From Google to GPT: How Search Actually Works in 2025

Does SEO still matter? We've defaulted to Google for 20 years because they've enjoyed 91% of global share of search. It's also posing a lot of challenges to kind of break that old thinking of search is Google to search is all of these things and we have to fundamentally rethink where and how we do that. People are asking is this the death of the website?

You know, because now everybody's getting their answers on chat GPT. People often just think search is SEO. No, search is like human psychology. The ways and the places and the reasons people search will evolve forever.

But the thing that will not change is the human need to search. You got like Pinterest, you've got Reddit, you've got Instagram, you got TikTok, like where people are finding content and searching things. It is an actual change to the human mind human behavior that is happening right now. Marketers got better, the algorithm got better, and users got better.

Strategy is not just choosing what you will do, it's choosing what you won't do. Is there one or two fundamental customer behaviors, expectations, or just truths to how people search that you are still betting on that you think was true before and will be true after this? That there is a human who is searching. Unfortunately, the time of people just investing in a bunch of AI swap and garbage that they're pumping out in mass onto the internet, but it's starting to backfire.

What the heck does that mean for me as a brand and for my customer? There's a fundamental shift in how people are discovering information, right? And when you think about brands, anything about companies, this means there's a shift in how people are discovering your brand and your company and how they're interacting and engaging with it. And this isn't just a small change in user behavior or customer behavior.

This is a massive overhaul. Like when I think about the executives we've talked to on this show, who we've talked to across all of our different podcasts, tech shows, marketing shows, etc. Everyone is asking the same question of how is discoverability changing and what the heck does that mean for me as a brand and for my customer? So this discoverability question challenge trend has been sitting in my head for months.

And finally, I was scrolling through LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago and I came across a post and I was like, whoever wrote this, I need to talk to because she's in on it. She knows what's going on and she's got stuff to share and that post was written by Heather Fizzyock, who's the chief discoverability officer of the ML and who we have had on our podcast today. What's really interesting to me about Heather is that she has this unique journalism background, which really informs the way that she thinks about how humans work.

What is your human customer, human user, human searcher actually want from this engagement or this interaction whenever they go to search? Where are they going to be searching for that information? It's not just going to be on Google. It's not just going to be on chat GPT.

There's a bunch of other different platforms. TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, that you need to be appearing on that people are searching on. So she really takes this idea of SEO. People often just think search is SEO, expands it and says, no, search is like human psychology.

How do we understand what our customer is doing at every single point in the customer journey? What they're going to be searching for at those points? Where are they going to be searching for that information? Then we come up with a plan of how we appear there and what's going to be most useful of them in those moments.

But before we get into it, and if you're new here, I'm your host Lacey Pease. You're listening to experts of experience. If you like what you hear today, you enjoy this conversation. Go ahead and that like button, hit subscribe, drop comment below about your favorite part or any questions that we didn't get into that you would like answered.

Of course, you can always find me on LinkedIn and DM me any recommendations you have for future guests or topics that you want to hear about. So with that, here's Heather Pizziak, the chief discoverability officer at VML. Heather, welcome to experts of experience. I'm so excited to have you here.

Thank you so much for having me, excited for a conversation today. Yeah, before we get into all the goodness we're going to get into today, I have to sit with your job title quickly. You're the chief discoverability officer at VML. What does that mean?

I originally started as a head of the SEO department here. But as the technology and landscape of search was changing, we sort of saw or anticipated down the road that the way we work and the things that we do to help our instincts discovered were going to be changing too. And we saw that thinking only about Google, only about websites and only through this lens of SEO, we were greatly limiting our potential to adapt to changing technologies and changing customer needs. So somewhere around seven years ago, we changed the name of our department to be discoverability to be more encompassing of the full breadth and depth of the things that we do.

And it's rooted instead of in a single platform, it's rooted in real human behavior, which is that desire or that need to search. It just feels right. That's such an interesting reposition. And what I find even more intriguing is that you guys did this seven years ago.

I think a lot of companies today are having that conversation and deciding, oh, we kind of need to rethink how we're what we're naming our team members, what we're thinking about the departments, how we actually think about what search is and discoverability. But to do that seven years ago, like Kudos to y'all for kind of seeing the piece of there and making the pivot. That's really cool. Seems sport.

I think as SEO's you get tired of getting a line out of mine's down. No, wait, we better really think about what the true value is of what we offer. So thank you. Yes, yeah, that's great.

