AI Search Rewards Brands That Structure Data and Do the Work

Welcome to the Marketing Madman. Nick Constantino here. We've got a special episode for you, and I say special because this is another one of those where I have learned a lot. It's been necessary for me to learn. So let me introduce the Mad Caddy, Matt Caddy. Matt, how are you doing, bud?

Good, good, good. Thank you for having me on.

A blast to have you. Okay, before we get into the nitty gritty of this, introduce yourself briefly. Talk about what led you to the role you're in today before you divulge that, because I want to be able to have this grand rollout. Talk a little bit about the work you've done previously that led to the current iteration of the company.

Awesome. Absolutely, thank you. My background: I've been in the digital marketing space for a long time, about a decade, primarily focused on SEO. Search was my passion. I love the internet, wanted to figure out how to control that, how to get the results we wanted. As everything evolved, AI came around, and I started seeing the writing on the wall in terms of what that looked like, how we're gathering information, where it's going. So I really looked at the next evolution of what search is. It's very exciting that it happens to be with AI, and I started to shift my focus over there. I've built and sold agencies, built teams, been in this space for quite a bit of time before venturing out on my own for about the last five years, serving as a consultant for some pretty large brands. Now I'm just looking forward to this next evolution of search.

Yeah, man. So if you haven't figured it out, we are talking about, let's call it SEO slash AEO slash GEO. I'm going to have you go through each of those, because I think like any ripe new industry, there are so many bad actors and so many people trying to take advantage. Really what we're talking about is this: SEO used to be just having a website to start. Then it became blogs, then it became images, then it became videos, then it became schema, then it became Google My Business, and then it became, where are we searching, what are we doing? That is now evolving, where the structure of the data has to be more responsive to someone searching AI.

The easiest way for me to say it, and then I want you to elaborate, is that as human beings we used to have our own consideration sets. Now we are turning our consideration sets over to the machines to process a lot of the work that we didn't want to do. As an easy example, I'm about to get on a plane to go to Puerto Rico. I used to have to manually go on Yelp, cross-reference with Google, find distances. Now you can literally plug in, here's my airport, here's my hotel, ask me five questions, plan me an itinerary, and it will do all that work for you. Probably more margin for error because you're leaving a lot to a machine, but the more specific you are with it, it works the same way with the internet. These people are allowing the AI to do the search criteria. Where you used to say, show me the best plumber, and get a list of plumbers, now it summarizes and says, here's the best plumber, here's why. So it has upended business.

Let's give a timeline. Give us the year that we started seeing AEO come in, where it's more important for those answers, and now where we're in this generative engine, and the differences. I think that would be very helpful.

Absolutely. I think when OpenAI first came out with ChatGPT, it was exciting. To your point, being able to get into a system and say, hey, I want you to solve this problem for me, and it delivers all the answers. At the end of the day, as humans, it's user experience that we're really after: the fewest number of clicks to solve my problem. Google solved that problem for a long time for us. Optimizing it, we got the blue links, we got the descriptions, awesome, this is what I want. But over time it's turned more conversational. What ChatGPT or other AIs have solved for us now is, I want you to solve this problem for me, how should I do it, and provide that information.

The exciting thing for businesses is it's a whole new frontier of getting in front of customers in a quicker way. With OpenAI now doing things in ChatGPT, we're able to do instant purchases in the platform. It's very exciting. Last year is when I started flipping my focus. I saw the writing on the wall. I saw brands looking at this. On a lot of the bigger brands we had, I started noticing ChatGPT traffic trickling in. I took it upon myself to say, okay, how do we make this work?

It really comes down to, when we look at AEO, GEO and SEO, how they all work and commingle together. The main thing you want to focus on is your crawlability. Is the information crawlable? Do you have all the right best practices? The great thing is that things like structured data or schema have been around for a long time. Google has been pushing that for a long time. When I first got into SEO, I thought, hey, I'm going to learn this. It's something they asked for. They have a whole portion of the website dedicated to that, so I started learning it myself. Where we're at now is they're saying you have to have this on your site. It's exciting to be able to mark up everything on the site and make sure everything is crawlable. You've got .txt files where you're basically saying, when you crawl my site, this is how I want you to do it, so it gives you a lot of control that way.

