#101: AI search uncovered: how to get your SaaS brand cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini

Speaker A: Hey, this is Ryan from RocketSAS, and you're listening to the SaaS Marketing Weekly

Speaker B: podcast, the show that gives you actionable

Speaker A: marketing strategies and campaign ideas to rocket your SaaS business. And if you want even more SaaS marketing ideas, go to SaaSMarketingWeekly.com to join my free newsletter.

Speaker B: Hello, and welcome Back to the SaaS Marketing Weekly podcast with me, your host, Ryan, the founder of RocketSAS. And today I am back in the studio. Hello, Daisy. Welcome to the show. Uh, so Daisy has recently joined RocketSAS as our head of SEO and AI search. I'm really, really excited for you to join. Already got into some really exciting stuff

Speaker A: for ourselves and our clients.

Speaker B: But today we are talking all about AI Search, sometimes called aeo, sometimes called geo, uh, sometimes called whatever you want to call it. Something else, I'm sure. Um, it's funny that it doesn't seem to have been the correct term. It hasn't seemed to have been coined yet.

Speaker C: Yeah, well, I mean, I think for the sort of first half of last year, SEOs were just arguing amongst themselves about what it should be called.

Speaker B: What are we calling it now?

Speaker C: Well, I just call it AI Search, but I don't really mind. It's all the same thing to me. You know, it means.

Speaker B: It means the same thing. Yeah, I mean, I call it AI Search just because it's the most, uh,

Speaker C: you know, it's pros of the tongue.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, but I've heard it used to be Geo, then it's aeo. Ah. But anyway, it doesn't matter what it's called. Let's talk about what is it? Or everyone knows what it is. But this episode is talking about, what's the difference between it. Well, how do you get, uh, uh, not ranked, but how do you get appeared? Most people will really complain about, you know, I'm searching for my terms. My product should be coming up in ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini, but our competitors coming up. We're not coming up. Everyone's aware that this is the new kind of hunting ground for search. Um, and if you're not appearing, then it's a big problem. Most people are noticing that their SEO is declining. The traffic that they're getting organically from Google is declining. Everyone knows why. It's because people are moving off of Google and people are starting to use LLMs. Even my mum told me the other day that she's using ChatGPT rather than. Rather than Google. So we're all at it. So the question is like, you know, before we get into like how do you actually get seen by these LLMs? Let's talk about the kind of the psychology of search, which I found really interesting is that Google is kind of used for like, I want this thing to be done or I need this tool, help me find it, basically bottom of the funnel. Yeah, it's like I've figured out what I want and now I use Google to give me, to point me in the direction of the thing that I want to buy or. Whereas now, Uh, searching on LLMs is coming higher up the funnel or earlier in the buying journey is probably a better way to describe it. But people uh, basically searching when they've got a problem, where people used to try and figure out problems themselves, maybe watch some YouTube videos or whatever, but now they're like, no, no, I've got a problem, just help me figure out. I can't be bothered to think anymore. So is that a good way of looking at it? Like the kind of psychology of the difference between.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think so. There's actually quite a lot of research that shows, um, well, for starters, 95% of B2B buyers are now using LLMs as part of the journey.

Speaker B: 95%, wow.

Speaker C: Yeah. And um, sort of typically they're maybe going into the LLM M and actually getting a short list of vendors they might want to go and sort of speak to. So if you're not in the search results there, then you're potentially not in the short list. And then thereafter they're sort of going to Google to actually potentially verify some of this information as well. So yeah, I think Google's maybe sort of shifting in terms of where it maybe was in the buyer journey. And people are now going to LLMs first because they can for starters add a lot more constraints to their queries. So really sort of target like, like niche aspects rather than um, having a much more sort of short tail.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, yeah, we all do it. Like you type paragraphs into LLM. I've never typed a paragraph into Google. I've been googling for 20 years. Uh, and the longest thing I've ever put into Google has been like a

Speaker C: short sentence pretty much.

Speaker B: So that changes things massively. Um, but yeah, let's get into how do we actually rank. So for the people that are listening to the show, watching the show, like I presume most of them will know the basics of like, of SEO in terms of how do you rank for SEO, which to give my kind of overview, it's usually three things. I mean you're the expert, but the way that I've always seen it is that there's really three things for SEO, which is having on page, good on page content with good keywords, like the header tags, M, the name of the URLs, the actual words on the website of all the keywords in there. And then you've got content creation, regularly creating thoughts, leadership and blogs and things like that. And then there's the backlinks, which is other websites linking to you. That's my summary of SEO and how that that works. Um, you can correct me if there's things that I've missed there, but other than that, like what's. What's the difference with AEO or AI search? Is it the same stuff? Is it similar but different? Tell me what you think.

