AI Search Isn’t ‘Coming’ — It’s Already Rewriting the Way Buyers Find You

Brandi Starr [00:00:00]:
You've optimized for Google, you've invested in content. But here's the problem. Your buyers aren't searching the way they used to. AI tools like Chat, GPT and Gemini are the gatekeepers. And if you're not showing up there, you're not showing up at all. Our guest Michael Buckbee says most marketers have no idea how they're showing up in AI and it's costing them real revenue. If you think this doesn't apply to you, keep, keep listening.

Brandi Starr [00:01:00]:
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to another episode of Revenue Rehab. I am your host, Brandi Starr and we have another amazing episode for you today. I am thrilled to be joined by Michael Buckbee. He is the founder of Knowatoa, a company that started as a joke and quickly turned into a must have tool for for search professionals tracking brand visibility across AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude Perplexity and Gemini. Michael's startup. He's a startup founder, product strategist and search marketing expert with bold ideas about how AI is already reshaping, how buyers find you and what marketers need to do to stay ahead. So, Michael, welcome to Revenue Rehab. You, your session begins now.

Michael Buckbee [00:01:52]:
Well, great. Thank you so much for having me. This is really great. Happy to talk to you and your audience.

Brandi Starr [00:01:59]:
Awesome. And you know, it's one of those things that comes up so often. You know, AI is changing everything and changing it very fast. I don't think there is any conversation that you can have without AI coming up. And a common belief that we are tackling today is that at this point in time that Google still dominates how B2B buyers discover brands. So, you know, keeping your SEO solid, you've got it covered. And so I know that you see this differently. And so this is your, you know, 60 seconds to convince our audience why this is the wrong position.

Brandi Starr [00:02:41]:
So Michael, change my mind.

Michael Buckbee [00:02:44]:
Okay, well, to start with, I think you are absolutely correct in saying that there are a lot of SEOs and search professionals that say like, we kind of don't need to care about these new AI startups and all we need to do is care about Google and they just go back to doing things how they have been doing them. And what they fail to see is that Google themselves are changing in response to these AI startups. So we could pretend like ChatGPT doesn't exist. We can pretend cloud and perplexity don't exist. But Google is fundamentally changing how they are structuring their organic search, how that happens, how people find out about information. And because of that, we as revenue leaders need to be aware because this changes our cost structure for, you know, customer acquisition and we need to be smarter about it and we need to put money into the right places in order to get the best results.

Brandi Starr [00:03:33]:
Okay. And I try and keep up. It is one of those things, you know, there's so much news and so much changing with AI, it is definitely hard to follow. So talk to me more about how is Google changing? Because of course, that's who everybody pays attention to most.

Michael Buckbee [00:03:50]:
Sure. I think the easiest entry point is, you know, Google calls these search surfaces and what they mean by that is the user interface and the search surface we have had for the last two decades has been you put in some keywords and you get back 10 blue links, you know, 10 links that you've never clicked on before. And there's a lot of things around that, you know, there's ads, there's other pieces, but you got other. A set of links that was somewhat unfiltered. And we are rapidly rushing forward to a new search surface, which is an interface that's a lot more chat, like an interface that's a lot more mediated between the searcher and the end result. Google has, you know, recently, I think two, three weeks ago, they had their Google IO conference where they very publicly stated that the new center of their efforts is Google Gemini, which is their AI tool. And that is the interface that is now available to everyone. AI mode.

Michael Buckbee [00:04:46]:
It is gaining more and more users and we're seeing a real similar rollout of that to, you know, lots and lots of different areas.

Brandi Starr [00:04:53]:
Okay. And so that's really interesting. I know for me, just, you know, as a user, I have even recognized the way that I have changed because although I do still go to Google because that's one of the things, like some people are arguing that people don't even ask Google questions anymore, that they just ask it of ChatGPT. And I know just my own behavior, I still go to Google. However, I don't look at those blue links anymore because as soon as I search for something, I get that AI summary. And in most cases, that AI summary is giving me sufficient information for what I'm looking for that I don't need to go any further. Now, obviously it depends on what I'm searching for. But both personally and professionally, a lot of those searches give me the answer.

Brandi Starr [00:05:50]:
And so. And they are brand agnostic, because unless I'm asking specifically for recommendations for something, it doesn't, you know, and it has the links of where the info is coming from so I could get to the brand. But generally it's leveraging that brand's information to produce the answer. And so what do we do as marketers? Because, you know, we put out all this content and all those things that are used to create those AI answers, but we make all this effort to get found. So what next?

