Get on your buyers’ AI shortlist.
The B2B AEO Playbook

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Hi, everyone. Welcome. So alongside Sam and the One IMS team, we help dozens of company turn strategies into plans they can actually run

Perfect. And if you're probably wondering like, hey, what sort of an organization is this one IMS and could we trust what they have to say? We have been, as I mentioned, working with organizations of all sizes and shapes in the B2B sector, both technology and SaaS

Remember the time we had telephones that were tethered to the wall

this technology could shift that happening rapidly, but the biggest shift that we see

We had to run up to a phone line, right, to pick up the phone. And now I'm living a completely different era where I have my children go to my parents' house and take the remote control, and then try to talk to it to say to open up and play whatever they

Search engine plus almost every major organization have Google products in their organizations, so they're all using Google products and Chrome browser and all of those different things. So combine total, there's over 2.5 billion active users that are using Google products, and they all are embedded with Google AI Mode

And exactly at that same time, we're seeing what we call the great decoupling. So as the increase in AI adoption happened, we saw a decrease in what we call click-through rates and how people are actually behaving once they do see

dependent on people coming to our website, browsing our product catalog, looking at our service offering, reading our case studies, and then ultimately submitting a form for request a quote or to request samples, or whatever that

the 2 or 3 spots that you would see on the paid ads sponsor listings that also dropped by almost 68%. So you can see that the numbers are showing people are seeing the answers, and they're not even browsing below that or even clicking through

to go to a specific website. And the other big shift, right, that we're seeing is how the entire customer journey is being truncated, right? It's being shortened a lot because a traditional B2B buying, when we talk to our customers, they mostly have

you know, high ticket item product or service that they're selling. So these are large purchases. It's a considered purchase process, which means, like, they're not making an impulsive purchase. It takes maybe months before they decide on a vendor or supplier, and it's a long sales cycle, and these are decisions that are made, right?

In multiple, multiple months. And there's also a lot of decision makers involved. There's a lot of different stakeholders that are part of that conversation. So when those organizations are doing those research in a traditional sense, in a Google research, that could take 15 to 30 days

Researching different topics, finding different vendors, going to their websites, analyzing their capabilities, reading their case studies, printing out maybe some information about those organizations, and then maybe having internal discussions, and then deciding, okay, which one of these vendors are we going to send the Rfp, or

Or fill out a code form. That was a very lengthy process. Now, that entire conversation can happen within 5 minutes, they can just go and ask a very extended question with a lot of context about the business, such as, like, hey, I'm looking for thermal forming manufacturer who has certain capacity and has

Certain capabilities and can do certain type of plastics for packaging, and they can put that inquiry into an LLM of their choice, and immediately the LLM platform is going to go and give them recommendation. And you're not seeing a list of 10 links, you're seeing a summarized and synthesized answer

That gives them recommendation, and people are going to see that recommendation and trust it for what it is

and being how we all are, you know, limited in time and resources. We're gonna just quickly assume those answers are the final answers and make our decisions based on that. So it's truncating that entire customer research process into a much shorter window.

And as you know, if you know anything about the way that Google search platform worked, it was always focused on crawling the web, cataloging the information that it finds, categorize them based on the industry product or whatever else, all the information. And as you, the researcher goes and Google search a thing

It will call that and recall that indexed information that will present to you as the 10 blue links on a page one result. So that was kind of how the search engines operated. But when you go to an LLM of your choice, you put that prompt in, and you're getting LLM platform to go and research

and retrieve answers, and then it's not giving you a list of answers, it's synthesizing and giving you a summary and a recommendation. So the process by which LLM is doing this is completely different. So if you're not one of the recommended supplier or vendor that shows up in the results page of an LLM platform

All of a sudden, you're completely out of the conversation or discussion in those organizations that are possibly looking to buy from you, whatever the product or service that you offer. So that's the biggest thing that I want you to take away. How is this going to impact your pipeline, how it's going to impact your

Inbound lead flow and possibly those, what we call, like, those invisible pipeline, right, where you're losing opportunities because you're never even part of that discussion. You never even had a chance to even talk to that prospect that was looking for it. So and also, you know, Ahref did a study and they conducted a research on hundreds and thousands. I think it was well over 15,000 long tail queries

They studied to see what percentage of those queries actually was organically listed versus LLM platform citing it. Right. So what we what the study found out was positions in Google results did not mean that they were being cited in LLM platforms. So

That study was pretty instrumental in recognizing that even if you had a really good, strong SEO foundation and did a great job of creating content and optimizing for SEO, it didn't necessarily mean that you were going to get cited naturally in an LLM platform. So I know you have questions that we're going to try to get

to those during Q&A sessions, and if you chat them, I'll make sure that Anna will bring them up in the later section. So, and then also, as you can tell, the fact that ChatGPT and both Google products are already rolling out ads, and they already are relevant and already seeing in most of these platforms.

