Winning the AI Search Game: How to Get Your Brand Seen in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity

Speaker A: It doesn't matter what kind of e commerce brand you're building, you still need a rock solid way to grow and scale your company like clockwork. Welcome to Seven Figures and Beyond, an e commerce marketing podcast for D2C brand owners and marketers looking for best practices that include proven strategies and tactics to grow an E commerce brand to seven figures and beyond. Bringing 18 plus years of marketing experience as an E commerce brand owner and E commerce agency owner. Please welcome your host, Greg Schue.

Speaker B: Hey everyone. Welcome to the seven Figures and Beyond E commerce Marketing Podcast. My name is Greg Schue and I'm your host. I created this podcast to help direct to consumer business owners as well as marketers who are stuck and who are working really hard to find a way to grow their businesses each and every year. Today's episode is going to be pretty amazing. It's going to be Baller. Like, do people still say baller? I. I don't even know. But, uh, I've got one of my good friends here joining us today. His name is Jake and he is from a company here in Utah called Redo. And if you haven't heard of Redo before, my assumption is that you've been living under a rock for the last year because they're probably, at least in my opinion, one of the fastest growing e commerce growth tools that you can leverage for your business. And I will let him talk a little bit more about that in just a minute. However, today we are going to be talking about AI Search optimization. People also call this LLM Optimization, Geo, aeo, et cetera. It's kind of almost ridiculous that we haven't settled on a name for it. Right, Jake?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, we can get into that.

Speaker B: I remember our first lunch. You're like, what do you call it? What do you call it?

Speaker C: Yeah, I spoke somewhere recently and my opening slide was aeo Geo aiseo. Wth. What the heck?

Speaker B: So when I'm talking to prospects about SEO, that's really the bulk. I'd say 70, 60 to 70% of what we do here at Stride. I'm always asked, can you also help me show up in chat GPT? The answer is always yes. And in today's episode, we're going to unpack how to do that. So if you want to do it yourself, you'll be able to walk away with this from some pretty. With some pretty amazing action items. So, Jake, why don't you take a few minutes, introduce yourself, give us the 10,000 foot overview of Redo and why it's crushing for Brands.

Speaker C: Yeah, totally. Thanks uh, for, for having me on the podcast, Greg. It's uh, it's an awesome podcast. I think it applies to so many different brands. Uh, I was actually listening to your last episode about post, uh, purchase surveys and Black Friday Cyber Monday and preparing for it and all of that. So it's a podcast I listen to and it's cool to be on it, man. Myself and Redo. So I'm Jake Benson. I'm the GM of AI Search at Redo Redo. Appreciate how you, you spoke about it. We're a Utah based, uh, technology company. We power uh, over 3,000 brands today. We've been around for only three years, so a lot has happened in those three years and we're a multi product company. So when you stand up your store or your brand and you um, launch a direct to consumer motion through Shopify, you then have this app store where you go and you purchase a number of different applications that power different parts of your business. What we have done at Redo is we have tried to build um, many of those applications under one umbrella and in doing so, the communication between each product, the data that flows between each product, uh, provides really unique, meaningful experiences for you as a brand. And we have some unique business models where the overall cost of getting all of those in one place is cheaper. So we have a return software product, we have an AI support product, we have an order management system, an inventory management system, we have email and sms. Uh, and the latest product that we've added to the fold is our AEO product, Geo AI SEO. Our AI search optimization tool for E commerce brands.

Speaker B: It's awesome man. Well, thank you for sharing that. Uh, if you are listening, you have never heard of Redo before. You should go check out their website. They are now@redo.com. uh, somehow they scored that domain. All right, man. Well, uh, I've prepped some questions to guide our conversation today. Maybe we get through all of them, maybe we don't. Let's just kind of see how the conversation goes. You ready to jump in?

Speaker C: Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: So for those who are just starting to explore AI search, you're thinking, great, I rank well on Google now I'd like to start showing up in ChatGPT more often. How would you define AI search optimization? And then how is it different from traditional SEO?

