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Search is changing fast, and showing up on Google is no longer the whole game. Rebecca Emery explains what it means to optimize your website and content for AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity – and why businesses need to start thinking beyond keywords alone. This is a smart, practical conversation for marketers and business owners who want to stay visible as AI reshapes how people find answers online.
Your Customers Are Asking AI for Recommendations — Is Your Business Coming Up?
Search used to be simple: rank on Google, get found, win. Things have changed. AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude are answering millions of questions every day — including questions about where to shop, who to hire, and which local business is worth calling.
Rebecca Emery knows this space inside and out. As founder of Seacoast AI and a fractional Chief AI Officer for multiple organizations, she’s been helping businesses think through AI optimization long before it had an acronym (or four). She recently joined the Agents of Change Podcast to talk about what’s changing, what still matters, and what small business marketers should actually do about it.
What Are We Even Calling This?
If you’ve been confused by the alphabet soup — AIO, AEO, GEO, GAO — you’re not alone. Rebecca’s preferred term is GAO: generative AI optimization. The name matters less than the concept: making sure that when AI tools are helping someone answer a question, your business has a shot at being part of that answer.
There are three main channels to think about: AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude that people query directly, AI-native search engines like Perplexity, and AI overviews that now appear right at the top of Google results. The good news? You don’t need three completely separate strategies. The underlying engine is the same across all of them: generative AI trying to find the best answer to someone’s question.
How AI Reads Your Website
Here’s something that should change how you think about your website: AI doesn’t read your pages the way your visitors do.
When a person lands on your site, they scroll, scan, click around, maybe expand an FAQ accordion or two. AI works differently. It hits the top of the page first (above the fold) and quickly decides whether it’s in the right place. If it’s not convinced in that first pass, it moves on. All the great content you buried at the bottom? Probably not getting ingested on that first visit.
“AI is just in a race to answer it quickly and authoritatively,” says Rebecca. “We need to optimize our content to give it more context so that it understands that answer can be relevant from multiple different audiences and perspectives.”
That has a few practical implications:
Expand your accordions. Those collapsible FAQ sections look great for human readers, but AI can’t always click to expand them. If your FAQs are hidden, they’re essentially invisible to AI search. Open them up.
Start subheadings with a question. Phrase your first H2 as a direct question, then answer it clearly and authoritatively right below it. This gives AI a clean, obvious unit of information it can confidently repurpose.
Don’t write just for your ICP. Traditional SEO encourages you to zero in on your ideal customer profile. AI search doesn’t filter out everyone else. Someone who doesn’t fit your ICP neatly might ask a question that leads AI straight to your content — and that could still turn into a customer.
Context Is the New Keyword
Traditional SEO focuses on keywords. GAO…not so much. AI is sophisticated enough to understand that “warm clothing” means gloves, a jacket, and a scarf…you don’t have to list them all out to get found.
What AI needs instead is context. If you’re a park, don’t just say you have 26 miles of trails. Say those trails include gentle walking paths for families with kids and pets, as well as challenging terrain for mountain bikers and avid hikers. Now AI has what it needs to serve your content to someone asking “family-friendly hiking near me” and someone asking “technical trails for mountain bikes”…two completely different queries, one piece of content.
Think of it as writing content that can be reused for many different audiences, not just the one customer you had in mind.
Traditional SEO Isn’t Dead — It’s a Foundation
Nothing Rebecca shared suggests you should abandon your SEO fundamentals. Google’s EEAT framework–experience, expertise, authority, trustworthiness–still applies. Strong SEO and strong GAO have the same foundation: good, credible, well-organized content.
The difference is what you build on top of it. Traditional SEO wants you to rank for specific keywords. GAO wants your content to be so clear and contextual that AI can pull the right piece of it to answer whatever question just got asked from whoever asked it.
Tools like Answer the Public (Neil Patel’s platform) can help you understand what questions people are asking in your category, which is a useful input for both SEO and GAO content planning.
Why AI Search Traffic Might Be Your Best Traffic
Traffic from AI recommendations tends to convert at a higher rate than traditional search traffic. Here at flyte new media, we track AI referral traffic separately in GA4, and the numbers are notably strong.
