Win the AI Answer, Not Just the Citations with Tim Sanders, Chief Innovation Officer at G2 - Ep 85

TT - 085 - Tim Sanders === Tim Sanders: Sometimes the best Go-To-Market strategy is to unscrew yourself by using expected value and get out of your own damn way. Tim Sanders: You have to get away from the addiction that traffic is a meaningful metric. It's not. Pipeline is the only metric that matters.

Tim Sanders: You're not just getting higher quality traffic from a closing standpoint, Tim Sanders: you're getting higher quality ARR. So your website matters, your traffic statistics don't. Tim Sanders: When you're using ChatGPT and it gives you returns, think about what you click on. Which citations do you actually take the time to click on?

You click on the ones where believing the claim would be high risk to you. Tim Sanders: There is one other like really geeky but helpful thing that I've been thinking about a lot. And that is the prompt problem. Tim Sanders: The prompt problem is the misalignment with the prompts that companies track to measure their AEO and the actual prompts their prospects are using with the answer engines.

That's a huge problem right now. Craig Rosenberg: the first thing I will do now that we're recording is mention that, uh, Matt's late and the only reason, oh, hold on. He's now calling. Please.

Let's do this while we're recording. Hold on one sec. Matt. What's up?

Sam Guertin: We're taking our first caller. Craig Rosenberg: All right. It's me, Sam, and Tim. Just between us on recording.

It's the way we like it, right, Sam? Sam Guertin: Let's do it. Craig Rosenberg: Alright, cool. So Tim Sanders: Let go.

In an AI layoff, are you gonna make an announcement that the structure of our company has changed and we're letting 25% of our staff go effective immediately? I'm sorry. 33% Tim Sanders: of our staff go immediately. But we think it's gonna lead to a stronger, more nimble, agile organization.

And Tim Sanders: then all Tim Sanders: of Twitter will say they overhired during COVID. Sam Guertin: the stock Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, that is interesting. Why does it always seem in the AI layoff that everyone's laying off the same percentage, number of people? Is that like a, or am I just because I see them and they react to, I mean, yeah.

No, thank Tim Sanders: It's a meme. I think it's a meme, and then the numbers that go 20% sounds good. Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, for sure. Tim Sanders: my my personal opinion is that, you know, we don't have the forensic vision to actually see who they laid off and how that lines up to AI displacement.

You know, my thesis has been, whether you're talking Jack Dorsey down to the most recent announcements by Wix or whomever, they all look like they overhired, they like hoarded people like for the last four years. And this is a really good time to make it right. So that's what I feel like most of them are because I just don't see a clean lineup. Between who they let go and what the AI's doing, like what they're doing with AI doesn't seem to be even.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, that, that's probably right. I mean, you know, our, one of our guys here, his thing is they just, they're laying off because they're laying off. But AI makes it a good story and, and you know, Tim Sanders: kinda get a two for one. Yeah.

Yeah, You get a two for one.​ Craig Rosenberg: So, um, Introducing Tim Sanders, Chief Innovation Officer at G2 - Craig Rosenberg: so here, uh, Tim, welcome to the show. I just want to give everyone some background. Craig Rosenberg: So this is, uh, this is the transaction.

So this is the first time I've met Tim, except, except that I, um, have been, uh, exposed to him without him knowing. For a long time because of, you know, the people around us like Sydney Sloan and Christina McMillan and these folks are like, you gotta get this dude on the show. Craig Rosenberg: And I'm like, yeah, we do. I just didn't, you know.

Hold on one sec. God dang it. Um, the, uh, we just, we just didn't, uh, you know, we, we just hadn't made it happen, and now we did, and it's like very, it's a very exciting moment for me because, uh, Tim, I'm gonna have you introduce yourself in a moment, but your work is fantastic as evidence just by that riff right there. Craig Rosenberg: Yeah.

And, uh, um, I'm really excited to have you on the show. So, the bef I'm gonna do three things. So one is I do want you to explain. To, uh, the audience, your background and what you're doing today 'cause it's amazing.

And then second, as you know, we ask you to tell, you know, a great story. Um, and then third is we want to hear from you, like, what are the, you know, two or three things that you're seeing really working today from your, uh, point of view. Craig Rosenberg: I'm really excited for this. I gotta be honest.

So even though we've screwed up everything on the production side, not Sam, me and Matt, um, it's gonna be a great show. So first we go. So Tim, tell us, tell the audience more about yourself. Tim Sanders: So I, I guess I'm a serial thrill seeker throughout my career, I like to take technologies that are just on the edge of working and dive in head first, risking it all.

Um, so, uh, my career started in earnest, uh, back in the 1990s when I went to work, uh, for Mark Cuban in Dallas. He had a startup. He had just moved from his loft to a warehouse downtown it was called Audio Net. Uh, before the IPO, we changed the name to broadcast.

com. Um, I was behind, I, I wanna call it a stunt, but we got a really big check for doing it, so I don't think it's a stunt. Uh, but I was, uh, the producer of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. That's the first time the, the, the actual fashion show was broadcast, and we streamed it on the web, or at least we did, until it crashed.

Um, but that was a real big moment, you know, for the, the, the size of the audience that could come to a singular web event. I, uh, was at Yahoo after that. I was their CSO for about five years, uh, right through the Google disruption. So I always think that.

When it comes to topics like, like answer engine optimization, I feel like I come by it pretty honestly, because I saw SEO before, SEO was SEO, and I've kind of watched that snake turn for the last, uh, you know, good god, 25 years now. Um, and then, um, I've written five books. They're behind me here. Um, most folks that know my books would know Love is the Killer app, which was my first book.

