#44 Marketing After GPTs: AI Search, Zero-Click Content & the Future of SEO with Rand Fishkin

Speaker A: Coming up in today's episode, Marketing after GPT AI Search zero Click Content and the Future of SEO for me, creating

Speaker B: great content is not a good strategy anymore. I think there was a time when, hey, I created something. This is the greatest resource about this topic. I think that in most sectors that's probably not very useful anymore. And that is because you will get decreasing amounts of traffic to those sorts of things. What we used to call high quality, authoritative, informational, useful content. And we used to tell businesses you need a lot of that on your website. You need to create it, you need to distribute it, you need to earn traffic to it. Anybody can do it, who cares? It's not even table stakes anymore. It's useless. Google can create that inside the Google search result.

Speaker A: That's Rand Fishkin, co founder of SparkToro and one of the most influential voices in modern marketing. From pioneering SEO with Moz to challenging the status quo with Spark Toro, Rand is a true industry legend. Also today, what does the growth of LLMs and Google AI mean to your website traffic?

Speaker B: My weird take on this is it does not matter whether ChatGPT takes market share from Google broadly or perplexity does. It doesn't matter if Google's AI overviews impact click through rate by 3% or 10% or 6%. These things don't actually matter to you. You're listening to this podcast. You are almost certainly doing marketing for a business. Maybe for your business, for your clients, maybe you run it, whatever. What you care about is what your audience does, not what the market does.

Speaker A: Brand makes also a bold bet on the AI impact on the job market.

Speaker B: 50% of white collar jobs in the United States are taken by AI. In less than five years, I will donate $100,000 to the charity of your choice. I don't believe that for a second. I think that is fear mongering. But it's the kind of thing people pay attention to.

Speaker A: That's all ahead on Fixing the Game podcast. Join me on a mission to unveil strategies and HAC turned the tables on the tech giants. They created the rules, ensuring only they can win. It's time to fix the rigged system. Listen, learn, transform your mindset and conquer the digital game. Your winning journey starts now. Welcome to Fixing the Game. Today I'm joined by Rand Fishkin, co founder of SparkToro, author of Lost and founder, and one of the most influential voices in modern marketing. From pioneering SEO with Moz to challenging the status quo with SparkToro, RAN continues to help thousands of people to rethink how they reach audiences and also how they think about marketing. Ran, first of all, welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me, Luke. Good to be here.

Speaker A: I have a personal connection to you. We never met each other, but I've been following you for many years. In 2004, I started working for the first SEO agency in the UK. You and Matt Cutts back then were the two people that everybody followed. And we were all trying to figure out how Google works.

Speaker B: I remember those days. I was very young. You were too.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I've been in this industry for 20 years and I think it's really interesting to see that a lot of the fundamentals have not even changed that much. Like the principles of content and creation, reaching, uh, audiences, doing things properly, avoiding shortcuts, and things like this. That has not really changed much.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a fair point.

Speaker A: And I think you're also one of the kind of voices of reason industry, because I follow your content. You talk a lot about AI, and we will talk about that on this show as well today. Because everybody's expecting Armageddon and big changes in search. You are actually looking at real data, uh, how the search behavior is changing and you have more conservative view on the space, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's fair to say.

Speaker A: I'm interested in the recent work at the SparkToro because I think it's a big shift from SEO to looking at search or just user behavior in general. But I would love to start with collapse of clicks. How do you see the advancements in Google and ChatGPT changing the search behavior, people staying more on platforms? Is this really happening or how do you see it developing?

