Why Brands Are Losing Google Traffic: How AI Search Is Changing SEO and AEO

Linda: Some brands are watching their Google traffic drop by half, not because they got worse, it's because it's the way people search today, and most companies haven't really caught up. So my guest today built her business around this exact shift. So stick around because we'll be covering how to optimize for the new Google. Welcome back to the show.

I'm Linda Fanaras. My guest today is Jenna Hannon. She's the founder and CEO of Hatter. They are an AI search agency that helps brands get found first in Google and in AI answers.

She was the first marketing hire at Uber Eats and has worked as a fractional CMO from Multisensor AI, Form Kitchens. Hi Jenna, welcome. It's great to have you here. I'm excited to dive into this topic.

It keeps coming up and I think people are really confused, so today we'll be able to clear up a few things. Jenna: Thanks, Linda. Glad to be here. Linda: Yeah, great.

So let's get started. Some brands are seeing Google traffic drop by up to 50%. So is that real and what's actually driving that? Jenna: Yes, it is real.

So we're seeing it across the board with clients. We're seeing both impressions drop significantly and actual traffic to your website. And what's been impacting that is AI. So if you've been on Google lately, you've probably noticed that more of the real estate in Google has been taken up by AI overviews, which means that all of the listings are being pushed down, which is going to impact both your impressions in Google search and your click-through, which is traffic.

Linda: A lot of agencies today claim that they do AEO, and you said most of them are just SEO agencies with a new label. Can you explain to the audience what the real difference is and what do they have to do to really be providing AEO? Jenna: Yes, absolutely. So we are actually an AEO native agency.

So we started a couple years ago during the shift. We weren't an SEO agency before that, but most agencies in the space are SEO agencies that have now rebranded to doing AEO or answer engine optimization, which is helping you show up in AI. It is slightly a different game. So when we do an audit, we will see that brands that have been dominant in SEO for years are now not showing up compared to their competitors in AI search.

So the strategy of how you show up is different. And let me say a few concrete things of what these SEO agencies were doing in the past. So a lot of SEO agencies were doing website technicals. So a lot of the package that you're buying from an SEO agency is they're going to come on my website, they're going to do the technicals, they're going to do on-page optimizations.

A lot of those best practices no longer app, especially when it comes to website technicals. Of course, your website still needs to load and there's still the basics, but most of AI search is about content. And so the content on your website is what's being picked up. It's what is training the LLMs and that is now what's being cited in AI answers.

So that changes your SEO strategy fundamentally. If your package from your agency is all about website technicals and on-page optimization, that's actually not going to work towards AI search. So you want an agency that knows how to build a strategy and the tactics towards AI search, not SEO. Linda: Right.

That's a great point. So what would be a couple of those tactics? Jenna: Yeah, on the AI search side. So as I mentioned around content, so what we see in the data is when we do an AI visibility audit, so this is saying, okay, how often does your brand show up in AI?

So we're basically running simulations and we are typing in the prompts and we're doing this thousands of times to see how often your brand shows up compared to your competitors. What we see is that the citations are often coming from first party content. What that means is your website. So I think there's a lot of talk right now about all of the different places that you need to show up in order to move the needle in AI search.

I hear a lot about Reddit or LinkedIn, but really we see that websites are showing up in industries and competitor sets. So the content on your website is the foundation. So if your website is not teaching LLMs who you are, what you do, why you're better than your competitors, you're likely not going to show up in AI answers. So the first step in terms of tactics is building out all of that content on your website and making sure that it's consistent in messaging.

And it's no longer those SEO tactics where it's very long pages targeting keywords. The content needs to be very specific about your business. So the very first thing we do tactically with clients is we build out a resource strategy of what content needs to exist on your website that will be recommended in the AI answers that you care about. Linda: So that's a great point because I've been doing this for a while.

So on the SEO side, it used to be just implement keyword or whatever the case may be tags and things like that. And then it went to sort of long form and then it sort of backed off into not so important. And now we're kind of back into, it doesn't sound like it should be long form from what I'm hearing. It sounds like it should be very specific.

So can you differentiate for the audience what is really important? Is it being specific to the offering and then including some of the key factors that AI is looking for or is it still long content but it just needs to be adjusted? Jenna: It's more the latter of what you're saying. So it's building out content that's commercial.

So when I say commercial, it's educating both the LLMs and your prospects exactly what you do along that buyer journey. So let me give you an example of this. A common piece along the buyer journey is comparing you to your competitors. So a piece of content that you likely want on your website is actually comparing you to your websites on all the things you know that your prospects care about.

That could be feature level, it could be pricing, it could be differentiation in positioning, but that is a commercial request that someone is making in ChatGPT when they are researching a solution that you want to show up in. Linda: Got it. Okay. Marketers don't understand a lot of different things like the AI chatbots or ChatGPT or Perplexity and Gemini and how all these things actually interact with SEO.

And I don't know if there's a way that you can share how that process might work on the backend. Jenna: Yeah, such a good question. So there still is an SEO component. So when you were typing in a question to ChatGPT, for example, that LLM is still likely going to run a real-time search.

So 60% of the time when you're asking ChatGPT something, it's going to do a real-time search to come up with an answer. The rest, so the other 40% is the model being trained every three to six months. So what information is on the internet when the model is trained is going to show up in the answer. So there's still an SEO component to AI search.

The difference is the real-time search is going to be very specific. The way that users use AI is different than how they use Google. So when you go to Google, you're used to typing in a keyword. It can be fairly broad and you're getting a list of links that you're going to go through.

When you're in AI, when you're going to ChatGPT, you're asking something much more specific. It's not keyword-based. And so you want to make sure that your content is answering all those specific questions that your user has throughout the journey because now what they're doing, instead of going to Google and going through a list of links based on a keyword, they are now going to ChatGPT and doing full research in a conversation with an AI chatbot. Linda: That's a great point.