Um, fun fact, I've written five books, the first books, um, sold, uh, you know, 80% of my total, uh, backlog, which just kind of proves in life, um, you spend your entire childhood writing, uh, appetite for destruction and then the rest of your career putting out Chinese democracy. Tim Sanders: So, um, Tim Sanders: I, uh, I am now. I am now. It's just a sad, it's a sad but true story.

I tell this to authors all the time. Yeah. Your first book's gonna be your book, buddy. I'm the Chief Innovation Officer now at G2.

I am very passionate about how organizations can transform as AI creates new opportunities, new threats, new channels, new lanes. Um, I'm centered around research on answer engine optimization and AI agents. The two are going to combine sometime in the near future. I'm also an executive fellow at Harvard Business School.

I have an AI institute there and, um, I advise them on how they talk to businesses about artificial intelligence, whether it's from their publications or, or their workshops and others because. One of the things I spend a lot of time on is how to decode technical language from an economist point of view for regular old business people so they can actually think about it in normalized terms. Craig Rosenberg: That was like, uh, the best intro. I, I, you know, we don't have guest do intros because they're mostly boring and they take 20.

That was really interesting, by the way. And Sam, were you aware, let's just see Tim, uh, Sam is old school, like he just reined, uh, Raiders of the Lost Ark Trilogy. So he does have some, uh, old school. Craig Rosenberg: Did you get catch his reference?

On appetite to dis uh, appetite for destruction and, um, Chinese democracy. Do you know what he was talking about? Sam Guertin: No, unfortunately I am not as well read, um, as I should be. Craig Rosenberg: Well, you don't have to be well read.

There's your hint. Sam Guertin: Oh, then no, I'm just stupid. Tim Sanders: No you're not. No, you're not.

It's generational. It's, it's, Tim Sanders: it's generational. Tim Sanders: If I make a Tim Sanders: Nickelodeon reference, I'll forgive you for that one too. Tim Sanders: It's Tim Sanders: okay.

Sam Guertin: Nickson I Tim Sanders: for Destruction was Guns N Roses first record. It sold Tim Sanders: like millions and millions. It's a classic. Tim Sanders: Chinese democracy was their most regrettable record.

Tim Sanders: It sold in the thousands. Craig Rosenberg: I was all excited too, because they were so good. I mean, when they came out it was amazing, by the way. Fun, uh, fun fact on that.

So I was like, you know, I, I went, I, my kids had me go to a country, uh, concert that all their friends were at. It was Luke Bryan, or Zach Bryan were one of the two. And it was amazing. And I realized, I, I realized that my kids exposure to music, um, by not, like I grew up going to concerts and, and starting in middle school, and it, it does, you realize what music.

Does for you, right? And so I was like, you know what? I'm gonna make these guys go to some concerts. And so I was looking through and it was, you know, I just asked Claude, I'm like, what concert, you know, what concerts from these two generations are out there?

Craig Rosenberg: And you know, the Foo Fighters are going on a big one that could be interesting for them, but like, guns N Roses, I'm like, oh, well that would be hilarious. Like 65% of the tour is in Brazil. Tim Sanders: Mm-hmm. Craig Rosenberg: I mean, they Craig Rosenberg: like going, Craig Rosenberg: what?

I mean they're going to like Fort Za. I mean, they're going to like all the cities there. Craig Rosenberg: It's not just going down for a big concert in, in, you know, Sao Paulo or Rio. It's like they're, they must be really popular in Brazil.

I asked my buddies like, well, there's a lot of rockers here, so I Tim Sanders: Yeah, there are. I've been to Brazil a lot, so yeah, there, there are. They love rock. Craig Rosenberg: That was an incredible Tim Sanders: don't mind if you sing outta tune either.

Craig Rosenberg: No, they definitely don't. Tim Sanders: friends. Just kidding. Craig Rosenberg: All right, Storytime - Craig Rosenberg: so you already showed that you're a good storyteller.

Um, we, you know, we do this because we want people to tell stories. We learned this the hard way and the podcast, we just have people come out of the gate. I don't think I'm gonna have a problem with that with you, but like, do you know, have any really great, uh, you know, in particular, you're seeing so much transformation and so much disaster. Craig Rosenberg: I mean, you've got it all.

So I'm looking forward to hearing what you, what your story is for us today, Tim Sanders: Tell you what, I'll, I'll tell you two quick stories. How about Tim Sanders: that. Tim Sanders: I'll tell you one story 'cause we're building on this. Okay.

I'll tell you one story about a band I was in and a Go-To-Market strategy that worked and I've never forgotten about it for the rest of my life. Okay? I had to paint the picture for you. Um, the year is, um, 1991.

That's who I was in 1991. Okay. So this is, this is an industrial rock Tim Sanders: band I was in and we had a record release party, um, downtown Dallas at a club called Trees. The cover charge was $1.

I had a mailing list, had 535 people on it. We absolutely wanted to pack the club, so I took all our money outta savings. Tim Sanders: Got it. In ones I took $535 in ones, and I mailed $1 to everybody on our mailing list with a flyer that says.

We've bet the farm on packing the house. Here's your free ticket. You have to come. 800 people showed up.

Tim Sanders: By the way. Tim Sanders: that was the only time 800 people ever showed up for one of our shows. But I never forgot. I never forgot that.

And so over the course of my adult career, I realized the value of what we now delicately call the marketing penalty. And I always ask myself like, like how can something that people receive in a message stand out? And I'm telling you, I've met people years later, like decades later, that came to that show and they said I had to go. It was what I, I had something else to do, but you sent me a dollar and obviously you guys don't have any money, so I had to show up.

So that's my fun Go-To-Market story about going all in, um, with a marketing penalty. But lemme give you one that's more contemporary and this is the one I was prepared to tell you, but you know, we went down the Appetite for destruction lens, so I wanted to show you that part of me. Tim Sanders: Um. So before I joined G2, when I was still dating Godard, 'cause he and I had all these conversations before I left where I was working and, and joined G2 for like six months.