Speaker B: Since you've been following me for a while, you know that since about 2017, maybe even earlier, I've been researching and talking about the drop in clicks that are available from platforms of all kinds. If you go way back to 2010, 11, 12, in that era, uh, when a lot of digital marketers joined the field, especially in social media marketing, content marketing and SEO, email marketing, all those kinds of things. As the field was exploding, Facebook was driving a lot of traffic. There were reports being published of news publishers in particular, saying, our Facebook traffic is bigger than our Google traffic. Facebook is going to take market share away from Google. Twitter was a huge traffic driver for a long time. Reddit was a big traffic driver. YouTube used to drive traffic. Folks might not remember, but many videos that were posted to YouTube would have the website that was associated with them, um, listed right below in the description. Now, you might Notice that if you include a description in YouTube, YouTube will cut off any URL and make you click. Show more before they'll show you the URL. We didn't have platforms like TikTok back then, but as you might imagine, TikTok and Instagram before it, no link content in the posts, right? Instagram was really the first to say, why don't we create a closed ecosystem where you really can't leave Instagram? When Facebook acquired them and made some iterations, it became the case that you could put a link in your profile and it would open inside an Instagram version of the browser.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: And Instagram still does drive a, uh, teeny tiny amount of traffic. But every one of these platforms, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, the places where Americans spend most of their online time, those platforms used to drive traffic and they no longer do. The Google zero click search situation, which, you know, for people who are in the search field, this current iteration, which I know the media is finally hyping, right? Like finally we're seeing mainstream media cover zero click everything. The rise of zero click search. But we've been writing about it for almost a decade. 2016 I think was the first report that I put out about zero click searches. And I want to say at that time it was about 40% of all searches ended without a click. Then in 2018 I put out a report showing that half of all searches end without a click. So Google essentially has been answering more and more searches. They give instant answers to all these things. Uh, nowadays it's close to 2/3, right? It's a little over 60%. That's when you combine mobile and desktop. Desktop still has a higher click through rate than mobile. No surprise. But is AI responsible for this trend? No, absolutely not. Unless you, like me, believe that AI is essentially just an iterative, um, step up from the machine learning that we've had since the mid, uh, 2000s. The current generation of generative AI and the very spicy autocomplete that Chatgpt and others put together, that is certainly an advanced advancement from the traditional sort of more simplistic and basic machine learning of Google's algorithm in 2008, 9, 10, the machine learning systems that were built to power the algorithms of Facebook and Reddit and Instagram and LinkedIn and YouTube and all the rest over the last decade and a half that drove zero click everything and the platform incentives of Facebook, uh, executives kind of looking around at each other and going, hey, do you guys want to make more money next Quarter. Let's keep everyone here instead of sending them out to other places. They want to get any traffic from anywhere. They have to pay. You got to pay to see that content. All of these algorithmic developments which are based on machine learning and what's now called artificial intelligence, but is really just fancy machine learning. That is all then part of this long iterative journey to uh, reduce the traffic that the big tech platforms send to the rest of the Internet. Yes, the mainstream media is covering it because it's part of the AI hype cycle. No, it's not new and it's not even accelerating way more than it was before. Right. Like the big leaps in time, I think between 2015 and 18 was the biggest leap in zero click searches we've seen with Google, for example.

Speaker A: Well, I have lots of questions about that, so I think we can a little bit unpack it because for the people who are listening, it's really challenging to measure that because I guess maybe that's one of the reasons why. Also you went into SparkToro because you predicted this trend, that we'll be looking at more customer behavior and brand development because actually this kind of dumb measuring clicks to the website is just a fraction of the whole customer journey.

Speaker B: Exactly right. I think that traffic, in a way is a vanity metric. It's not sales. There's this Internet era that's happened for the last 20 years where many companies and marketing professionals said, hey, let's get as much traffic as we can to our website and then once they get to the website, we'll figure out what to do with them. Yes, that's actually a weird way to do marketing. It's quite strange. Right. In the, uh, classic imagining of how marketing worked for the prior hundred, 200 years, your goal wasn't let's get as many visitors to our store as possible. It was let's make sure that when people have the problem that our products solve, they come to our store. That's very different.

Speaker A: On top of that you have brand awareness. Right. Something that people recognize you. Because when you talk about zero click searches, that uh, doesn't mean that people don't recognize your brand afterwards because you help maybe answer a question.