Speaker C: It's definitely different. Like, I think it's um, There are some aspects that crossover definitely. But I think sort of the fundamentals of a, ah, very different to uh, SEO. Um, so for starters, I think it matters so much more now than ever about getting really clear on your messaging and sort of where your brand sits in the market and how you're different.

Speaker B: Good. Because, I mean, I talk about this podcast all the time, how most P2B SaaS companies have such terrible messaging. It's like a load of buzzwords.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: So if your website is, oh, we supercharge and turbo power your fin. Your finance company, like when people are learning they're not using those stupid words, so stop using them.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um, and you know, that really actually comes from the top. It's not a sort of SEO's job to help define that. Yes, they can help you appear, but I think if you don't have clear. If you're not clear on your messaging that you can distribute across your content, then you're not going to be like perceived in LLMs the way you want to be. So it definitely starts there. And then I think it's about taking that message and then making sure it's delivered consistently across your entire marketing strategy. So from what you have on your domain, um, and you know, building those relevant funnel pages, um, that will position your product correctly, potentially get you a citation, um, and then also actually organically help drive when someone else is sort of writing about you. They say the correct things, um, because they've found the information on, say, your pages. So I think that is really important.

Speaker B: So it's more so a real emphasis on creating really strong content about the product itself, but not just on your website.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: But trying to get it on as many other Websites as possible.

Speaker C: Exactly. So yeah, um, there's a bit of research that says it's actually over 80% of uh, appearing uh, in LLMs is potentially third party websites. So that's off your domain. Some of these are uh, potentially um, not websites you would have traditionally reach out to for um, the old way of searching. Um, because of the nature of LLMs, they're a lot more volatile than um, Google. So you might not necessarily get the same answer time, ah, and time again. Exactly. Word for word, even if you type the same query in.

Speaker B: Well let's talk about where it should be, uh, where your content is going to do the hard work for showing up in the LLMs. So I remember relatively recently like maybe, I don't know, six months ago or maybe a year ago, everyone's talking about Reddit, that you have to be on Reddit because that's where the LLM search. And then I've heard that's kind of actually tailed back a little bit now. Yeah, I mean do we even know? I mean because I know when Google do big updates they literally tell you these things. Do OpenAI actually publish anything to say this is where we're taking our ah, citations from?

Speaker C: Um, no, no. Um, there's research that's been done by other sort of third parties. Um, kind of, you know all of the new uh, AI tracking tools on the scene do their own, publish their own research. You can go and sort of look at that. Um, I guess what's really interesting when it comes to AI search is that the different LLMs and platforms, they each have a kind of um, preference towards what they cite. So for example in AI overviews, YouTube has been found to be highly, highly cited source.

Speaker B: Um, so in terms of like YouTube, you said that that has a real big impact on the LLMs citing. Uh, you. So I know that YouTube itself has got its own kind of internal version of SEO. You've got the titles, you've got the description, there's got to have all the right keywords in there. You can upload the transcript of the video into YouTube. I presume that that's what AI is, is reading. Um, and then the same can be said about things like this podcasts. So when a podcast gets released, um, then the transcript of the podcast can get uploaded to websites. If the podcast is um, posted in other uh, podcast directories, they will upload the transcript and LLMs are just soaking up all this information. Essentially the way that I look at it is that the LLMs are looking for more problem solving, thought Leadership, educational, helpful stuff because that's what a lot of people are searching on LLMs is help me solve this problem rather than I'm looking for this platform which is the best one to buy.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think as well it's more specific than maybe what they have in their training data. So an LLM for example doesn't have lived experience, it can't provide that. So I think that's where a lot of these sources are um, coming in um, and are more important than they maybe were before in traditional search. Um, yeah. I think it's also interesting to think about how the LLM might think the user might want to receive a certain format of content. So for some queries LLMs might trigger just sending you a YouTube video that you might want to watch instead. So yeah, I think it's interesting how they recommend different formats for different queries and um, for one query they might just sort of parse a um, like web page. Whereas for one it might bring up like a video or sort of reference. Something that was said in a podcast.

Speaker B: Yeah, so I think there's more emphasis than ever to get your content on your website obviously or your domain as you call it, but then also in other channels as well. So YouTube podcasts, uh, press mentions as well. Um, and just becoming a thought leader that is you working hard to get your content out there but also your content being so good that other publications are wanting to publish it.