I'm saying, I'm saying. Don't believe those fools, uh, uh, I'm not gonna say the names of the company, but the, the, these fools that are releasing these reports that say no one is defecting from Google to use ChatGPT, this is like early 2024. Tim Sanders: I said, don't believe that. Not for your business software.

I said, people that buy software will index heavier on using things like Perplexity and ChatGPT for everything, especially the crap they don't want to do. You know, like researching software, like who wants to do that? It's not your job. I said, so they're gonna lean into it.

And I said, I make, I'm gonna make a bet that it's going to be a, a much bigger part of your business in the next few months. So I joined the company six months later, and then we did our first study, um, later, and it came true. But here's the story. So I joined the company.

I'm only at the company a month, and my, um, market research analyst comes to me and says, there's this vendor out of Newark called Profound. And it's just two guys. They're in an empty office, but they have a really nice dashboard for measuring, um, AI visibility. So I took a call with him and I'm like, oh, this guy James, he's a storyteller, wall of blue links.

Ah, he's validating everything I think. So I said, Hey, Godard, let's have a call with this startup kid it's Khosla Ventures is behind him. I think this is, this, this pretty interesting play. He's got a, a former executive from Uber as his CTO, so, so basically we get on a call.

James shows Godard, all the places on G2 that we had disallowed, robot crawling. And of course our response was, well, the reason we blocked is because, you know, eventually it's a big check, you know, for it. And then James challenges us and say, yeah, but have you run expected value on that decision? Meaning have you really run the calculations for, if you unblock everything and immediately G2 becomes like the citation source for software, what's the value of that?

Or if you. Hold out, keep blocking it. Tim Sanders: You're not AI visible and you're gonna get a check written with whatever propensity that is. What is the value?

The hilarious thing is Godard had just sent me a book and I still have it 'cause it made a big impression on me. On the edge. Nate Silver, you might know him Tim Sanders: from 5 38. Um, but you Tim Sanders: know, a lot of people in poker know him 'cause he won final Table World Series of Poker.

It was all Ev. Craig Rosenberg: Is that right? Tim Sanders: Yeah. Tim Sanders: Yeah.

He, he just took everything he knew about expected value, brought it to poker. It was like a final table. First year he went to, the first year he went to the competition. Tim Sanders: So, so Godard made a very strategic decision, I'm saying within a month.

Yeah, EV, unblock the whole thing. Unblocked the whole thing. By the beginning of 2025, we're already seeing green chutes. We had literally gotten out of our own way, and it turned out that ChatGPT was tuning the purchase recommendation use case, not just for pattern matching, like other use cases like fact lookup.

They were tuning it for third party trust signals. Tim Sanders: And guess what? G2 gets a couple of million reviews a year. So when we say these are the best 10 whatevers, and we've got 50,000 reviews that underlie it, turned out that had the heaviest weight in the models at test time.

And as 2025 rolled along, it all of a sudden became our number one value proposition. Tim Sanders: So what I'm saying is that sometimes the best Go-To-Market strategy is to unscrew yourself by using expected value and get out of your own damn way. As a matter of Tim Sanders: fact, as I've talked to so many software companies over the last year and a half, that's been job one is, hey, you've got analyst relations. You need LLM relations because they're a bigger influencer now than analysts.

And I Tim Sanders: think that was a realization that Godard and our team had, and we recently bought Gartner Digital Markets, which is Capterra software advice, um, as well as GI app. Gartner, they block. 'cause you know, Gartner, the publisher, publisher mentality, they probably feel the same way. Um, we unblocked those three after we purchased them.

And the context request from ChatGPT, Gemini, through the roof. Um, so I guess that's our story. Sometimes Go-To-Market isn't just what you think it is sometimes it's very fundamental, uh, and it's really about, uh, making the right decisions. I'm not trying to go six seven here, but it's really about making expected value decisions.

Tim Sanders: And I have to say, to this day, I'll talk to marketers. Well, I'll run an audit. Of their website properties for are you easy to work with with a language model? And you'll find that they gate like the best content that would've been the most sided.

And they're gating it obviously for lead generation. And that's when I say you might wanna run expected value between lead gen based on actual closed deals and, and the value of each deal and what you would be getting back in AI visibility. Tim Sanders: And so that's kind of the lesson that I keep preaching. You know, here we are, you know, Craig Rosenberg: Amazing.

Well, actually, yeah, like before we go, you do. Well maybe I, I, I'll leave it to the end. Let's see what you want to talk about, because that's obviously something you, you weave the story of what's working, um, into your story, which is great. Uh, I do, I have a million questions for you.

I've seen, by the way, a lot of your data, I used it, uh, I credited Sydney so you can talk to her about attribution issues. Tim Sanders: There you go. You should. Tim Sanders: I worked for her for quite some time.

She was an they created this. Yeah, she, she's amazing speaker. Like, I, I am so engaged when she and I know her well. I spent three days, you know, as you do.

And I still love when she speaks. Um, okay, so, um, why don't we, let's just give you the platform here. Like what we, what we really are looking, you know, just to give you a little historical on the, on the pod. Craig Rosenberg: Matt was working as a executive residence here with me, and we were sitting there, this was like four years ago, and we were just going.

Oh man. Like things just changed, right? And so we were like, we have to learn. So we just started talking to people and we, we would come into and analyze it.

Someone's like, you gotta create a podcast on it. Craig Rosenberg: It just, you know, as you go, learn from everyone, do it. Take it all in. By the way, what we like to say is we were learning.

We were learning. And then all of a sudden, what, a year ago we call it, a year and a half ago, holy crap. Like that we thought we were learning and it was incremental. And now we have to like.