Then in terms of GEO, tracking which prompts you're in and actually organizing your content. We all knew in SEO your header structure is important, but now it's highly important. How is the structure on your page? I look at each page now as almost a database. We want the crawlers to pull information from that, and make sure everything is marked up. In your case, Solomon Brothers has jewelry. When the AI is crawling for that, are we telling them how to properly clean it? Are we telling them the material? Are we telling them everything that's going on?

Right, there's so much more that goes into it. The biggest thing I'm realizing is that it has to all live in one place and be easy to get to. Most business owners are really good at their one thing. They don't know the whole; you need the full gamut of the business. You need to know credit terms. You need to know that we are offering extended support, but you can't just hit them in the face and say extended warranty. You have to talk about why the warranty is important and what could go wrong, because the way it pulls information is different.

Go back to why SEO exists. Everyone gets it wrong. It exists because Google wants to make money. The easiest way for them to make money is to serve hyper-relevant information to the people who are searching so they spend more time on it. There's no other way around it. Say what you will about the algorithms, but the days of just paying a ton of money to Google don't exist anymore. That being said, let's call a spade a spade. If you pay Google more, they're more lenient with you, and I'm never going to have anyone argue with that. Meta, the second you start paying, it's amazing how quickly some of these gears turn that weren't turning before. Any of them. Reddit shuts down every page, and all of a sudden you start paying and it's like, we've accepted every single thing you've done. We don't have to lie about it. Money makes anything go.

But now you're starting to see that if somebody went on Google and it gave them the wrong information, they're going to go to DuckDuckGo or something else. You've got to look at Bing nowadays, because of the ownership stake Microsoft has in ChatGPT. You'd be a fool not to believe Bing is going to be incorporated into this to some capacity. There are all these little nuances. I'm not saying you have to be an expert on them, but the terminology I use is that to be a marketer today, you have to know enough to be dangerous in every facet of business and web design. If you don't, you are relying on other people, and that's where we're going to come to the bad actors.

You and I have developed a relationship which makes this easier. I'm not micromanaging. We got together and said, this is the end goal. I don't necessarily care how you get there. All I care is that along the way you drop nuggets for me so I understand the process. That's not how most of this works. Most of the time it's a completely ignorant marketing person going to a company that's baiting them in with some completely ridiculous phrase like, make your GEO go up 66,000% on day one, based on one case study that happened in Anchorage, Alaska on a Tuesday during a complete solar blackout. It's insane. So I want to get into some best practices of what people can do, because I want to be helpful, but first talk about what to look out for. Talk about what a lot of these companies that popped up out of nowhere are doing to bait you in and why they're not doing what is necessary.

Definitely. To piggyback on that, you're absolutely right. Something that's important when we look at the crawlers and SEO, and making sure you're doing things right, is even understanding the crawl time on the website. How much more computing power does it take for an AI to crawl a slower website versus a faster loading website? Those are some of the things I look at at a detailed level, because it all adds up.

So the best practices start with your site speed. I know they've pushed that for a long time, but look at it this way: everyone's been on ChatGPT or other AIs and seen the message, hey, you're prompting too fast, wait. That's their signal that they're computing at a high level. At the same time, when they're crawling a website, they're trying to surface an answer, maybe it's a deep scan. How long does it take to load the website? We all know it matters to load fast, but now it's actually taking computing power to do that. The first thing is make sure you have a fast-loading website. I know that's a broken record. Everyone in SEO said that, but now we have hard data tied to exactly why, from the AI point of view.

The second thing is make sure you mark up the structured data on your website. Go to schema.org and do it. It takes time to mark up your entire website. The way we do it, especially working with Solomon Brothers, is we want to automate this site-wide so you're pulling new fields. You have 5,000 products, you need to make sure they all have best practices. No need to do that one at a time. It should be deployed wide, because those are standard now. They need to crawl and understand the website as quickly as possible. To understand how they may see it, go click on any of your web pages, right click and save the page as. Look at all the HTML. That's exactly what they're crawling when they look at your website. It gives you a lot of insight into what they actually see, and that's why it's super important.