Speaker B: Exactly right. So you're driving down the highway, you see a billboard for, I don't know, a new gas station, you haven't heard of that gas station brand and you think to yourself, who are they? But then you see a few more billboards and maybe you drive by one of those gas stations or uh, maybe a buddy tells you that he went to that gas station and actually the gas was cheap, like it was less expensive than the big guys across the street. And you think to yourself, oh, okay, maybe I'll give it a try. That's all part of brand impression making. And that's exactly the same kind of effect that can happen if you appear frequently in zero click searches or in someone's Facebook feed as they're scrolling, or on someone's LinkedIn feed, or in Reddit comments, or on Instagram, or in YouTube videos and shorts, or on TikToks. All of these places are essentially becoming opportunities for digital brand awareness, brand creation. So that way, when they finally go to Google and say, oh, I need this product, instead of searching for the generic product or searching for one of your competitors, they search for you. If you think about this like, I'm not trying to create a bunch of search demand for audience research software. Well, I am, but I'm trying to create demand for SparkToro. I want people who have a problem of audience research, like they need to know which search and AI tools their audience is using or what YouTube channels are popular with them. I want them to search SparkToro, not audience research software. And the same thing is true for every brand out there, right? I think the weirdest trend that we see right now is all of this concern and fear around zero click search, zero click social, zero click everything. And yet what's happening on the back end, what I see with almost every business that complains about it is traffic is down, but revenue is up. You know what that means, Luke? That means people are still finding you when they need to transact, you're panicking about loss of traffic. But unless you're a publisher and you're monetizing via views, which those people have every right to panic, and they should all be suing the AI companies for stealing their content too. But unless you're a publisher, your goal has not changed. Digital marketing is not less effective for you. It's just that the traffic that used to come to your site early is now coming later. That traffic that wasn't going to convert is figuring out who you are and what you do on other platforms. But then when they're ready to buy, they still come to you.

Speaker A: I think a lot of businesses that we talk to are panicking or because Google has been always one of the main sources of traffic, mainly for the reasons that you also said before, because other platforms locked the users in within their platforms. So naturally it became almost like a blind spot. Right, because they were focusing on um, Google Analytics, which of course also favors giving more results and more emphasis on Google. So people were really blinded by just watching, observing Google Analytics, what's happening in there. And now of course what you said is very important that you have to pay for getting users outside of this platform. And the cost of that has also increased massively. If you remember in 2005 or 10 you were able to a hundred dollars, thousands of revenue with buying cheap clicks. And now that's gone. I mean clicks are so expensive. So that business is completely gone. And I think that's why probably people are panicking because they're thinking, okay, where am I going to get this traffic from? And because that's what they've been used to.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that the uh, the weird part of this is if you were a marketer in 1965, you know exactly what to do. The problem is if you were a marketer who really learned it between sort of 2005 and 2015, that brief time period where you could siphon organic, that's the thing that's ending. It's just that the system became much more in a way fair and distributed for a brief period of time.

Speaker A: I think a, ah, lot of businesses that I talk to ah, are stuck because they're like, okay, what shall we do? Normal marketing, of course, it's a huge investment. What I tell them normally is to focus on fundamentals. How do you think about it?

Speaker B: Yeah, for me creating great content is not a good strategy anymore. I think there was a time when, hey, I created something. This is the greatest resource about this topic. I think that in most sectors that's probably not very useful anymore. And that is because you will get decreasing amounts of traffic to those sorts of things. Now if you told me this is the most creative, novel and weird resource on this topic, you're not going to find anything like this. This is crazy. A lot of people are not going to like it, but a few people are going to really love it. Now you're onto something that is the only way to stand out in a world where AI can create good content. What we used to call high quality, authoritative, informational, useful content. And uh, we used to tell businesses you need a lot of that on your website. You need to create it, you need to distribute it, you need to earn traffic to it. Anybody can do it, who cares? It's not even table stakes anymore. It's useless. Google can create that inside the Google search result. LinkedIn can create that inside LinkedIn's platform. You don't need to push that stuff. I want to see the weird, I want to see the creative, I want to see the, you know, we turned the problem that we solved into a messed up version of Macbeth.

Speaker A: Do you have examples of content that you created that fall into that category?