The reason makes intuitive sense. When someone searches Google, they vet multiple results themselves. When AI recommends something, people tend to trust that recommendation. They’ve delegated the vetting. They’re already further along in the decision-making process.
That’s a big deal for small businesses. You’re no longer fighting for 10 blue links, you’re fighting to be one of the three or four sources an AI cites in its response. More competitive, yes. But the payoff per citation is significantly higher.
Your First Move: Query Your Own Business
If you haven’t done this yet, stop reading and go do it. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. Search for your business by name. Then search the way a potential customer would — “best [your service] in [your city]” or “who should I hire for [your category]?”
See what comes up. See what sources get cited. See whether AI is pulling from your website, or from a two-year-old podcast episode you forgot existed (Rebecca’s seen this happen firsthand). That audit alone will tell you where the gaps are.
Then take it further: share your messaging with AI and ask it how your content could better align with that language. Rebecca’s advice is to treat AI like a consultant — ask it what you’re missing, what would help it answer questions about your business more confidently, and what your “future self” should do better next time.
Start Simple
You don’t need to overhaul your entire website today. Start with one page. Add a question-formatted H2. Expand your FAQ accordion. Layer in more context around who you serve, what situations you help with, and what makes you the right answer for multiple types of customers.
The businesses that figure this out early will have a head start as AI search continues to grow. Rebecca’s conservative estimate: AI search could overtake traditional search within two years. Maybe sooner.
Either way, the time to start optimizing isn’t when AI has already fully taken over. It’s now, while you can still get ahead of the curve.
Transcript from Rebecca Emery’s Episode
Rich: My next guest is a marketing and PR executive and founder of Seacoast AI, based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Seacoast AI provides AI training, consulting, and use case implementation. She serves as a fractional chief AI officer for multiple organizations and implements AI use cases throughout local organizations as well.
She’s also nationally accredited in public relations and currently serves as president of the Maine Public Relations Council, a statewide organization of PR and communications professionals.
Today we’re going to be talking about optimizing your website and your business for AI with Rebecca Emery. Rebecca, welcome to the podcast.
Rebecca: Thank you so much, Rich. Great to see you again.
Rich: Nice to see you. And of course you were also on the stage for Agents of Change a few years ago. So it’s always good to see you again.
Rebecca: Yes, that was my first big onstage opportunity and I’m grateful for it. And I’ve grown a lot, and I’d say that my presentations have definitely gotten bigger and better over the years.
Rich: Well then they must be amazing, because I know that you blew some minds even back then.
Rebecca: Thank you.
Rich: How did you get interested in AI, and how did you shift to become an AI consultant for those other businesses?
Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been a consultant and a freelancer for a few years, mostly in public relations and communications and digital marketing. That’s really where for the last decade I’d say I’ve been focused.
And when ChatGPT was released to the market back in November of 2022, I had a lot of my colleagues through the Maine PR Council come to me and say, what is this? I mean, it’s giving us all this great content, but can we use it? Is it safe to use? Is it plagiarism? And it was at that point that I challenged myself to do a training for the Maine PR Council. And from there it just led to word of mouth, and basically I just dove in and started understanding all about the technology.
This type of technology isn’t necessarily new to me. My very first tech job was at a supercomputer company, which essentially is doing the same type of analysis, visualization of data for weather and science. Fast forward 30, 40 years, now we’re looking at how we talk to our data in natural language. That’s really what’s very different. Predictive has been around for a long time. Generative is the new piece. Which is really generating new content based on patterns. It’s learning from language and being a communications professional that’s right up my alley.
So that is how I got started with Seacoast AI. And I’d say the first year of my business model, and even into year two, it was just a lot of learning and understanding and then being able to translate into real practical business terms. And then it’s really been in the last year that I’ve started with the implementations. I think now businesses are ready to understand how do we evaluate use cases and how do we implement them within our workplace safely and responsibly.