Do you think this is a role, chief discoverability officer? Do you think that's a role more companies are going to start to have? Gosh, I don't know. I secretly hope not because I selfishly love it.

At the same time, I do think that is the direction that things are going. I think that's popping up more and more. My LinkedIn feed that I'm seeing more people refer to this entire capability or practice as discoverability. It's just a more robust and holistic way of thinking about this part of a customer's journey.

And speaking of the customer journey, I mean the whole point of our podcast is to talk everything customer journey, everything customer experience. Could you just speak to what role discoverability plays in that journey? Yeah, well, I mean, search is kind of interesting because there is a search mindset or a search function that happens literally at potentially every single step of a customer's journey. Yeah, for sure.

Every point this person is trying to find information or complete a task or go somewhere or do something. And so if we only think about Google, we only think about the website, we're only thinking about this like conversion part of customer experience. You're missing this massive span of potential points where you can connect with these customers and serve their needs, anticipate and answer the things that they're telling us that they're looking for. The search data tells us that they're looking for.

And so where we have found that search and discoverability intersects most with our CX capabilities and is journey mapping. And taking that classic search or excuse me customer journey, taking that full customer journey or personas and then translating that into how we connect with those people when they're in those moments of discovery. And the thing that we know for sure is that when people are in a search mindset, they're not staying in a single lane. They're not just going to Google.

That's not always the best, most efficient, most effective way or place to find information. They're going to be weaving in and out of different platforms. If they're in the beginning of the process and just recognizing their need, the way that they search and the things that they expect to find there are different from when they are hunting and gathering and decision making and getting ready to make moves. They're going to search in different places.

So yeah, zooming out to take a look at that broader customer journey and then drilling down to actually bring it to life. Yeah, I mean, I think this is such an important point that when we talk about discoverability, it's not just this is the first time they've discovered your brand and now we're done. Like, oh, they searched you, they found your brand. That's it.

That's the only time they're ever going to look up your logo or your company name again on search, right? It's not just awareness. It's the entire time from like, maybe I've been with this company for, I don't know, five years and I love them and I love their products, but I need a replacement part. Now I'm back in search mode.

I'm trying to figure out a solution, find something. So I think it's super intriguing and important to do this entire customer journey, mapping that you're speaking about of like where in what moments are people going to be searching and not just in those moments, you know, what are they searching for, but where will they be looking for the answers? Because it's not just Google anymore. Right.

Right. Exactly. Yeah. So as we look into the future a little bit, I mean, we're going to dive deep into a lot of things discoverability, search, Google, you know, is SEO dead, all those conversations.

But I want to start by just asking you a simple question that I think might be one that's very relevant to marketing and CX leaders right now. What are the most just urgent gaps in marketing and CX right now? Gosh, besides everything, just it feels like everything is on track. Literally.

I mean, and that's that's why I'm asking this, right? It's because like what I look on LinkedIn, I'm like, there are so many different things that we could just like, it's that, it's this, it's that, it's this, but like really, if I am a marketing leader, CX leader, sales leader, even like and I'm thinking about this, what are the gaps I should just really be honing in on and focusing in on? It is a huge question. Obviously, it's going to depend by every brand, but I think you're right.

Like we're getting hammered with it should be this, it should be the other students. Yeah. It's kind of a yes and right now because I'm thinking about it from the perspective of a search person who cares very much about how we show up in all different searchable platforms and AI search results. And so the thing I'm thinking about is how we find better term connect the types across all these different marketing channels.

So if we're under the assumption that we have done the research and the intelligence and strategy to determine which channels our audiences are on and are relevant to what we are trying to accomplish as a brand, then what remains to improve that connected customer experience is not doing more stuff in individual channels. I don't mean more LinkedIn. I don't need more video. I mean, even though that may be true, but in order to really succeed in this new and emerging text landscape, it's about how those things string together so that no matter at what point that customer discovers you and enters that no matter from where they are having a consistent experience that moves them through the process where you need them to go.

You're serving their needs, you knew they were coming, you anticipated it, it feels like a great experience the whole way. So it's not necessarily some major dramatic new thing that we have to do. We have to stuff like piling more things on that we're going to do poorly and instead do the hard work of signing those wins at those intersections between the different disciplines and channels and across entire connected customer journey. And I think too, it's not just about what you feel comfortable with.