Speaker B: For us, the big thing that stands out is what you might call spicy opinions. Hot takes unconventional thinking. That's what gets us most of our traffic and attention. To the point. I did a deep dive research, I think two weekends ago, published something last week that was essentially a takedown of the idea that AI is going to take anyone's job. Yeah. After I published this piece, I had a brief conversation with Ross Hudgens and Ross said, hey, a lot of people are worried about this. And I said, look, if, if the um, anthropic CEO is correct and 50% of white collar jobs in the United States are taken by AI in less than five years, I will donate a hundred thousand dollars to the charity of your choice. I don't believe that for a second. I think that is fear mongering, but it's the kind of thing people pay attention to. It's not, hey, here's a resource on how you can protect your job by learning AI. Everybody has that. This is boring, it's useless, it's not going to get any attention. But here's a spicy takedown of all these high powered CEOs who are just using fear to try and sell you their product. That's something people might read. And in fact I didn't even submit it. It was on top of Hacker News last week.

Speaker A: Mhm. Where do you publish? Because you're active on LinkedIn and as SparkToro, you publish the same content or similar content on your blog or what are your outlets.

Speaker B: So the blog is still a primary home. Because the goal, Right. The way I think of any publishing type of goal is you should have a home base where you put the authoritative initial version of your content. You might get some traffic to that. But really the reason it exists is because if someone likes the content when they see it on LinkedIn, on Reddit, on Facebook, on Hacker News, on YouTube, via this podcast, whoever, there's one central place where they can go to always get it. So if you're someone who's a fan of this style of thinking, and I want to follow this person, Rand and Amanda, basically, uh, more and I want to hear what they have to say, the blog is a good place to subscribe to. And that's how I would urge anybody who's in B2B and a lot of B2C marketing to think about their publishing as well. Your blog or your website is your home base, is where you put all the stuff that then you're distributing through all these other channels. You don't expect to get traffic from it. You expect that a very tiny sliver of your most loyal fans will go there and follow it and you can use it to distribute to all the places where your audience pays attention.

Speaker A: And, uh, do you invest in paid media or do you push out this type of content? Or is it primarily organic and inbound?

Speaker B: We are exclusively organic and inbound right now. We did try some paid marketing in Q1 of this year. Not a big campaign, probably less than $15,000 total spend. Didn't have success with it. To your point. Clicks are so expensive. We were able to drive a few hundred people to the site, but we had very few conversions and wasn't successful for us. So investing in organic has been very successful for us.

Speaker A: I think you know this very well. When I listen to this, it's like a repetition of what you've done with Moz. Just maybe the rules are slightly different. Your way of marketing is through publishing, right? You are building a media company first or as part of your successful growth engine. This kind of media is very important, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. I think the type of media has changed. The distribution philosophy behind it has changed. But the idea of we create things that people will want to pay attention to in order to earn their attention and then their trust and get them to take a look at our product, that philosophy is still the same.

Speaker A: So what's the kind of initial touch point with the product? Of course, if you think of like, things like product LED growth, how does this integrate with your publishing efforts?

Speaker B: I have this philosophy that I've touted for a long time that the best way to sell something is not to sell anything. Just turn the awareness, trust and consideration of your audience and then they'll find you. And so essentially, we don't sell very much on our webinars. We don't sell at our conference. We don't sell on the blog very much. There are blog posts you can find that are like, hey, here's how to do this thing in SparkToro. So if you subscribe to the blog for some of those spicy opinions or whatever, and then you happen to see that in your feed, maybe that'll send you over to the product. But the way we make it easy is the product is as a free version, like a forever free version that you can use all you need is an email address to sign up. We basically rely on the fact that if you've heard about SparkToro and you like the stuff you hear from Rand and Amanda, uh, at some point you might be interested to check out the free version of the product. And if that free version solves a problem for you and you go, gosh, I like this, but I want more, then you pay, right?

Speaker A: Amazing. I had Talia, uh, Wolf on my podcast and I saw your post. She's a big fan of your tool and your work because she told me, hey, we use sparktor all time and we can't live without.

