EP 551: Thriving in AI Search: Strategies for Modern Brands
🎯 Summary
Summary of Everyday AI Show: Winning in the Age of AI Search
This episode of the Everyday AI Show, hosted by Jordan Wilson, features Chris Andrew, CEO and co-founder of Scrunch AI, focusing on the critical shift in customer journeys driven by the rise of generative AI search tools like GPT and Perplexity. The central theme is how businesses must adapt their marketing and content strategies to optimize for AI search results rather than relying solely on traditional web traffic.
Key Takeaways for Technology Professionals:
1. The Fundamental Shift in Customer Journey: The core problem highlighted is the move from traditional web browsing (visiting multiple websites to gather information) to AI-outsourced browsing, where users receive synthesized answers directly from AI models. This means fewer direct website visits and a change in the conversion funnel.
2. AI Search Optimization is the New Imperative: Companies must actively monitor and optimize for how they appear in AI overviews and generative answers. Chris Andrew’s company, Scrunch AI, provides an enterprise platform to help businesses understand their representation across these new search environments.
3. Rethinking Content Strategy for AI Crawlers:
- Primary Consumer Shift: Businesses must recognize that the primary consumer of their top-of-funnel (TOFU) educational content is now often an AI crawler, not just a human.
- Content Quality: While traditional SEO foundations (like technical structure) remain important for initial consideration, content must be clear, concise, and accurate to be easily retrieved and synthesized by LLMs. Keyword stuffing is obsolete; intent-based optimization is paramount.
- Content Types: Brands should focus on creating structured data, FAQs, glossaries, and knowledge bases, as LLMs thrive on accessible language data.
4. The Critical Role of Third-Party Content: For non-branded searches, AI models rely heavily on third-party content (reviews, blogs, industry sites) to form unbiased answers.
- Actionable Advice: Businesses must actively monitor what third-party sites are saying about them, correct inaccuracies, and engage with these influential sources (via paid placement or organic outreach) to ensure positive representation in AI answers.
5. Unblocking AI Crawlers is Essential: A major challenge highlighted is that many companies, out of data security fears, are blocking AI crawlers (including those from Google/Gemini). This is detrimental, as blocking these bots prevents the AI from accessing and accurately representing the company’s information, potentially forcing the model to rely on less accurate, external sources. Professionals must ensure their sites are accessible to these new indexing agents.
6. SEO Evolution, Not Obsolescence: Traditional SEO is not dead; it serves as the foundation for AI models to identify which websites to evaluate. However, the application of SEO is changing. Prompts are human questions, not just keyword strings, requiring content to be optimized for conversational intent rather than just keyword density.
7. Opportunity for SMBs: Despite large brands having more overall data, Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs) have a significant opportunity. Because AI prioritizes matching specific intent to the right source, highly targeted, niche content from smaller players can surface effectively in AI search results, especially as features like OpenAI’s memory capabilities personalize results based on user history and location.
Context and Significance:
This conversation is vital because the shift to AI search is not a future trend but an immediate, mainstream reality (evidenced by Google integrating AI Overviews). Technology professionals must pivot from a traffic-acquisition mindset to an information-retrieval and representation mindset, treating AI models as the new primary brokers between their brand and the potential buyer. Failure to adapt means losing visibility at the crucial decision-making stage of the customer journey.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
💬 Key Insights
"I would say stop ignoring it and go participate."
"What is your one most important piece of advice? Like, what should a business leader go do today in order to start this winning on this uphill battle? Yeah, I would say stop ignoring it and go participate."
"the more context AI has about your business problem, your company, and the more you enrich the prompt with that context, the more of a thoughtful response you're going to get back."
"Continue to produce thoughtful content for a human, right? One of the beautiful things is you don't need to write for humans and robots. These robots read like humans."
"For a non-branded search, it's 80% plus of the websites that are cited by models are third-party content websites, right?"
"If you think that this is some phase or some beta program from Google, it's not. This is the new way that the internet works."