It also shows that there's active users researching, and they're trying to monetize the users there, right? So that data also shows advertisers are looking to find a way to get in in the LLM platforms. So this is why your biggest opportunity is how do you optimize to get recommended by LLM platform the most organic way possible

So you're not competing on those clicks and then you're not competing on those ad platforms there. And then the from a number standpoint, what this means for you from a revenue standpoint, you have to ask yourself, right? The old way of measuring success and how you would drive new business was

Hey, create content that are compelling for our buyers, make sure that gets ranked and recommended in a Google organic listings. Get people to come to our website, maybe use a gated resource as a conversion mechanism or a form to get them to convert. And then obviously nurture them and turn them into a customer long term

But if that playbook is no longer effective, and imagine that you are not being recommended in an LLM platform. So just for the number's sake, imagine if you're… if there are 4 opportunities that could have been sourced through an LLM recommendation in a given month

And you are selling maybe a packaging machine, or you're selling some sort of an annual contract value of a software for, let's say, $50,000 a year, and if you lost those 4 opportunities, that's 200,000 in pipeline created in every month that you just lost. And that's well over $2.4 million

If you don't get those opportunities, right? So this has real business impact on businesses. If you're not actually proactively focusing on improving your AI visibility.

So the biggest thing most people have is, okay, I understand I need to get on LLM, and a lot of people are just doing a lot of what we call, like, a random act of marketing. They're doing a whole lot of different things, like they have blog posts going, they might have a trade show, they're doing some paid ads

They're posting on Linkedin a new website, you know, trying to create some content with AI

all of which in its own right have the best practices and habits use case. But if you're just doing all of that just as a random way of improving your online visibility, that's not going to get you anywhere. And we at One Imams have always practiced

practice and believed in having frameworks and methodology that we can test it, prove it, so it becomes repeatable. And so for that, we've always had frameworks such as this one that you see here. Our growth formula framework. It really focused on

How do you consistently acquire brand new customers, and then also, once those leads are generated, how do you systematically nurture them long-term? And then, how do you turn those existing customers into repeat orders and referral sources for your business? So having that sort of a framework is

How we usually look at it, so when we have a prospect that we talk to, we look at which of these levers are they not properly pulling, so that they're missing the opportunity, right? So if you look at your… from an AI perspective as well, so if you're looking at your total adjustable market, your prospective customers are

in two buckets. There is a certain percentage of your addressable market is always in an in-market buying scenario. They're researching, statistically, from industry research, about 3% of your total adjustable market in a buying cycle, and about 97% of them

They may be in the market in the future, but they're mostly doing research and planning and analyzing and learning about new solutions. So if you think about AI search as a discovery tool, you have to figure out how do we get found when people are researching and they're in the bottom of funnel kind of query, looking for the best provider or supplier for a specific

application or a need, you need to make sure that you're getting found in AI search and capturing that demand. That's one half of the equation you need to solve for. And then for anything else where your prospective customers may or may not be actively researching your particular brand

But if they're asking a lot of problem-related questions, you need to be providing answers where the answers are the content that you've created around how to solve those specific problems. So even if they're not brand aware, even if they're not solution aware of yours, particular solutions.

But they need to be discovering your brand and your content and your point of view from the AI platform that they're using for the research. And you need to also have a system in place as those leads are coming across the funnel, how do we make sure that we properly segment them into those respective buyer personas and thus market segments and everything else so you can nurture them long term

And then ultimately having a system for making sure that you have a system to take care of those customers long term as well. So this is kind of our big picture framework that we use and how we funnel our marketing initiative through

And so with that, I'll just take a pause, and I'll give Anna the floor to tell you more about how these assessment would work along this presentation.

Everyone, we just got to the first break. We're going to have multiple breaks throughout the whole presentation. And where you're going to be able to answer a specific set of questions

So to get started, you need to scan the QR code that is in the presentation

Or chat, yeah

Don't… yeah, don't close this. We're going to go through it together

And while you're answering, we're going to give Sam a little bit of a breathing room. And as well, we're going to answer questions. So feel free to put in the chat anything that comes up. If you have any doubts

questions, any real life cases, feel free to put them in the in chat, and I'll

Take care that Sam answers them live

Yeah, and the link to this assessment is also in the chat too, so you can click and open it. And then just have it on the slide so you can answer it along the way.

Yes, we have one

And you want me to answer a question that I think that was chatted earlier, Anna?

Just let me here

So, how do we know AI search is really driving deals and not just a good story? What do you actually see in a client account?