Speaker B: I've seen a lot of people, especially in conversion rate optimization world, which was not a traditional sort of practice that we thought SparkToro helped with. But then I saw Talia's, obviously brilliant, and she uses SparkToro in a lot of interesting ways. But a bunch of people in CRO have started using SparkToro essentially just to get the export. So they like, come to the product and then they export the CSV of all their audiences, behaviors and demographics so that they can upload it to an AI, upload it to ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, and then they'll ask, they almost interview the behaviors and demographics to craft a landing page or get a bunch of messaging ideas, get a bunch of content ideas, like whatever it is, usually for their clients. Most of them tend to be consultants and agencies. But yeah, there's an organic spread here too. Philosophy, right, Luke? And this is something again, I would tell every brand who's considering this. In that old era where you could drive a lot of traffic through publishing and create good content and all that kind of stuff. In that era, you didn't have to worry so much about the viral loop, but now you really need to worry about the viral loop. We need to make sure, for example, that if one person, if Talia tries out our product and she doesn't get value from it and she doesn't like it and she's not into it, that's the end, right? Like, it doesn't go any further even if she likes it and gets value from it. But there's nothing worth sharing in there. If you want to penetrate a market and create the viral loop because traffic is so hard to come by now, you need to make sure that when people try your product, they want to share it. What is it that makes Talia talk about Spark first? Especially different, Luke, because a year ago, two years ago, even though Talia and I are friends, uh, I never Heard her talk about SparkToro. But the new version came out and the new version is much more visual. The graphs are prettier, it's more modern looking. The data behind is pretty similar, but the graphs are so shareable. I see people posting them on, um, LinkedIn and on Blue sky and on threads and I'm like, hey, this is going somewhere. And I can see since the launch that more people are using the product and trying the product. If you make that viral cycle easier, you really improve the opportunity that you can get, even from a small group of people visiting the actual website.

Speaker A: The moment when I think of like lots of B2B companies, that's not where they focus on, they focus on, uh, lead generation, right? Buying emails or buying leads and things like that. What's your view on it? Or you're naturally skewed towards organic content because that's what you know. Or you're skeptical about the other channels. How do you see it?

Speaker B: Some of those channels can work. I've definitely seen businesses be built successfully using, I don't want to say cold outreach, but lukewarm outreach, not very warm outreach. It can work if you know exactly, hey, our software is only good for people with exactly this job title at these 5,000 businesses around the planet. That's kind of it. That's our whole market. So our job is essentially to get intros to every single one of those 5,000 people at those 5,000 companies. And we treat everyone in this sort of very customized way. Great. Fantastic, right? That audience research might be valuable for you in terms of messaging, might be valuable in terms of which channels that you pick to build your brand on, but really it's going to be that outreach that seals the deal no problem. But I would say that is quite rare. And one of the things I do worry about, and I've seen a lot of companies, especially B2B SaaS, even B2B to see, like businesses that serve consumer businesses with physical product and services. Those types of companies often underestimate the degree to which brand recognition and trust turn into far more successful early conversations. Far more likely to open your email, far more likely to reply, far more likely to schedule that demo. So even if you're doing that very one to one selling, which I think people for a while were calling account based marketing, like Admiral, some people still call it that. If you're doing that type of relationship focused marketing would still tell you if you can get that audience of those 5,000 people at those 5,000 companies to know your brand before you send the first email to have an association in their brain, especially a positive one. Right. Oh, yeah, I know this company. I've heard of them before. Everything gets easier.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, it's not one or the other. It's just, my God, brand is such a leverage point. It's such a friction remover.

Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, and, um, can you talk about kind of audience research? Even sparktoria is not available everywhere. But maybe we can talk about principles around audience research. Because I think when I talk to many B2B companies and I ask them for their ideal customer profile. What's your icp? A lot of companies really don't know who they sell to. SparkToro is, like, super advanced for people who maybe are already quite deep into understanding their audience. And it adds another layer of understanding. But if you scale back, can you talk about fundamentals of understanding your ideal, uh, customer profile? And how do you think about that? And where does Parktoro fit into this?