Speaker C: Yeah, there's, I've explored this a lot and tried to think through how I talk about it with E commerce brands. The way I would define it is it's the art and science. Although right now probably a little bit more art than science. Uh, uh, how a brand is mentioned or referenced or recommended in the different AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and others. When I think about AI search, I often talk about this concept of content equals context. Because context is what these LLMs ingest, uh, and review so they can then provide answers to the questions that people have. And the reason why it's different from traditional SEO is when you look at traditional SEO, it's been around since the early to mid 2000s, it's keyword based. I think of it as one dimensional in the sense that you try and take everything, narrow it down to a set of keywords that you can track in Google Search Console or Bing Search Console, and you can, you know, provide content with said keywords. That is more of a science. And so that's, you know, I think about it as one dimensional, whereas AI search is multidimensional. It's not about rankings, it's not something that today you can track and say, I'm moving from tenth place to, you know, to fourth place to second place to first place. I show up at the top of organic search. It's, it's now about how do I increase the probability of my brand showing up when an individual or uh, an agent, um, asks a question. And so it's, it's about answers, it's about, I think of returning to human behavior where I ask a question, I put in a prompt, there's intent and said prompt. The way the words are organized communicate how interested I am in buying something versus researching something. Whereas in an SEO world it's, it's back to that one dimensional. So it is different fundamentally in terms of how it's architected and how it operates. Now I do or am of the belief that the fundamentals of SEO matter a lot in a world of AI search like brand building and great marketing, just they matter and they matter just as much as they ever have. And that is the same foundation for SEO that it is for uh, AI search. But there are a number of meaningful differences between the two things. And in order to do really well in AI search, it requires some different strategies and ways of thinking.

Speaker B: 100%. I like that a lot. The one dimensional versus multidimensional. And uh, you know, kind of the plug here for SEO is a lot of the foundational principles that you do put in place for your SEO can help with AI search optimization, but it requires a little bit extra on top of that like you just mentioned. So Excited to kind of unpack that as we go, I guess, kind of Next question for you is what are some of the biggest shifts you've seen in how consumers are discovering brands through AI powered tools like ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity?

Speaker C: Maybe I'll share a couple of examples. I was with a friend recently who was training for a really long cycling race and uh, loaded jaw. And what they had done was they basically took all of their information, their diet plan, they talked about their height, their weight, just kind of took all of this detail and fed it into ChatGPT and said, what is the best sports nutrition, uh, for me. And it came back with a very specific recommendation. When I think about the process of typing in keywords and then those keywords matching with organic content and organic rankings and then sending me to a page where I click through every single link or I do my own discovery. The biggest shift in how I see consumers discovering brands is, you know, discovery and purchase are merging together. So instead of, you know, saying, you know, sports nutrition and then seeing who shows up organically and going through the links to each website page, it's now people are sharing a lot of context. In the sharing of context, they then say, recommend to me what I should be buying. And so instead of the person doing the discovery, AI is the one doing the discovery and filtering down the number of options. And what I've seen is that a lot of people tend to trust those options the more and more information they put into the system.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And the more and more context it has. And so you're starting to see people open up, share more intent, share more data, share more details. And AI is trying to do the work of making the right recommendation as opposed to filtering down the number of options so you can discover on your own. That's where I see the biggest ah, shift in terms of how human behavior is re entering search.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: There's this whole agentic commerce protocol, AI shopping movement. We're still in the very early days of that. But the thing that I also think people should keep top of mind is we're so used to building things for humans who elicit certain behaviors and aren't totally predictable. Although statistically you can, you can make the claim that humans are, uh, predictable. But when it comes to an agent actually doing discovery or purchasing on behalf of someone, it's very much pattern recognition, even if it's artificial intelligence. And so I see shifts happening in terms of how, you know, people share information and then expect a recommendation and follow through with that. You'll see, conversion rates are higher through ChatGPT because there's higher intent and people trust those answers better because there's less understanding they have to do. It's more like, okay, this did the work for me, I can purchase it. And then in agentic shopping, that's a total.

Speaker B: Just did the heavy lifting.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. I was doing this for, uh, you're gonna laugh. Mountain bikes. I don't want Greg's. Greg loves mountain biking. I'm a road cyclist. But I was looking at some mountain bikes and they're all so modern these days. And, you know, they either use this set of components or that set of components. So I talk about the color I want, I talk about the type of riding I'm going to do, I talk about where I live. I say, give me the best recommendation. And it says, hey, you live here. You know, there are bike shops that can fix these types of brands in your neighborhood. You know, we recommend you buy this type of bike and if you're at this level of expertise, it's the more expensive one versus the cheaper one. And I'm like, you know, you did all the work for me. That's great, I'll buy that one. I didn't actually buy it, but that was the process I went through. Mountain bikes are too expensive.