Michael Buckbee [00:06:23]:
So I think in general, you know, and this changes industry to industry, what this plan looks like, but I think content strategies need to change. And so, you know, in the past it was really about traffic and how you would choose what topics to write on for your blog or your site. Your SaaS trying to attract visitors. You would look for high traffic, low intent topics that would bring people to your site and then you'd try to capture them in some other way. You try to get them on your newsletter, you try to get them to sign up for a webinar. And now we're seeing those informational queries that have the AI overviews that can be easily answered inside of ChatGPT or Gemini. Those are going away as a traffic source. And that's really concerning to, you know, if you're trying to make a budget for your marketing, because that's essentially been free quote, unquote traffic that you've been able to get.

Michael Buckbee [00:07:13]:
And for most sites that organic traffic is the majority of the traffic. I do think there's a lot of caveats in there. The number one keyword that people search for on Google is YouTube, which is kind of crazy. Like you could type in YouTube.com and that really just goes to show how much of search in Google isn't really search. Its navigation. And a pattern we're seeing is that the AI tools are where people are actually doing research. It's where people are actually making decisions and figuring out how to think about things. And then the final step in that is navigating.

Michael Buckbee [00:07:47]:
And then they pop over to Google and they type in the name of the brand or they type in, you know, a little more information. But so much of that search journey is now being pulled into these other sources where we don't have good analytics on them and we aren't going to.

Brandi Starr [00:08:01]:
Okay. And so you've hit on budget a couple times and you know, we are getting close to the point where everyone is starting to think about next year's budgets. And even if we're not thinking about the next year, we're always thinking about where our budget's going, how we're planning, how we're pivoting. And so, you know, in general, we've had budgets for paid search and, you know, budget for the kind of content that you're talking about that gets surfaced in traditional SEO. How do our budgets need to change? Like, where does the money need to go now in order for us to actually get found in the same way that we used to?

Michael Buckbee [00:08:41]:
So, you know, I really described this as a content strategy shift. And where that shift is, is from top of the funnel to more mid and bottom of the funnel. You know, if you have a choice to write an article on, hey, what is an xyz? That's very different than, you know, taking that same writer and having them write something on, hey, here's why we're the best in this particular category. And then taking that content, putting it on your site and then putting it to, you know, be distributed into the right places to show up in the right ways. So budget wise, I think it doesn't really change. Like you're still putting out 10 blog posts a month. You're still, you know, doing those sort of activities. It's just where you're hitting that changes.

Michael Buckbee [00:09:21]:
And I think the other piece is that gets a little blurry in the budgets is right now, within marketing, everything is still pretty siloed. You have a social team, you have a content team, you have a, you know, sales support content team. You know, and I think AI is really blurring the lines of all of these, where suddenly, like, here's a great example, OpenAI and Microsoft have a $13 billion relationship. It's a weird financial relationship in a lot of ways, but it is literally billions of dollars. Part of that is that OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, get access to LinkedIn and they train on LinkedIn data. So it makes total sense to take, you know, the article you're writing about, like, hey, we're great for this particular sector. We're the best for this. To write that on your, your site and then put that as an article on LinkedIn, which is not part of most people's social plans right now, where it's maybe more carousels is maybe short form video.

Michael Buckbee [00:10:18]:
And this is, you know, as marketers, the game is changing. And that is part of how that is changing.

Brandi Starr [00:10:24]:
Ah, I was gonna say I am like action item. Yeah, because you're right. Like we do, you know, think about posting some articles on LinkedIn, but it's definitely not a main source because we think about wanting to have it, you know, in our content hub and where all everything lives. And that's, that is a really good point in thinking about LinkedIn as a place to host more content and understanding some of these relationships between the different, you know, how like how things are being trained, how it all works. Like this is a place that I feel like is a big gap in people not really knowing, like, because just that one fact alone I'm like, that changes so much. I didn't know that this partnership existed and that models are being trained on LinkedIn data. Helps me understand why ChatGPT knows such so much about me.

Michael Buckbee [00:11:25]:
Yeah, well, I think there's a lot of emerging things that you know, again, so search for a long time exactly as you said. Like I used to be a director of Demand Gen. You know, we had content hubs, we had, you know, everything you're saying, a lot of that was gated, a lot of that was, you know, kept real close to us. And a big change now is, and a customer told me this, they said ChatGPT is now our most popular and least well trained representative of the company. And every day people are asking IT questions about like, hey, do we support this kind of stuff? Are we HIPAA compliant, are we SOC compliant, Do we do business in, you know, the Chicago area? And all of those are money questions that are not traditional questions that the search and content team would be going after. They're much more of the business team, of the sales team. Something we've been recommending is that companies start working a lot more closely with their sales team to get all the object that people have on buying, make sure that's all written up and make sure all of that is distributed and in these AI services because people are asking about it and those are like serious bottom line money questions that if you're a hospital and you're looking to make a big IT purchase, who you buy from has to be HIPAA certified. And if ChatGPT erroneously says no, they're not, you're not even in the running and you won't even know.

