How to Get Your Brand Cited by LLMs

Charlie Marchant: If you're a brand and you actually know your niche, you know your customers, you know the kinds of things that they ask, you know the kinds of people that they are, you are way more likely to then show up to relevant customers. It's one of the reasons that we see quite often traffic from ChatGPT tends to convert higher because it actually is more likely to be someone who has intent because you've come up with something really relevant. So yeah, knowing your niche is so important here.

Bailey Gunnell: Welcome back to Content Logistics. I'm your host, Bailey Gunnell and today we're digging into how AI search really chooses who to cite, where the citations come from, why certain brands show up, and what you can do as a business to start earning those spots. To help us break it down, I'm joined by Charlie Marchant, CEO of Exposure Ninja, an award winning search marketing agency that's been deep in the weeds with AI search strategy, including citation research and, uh, frameworks like citation authority. Charlie's also a global speaker on AI search and SEO, and she's helped many companies shift beyond classic SEO into what actually drives visibility and conversions. Right now, let's get into it. Hey Charlie, super excited to have you on the podcast today and talk all things AI.

Charlie Marchant: Hey Bailey, thanks for having me on.

Bailey Gunnell: We hear a lot of questions about how AI chooses to cite businesses and if they're not doing this day to day here, maybe some misinformation or just feel really confused on how all of this works. It is a relatively newer thing, so I do think it's pretty normal for that. Let's maybe start with what it means to be sighted. So when an AI tool like answers, what does that mean?

Charlie Marchant: Yeah, sure. So when an AI tool, and we're talking about ChatGPT, Gemini perplexity, Claude Grok, Microsoft Copilot, there's loads of them. And if I say chatgpt, it's because it's the one, the biggest, that's most dominant. So it tends to be the one people think of first. But all of these AI tools, when you're asking for recommendations, when you're having a conversation, say you're looking for the best running shoes, but you need something that you can run half marathons in. And actually sometimes you get, you know, bad ankles from running too much. When you're asking those kinds of recommendations in AI, what it will actually do is give citations within the answers it's giving. And what a citation is, is sometimes a link out and it's a reference point. So if you're a business Selling running shoes. The ideal situation, right, is in that conversation, your brand of running shoes comes up, or at least your brand name, your company name. So everyone is thinking like, I want brand Brooks Running shoes, or I want Adidas or whatever it is you want AI to actually cite you. So being cited in the answers is one of the key focuses for a lot of businesses who are thinking about how they become more visible in ChatGPT and AI search.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah, I think you mentioned another thing about you might get mentioned too. So not every single prompt might lead to a citation, but what are some other things you might look for getting mentioned?

Charlie Marchant: Right. So not every prompt leads to a citation. And that's because sometimes AI, uh, can answer just using its own training data. So all of these AI chatbots, they have different training data from one another. They were all trained on different information, roughly. And that means that they have already a knowledge base. So in those cases, they don't link out, they don't cite to sources because they've just used the information they've already got when they do, which is quite often if you ask something complex or you set the models when you're asking the question onto something like deep thinking or slow thinking rather than fast answers generally. If you can avoid using fast answers on AI, I definitely would, because you'll get better answers. And, um, the great thing about AI when you get mentioned is that all of the reference points it uses, it also lists those as sources. So like when you write an essay at university, right, you had to go through, it took ages. At the end, you had to go through, put every single author, every single book or quote, and put where you referenced it from. Well, AI works exactly the same way, which is amazing for marketers because then you can unfurl and see all of those references that were used as sources for it to decide what went into its final answer. So if you're on ChatGPT, you can do that just by scrolling to the bottom of the chat and there's a little tab that says sources. Click it, it will open a panel on the right side that shows you everything. So you basically get to see all of the research.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah, that was always my least favorite part of writing essays, but oh my goodness. So time consuming.

Charlie Marchant: But time consuming.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah. Glad the AI could do it. So what is this equation of how the AI is compiling all this source, all this, all of these different sources to create this answer?