Speaker B: It's crazy. Uh, it's absolutely crazy. So given all of that, how do brands actually influence ChatGPT and the other LLMs? Like, what signals are they looking at? What kind of data are they pulling from? Are there different content types that matter more for being cited, recommended and linked to?

Speaker C: Yeah, this is a good question. And where the art and science mix together, uh, in this process. This is actually why Redo Heads has started building a, uh, tool to track this when brands are trying to influence chatgpt and Perplexity and Gemini and others so they show up. Um, I think that the first thing that's important is just understanding how these LLMs think. And you can try this on your own, but when you go and put in a prompt, you'll see it will have some sort of description on, you know, what matters and what it's going to review when it comes up with the answer. And then if it's product related, it will recommend a number of products and then allow you to look through those products. You know, click on which one you want to buy and it will today redirect you to the site to purchase it in the future. I think you'll actually be able. Well, I don't think. I know you'll actually be able to buy it within that experience, right? You go a little bit further down and you'll see sources. You can click on the sources and then what will happen is in a, in a window on the right side, it will show you the different URLs that chatgpt or perplexity or others referenced in their process of trying to answer the question or the prompt that you put in. And we've built a tool that looks at all of those, indexes them and then categorizes them to show, okay, is it product review sites, is it YouTube, is it Reddit, is it own content? What's actually influencing the answers? And so when we think about how do you influence it, right, it's content, but it's not just content for content's sake. It's content that truly answers the question that the individual had. Um, sometimes there's a set of questions, right, I'll ask about the best running shoes and then it will say, well, do you want comfort? You know, do you have wide feet? It'll, it'll ask more and more details and then you'll provide more and more context. And so I think the best way to influence these is to put out content that is built on the principles of great marketing but also answers every question that an end user can have. I think case studies are great, I think tables with data are great. There are some SEO related things like you know, uh, semantic URLs or URLs that clearly state what uh, the article or blog post or piece of content is about rather than a mix of random numbers. Take AI overviews as an example and how successful those are. There's a lot of traffic on Google that now doesn't actually click because they get what they need through AI overviews. Think about writing your content the same way. If you can spoil the answer in an AI overview like way at the top of the article and then get into the details, that's also beneficial for AI picking up your brand, going to forums, wherever your brand is mentioned and talking about your brand in a non salesy like way. Recency is important. So if you aren't keeping up with the content regularly, uh, or you just republish it the date, but you don't meaningfully change or update the content. There's lots of things that when all of them are put into practice, uh, you know, it does, it does a meaningful job of influencing how these LLMs pick up on your brand versus other brands.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it would probably be safe to say that like the types of content that they're typically pulling from, especially when it comes in relation to like your own content, are blog posts, FAQs, reviews, those types of, of pieces of content and making that you're weaving FAQ type content through your category pages, product pages, blog posts, those types of things can be absolutely huge and critical to showing up.

Speaker C: Oh, uh, a hundred percent content is. So when I say content equals context, everything is content. Your product details page, your FAQs, the images, you know, videos on YouTube, how to guides, buying guides, blog posts, all of it matters. And what's interesting is if there's a lot of variation between all of it. Sometimes we think that if we cover more ground and we're all over the place, you know, we'll hit. Well, what'll happen is AI will actually look at multiple things and if it doesn't see a continual thread between them, it doesn't know how to recommend or talk about your product. So if your fa, you know, if your FAQs are way over here and your PDPs are way over there and it's not cohesive, then you know, the experience, expertise, authority, trust, like that still matters. It's not going to work out as well in your favor if you can have a single thread through all of those things and then expand it to talk broader about your brand or the FAQs are very extensive and detailed. Um, those are some strategies that, that I think play well in the E comm space.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, 100%. Okay, so shifting gears a little bit over to measurement. So you know, with SEO we've got Google Search console where we can track impressions, clicks, average ranking position, click through, rate, those types of things. If we're just looking at AI search optimization, like we don't have those, maybe one day we'll have like a webmaster tools for ChatGPT. That would be super cool. But uh, how are you measuring the impact of AI search optimization?