Brandi Starr [00:12:47]:
And it's, it's interesting you say that. One thing I talk about all the time is how like so much changes and so much stays the same. And I can think back to very early in my career, some of my most effective content was content focused on overcoming objections before the buyer expressed them. Now how we deployed that content was very different. It was a lot more email nurtures and trying to get that to show up in SEO in some ways. And. And so now it is that same importance. From what I'm hearing that now it's just a matter of getting the AI agents to be able to surface that.

Brandi Starr [00:13:31]:
Because I do think you're right. Like, people are trying to overcome their own objections with AI and understand all those things. And it is so easy. I mean, we've seen it with our own brand where someone wrote a summary of who we are as a company, and they shared the slide with us for us to approve. And we were like, who are you talking about?

Michael Buckbee [00:13:53]:
Yeah, very much so.

Brandi Starr [00:13:55]:
That's not us at all. And it, you know, it was crazy. And they were like, oh, well, I asked, you know, I forgot which platform, like, who you guys are. And this was a summary that I got. And I was like, oh, I got to do better at, like, making sure that I'm feeding and helping AI to know who we are. Because had we not been given that summary, I mean, like, it was just. I mean, it was flat out wrong. Like, it would have had people calling us for things that we don't even do.

Brandi Starr [00:14:23]:
And I'm like, I don't even know how that happened.

Michael Buckbee [00:14:26]:
Yeah. So, you know, the technical term for what you're describing is the hallucinations. And I think everyone has concerns about this, which is like, is this AI service going to hallucinate about my company? What can I do about it? And I think the good news is that there's two types of hallucinations that AI services have, one of which comes from a lack of knowledge, and one of which comes from, like, logical issues of, like, going through step by step of things. And the first is very easy to fix, which is you need to publish more about, like, what exactly your company is, what exactly it does, what exact problems it solves, how it does those, and then make sure that that's indexed into the AI search services. In the same way, you would be concerned about, like, Google being able to come to your site, read the information, include it, and then give it back to people when they search. And by creating that information, you're overcoming that hallucination, which is what happens when there's a gap in the knowledge that the AI has. It doesn't know what to do. So it sort of like, puts it together from the points of reference it does have.

Brandi Starr [00:15:28]:
Okay. And you hit on a key thing. I think that has been a gray area for me. You talked about making sure. That information about your company is indexed in AI search. And we're all familiar. You know, it's one of the reasons we all started blogs was, you know, that repeated or regularly updated on your website, domain authority, all those sorts of things. We know how to get that stuff into, you know, your regular Google search.

Brandi Starr [00:15:56]:
How do we actually get our stuff indexed in AI search?

Michael Buckbee [00:16:02]:
So let's talk about what happens on your site and then what happens on the rest of the Internet. And so on your site, there are all of the major AI services, all of their own bots that function like googlebot. And I do think there's a bit of a language issue that we have professionally. We talk about googlebot coming to index your site, and a lot of times when I read and press the articles state, all these AI bots are scraping your site, they're taking your information. And from a technical standpoint, what Google's doing and what claude and what meta and what all these other sites and AI search services are doing is the exact same thing, but they don't have the equivalent of Google search console. It's a lot harder to see that. And what we found is lots and lots of sites are accidentally blocking these, either because they're requesting the information really quickly and they have some sort of automated protection, or in the early days of this, there's a lot of stuff like even in Cloudflare, which a lot of sites are protected by, there's like a single checkbox that's like, block these AI bots. And you know, maybe your IT team did that maybe a year ago, your legal team requested that that happens.

Michael Buckbee [00:17:08]:
And that's invisible. That's something that you can't see in your robots Txt and it's a real challenge. So something we built is an AI search console. This a free tool that's on the Noa toa site you can put in your domain. And we will check against 24 different AI search service bots to see if they can reach your site. And we simulate requests from those and we'll at least tell you like this can successfully reach it. And if not, you should take a look at this and like, give it to your IT team for help.

Brandi Starr [00:17:36]:
So, okay, another action item.

Michael Buckbee [00:17:40]:
Yeah, and that's an easy one. And this is the sort of, you know, foundational pieces that I think we're working with, which is like, let's just make sure our information is in there, make sure the information's correct. And, you know, I think a lot of people are put off by the hypeness around AI. Yes, but you know, so much of this I think is still fundamental marketing activities, which is like the right information to the right people at the right time and it's a little different. But almost all of these activities have both a direct impact on the AI search on SEO, which is positive, but also I think they have general economic benefit to the company in lots of other areas like, and you know, we mentioned on site SEO, but I think we're moving into an area where there's going to be more and more siteless SEO, where you need to really consider things outside of your website as part of your SEO strategy. And oh, I think an even stronger way we've always considered like backlinks and you know, references, but to actually put our content, just like I was saying, like onto LinkedIn, onto Reddit, onto these other platforms where it's consumed, where it's handed back to prospects. And that's just, I think, a solid strategy going forward.

