've got the best of it optimizing our businesses to be able to serve humans and agents.

I think where I would start is by finding out where I am at the moment, right? As simple as that.

Bit of an audit on the site.

Yeah, a little bit of the audit on the site. Look at your visibility in the AI, see what percentage of your traffic is AI, and basically take it from there. On top of that, also, when I think about it, look at where your competitors are and compare your site to your competitors.

Because if your traffic from AI is only at, let's say, half a percent, you would say, forget about this channel. Don't worry about it. Yeah, I don't care. But if you audit your competitors and it appears that they're at three or 8%, then you'd be like, Oh, how did they do that? Right. So that might be, you know, showing you the opportunity to work towards that.

Which is awesome. People can use this for like we were talking about before is people can use these, like getting visibility on the site they're looking at buying so they can use it for due diligence and then, you know, look at their competitors in seeing what AI visibility they have and comparing and then building out a strategy and a AI visibility growth plan for that, for that business if they were to purchase it, which is a lever to pull when you, when you buy a business.

So you've got something to share, to share with us as well. You've got a bit of an offer here, a visibility report. Do you want to? I'm excited to share this with the audience.

Yes, let me show my screen. Obviously, I don't want this to be too much of a product placement, especially since this report we have at the moment, 57, I think, reports that you guys can generate for free or the listeners can generate just over 50 reports for free using this too, l and they can use it for their own business and their competitors, or they can use it for a business they're doing due diligence ,on and then competitors as well.

Right.

Exactly. Exactly. You've got, you've got a lot of date points here. gives you the thousand feet overview of your website from an eye perspective. Tells you if your, if your average rankings are high or low, it gives you the highest or most searched-for prompts that you're currently ranking for.

It gives you answers that include your brand without actually without actually saying anything about that, saying anything that is commercial, or just mentioning your brand, which is also a pretty good addition when AI mentions your brand.

You've got, like you mentioned, competitor analysis with similar data points. Then we actually use AI to generate five commercial keywords that AI thinks are best suited for your website.

And then we also check how you're ranking for them and if there isn't even any AI presence in those terms. Benchmark, and at the end, you have a nice summary that tells you what you need to look at basically. So, just by the way.

People are listeningg and not watching on YouTube. We've been sharing our screen, going through the report so you can watch this on YouTube or just go to the show not,es and there'll be a link to the tool where you can, you can get access to it and start getting your own reports on your own business website or businesses that you're looking at purchasing.

Exactly. This report was actually used as a demo by anonymizing all the client data, but it's a client that has been working with us for I think six months, seeing a little package of articles every month. I think it's like 10 or 14 articles, I think very big. However, they already have almost 1.5 thousand keywords from those articles ranking in AI. So that's a lot of keywords.

So they use this visibility report and then go and use your AI content generator to create the content that gained them those results. Is that right?

The other way around, sorry if I wasn't too clear. It's just a client who's been working with us for a while, and we noticed that they used this report to summarize.

Yeah, thanks for sharing. It seems like the linear path would be to get the visibility report and then, cause you've got keywords and then you've got some like mentioned suggests, and then you can optimize your content to create AI content through the generator that you have to create content based on what this visibility report shares. So you can use that data.

Yeah. Speaking of which, that content generator that we have iisalready doinga lot of research that takes into consideration things that AI takes into consideration. So, for example, in the LLMs, when LLMs are analyzing the content, they break the content.

down into something we call predicates. And these are, let's say, shorter forms of sheer facts, let's say, just extracted from the content. So AI generates that to basically understand the relationship between specific words and specific entities in that content. And our generator obviously works similarly as well.

Other than just spitting out content, it does the research extracts those predicates and builds a knowledge base as well. Because obviously you could say to Chachi, Hey, write me some content about buying a business online and it would do a decent job.

However, you would have to check it yourself to make sure that it's not talking some complete, you know, BS. Whereas our content is basically grounded in facts based on the knowledge that it's built in its knowledge base. And then all the semantics and you know all the other technical.

And then also, you were sharing with me the AI content generator that you have. You can write within your brand ethos and value,s and also in your tone, right? So just for people listening, Rad, you're doing a bit of a deal. You're going to share a deal with the listeners for this generator if thewanted to use it. So maybe we can go through that now.