It might feel comfortable to do more LinkedIn posts because you understand that and can do that and execute on that. But what might be uncomfortable is actually stepping back and saying, oh, truthfully, my customers aren't searching this on LinkedIn. They're looking up on Reddit. So I need to be there.

I need to be present there, but I'm uncomfortable with that because I've never actually decided to be on Reddit before. I don't know how to play that game. So I think there's a lot of stepping into some discomfort and trying things and taking a little bit of risks that especially established brands may not be ready for. Yeah, and I think that's interesting because I actually see it from our perspective as practitioners too, is we're so comfortable in Google and we are so comfortable with the classic ways of measuring success and search that and we've defaulted to Google for 20 years because they've enjoyed 91% of global share of search.

So it's also posing a lot of challenges to kind of break that old thinking of search is Google to searches all of these things and we have to fundamentally rethink where and how we do that. We have to accept that like it's not always going to be measured by conversions or eyeballs or traffic like measures of customer experience success. I know I think we're going to be looking to your kind of expertise actually in the imminent future to better understand how we can measure the full scope of scale of search impact.

So for those who are listening, we just pulled up on screen an actual graphic of what Heather just described of how Google has just dominated search for so so long. So definitely pop over to YouTube or check it out on the Spotify video. If you're listening in and you can see this graphic will also drop the link to the slides in the show notes so you can check them out yourself. But Heather, I want to want you to guide us a little bit through the the journey through time on search and discoverability.

So Rose, if you could go back to slides, I want this comparison trust. Yeah, tell me a little bit about what did it look like in the early internet era of search and then we can talk about what it looks like now. Yeah, so I got my start almost 20 years ago for me in search, young whippersnapper coming off the heels of a career start in journalism and then I was moving into online journalism so it started in search and so this is what it kind of looked like and what we talked about since then, right?

So a user needs to get a piece of information completed task, go somewhere, do something, make a decision, whatever it is. So back then they would go to their desktop computer and they would go to a search engine like Yahoo or ask jeans and then eventually Google and they would type in their query in that skate navigator and they would get back some blue links, right? Back when I first got started, we talked about it as a super linear journey as someone goes in an orderly fashion through one gate and then another another to get information, you know, they go to their desktop device, they go to a standard search engine, they get back 10 blue links.

But when you fast forward about a decade and 10 years pass from now on the next slide, it'll show you how complicated that got, right? There's still that truth that the human being needs to get a piece of information or complete a task, but now instead of only happening on their desktop device, it's happening on their mobile devices in their cars, voice search, internet of things and they're not just going to standard search engines like Google, they're going to commerce engines like Amazon video engines like YouTube, social engines, Facebook was the big one at the time and they weren't just getting back 10 blue links, they were getting back this huge swath of multimedia, right?

As links, videos, images, maps, products, sometimes interactive features to do some shopping, it just became way more complex and fragmented. So it created a lot of opportunity for us as marketers to take advantage of more real estate and features in Google and that traditional search space. You want to skip forward one to see how that pans out? It seems to be a personal one.

There we go. I just get overwhelmed looking at this like, I'm like, whoa, where are we going? This is wild. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And I, what I like about this too is, I mean, this is so realistic. This is true.

If I followed any one of these, choose your adventure style. If I do this, if I do that, this is exactly how I search or how I did search. That's a little bit different. It's like, oh, I need this.

I need that. And so you're trying to map how someone's brain is working. There's almost like a psychology game trying to figure out what are people thinking? What are they searching?

Why would they use this phrase instead of that phrase? What does that mean? So why would I present this information? It gets very, very complicated as we move forward in time.

And a search gets better. And the expectations of customers or expectations of searchers change. You know, I think about when I was in high school and I was using Google to like write a paper or something. And I would actually go through page one, page two, page three, page four to five to like go find stuff, right?

I was like genuinely going through. I might end up on page 15 to be like, oh, that's the link that I need it, right? And that was my process of search. And then you think about college.

And I only needed to go page one because I think two things happened. I think I got better at searching. So I knew what keywords to put in to find the information I needed. And two, Google got better at presenting things that were actually relevant to me.

So I didn't need to go play the game of page 15, right? But then if you flip that and you think about it from the marketer's perspective versus the user's perspective, that means making content that's way more relevant to what people are actually looking up. Now I fast forward. Yeah, we provided more value.

Yes, marketers got better. The algorithm got better and users got better. I think we just got used to it, right? So there's like three things that play.