Rich: Awesome. So we’re going to be talking about visibility in the age of AI today. But before we dive too deeply into this topic, do you prefer AIO, AEO, or GEO, or even today I saw GAO for the first time. How do you define whatever it is we’re talking about?
Rebecca: I think I use GAO, Generative AI optimization. I think that we have to think about not only optimizing for large language models like ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and so forth, but we also need to think about AI browsers, the AI search, native search like Perplexity, and then Comet and some of these other browsers. We need to understand that lots of different AI models might be crawling our content, and we need to understand how that’s different from traditional SEO.
So I don’t know, I call it GAO, but it could be GEO, it could be AIO. I’ve seen it all. I don’t think there’s any one standard necessarily, but I usually say optimizing for people, platforms, and large language models.
Rich: So it’s interesting. So you brought up something I wasn’t thinking about, whatever we call it today, because you’re our guest, we’re going to call it GAO. So when we’re thinking about, there’s GAO, and we’re thinking about things like when people turn to a ChatGPT or a Claude, and they ask a question as a business. If they’re asking about, “Where do I go for branding in Southern Maine?” you know, we want them to say, “flight new media” as an example.
And then there’s also other types of AI influence search. There’s the AI overviews, which we get from Google when we do a search. And then there’s also search tools that are built on AI like Perplexity. So those are really three different channels. Do we need to have a different approach for each one of those channels?
Rebecca: No, I don’t think so. Because I think the underlying engine is still artificial intelligence, essentially the generative AI piece. But we do need to understand how AI reads content on our website because it doesn’t read content like a human.
Where SEO is very much focused on keywords and content and being trustworthy and authoritative, the EEAT framework of Google and all that we know about GA4, AI is a different animal. It’s looking to understand what’s on your website. It’s looking to check the box to make sure the EEAT is covered. But it’s trying to figure out how to answer this person’s question, and that person’s question, and that person’s question, and that person’s question. And all these questions are coming from a variety of sources, and they’re all coming from different perspectives, different types of customer profiles.
I know you use ICP as an example on that. But essentially, it’s trying to figure out, have I come to the right place to answer somebody’s question. So how does it do that effectively? That’s what we’re really trying to open up and unlock, so that we can optimize our content so that indeed, if it’s landed on the right page, and we hope it has, that it is able to get the information it needs, and we understand what it’s doing with it.
Rich: So when we’re talking about using AI for search, is this a small percentage of people who are using this, or is like a large group of people regularly using AI to find businesses online?
Rebecca: I think the number is growing. We know that there are hundreds of millions of users that are using these tools on a weekly basis. And I find even myself, that I’m turning more to AI to ask it questions about what’s happening out in the world, what’s happening in the news, because I want a broader perspective and I don’t want it to be given to me through the lens of just one outlet.
So I think others are also getting to that. Because when you think about it, when you’re searching for information, you’re really asking a question. You want to know more about something. And so that’s where the answer engines, really what they call the ‘answer engines’, really come in helpful.
I do believe that more people are using AI for search on a weekly basis. I did see some stats about that recently. I don’t have them at the top of my head, but I have seen essentially the nod that AI search in possibly as close as two years will overcome and overtake the traditional search.
I don’t necessarily go to Google for all of my searches anymore. I open up my ChatGPT and start asking real questions and get very tailored answers. And I think you’re seeing more people get used to having AI on their device and starting to turn to it for regular searches.
I still think there’s a value in Google searches, and I do think that we as hardened business professionals are never going to completely get rid of our Google. But I do think that AI is going to eclipse that very quickly. Again, I’ve heard some conservative estimates of two years. I think it could be less than that. We’ll see.
Rich: And I certainly use a mix of both Google as well as other search tools for answers. I mean, yeah, I even talk to Alexa sometimes if I want a pop culture reference when I’m watching TV.
But I’m wondering from your experience, when we’re searching with AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity, is it the same search that we would do at Google, or are people asking different types of questions when they use these answer engines?
Rebecca: I think they’re using more contextual, natural language answers. What is the meaning behind xxxx? I think we ask more contextual natural language questions when we go to Google. I think sometimes we’re more conditioned to use fewer words because we want to hone in on the keywords that we think are most important to that particular search.