Yeah, so one of the trends that we're seeing is that even though we see a decline in organic traffic, we see referral traffic coming from AI platform when you actually have a brand citation is in an AI search, or when a brand recommended in an AI search

We see an increase in organic or direct traffic. So and then also what we call like self-reported attribution where you ask a prospect as you join a call or something, how'd you hear about us? And then verifying, okay, I use ChatGPT, I use Gemini. So self-reported attribution is one way

And then the other one is tracking the referral traffic that you're getting from and also seeing the uptick in your direct traffic where people are finding you

in an LLM recommendation, and they're going to your specific URL manually later on or on that same day. So those are some ways that we're able to do it. And then we're also using proprietary tools that we are leveraging internally to track problems

for all the queries in which I'll talk about in a second. So track the prompts across all the major Llms to see how frequently are you being recommended or cited by the LLM platform. So you also get that information on whether or not you're being recommended in the 1st place

So that you know you have the what we call AI visibility score. So getting a score on your overall AI visibility across all the queries or prompts that you should be tracking.

We have another question. And it says, we are seeing citations drop for both us and our competitors. Is this part of a broader trend?

Yeah, so a couple of factors. I mean, there's a lot of things that we're all experimenting. We've noticed when you're using kind of the lower tier LLM platforms or the earlier versions or kind of the earlier versions of it, sometimes they're not as up-to-date as

as they are. So there's a lot of changes in using a paid version of an LLM platform versus a free version. So I think they're all trying to save tokens, and they're all trying to save resources, or what we call a crawl budgets. So the answers do vary a lot, and that's what we're using a proprietary tool that actually

It almost like an incognito window that goes and searches across these platforms, crawls the answer, scrapes the responses, and then results back and reports it, right? Because if you use it daily, it's going to vary based on your user habits and what kind of search history that you have

It's going to tend to do that for you. So we're using different proprietary tools to be able to monitor that. And one thing to keep in mind, Google search algorithm updates were maybe about 3 to 6 months at a time. LLMs are coming up with a model every week. It almost seems like

And all of which has an impact on the overall results as well.

Great.

Yeah, we have several tools that we're testing and we have our own proprietary tool that we are using several API and scraping capabilities to build reports for our clients.

So in the interest of time, I'll kind of quickly get to that next section, right? So the question you might be asking, okay, how do I, now that I know that AI is important, it does have an impact on my business that I have to make sure that I am being recommended to my prospective customers. What's the playbook? How do I do that?

So AI recommends brands that it trusts. So that's the main thing you need to keep in mind. So with that, we'll share our framework that we built and tested it over the last 18 months and have been implementing this for our clients. So our framework is basically maps

model buyer intent, answer clearly, prove in place and structure and stay fresh. And so it's almost like a, basically a loop that happens. You have to implement this on a consistent basis that you can build trust. That trust actually feeds that discoverability

long term. So I'll get into the specific of each of these core areas, or what we call the pillars. So the first pillar of our MAPS framework is model buyer intent. You cannot answer questions that you have not mapped. What do I mean by that?

When you talk to your prospective customers, I'm pretty sure they might already tell you, hey, we hate getting cold outreach emails, or hey, we don't find the information I was looking for on your website. A lot of times there's been studies conducted. Most people actually even say that when they go to a supplier website that they're not even finding the information that they're looking for

The main thing you need to keep in mind is when you're selling, right, like I mentioned earlier, Gartner Studies said that average B2B buying committees, 11 to 22 people. There's a lot of people involved in a buying decision in a B2B sector. So you have an economic buyer, you might have, like, a CFO, you might have a plant manager, you might have an operations person, a design engineer

All of these people have a lot of different questions that they're going to their preferred LLM platforms to find answers to. So you need to internally as an organization, talk and get alignment on who are we selling to? What are the questions that they're asking, and where do they actually go for information? And how do we make sure that we are

The recommended solution that these LLM platforms provide, right? Like I mentioned, right, there's a lot of committee members involved in this process. Every one of those decision maker has a completely different objective on what they want to see as an answer. So a design engineer might have a completely different goals

That may be a plant manager or quality assurance person or a procurement manager. So all of those questions and queries have to be thought about as you think about, you know, coming up with the queries that you should be creating content around. So the main thing that you might be wondering, okay, I understand that I have to create

the queries, and I have to understand the kind of questions my prospected buyers are asking. Where do I get those queries?

The best place to start, if you're already doing any sort of content marketing or SEO, you have access to some of that data through Google Search Console. Some of it you can use third party tools such as SEMrush or Ahref. You might be doing Google ads, and if so, you might have historical data on

The search query report that will tell you the kind of queries that people use. That's one place to start in terms of finding the type of questions that people are asking. And one thing to keep in mind, a traditional Google keyword, SEO keywords with maybe 3 to 5 words

But in the world of AI search, right, it's a lot longer. Sometimes it's 10, 15 words and it's very descriptive and they're putting a lot of context in their questions. So you have to think of it as a long tail query, almost like a question that they're naturally just asking their preferred platform

The other place is certainly looking at social platforms and any sort of forums where your prospecting customers might be going and asking other users with similar challenges that they may be running into. They might say, hey, have you had this? Have you used this software? What's your use? How did you like it