And now I go Google something and I'm not even scrolling down page one. I'm looking at the I overview, right? So like in just what 10 years, Heather, the experience I have two years even. Yeah, like the experience I had on Google has changed dramatically.

And it was so strong. The other search for so long search tools. Yeah, that I use. Thank you for walking us through the sort of like what it looked like, what it looks like now.

Well, that's that was even like two years ago. Yeah, right. Society. All those lines, right?

All those lines on that graph. It looks like when you're doing that big paper, you have to do you would do the search. You could write something down or copy and paste some information or try to cram it in your brain. And then you go back in the search and you find some more things and you would back out, dude, again, out and out.

Now we're entering this era where we can ask multiple things at once. And those compound queries are going to get answered in a single synthesized answer in your overview. And like you said, a lot of time you don't even have to go pass that. Nope.

Yeah, I don't know if it's rolled down anymore. It's crazy. It's crazy. And that's secretly what people always want us.

Yeah. And I think the trust is being built too, right? Because I know like when AI overviews initially came out, I was skeptical. I was like, I don't trust you.

I don't trust this like answer. So I go click the links and like actually still go look and reference that. But now I don't do that. So there is a change in behavior even in the last six months that I've seen with people where it's like, I don't trust this.

And now I do trust it. That I think is really important. The citations, the sourcing. Yeah.

I mean, again, I come from a background of journalism. So like that was incredibly important to me, trust and accuracy. But also that is something that for 20 years I've been trained is something that is important to Google. That stress factor and having the higher quality search results, delivering better information in a better way, a better satisfies people is what kept them coming back to Google and let allow them to have that giant blue maybe one percent of global market share.

It was a superior experience. And so now AI is taking what I think Google is always aiming toward being that answer engine and has just flows the gap, but wanting to do it and we're doing it guys. We're doing it live. The competition is what made that happen.

You know, and I know we've talked a lot about Google here, but you also mentioned all these other platforms. You know, you got like Pinterest, you've got Reddit, you've got Instagram, you got TikTok, like where people are finding content and searching things and like learning and new information is definitely changing growing expanding. So it's not just Google anymore. And we haven't even said the keyword here, the clickbait word here, Heather of chat GPT, right, or cloud or perplexity, right?

We haven't even touched those LLMs. How is search changing now that people have access to those kinds of tools? Yeah, I think that's the really, really exciting stuff. And we're seeing Google, of course, keep pace with it to try to stay competitive.

But I mean, we're seeing three big changes that I would argue are stemming from this AI search revolution. The first is obviously the way the search results look. You talked about how they improved what they delivered. The algorithms got better, more better information was showing up.

That just took a big leap forward. There's just a different shape of the search results and different real estate and opportunities we can take advantage of now. But that are also threats, as we talked about. AI overviews are driving us down to the zero click world.

Now part two is how those results are getting synthesized. We talked about that back and forth of having to do a query yourself and then try to remember that yourself. And now it's just taking a huge amount of that lift out between interest and action. It just synthesizes so much so quickly.

And then the last part is that human behavior. And I don't think we're talking better than us. It is an actual change to the human mind, human behavior that is happening right now. Just like in the early days of when we got mobile phones.

And we would look for hamburgers near me on our way home from work. Yeah. And originally we would put in hamburgers can't see them. So then we learned we could go near me because the phone phone knew where we were.

Then we learned we didn't even have to say near me. It just assumed because I was on my phone and I was asking for hamburgers at 5 p.m. that I might want some and it pulled local result.

And we learned that and we changed and we adapted just like you learned to search for and as the algorithms learned to return better information. And so that behavior now is changing in how we ask these longer more complex queries but also what we as searchers and customers expect when we do. That standard is rising. We need more better information out there.

We need those types connected in order for them to be good sources and citations that can be trusted in those synthesized AI search answers. It is sort of context now right like I'm not just googling average vitamin D dose for you know adult woman right. I'm also googling you know average vitamin D dose for someone who lives in Alaska that you know just gave birth and is you know X number years old and dead and dead right like I'm looking up very specific things and I want contextual answers back to me.