Charlie Marchant: This is such a good question. So when AI is deciding what sources, what websites to actually cite, it has the ability to search across Hundreds and thousands of different websites. One of the reasons that AI works so differently from Google's algorithm is because Google is just trying to rank you a list of websites that it thinks most relevant to the query you're asking. AI isn't trying to do that. AI is trying to give you an answer that is the most thorough that is going to address the intent of your question. So sometimes that will have websites, other businesses, products, reference, but sometimes not. It's just wanting to give you something that it thinks is really, really going to answer the question you're asking with as much detail as possible. And what AI is doing when it's scouring the Internet is it's actually surfacing content into its answer from lots of different places. And it does this across all sorts of websites. So that will be things like Reddit and Quora forums, social media, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos from time to time. That's coming up significantly more your own website, other People's websites, Wikipedia, Trustpilot, G2 loads of different review sites. All of these other informational content pieces are uh, coming up in the answers that it's giving. How does it choose them, which is the question you're asking me? Well, firstly, I wish that I could give you a definitive answer to how it's choosing them. But there's lots of things that we do know about how it's choosing these sources. So we know, for example, that it cares about what's called topical authority. It cares about websites that are really strong in a certain topic. So if you're asking for reviews of the latest MacBook, for example, it's going to be much more likely to reference tech review sites because it knows that they very, very strong topical authority in reviews of different technology. Perfect. That's where a lot of people would actually go to find information if they were looking at new models of laptops, new models of whatever for their new tech purchases. So that's important. Freshness of content is also incredibly important. It loves to cite newer content that it feels is more relevant in that kind of example. Right. If you're looking at the new MacBook, it's obviously not going to be citing content from 2011 in those kinds of answers. It loves first person reviews because when it's answering, it tries to give you the most complete answer. So it doesn't want to just give you what someone's own website has said because they might be very biased. They might think that they have the best product on the market. You would hope that most people think they have the best product on the market. But that kind of bias it doesn't want. So it's looking across different websites to make a story, it's trying to piece together a story. It wants to see that people on review sites have said your product is also the best. It wants to see that discussions on Quora and Reddit have said it's the best. It wants to see that influencers on TikTok or YouTube or LinkedIn, whichever platforms are most relevant to the query, have said it's the best in order to pull that information. So lots of first party stuff, lots of actual reviews get pulled up all the time in AI.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah, this is where I feel like a lot is changing from traditional SEO. It's a lot about almost PR and getting on other sites and just being a part of the conversation.

Charlie Marchant: I think this is one of the biggest misunderstandings about how AI works differently from Google search, because over 85% of the time in a query that's related to what it is you do or sell, AI is going to cite a third party website, not your own website. And when we're thinking about SEO for Google, we're thinking mostly about how do we optimize our own website content, how do we make sure our website shows up in these search results? But when you're thinking about optimizing for ChatGPT or Gemini or Perplexity, you're actually needing to think, wow, okay. More than 85% of the time it wants to know what other websites have said about me, what other people have to say about my business or my products or what it is that I do. And so the strategies behind actually doing it means you have a huge focus on pr way more than ever before.

Bailey Gunnell: Dad, it's such a difference. One other thing that you mentioned was things like YouTube and like these social platforms where like we have a lot of video content. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I've, I've noticed that the LLMs really love natural language. They like to hear, like how people are talking about certain things.

Charlie Marchant: Yeah, right. And AIs are, uh, essentially natural language processes. Whenever you ask a question, you're doing it in your own language and AI tries to reply to you in a similar kind of natural language to what you're using. And it loves that because it's actually trying to answer something that sounds like you and it wants to sound less artificial. That's how they're programmed. Ideally with ChatGPT, the reason so many of us love it is because we're actually having a conversation with someone we feel like they understand what we're trying to get at. But actually all that is is the AI system pattern matching your language and then formatting its own output into similar language and the same, it will surface lots of social media content, as I mentioned, because it loves first party reviews. It gives much more information credibility to its answers and all of those are in that person's own language, their own way of speaking.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah, this is all so cool.

Charlie Marchant: Yeah, it's actually awesome.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah, it's amazing how this, this all works and how it's changed things so, so much. One thing we talked about, like when we, before we hopped on here, was the idea of citation authority. Do you mind just explaining a little bit what that is?

Charlie Marchant: Yeah, absolutely. So when you're thinking about how to show up in ChatGPT or other AI platforms, what you want is to become an authority in certain topical areas so that you are more likely to be cited in answers relating to that. So if you sell skincare products, for example, you want to come up in all answers relating to things for skincare. Uh, so if we're in the winter, loads of people, loads of us have dry skin in the winter, we're having conversations with ChatGPT. A lot of people just actually upload pictures of their own face, their own skin.