What was the experience working with that company? Any sort of questions that they're asking in LinkedIn, LinkedIn or Quora or anywhere else that they may be asking, you want to make sure that you're using tools to listen to that or scrape those answers. And then the best place to get a lot of this insight is your existing sales team

and your support team and their day-to-day conversations that they're having. So sitting down with the salespeople and getting them to explain to you, hey, what are the questions that you're getting on a sales conversations, or even asking your support team, what kind of challenges are our customers usually bringing up? Because

The reason why those sales conversations, where they ask some of those questions is because they couldn't find the answer on your website, or they couldn't find the answer in an LLM search. So they are actually going and figuring out, okay, I can't get the answers that I'm looking for. I may need to go and actually talk to a human being

And then figure out could they actually help me answer or address this question? I'm sure you probably heard some stats in the past, like 67% of the buyer's journey is complete before the buyer ever reaches out to the salesperson. That was a stat from like 2017 or so. And now, if you imagine, it's even much further than that, right? So these people are able to go and research the topics

Get answers that they're looking for in an LLM platform. So the best place is to actually have internal discussion with your team to say, what are the questions that are being asked and how do we make sure that we're addressing those questions? So the first step right in this entire framework that we're trying to address here

is the model by Rington. Know who your buyers are. Try to get us, you know, get into the psyche of the buyer and the different personas that you might be targeting and then figuring out the type of questions that they're asking and then really documenting those questions and coming up with a system for

How do we track these questions? How do we monitor them? And also how do we answer those questions, which I will address in a second. Because if you can't get real clarity on your buyers and the type of questions that they are asking, you're going to have a tough time really figuring out where to focus your attention on, because everybody

you know, every organization knows their personas and their ICP, but oftentimes there's no clarity on kind of the objective each of those personas have, and that's really where you need to put a lot of the energy in your strategy there. So with that, I'll pause for this second

Second pause here

How do we grab onto queries that bring in new customers?

What was the opening of that when I

When I look at the queries for our website, I only see our brand names and product SKUs.

Yeah, so I'm assuming they're probably looking in Google Search Console is probably where they're getting that. So it's a good indication that if they're searching brand name that you have a very established brand. And then if they know your product by name, that's also a good sign that people actually know your product name. So then your your biggest gap or weakness is that you're probably not doing a great job on

Awareness side of our framework that I mentioned, you're probably not creating a lot of problem-aware and solution aware sort of topics to capture that broader audience who may or may not have ever heard of you. So that's where I would see the opportunity there. And then also, like I mentioned, using internal discussions with your team to see

What are questions people are asking that they're not finding on our website, right? That they're not finding in an LLM platform. So hopefully that might be where you may want to start seeing what can you do to expand your topic topic clusters to cover a much broader topics than

What… whatever your brand is and products are covering there.

So hopefully you had the chance to take the second step in that self-assessment

So we touched on the first pillar of our Maps framework, model buyer intent. And then the second part is answer clearly. It seems very simple, and I'll get into the specifics of what goes into that. But the main takeaway is you have to give clear answer to AI

That it can easily digest and answer back, right? Like, it has to be easy for the LLM platform to answer. But here's the sobering stat, right? 80% of the informational queries trigger an AI overview. So if you go to a search, almost 80% of the time, when you make a search, it's informational query

It's gonna come back with an AI overview that just gives the answer the prospect was looking for, which means most of the time that answer is satisfactory enough that they may or may not even need to go and do any more additional research. So… and a lot of times, those answers that they get back

It's usually just what we call like a brand mentions, not even citations. It may not even give a link to an external source in a lot of scenarios. So your objective is to make sure that, hey, how are we answering questions in our content that we're creating that it is it is providing the answers to the LLM platform

In a very short and concise manner, very much up at the top, because the direct answers is the solution for AI platform, right? Like the AI platform, usually AI platform is scanning through the first 20% of the content on a page to really determine, is this page

Gonna address the question that the prospect just asked, right? So, answering clearly, and how the answer is structured is very important, because traditional SEO, there was a lot of run-on sentences and long content that you would create, which you still need that quality content written

But a lot of times the important part of that page has to be up at the very top of that page. So that's one thing to keep in mind. The other thing to keep in mind is gated content versus open pages, right? Many manufacturing companies that we talked to has a lot of PDF and

spec sheets and things that are usually gated, or even just PDF that are not even readable in many scenarios. So if you have a lot of your content just residing in those kind of documentations, it is not digestible or crawlable by an AI platform. So that's one thing to avoid. And making those crawlable

And have the proper schema in publishing as HTML pages, and without any JavaScripts and things like that, would make your pages inside a lot more readable. The other thing to keep in mind is the type of content that you're creating as well. So

One of the main thing I just returned from the Unbound conference at HubSpot, and the HubSpot themselves have done a very deep study on the specific type of content that actually performs really well. One of the ones that they saw was industry plus use case. So creating content

Specific use cases for an industry, and you can imagine, kind of, the different, you know, kind of variations of that you can do in your industry, because a lot of times people are asking very industry specific question. And if your website has content that a user, use case content that are specific to that industry.