I don't want I don't want to connect the dots anymore like we used to like you were saying where you go open one thing okay this is the average of my need oh this is how your body changes after pregnancy oh this is how this happens oh here here's this and then you on your own kind of decide this is what I will do based off all this information. I now expect the overview or chat GPT or whatever I'm interacting with to give me the context and decide for me like oh here's the solution that I propose right and I'm not saying go to your local chat GPT and ask for health advice but I you know it is what we're doing like we're realistic about what happy about using these tools so I think just like the expectation on like I want to give it context and I expect to understand what I mean what I mean but then you have to you have to have good content for that I mean going back to what you're saying right there has to be actually something in the back end that's connecting those dots in a way that we can trust.

I think that's absolutely true I mean people are kind of asking is this the death of the website you know because yeah everybody's getting their answers on chat GPT yeah well I don't know if the website is going to be the medium forever but I do know that that information is coming from somewhere and so if we want to increase the odds that it shows up in an accurate way that reflects how we want our brands to be reflected or that serves customers in a way that we want them to be served then I think it's incredibly important that we consider what content and assets we have in the mix how they're optimized how accurate how strengths they are all the things that we knew we should be doing and that take a lot of human effort to do it just got way more important to your point of like connecting I'm just really obsessed with the idea of connecting the dots connecting the pipes as you framed it like the more that we track what people are searching because they have the opportunity to do more of these like long form more complicated searches are you guys seeing just more interest or maybe developing tools on just tracking what's actually being searched because then that will more greatly inform like oh this thing about I'm gonna stick with this example of like vitamin D for this age like that's something that's coming up frequently so we should make content for that um are you guys able to track like what people are searching on let's say a chat GPT or definitely on Google and and kind of map that to the content that you recommend brands make the capability to tell specifically what is being searched and at what volume is greatly limited right now um we're starting to see more platforms start to kind of model the information but I'll be honest they don't totally trust those things so far so we're sort of monitoring testing learning but we're still heavily reliant on Google search data but we're also looking at Amazon search data um we have some access like TikTok and Instagram like search data Walmart some different ones that we can kind of piece together a whole story but there's a lot of areas including AI search some social search and other areas where we still quite manually have to interpret three things like hashtags and auto suggest bars to to manually piece together that whole search journey I do think that is changing and will change with time like Google search console says that they do have AI mode or AI overview or whatever they have some AI related keyword data in there but it's all blended with everything else so we can't really extract anything usually yet um so there's a lot of live testing the annual testing and learning and talking to people to figure out how they're using it and different industries yeah and I think it I think it's Google AI mode because I was just messing with it um is that where you're talking about like the actual AI mode it's like if you type something into there is it going to show up in our Google search console query data yeah yeah yeah this is interesting so I'm going to I'm going to ask you something that is just like this is my my clickbait question okay are you ready ready just does SEO still matter I think yes I just hate the word SEO I mean going back to that idea it's like SEO is just it's been around as long as I have this so I know it's old so you don't I mean it's like it's got a reputation for kind of being slimy in a lot of corners of the web and like even without that it feels like a lowest common denominator speed version of what we do it feels like 1% of 1% of what we actually do in discoverability so it's a great gateway it's a it's a door or a way to bring people in who do know about SEO as a concept and we can bring them along on that journey and pull them forward into this new world of discoverability but yeah I don't think that search is ever going to be right like the ways and the places and the reasons people search will evolve forever but the thing that will not change is the human need to search so it's our job to stop putting all of our eggs into a platform or a technology and instead take ourselves back to that human need that core thing that drove the search to begin with and we will be much better able to search customers needs no matter what the technology the day is yeah I think that's so true and I just have a bone to pick with the SEO phrase I know that we've started to say GEO which I think is like generated engine optimization which doesn't make sense why we would need a new term because it's still search like it's still an engine for search so could we not stick with search engine optimization as the term that we're using we just understand that this is a moving thing it just unfortunately that phrase has been so tainted as you just shared and kind of like only in our mind now SEO equals keyword stuffing right like that's just what we believe whenever we hear the word SEO so I just had to say that like I'm kind of past the GEO phrase and I'm hoping that we can come up with something better it's not a practice that sounds like a deliver you know what I mean yeah that's really hard to optimize for sorry optimizing for GEO yeah that's so true so as we move into the next I don't know six months to a year I'm not going to ask you to pick too far out because I just think that's purely impossible that's being good luck but I do wonder about like what platforms matter most right now and this might be different I'm sure you're going to have different answers for different industries like B2B B2C there might be just different things to be looking at but in general when you're talking to someone and they're like hey where do I need to double down what advice are you giving them yeah absolutely and this is a conversation I'm having easily five or six times a week right now it's clearly the word is out that AI searches a thing and more and more clients are asking what do we do how do we adapt how do we evolve and get ahead of this and should we be pivoting our entire SEO program to this or taking money from this and jumping it on to that and our advice is generally yes we should be investing in this and we should be proactive in in testing and learning but don't just drop everything and go over there it be really intentional carve out a piece of your budget say five and 15% of your search budget dedicated to testing and learning and optimizing for these LLMs and AI search engines AI search platforms right test and learn test and learn test and learn like that is all we can do right now which is reminiscent of when I first got started and we were all trying to listen to your Google and understand how they range things number one right yep yep the next thing that I'm advising people to double down on is authority and trust and I really look to a lot of my CX experts and everybody that's working in different disciplines where we can connect with customers to communicate signals of trust credibility authority reality humanity credentials anything that these AI search engines can trust and source them site to yield real accurate health answers I think the next big competitive front of this AI search war is which of those will deliver the best most