Craig Rosenberg: Or through the roof, you're in the, through the roof side. So I'm looking forward to this. So we just try to find out, you know, like what, when in your lens, like what are the, you know, two or three things that you're seeing working out there. And then, you know, as we have questions or comments along the way, we'll jump in.

Craig Rosenberg: So I'm gonna hand the, hand it back to you and hear what you have for me. Answer Engine Optimization & Content Strategy in the AI Age - Tim Sanders: Yeah, so let me set up some, some guardrails for my point of view. So when it comes to answer engine optimization, I care about one use case and one prompt category. I care about purchase recommendation, high risk software.

I care about commercial intent prompts. Give me the best for this or choose between the two. So I care about commercial intent, I care about, um, software, uh, purchase recommendation. And I say this, and this is the first insight I want to give you.

I say this because not all use cases are tuned. The same way when it comes to citations are more important, winning the answer 'cause a citation is not the same thing as winning the answer. So they're all tuned differently. And so I am absolutely obsessed with the algorithm at OpenAI and Gemini around how they recommend something.

Now at OpenAI, they call this your money, your life. So when OpenAI issues, a your money, your Life recommendation, that could be health. That's cancer. That's not cancer.

Tim Sanders: It could be software by agent force instead of buying UiPath. They tune differently, and I say tune differently because so many people in AEO, they, they just, they talk as if all the models are doing is pattern matching. And for some use cases that's true. So if you went on ChatGPT and you said is the HBO television series, the pit going to come back for season three?

Tim Sanders: And if so, it's Dr. Robbie still the lead straight pattern matching high authority website. Baa bing, baa boom. Yes, it's coming back.

And yes, he's back. But this character's. And Tim Sanders: all it did was pattern matching based on website authority. But if I said, give me the best three customer service agents for a medium sized hospital patient outreach, it has to have a mobile endpoint.

There's gonna be some pattern matching to fix entities, meaning I now have a, a group of entities I could choose from, but it's fine tuned then to do something called validation layer work. That's where the neural networks are looking for third party sentiment scale. At G2, we call it trust signals to gain enough confidence to make the purchase recommendation. The North Star, at least for OpenAI, is to avoid regrettable purchase.

So when they make a recommendation, the way they think about it is if you make a regrettable purchase, that will indicate platform health decline. So that's a fascinating point of view. So with that said, here's a couple of pieces of advice I'm giving you. Tim Sanders: The first one, the foundational one.

You better be easy for an LLM to work with. You need to challenge every place you block robots from crawling you during either training or retrieval. You need to really question whether you gate content, and then you need to really scrutinize the format of your web properties, whether you're requiring JavaScript rendering, which is a no-no, whether you're publishing content and PDF format. Um, very good evidence suggests that these models, especially for users that aren't paying based on tokens, they're not going to actually read PDFs at test time.

Yes, you can upload one in your prompt and they'll read it, but they're not reading it during retrieval. We learned this the hard way at G2. Tim Sanders: Now our reports were published in flat HTML, but anyway, be easy to work with. Point number two.

If you wanna win the answer, you have to earn trust signals in places that are AI visible. So I wanna break that down. Citations are like eyeballs. 25 years ago when I was at Yahoo.

Easy to measure really don't mean anything. Tim Sanders: Okay? Citations are all we have today. What you are really trying to do, at least in our category, you're trying to win the answer.

Now at G2. Our most recent study, the AI search survey that just came out in March. Dig this one out of three first prompts. When a software buyer starts with ChatGPT, half of them do.

One outta three of their first promises. Give me the best of this for that. In other words, they one shot a short list. So just because a vendor is cited in that return, which increasingly is now deep research as a tool, just because they're cited doesn't mean they were recommended.

In fact, I've been able to review a lot of synthetic returns. I've seen vendors, I'll give you an example. I've seen Adobe show up 13 times in citations, but not make the shortlist at the bottom of the return. Winning.

The answer means your product was recommended at the bottom of the return as one of the three. And I think that's a fascinating paradigm and you don't win the answer just because you have content. Tim Sanders: That pattern matches the prompt that causes you to get cited. You might get some traffic for that one 10th of 1% click through rate traffic, but really winning the answer is because you've generated trust signals in places the models can see.

I wanna break that down just a little bit. Tim Sanders: When I say places, the models can see, as I mentioned earlier. Until August of 2024, G2 blocked to this day, Gartner's peer insights blocks. So not every review site is visible to the models.

Let's talk about publishers. Josh Blyk profound, studied millions of citations and he found out, and this is crazy, the tier one publications, uh, New York Times, wall Street Journal, AP Bloomberg, you know those, they only get 3% of the B2B citations. Tim Sanders: The other 97% of citations are going to niche publications, regional trades. Why?

Because the tier ones block and the blocks are working. So I tell people all the time, if you're spending money on earned media to generate AEO, you should use these AI visibility tools to measure your targets, not just you. Tim Sanders: Because a lot of companies, they'll buy a profound Arun, a conductor, a simr, a prompt watch to monitor their brands, and then they go spend oodles of money chasing a publication or an analyst firm, Gartner Forrester, IDC, all Block Futurum has much more AI visibility than all those cats these days.

You just have a, have to sensitivity of not only trust signals, but trust signals that show up for the models. My third and final piece of advice. Produce fresh content that is answer shaped. Fresh means you are answering a question that may not be satisfactory answered so far.

And what I mean by that is, uh, air Ops calls it frontier content. Imagine a Reddit thread where there's a question somebody's struggling with trying to figure out something about a product and they weren't satisfied with the results of the thread is still open writing content that resolves that in publishing it can be outsize in terms of the number of citations that you get back. And when I talk about the idea that you're producing answer shaped content, what I mean is that the content reads more like an FAQ than a corporate marketing message.

