The Legibility Gap: Why Authentic Experts Still Struggle to Be Seen in the Age of AI. A Conversation with AI Strategist, Paul Culshaw. (Epi. # 283)

And you mentioned now that you've brought in AI strategy into your toolkit, have you noticed things like ChatGPT and Claude? And actually, I think I know you've noticed because you mentioned this in your article that these AI large language models may, for lack of a better word, get your authority or your presence if they don't have the right signals.

And how has this impacted how you try to educate or help founders because they may not even understand the old SEO versus the now, the new one.

Right.

Uh, very much so.

Yeah.

And it can be a learning curve, um, uh, at times.

The thing about it is that it's not really changed in terms of how SEO works and what Google was looking for and now what ChatGPT and what Cloud are looking for to surface experts and products in chats and conversations.

So Google was always looking for... or to identify who are the real experts in the real world at the end of the day, because it wanted to surface the real experts in the real world at the top of the search results.

Because if it didn't, then the Google users would get a bad experience at the beginning of Google searching for something.

And the people about the top wouldn't be, you know, kind of great at their jobs.

And that's how Google used to be in the early days before all of the algorithm changes came in.

And ChatGPT and Claude are looking for similar things.

As she says, they're looking for clear signals of expertise.

All we need to do is be logical about it and understand what are the clear signals of expertise which these tools are looking for.

And then how do we then achieve them? How do we kind of shine a torch on ourselves and provide these signals of expertise? So that's the marketing side of things, to be able to actually implement that strategy.

Interesting you should say the signals and that how things really haven't changed in terms of how either ChatGPT or Google would have identified you as an expert.

I at one point worked at a company that was called Local.com where it was to bring up local businesses.

And it seemed like...

Some businesses at least tried really hard to get bumped up by bringing up repetitive hashtag words or using key buzzwords.

And I realize that those using their key terms and wordings helps, but are there other signals now that can truly help you be identified as an authentic, I don't know, authority in that space?

Yeah, absolutely.

Very much so.

So I have a framework all around this.

Everyone likes a framework.

It's easier to learn a framework as well.