Speaker C: Yeah, definitely. I think as well with regards to content there's been sort of a lot of research done that says they also like to cite like data so having kind of original data points that you can bring in that again um, the LLM wouldn't necessarily know outside of um, their training data which that's would lead them to go to retrieval augmented generation which is where they go out and um, fetch information from a live web page. Um, so yeah a lot of companies are now sort of focusing on like how they can release these um, new information um, and sort of proprietary data research reports um, across their domain.

Speaker B: Yeah, I've noticed that when you, when you search in LLMs, like if you search for rocketsas it comes up with all these numbers and facts about our revenue and growth and how many leads we've got. It does seem to like facts and stats and numbers. Um, and what about the good old faq, ah, section of a site? Now I've heard a lot of people, a lot of experts say that an FAQ section is really important because an FAQ is literally asking questions, often long tail questions and then the answer is often long helpful paragraphs, uh, as opposed to normal website content which is a bit more short and long, snappy. So an FAQ just feeds in nicely to what an LLM likes. So do you agree with that? Is that a good approach that? Is it every single page or just some.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think this has become maybe a bit of a hack I suppose when it comes to LLMs. Um, yeah, I think it can definitely be useful but I wouldn't maybe do it to death, like to the detriment of the user of the page. Um, and make sure that they are actually genuinely helpful FAQs that potentially aren't being answered anywhere else. Um, because otherwise you're just going to have be potentially answering FAQs that are just answered by loads of other websites and domains and compete for that. I think leaning with more being really specific when it comes to that is important.

Speaker B: And what would you say about uh, like I guess it's, it's, you know, it's obviously very closely aligned to SEO in terms of, with SEO you have to try and predict what other people typing into Google, what keywords, key phrases are they using to find my brand. And that's relatively straightforward exercise for most companies because there's so few words, it's usually just like you know, three, four, five different words. But I guess with LLMs you need to zoom out or zoom earlier along in the buying journey to be like, okay, what long tail questions, paragraphs are people going to be entering into LLM that could lead them down the path of us being the right solution for them? Is that the right approach to take?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Like I think um, so for example at Cognizant we really focused on how we could create content that was more specific to the European market that um, aligned with our positioning. Ah, so Cognizant really wanted to be known for being like the best data provider in Europe. And um, so as a tactic we went out and sort of created a lot of uh, content that was like relevant to that. So specific pages around the best data providers in Germany or in EMEA. And those pages generally worked very well across LLMs actually. And um, I think they contributed towards Cognizant being positioned in that way. And we could see that they were often sort of very heavily cited. If you typed in um, a more specific and constrained query around what is the best data provider in Europe, um, you could see that they would often pull those pages through uh, when they went out to citation. So yeah, I think just again really focusing on how you can um, distill your core messages across your domain and then of course working off your domain as well to do that.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I like the direction it's going. I'm a bit cautious as to kind of where it's going, but I think in essence I think it's right in terms of it's basically rewarding thought leadership. It's rewarding brands that create helpful educational, problem solving content. Um, and that's how I see a lot of brands winning anyway, like regardless of this, uh, aeo, uh, and how you, how you get it, how you get yourself cited. Um, because for example, like my business, that's what we've always done. If you were to ask me like, what is the essence of why rocketstaz has scaled so fast? It is because of all the educational top of funnel content that we create. We genuinely create content. Just genuinely trying to help people. Like this podcast right now, just generally trying to, genuinely trying to help people to understand marketing better, understand SaaS growth more, how to scale a SaaS business, how to do better marketing campaigns. We create all of that content in the form of podcast newsletters, videos, blogs, guides, LinkedIn posts. Uh, and that's just getting our content and our words out there. Uh, and it's great to hear that we're going to hopefully be rewarded with these LLMs by finding and picking up on all of that helpful problem solving content that we're creating. And that is the way that I believe that all businesses should, that's what they should be doing. They should be leading by helping.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: And then you will reap the revenue rewards downstream from that. Huh. So, so I do hope that the LLMs is going down direction rather than just like who can.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think so. That I think there will be a kind of reckoning at some point as well. Because it's so easy to produce content these days with. Well, with LLMs, you know, there's obviously a lot of websites that have sort of gone down the route of producing AI slot that has no kind of original value to bring to the table. And I think eventually, uh, obviously Google is getting better at kind of recognizing that, but also I think LLMs will get better at recognizing that and the um, sort of really thoughtful original content will be rewarded.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean that's, that's the way it kind of has to go and I'm always happy when that does come in. Um, so yeah, I think when you're creating AI slop, you are just kind of repurposing stuff that's Already there? Yeah, it's already been out there in one form or another. Um, ah, and I just, obviously there's so many businesses that are trying to take those shortcuts. Like every time a shortcut exists in business, like, particularly in marketing, it's almost a good thing for the businesses that are not going to take those shortcuts and they're going to do things properly like my business does, because we know that so many of our competitors are going to try and take those shortcuts, uh, and we're not. And we're going to focus on creating genuinely helpful, decent content, like this podcast, for example. Um, and then we just have to hope that the LLMs kind of catch all the shortcuts and start punishing them and start really valuing and rewarding, um, the real kind of genuine content, which is what Google and OpenAI are trying to do. They're trying to create a better kind of society around this stuff so that the best content gets surfaced, not the people that kind of have the quickest hack to get there. So I think the message is something that I've kind of been banging on about for a long time is the quality of genuine real thought leadership content rather than just kind of AI slopping and trying to hack things. So it sounds like there's not even too many. You know, I would have loved you to come onto this show and been like, okay, to get to rank on, um, LLMs, you need to do, go post here, go on Reddit and do these posts and go on these list of calls.