We don't need you to understand what those codes are. Understand that it is a numbers game. It's funny, because when you talk about things like page speed, it's almost counterintuitive. You're compressing images down, they don't look as good, the videos look blurry. But as with any technology, we've moved so fast that the speed of the servers, the speed of your computer, all of it is called into question. Perfect is the enemy of good. You're not striving for perfection right now. You are striving to play these games, get as much information out, and make it as digestible as possible.

That's why brand marketing is so important right now. All these companies that spent all this time on their performance marketing, who do you think is getting annihilated right now? I see it every day in every direction. Two kinds of companies. One is the companies that spent all their time on operations. You can be the best operational company; AI doesn't understand your operations business at all. It understands a directory, and it's trying to create a directory. Number two is the ones that just unloaded everything into Google Ads and Meta. They spent everything on performance. They have no brand whatsoever. You want to know why Solomon Brothers will be okay? 75% of my traffic comes in from people searching Solomon Brothers. What is AI going to do there? Do you know how much money it would cost for somebody to come in and steal Solomon Brothers? It's not illegal to do; they could call it Solomon Sisters. They would never, because the barrier to entry is so high.

Part of the reason I say it is because I don't want people to get lost. This is one part of the marketing funnel. When you do this stuff, it's not like stop everything you're doing and go GEO. When Matt and I started talking, my thought was, because I had just started doing this seven or eight months ago, I want to put 10% of my budget into future proofing. What I did not think was that it was going to come so quickly, that what was me future proofing eight months ago is already now, and we're in it. That being said, you've also been good enough to show me how we compare versus some of our competitors, and we're so far ahead of them without even really turning the juice on yet.

So again, as we always talk about on this show, this is part of a full funnel approach. There are tools you can use. I've been blown away by how powerful press releases are. For example, when I search our other show that we started, Legacy of Luxury, five years ago it would have taken years for the algorithms to catch it. I search it now, and because we put out a press release, it pulled exactly from the press release and says Legacy of Luxury is a new show with this and this. It doesn't work if there's only one place, but a good paid press release should reach thousands of people, so it's almost forcing the internet to crawl it. Those are little things, and a lot of it is stuff you can do yourself, but you've got to be deliberate with your intention.

First of all, anything you do with SEO is going to help GEO. Anything you do with GEO is going to help with SEO. We woke up, what was it, two weeks ago, and Gemini was number one in the Apple App Store. It had already passed ChatGPT. Google wasn't going to lose this game. We've seen too many Blockbuster Videos, too many Xeroxes and Kodaks, too many companies that did not adapt. That is not going to be Google. They are so far ahead of this, and you see the gears starting to turn with their image generation and everything else. So be part of a full funnel approach.

All right, you gave some good advice there. Talk a little bit about Reddit, because I was shocked to see that AI is pulling 45% of its content from Reddit. I have to imagine that was because for a long time Reddit was not advertising based, and if I was a betting man, the advertising is going to drop that ranking down, because it's going to start being filled with more nonsense and stuff you can pay for. But talk about how important that is now and why it's pulling from something like Reddit.

For sure. Reddit's interesting, because you could look at it as a form of an echo chamber, but you realize the power that's behind user-generated content. With something like Reddit you have an infinite number of subreddits where people are confirming pieces of information, asking questions, getting a response, and then you're looking at people who've had accounts for a long time saying, hey, this is the one that's most likely. There are game shows based on the same logic. You don't know the answer, you ask the crowd, 75% of the crowd says one thing.

Be prepared when you ask. Twitter's a cesspool, but Twitter's a cesspool with three sentences. I went into a Reddit thread on a jewelry chain, a guy asking why the chain he got his girl smelled so bad, and it was a novel about the smell. I was reading it thinking, honestly, I don't know if this is a fetish thing, I don't know why people are reading this, but it was one of the trendiest reads. So be prepared that whatever you post, you're going to get people who are just going to lambast it. Come to terms with it. You never want to see a peek behind the curtain of the internet.