trustworthy results they are going to be biasing toward those signals for their own reputations for their own ability to survive and so we need to start working in that way unfortunately what we see instead is a ton of people just investing in a bunch of AI slop and garbage that they're pumping out in mass on the internet but it's starting to backfire we're seeing evidence that it's starting to backfire on those people I would rather my brands invest in less but better and real or any day that we in the last thing that I am sort of putting some chips on is like structured data I think the ability to retrieve information and synthesize it into answers and select solutions it's going to require tagging and organizing information out on the web and tying streams to things like never before it's just going to require way more parsing through a lot more information to achieve results and so I think structured data will become more important it hasn't really shown that it's like a bombshell today but I think it makes absolute sense that that is a pretty useful especially knowing what we've seen in Google all the past years and why they did what they did I think it's just the way to prepare right I mean it's like if you want the content that you're creating right now to be relevant in a year or two years be accessible to these new technologies as they continue to evolve cleaning up how it's being delivered how it's connected how it can be bred this table stakes you absolutely need to be doing that now yeah yeah yeah the thing you mentioned about trustworthiness and that kind of like authoritiveness that comes with content that is credible trustworthy and from people that you know in the industry you might trust them like what do you when you think about that what kind of content are you actually recommending so we you know we obviously make a lot of content for executive leaders at our company so I think about this a lot with like how do we continue to just build great trust with our audiences and you know and I think bringing on great leaders under our shows like you who can bring in like these knowledge drops that helps us you know connect with our audiences but I'm wondering for like bigger brands where recommendations you're giving them of like how you actually build this sort of trust and authority because I don't again I don't think it's just like oh here's a new blog post and you know it's SEO optimized like I just don't think that's the future that's a great point and I think working with these big multinational fortune 500 enterprise brands there is sort of a luxury of their well-known established brand some of whom who've been around for a hundred years or more right away you get some extra trust signals but if you're not bad you know that it's going to take a lot more work to establish that but even if you are I think executive content is a great example of you're putting real names real faces real points of view that have been thoughtfully crafted and curated and so there's an inherent trust baked into the content to begin with and then how that's presented out in the world for search benefit is certainly a win-win I think executive content is great for retail and commerce content we're advising just providing more fill out the maximum fields use all the available product tags that you can provide the information because as you talked about with your highly personalized queries people could ask for any combination based on any context so we need to be able to field almost any kind of context so those types of content are great I think they're we come back to the connecting the pipes as well on content I think the content world is type or fragmented and kind of right for disruption in general the entire content supply chain is it's chaotic it's chaotic so honestly connecting the different kinds of content you are creating maybe you're creating owned website content for a brand and you're doing e-commerce content for a brand or you're doing a ton of social and video content and website content syncing those things up so they connect and validate and playoff as one another will feed into more ownership of those synthesized answers and just capturing more of those citations and sources and I do feel like that's actually really hard to do like that what you're describing where you're connecting the dots thing was happening on social with with over there like all these things especially larger brands are owned by different people in different departments so getting people out of their silos to have those conversations of what are you doing on LinkedIn what are you doing on TikTok what are you doing on you know on your website what podcast did our CEO appear on this past month right like how can we connect the dots on all of these things that's actually very very difficult give any advice for teams on how to do that yeah so I actually did a whole study gosh it would have been eight years now but if I did it now it'd be more chaotic but if you ask a hundred people what content is and I did as part of that exercise you will get a hundred different answers now I thought it's a thousand and everybody thinks the uncontent and no one has the same definition of it what is probably true is that everybody is a part of a larger content supply chain that just like our search for anybody can enter at any part of this content supply chain but this content supply chain is required to produce a true omnichannel holistic end-to-end content system or content pull right it is incredibly hard and competitive advantage is doing the things that your competitors can't won't or don't do so that to me feels like the thing that's worse investing in but it does require a lot of listening and learning and figuring out what other people's definitions of content or their role in the content supply chain is or the value that their piece of it provides to the client so you know which pieces of it to tap into for which needs but you first need to kind of zoom out and look at all the different moving pieces of content figure out who's out there what do we have what do we need what do we agree on what do we not agree on okay yeah which might actually be the hardest first step of all this is to say pause pause everything we're doing let's actually take the time I don't know that you should pause yeah well maybe not pause but at least at least like like it's so much it's so easy to be like let me just keep doing more right like let's just keep piling on more initiatives so maybe keep the initiatives you're doing keep them going but like let's also step back and take a look so how do we do these things simultaneously and how do we keep double checking that right how do we keep having opportunities checking with each other with leadership because we are so far from a set it and forget it marketing or content strategy like that is not a luxury we have no no that does not happen but it takes me back to like newsroom thinking where you have like a editor-in-chief who kind of knows how all of the pieces gather who knows how all of the different sections play how all the different content plays together who can make those editorial decisions and somebody has to have that master view in order to be able to tweak the process and you may not have all of it once but start somewhere and then build on that scaffolding of what you know and you'll be able to save the better content system whenever you're working with clients or when you're just like looking at this what you've called the content supply chain and you're trying to identify where there are gaps in where you're maybe showing up or you're trying to understand like what's actually happening here do our customers actually like this thing that we did like what metrics are you actually looking at because I know that we can get bogged down with like the 50 slide deck of all the different metrics that we could be looking at but what are you saying you know what these are the maybe three or five and I'm not saying all the other ones don't matter but like what are the metrics that you guys are actually looking at to say like oh this is doing well or hey there's a gap here that we get to fill.