Speaker C: Because with Reddit you can't. It's not really very like hackable in that respect. The moderators, you'll just get kicked out if you come on there. And so I think if anyone's sort of pushing a Reddit strategy, um, I would approach them with caution. But there's definitely value in the third party piece. Getting brand mentions off your website like that is definitely a proven tactic that does work.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, agreed. And yeah, and obviously you can put budget into it in terms of using ads to get seen and investing in PR to get your content out there in other areas. And um, yeah, no, it makes perfect sense. I think it's more of a natural way of scaling a business with great marketing. And if you do it that way, then the LLMs will pick up. But you do need an engine, you need a content creation engine. Uh, that's the biggest challenge that a lot of small businesses have is that they're just not creating enough content in a rhythm. Yeah, like that's something that I always talk about is content isn't really about that one amazing campaign that you did last quarter.

Speaker C: Consistency built up over time.

Speaker B: It's consistency built up over time. So this podcast, we're nearly on episode 100 by the time this gets released. It might actually be beyond 100. I'm not sure what number this one's going to be. Um, which means, and it's weekly, meaning we've done it for two years. Uh, and then every single podcast episode we repurpose. So this podcast has been released on a weekly basis. There's been a weekly newsletter off the back of it, a weekly blog, daily LinkedIn posts being repurposed into a monthly webinar. Ah, uh, and just constant content going out. Um, and it's all about getting in that rhythm. And, and then it's great that you get the AI search rewards afterwards as well. So, yeah, I wouldn't say, I think for the listeners really, it's not about the latest hack and the latest. Where things should be posted. It's about creating really genuine thought leadership content that is different to the other kind of AI slop and competitors that are putting it out there. Um, and ensuring it's getting distributed and repurposed in multiple formats. Thinking, I probably say thinking earlier, uh, on in the buying journey, like, what are people? What problems are people, what's on their mind, what's keeping up at night, Creating content about that, rather than just creating content at the bottom of the funnel of. This is our platform, this is what it does.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think you can, yeah, really sort of focus on that job, jobs to be done, um, content. And, um, as part of your middle to bottom of funnel play, you know, you can really position your brand as like, okay, this, it helps with this kind of thing when someone has got an issue and they're sort of typing like, ah, how can I resolve this, like, faster kind of thing. Um, so, yeah, I think that's definitely an angle as well.

Speaker B: Awesome. All right, well, thank you so much for coming onto the show. It's great to have you here.

Speaker C: Thank you for having me.

Speaker B: I'm sure we'll have you back at some point soon. And welcome to rocketsas.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for listening and watching to the SaaS Marketing Weekly podcast. And I will see you next week.

Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the SaaS Marketing Weekly podcast. Now, if you are a founder or a marketer of a B2B SaaS business and you are struggling to generate leads, you should check out my demand generation agency rocketsas for roughly the same price as hiring one in house marketer. You will get a full team of marketing experts to create you a demand generation strategy and execute on content, ads, lead magnets and website optimization all designed to scale your SaaS business and generate you inbound leads. To find out more please go to Rocket SaaS IO where you can apply for a free SaaS marketing strategy. Call with me.