100%, exactly. It's a true example of a double-edged sword. Both Google and OpenAI are indexing that, because at the end of the day, think about how many decisions are based off of reviews. It's the same thing with user-generated content. Someone says, hey, what's the best this, and you've got everyone confirming that's what it is. Chances are that's going to be something you want to take a look at. With the power of user-generated content and peer-proofing it, they see the power of that. I'm sure with a lot of the other stuff that's in there, as they're indexing it, they're filtering a lot out. But at its core, it's a good source to generate answers, because your peers are rating it up.

The great thing about it, too, is everyone knows how crazy the mods are on Reddit. You think you're trying to answer a great question, and next thing you know you're getting yelled at 50 times and your whole account is banned. So they do a good job of making sure that if someone is trying to gamify the system, it's had this system in place for so long that it's already good at removing a lot of things. I'm very curious, to your point earlier, how much crap is going to get wiped out, because in the last three months everyone's dumping content in there, and they'll keep dumping it the rest of the year.

I'm curious, because it doesn't happen anymore, it's much harder now, but there was a time when everyone was buying reviews. Amazon was a cesspool of fake reviews. Then they started putting up sites that would catch the fake reviews, and then they started reviewing the sites that caught the reviews. These levels of authenticity: everything becomes capitalism at some point, which is why you brought up a good point about ChatGPT being able to make purchases from it. They get a cut. We finally got there, and we know why. That $20 a month from 10 million people was not enough. The shareholders want more, and they're about to go public. OpenAI is going to be the first company at a trillion dollar valuation. Think about that.

And they said, we're a nonprofit.

It's going to change everything. But again, this is where I say know enough to be dangerous. You've got to predict the future a little bit. One of the things I was shocked by is, for all the talk about Elon Musk and what a crazy person he is, X is still crazy influential in all this. It's more than Facebook. I'm not saying be neurotic like me and log into all of these things three times a day to get a feel for what's going on out there. But I am saying if you are relying on somebody else in your business to do this work for you, or God forbid an agency, they're not going to do it. They have 20 employees spread across 50 accounts and their time is not optimized. There's nothing in it for them besides the paycheck. They're not trying to learn and push it. So you have to be dangerous. You have to know enough yourself.

What do you see the next couple of months looking like? Obviously there are plenty of tips and tactics, but how does this pan out? Are there going to be more and more companies coming into this space? Are we going to see old SEO agencies go out of business, or are they going to adjust? What do you see the marketplace and the business looking like?

Definitely. The great thing about GEO, or whatever this new role is going to be that works alongside the SEO specialist, is that to your point earlier, it's just another slice of the pie. You're still going to have the need for SEO. It's still highly important. Even if for some reason Google search dropped 50% of its search volume and still controlled 50% of search, that's a substantial amount of revenue, and you still need someone in SEO to make sure you're there. What I see is a lot of SEO agencies bringing this on as another service added to their existing services.

One thing I did a bit differently, being in the SEO world for so long, is I wanted to focus purely on understanding how AI search works and go all in on it. Then I work with other agencies, whether it's training their team or they're saying, hey, we need to bring you on as a partner to help us with these specific types of accounts. I see it continuing to grow into a true role. I see it now in the industry. People are hiring GEO experts. They're basically hiring somebody and saying, I need you to help fix AI search. I see it in inbounds all the time.

It's funny, the number one request I get right now is Reddit influencing. That's the number one thing I see right now. I don't know if it's a hot keyword or if everyone's just saying, I need to get on Reddit. I think what it is, there are a million tools that track your prompts, and they all show the same thing: every citation is being referenced as Reddit. So over the next few months, at least to the end of the quarter, I'm very curious to see what Reddit looks like in terms of a bunch of spam coming in. Are they going to release notes saying, hey, we fixed this problem?