Bailey Gunnell: Yep.

Charlie Marchant: Into ChatGPT to get the answer to a problem, to be like, okay, my moisturizer is not working. What is the next step? What kind of products do I need to use? I have no idea. I'm lost, I'm at sea. Right. And then chat GBT actually having a personal, it's actually a very personal conversation about your skincare routine. If you're a business, you'll have been focused on building authority in that area and you'll have lots of different topical areas. You know, you're going to have an overwhelmingly broad one which is going to be something like skincare, but underneath that you're going to have like moisturizers, you're going to have like retinol and anti aging products, you're going to have like Sun, SPFs, Tan, all of that, lots of different areas that you might be looking at. So you're actually building in different topical areas. So to become an authority in that area, you're first thinking, right, about your own website content. Is it clear that I am an authority in this area? And then you're thinking about third party websites. Is it clear online that I'm an authority in this area based on what other people are saying? And some of that is your PR A lot of that is your pr. That's going to be things like if you're in Cosmo speaking about skincare, if you're in Glamour magazine, if you're in all sorts of different places, some of it's then going to be reviewers, it's going to be bloggers, it's going to be influencers, it's going to be people doing YouTube videos, talking about their own skincare regimes. There are thousands, hundreds and thousands of those all over the Internet. And it's also going to be spinoffs that come from that. People talking on Reddit and Quora and actually having conversations about their personal experiences. All of those come together to mean that you've built an authority in that topic. And the more authority you have, the more likely you are to dominate across loads of different areas for those conversations in ChatGPT and the other AI chatbots love it.

Bailey Gunnell: How is citation authority different than domain authority? So for domain authority, I know that's like a very traditional SEO metric that people are looking at. So how are those two different?

Charlie Marchant: Yeah, this is a great question. Domain authority is kind of an older metric that we have now. So it was originally, um, developed by Moz, and it pretty much predicted how likely a website was going to rank in a search engine results page. So it ranged from 1 to 100. If there's very few that would ever be 100. But if you're 100, you're basically incredibly dominant. If you're 1, you probably just started your WordPress site yesterday. And so domain authority was traditionally used in SEO and content to predict how useful it would be to get a backlink from a certain website. So, for example, if you were thinking, uh, about getting on the New York Times or the Guardian, if you're in the uk, those kinds of websites, you know, are going to have a really strong domain authority somewhere above 80, but just below 100. Then part of that SEO work was, okay, if we got a link from there, it would be really good for our website because it shows that the New York Times or the Guardian thinks our website is worth writing about and linking to. Now though, this doesn't play out the same way in AI, and that's because of these topical areas that I was just speaking about. If you have a link in the New York Times, but it's totally unrelated to what your business does. AI is never going to reference it. It doesn't care. It's not interested. So it's much, much more important to be in relevant websites that are super, uh, related to your Niche that ah, are the kinds of places that the customers you have would actually go and read content. Not just to try and get something because it's got a high domain authority.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah, 100%. I feel like that's some of the, maybe the black hat SEO a little bit. Like definitely look down on just getting backlinks for the sake of backlinks. Even if they have Thai domain authority,

Charlie Marchant: uh, getting backlinks for the sake of backlinks, which had an impact at some points. Uh, some businesses probably still get lucky with doing it now for their Google search. But the problem that they're going to run into very quickly when it comes to AI is if those backlinks firstly, AI doesn't matter, doesn't care if it's linked or not. What it cares is just that your name is mentioned because AI can marry up who you are just from a M mention without a link to your website, it knows that it's talking about you. So if it's in a Reddit thread and it's your brand name, it knows it's you. What matters so much more in AI is the context around where your brand name or your products were actually spoken about. So if you're in a Reddit thread just for an example, and someone is speaking negatively about you, they had a problem with the products that they got from you, AI is picking up on those signals and it's more likely to surface that context around it just because you've got a link somewhere. If you've then got a link in the New York Times, but it's not relevant to the question someone's asking, it's not going to reference it just because it's got a higher authority, it's looking for what's really, really relevant.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah. And that, I mean, can really level the playing field for these smaller companies.