So, so message shaped content would say like problem, solution, feature, benefits, proof, call to action, that kind of thing. When the model see that looks like vendor speak doesn't give them a lot of confidence. Tim Sanders: Could absolutely lead to a regrettable purchase. But when you see human beings like you and I having a discussion and conversational tone, then that, and I'm answering questions.

So it's like I'm doing for you now. That resonates more as actual user, actual owner and is going to get more citations. Optimizing Your YouTube Videos for AI LLMs to Index & Cite Your Content - Tim Sanders: I'll give you one data point to prove this. I'm sure you've been hearing about YouTube.

YouTube is becoming a really, really big source of citations for all the models, and it's not because they're watching videos, because when the model goes to YouTube, which considers a very high authority website, it sees the title, it sees the description, and measures the interaction with the content. Smart B2B marketers have been putting the transcript for their video conversations in the description. And that has been a forcing function to get these marketers to stop talking like corporate marketers and talk like real human beings.

And so that's been a breakthrough. So those are my three pieces of advice. Craig Rosenberg: That was amazing. Sam Guertin: That was incredible.

Craig Rosenberg: So good. Jesus. Holy moly. God, man.

Sam, first of all, dude, I could tell you were going crazy. That was in, that was the best rant I've ever had on this show. I mean, I was wrapped. Oh, okay.

All right. You want to go, uh, Sam, by the way, I know you probably have a million questions. First of all, we gotta get our transcripts in the, uh, Well, I, I have a specific question about that, that might be super tactical, but, Tim Sanders: Let's get super tactical. Sam Guertin: okay.

Tim Sanders: I'm like, Sheldon Cooper over here. Let's go. Tim Sanders: Let's talk about flags. Sam Guertin: So YouTube specifically, you can upload a transcript, like when you're uploading a video, uh, on the backend so that it'll use that for the, like closed captioning Tim Sanders: Sure.

Sam Guertin: on a video. Tim Sanders: Yep. Doesn't help. Sam Guertin: is that being Tim Sanders: Nope.

Nope. Can't. The rocks can't. The rocks can't watch video.

The rocks don't read the captions either. Uh, that's what we call the models. They're rocks. Um, the rocks read the description.

So what you'll see is that in the description, you cut and copy the transcripts. You have your description, and then you have dot, dot, dot cut and copy transcript. Tim Sanders: They read that. Sam Guertin: Okay.

Sam Guertin: 'cause I know that. Sam Guertin: the transcripts are limited to, I think, like 5,000 characters or something like that. Um, but there are, there is a section on the, the user side of YouTube where you can see that the transcript, Tim Sanders: Yep. Sam Guertin: okay.

That's, that's super interesting. Sam Guertin: Craig, sorry for, for Craig Rosenberg: No, please, no wonder I'm not in the LLMs. All right, so, uh, okay. First one, can I, we gotta do this Seeding Branded Content into Reddit to Influence the Outputs of LLMs - Craig Rosenberg: one.

So we have a, a guest host named Scott Albro, and he's a pretty funny LinkedIn guy, but he's all, you know, he's highly analytical. I'm gonna read to you a, a LinkedIn post he did that, got tons of action. Craig Rosenberg: You can't call him an idiot, you can only call him a unique, uh, bird. Craig Rosenberg: So the fact that AEO/GEO is a thing is a bad sign for artificial super intelligence, you mean to tell me we're building a digital God, but I can trick it by stuffing comments into Reddit threads and that the SEO Industrial Complex has already morphed itself into a cabal of consultants and startups that will help me turn the LLMs into marketing spam landfill.

Craig Rosenberg: Make it make sense your thoughts. Tim Sanders: So I believe the models because Reddit, you know, has done their deals with the labs and they give not just the data that would be crawled, but other signals. I, I think the idea of inorganic comments being connected to citations has been debunked mostly by Tim Sanders: research that actually takes a look at citations that follow. Um, Rob Gage, global Head of Insights at Reddit explains it this way.

Reddit is a dinner party. Okay. You're, you as a brand are barely invited. You're like, you're like the people serving champagne.

Just serve the champagne. Don't talk. Um, so, so I, I believe that Reddit has preserved their integrity in these systems knowing people are trying to trick and create false comments, um, by using upvote systems and authentic Reddit or, uh, verification to really help Tim Sanders: signal to the models at a glance the difference between good and not real content. Tim Sanders: That being said, that being said, there is a lot of trickery going on, but the models are pretty agile.

Just like Larry Page and his gang has been agile for the last couple of decades at making rug pulls as what people call it when they lose all their traffic. We like to call it quality updates. So the, the models are very aggressive about protecting their business, and in particular, ChatGPT will only reach their valuation based on their fundraising. If they really build a healthy ads business and make a lot of money on shopping, they've gotta have a meta meets Amazon multiple.

If you think that OpenAI is gonna grow into their valuation, just selling tokens, are you kidding? As, as Prof G would say, those people are gonna grow up to have a shitty business like Kroger or Southwest Airlines where they're sexy stocks until they're not, because there's just no margin in that business. Tim Sanders: The margin is. Content that people trust, shopping recommendations that people rely on, and I believe that ChatGPT.

Will be very aggressive in protecting that against, uh, Tom Foolery, so to speak. And I'll give you a classic example, like markdown language. A lot of companies have like said, Hmm, we're gonna take all of our pages and publish them in markdown, put 'em out in the edge for the agents to see. Um, it worked for a minute and then all of a sudden there's been adjustments to make sure that it doesn't work too much because it actually might pollute, uh, the value of the actual platform.

So. But I could see how that would get a lot of action. I, I can, and, um, it's good, good sense of humor. He's funny, he obviously didn't Tim Sanders: use the AI to write that.