That's the other downfall of this. You're asking AI what you should do, and if it tells everybody to do the same thing, that's a problem. One of the things I find most fascinating: unfortunately, marketers today want to sit in a high castle and just make strategy. I can't tell you how many events I go to where I'm sitting there thinking, this is just people telling each other how awesome they are. There's no thought leader, no one's doing anything, because they don't want to do the work. When you get into it, man, when you sent me over those 17 pages of code, that is work. That is not AI generated. That is work. When you look at how hard it is to get backlinks, even to get the AI agents to write to the right parameters, this is work. This is manual labor. Anyone you believe that is automating these systems is lying to you. What it's doing is getting the lowest hanging garbage fruit, which, to be honest with you, doesn't help your authority score. I'm not saying that when you're a brand new business you shouldn't automate everything. But if you want to play with the big boys and get to that level, it's work.

One of the things I found fascinating since I've taken this role over is it almost doesn't even look at some of my local competitors. It's like, don't even worry about these guys. It's putting me with Diamonds Direct and Rare Carat and the big corporate players. That's who I'm going after. I don't know if it's because we don't even sell online and we're just playing in a different league, or if it's the amount of money we're spending, but you see these things.

I also think one of the really cool things about digital is that it used to be you had to spend 100 grand to do market research. You know how much market research a $10,000 Google campaign will give you if you give it the time to learn keywords, time of year? You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know the jewelry industry is going to spend more around Christmas, but to get an idea. The biggest compliment to me is all my competitors are trying to come in and buy my keywords. The Solomon Brothers keyword is spiking and they're all fighting for it. So I'm thinking, you fight for it. I'm not going to buy my own keyword. They trust us. We have all these other mechanisms.

To interject on that, I do see a correlation between brand search on Google and AI search results. If the brand is recognized, like the search volume you were describing, it correlates pretty closely. So to your point, focus on your branding. What do people know about your brand? One of the specific llms.txt files we create is brand specific. When the AI crawls the website, we want them to know exactly who you are, exactly who you're trying to get in front of, and what problem you solve. They correlate together, whether it's your branding, your SEO or your GEO.

Even the ads, man. If they've heard of you before, they're more likely to click on you out of the three. This is not rocket science. This is human nature. You always go towards familiarity, even if you don't know what Solomon Brothers does. You just heard Solomon Brothers. How many moving companies are there? Braves Movers, Falcons Movers. They have nothing to do with the teams, they just borrow the affinity. You can't knock that.

So my question for you now: one of the differences between branding as a whole, GEO, SEO, all these different things, is that the investment you make gradually grows and builds, as opposed to something like Google Ads, where when you shut it off, it falls off a cliff. I try to explain to people, if you're looking at Google Ads as an advertising source, you're a fool. Google Ads is the Yellow Pages. It's the net. You have to set out all the lures, and Google is just clever enough to make you pay to use the net. It's the biggest con ever. We'll talk about it another time, and I know I'm going to get shut down and it's not going to go viral for saying this, but I promise you that at some point, when we go back in history, Meta and Google will be found complicit in some of the greatest fraud this country has ever seen, in the way they perpetrate fraudulent information and allow it to go. It's insane. But if I'm so down on it, why am I still using it? Because of the brand I have, the return on investment I get is so high it's insane not to use it.

So talk a little bit about how the GEO investment grows and amplifies. It's not something where you pay and then it stops. If you stop, you probably won't start seeing detriment for six months, a year, two, five years, depending on how much you have established. If you're selling somebody who says, I have $1,500, I'm either going to use you or I'm going to go pay for ads. First off, if you have $1,500 and you think it's going to help you with ads, you're out of your mind, unless you're in a town of 300 people. Talk about how GEO, SEO, even some brand marketing pays longer-term dividends, and how important it is to have those in line before you start doing real performance marketing.

For sure, and that's a good point. I always correlate that back to the early SEO days. The brands that adopted SEO and Google search early on did very well. A lot of brands were slower to adopt. Now you have to have it. You're either using a consultant, you have it in-house, or you have an agency. We all know SEO is one of the highest ROIs in any marketing stack. With GEO, it's actually moving a lot faster than Google search did. With Google search, no one knew about it. People said, I'm not using that, I'm on the Yellow Pages.