But as we know with this new AI search, it’s not necessarily about keywords anymore. It’s more about reusability. The AI needs to come to that content, be able to know, am I in the right place? Is this, trustworthy and authoritative? But more importantly, can it help me answer that person’s question and that person’s question? I mean, that’s really the challenge that these AI answer engines are facing. And so far they seem to do a pretty good job of giving you a contextual answer, which is why, you know it’s important to optimize our content that way.
Rich: So if we are a business looking to generate more leads online, if that is our underlying mission, whether we care about whether where it comes from, what are some of the things that we need to think about as we prepare for these answer engines?
Rebecca: Yeah. Well, I mean, the first thing is we need to understand that it’s no longer about keywords and iterating back exactly what’s set on a page. It’s about reusability. AI generates new content from patterns and language. So it’s going to come to your content. It’s going to make sure it’s in the right place, and it’s going to answer somebody’s question in its own terms. And we need to come to grips with that. It’s reusing our content. It’s about reusability right now.
So for example, if I’m working for a Parks and Recs organization, and I talk about how our park has 26 miles of trails and woodlands, that is factual. It’s authoritative. It’s definitely good content. But the AI is getting asked questions by all different types of people, and it’s trying to figure out if that indeed is an appropriate response to provide for multiple different perspectives.
So instead, we need to optimize our content to say that this park offers X number of miles of trails and woodland and offers both gentle walking paths in the shade as well as full mountainous trails that are excellent for avid hikers and mountain bikers. You might want to say things like, it’s a great place for families with children and pets because we have pet friendly policies, et cetera, et cetera.
But the idea is that we don’t know who’s asking the question and how they’re phrasing the question. AI is just in a race to answer it quickly and authoritatively, and so we need to now optimize our content to give it more context so that it understands that answer can be relevant from multiple different audiences and perspectives.
Rich: That’s an interesting approach and it makes me wonder about, first of all, how are we going to create the content that speaks to everyone? Also, when should we be focused just on our ICPs, our ideal client personas? Do we get any data from these answer engines that tell us, here are the queries that were done where we cited you, or is that something more of a black box?
Rebecca: Well, I think for companies that have active SEO folks internally, you certainly are going to get a lot of information from your Google Analytics or GA4, all of that. But there are also tools out there like Answer the Public that show you in any given day what questions are being asked on a particular topic.
Then the next thing we need to think about is that AI, especially these AI answer engines, are doing just that. They’re answering questions. So we might want to optimize our page to include and understand that when it’s reading a page, at first, it doesn’t necessarily read all of your content. It’s actually looking above the fold (old speak PR speak). So halfway and above. But it’s looking to see whether it’s in the right place or not to answer the question, or whether it should abandon ship and go search somewhere else.
Once it determines it’s in a right place and it has that authoritative, trustworthy content, then it will dive in further. But I think in the past, a lot of us have put our FAQs in those nice little accordions to keep our content to a page or two from a screen length. But the truth is, some of these answer engines aren’t yet really proficient at being able to click through and expand those.
So one of the things that I’ve been advising my clients is to actually expand those accordions so that an AI can analyze those questions and answers and hopefully reuse them in meaningful ways for our clients. I think when you come back to asking about our ideal clients, we need to understand and look at our own business and understand whether our leads come directly from those ICPs or whether they come from a broader group.
Because if we’re only optimizing for our ICP, we could be missing out on a broader group. And that’s where I think AI search helps, because the broader group asks the question, AI finds the answer, and it doesn’t necessarily filter and say, well, you’re not a part of their ICP, therefore, I’m not going to choose that as a good reference point.
So I think it’s important for us to understand that. AI search changes how we optimize for people, for platforms, and for large language models. And we need to take a more holistic approach, which is keep the foundations of SEO, understand that we need to have good, authoritative, trustworthy content, but now we need to shape its context for how AI engines search our content, how they repurpose our content, and understand that they’re going to serve it up to people who aren’t in our ideal, client profile. But that could be a good thing that could actually bring us business from outside of where we think our sweet spot is.