Craig Rosenberg: no, he never does. Uh, you know, what you Craig Rosenberg: just said is interesting. AI to write my stuff either, by the way. Craig Rosenberg: Oh, there's no, yeah, no, I can tell.

Yeah, there the, um, yeah, you just, what you just said. You know, we have a, I have buddy JH Scherck, he's an old SEO guy and you know, he's looking at AEO and he said, what you said, he said, well, look like anybody who's tricking the platforms now, he's like, I've been around long enough to know that tech giants do not like to be tricked, and when they pull the rug, it will hurt. Craig Rosenberg: And he's like, how many times on the Google update. Do we see just ABX, you know, an annihilation of someone's trick.

They do not want to be tricked and they that's right. will take care of that. And this is exactly what you said. Tim Sanders: Yeah.

And Tim Sanders: I mean, I think the other thing too is that people, they have to have a goal when it comes to AEO. Like what is your goal? Are you trying to build brand equity by showing up? And people like, oh, I, I, Craig, I've heard his name.

Are you trying to get traffic? Or are you trying to generate pipeline? Tim Sanders: And I think the tactics are all different for those three goals, but people like bring it all together into one and think, I'm just trying to get citations, trying to be sided. Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, to, I want to talk more about the citations versus an, so I, another, I've been, you know, talking to folks and they, similar to the stat you threw out, which is one 10th of 1%, uh, he said the same thing.

He said, look, like I, I just paraphrase. Um, you know, he said, look, the citations are nice, but they don't, they don't do it for you. Craig Rosenberg: I'll get your reaction to that. And he said, you have to what?

You said you gotta win the answer. He said, because, uh, there is no top of funnel for you anymore. It's out there on a, you know, and so he's like, you have to, all the blog strategies you did it five years ago are, are not, you know, he's like, you could do it. Craig Rosenberg: You need 'em to be on other sites.

And if you care about citations, great. The most important thing we're doing Tim Sanders: Yeah. Craig Rosenberg: that people are coming to you bottom of funnel. Tim Sanders: That's right.

Tim Sanders: you? need to be helpful and trusted. Helpful Tim Sanders: and trusted. So I think, I think that should be the paradigm.

But let's talk about citation. Click through rates. It's something Tim Sanders: I went down the rabbit hole on last year and I Tim Sanders: went everywhere. I talked to every vendor.

I've talked to, academic researchers, everywhere I go, I'm getting to the bottom of this. Tim Sanders: So there's a difference between an expository citation and a proof citation for your money, your life claim. Tim Sanders: Think about it this way, when you're using ChatGPT and it gives you returns, think about what you click on. Which citations do you actually take the time to click on?

You click on the ones where believing the claim would be high risk to you. Tim Sanders: That's what you click on, all the stuff that's low risk you don't care about. So when you look at a return, it's true. Tim Sanders: The average click through rate for expository citations, probably one 10th to one third of a percent, depending on like perplexity, is a little kinder on the click through, um, than, uh, ChatGPT.

Tim Sanders: However, um, heels, um, spelled GILS at prompt watch reveal data to me that showed that the click through rate goes up at least 10 x to a 1% click through rate. When the citation is the proof point of a high risk claim, that's different. Trust but verify. In fact, research that I've also seen suggests that that click-through rate could be as high as what we see on SERP first page, depending on the risk factor of the claim.

So this is why if traffic is your goal in AEO, you should be obsessed with something called citation position. So you are making a commercial intent prompt and you want to get a purchase recommendation short list, and you get a return back. Think of the everything at the top of the return. I ain't gonna click.

Think of everything at the bottom where it says it's these three vendors and the proof behind it. I'm gonna click. Now how do I know this Well at G2. We've been using CloudFlare data to track traffic from user bot.

Okay? Tim Sanders: 2025. We had a million human beings come to us directly from chat. Directly from chat.

Tim Sanders: It was part of how we bent the curve on traffic. Why? Because we obsessed with G2 citations being related to our best of software awards and all our best of category content instead of just pattern matching content. So where G2 tended to show up in our citation counts was at the bottom of every return as the proof between why they recommended Agent Force over UiPath, over N eight N.

And that's where we were actually able to get meaningful traffic. So if you care about traffic, you have to care about citation physician. You have to be a trust agent of sorts, as opposed to being helpful. That's why I said be helpful and trusted.

Helpful if you wanna show up trusted, if you want to have people come see you or have influence, which is what G2's business is, is to have influence. Craig Rosenberg: Okay. That's. Sam Guertin: This gonna run outta space on this legal pad.

Craig Rosenberg: these things here. I wrote down the, um, so, um, the, I'll, I'll move off the citation. I do think that's interesting. Does Your Company Website Still Matter in the AI Age?

- Craig Rosenberg: I do want to get to the second part of, of, of what, um, he was talking about, which is what happens to your website? What is it now? Right, because we, we used to try to have it be everything. Craig Rosenberg: It was where you would go and you'd gain your knowledge of what's happening in the world.

You would, uh, we wanted you to be there and cruise, but now web traffic is significantly down. A lot of the work is being done, by the way, at G2 and at um, on the LLMs. Tim Sanders: that's a very good question. So What, what is the purpose of a website?

So, um, it again, depends on the business you're in, depends on the use case you care about. I'll just speak to software companies. So as a software company, what's your website? Your website is the place that they go when it's time to get a sales rep and confirm pricing and move forward.

Craig Rosenberg: Got it. Tim Sanders: your website becomes a conversion machine at the most fundamental level. That being said, that being said, you still have an opportunity with content to be helpful to show up persistently. One of the things we learned in our most recent study at G2 is that 83% of all buyers think more of a brand that is mentioned that's different than being cited mentioned.