I would venture to say that's because Google search was one entity, and now AI has people competing for the space. Either they buy each other out, but you're not going to see six of these competitors keep this pace. That's just not how this country works. So I think the pace will slow eventually. Seeing how badly they botched GPT-5 makes me think the pace is going to slow, because that was not a good system. It breaks, it freezes, it hangs. It does worse for me than GPT-4 did. That was the corporate board of directors saying, get this out now, I don't care. But sorry, keep going.

That's a good point too. As we rely more on this, whether it's our daily search or how do I cook a piece of steak, we're relying on it to the point where if they have a bad release or it's pulling bad data, that's something to be reminded of. But in terms of the business, brands that are adopting it right now are going to be in a much better spot, just like the earlier brands that adopted SEO. I think right now it's a must for any brand. You have to get behind it. Even if you're not seeing the growth immediately, it's like anything else. Everyone knows when you start SEO you have no traffic. You're not going to get sales the next day. It takes time to deliver best practices. You're competing against brands that have been around for a long time.

Let me ask you this, because I think this is really important. Isn't that also a competitive advantage to an extent? One of the things I understand is that SEO at first wasn't about locality. GEO is about local and relevant. So as a little guy playing in this game, you can compete with some of the bigger guys. That wasn't the case when SEO started, because it took time for the internet to figure out that people don't want national companies or things that are 200 miles away from them. So isn't that an advantage for a local company that starts playing these games? Isn't it an advantage for a small company to be an early adopter of this? Isn't there something about that that's almost a great equalizer?

100%. Every business that's in business should be doing this, whether you're a plumber or a large brand, because in my opinion it's easier to see the best practice. It's easier to see exactly why these results were chosen for the prompts. The prime example is we work with a lot of cannabis brands. They've got a combination of e-commerce mixed with door to door, whether it's delivery or an in-person establishment. We're seeing brands come in, we set up best practices, and they're able to take massive advantage of AI search. Their SEO is lagging a little behind, but you've got brands that do great in SEO that have no AI search because they're not programming right. We've seen a lot of local brands specifically.

I would argue, unfortunately, that's because the cannabis space has become commoditized. Everyone's selling the same stuff, so it's a race to the bottom on price. There are very few established brands, they're all new, so it becomes price sensitivity. If everyone's selling the same stuff, especially because they're all buying the same product, and in a lot of places where it's not even legalized they're buying the same hemp stuff, that's another problem.

It goes to this: say 50 brands in the city are competing, and 49 of them have been around for a long time, and they're all selling the same thing. Then one comes in and gets set up properly, and now they're the one selling the product a lot more. Even within six months, they're able to beat out brands that have been doing it for years on AI.

That's a good point. What you're saying is that the mechanisms amplify word of mouth, which has always been the strongest form of advertising. That's a really good way to put it. That's why you go to something like Reddit. Reddit is word of mouth. It's people sharing information. As much as reviews are, I don't think people trust that Google is doing anything out of the goodness of its heart anymore, because it's such a monstrosity of a company. That's a really good point. I'm going to use that: GEO is better attuned to amplify word of mouth advertising.

All right, I want to leave it with this, because you've been super helpful. Talk about the biggest players in the space. Your Perplexity, your Claude, talk about what you're seeing on the back end and the differences. Very quickly: I use Copilot, which is off GPT but works with Microsoft. Microsoft is going to do its damnedest to make sure anybody in the business space leans as much into Microsoft as possible. It's already starting with LinkedIn. If it wanted to, it could block bots from crawling LinkedIn. It's not going to, but it could. Google tends to do what Google does, trying to get out ahead of this, and they're very focused on video and video generation, where they know their investments can pay off. OpenAI was the leader. Perplexity seems to be more advanced thought and research. Talk about what you've seen from the back end about how these tools differ.

Absolutely, and that's a good point. You see a lot of software out there saying, hey, we track everything from Perplexity to Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, whatever you're trying to use. But at the end of the day, similar to search engines, the majority of people are using one, and it's ChatGPT right now. There are a lot of people using Perplexity and Copilot. I use Claude often for any kind of data work. But in terms of first to market, ChatGPT was the brand that came out. When people think, hey, I want to look up something, it's ChatGPT. Even some of the brands we have with sites getting $2 million visits a month, 98% of all that AI traffic is coming from ChatGPT, which is astonishing.