Rich: All right. Now we’ve talked a little bit about traditional SEO. So imagining that there’s this Venn diagram with traditional search in one circle, and an overlapping search for AI or answer engines in the other, what are the elements of traditional search – would you say – that are still relevant when it comes to optimizing for the AI platforms?
Rebecca: I think it still is very relevant that Google’s EEAT is experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. We need to make sure that our content checks those boxes to ensure that it’s going to be served up ranked higher versus down ranked. And then also we need to understand that Google still maintains dominance when it comes to any traditional search. They’ve developed these good practices over the years, and we’re certainly not in a place, and they’re certainly not in a place, to abandon them wholeheartedly. So we need to build on that. So that would be on one side.
I think from the AI perspective, we need to remember that it’s not just taking our content and feeding it up identically. That is no longer happening. Generative AI generates new content, and it’s going to answer your question in different ways, time after time. So knowing that, it helps to provide additional context so that it can serve that up.
And then I also think we need to think about how AI is reading the page is different than a human reads it, right? We read a page, we start at the top, we go to the bottom. We might scan back up, zone in on a few things and be good. But AI doesn’t do that. First of all, it’s received an answer it doesn’t have. Unless memory is enabled, unless it’s been a very deep, contextual conversation, most of us just open up a brand-new session and fire off a question so it knows nothing about us, technically. It doesn’t even know what ICP we might necessarily fall into.
So given that, it’s looking to find the answer very quickly, and it’s going to buzz about the top of the fold first. It’s going to scan that, looking for those signals, looking for that trustworthy content. Am I in the right place? If it’s not, it’s going to abandon ship and move on. So anything below the fold, unfortunately, I believe, gets lost in that first pass.
And we know that because there are times where we might query a page. And this is good practice for us understanding our own content, is to put it through all the large language, ask questions and see if it’s serving us back up, and what it’s serving, and how it’s answering our questions. But then we want to think about, okay, once it’s identified that it’s in the right place, now what’s it doing? And now it’s really going through.
And again, it’s not good at ticking any boxes or expanding those accordions, but we want to make sure that things like a good best practice is to take your first subhead. – they call that an H2 – and basically phrase that as a question, and then authoritatively answer it immediately thereafter. Now, AI has something to completely zoom in on, answer the basic question, and then look to how it can repurpose that answer for a particular inquiry. It doesn’t always know who’s asked the question, but in some cases it may. And so in that case, it’s going to look to personalize that. And then I think it’s on us to start using the tools and go to Claude and ask about our brand or ask questions that we think we’re ranking on.
And the other thing that I would also say is that we forget sometimes, and I see this especially when working with independent schools, that they’re on a particular cycle. And it’s not always the calendar year that we think of it. It’s the admission cycle and the advancement cycle. And those cycles people will be asking different questions throughout the year. So it’s also a really good practice, if you have time and you have the team, to essentially optimize those FAQs based on certain seasons so that questions that are being asked today can be answered with your content.
Because right now, instead of fighting for the 10 blue links, we’re fighting to be maybe one of four sources that are named or cited in a particular answer engine response. So higher competition, but more context, that’s the best thing.
So again, really looking at our content and making sure we’re optimizing it for those engines. And then asking those engines about our brand, or particularly about our industry and seeing how we’re being served up, if at all.
Rich: Are there parts of traditional SEO that you find are not relevant for the AI search engines?
Rebecca: No. But I think things like keyword stuffing, I think all of that is different now. Because when you say something like, “Is this appropriate for warm clothing?”, AI understands that could mean gloves and a jacket and a scarf, where before we would’ve had to put in all those keywords to make sure that we were ticking the box if someone searched on warm clothing.
So I think now we can assume that AI has the ability to interpret what’s on the page. So it’s not so much about making sure we cover all the keywords, it’s about making sure we cover the context. So again, AI can repurpose it.
Rich: So as we’re thinking about this, a lot of what you’ve talked about is giving AI the information it needs to answer the query that it was just asked. We all like to get cited by AI, but as a business, we really want to be recommended. Is there an approach that we might consider where instead of just mentioning our company name, or if somebody asks a question about specifically answering it, where it could recommend us?
