How To Get ChatGPT to Mention Your Business to Your Ideal Clients with Jenna Hannon

But we've had other guests come on the show and talk about how to show up in AI search results, AEO or GEO or whatever they're calling it, and it seems like the conversation is always evolving [laughs].

And it's fascinating to me the new things that are coming up all the time.

I guess the first question I have is does SEO still matter? Like, do we still need to focus on good SEO before we can do AEO, or is ...

Or, or do you feel like at some point we won't even need SEO and we just need to focus on the search engine, or on the, uh, AI search?

Ooh, this is such a great question.

We've been trying to answer this with clients currently, and we're, we're seeing it's different by business.

So a lot of it, a lot of it depends on your buyer behavior.

Let me give you an example of this.

So for our B2B clients, we'll ask a lot about that, about their buyer journey.

How do buyers usually choose this solution? Are they comparing you between other options, or are you such a unique solution that there's not obvious other solutions in, in the market? And on the B2B side, what we hear a lot is that a decision maker i- used to go to the procurement department, and the procurement department would give them a bunch of solutions and do the research, and then make a recommendation.

And now what we're finding, if you're a decision maker, let's say you're a, a CFO or a CMO and you're looking for a new solution, now you're just going directly to ChatGPT or Claude, and you're doing that research yourself.

So we're seeing the change to AI search really happen on the B2B side.

On the consumer side, it's still quite mixed.

We are seeing more and more consumers choosing to go to AI to do research on products and get deeper in research, but I think the habit of going to Google and getting a list of links is still strong, and you still see that in the data.

So there's still, the majority of people are still going to Google Search and, and using Google Search.

Now, I've heard that AEO depends on SEO.

Like, when you ask an AI search engine, whether it's ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, they're searching the internet in place of you, and so they're still looking at the Google Search results.

They may be going deeper into the results to get the results that you want.

But in that respect it seems like, will we always still need some sort of SEO?

So the way the LLMs work is, A, they train every three to six months on the data that's on the internet.

So every three to six months they're doing a, a model update and they're retraining on data.

B, they are also doing real-time searches, but not every query that you type in is going to prompt the AI chatbot to do a real-time search, meaning both matter.

The latter is a little bit more SEO, meaning how you are showing up in the search engine will help you be more likely to show up, but the, the model's still gonna be training on information.

So it's not always that, oh, great SEO translates, and I think we are starting to see that more and more with clients.

We'll have clients come in who have invested in SEO for a decade.