When we go about our strategies, we start with ChatGPT. That's the first thing we do. We spend a lot of time diving in, a lot of A/B testing to figure out what we need to do, but that's the platform we primarily focus on. We look at it as, people go to Google for search, we know people are going to ChatGPT for search, and we correlate that to the data we have available. When it comes to Perplexity, Claude, anything like that, we think of it like Google: if you're doing well on Google with your SEO, and if you're doing well and getting surfaced on ChatGPT, generally you're going to be ranking across your other LLMs. Granted, that's not always the case. We track everything in detail across quite a few of them, but we spend most of our time trying to get in front of ChatGPT, because we see that having the highest ROI for the clients.

That's what I brought up earlier. I think there's going to be consolidation. The valuations of some of these companies: if ChatGPT is doing 90% of the traffic and they're at a trillion dollar valuation, then yeah, there's $100 billion out there, there's $100 million, there's a billion, there's lots of money, but there's not enough money to keep going at the pace of expansion we're at right now. Microsoft has that huge investment in OpenAI. There are going to be other people coming in, like Larry Ellison. You see this happening everywhere. All of a sudden you merge TikTok with the right AI company. Perplexity was the one that was going to buy Chrome. That was another great example of how dumb we are as a country. If Google has Chrome, they're a monopoly, but you're going to sell Chrome for $300 billion. Who do you think is going to be able to afford Chrome? Somebody else who has a monopoly. We are in the new Gilded Age. These are too big to fail. We're never going to be able to go backwards.

I encourage people, do not put your head in the sand. Start with the easiest things. For me, the big aha moment was five or six months ago, when I read a book that said, look, you're looking at this all wrong. AI is not about you asking questions. AI asks you the questions. Give it the parameters and have it ask you the questions to give you the best answer. You are the thought leader. You are the leader. This is just a tool. I see everybody talking to it like it's the boss. That's when the machines are going to rise up.

But also, don't be scared. Do you know how many times my computer, with a 16 gigabyte graphics card, as good as it comes, freezes on me because I'm running prompts so hard it doesn't know what to do? It just stops. So it's not there yet. The machines are not taking over. It's gotten immensely better. It's crazy to see how much better it is at graphics and context, but we're not near there. Dip your toe in, start with simple tasks, learn from it, program it. But I can see why the advertising industry is terrified. You can replace the job of 10 people with one bot that just learns more and more, and it's starting to preemptively say, do this. Now it's adding to memory, so you can program it to do these things.

My advice, especially if you're going to use GEO, is that the only way to really do it is to learn the tools. If you're doing SEO and you don't understand how Google Tag Manager works, you've got a big problem. That's one of the advantages I've taken. I design our web. I'm doing the scripts. I'm doing the tech. Yes, it's exhausting and I'm killing myself mentally. But think about it: who's going to screw me over right now? It's very hard. The way you know you've succeeded is when you ask a question and people just hang up the phone or stop answering you, because it's, uh-oh, let's go find another dummy. I say it: there are a lot of dummies out there. I'm not one of them. Either fix this or hang up the phone. You've just got to be smart and dangerous. Why don't you leave us with some final thoughts, and then give everyone a way to find you in case this is appealing and something they want to do?

Absolutely. A final thought is the thing you said earlier: when everyone has ChatGPT, it's learning about you as the user. It understands your prior prompts, your language style, everything along those lines. You have to understand the importance for a brand of investing in this. That way, when someone is looking for recommendations and your brand is being listed, it's important to get in there early, because the next time they're asking questions or having similar prompts, it's going to surface things that are important to them within those prompts, including your brand. Make sure you're at least looking into this. Play around with it. Ask ChatGPT or any other LLM, what do you know about my brand? Just start with that alone, because the earlier you can get in there, the more prompts and the more accounts you can lock in, and the easier it's going to be as things start scaling and turn into instant purchasing, instant booking, and all of that.