Like we’ve all done searches, I assume. I have. Where it’s like, what’s the best lobster shack in Maine? And it may not give the same answer two or three times in a row, but the bottom line is, I’m sure every lobster shack in Maine wants to be mentioned every single time somebody answers that question.
Do you have any, have you seen anything work that increases our chances of being not just cited but also recommended?
Rebecca: No. But what I have seen and what I have adopted, is the fact that you can actually create buttons on your website. I have them on mine that say, “ask AI about our business”, and you code that link so that it puts in a prompt, it actually pre-fills the prompt box. It works for some, not for all, unfortunately. It’s a little quirky.
But that being said, if someone is more comfortable asking AI and being able to go back and forth and ask questions, you’re giving your visitors the opportunity to click on the tool of choice and have a conversation about your brand. And in my opinion, that’s probably a good thing, because you’re actually having the AI talk about your brand, refer to your website, and that’s a very, in my opinion, would be a higher qualified conversation than if it’s just getting a random query out of the west coast somewhere.
So again, I think there are ways of doing that. And that was one of the things that I saw and have implemented myself. Which is again, “Want to know more about our business, ask AI a question”, and you lead them right into that. And again, that allows for a more contextual conversation, plenty of content for it to pull from, and hopefully if it’s only pulling from your content, it’s getting things right.
Rich: Alright. You mentioned earlier about maybe not using accordions to hide some of your window shades, hide some of your content.
Rebecca: Just expanding them. Expanding them out. Yeah.
Rich: Right. And obviously, the reason we do that is because we don’t want to overwhelm the human brain with information, or we want shorter pages, or there’s more white space, more visual. How do you strike the balance between designing websites that are beautiful for humans and yet structuring them for AI?
Rebecca: Well, I think you can start out by having good pillar pages and then contextual subpages. I think you can also look at linking to your evergreen content. I think you, again, want to be thinking about posing some of your content in the form of a question. I still think the FAQs are very valuable, it’s just you need to understand that in the first pass if it’s below the fold and expanded, AI probably isn’t going to drive down and drill down into that. So that just means that we need to unexpanded those and figure out new strategies.
We don’t want our content to also be all questions and answers. That seems a little odd, too. There are some strategies, I understand, where you can create some kind of an LLM txt file that allows AI to ingest sort of a general broad overview of your business very quickly. I, myself, haven’t implemented that, but it’s something that’s been on my sort of to-do list to start experimenting with, does that have value?
I have run into a couple of clients that are doing that. They have SEO specialists on staff, and they said that’s been interesting and seems to do well because they’re able to craft a very nice behind the scenes narrative including sort of the site map that then drives AI to be able to know where to go for that content.
But I think for the average organization right now, just be thinking about at least posing one good question per content page. And don’t worry if the FAQs towards the bottom are expanded. I think we as humans can click and either compress those or open those, but AI doesn’t necessarily have the ability to do that yet. So knowing that it’s probably just a good practice to expand those for the time being. And then also think about if you have very cyclical business models, you might want to think about addressing that within your FAQ or within certain pages so that AI can drill down into that.
It’s still kind of the wild, wild west out there right now. I mean, what are you seeing for some of your clients in this area? Are you finding that because based on what you do, are you finding that they’re still giving as much emphasis into the basic SEO, but trying to figure out how to augment their strategies for AI? Or are we flipping that?
Rich: I think that it’s still an SEO world, and AIO or GEO, GAO AI search is fast taking it over. Just in terms of, it’s still a fraction, but it’s a fast-expanding fraction. And I think as the tools become easier and people have become more comfortable with using those AI-powered search tools, we’re going to see more.
And the one thing that we are absolutely seeing in our clients’ data and our own, because we set up special reports in GA4 to track recommendations or traffic from AI search versus traditional search and other methods, is that traffic tends to convert at a much higher level. And I don’t know why that is, but I believe it’s because when we do a search – and by the way, I’m not supposed to be the one speaking right now, but anyways, I am going to answer your question. I know that when we are doing search on a traditional search engine, we want to get the top responses, and then we’re going to vet each one of those, say hotels, for our own personal choices.