Charlie Marchant: Absolutely, absolutely. And because it tends to be the case that Reddit threads and YouTube content, lots of others as well, but they get cited so much, it means that actually, even if you're a smaller player, if you're an underdog coming into your field, but you're getting great reviews and you're getting some rave responses, early doors about what you're selling, great AI is going to pick up on that context and that's the story that it's making about you from all of these different sources, that means that you can actually show in AI search results, even against big players in your market, if you're doing something cool, if you're doing something different, if all of those signals are really Positive.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah. That's amazing.

Charlie Marchant: Yeah, it's uh, great, great news.

Bailey Gunnell: It's great news because it's an opportunity for so many newer businesses to come in and disrupt industries.

Charlie Marchant: Yeah.

Bailey Gunnell: Because yeah you don't need the biggest budget to do a lot of these things.

Charlie Marchant: Right. And that's one of the things that I think has become so competitive about Google is because so much of the Google search result is firstly ads on commercial terms. Those are ah, expensive, increasing in cost every month. Every year prices are rising for Google Ads. And then the problem for new players is if there's market leading competitors, if you've got big competitors in your area, they're bidding so heavily and they've got significant budgets to pour into those Google Ads. So even if you're doing pretty well on your SEO most of the time, those results, if you're still position like 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 or later, uh, the number of clicks you're going to get is going to be really low because of the ads. And then you've got the top three organic spots by far take the majority of clicks on Google. So it's a hard place to start playing. Whereas if you have a niche and you're starting to get great content online about what it is you do, you can actually then start to chip away in certain topical areas and get surfaced in AI search. Because if you actually have customers, if there are actually people in the world searching for the specific thing you do, you have so much more opportunity to start showing up even against major players.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah, 100%. I'd love to dive in a little bit more about this topical authority. This seems like a really important part with what we've been talking about. So how would you recommend going about building authority if we're talking just one topic? So if we're talking moisturized skin, I think that was one of the examples you used to. So how would you go about like building that authority if you're like a newer company? Like what kind of content would you create? Maybe like what content would you take off of your website? How would you go about that?

Charlie Marchant: Oh, great question. So let's say you're building in a topical area like that. So that topical area is probably going to be dry skin problems. That's the overarching one. Then you're going to be breaking it down into lots of different areas that might be reasons that you have dry skin or that someone has dry skin. Then you can think about how you're structuring the content on your website. If you don't have a lot of content, people are sometimes like oh my God, this is really overwhelming. The good thing about not having much content on your site is you are in the perfect position to neatly categorize it from the beginning. So creating a nice structure, a nice architecture to your content that makes sense, that flows through. So you've got your key topic at the top. Then you've got subtopics, they might be split into other subtopics and you're using categories probably to create that content. One way you can do that is just in something that we call like a knowledge base or a knowledge hub on the website. A great example would be like the ordinary. They have fantastic knowledge hub about all sorts of things on their website. If you want to go and have a look at uh, uh, what that actually looks like. You might also think about what would engage people when they're coming to your website on those topics. So something like a quiz in this example would be very engaging for people who have literally like no idea and they're like I just need to find what problem it's most likely to be and then the solutions to my problem. So that's the first thing. Once you've sorted your on site content and you've got that going then you want to think about all of that third uh, party content that you want to get. So a good portion of that will be PR that will be trying to get irrelevant publications speaking to journalists to get featured. There's some amazing uh, platforms. One is called quoted Q W O T E D. There's Haro which is helper reporter out mainly used in the us Journalists actually ask lots of different questions because they're writing so many articles that they need quotes from experts in those areas. Skincare is a big area for that in this example. So you would go after then trying to make sure that you have publications in those topics. You might also reach out to editors. You might offer to write content, you might offer to give quotes and specific types of articles. The next area is going to be like your 3rd party reviews what customers are saying about your products to build authority in those topical areas. Ideally you want reviews about the right things so you want to ask for reviews specifically about your products. In this case it's going to be lots of moisturizer, dry skin products. You can do that by sending out emails, having email flows off the back of your. If you've got an E commerce site having email flows that once that customer actually gets their product then you've asked them to leave a review and that might be on your own site. It might also be on trustpilot, whichever review site is most relevant to where you actually work, what your business actually does. And then the other area is going to be influencers working with influencers. And they don't have to be huge influences, just ones that are really relevant to your topic. So in this example, we're obviously going to want skincare, uh, influences. There's going to be a huge seasonal variation for this. So autumn, winter, the dry skin is a really big problem for a lot of people. You're probably going to run a campaign at that time of year and that might just be sending out a couple of free products and asking someone to create videos around them. It might be using some of that UGC content and then you can repurpose it as well. If you're running ads, amazing. You can use some of that UGC content. Or if you're doing organic social media campaigns, you can use that as well if you've got the time for it. So building in all of those areas and if that sounds overwhelming, my advice is start with one, focus on that first, then move on to the next one. Don't try and do like 10 topical areas all at the same time.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah, depending on your team size that,

Charlie Marchant: that could be exactly.