It will have a much better chance of performing. So, for example, in the case of HubSpot, it was like CRM for manufacturing companies and writing a lot of content around how HubSpot CRM is specifically designed for manufacturing companies, and then talking about the specific use case of all its features. So that way, when somebody goes and asks

Hey, best CRM for manufacturing companies, then now the content that was written by HubSpot around how their CRM is unique and better suited for that manufacturing industry, it's much, much more likely to be a Cited page by LLM platform. So thinking of that as one. And then the other thing is comparison page. And I'm sure

Most of you can probably relate to it. Most people who go to the LLM platform, they're going to be asking, like, this machine versus that machine, this product versus this product. So comparison pages is an important part of content strategy that you need to follow. And a lot of times, the competitor comparison is another

big one, like in the case of HubSpot, HubSpot versus Salesforce. And I know in many of our clients who are manufacturers have a very tough time creating those comparison content, because first they don't want to publicly profess who their competitors are, or that they have other concerns of, you know, getting cease and desist and whatever other sort of

challenges of having to address. But most of those cases, what you want to say is, hey, here's what's unique about us, here's what the unnamed competitors typically do, and here's why we are better, superior, and why our product or approach is better. So, creating such comparison page would feed the LLM platform what it needs

to be able to

provide those answers when someone goes there. Integration guides, especially if you are a commission shops and it integrates without the machines, or if you're a software and integrating with another third-party tool, having those sort of integration pages and answering those questions that people might have would help increase your likelihood of getting cited.

And then the last one is mostly interactive tools, because if LLM platform is providing the answers in its own platform, the only reason for them to leave that platform to come to you is you provide them more useful tools that the LLM is not able to make it available, right? So that could be like product configurators

or pricing calculators, or ROI tools, anything like that that you can make available on your website, that they then would want to use, they would leave that platform of their choice, come to your website, use the product, configure it, and see, okay, how do I configure this product, and how do I apply this to my specific use case

So, think of all these different content types as you create content. The other thing to keep in mind is, there's been a lot of study conducted about this, and specifically by Bright Edge. Every time LLM platform actually cites videos, it mostly is coming from YouTube

So having videos hosted in YouTube is actually superior to having, let's say, any other platform that you might be using for video hosting. And we're not discouraging you from using other platform if you need to, but ultimately, you're better… better off actually using your YouTube channel and publishing content there

And the best use case is you can have long-form, short-form content that can have specific answers, and you probably even see when you go to ChatGPT or Gemini and you make a search, you will see sometimes how-tos are usually a transcript of a summary of a specific video, and it might even give you the link to that YouTube video, but it actually gives you the answer

From that transcript of that video. So, you want to think of every possible questions that people are asking, and then figuring out, how do I create YouTube content around it that ultimately can actually be a source that LLM uses to cite and recommend, right? Which is ultimately feeding you back more prospects

And then the type of videos that you can think of creating as well, like ask an expert. So if you have, if you're an engineering shop talking about specific applications or anything like that where you can have an expert talking about it, and I will get to it in a second about the importance of what we call a brand entity

So LLM platform will be able to put it together and say, okay, this is a subject matter expert from this organization creating content around this particular topic, and that person is an expert and they know that subject, right? And then being able to embed that same video onto your own blog page or your service page

It also increases your odds of getting cited. And there are a lot of other content type, right? Like you can create process videos explaining specific use cases or application or process. Those are all important type of video content that you can create, ultimately to increase your chance of

getting sighted. And I mentioned to buy AI interactive tools. Any sort of interactive tools that would help increase the time on site or help increase the need for someone to come to your website. It ultimately is a way to increase your overall

AI visibility. And so, from an answer clearly standpoint, right? You must answer the questions your prospects are asking in simple and buyer-focused terms, and the pages should answer all of that content, right? All of that information as clearly as possible

And you need to make sure that you're publishing them with comparison charts, FAQs, and having interactive tools and even embedding videos when possible to make those pages to be as relevant and informative and easy for AI platform to be able to source and digest.

So with that, we'll pause for the second here

We are already through the half of the assessment. Please answer section three. And in the meantime, we give you time. Sam, we have one question

And it says, we have been told in the past that Google cannot crawl PDF for SEO purposes. Can AI platform crawl PDFs? We have a lot of PDFs on our website that are not gated

Yeah, so obviously, if you upload a PDF to Gemini and tell it to read it, it is capable of reading it, but you need to understand when someone goes to an LLM platform making a search, you're giving an LLM an extra step to go and now crawl the web, find a PDF, now digest the content, and then be able to respond back.