I think when we use an AI tool, we’re thinking that their brain, the tool’s brain, is going to figure a lot of that stuff for us. So when it recommends this hotel and this airline, we’re more likely to trust that for no good reason, but just because of the weight of our experience. So I think that’s why we are putting more emphasis onto GAO is because that’s some of the best performing traffic out there.
And at the end of the day, it’s not how many people visit your website, it’s how many people buy or fill out the contact form or book a time with you. So I think, and this why I was excited to talk about this topic, I think it’s really important and I think all businesses need to be giving more attention to it, even though, like you said, it’s a wild, wild west that what’s best practice today may be terrible advice tomorrow. But I think getting out there and starting to experiment and taking a look at your analytics about what’s working, what’s not is probably the most important thing we can do right now.
Rebecca: Yeah.
Rich: Which brings me to my next question. Which is, in SEO we have keyword research tools and other tools like Ahrefs and Moz. I’m curious, when you’re working with your clients on AI visibility, are there any tools or platforms you are using to kind of either do a better job for them or to measure the work that you’ve done afterwards?
Rebecca: Actually, yes. I’ve been a big fan of Neil Patel’s, Answer the Public. And he also has a SEMrush equivalent tool called, Uber Suggest. And I actually recently bit on his perpetual lifetime license, one of his offers that he made recently. Because I’m not a big fan of having this subscription month after month. I’m sure you look at your credit card statement and too, right?
We are in a world of everything seems to be monthly subscription based and that can be very challenging. But I’m really impressed by some of the tools that I see coming out of there. So just recently invested in Uber Suggests, so that I can not only continue a site audit on my site but also be able to support my clients.
But I think any of those tools are really helpful, and I think they’re all looking at ways that we can anticipate how large language models are changing the landscape here.
Rich: Yeah, I think we just upgraded our Ahrefs license to include AI reporting as well. So I haven’t dived so deep into it yet.
Alright, so to kind of wrap things up today, if somebody’s listening to this and they’re either excited or panicked about AI search and what it’s going to mean to their business and they haven’t done anything yet, what would be the first step you would recommend they take to be better prepared for AI search tomorrow?
Rebecca: I think the first thing is go to all the major tools and query about your business, specifically by name and not by name, and see what it serves up to you. And throw it some curve balls and throw it questions as though you were an ICP.
But the first thing I think we need to all understand is what is AI repurposing about our business, what sources is it using? If you’ll notice when you do Gemini research, for example, you get a whole lot of – same with Claude – you get a whole lot of sources. Where is it going to get information about your business? And is it perhaps weighting certain things?
Like for example, I did a podcast a couple of years ago and it was a video, and it still ends up being served into whenever I’m analyzing AI answer engines questions and answers about my business. And I’m always surprised to see that pulled in. But again, it’s a reference point. Unfortunately, it’s now two year plus dated reference point, that tells me that conversations like we’re having today are vitally important because we want to make sure we’re keeping that conversation and also the content that’s out there about us more current.
Again, AI is just looking to answer questions. It’s going to scan across a variety of sources. Making our own content the most authoritative, trustworthy, and contextual content, I think, is the winning solution. Just understanding it’s trying to answer questions, so let’s make sure we address that. And it needs context because it’s getting questions from who knows who. And so we need to make sure that our answers and our content on our page are much more contextual so that it can essentially serve our content up to a variety of audiences. That’s, I think, really where we’re at, at this point.
Rich: Yeah. And I just want to add onto that. Because one of my favorite things about using AI is just asking it where it came up with the answer. So I did exactly what you suggested at one point and I asked, “What are some highly recommended digital agencies in southern Maine” and in different categories for different things. And we came up nicely in the top 10 for just about every search. And then there was the top five, whatever it was, one didn’t include us. And I don’t remember which tool it was, and I said it’s dead to me. No. I don’t remember what tool it was, but I said, “how about flyte new media?” And they were like, “excellent answer too” But you know, really just trying to limit it to five or 10, whatever the answer is. But I said, “well, what steps could I take if I were flyte new media to ensure that…”, and so you can have conversations. Now, whether you can trust the answers is a whole other thing. But the bottom line is, it can give you some insights into maybe what information is lacking.