Bailey Gunnell: It's better to do one thing than nothing. I think that's where I find a lot of companies just get stuck is they try to think of a strategy and they'll noodle on a strategy for three months and it's like uh, ah, you could have been, you could have published.

Charlie Marchant: Oh my goodness. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You mustn't get stuck in inertia and overwhelm about it at all. The way I like to think about it is just think about it as campaigns and you can just think of it as like a quarterly campaign. Like we're having a push on this product at this time. That works great for seasonal businesses because you start your campaign just before a high season for certain kinds of products. But there's also plenty of other ways to divide that. If you're not really seasonal, then you can just think about, okay, which are my highest profit products, which are the ones that I really want to push first. Go over, go after that first. Right. If you're thinking, okay, well I'm, um, B2B. When are your customers most likely to be in market for certain products? Think about that instead. Or sometimes just things happen. Right. Sometimes there's just trends in the news cycle and something that you do might really be interesting. At that time. Push it at that time. That's great.

Bailey Gunnell: Love it. One of the things you had mentioned before too, in that that PR is like reaching out to journalists and trying to get on other people's websites. And I, I want to almost just make a plugin for podcasts. Like this is literally what we're doing. Like, and it's mutually beneficial because I get to learn from you. And we're going to publish some great stuff on, on your stuff too. So I think most businesses should run a podcast just cause it's, I love doing it, I think it's super fun, but it's also like it, it ticks that box.

Charlie Marchant: Yeah. And podcasts are really fun. There's lots of different ways to run, um, podcasts and I think they can be a lot of businesses, I don't think, realize that you don't have to have like huge production budgets to be running a podcast. Like you can have two people internally having a conversation. I run a podcast with my colleague Dale, who's fantastic. And we just talk about AI search, SEO and PPC every week. We just talk about what was in the news that week. We give our thoughts, we give our opinions, we talk about, you know, how it affects business owners bottom lines. Because ultimately we work in, in marketing. We sell search marketing as a service, as our agency, and that's great. The other great thing about them is now there's so many AI tools out there in the world that the content that you actually do in your podcast, it's going to create a transcript for you. Fantastic. You can use that transcript, feed it into a tool like there's one called Profound that we like to use that has an agent workflow that then takes that transcript, uses your tone of voice and uh, writes it into a blog for you. It will still need a couple of edits. AI is never perfect. Right. We all know that. But the best thing about doing it that way is that's not asking. ChatGPT, uh, write me a blog on this topic, please. It's actually using the conversation that you had, repurposing it into more content. So I absolutely love podcasts. I think they're fantastic ways to get authority in your topic.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah, there's, there's so many ways you can go about getting pr. I've seen you've done like some really nice videos and other things like that. So people will go out and produce these great videos or they'll get appearances on, um, on other people's YouTube channels. All those work just, uh, it depends on what what your time is, like, what your budget is.

Charlie Marchant: Yeah.

Bailey Gunnell: And like different ways.

Charlie Marchant: Because my team have the pleasure of working across so many different sectors. One of the ones we were looking at recently was windows and window installers. So things like double glazing, triple gl, UPVC windows, things that you would never even think. And, um, there are so many local installers in that space who just have their iPhones and they're just creating content. Um, you know, when they go around to a customer's house to talk about the problems with the windows or to show these beautiful new windows that they're like the before and after of the amazing windows. And you would think, like, who is watching content from just a local window install? You'd be surprised. Thousands of people are watching YouTube video shorts before they're buying their new double glazing from those local installers because they actually want to see, what is this? What is this? Like, do I trust this guy to come and do this task? Like, I'd be spending thousands of pounds to have my windows done. That content gets watched. And the thing I would say about building your top of authority is do it in the area that you're comfortable. If you are comfortable on video and you don't mind like whacking your iPhone out and just record it yourself, amazing. But loads of people probably thinking, oh, I just can't think of anything worse. Voice are absolutely fine. Then you can go the other route. Then you can do lots of written content and you can be thinking about getting journalists involved, doing pr, doing fun stories, or like you say, Bailey, if you're more likely to just do podcasts, you think, you know, I can just voice, great. Then. Then voice works just as well. And you don't have to do video podcasts every time. You can just do speaking podcasts instead.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah. So so many different ways. I love how creative people get. Or even like faceless YouTube channels. Like, it's awesome.