So, and you know that when you go to Google, you make a search, instantly you get an answer. Whereas in LLM platform, right, you make the search, it's thinking, it's doing research, synthesizing the answer and coming back with that response. So that's where it's difficult to do that. I'm sure the LLM platform is going to get better at reading those PDFs on that

instant fly, but to make it easy on them, right? To increase your odds of getting recommended, what you want to do is translating or converting these PDFs into HTML pages that are easily digestible digestible. So when we get to the structure and stay fresh, I'll touch on some specificity on the type of

Things that you need to consider from a technical standpoint. But my recommendation is, hey, as hard as it sounds, I'm sure someone can write a script and upload these PDF and start converting them into HTML, and then figuring out where on the website it should be hosted and how it should be organized

And certainly something we can talk to you more about. But yeah, that would be my recommendation.

Great, thank you. In the interest of time, I'll be saving the other questions.

to the next week

Yes, I'll try to be as brief as possible. So we touched on model buyer intent, answer clearly. And the third pillar is proven place. AI trusts third parties than your own site. So there's been a lot of studies conducted about it. 89% of sites that AI recommends

are coming from third-party recommendations or third-party references. So, it's very, very mission critical that you don't just focus on your brand content and your own websites, which is what most SEO was focused on. This is where you also need to think about your brand as a whole and see how do we

Make sure that we are making our name known in the market, because AI is corroborating information about your website, your brand, across all the places that it can find information about you, whether that's review sites, directory, public community forums, or industry podcasts and things like that, right? So it's using all of that information

synthesize and make sure that, hey, is this company that I'm about to recommend, is it trustworthy? It's almost like when you ask your friend, hey, give me a reference for, you know, do you have a reference, like a referral or reference for somebody who did your kitchen or bathroom? You want to make sure that you get it from somebody who actually used them, right? That's the most important thing. So.

From a trust factor standpoint, you have to think of it as a ladder, right? The first thing you need to make sure that you have on your from a business standpoint, have we built an author profile or a bio for each of our subject matter experts in our company? Do they have an author bio on

our website, and is it associated to every blog that we're publishing? So that's one thing, right? And having the proper schema markup and everything to be able to tell that

And then basically the other form of trust building factor is the case studies that you publish. Because if you can show clearly that, hey, we have customers that we've helped and these are the industry they fall into, and these are the kind of problems that we solve, that's another form of trust signal that you're creating

So

being able to get your subject matter expert to contribute content and publish on these industry publications is very mission critical. And then the last one is really expanding your horizon and getting industry journals to quote your subject matter experts. So if you're able to

Maybe packaging digest to write about you, or another software review website to write about you. All of those are ways of you establishing trust and credibility in the market, and then also getting LLM to consider your brand

over alternative options. So this is kind of that trust ladder that you need to think about from a foundation to how to scale. And being on podcasts and getting Cited or actually being able to contribute content in third-party websites, all of those are also great ways to really build

Strengthening your brand equity. The other thing, too, is when you go and make some test searches, you can go and go to Google and or go to ChatGPT or any preferred LLM platform, make a typical query that your prospective customers would search, and then see what sort of sources is being recommended or

brought up, right? Is it pulling information from your brand? Is it coming from your competitor? Or is it pulling information from an industry journal? Or is it summarizing and bringing answers from a review site

Or is it a YouTube is a Linkedin response Linkedin post. See what type of content type is being pushed to those results, and that should give you an indication where the Llm is actually going and sourcing the content. And you need to figure out, okay, that's those are the places either we need to contribute content

Or we need to figure out how do we get our name mentioned in that list or that listicle or that publication. So that's one thing to keep in mind. So from a proven place standpoint, right, you really have to get earn the trust, right? You have to earn the trust from your, from the LLMs. So you have to do everything right in terms of getting reviews

And creating case studies and publishing on industry publications, and making sure that you are a trusted source for what you claim you are, who you claim to be. And then that's the only way that LLM platform is going to trust you and recommend your brand. So with that, we'll take the

pause here

You're muted, Anna

You all know what to do, so please go ahead and answer section four. And Sam, a question for you. We all know that reviews take months. What is the fastest proof signal a company can get in 30 days in your own opinion?

Yeah, I mean, in the industry manufacturing sector, there's not a lot of review websites such as, let's say Thomas Knitter, GlobalSpec or any of those websites. They don't necessarily have a review sort of a capability and somebody who's buying a million dollar machine is less likely to actually even go to those places to put reviews. So it's very hard to do so

But in the world of software and service companies, there's a lot of review websites that you can probably go to. G2 software review, Capterra, those are all places you can possibly get reviews a lot faster. Sometimes you have to incentivize to get those reviews. The best way to do it is if you have happy customers

engage the happy customer at the moment of that and joyous moment, and then ask him, hey, would you mind putting us a review in whatever that plays you can get? So that's the easiest one, but ultimately, you need to consider starting to create more testimonial videos as much as possible

And then obviously hosting them on Youtube and embedding them on your site. That's one way to really corroborate the story that you're claiming to have it be supported by your own customer's voice and their words.