Money's always going to be involved. Before you say where to find you, we're unfortunately in a country that requires instant gratification for everything. Just for a quick second, explain the time and how this works, and how there are guardrails in place for it not to work quickly. You can't expect this to work overnight. This is a six-month, year, 18-month process. You'll always see gradual lift, but you're never going to see that exponential clip. If you do, go run Google Ads. You'll see it, but it will drop off as fast as it comes on. So to manage expectations, talk about the time frame and the work required, and why it's not something that can be immediately done.

That's a good point. You mentioned bad actors. It's like the SEO world: there are a lot of great SEOs, and there are a lot of SEOs that unfortunately do bad practices that can affect entire brands. Right now, with GEO being the new hot topic and ranking in ChatGPT, brands should be cautious. Just like in SEO, there are people trying to make a quick buck saying, hey, we're going to do these 10 things that might look good to you and help you, but it could actually harm you. It's important to ask the right questions when you're meeting with somebody. People right now are saying, hey, I took a course, I know how to do this. Don't go down that route. Work with professionals, ask them questions, make them show results, especially with something this new.

To give you an idea of what that looks like: in our first month, when we do our analysis, we do an entire AEO audit. We analyze the pages on a website to understand exactly how the AI sees them, and not just ChatGPT. We start with ChatGPT, then go to Perplexity, understand exactly how they see them, and then how they correlate together. From that we understand what we need to have on each page, and we break it down by category. Then we create custom code, as you know, that needs to be deployed site-wide. These are the best practices for necklaces, for instance, so we make sure that's deployed across every single necklace page. It doesn't stop there. We also monitor every single page against competitors, so we can say, this is the top competitor surfacing an answer right now, this is where we're at, what are we missing? You can imagine the work in just doing that.

AI is a tool, but to be great as a marketer you have to use the tool. Don't let the tool become you. People just use AI to write a blog or write code. It's a tool, but don't make that 100% of what you're doing.

These systems don't like laziness. They can smell laziness a mile away. I'll say this from the other side, as the brand guy: that doesn't mean you sign somebody up to be your GEO guy and don't ask any questions for six months. You need to ask, specifically, what did you do? One, you're keeping them honest. Two, you're learning along the way. Because I've also seen the other side, where a guy says, I'm going to do this, and then in the first month he shows you that he built an agent to write you articles. Okay, cool. If you're going to do that, I'll buy the agent from you and just do it myself. Why would I pay you to use AI to just write with an agent? That's the other part of this. It is the Wild West. Everybody should at least get a consultation. Matt does a really good job. I've enjoyed working with him. We skip a lot of the BS and get down to the nitty-gritty, which is required nowadays. Tell everybody how to find you, and tell us some of the companies you specialize in working with and where you see the most opportunity.

Absolutely. Again, the name is Matthew Caddy, the Mad Caddy. You can go to madcaddy.com or find me on LinkedIn, Matthew Caddy, easy to find. Since it is so new and it is the Wild West, I take my time meeting with everybody and helping them fully understand it. Someone like Nick is good at what he does, so we spend 15 minutes and he says, I've got to move on. But if someone needs me to hold their hand, absolutely, especially with something so new.

The space I see a lot of opportunity in is definitely e-commerce. If you're in e-com right now and you don't have a strategy like this, I will literally do a free audit and show you what it looks like, because you have to see it. It will shock you, once you put a strategy in place, how much revenue is there. We've got some brands hitting 30x ROI a month right now because they're making all their purchases through the site, coming purely from ChatGPT. It becomes a new channel that within six months, nine months, is generating enough to make some big decisions at your business. Definitely something to keep in mind.

On the flip side, be cautious of spam emails and these gurus popping up out of nowhere. We've been there. Don't risk it. Make sure you're asking a lot of good questions and do your own research. You've got LLMs now. Ask them. If somebody says something, pop it in there and start doing your own research on that.

I agree with that. All right, man, it's been great. I think we're probably going to get some comments and questions, so we might have to do a follow-up soon with a little more Q&A, because it is the Wild West. I appreciate you, brother. The Mad Caddy. You've been listening to the Marketing Madman, and we'll catch you next time.

Thanks, Nick. Good chatting.