Charlie Marchant: Exactly. Do something that suits you.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah. So one other thing we had talked about too, I think getting into like, I think a bit more tactical things is how do you create this like AI citation worthy content? How would you go about starting to do that?

Charlie Marchant: Okay, this is a big topic. So if you actually want to show up in ChatGPT answers and other AIs, there's kind of three pillars of AI search that you need to think about. The first one is your technical foundations. So if you're familiar with SEO, you probably know this. This is things like having a well structured website. Like someone can go onto your website and there's a very clear structure of categories and subcategories in your menu. You know, like you go into a library, right? And if the books were just in chaos on the floor, you would be like, what is this? You would just leave the library. You expect to be able to go in, go to the genre of book that you want, and then find the author from A to Z. Well, both humans and AI expect the same. On your website, you want to make sure it's crawlable. So everyone must, the first thing they must do is check their robots txt file and make sure that they have not blocked ChatGPT and and other AI platforms from crawling the website. If you have done that, it will not ever surface content from your site. It doesn't know much about you, it struggles to piece together information. That tends to be where AI starts to hallucinate when it actually can't find anything about your business online. And then you want to make sure you don't have like lots of errors. You don't want redirect chains, you don't want broken pages, broken links, anything messy like that. And the other big area to look at is your schema, or what's known as structured data, which is a code that goes on the back of each page that indicates to AI when it's crawling behind the scenes. And it's also used by Google Crawlers as well. So important for your normal SEO, you also want to have that schema which explains what your business does, what products you sell, what services it is. It also does things like FAQs use, can put schema on your blog post. There's 500 different types of schema. I'm not going to go into all of them now. That will drive everyone mad.

Bailey Gunnell: Right?

Charlie Marchant: The second area, and this is probably the most relevant to the question you've just asked about how you actually get your content positioned properly, is thinking about your positioning and the content you have on your site. And when I say your positioning, every business should be able to describe what they do very clearly in one sentence. And that same positioning should be on your website and everywhere else that there's a description of your business. So AI is trying to piece together a story, right? It's looking across different areas of the Internet. And if you call your business one thing somewhere and something else somewhere else, it's thinking, well, which one is true? So your website should have that description. Your YouTube, your Instagram, your LinkedIn, wherever it is you are, you should be describing what your business does. The same way everywhere so one of the great examples that I love to talk about is, uh, the Ordinary, the skincare brand I mentioned earlier, because they chose their positioning way, way before AI even was in the mainstream like it is now. And they went after two really clear propositions. The first one is science backed skincare. So they talk about their ingredients, the science behind their products everywhere. And the other is best value skincare. And because they have done so much work around that positioning in their own content and in third party content, whenever you ask AI anything relating to the best value skincare products, they will always be in that answer. So start there.

Bailey Gunnell: Wow.

Charlie Marchant: Then if you actually. Yeah, it's cool. It's a really cool example. And you kind of do want to think of those USPs, right? If you're selling iPad air cases, you want to be the best iPad air case, maybe. But do you also want to be known as like the most durable? What is it that's different about your product? Or what is the really big selling point for why people would buy from you? Then the content that you're. Oh, sorry, go.

Bailey Gunnell: Sorry. I just want to dive into this a little bit because I think it's awesome. But it seems like niching down is more important now than ever. Like, I feel like marketers have been talking about this for so long. Like, stop talking to everyone, talk to your specific audience. But this is where like AI loves that because people are going in and prompting things like I am, um, so and so. And they're getting really specific about the types of problems they need solved. So this is where those really niche content companies can win.