So if you actually had five minutes with a CEO who had zero AEO knowledge whatsoever, what would you tell them to do first? Jenna: Absolutely. So the steps of what they should do first is actually quite easy. The first thing you're going to do is you're going to go to an AI chatbot and you're going to tell it your website and you're going to say, "What are the top commercial questions that my prospects likely have that they would type into ChatGPT?

Give me 50 to a hundred of those questions that my prospects will likely ask about my solution or my business that would surface a result that would recommend a company or a brand. Once you have those list of prompts, you're going to know your business better than anyone else. So you're going to go through those prompts and say, we know how our customer buys. We've been in business for a long time.

We understand our customers. And you're going to go through that list and make sure it's actually the right questions. Once you have your final list, that turns into your content plan. You need to make sure that the content you develop for marketing answers those questions and you want to answer every single one of them.

It can start with content on your website, but it also needs to extend to all of the content that you create. So we're kind of back to marketing 101. We're down the customer journey. I actually like this better than SEO because there's not a lot of hacks.

You're not trying to mine for keywords that are so far from your core business. You're actually just going back to your business and educating your users. I would say the big thing that we find makes the most difference in once you are executing that content to answer those questions is making sure you are very clear on how you are different or better than your competitors. So this is back to marketing positioning.

So you need to be very clear and very consistent because AI answers are very good at understanding industries, getting into niche industries, and then recommending based on the differences between the competitors in those industries. Linda: That's great advice. And I do have a question. Are you telling the audience they should put those answers in a blog, in the actual content, in a Q&A that sits on a separate page?

Any preference or it just doesn't matter? Jenna: It doesn't really matter. There's some tactics that will work better than others, but just having those answers on your website is what's important. So if that's updating your homepage and your product pages, that's going to help move the needle.

If you're building a knowledge base or FAQ, that will help move the needle. If you're putting these in blogs and answering them through individual blog posts, that will also move the needle. Linda: Yep, that's great. And how should companies really measure their ROI?

Is it just leads that are coming in? Is it quality of leads? Jenna: So it's all about leads. So the way that we often measure with clients on the B2B side is how many of your prospects on an inbound phone call are mentioning they found you on ChatGPT or Cloud or Perplexity.

That's really the best way to measure. Linda: Yeah. And then how does your product address some of the challenges that are out there today? Jenna: Yeah, so our product is exactly that workflow.

So the first step is auditing. So adding your website and your competitors. And then we actually run that for you. We run the questions that we think your customers will ask, and then we send those to you to review.

And then you can see how often you are showing up in those queries versus your competitors. Once you know that, that tells you, oh, where are the gaps? Where are we not showing up in places that we should be that our competitors are showing up? So then our tool actually helps you create content.

We have a service business as well where we do the content piece for you. So we're creating fully AEO optimized content, but we also have users that use the tool self-serve. And then you're publishing that directly to your website. So you can do that in our tool or on the service side we're publishing to the website.

You’re measuring how often that content is being cited or how often your overall visibility as a brand is lifting in AI answers. Linda: Great. So Google in five years, do you think it'll be bigger or smaller? Jenna: Bigger.

Linda: One brand doing AEO right today that you can put your finger on? Jenna: One of our clients is doing very well are called Swimply. They have almost 90% visibility. Linda: Okay.

And if Google traffic hits zero tomorrow, what's the first move? Jenna: Your website. Linda: That's phenomenal. So what's the biggest myth about AI search that you wish could actually go away?

Jenna: Reddit. Linda: That's interesting. One word for what most agencies are getting wrong about AEO. Jenna: I need two.

It would be multi-channel. A lot of AI search agencies right now are selling, we're going to do multiple channels for you, which is going to be more effective in increasing your visibility in the AI chatbots. Unless you execute those channels well, it's not going to move the needle. And for most businesses, that's too many channels.

So what I mean by those channels is they're recommending that businesses start investing in YouTube, LinkedIn content, Reddit content. And for most businesses, that's really expensive. And some of the AI search agencies are selling it as a reasonable price point, but when we see the output of the content that they're putting across those channels, it's not good. It's far better as a business to pick one or two channels and truly invest in it.

So this is back to classic marketing. So you don't want to pick a channel just for AEO. You want to pick that channel because your audience is genuinely watching YouTube and you have great content to share there. That's why we always go back to and say, "Hey, is your foundation, which is your website in order and do you understand your positioning and is your content educating your prospects?

If that's not done, let's start there. And then we can start thinking about the next channels because running all these channels at once poorly is not going to move the needle. Linda: Fantastic. Any major big takeaways you'd like to share with the audience before we wrap up today?

Jenna: I think the big thing to share is that there's a big opportunity here. So for us as an agency, we look at a lot of brands and anytime there's a new frontier in marketing, it's about those who go and act on it first. And so we very much see in industries incumbents being beaten by smaller players that are investing in AEO earlier and faster. I think it's actually exciting.

It is adding a little bit more work, but it's a big opportunity for businesses. Linda: Thanks for coming on. This was a great conversation. I think it's insightful.

It's new information. So it's great to share that with the audience today. I would love for you to share how they can get in touch with you. Jenna: Absolutely.

So they can visit us at gethatter.ai or reach out to me on LinkedIn. So I'm Jenna Hannon on LinkedIn . I'm easy to find.

I post a lot there about AEO and marketing, or they can email me directly at jenna@gethatter.ai . Linda: That's awesome. Thank you, Jenna.

Well, thank you for listening to the B2B Brand180 Podcast today. Hopefully you received some great insight and if you like what you heard, please hit like, share, or subscribe. And again, I'm Linda Fanaras, and I'll see you next time.