Yeah yeah and that's changing in real-time view we're actually reassuring in only rethinking how to measure search but I think traditionally search folks have measured their impact or value in the supply chain around eyeballs, clicks, conversions. That was the entire economy of the web for the last 20 years and so that is how we measured success. I work in a creative agency where we're doing every different kind of content from every different angle at every part of the supply chain and so from a search lens I'm looking at all those different people departments capability services and going how can search augment and add value through those things.

So I don't have ownership over the whole thing to optimize all the things but I have authority over the parts that affect the discoverability of that content of that brand and it's my role to tweet those myths. As far as what we're going to be measuring in the future though I think that's the part that's happened here. One thing that's always true is like whatever the brand is whatever the client is whatever keeps them in business that is the core metric of success period and a day.

Yeah our job is search or content marketers go okay what metrics or KPIs will specifically signify success against that or proxy some indication that we're moving in the right direction toward that day. That's not always going to be clicks it's not always going to be conversions it's not always going to be impressions and search results anymore. There's something that has been kind of like letter on in my head as we've been talking and I mentioned this to gentlemen we talked to a couple months ago about sponsorships and ad buying in this new future with AI.

Do you have any thoughts about will people be able to sponsor this content because when I look at AI overviews now a lot of it doesn't include sponsored content like the ads that you would only pay for as a top of Google this AI overview is appearing before that and it's really hit or miss whether or not they actually get incorporated into the answers it just feels like there's no real playbook yet for this. Do you have any perspective on like what how search plus you know ad buying might change in the future?

Yeah we've always thought about discoverability as like an integrated search offering which includes paid search as part of that and what we've been talking about with our paid search colleagues is very much around how these things will blend eventually right now they're testing AI and they're not ready to blend those two things but I feel like it is imminent and inevitable that paid and sponsored placements will eventually be folded into AI search results and I think we've even seen some evidence of it being tested in small pockets here or there but nothing that we've seen rolled out widely you're ready like it will be it will be integrated okay what about like on LLM's like do you think on chat GBT there's going to start to be sponsored content.

That's a tough one I don't know I don't know I think it's plausible. I think it is absolutely plausible but they don't have a search had network for you built ready to plug into new technologies that I know of and they've got other better mechanisms for earning right now I just don't know that that would be their number one fiery totally hypothetical speculation here.