Charlie Marchant: And, um, I think one of the biggest myths is that because AI is personalized to you, that it means you can't optimize for it. Like every answer is personalized based on what the person is asking. But that is perfect because it means that you can get much closer to your target customers if you know who they are. Because actually there's still going to be a group of people. If you know that you target women in their 30s who don't have kids, for example, you are much, much more likely because they are very likely to be asking similar queries, even if they're doing it in slightly different ways. But if someone's saying I'm 35, someone else is saying I'm 36, roughly categorizing them in the same way, and they are roughly going to see a similar type of answer. So personalizing is firstly fantastic because the user searching is more likely to get something relevant to them if You're a brand and you actually know your niche, you know your customers, then you know the kinds of things that they ask you know the kinds of people that they are. You are way more likely to then show up to relevant customers. It's one of the reasons that we see quite often traffic from ChatGPT tends to convert higher because it actually is more likely to be someone who has intent because you've come up m with something really relevant. So yeah, knowing your niche is so important here.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah. And another thing with your positioning that you talked about is I think for, for newer companies this is a great way to win and make sure it's consistent across all things, but it's also a great place to win for companies who've been around for a long time. So like your positioning might have changed and then it's an opportunity to go back to some older content, tweak a few things and that I think you'll see some really quick wins there as

Charlie Marchant: you adjust things 100%. We've done a few cleanup operations for companies who have been running for a long time and they've got all sorts of old content in loads of places that they have no way to keep track of because it's impossible to watch the Internet that starts being surfaced in AI and so particularly what we see, one of the examples we see quite a lot is smaller businesses who have moved to serve the mid market or larger client types, but they're still being described as cheap or for small businesses and AI and they're thinking, oh my God, no we're not. We have a premium offering now. Right. And that's because they've got old content or old descriptions in random places across the Internet that actually need picking up and cleaning up that reference them in a certain way that say, oh, they serve small businesses, that's their main clientele, for example. And then actually the cleanup job is right, no, we're going to go sort that out. We're going to explain that actually they now serve mid market businesses. They have a premium offering, but it means going back to all those things that you maybe published in like 2008 to sort them out so that AI doesn't keep surfacing incorrect info.

Bailey Gunnell: Okay, thank you for going on that little chance.

Charlie Marchant: My pleasure, my pleasure. Should we go back to the content then? So once you've got your position, you're thinking about your on site content. Unfortunately you can't just like whack your thoughts up on a page. I think everyone knows this already from when you read a great Structured blog post online. And you're like, oh my goodness, that made life so clear. AI also likes to have really nicely structured blogs as well. And I tend to think like, people like to read things that are easy to take in, that are nicely split up. So having things like a really clear author bio with expertise in it, having an introduction that actually explains, like, what you're going to answer in your informational content quickly. Things like having contents in there, having it split up by headers and chunked into different sections that are concise and actually answer questions, having summaries and overview takeaway points and FAQs, all of that are really nice structure in there. If anyone actually wants to deep dive into this, because I think it gets a bit complicated to explain on a podcast, then my team have a fantastic blog post, which is an AI optimized blog post template that just gives you a structure that AI loves to surface that they can find on the Exposure Ninja blog. So you can jump in there and have a look.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah, I can hyperlink it in the show notes too, so people can.

Charlie Marchant: Oh, amazing. Thank you. That would be awesome. And then the third area is the area that we kind of dug into earlier. Uh, that's the pillar around digital pr, getting those citations from other publications and your reviews. And I just kind of want to touch on reviews because they get referenced all the time, particularly in branded search. So if someone searches for a company name, AI loves to share reviews. And I know that a lot of businesses have problems with, you know, they might have got one bad review of their pizza restaurant from years ago and suddenly AI is surfacing it. And it will always do this because it wants to show as much of a story as it possibly can. It wants to give the positive and the negative so that it's giving the most balanced view possible of a business or of a product. And that is just unfortunately the way AI works. So there's no way to get away from it. It's always going to do that. You just have to focus on building a great reputation as much as you can.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah, um, I think too negative reviews are at the end of the world. I think sometimes we stress so much, but as long as all of them are negative, if all of yours are negative, you're in trouble. But I think sometimes people are really skeptical of all five star reviews. Like that almost is like, did they pay for this? Like, why?