Speaker C: Yeah, I can't wait for the day when there's a webmaster tool or a, you know, uh, a chat search console, perplexity search console, those things would be great. And I think ultimately it would be in, it would be in the best interest of those brands or those, those companies to put those out. When we think about one dimensional SEO keywords and multidimensional prompts, answers, it's going to be a lot harder to track and understand. And so maybe, maybe there's a way where we can build off of topics and then prompts underneath. These topics are tracked that way but it's hard. This is one of those areas that's more of an art than a science right now. And there's three ways that we've seen. You can either use one of these two of them, all three of them, combine them together. I think the more you use and the more you triangulate it, the better the information is going to be. But there's ways in GA4, Google Analytics, where you can track through Last Touch. If people come through ChatGPT, perplexing Gemini and other channels, that's one way. It's not a perfect data set because with attribution people will do all their research, find the brand they want through ChatGPT, and then directly Google that brand. And you won't actually see that ChatGPT was the thing that influenced the discovery and decision. You'll just see them come through, you know, direct or organic search traffic.

Speaker B: They're either going to come through direct or they're going to come through your organic search, which is, you know, if you're marrying the two together and you're an SEO person doing that, I mean it's, it's a win, win 100%.

Speaker C: This is why it's important that these things go together. Uh, some, some, some companies have come out and said SEO is dead. And you know, all of this other stuff, it's, it's all an evolution, right? I mean SEO is fundamental to how things show up on the Internet. And I believe, if I'm not mistaken, AI platforms have indexed the whole Internet and that's what they train on. So they're all intertwined. But evolution is necessary in order to succeed in this new world. And so, you know, you have the Google Analytics, another one, you know, you had, I think Jeremiah, right, the no Commerce CEO on the last episode post purchase surveys, like, those are important too. So those are two ways. The third way, you know, using, using traditional SEO keyword volume tools, you can kind of get a sense based on the keyword how much traffic is going there. And it's not, it's more of a leading indicator than a lagging indicator, which is why I loop it into this measurement. But if you can go and look at, you know, a two keyword search term and see that it's high volume or low volume, don't always prioritize the high volume ones. There's a lot of value to be unlocked in the low volume ones. But those are three interesting ways where I think we can bring some measurement into the space of like, okay, Google Analytics, there's a way Post purchase surveys. There's another way. And then the third way is using some existing keyword based volume, um, indicators, you know, to then make sure that the prompts or the questions that you're tracking through a different tool measure uh up. And then I guess that's the last thing I'll say is if you don't have a tool where you can choose the prompts that matter most or create the prompts that matter most and at least get feedback on how often your brand is showing up with those prompts, I think that's another really important measurement or tool. It's not the source of truth. But directionally it'll be very impactful for how you strategize to show up in AI search.

Speaker B: Sure, absolutely.

Speaker C: Cool.

Speaker B: Okay. So for the brands that are listening, they're like great, all of this is amazing information, super helpful. But what are the first two to three steps that they can take this week that will help them start to move their business forward with AI search and start to move the needle in terms of visibility, potential traffic and revenue? Yeah.

Speaker C: Okay. This week a couple of quick wins, uh, getting a tool to track it. Quick Win Redu's got one that's E commerce specific. There are plenty of them out there. I'm not going to say just go to Redo, but look into it, find one that works great for you and start tracking it. And those can get set up in a quick period of time. Ours is fairly inexpensive because we know that with a bunch of different products under the Redo umbrella, we can offer it for a lot less than others. So start tracking it. You can track it really quickly. That'll be helpful. I think. The second one is you can go into ChatGPT and you can ask uh, questions that you think your customers are asking and then go scroll down and look at the sources and see what shows up. I did this with a, uh, dog beds brand that's a customer of ours. And what was interesting is we asked a couple of prompts and in one of them all of the articles that were referenced were owned content from other brands. Talking about how to measure uh, your dog to get the right size dog bed. And this brand did not have content that addressed uh, that. And so it was really easy to say, oh, we don't have that. That's what ChatGPT and others are referencing constantly for this type of question. We should put that together as a piece of content. So that's another thing you can do. There's some schema updates that you can do and if you know, if you want to go to ChatGPT and ask about what schema updates need to be put in place, you can find some answers there. Redo helps with that too. I think there are a lot of companies Greg I'm sure can help with that. He'd be the real expert to go to. And then one other quick win is review and expand your FAQs. It's amazing how FAQs are becoming more and more important in terms of answering these questions. Those are some easy things I would do. You know, bigger, broader things like you could review your content strategy, adjust it. You can go review old articles, uh, update them, put in new data, reformat them, republish them for recency. There's some things you can do with your PDPs, those are some of the low hanging fruits that I would focus on. Uh, and then you know, I think there's levels to this through which you can graduate and do more and more, uh, as time goes on for sure.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Thank you for sharing those. So as we, as we start to wrap up, as you think forward, right. Maybe 12 months into the future and I know AI, AI is moving at lightning speed, faster than we've ever seen Google and traditional SEO move. So it may be hard to answer this question, but where do you think AI search is heading over the next 12 months? And then how should e commerce marketers adapt their strategies to stay ahead of that?