Well, first of all, we've been using it internally for over a year now. Great results for our clients, great results for our websites. And we said, well, why not open it to the world? When we were doing due diligence on the competitors, we noticed that it's difficult to find a content generator that builds that knowledge base and makes sure that the research is done before writing the content like a real human would do, as a real copywriter would do.

But also automatically generates images that it inserts into the content contextually. It generates infographics, I'm showing now at the moment, even screenshots from, you know, generated screenshots from Google or obviously images of people, right? So it all depends. It all depends on what's in the contents, and it just finds contextual places where an image would be a good addition and does that.

You can, you can fill out the form. gives you a free article at the beginning, but you're buying the whole 10 articles package with it. When you fill out the form, it's a long form; only five fields are required, but it's a long form. The more you fill in to teach it, what is your brand voice?

The better it gets and adjusts to your brand, to your actual brand voice. And lastly, it also does internal linking. So you can provide other, your links or your site map,, and it will read up to 200 URLs and then tries, tries to insert them contextually where they fit in the new content it's generating. And frankly, like I was saying, we did due diligence on competitors. There's no other tool that does that. All comprehensive at the moment.

We said, well, let's, let's open it to people at the moment we're doing the promo. So we're not charging additional for these add-ons like brand voice, for example, or internal linking. It's all in the package. So go grab yours.

Wow. That's pretty cool. Creates content based on your brand, your tone, images, and context screenshots from different areas that emphasize points. And yeah, call and like, wow. That's pretty cool. And s,o how much is the ? Howow much is it for a package of 10 articles?

Whatever.

It's $89.99, all things included.

Okay, wow. It's like basically $9 per…

Yeah. I think it's pretty good. It's difficult. It's difficult to find a human who would do so much research and so much, so many things to publish the content for you. Right. We're actually working on auto-publishing on WordPress and Shopify.

So it's probably coming within a quarter as well. a lot of other things. It's like a lot of things we can, we can add to it, and we're very excited about it. That's why we're opening it to the public as MVP for now.

Let's try.

It will probably grow.

Yeah, awesome. It sounds like it could be a just a machine eventually that continues optimizing and building your website without you needing to prompt it or nudge it for anything. iIt's you know, you can set, you might be able to set like, want this amount of content published this way or this, this many, you know, per month or per week, and I want it to optimize as the internet optimizes and GEO changes, and wow.

So you could just let the AI do the growth for you. Obviously, you would need to have measures in place to check it and stuff, yeah, creating this and then publishing for you.Thenn maybe some, maybe once a month, that does an order of your site and competitors and then readjust some things on your site to make sure it's optimized.

There are so many ways you can, like so many things you can do with it. moving forwards, it's, it's limitless really, isn't it?

It's pretty exciting.

Yeah, that's why we're like really pumped, and our motto for this year is basically allowing people to scale because that's what we're seeing people have the most issues with.

I love that. All right. Wel,l guys, there'll be links to both the visibility report and the content generator promo. The visibility reports are free, obviously, and then the content generator. If you want to check that out, I'll put links in the show notes. Rad, what's one parting piece of advice you would share with the listeners about how to best prepare for AI and the future of our businesses?

Don't lose your mind. I keep saying that quite often because people are panicking. We have a lot of inquiries from people who don't have much AI visibility. AI hasn't attacked their brand or their niche yet.

Yet they're already panicking. So don't panic, know, take a step back, think about how you can develop your brand, and you know, talk to people who follow the trends and are on top of their game to advise you.

Right. Because like I said, sometimes it's you don't have to worry about it yet. Although it's not planned. Yeah. And just to add on top of that, sorry, just very, very quickly, last thing. AI is coming whether we want it or not. We can't stop it. Right. So let's find a workaround. If it's affecting you already, win back and develop apps.

Absolutely.

Get on board or get left behind, and whether you like it or not, it's doing its thing, and it's working without us. So we need to work out how it can work for us without us needing to use it that much as well. I love that. Brad, I'm sure that we're gonna come back, and I would love to see more of the results of what you guys are doing and changes that you're making for client, helping them get more traffic and visibility, and growing their businesses.

I'm sure that I would like to see the evolution of this MVP contentgenerator as well. Thanks so much for your time. Everybody, stay tuned. There'll be more. There'll be links in the show notes as well for those, the deal, and the freebie there. But yeah, thanks again.

Sure, thank you very much. Pleasure as always.

Absolutely.