So in the interest of time, let's quickly get to the last pillar, which is structure and stay fresh. So basically, we've touched on model variant and answer clearly proven plays. The biggest hurdle that we see in most businesses that we're working with

Is this part of it, which is the structural issues that we run into when either the website is not functionally set up to crawl, or other issues that the site actually contains. So it's… your website is 40% more likely to have been cited by AI platform

If you have the proper schema markup that tells the platform, this is a product page, this is a service page, this is a case study, and this is a comparison table. So if you have the proper schema, it actually increases the odds of your site being recommended. And then also, if the content is fresh, because the LLM platform really prefers

fresh content. It is looking for recency and frequency updates. So if your site has been… hasn't been touched in months, and maybe sometimes in years, that's an indication to LLM platform that site is old, and I'm not going to trust that information. I'm going to go find a source that actually is very recently

updated. So you might be wondering, well, how can I even possibly update my service pages? So looking at ways of either adding related case studies, adding a related blog post, adding a related testimonial video, or adding a related resource of some kind, and then making some changes to the page itself

We're updating the FAQs. So there are so many different things you can do on a page, and having some sort of a cadence that is marked on your calendar that's every 6 months, we're going to look at our service pages to see what can we update on there every, you know, 3 to 6 months, we're going to look at our blogs. So, and looking at your top performing pages and assessing what's what can be updated.

And then making those

Necessary changes is an important part. And then also, right, when you're using third-party tools to crawl and test your pages, looking for, you know, are we missing anything, like, in terms of comparison page or schema or meta descriptions or anything like that? Looking at what's missing and figuring out, can we update our site to include that? So that's one way to also constantly be in the know for

And when you're researching, if your competitors are being cited, but you're not, and you have a specific page that answers that specific question, you got to ask yourself, why isn't our page a source that LLM uses? What are we lacking on that page? That's probably preventing us from showing up. So kind of the three pillars to keep in mind

fresh content update as frequently as you can, but on the minimum 90 days is is a bare minimum we are recommending for our core pages of our clients having structured data, making sure that we have schema markup that's relevant to that specific page, and having the date modified embedded, and then also the fast architecture. The site has to be easily

Accessible, right? So if the traditional website takes a very long time to load, LLM platform is just going to abandon your site and leave. And I'm pretty sure you probably are seeing some stats if you look at your total traffic, bot traffic is actually going to surpass the human beings in the near future. So, when that sort of a trend is happening, most of who is coming to your website is these bots

And it has to make it easy for them to access, and it has to be easy for them to digest. So not having any sort of JavaScript and everything else that kind of hides the words and hides the images, that's a very big no-no for AI visibility. So making sure that those things are avoided

So from a structured standpoint, right, make sure the schema markup structured correctly, having all the proper, the tables and everything else organized in a way that is easy for LLM platforms can digest. And that's the most important thing that you need to focus on. A lot of that is usually dependent on

Your internal dev team, or someone who might be like a web development team that you work with, but you also need to address this on a page-by-page basis for all the core pages, and then there are a lot of things that you might need to do more on a global level on a website. So especially if you have

product catalogs and things like that, having some sort of a global setup that has a product schema automatically created, and that pushes out the product pricing, tables and all the specifications about the product in an easy, digestible way to the LLM platform. So those are things that you could implement on a global level.

With that, we'll pause, and then we'll try to cover the rest of the KPIs and measurements in the next section.

You're muted, Anna

Sorry about that. We're heading towards the end. Please answer Section 5. Sam, one quick question. How do you actually track AI visibility?

Yeah, so for us, we have a proprietary tool that we're using. The first thing we do with our clients get access to the Google search console, get access to the Google analytics and any other historical data they may have about their persona, the target markets, and the product or service they're trying to promote

And then work with our clients to come up with a query list. Just a list of queries organized by those different categories that they care about, the product, the business, or the persona. So first get those queries, then we upload it to our platform, and then it tracks across all the major platforms, Google

Google AI Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot, and what else I can't remember Perplexity. Yeah, so all the major four platforms that we track across, and then we monitor the prompt. We see what are the answers that the LLM platform brings back

And then it scrapes the answers and reports back what is being provided as an answer is the answer a citation of your brand or a brand mention. Are you getting anything at all? And then also based on that, right, you can have an AI visibility percentage

And then it also tracks the sentiment score. So if there's a lot of bad negative things about your business being mentioned in the public, let's say some press release or something like that, you will find all those things. And so we'll give you brand sentiment, it will give you an AI visibility score. It will give you the citation score. It will also give you the content gap. So if you're not showing up

Where is the gap in what sort of content you need to create and optimize? And also the technical fixes from a structured standpoint that you need to address. So there's a lot of platforms out there. We have a customer proprietary tool that we built

And then we've been perfecting that over the last 18 months.