Speaker B: Yeah. Audience research, at its core is understanding people's behaviors and demographics so you can make better products for them and so that you can market and sell those products better to them. And that applies to every kind of audience and every kind of product. You could be a nonprofit that's trying to raise money. You could be a, uh, politician who's trying to win votes. All the principles. Right. Work the same. It's essentially, I need to understand this group of people. I want to know their preferences. What do they like, what do they not like, where do they live, who are they generally, how much money do they make, what kind of jobs do they have, what are their big problems in life, and how do they experience those problems? And then you can do a lot of wonderful things for them. Right. As an example, I love physical technology, home products that really solve a problem. There's a great story about, like, James Dyson, the guy who made the vacuum cleaner. And of course, this was a super closed world. Like, nobody come out with a popular new vacuum cleaner brand in 50 years plus. And Dyson essentially was observing and learning from hundreds of home customers. Right. People who were using their vacuum cleaners. What are they trying to do with it? Which is not just standard cleaning on standard carpets. Right. There's tons of different flooring materials and the classic vacuum. So work on all these places. So it's going into those homes and observing and watching. If I remember correctly, there were something on the order of 400, 500 versions of the vacuum cleaner that he made before he ever launched one. It's this constant product iteration using audience Research, Right. Because he knows the problem that needs to be solved. Because he's observed what's really going on and he knows his audience and customer. If I can solve this problem better than everyone else and make a vacuum cleaner that does this job for these people, I will sell a lot of units of, uh, it. And that is audience research. Just as much as I have a B2B software company in 2025 and I'm trying to sell to graphic designers in California to adopt my new tech instead of Figma's. And I need to figure out which YouTube channels I should advertise on and which podcasts I should try and pitch and which events I should be at and what keywords I should target in Google. Same principle for a different purpose, but same principle. That's audience research. SparkToro is essentially behaviors and demographics of a describable group of online humans in the us, UK or Canada. If you're targeting graphic designers in California, parktoro can tell you a bunch of information about them. Uh, demographic information, what are their job titles and roles, how much money do they generally earn, what words and phrases they use to describe themselves, where you can find them on the Internet, which search and AI tools they use, which social networks they're on, to what degree, which YouTube channels, like all that kind of stuff. You could use that somewhat for product, but uh, most of that is useful for the marketing use case. I would strongly urge you not to limit your thinking in audience research around purely marketing. It should inform product too. I can't tell you what a big difference like we were talking about earlier. Product removes friction from marketing. The more discussion worthy the product is, the more it makes emotional sense for someone who uses your product to go share it with somebody else and talk about it to someone else, the easier all your marketing is. And so doing that audience research to figure out like, why would this resonate with my customers more? Why are they using these other solutions? What's the real problem they're having? Honestly, I, as much as I'm a marketer and talk about marketing, and I know you do too, Luke, it's 70. 30, right? 70% of your marketing is going to come from how good your product is and how much it makes people share and talk about it, and 30% is going to come from all the other things that I can possibly help you with, or SparkToro can help you with, or my content can help you with.

Speaker A: I totally agree. And uh, that's why when I talk to clients, often the first conversations are really about the product and I buy their product as well if I can, if that makes sense. When we onboard the client, first thing is go to their website, I order the product and then if it's good and something I would use and I can imagine other people getting value from, then that uh, makes sense for marketing work. Otherwise it's really difficult to sell something that you don't even believe yourself in. I can't not ask you about SEO and the future of SEO. So I think we have a few minutes left. Maybe you can give us an outlook of how you see the search changing and also how do you see the role of uh, ChatGPT and similar tools that provide more answers or discussions. Is that a threat to Google? Where do you see cracks? Also in Google system? I'd love you just speak openly about outlook or how do you see that developing?

Speaker B: Okay, my weird take on this is it does not matter whether ChatGPT takes market share from Google broadly or perplexity does. It doesn't matter if Google's AI overviews impact click through rate by 3% or 10% or 6%. These things don't actually matter to you. If you're listening to this podcast, you are almost certainly doing marketing for a business. Maybe for your business, for your clients, maybe you run it, whatever. What you care about is what your audience does, not what the market does. And so I worry a lot when we get overly obsessed, right? If you're me and you have to talk and think about this stuff and get on stages and do presentations and you producing research and data, like I have a reason why I care about the macroeconomic situation of what ChatGPT and Google and AI and all that is doing. But you don't care. What you care about is, are my customers and um, my potential customers, are they actually using Pinterest more than they're using AI tools? And I totally ignored Pinterest. I should really do some Pinterest marketing and Pinterest SEO that is way more common than you think. The same thing is true of Reddit and it's true of YouTube and it's true of TikTok and it's true of Instagram and LinkedIn and Facebook. And if you're ignoring those platforms but investing in, hey, how do we appear in AI answers? You might be caught in a hype cycle, right? You might be driven by media hype rather than real customer behavior. So my advice is again, you should know your audience. Maybe your audience is super weird and they're really on the cutting edge and they're downloading their own Deep Seq models to their own machines, and that's what they're using. And, oh, wait a minute. What powers the Deep Seq model? How do I get into those? What are the steps that matter? How are they building their index? Okay, you should go down that rabbit hole. Uh, and maybe you should look at the data and go, whoa, wait a minute. They're using Reddit like a hundred times more than they're using any AI tool. Why am I not participating in Reddit? Our brand can't even be thinking found on all the subreddits where the conversations are happening. That should be our priority. We need to find a marketer who can help us with Reddit. Great. Do the thing that matters to your audience. Don't do the thing that's popular in your LinkedIn feed.