In a return. So there is brand equity value. Now, the, the reason I say this is important is because you, you hear all these people, especially in the AEO consulting world, and they're like, nobody goes to Google anymore. I'm like, it's not true.

GG2's research is, is as crazy as it is. G2's research suggests it's forked. So about half of all software buyers now start on chat and the other half start in a search engine. It ain't a hundred percent.

So you can't abandon SEO right now. Okay. It's still half the ball game. In fact, not to get even nerdier here, Tim Sanders: uh, Tim Sanders: first page, Sage released a study back in March where they decoded.

The purchase algorithm for ChatGPT, perplexity and Gemini. It's fascinating. Just go find it. Um, maybe you'll put it in the show notes.

I'll send it to you. Tim Sanders: And they showed that the distinction is the ChatGPT purchase recommendation algorithm. 41% of the algorithm waiting was around authoritative list mentions, but those are mostly gonna be offsite, not your website. Um, and then around 18% was going to be award certifications, affiliations.

Then about 13, 14% was gonna be reviews, and then there was gonna be, your content was another 10% and socials was, or UGC was gonna be another 11%. But Gemini was different. 23% of the algo for Gemini was website authority. Now are they putting their thumb on the scale?

Tim Sanders: No. They truly believe that should be taken into account when they cite things. So it's like. SEO is not just important for the half that still start with search.

It's still important over here as Mike King, uh, the founder of I Pull Rank. He's an amazing speaker, amazing thinker in, in, in this world. SEO skill sets and AEO skill sets. Tim Sanders: They're all vector spaces.

They're all vector spaces. I mean, the difference is when we go to search, we say find something. When we go to an answer engine, we say recommend something. The difference is we're asking the answer engine to use generative AI to reason over a lot of data so we don't have to.

But that's the difference, so, so I think the website is still vitally important. It's the metrics you have to divorce yourself from. You have to get away from the addiction. That traffic is a meaningful metric.

It's not, pipeline is the only metric that matters. And now that's something that's feasible. Tim Sanders: I've seen the craziest numbers on Tim Sanders: closing ratios for leads that come from ChatGPT for these vendors. I'm hearing that the closing ratio for a lead that came from chat is 50% higher.

Now G2, our numbers are a little more normal, four to 7%. Those are meaningful, so you're not gonna get as much traffic, but the pipe addition is going to be meaningful. Tim Sanders: You're closing ratios better. I'll tell you one last thing to just thoroughly get on the edge of geekdom here.

When a person uses GPT to compress the cycle, so they got their short list in one prompt instead of seven or eight hours of hard work, and then they form conviction in one day instead of a month. They're coming to you later in the process, but fresher in the process. Corporate executive board did a study, an exhaustive study that guys from Challenger Sale did this. Here's what they learned about B2B buying.

If I spend too much time trying to figure out how to buy from you and I put all this energy in the buying process, I'm more likely to be dissatisfied with your product a year later in turn, so you're not just getting higher quality traffic from a closing standpoint, you're getting higher quality ARR, so your website matters, your traffic statistics don't. Tim Sanders: You have to move away from that and start focusing laser focus on revenue attribution. Craig Rosenberg: You know, that's, uh, that's amazing.

And uh, I actually wanted to add, you know, we had the Google guys come on and talk to our portfolio. And um, and what it was interesting, I'll just give you a tidbit. 'cause there was a lot of data that, you know, basically, you know, uh, a like almost a hundred percent, you know, even though LLM users still use Google, but they use it differently because they know more. Craig Rosenberg: And so, like an example, a very tactical example that they gave is like, oh no, like competitor ad buying.

You have to do that now. You like from the get go. That's not a phase two, that's not a phase three. In your Google though, you pay and pay the price because they're not coming in and saying they're getting their education.

Craig Rosenberg: Then they're coming in and saying, I wanna learn about profound. Uh, you better be the top result. Both. 'cause now what you just said is they, you, you are at bottom of the funnel on Google.

So you're going, they're going and doing the research, they're coming in, they're looking for it, and bam, you want them to, to land and become pipeline and you gotta make sure you, so that it is just a very specific example that, yeah, it was, uh, I, I agree. Craig Rosenberg: I put it in this big deck. I had all these big strategic things. I'm like, guys, I just talked to the Google guy, like this is.

This is an example of how the world's changing. And even Google is admitting the world's changing, and they're saying that we under, we understand who's coming in, you know, and Tim Sanders: Oh, they're pivoting. AI mode is more visible. They've announced agents for search.

They're, they're going there, and I think it's smart. It's very mature. A lot of other businesses just couldn't do that. Tim Sanders: Like Yeah.

video couldn't do such a thing, right? Even Tim Sanders: though they had all the cash in the world to make that pivot, they could have turned, they had all the Hollywood contracts. Tim Sanders: They could have turned on video and demand and completely boxed out Netflix, but they were too stuck believing it was a fad. Craig Rosenberg: Yeah.

Sam Guertin: They have the chance to buy Netflix multiple times too. Tim Sanders: Multiple times. So there is just to, in, in, in our last few minutes, The Misaligned Prompt Problem Hurting Your Understanding of Customers & Prospects - Tim Sanders: there is one other like really geeky but helpful thing that I've been thinking about a lot. Um, and that is the prompt problem.

I dunno if you heard about this. So I. Craig Rosenberg: No, we can't wait. Tim Sanders: The prompt problem is the misalignment with the prompts that companies track to measure their AEO.

And the actual prompts their prospects are using with the answer engines. Okay? Tim Sanders: Um, that's a huge problem right now. Why do we know this?

Well, because the Frontier Labs haven't released the prompts. No one knows what's going in. We just guess typically, an AEO company's like, we're gonna crawl your website, pick up all the terms, create a prompt panel. Tim Sanders: We're gonna follow that.