Brandi Starr [00:19:00]:
All right, Michael, so we've explored the issue, now let's talk about how to fix it. Welcome to the lightning rounds.

Michael Buckbee [00:19:07]:
All right, let's do it.

Brandi Starr [00:19:09]:
Fast answers only. Hardest part of this.

Michael Buckbee [00:19:11]:
All right, I'll try to be quick. So.

Brandi Starr [00:19:15]:
So what is the first sign that a company is facing the problem of being ready for AI search but, hasn't yet named it in their Google search console?

Michael Buckbee [00:19:24]:
They're probably seeing a very steady amount of impressions coming through and a drop off in click throughs to their site. That's a pattern that's seen in lots of different places. That's the first like real data point that a lot of SEOs have found. Like something's going on here we need to be prepared for.

Brandi Starr [00:19:44]:
Okay, and what's one mindset shift that unlocks progress?

Michael Buckbee [00:19:48]:
I think the biggest mindset shift should be the duplicate content penalty, which was something that SEOs have considered for a long time, which is like I put a blog post up on my site, I don't want another site to scrape it and put it up on their site because that pulls the Google juice from both of us, it dilutes it. But in the world of AI search, that's a huge benefit. Now you're twice as powerful because the messaging has been been said twice.

Brandi Starr [00:20:16]:
So okay, and what's one common trap leaders fall into when trying to solve this?

Michael Buckbee [00:20:23]:
I think a common trap is to stick with the existing content plans. You know, you had mentioned AI overviews and how it lists sources. You know, you can still fight for those terms, those like high level informational terms. But I do think you really need to consider, is this something where people are going to read this and then there's a list of 30 sites on the side? Is that a benefit to you that you're one of those 30 links that's buried in there? Are people actually going to find you? Is it actually going to move things forward or are your efforts better spent elsewhere?

Brandi Starr [00:20:55]:
Okay, and what's the most underrated move that actually works to fix this fast?

Michael Buckbee [00:21:01]:
I think the most underrated move is to just make sure that Checkbox isn't hit in Cloudflare. Because I see that a lot, many, many sites are inadvertently blocking these for lot weird reasons. And, you know, it's such an easy fix. Why wouldn't you do that?

Brandi Starr [00:21:17]:
Awesome. And before we close, let's have a little fun. Tell me, what's one book, podcast or tech tool that's been a game changer in your business lately?

Michael Buckbee [00:21:27]:
So I've always thought that, you know, the best marketers are the most empathetic marketers that can really understand their customers, can understand search intent, what is it people are trying to accomplish, and then to align their brand to help with that, there's a fantastic book written by my friend Michelle Hanson called Deploy Empathy, which is really for technical people to do customer interviews to understand the problems their customers and prospects are having, and then to, you know, turn that around and make it really actionable for your business. So that would be my recommendation.

Brandi Starr [00:22:02]:
Well, Michael, I have enjoyed our time for today, but before we go, where can our listeners connect with you and definitely do the shameless plug for Knowatoa.

Michael Buckbee [00:22:14]:
Certainly. I'm on LinkedIn. We have a LinkedIn newsletter that goes out that covers a lot of these same topics. Something we didn't really talk about in the conversation so far is, I think, another great strategy and one we're trying to live by, is having face and faceless content. So, you know, face content is like what you're producing and what we're doing here, which is that it's in my voice, it has a point of view, it exists. And, you know, if people read the newsletter and they've listened to this, they will know I wrote it like it is deliberate. That's a deliberate tactic. And faceless content is what you're going to get from ChatGPT or an AI overview, which is it doesn't have any of those things.

Michael Buckbee [00:22:51]:
And there is real brand value and there's real, you know, revenue value in having that face content. If you go to knowatoa.com, you will be able to put your own website in. You'll be able to do the AI search console and we also do like a free like top level report of how your brand shows up in chat GPT for a couple questions. No credit card. You can just put. Just go give it a shot.

Brandi Starr [00:23:12]:
Awesome. Yes. That is my immediate action item following this conversation. And thanks so, so much for joining me. I think this was extremely valuable. AI in search is one of those things that most people are still really trying to figure out and I feel like you gave some really tangible advice, so I appreciate it.

Michael Buckbee [00:23:32]:
Well, I think this is a huge opportunity for marketers and to, you know, there's lots of opportunities to win for your brand. I think it's very exciting. Lots of new changes. I think it's a bright future.

Brandi Starr [00:23:44]:
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks everyone for tuning in. I can't believe we're at the end. Until next time, bye.

Michael Buckbee [00:23:53]:
Bye. Bye.