We’ve been doing branding for a couple years now but. We are really moving into branding this year, and we’ve got a new website coming out. We’re going to be talking about it. I know that part of my work is going to be in training the LLMs out there that flyte new media is now a viable option for businesses in Maine who are looking for branding. So those are going to be a lot of the questions that I ask, and I’m going to be measuring that, just like you suggested, by continually asking “what are some of the top branding agencies in Maine”, until I get the answer I’m looking for. And then I’ll know I would’ve made an impact.
Rebecca: Then I’ll add onto that. Because I think you want to take your best elevator pitch, your best, most compelling, shortest, hardest hitting description. And you want to put into that response when you get that output back, put in your elevator pitch and say, “I am Rich of flyte new media, and this is our core messaging framework, our statement. How could I have optimized my content to really align with so that the AI was able to use more of this desired language?”
One of the things that I find most interesting about AI, especially when I’m working on use cases, is I’ll be able to have the AI actually score itself. If I’m training it to complete questionnaires or I’m training it to create quote estimates or whatever that looks like, I’ll very often have it do its magic. And then I’ll say, “Now, here was the actual. Digest this and analyze it.” And then the key is, and I think this is so awesome, tell your future self what it could do better next time, and it does a great job.
And I’ve learned things about the why behind AI, and maybe we can take this up in a future conversation, Rich, where there’s a psychology around AI. For example, it doesn’t understand decision trees like humans. If you wanted to complete a questionnaire, you have to also give it the logic. It doesn’t come built in with that.
Part of the beauty of generative AI, and again, a lot of these creators don’t know how these systems get from point A to point B, but they’re able to generate new content from patterns in language. And so as a result, they don’t give it huge constraints around how to think. It’s up to us to give it guidance on how to think.
So it’s really fun when you can say to the AI, “Hey, that was a great answer, but I would’ve loved this answer. What can I do better?” Or “What can you tell your future self in order to get to that answer or that output?”, and it will give great advice.
And for one of my clients, I was able to get it to answer very complex questionnaires within first pass with a 92% accuracy rate, just by training and asking the AI, “What would you inform your future self to better answer these questions?” And it created this huge key. We put it right into its training docs and away we went.
So I think sometimes we underestimate and think that AI really does think like humans. And while it’s programmed to do that very thing, it lacks the context. And that’s really when we come back to this whole conversation. It’s about layering on that contextual detail that AI is looking for. Because it has a much bigger brain than us, so it can zoom right through long pages, no problem.
But again, you know, we’re trying to optimize, I always say, for people, platforms, and large language models. And that’s, I think, the new – I don’t want to say ‘paradigm’ – but I think that’s kind of the new model that we really need to think about as we move forward.
Rich: Alright. For people who want to learn more about you, more about Seacoast AI and AI, and possibly about having you help them with some of their own AI needs, where can we send them, Rebecca?
Rebecca: You can go to my website at seacoastai.com and if you scroll down to the bottom, you can even choose the AI tool of your choice and have a conversation about my business. But you can also reach out to me, there’s a contact form there as well.
Rich: Awesome, Rebecca. We’ll have those links in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Rebecca: Thank you, Rich. I always enjoy our conversations, and I would love to again have a follow-on chat about the ‘why’ behind AI. Because I think it’s fascinating, and I think it really helps us when we’re looking at utilizing it fully to understand and uncover some of those little-known facts about AI. It really fills in the gaps.
Rich: Sounds awesome. Thanks so much.
Rebecca: Thank you, Rich. Bye.
Show Notes:
Rebecca Emery is the founder of Seacoast AI, where she helps organizations turn AI from a buzzword into practical business strategy through training, consulting, and implementation. Connect with her at Seacoast AI to learn more about optimizing your business for the AI era.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his nearly 30 years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.