Good news. You have all the share of voice. Well, of course you do, fool. You are the only person that calls it 'AI visual collaboration software', the rest of the real world calls it 'whiteboards'.

Okay, so this is a real problem and, and the reason it's a problem is because the marketers haven't weighed the source of truth for what prompts they're gonna track. Tim Sanders: 'cause I'm gonna tell you something, in 2026, the alignment between what they're prompting and what you're optimizing for is the yeast in the bread, okay? If you get it wrong, at best, you get a false positive and your board can breathe at least for a year. At worst, you get it wrong in the other direction and you spend a boatload of money on the wrong stuff.

Tim Sanders: So the question now is, what is the source of truth? Since we don't know what the prompts are, and that's fascinating. So I've been hearing some really cool things about how companies have approached the prompt problem. Now at G2, one of the things we learned early from a very smart AEO consultant, genius, I mentioned him earlier on the call, Josh Lyall.

Craig Rosenberg: Yep. Tim Sanders: Is that before you create prompts, you have to create a persona. So you need to know what your ICP persona is. You need to understand the jobs to be done and how they talk about those jobs to be done.

The vocabulary they use for spaces and categories, you need to understand the constraints they operate under. Tim Sanders: 'cause it's usually in the long tail prompt. You need to understand, uh, what their success criteria is. And once you understand those five elements, then you can approach creating prompts based on natural language.

We use our review data, which is a great place. For us to look at actual language of users around software, but increasingly companies are using gong call data. Tim Sanders: So call transcript data with BDRs is fascinating for you to understand the vocabulary, the jobs to be done in terms of natural language. I'm seeing software companies now, and this is brilliant, they'll use the BDRs for inbound, like the BDR will be like incentivized with like a $50 spiff for every prompt you capture.

Tim Sanders: So the inbound call comes and the first thing they say is they're like, did you come to us from ChatGPT? Your Gemini? Yes. Who?

Okay. Do you mind sharing the prompt? It would mean a lot to me. In my job, I'll wait.

They're literally going to their browser. They go to their history. They take the prompt, they put it in the chat. Tim Sanders: The guy puts it in Salesforce, he gets $50.

Why do you do that? Because if you capture about 200 of those, you have the most meaningful source of truth to solve the prompt problem because now you know exactly what they did. Now, some of these providers like Profound and Scrunch and others can go get you panel data and that's good. But the panel data is noisy compared to the actual inbound call data that is on point to your product.

So I, I've just been talking to marketers a lot of like, take the prompt problem seriously. It was a huge thing for us at G2 last year when we stopped using our category naming as the only thing we were tracking prompts for, and started to really dig into the things I'm talking to you about. Tim Sanders: Our Gong call data, the natural language and reviews, et cetera, building personas because the sharper your prompt panel is. The more value you're gonna see from all the investments you make in content and trust signal acquisition.

And, and so just on that little note, the last little thread I'll pull here, and this is kind of a new thing I've just learned, but I've learned it from three places, so I believe this is true. So I want you to imagine the marketer on their website, they make three claims, claim A, claim B, and claim C. These are about functionality or benefits. Okay?

So they make A, B, and C. The reviews they gather on G2, validate claim, D and E, which are different than A, B, and C. So they might be other functionalities, other benefits. Tim Sanders: Okay?

That misalignment means that the G2 review may lead to winning the answer, but the reviews don't improve the AEO for the marketer's claims. So right now, not only do you have to align the prompts as a marketer, you've gotta align the trust signals. You get offsite. To actually match the claims you make on site for you to actually have AEO value to your own properties.

Now, Sydney Sloan, we mentioned her earlier. One of the things she taught me early in this process is this concept of consistency, right? You have to consistently be referred to as an entity across all your properties for AEO. This is an example of that.

I tell people all the time, don't think about driving reviews. Tim Sanders: You recruit reviews and you want to recruit reviews from those that have expressed. Yes, I believe the claims your marketing team, your Go-To-Market team have made, they have come true in our life. That alignment alone makes a massive difference to your AEO.

So let alignment be like my final theme here. Tim Sanders: Uh, so important, you know, from prompt to trust signal. Craig Rosenberg: This was the most interesting show we've ever done. That say That to everybody?

You know what I'm sad about? I'm sad that, that Matt's in jail right now. I think he's Tim Sanders: learned a very valuable lesson about bench warrants and parking tickets and not just Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men. Obviously they will throw you in the Santa Clara jail, uh, for old parking tickets.

Tim Sanders: So, um, Matt, get well Tim Sanders: soon, get well Tim Sanders: soon, if you Craig Rosenberg: that. We're going to, Craig Rosenberg: oh my God. Sam Guertin: himself so hard. Craig Rosenberg: Oh man.

This was so good. Uh, Tim. So that, that was so good. That was the transaction.

I thank you for your patience. I'm so glad we did this show. Tim Sanders: This is fun. I had a good time with you guys.

I'm punchy on Friday, so you probably wanna catch me on Friday, Monday. I'm Craig Rosenberg: We're going to, we would shit, you know. Craig Rosenberg: be careful. Oh man, that was so good.

All right, well, uh, um, I'm just gonna say, I'm gonna leave it at that. That was the transaction. Thank you for Tim Sanders: As my favorite comedian, Mitch Hedberg said it was a fight to the finish and that was a good place to end it. I love that guy.

I love it. Craig Rosenberg: That is so good. All right. Thank you.

That was so good. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Transaction, Craig, and I really appreciate the fact that you've listened all the way to the end. What are you actually doing here? For show notes and other episodes, please visit us@thetransactionpod.

com, like and subscribe on Spotify, apple Podcast or any other place you get your podcast from. Either you have walked away from your podcast device. Or this is playing somewhere in the background. Someone in your house would really like for you to shut this off now.