Speaker C: Oh man, this is the real question. Building a product in this space. I'm constantly thinking about this question. Uh, there are some low risk opinions and some high risk opinions. I'm trying to think of which ones I share. I'll start with the low risk opinions. I think just like Google and others, I think chatgpt, Perplexity, Gemini, you name it, I think they will do a better job in the next 12 to 18 months of eliminating the loopholes. So in the early days of SEO you had keyword stuffing. In the early days of uh, AEO Geo, there's a lot of things that people are doing that aren't, I wouldn't say great marketing, I would say they're clever marketing. And I think some of those things, although effective now, are going to wear off over time. I don't know if there will be, you know, penalties for doing such things, but I know that they will become less effective over time. So I think strategy is important. Like what, what you're doing, long term thinking dedicated to will matter. So that's one low risk thing that I think will happen in the next 12 to 18 months. I don't think this is higher risk per se, but I don't know if it'll happen in the next 12 to 18 months. We're not just marketing to people anymore, Right. We will be marketing to agents who represent the desires of people, but they won't necessarily behave like people. And so when it comes to the emotional connection from a picture, when it comes to all of these things, I don't know how that's going to play in the uh, in the world of agentic shopping. But I can say that you, if you do a really great job of talking about what your brand is, who the right customer is, what your brand stands for, what products you sell, the very nitty gritty details of each product, you will show up well for not only the humans, but also the agents. I think in the next 12 to 18 months we will have agents buying stuff for people too. What volume? I don't know enough to predict on that, but I think it will be meaningful. I also believe that following Black Friday, Cyber Monday this year, I think OpenAI is probably going to publish some statistics, let's hope, of how much shopping came through their channels. I hope so. Right. I think we'll be surprised by how many people are starting to move their shopping behavior over to ChatGPT because just like I explained earlier, it's the discovery, uh, is different but in some ways it's enhanced because people feel like they can get something that's more personalized and catered to them. Yeah, I do this, Um, I see my wife do it, I see other people do it. Yes. The results aren't translating to people buying within ChatGPT, but another one of my next 12 to 18 month predictions, people won't be redirecting to your site to purchase directly. People will be purchasing within ChatGPT. You know, you'll get a notification of how long it will take to ship and then who knows, maybe there's this really interesting world where you'll go back to ChatGPT and say, that thing you bought me, I need to return it. And it will pull up a label for you right then and there and say, put this on the package and set it on your doorstep and something will be able to pick it up. I don't know. I know of a company that does a lot in this space that's thinking at that level. So yeah, it could happen.

Speaker B: Definitely, definitely. Interesting. Cool, man. Well, I know we're kind of getting on the long side of this, so definitely appreciate your time today. I think you've shared some really amazing things, and, uh, I'm hopeful that everyone listening will be able to kind of have those two to three takeaways that they can take and start executing today. Jake, any final words of wisdom before we close?

Speaker C: Uh, I'm not the wisest person, so not. Not a whole lot. Lean in. Lean in. I think if you're a marketer right now. I've talked to a lot of marketers. I've spoken at a handful of conferences. And one interesting that I've learned is there's people who are afraid of the future, and there are people who are going to embrace it. And, uh, I think how you think about it is what the future will be like. So if you're afraid of it, I think not great things will happen. If you just lean in and experiment and ride the wave like all of us are trying to do, I think you'll come out ahead, and I think that'll be valuable from a career standpoint as a marketer, but I also think it'll be valuable for, uh, you and the job you're in right now in terms of the benefits that your company will see.

Speaker B: Yep, absolutely. Awesome. Well, everyone, thank you for tuning in. And Jake, thank you so much, so much for your time today. If you found today's episode helpful, please take a minute to share it with your fellow brand owners, marketers that you're friends with, those types of things. So please do that and then hope you tune in again next time. Thank you so much for joining.