So with that, right, the action framework. So, obviously, we touched on the core frameworks. You need to measure across all of these different frameworks, right? Having a self-assessment to see how we've done a great job on the understanding our buyers and the type of question. Are we doing a great job answering those

What are we doing to build our brand credibility in the marketplace? And then are we structuring our content and our site in a way that can be digest by AI platforms, right? But in the traditional world of SEO, right? You cared about organic traffic, keyword ranking, backlink count, and then also the time on site.

All of those metrics are now being completely obsolete, especially as the platforms are being visited by a platform, right? So you are your number one priority is, hey, what's our AI visibility score? Are we, you know, are we getting cited and recommended for every prompt that we track? What about the branded versus non-branded prompts

If our people are not using our brand in our in the questions are even getting a shot, right? So that's the AIC score. And then the citation, right? Like you need to see the number of pages that are being cited and then also the share of voice in comparison to your competitors. So these are kind of the things that you need to be tracking and measuring

To make sure that you are being recommended in those LLM platforms. And then also keep in mind, right, the customer journey is being very much truncated. The traditional search, you know, the funnel is been

completely obsolete in terms of how people might be researching, and they're actually going to these LLM platforms. So, making sure that you understand the personas and their questions, and making sure that we're addressing those questions as clearly as possible, and to see, as you're getting prospects and leads coming in

Asking them, hey, how did you hear about us? Where did you find them? What kind of questions did you ask? And did you find what you were looking for? Getting that feedback is very, very mission critical. And to remind you, right, just having an SEO campaign or strategy alone isn't sufficient

Because, as you saw, some of the studies and research conducted by some reputable organizations in the industry, just because you had AI sorry SEO foundation done, it does not guarantee you have an opportunity to get Cited in NLM platform. So making sure that you are focused on your answer engine optimization specific strategies

or generative engine optimization strategies to improve your overall AI visibility across every platform, right? And then being that recommended provider or supplier and increasing your increasing the discoverability of your brand

By your prospective customers, and it has clear implication on your business and your pipeline, and having those internal conversations say, well, how do we properly fund our initiatives to make sure that we're not just taking this haphazardly, that we're prioritizing these initiatives so we can win

this new era. So with that, we have the final assessment, which is to basically have you do a self-assessment to see where you stand on measurement, and do you have good control on your overarching strategy there

And then the interest of time, I was just going to give you kind of like a key takeaway for the next 90 days. What should you do? Doing that AI visibility audit for your brand, whether that you work with us to execute it or you do it yourself by manually tracking some prompt

We're trying to find some tools that can do it. Build that query report by roles and determining what are the problems that we should be tracking, and come up with the brand facts about all of those questions, and what should we be answering for those prompts. And then writing those top pages that are

the answers to those questions and making sure that those have product schema, and that we're updating them on a regular cadence. And then, last not but not least, right, running the review campaign, trying to get as many brand mentions in third-party publications, and then trying to see

How is that impacting our citations and our brand voice and our share of voice in the market? So that would be what I would give as a short 90 day playbook. And with that, hopefully they have finished the self-assessment. And Anna, if you have any further questions, maybe I can address those

And then I want to make our resource available as well. I'll leave that window open so everyone can take a snap of that QR code, and then my colleague will chat the link in the in the resource in the chat as well. With that, Anna, what questions can we quickly answer in the next minute and a half?

So who has to do this work in specific? Is it a marketer, a team?

hiring agency

What should we do as a first step?

Yeah, I mean, I think if you have internal resources to execute it, yeah, sure, go right ahead, but you don't want to be learning on your own dime, right? You want to make sure that you're not just doing experiments and wasting time and time is of the essence. Certainly partnering with an organization such as Oneima is recommended

We have the proprietary tools, we have frameworks that we establish, we've done a lot of experiments and constantly testing our hypotheses. So we have a lot of that. And like I said, we take you through a very systematic process in assessing where you stand and getting a picture of your AI visibility

make sure that we are tracking the right prompts, and then monitoring that prompt, and then getting that content gap analysis, which is essentially giving you a playbook on the type of content we need to create and the topics you need to create. And then, essentially, you and I, our team working together to create that content

Publish with the proper structure, making sure that you are getting those pages to be crawled by LLM platform, and then also providing a recommendation on places you need to get published or mentioned or cited by, right? Whether that's directories or industry journals or anywhere else

So that you can increase your odds of getting that brand visibility to increase. So that's the playbook. Our objective is to be a resource to you, and when you go to this resource page, there's an opportunity to book a time with us, and we can certainly connect that A, obviously, audit

do a preliminary review of your site's performance, and then create a playbook on it specifically for your business, what you can execute so you can win this AI era

Of discovery.

Yes.

Please remember to click submit in the assessment, and we're looking forward to having a one-on-one time with you.

Yeah, and please feel free to book a time with us so we can go a little bit more deeper about your specific business and your needs and then figure out how we can best help you achieve your business objective from a marketing standpoint.

Thank you all for joining us today.