Charlie Marchant: Yeah, for sure. And I think the same with how you manage this, like in general is AI will pick up on things like if you actually reply to Your reviews. And if you're like, you know, hey, we made a mistake there, like, we're sorry that your pizza was cold, please come back and have another pizza on us. That kind of response that isn't like you arguing with the reviewer, but is like owning the thing or actually just giving the perspective on what's happened. Like, if there was a misunderstanding and saying, oh, I'm so sorry, I think we had a misunderstanding, then AI is actually likely to even say that the business has done that. Like, the business cares and is addressing these reviews online. So just managing it the same way you would do, uh, when you're thinking about, like, doing good business and you're also thinking about, like, interpersonal relations, just, just being a good person within a business to a customer.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah, I, I listened to this interview and I wish I remembered the name of the guy it was at this moment. But he was asked, like, what's your biggest tip for like, winning an aeo? His answer was, just build a good business. And I was like, maybe a little simplified. But the, the idea is, like, so true though. Like, and as you're talking about, like, writing content, like you're, you're just trying to write content that is really helpful for people and there's definitely ways to do it better than others. But building a good business, being good to your customers, like, that's going to help you win more than, um, any sort of other tactic.

Charlie Marchant: Yeah, like, I like the advice. It's definitely general and a simplified view of, like, how you would win an AI. But all of these things that we've spoken about, like, ultimately you could boil them down to being good business. Like having a clear positioning, having USPs in your market, knowing topics that you want to dominate, knowing who your customers are, managing the reviews that you have, creating great products, creating products that look really good. Because often we see product images coming up, owning what's being said about you online. All of this is just creating a good business.

Bailey Gunnell: Yeah, exactly. A little simplified, but yeah, but definitely helpful. Well, I have one last question for you, Charlie, and this is just my kind of silly question. I want to know what your biggest content marketing ick is right now. Like, what's really bothering you when you see it out in the wild?

Charlie Marchant: My biggest content marketing ick right now is LinkedIn posts that use the word quietly. Because then I immediately know that ChatGPT wrote your LinkedIn post and I'm not

Bailey Gunnell: going to read it.

Charlie Marchant: Basically, anything that comes up where it's like, I'm starting my LinkedIn newsletter quietly. And it's like, just start it loudly. Don't use ChatGPT to write it. That's by far my biggest current ick.

Bailey Gunnell: Oh, I haven't seen that one. I'm going to keep an eye out for it though.

Charlie Marchant: You're going to say it everywhere. Now I've said it now I've said it now that you said it. But yeah, I feel like this happens.

Bailey Gunnell: That is kind of a weird thing to say, right?

Charlie Marchant: Firstly, no one ever uses that language. No one says, I'm quietly doing something. That's very rare that anyone would ever say that to you. Secondly, every time an AI model gets updated, so ChatGPT or Gemini, they tend to have like, little things that they say. Everyone was speaking for a long time about, like ChatGPT using the em m dash all the time. And so people who used to use EM dashes in their writing suddenly stopped because they were like, oh my God. I don't want everyone to think that I'm AI, but I sometimes think these certain words that aren't really used in human to human interaction, like, it's not that. That's not an ism that anyone uses just suddenly crop up and then you see like a huge amount of content coming out, using them. Yeah, I just think you're gonna.

Bailey Gunnell: I'm gonna keep an eye out for that. I'm probably gonna see that.

Charlie Marchant: Such a.

Bailey Gunnell: It'll be the first post.

Charlie Marchant: Yeah, absolutely.

Bailey Gunnell: Well, Charlie, where can people go to talk to you and learn more about what you're doing?

Charlie Marchant: Oh, amazing. If anyone would like to talk to me and I'm super passionate and happy to talk about all things AI search. It's such a new area and I think there's so many interesting questions and ideas around it. I love to chat about it. You can Find me on LinkedIn. My name is Charlie Marchant and you can just, you know, Charlie Marchant, Exposure Ninja. Uh, you'll find me straight away. I also run a weekly podcast on the exposure ninja, uh, YouTube channel that you can find. It's also on all good podcast providers, so you can find it on Apple, Spotify and everywhere else. And I also do conferences and events quite a lot. So I'll be at Digital Marketing Conference Europe. If you happen to also be there, then I would love to see you in person. And I'll also be at, uh, the SIP and search events in London and Brighton coming up in the next couple of months too.

Bailey Gunnell: Amazing. Well, I'll make sure all of those links make it to the show Notes so people can find you easily. But thank you so much much for hopping on today. This was a lot of fun and I definitely learned a lot.

Charlie Marchant: Oh, Bailey, thank you for the amazing questions and thank you for having me.

Bailey Gunnell: Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Logistics. Make sure to subscribe to the show so you don't miss the next episode. Bye.