Speaker A: I think that's brilliant. Uh, I also think people can, even without tools like SparkToro, even if you don't have access, can still run experiments. Right?

Speaker B: You can do things like surveys and interviews, which are not always great for finding how did you learn about us? But they can be relatively good for asking people, Tell me which platforms you load up, what do you read on a regular basis? What do you watch? What do you listen to? Who do you listen to? And then you can also go to these platforms, right? Just do a little cursory investigation. Take the top 15 platforms where you think it's remotely possible your audience could be there. Then go look for the number of discussions and the number of subscribers to all those subreddits and YouTube channels and Instagram feeds and LinkedIn folks, and then put it into a little spreadsheet and go, oh, gosh, you know what? These people with this job title, they're really heavily on YouTube and Reddit and LinkedIn and are they using AI tools? We found some evidence that they're asking questions to AI. Uh, it seems like these ones are popular. Let's go invest in some PR efforts that can get us into these AI models. Are we seeing some lift from that over the next six months? Hey, we are. Okay, looks like that's worthwhile.

Speaker A: The final question I have for you, what are the things that, if you go back 20 years, what you were telling marketeers, uh, back then, are there any fundamental things that have not changed at all? Exactly the same what you were saying 20 years ago, you could say right

Speaker B: now, on the principles, yes, like very high level principles, but on the tactics. So as an example, 20 years ago, what was that, 2005? I was telling people that it was very important to do keyword research to figure out what words and phrases your audience was searching for in Google so that you could make content for targeting those things. It is still somewhat important to know the words and phrases that your audience is searching for in Google so that you can create content that speaks the same language. Ranking for those things is probably less valuable and important now, but knowing what it is that still matters. Keyword research is the first form of audience research I ever did. That was like my start in audience research. Can it still be valuable to some people? Yes. I think the other thing, in 2005 it was really valuable to know and understand how Google's algorithm worked. That really gave you a huge competitive advantage. And today it uh, m really pays to understand the algorithms, the ranking systems, the visibility systems that drive whatever platforms your audience is using. That could be Google, still could be Bing and DuckDuckGo and like other traditional search engines, could be ChatGPT and Perplexity and Gemini, could be LinkedIn, could be Reddit, could be YouTube, could be Twitter. Understanding how those algorithms work, right, why they reduce the visibility of posts that contain links, why they love short form video. Learn the systems, learn the algorithms of the platforms that your audience is using. That's as valuable or more valuable today than it was 20 years ago.

Speaker A: Iran, thank you so much. You're an absolute legend in, um, the industry. I know the best people in industry. They all follow you and read your content. You impact a lot of people. I want to just thank you, um, on behalf of everybody who learns from your work because I think, uh, it's super nice. Thank you for your work and thanks for doing this today.

Speaker B: Yeah, my pleasure, Luke. Thank you for having me.

Speaker A: That brings us to the end of today's show. My thanks to Rand Fishkin. To find out more about what and what we do, go to our website, wot.dega and if the topics resonate with you, download my book of hacks which contains ready made recipes for growth that I've collected in my own client work at what and picked up from conversations with my guests on this podcast. You can find it on WOT Digital. Remember to subscribe and to look out for the next episode. You will find it wherever you get your podcast. That's all for now. Goodbye, Sam.